Last December, Google launched AdWords Business Pages. Today, Google Australia announced it in Australia. What are AdWords Business Pages (ABPs)? They are a single-page website meant to be a landing page for a business that does not have any website. When you open a new AdWords Starter Edition account (and not Standard Edition), you get the option to create one. If you are an existing advertiser, you are SOL — at this time you can’t get one, but then existing advertisers would have a website.

ABPs seem to be hosted on the subdomain biz.googlepages.com. A typical site is here. As you can see, you can upload an image and link to a Google Map.

An Aside

Curiously, a sub-subdomain http://nura.biz.googlepages.com/ seems to be a private site in Russian. In fact, there are numerous, dubious residents of sub-subdomains of biz.googlepages.com as evidenced by a “site:” command. Now, googlepages.com is owned by Google Inc and is used for creating a Google Page. The IP address is 72.14.207.118, which has some interesting tenants such as http://gr8tools.com/ or http://baidupages.com/. You will need a paid account at Domaintools to see all 48 of them. They seem to be domains used some years ago possibly for testing Google Page Creator templates – example. Nothing too exciting there, but those sub-subdomains are either uninvited guests or they are Google’s own spam test pages – translated example. Weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 14% [?]

I saw a comment somewhere that SEO is no longer a hot topic – I cannot remember exactly where I saw it but it was a red rag to a bull.

I did a check on Google Trends to see whether the number of searches for SEO were increasing or decreasing (for both spellings – is/iz). For fun I also checked “affiliate marketing”. The red line is “search engine optimization” with an “iz” spelling, yellow is “search engine optimisation” with an “is” spelling – both are decreasing. The blue line is AM and it shows a small increase.

Well, I’ll be damned. You have to discount the fact that many of these searches would be SEO firms checking their own rankings, but some would be the searches of others. What could be the reason for this diminished interest? Comments?

Popularity: 14% [?]