The official announcement from ebay regards to sell the digital downloadable products has drop a big boom for lots of marketers that sell information products.

Digital goods are often reproduced at little to no cost to the seller. On eBay, this creates the potential for Feedback Manipulation (both real and perceived). To preserve the integrity of the Feedback system, effective March 31 all goods that can be digitally downloaded or transferred electronically must be listed using the Classified Ads format.

Using the Classified Ads format, sellers receive a 30-day ad at a fixed price. This solution enables sellers to continue to market their digital goods on eBay; however, because Classified Ad listings are a lead generation tool and do not result in transactions that go through eBay, Feedback cannot be exchanged between buyer and seller.

Here is ebay’s official announcement

I was hanging around on the Warrior Forum and find following post that regarding to the policy:

-. Is eBay Died for Internet Marketers?
-. BAD NEWS Ebay Limits Digital Downloads 2 Classified

Google has planned on launching project called “Knol,” which looks very similar to the infamous Wikipedia.

According to Google,

“Knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write.

The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions …

Google’s key idea behind this project is to highlight authors. Such as have authors’ names right on the cover if they wrote any books, news articles have bylines and so forth. As google said, it is unlike other user-generated content websites, which don’t necessarily give much thought into the sites’ biggest contributors…

You can read more detail information at Google Blog

Since it is a quite challenge project, so it is unavoidable to see there are many discussion going on around the Net, I find many interesting opinions from the Search Engine Watch.

In his Social Bookmarks Article, Loren Baker wrote:

Social bookmarking allows web users to search, share, organize, and store the bookmarks of different web pages. Most of the services that provide social bookmarking encourage you to organize bookmarks with informal tags …

The tagging and descriptions used in bookmarking is referred to as external meta data and can have huge benefits in SEO, because the information used in the tagging is not controlled by the site owners, but by the public. In essence, the information in external meta tags should be much more valuable than external inbound link anchor text or directory co citation.

NoFollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value which is used to police the outbound link value of user generated content, especially blog commenting. NoFollow is used to communicate with search engines to tell them that a link should not be used to pass on link juice, or “Page Rank”.

To help you developing better SEO strategies, he listed down those social bookmarking sites that do not use nofollow in their HTML tags, which is important for you to understand.

So go here and find out which social bookmarking sites in his list.

Future Google slaps are going to make life harder and harder for a lot of affiliates, quality score updates make it harder for affiliates that want it quick and easy

Super Affiliate Mindset has a great discussion about Are You Ready For The Next 5 Google Slaps. Amit, a well known affiliates discuss what will take to pass upcoming quality score hurtles and how to succeed in your PPC campaign when the game gets tougher.

… more and more advertisers (read – flood of affiliates with ugly one page landing pages they throw together with front page) flood every possible niche and market out there, as a result the bid prices will go higher, and higher, and HIGHER.

Eventually, the bid prices will get so high that most advertiser will be squeaking by with a tiny ROI, or breaking even just acquiring a customer (NOT good for affiliates doing CPA) …

If you take advantage of his insights advice, you will on the game and end up on the winning end. He made some really good point and also raise some good issues.

So prepare yourself and be ready for next big Google slaps.

The US-based worldwide e-marketing group eBay is to close its www.ebay.co.th website and hand over its Thailand businesses to Sanook.com. Thailand will be the 38th market where eBay has a local presence.

eBay Inc announced an agreement with Sanook! the leading online portal in Thailand, to launch an e-commerce site that will enable individuals and businesses in Thailand to participate in local trade as well as cross border trade through eBay’s global Web sites.

According to research firm IDC, Thailand currently has more than 16 million Internet users – a figure expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent through 2009.

“The e-commerce community in Thailand is among the most active we’ve seen anywhere,” said Lorrie Norrington, president, eBay international marketplaces. “Through this agreement, we are combining our core competency in cross border trade with Sanook’s local market expertise to deliver the best e-commerce experience for Thai users, enabling them to not only engage in domestic trade but also to buy from and sell to the world.”

“We are pleased to partner with eBay in creating this new e-commerce site which we believe will provide new economic opportunities for the growing online community in Thailand,” said Torboon Puangmaha, chief executive officer, Sanook Online Limited. “As Thai Internet users become more comfortable doing transactions online, there is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the eBay global online marketplace via the local co-branded site created especially for Thai users. We expect that the Sanook! eBay Web site will quickly become a popular place for people to buy and sell a wide variety of items both within Thailand as well as internationally.”

Bangkok Independent Newspaper Nation has the full news, you can read it Here

Google is shutting down tons of Adsense publishers June 1st because the “unsuitable business model” they are using, according Jensense.com

Many Adsense publishers are receiving emails from Google the past couple of days that letting them know their accounts will be closed June 1st because the above reason.

For those ARBI/MFA sites that contain absolutely no content. No informational articles, no product endorsements, news or anything else that a good affiliate, publisher would place on their site. Google is to disable their Adsense account.

