Mamma.com has finally decided to spruce herself up a bit, get a makeover and start offering the ability to bid on keywords for the classified ads. After flat sales with the flat rate offering Mamma has decided to offer both which is good for Mamma and not so good for advertisers.
Mamma in the past has been a cost-effective way for advertisers to be seen and get targeted traffic without the expense of a Google AdWords or Overture ad campaign. With the flat rate feature which was a comparative bargain for most keyword-phrases, Mamma has decided that now instead of handing out slices, she wants a piece of the pie as well.
In other news, the Google Sandbox is alive! After 8 months of building sand castles, knocking them down, then eating the sand, SEO Firm, in one day mind you has popped from number 353 in the Google rankings to number 28. If you do a search in Yahoo! and MSN for “SEO firm” you will see top 10 results in those engines and would have seen them for the last couple of months. One hurdle passed, more to follow.
In addition, we have a cellular POS software client that is worth checking out that is possibly struggling with the same situation. Its getting harder to be an SEO when you have to tell clients that they will have to wait 8 – 9 months in order to receive decent rankings in Google. I can see Google’s rational of wanting to keep the fly-by-night websites out of the top results list and making websites prove themselves. Waiting for 8 months, though seems like a pretty steep apprenticeship.
