If you missed this (and I did admittedly) you missed an important announcement from Google.

Load time is now a large factor in determining your landing page quality score for AdWords.

This effects everything from the design of your pages to the hosting company you choose. Ultimately, in this department, you have to choose between quality and price. Saving $20 a month on hosting could end up costing you much more in the long run if your quality score drops and your marketing costs go up.

It’s something to think about!

Google has a lot of information here (this is a direct link to the part about load time and quality score)

Yahoo! announced last week that it is changing the minimum bid for Sponsored Search from $0.10 to…well not $0.10.

They go into an explanation that somehow involves Van Gogh and hog auctions, but the long story short is that some minimum bids will be lower and some higher.

The objective, according to Yahoo!, is to reward advertisers for better ad quality by allowing lower entry points for certain keywords.

While this move is likely to hurt some affiliates and advertisers, I believe that overall it will help those that are willing to put in a little effort and will go after QUALITY!

You can read the full post at the YSM Blog here

Enjoy!