I just spotted this earlier this evening when I was working on a new blog under development. Apparently, Google is testing unbranded, direct-response ads. The ad spotted was using Flash, was fully interactive with multiple tabs and links, and was completely void of any Google branding, on the surface.

Here’s a screenshot of the ad on-site along with the source code view.

Here are a couple screenshots illustrating the interactivity of the advertisement.

At first, I thought, cool, a new ad format I can use. Being an Adwords and Adsense client for several years, I usually get access to new features pretty early on. Big corporations get them first, but usually I get them relatively early. So, I fired up Google Adwords and indeed, I have direct-response ad formats available to me, but they’re all branded. See the following screenshot.

However, unlike the ad witnessed online, my ad options are all branded, as indicated by the red rectangles. I asked a few of my search and marketing peeps if they had seen anything like this, complete with screenshot and none had seen such an ad format from Google before.

Is Google testing unbranded direct-response ads?

This brings up several questions that need answered…

• Can anyone other than Google confirm the appearance of unbranded direct-response ads?
• Who are these ad formats available to, just big name advertisers, or are they available to smaller advertisers?
• What does this new ad format say about Google’s brand?
• Has Google come to the realization that branding their ads increases banner blindness?
• What level of interactivity will this ad format allow for?

While no confirmation is immediately available, such a move in Google’s part could potentially increase revenue for both Google and their Advertising partners. In a world where many have become completely blind to conventional advertising methods, new, sparkly ad formats that break the traditional mold have a much higher CTR. How widespread this is is yet to be seen, but I, for one, can’t wait for it to become available in my Adwords account.

This just in… On Saturday, January 31, 2009, Google declairs You’re All Malware Mongers!

For those of you who missed the twitter buzz and early excitement of Google’s massive malware message FAIL, I’ve compiled a few images collected during the outage that illustrate what was happening. Essentially, for a brief period of time this morning, Google experienced a widespread glitch that flagged virtually every search result as potentially malicious. For several minutes, countless people were greeted with the message “This site may harm your computer.” appended to every search result on Google.com (Google US confirmed).

TechCrunch was the first to break the news that Google had flagged the whole Internet as malware. Within moments message alerts began to chime incessantly in TweetDeck as more and more of my associates began to report their findings as well. Indeed, the mighty Google had FAIL.

Here are several images of the outage that list some well trusted sites with a malware warning.

What makes this issue news isn’t so much that a mighty giant in search served up a boo-boo in their SERPS. No, that’s not such a big deal. Companies make mistakes. What makes this issue a big deal is that, for no less than 30 minutes this morning, perfectly safe sites were flagged as malicious by Google. For those of us who are search savvy and understand what was going on, sure, no big deal. However, what do you think was going on in the minds of those who are less savvy? How many queries were run by non-techie people in that time frame? What are the long-term effects on Google’s image after such a snafu.

It will be interesting to see how Google handles this blunder. As of the time of this post, no news release has been published as of yet, but I’m certain Google has their best people on the job.

Fresh off my morning feeds, I got this post straight from Google’s blog.

Linking out: Often it’s just applying common sense

I’m not going to write a full-on post this time. Instead, I’d like you to read what Google says then let us discuss it. This is a real issue that needs a resolution. I think Google should hear the voice of the masses.

The “forum” is yours. Let’s discuss this issue in depth.

EDIT: Here is the comment I left on Google’s blog. Let this start the discussion.

Oh, buddy, you just opened a can of worms! I’ll be polite here and keep this short, but you can bet this topic is going to have some strong opinions coming from the blogsphere.

Let’s just say that, as much as I love most of what Google does, who died and made Google the Internet police? Isn’t Google’s primary function that of INDEXING websites? NOT dictating what should be published on them!

I won’t pull at this thread too hard right now, but this will be interesting discussion, for sure!

BTW… The antiquated HTML 4.01 tag limitation in this blog is ridiculous! What happened to xHTML? The better HTML!

Well, another round of Google PageShank, erm PageRank Updates hit this weekend. While those who have not been initiated into the PRSlap club sit on the edge of their seats to see if they gain a measly point or two in precious PR juice, those of us who are seasoned members of the PRSlap club sit back and laugh. Once again, our old friend we love to hate, Google, is spreading fear with their dreaded PR updates.

