This blank space brought to you by Google

[mediahound]

Just saw this in the link to google on an adwords box on a website.

"This blank space brought to you by Google"

There were no ads in the box, and it appeared to be a new page, before the three hour wait for mediabot to come in and check things out.

Has anyone else seen this on any sites? Or have I been in my cave too long?

Has google been doing some serious backend changes or what?

I had a site ranking #2 for a very popular real estate term fall off the face of results. Boo hoo, back to the drawing board on that site...

You guys know I own free-hit-counter.com, right?
Well, I'm happy to report, that the service has seen growth with every single day this year. (as usual)
So while some sites may have seen fluctuations, dont despair, its not an internet catastrophy going on. Just keep your site geared to your user and dont keep your eggs in any one basket. And dont rely on just any one engine either. Well, PPC people need not worry about that. Keep spending what you can afford if it's PPC and a profitable product, and you'll do good. Optimise your ads title and descriptions, use this as an opp to get people that are used to clicking on their favorite site when searching, and now that they cant find it, they're looking for new sites to visit. So, it's a win-win situation after all.

Has anyone seen that adwords change yet?

[Maureen]

I haven't seen it yet - but I have received an influx of emails starting Thursday from people who were either updating their existing AdWords campaign or were trying to create a new one. They all reported errors and timeouts - There was a Red Text message that occasionally appeared at the top of the page, which stated that Google AdWords was going to, be offline in 10 minutes.

I wonder if what you saw was a placeholder for new ads during that down time.

The last question/email on the topic came in today at 3:00 PM EST - When did you first notice and have you seen it since?

I also noted in another thread where Fathom posted information about datacenter IP changes - Does anyone know when that took place?

[mediahound]

I noticed it just before I posted.

Haven't seen it since, but have had some sites rollercoaster around a bit in the search results, just like everyone else seems to have had.

As far as the ip changes, havent heard much on that either... care to share what you have had?

Does this mean I have to update my spidertrax scripts? Is it googlebot has new ip's or just simply datacenters that provide results, that dont crawl?

This is important information for anyone who uses Darren Ward's Spydertrax. (Highly recommended script, from a great person)

Keep us informed, please!


- Jarred