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Microsoft had high expectations for customer adoption of Vista, and claimed the launch would be one of the most successful in Windows history. Unfortunately for the company, those predictions so far haven’t panned out, and in July, Microsoft lowered its projections for customer adoption of Vista. The company had said the split between XP and Vista sales in its fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, would be 15 percent to 85 percent; now the company is saying the split will be 22 percent XP and 78 percent Vista.

According to some, that may even be optimistic. Paul Ghysels, a custom system builder who owns the Neighborhood Computer Store in Moraga, California, said that Microsoft has “really blown Vista.” He said he’s not surprised Microsoft extended the availability of XP for OEMs. “I figured Microsoft would have to come up with something because Vista is so unprepared for the market right now,” Ghysels said. Full article.

We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

This is the first update after the launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer. We’ve had millions of URLs rewritten based on your submissions and your sites should have seen smarter crawling from Yahoo! Slurp as a result. You will see further benefits in how your site is represented in the index from this update. Your input improves relevance and coverage for users in search results, particularly in relation to your site. Full article.

DMOZ is made up of thousands of passionate, volunteer category enthusiasts and experts from all over the world who donate their time to arrange their respective portion of the web. Thanks to their work, DMOZ is a starting place for browsing and searching the web. DMOZ data is also used by thousands of search engines and web portals to help people quickly and easily find information on the web.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of DMOZ’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The editor community is very much alive and thriving. Thousands of new sites are added and updated every week, and we continue to receive hundreds of editor applications and suggested sites every day. Full Article.

What is the Conversion Optimizer?

The Conversion Optimizer (beta) is an AdWords feature that manages your advertising costs around specific conversion goals.

Suppose you know how much you’re willing to pay for a conversion, and you know that your ads get better conversion rates on certain days of the week. Normally, you’d spend time monitoring and adjusting your cost-per-click (CPC) bids in order to get more conversions for a lower cost.

With the Conversion Optimizer, this process is automated. You still pay per click, but instead of setting CPC bids, you simply specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid for each ad group. The Conversion Optimizer manages your CPC bids for you, making adjustments and showing your ads only when you’re likely to get conversions.

To determine when to show your ads, the Conversion Optimizer predicts a conversion rate for your ads every time they’re eligible to appear. This prediction is based on various factors. For example, here are some of the factors that affect the conversion rate on Kim’s custom shirt website:

The search query. Kim’s conversion rate is higher when users search for custom shirts than when they search for shirts.
The location of the user. Her conversion rate is highest when her ad shows in New York.
The conversion history of particular sites. When her ad shows on certain types of content sites in the Google Network, Kim is more likely to get conversions. Full Article.

Not tonight, Honey. I’m online.
Sound familiar? A survey of about 1,000 Americans showed that the Internet has become such an essential part of their every-day lives that 28% said they spend less time socializing with friends because of it. And 20% said they spend less time having sex because they’re too busy online, according to a study by advertising agency JWT.

“It’s clear that there’s been a huge cumulative shift in what we do and what we pay attention to, thanks to new technologies,” said Bob Jeffrey, chairman and CEO of JWT, in a written statement. “Increasingly, you will see the emergence of truly passionate ‘digitivity denizens,’ or people who thrive in a technology-enabled universe. They see their cell phones as extensions of themselves, their online and offline lives are co-mingled, and they would choose a Wi-Fi connection over television any day. Trending younger, these are people who don’t distinguish between old and new media — in fact, new media is not thought of as new, it’s just media.” Full article.

The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets.

“That’s going to help out small- and medium-size businesses,” Fujitsu marketing manager Brandon Farris told CNET News.com.

Hewlett-Packard also started a program in August for many of its business models. “For business desktops, workstations and select business notebooks and tablet PCs, customers can configure their systems to include the XP Pro restore disc for little or no charge,” HP spokeswoman Tiffany Smith said in an e-mail. She said it was too soon to gauge how high customer interest has been. “Since we’ve only been offering (it) for about a month, we don’t really have anything to share on demand.” Full article.

At stake is the future of how we interact with software: by logging online to free applications provided by groups such as Google, or by buying costly boxed software from behemoths such as Microsoft.

For the past year or so, Google has been quietly promoting its online range of free software, including the Gmail email service and its Docs and Spreadsheets programs for creating Office-style documents.

But its executives have denied they’re trying to take serious business away from the omnipotent Microsoft Office: just providing a handy little service for consumers, they have said. Full article.

The big problem with third-party auditors is that they continue to count “fictitious clicks,” clicks that Google doesn’t count as clicks at all, in click fraud estimates. Here’s one major example: Users click on a Google ad on Google.com or an Adsense site.

 When they land on the advertiser’s site, they click on products, hitting the “back” button to go back to the landing page. Many browsers reload the landing page each time. We don’t count those as clicks, but third-party auditors actually register each click on the “back” button as another click on an ad, which grossly overestimates the number of ad clicks.  Full article.

            Tired of emptying your wallet for links to build up your Search Engine Optimization? Sick of getting poor Google, MSN, or Yahoo Search Engine statistics? Great news, now you don’t have to be with New Way Links. New Way Links is a revolutionary and easy way of building one-way links for your site. How? New Way Links has a unique algorithm that connects the sites in the program all in a one way direction.

All links are one way; no installation is required, permanent one way links, and even 30 day money back guarantee. This all seems way too good to be true. The catch? There is none! All you have to do is manually install outgoing links on your site which can’t take more than a couple minutes.

Why is New Way Links a necessity for any aspiring web developer? Every experienced web developer would tell you that link building is the key for any success for any site. Now, you don’t have to toil for links. Almost everything is done by the staff of New Way Links, yet you reap all the success. At just 25$ a month, it can turn out to be a great investment.

Google’s pagerank is directly related to how many links your site has and the relevance of the links. Not only will New Way Links provide you with one way links, it will provide you with relevant links boosting your pagerank significantly. With just a pagerank of 6 you can be earning hundreds of dollars a month all without breaking a sweat.

There are many sites that offer lots of links such as link farms, or reciprocal links. However, search engines have made it clear that reciprocal links and link farms will affect your site negatively. On the other hand, search engines also have made it clear that they’re looking specifically for relevant one way links.

Where does New Way Links get all these links from? We already have volunteer sites to start up the program. Once the program gets started, the volunteer sites will link to the registered sites, which will return link to other sites causing a massive chain reaction. If you decide that this program is not for you, there is a 30 day refund and the best part is that the links linking to your site are 100% permanent even after cancellation of membership.

In this modern age, the Internet is becoming more and more competitive. New Way Links is a great way to get ahead of the game with absolutely no hassle. If you register now, you will get a whole month FREE on top of the 30 day refund making it completely without risks. The only question left is what are you waiting for?