It comes as no surprise that this blog dropped a point on the homepage but gained a point or two on a few deep pages. No biggy either way since I don’t earn a living here. Besides that, my SERPs and RSS subscriptions continually grow with each posting. Those SERPs and subscriptions are far more important than some arbitrary number Google assigns. Nevertheless, a couple of my other sites gained some PR both on their homepages and deep pages, which will be good for advertising revenue, but not much else.

Still, PageRank is here, broken as it may be, so we have to live with it. For myself as well as many other web professionals, there are much more important metrics to consider than PageRank. Unfortunately, the average “webmaster” may not be aware of these metrics. Instead of focusing on factors that are important, they waste precious time and resources trying to get naked one-way backlinks from high PR sites, while completely ignoring sites that can help generate much more traffic in a shorter time and for less money.

While you sit and watch the little green bar on your screen helplessly, please do take the time to learn more about other metrics that are truly important to growing your online business. Once you understand how to interpret and capitalize on these issues, you too will laugh at the panic of others who scramble for the all mighty PageShank.

In fact, I have a few sites that have PR0s and I can assure you, I’m not sweating it. Why? Because PageRank doesn’t matter. Those sites have SERPs, subscribers and generate revenue as well as provide background services to other sites I own. That is what they were built to do and they do it well, regardless of what number Google wishes to assign them.

If you want to break free from PageShank slavery, learn how to read and understand ALL the factors that influence your site’s growth and sales.

Originally, I started to write this as a comment on the Matt Cutts Repsonds, Confirms Double Standards post over at the IZEA Blog. Given the length of my comments and the fact that I’m raising some additional issues, I felt it best to post here instead.

No offense is intended towards Matt Cutts personally in this post. Matt, I don’t know you personally, so I would not confront you personally. You just happen to be the voice of a company I take issue with right now. Please take my comments as such.

<begin rant>

If I link to anyone, I’m getting something in return for it. I’m either adding value which benefits my visitors then returns the benefit with return visitors. Consistent, highly targeted traffic is most certainly a commodity. Therefore, by definition, every link on every one of my sites earns revenue of one sort or another, whether it be cash or traffic, which eventually leads to $$$. I get something in return from every single link.

Matt, is Google going to penalize me again because I’m getting paid off in traffic for every link I make?

Seriously, PageRank is a broken metric. Let’s get real. How many quality backlinks a site has is a very poor metric for measuring its worth. I recently wrote a post that sent out 380+ trackbacks and got Shpunn and Stumbled. Was it a quality post, no, not really, but I got some quality followed backlinks from it. It took me less than 30 minutes to write that post.

That single post will most likely end up getting a PR2+ within a couple updates because 1) I wasn’t compensated with cash. 2) The content of the post centers on a relatively tight niche and the text is all relevant.

We’re talking about a low quality post here. Then entire post was a list of posts I’ve bookmarked. Sure, some people appreciated the backlink and exposure. Some people were exposed to posts they otherwise might not have known about. However, no unique information was given. It was simply a list of links to other articles with some descriptive text. Yet, I’ve published pages like this before or other sites and seen them rank well in SERPs and get a decent PR for a deep page.

Matt, would you care to explain why Google’s algorithm is broken to the point where a junk post like mine that can rank well and get PR while a high quality, editorial post, that happens to be paid, like what Andy wrote, gets hit with a PR penalty?

The issue here isn’t paid vs. editorial. Let’s cut the BS. All content has one payoff or another and nearly all of it leads to $$$ in the long run. The issue here is Google’s algorithm is broken and cannot differentiate between shit content and quality content. If it could, junk posts wouldn’t end up with good PR and SERPs. I see splogs on the 1st page of Google SERPs for competitive phrases on a regular basis.

Another Example: I recently sold a site that once had a page that was nothing more than RSS feeds from related sites. On that page, there were links to the originating sites and a short excerpt of their feed. This page was a subpage of the domain. Yet, this page got a PR5… For displaying RSS feeds that were aggregated on several hundred other sites. AND This page also helped the site rank #1 for a very competitive term in Google’s index. Scraped content. PR5. 1st place ranking. Junk content that added no value other than centralizing news feeds of related sites.

Sorry Matt. As a whole I respect you and the company you represent. However, I wont stand with my hands on my cheeks while someone tries to blow smoke up my ass.

Google needs to stop making webmasters report paid content with the misuse of a standard and instead should focus on writing an algorithm that does a better job of differentiating between quality content (paid or not) and crap content that happens to be relevant.

</end rant>