Google’s decision will make it easier for affiliates to play the Adwords game in many markets after those arbi/MFA players gone. And it will also make things better for advertisers because after those no useful content gone, you can bid higher positions without additional cost.

Once the arbitragers’ Adsense accounts are terminated, you can start to place your ads to the content network, you can turn on that function from your adwords account, I think your ads will show up in some decent sites that offer great relevant content (I will do it). That’s why I think Google is doing the right thing.

To get in-depth info about the situation, you can visit Jennifer Slegg’s Google AdSense disabling arbitrage publisher accounts as of June 1st

There are some interesting commentary over at WebMasterWorld – AdSense Disabling Arbitrage Account, check it out.

Finally, Google launches a CPA network and Google Adwords is starting the cost-per-action (CPA based) Beta test phase.

Rob K., Product Manager for Pay-Per-Action, said,

Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site …

Here is the full story from Inside Adwords-The official source for information about AdWords

I have cross this piece back to June 2006 that written by David Jackon, has labeled Google’s CPA beta test announcement as a ValueWeb killer …

Also Jeff Doak, on ReveNews concurs with Mr. Harrelson think that this is far from the beginning of the end for CJ, says Mr. Doak,

Affiliate marketing isn’t about dynamically generated text links on content sites, it’s about clever publishers who figure out new ways to drive converting traffic. Affiliate marketing is about relationships, and there is simply no relationship here.

He thinks Google makes too much on PPC to risk it on CPA deals.

Marketing Pilgrim has one of the stories about the latest news Google’s Launches Pay-Per-Action; a Threat to Affiliate Networks? Andy writes,

To me, it sounds like a clear threat to the likes of Commission Junction or LinkShare – or any other affiliate marketing network. Google, for all intents and purposes, has just entered the affiliate marketing arena, with the battle cry that they can do affiliate marketing better than the affiliate networks can. More

One of the greatest challenges that many affiliates, bloggers and AdSense marketers face is finding and choosing their niche and generate keyword lists. To help you immediately generate huge sortable keyword lists from any web page you’re visiting on the FLY!

Marcin Lejman created free script to help you achieve this, it is a technique described in the most popular post Profitable Niches In Under 10 Minutes

You just need to watch this Keyword Bookmarlet Demo Video to see what it does. Trust me – you will be glad that you did and your mind will reel with all the possibilities

By using this FREE script, you can use Google keyword tool to analyze any page that you’re currently visiting to extract and generate related keywords immediately, together with their prices in the Adwords system to help you do more Keywords research and output everything in a well formatted html table that can be easily imported to any other application!

To grab the free bookmarklet script, go to this post to read the overview and get it while you can! Then go to SEOproToolZ – Profitable niches & tools to exploit them read Marcin Lejman’s most popular posts in the right column to discover bunch of other ways and find how to make money from good niches. He shows you the step-by step instructions and screenshots that uses free tools in a very interesting way.

Google has clamped down on ads which compete with AdSense. If you use ads on your site which look like AdSense ads, you need to know this.

Their competitve ads & services policy was also updated:

Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

In other Google news, Wikipedia is now using rel=nofollow on its outbound / external links. Spammers were placing links on Wikipedia to boost their PageRank. This one little snippet of html code stops the big three spiders from crawling and Google’s PageRank from spreading. In the other words, now search engine spiders will stop following such links, so the spammers will seek new hunting grounds.

Wikipedia is latest casualty, because a popular newsletter said that Wiki links are one of the easiest ways to get more PageRank to your site. Then people started spreading the word, quietly whispering it in podcasts at first. Then all of a sudden, it hits critical mass and every second journalist wannabe copycats the story.

Google also has announced it has created a new algorithm which weakens the impact of prank “Google bombs”.

Well, how does this affect non-pranksters? Not much (according the news) because when you link to one of your pages, you’re probably already use relevant phrases which are on the page you’re linking to. If you did, then just keep doing that

To learn more about this updated policy, here is a Good Explanation of the Changes …

Have you read about the problem that lately many affiliates complete uproar with Google’s aggressive campaign to get merchants to adopt to using Google Checkout. It’s not that affiliates have anything against Google Checkout, but wouldn’t YOU be upset if Google was taking money from you?

Here is what’s happened? A lot of very large merchants are starting to allow Google Checkout for their customers. Google is also offering $10 to consumers who use their service at participating merchants. A TONs of these merchants have affiliate programs.

But all of a sudden it seems that affiliate links are not tracking properly!, which means when affiliates send traffic to merchants website that have Checkout, if the customer buys through Checkout the affiliate sale will not be tracked and commission will not be paid. On the other words, sales are being diverted after the customer is on the merchant site.

This is a serious leak. So check with your merchants to see if they offer Checkout.

For a lot more information and more detailed post about this, read Linda Buquet’s post at 5Star Affiliate Programs Blog …