Google has already faced quite a bit of examination for their proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo and now they are on the receiving end of a little more. During separate House and Senate hearings on Internet competition recently Capitol Hill turned their attention to the potential deal.

Executives from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were all questioned by lawmakers about the impact consumers and advertisers would face from the deals. An announcement made by Google last month about providing search advertising for Yahoo is what brought about the hearings.

A main concern is that Yahoo will be reduced to “a satellite in the Google orbit” should the deal go through. And the Justice Department is investigating whether a Google and Yahoo deal would create a monopoly.
Google and Yahoo defend their deal as a way to deliver more relevant ads to consumers and more valuable leads to advertisers.

Google and Yahoo defended the partnership as a way to deliver more relevant ads to consumers and more valuable leads to advertisers. And David Drummond, Google’s general counselor, stated that Yahoo would still be selling its own ads which means that deal wouldn’t lead to Google having ultimate control in the search ad market.

Under the deal, Google would provide search advertising to run with some Yahoo searches in the United States and Canada. Yahoo is estimated to receive as much as $800 million annually from the deal.

Microsoft argues that allowing the two biggest players in search advertising to combine efforts would give Google control of 90 percent of the market and allow it to raise prices and have unprecedented access to information about consumers’ online habits.

Recently the zip code guy blog highlighted a zip code map in a wide array of formats. The database includes lists of All US Cities

• All US Counties
• All US Zip Codes
• Latitude and Longitude of Cities/Zip Codes
• States and State Abbreviations

For $25 this database is a great investment if you are run geo-local AdWords campaigns using tools like Speed PPC.

Determining the value of a website is not always an easy task. There are so many variables that go into the equation that it can get a little confusing at time. A general rule of thumb is that a website is worth anywhere between 18 – 24 times a company’s monthly revenue minus your expense and plus your development costs. But, here are some other factors to consider.

The age of your domain is definitely something to consider. The longer the site has been around, the more trust search engines put into it. Therefore if you have a site that is 10 years old, it’s worth more than one that is 10 months old.

Another factor is how many back links a site has and the quality of these links. Links are also seen as a source of trust by search engines. Sites with high quality links tend to place better in SERPs so a site with more quality links is worth more than a site with lots of low quality links or one with few or no links at all.

You should also look at how many active emails a site has on a mailing list as well as what kind of community if users it has. If a website has a large mailing list or a big community of users then it’s worth more to a buyer because it has a built-in database.

To show an example of this formula we’ll use a site that has monthly revenue of $300 and is 5 years old, but doesn’t have any top 10 rankings. Let’s say the monthly expenses are $50 and the so the net income is $250. So 24 months multiplied by $250 equals $6,000. If you add in $5,000 for development cost with some age premium you’ll get a  $12,500 valuation. However, at the end of the day your website is only worth what someone else is willing to pay or it.

Some tools that can help you appraise the value of a website are Alexa, Overture bid tool, a keyword tool, the site’s log files and financials. You should also consider the cost of replicating the website when appraising it as well as how much qualified, relevant, targeted traffic the website gets.

Matt Cutts announced at Pubcon that Google will begin treating sub domains similar to how they treat folders.  The most dramatic effect is that many website that used sub domains as a way to dominate top search listings will have to revise their strategy as now only 2 listings will show up in Google for a particular domain even if sub domains previously pulled additional top rankings.  A good example used of this used by many SEO bloggers is Apple.com:

In this example, store.apple.com is the #4 search using a sub-domain with the main apple.com site holding the #1 and #2 spot.  In the new subdomain, the www.apple.com wil l stll hold the #1 ranking and the store.apple.com will have the indentation for store.apple.com resulting in a Top 10 ranking loss for apple.com with the introduction of a new competitor into the Top 10.

While this one re-stack of the Top 10 of Google is not significant, I have been asked many times from clients about sub domains and I have tended to recommend against the use of sub domains as a SEO strategy for a number of reasons, but the only that held up was my Google ’spidey’ sense that told me that Google may change their opinion on sub domains at some time in the future.  I think this is one of the first moves to treat sub domains as simply extensions of the core www instead of a separate web site.  Either way, there is an immediate affect on current Google rankings that are using sub domains.

When You buy A Google Mini, your company receives a free link on Google.com page that has a PR7 rating.  Here is the  page -> http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/success_stories.html

1.Paying this much money for a link may or not be a good idea.  Google has been penalizing sites that actively buy and sell links for the purpose of manipulating Page Rank.  But it seems like the going rate for PR7 site might be between $200 - $300 per month.

2. This is not a fee for a link, this is a software/server purchase for a Google Search Appliance called Google Mini. 

3. While this seems appealing, there is no guarantee from Google (unless it is actually in the contract) for them to list UDR.com on the product listing pages.  The other problem is that the more sales they make, the more links on the page….therefore, less link popularity.

So, if you want to buy Google Search technology…I think the $1,995 is a fair, if not good, price.  The fact it might get you a high PR link on Google is a huge bonus.  Unless, Google could have an internal setting not to count the PR in the favor of clients, which would not really be that hard to do internally for Google.