However, this new feature may just change all that:

Show your ad only when both keywords and placements match. You’ll get the benefits of keyword targeting while also limiting the places where your ad can appear.

For instance, set your campaign to appear only on your favourite soccer fan site and only when the site content matches the keyword soccer shoes. You may see less traffic, but AdWords contextual matching will help to make sure your placement pages are highly targeted.

I’ve not yet tried it. Maybe you have.

This is big news for anyone doing key phrase research, providing solid numbers that matter. It should mean no further guesswork and extrapolating from questionable data.

Thank you, Google!

It’s definitely worth 10 minutes of your time.

You’ll also be able to see why SEO and great content should be one and the same thing.

The power of an appropriate domain name and a few well-chosen links, I say!

There’s lots of good stuff in Creating a backup for your Google Account. In fact, I’ve already integrated the Google Docs backup suggestion into my Saturday manual backup scheme. Whether I replace my current POP-based backup for GMail is yet to be seen.

mad.co.uk in PPC shot down by SEO experts reports:

Stuart Small, industry leader, business and industrial markets at Google, backed up the argument and said that with 85% of all B2B purchases starting in a search engine, paid search ads were vital to any business. He added that Google sees 80% of searchers clicking on organic results, with 20% clicking on search ads. (my italics)

That’s a pretty commercially sensitive piece of information, and one that anyone in SEO or who owns a Web site needs to take on board.

The inference is quite clearly that one should do as much Organically as possible, a piece of advice Paul and I have been trotting out regularly since we founded Web Positioning Centre.

But my colleague Paul Silver wondered if we we could find another way of establishing this blog’s UK provenance. We ended up registering Dangerous Thinking on Google Local, so Google knew that the blog had a real physical UK location.

We sat back and waited to see if Google Search picked up on the Google Local registration. Some six weeks later, it hadn’t, so we’ve concluded Google Search does not reference Google Local.

Whether Google will join up the two services in the future, I don’t know – it seems very logical to. But they don’t appear to work together now.

Edit (20 November 2007): Burrowing back into my RSS feeds (I always read the most up-to-date ones first), I found Google’s answer to search localisation in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog back in August called Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts.

Here we go:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

So, there we are. IP and top-level domain.