Google Adwords Is "Closed"

I am making changes in an account and the Google Adwords Interface is having a problem with some of the keywords I am trying to add. I call the Google Adwords number and here is the message I receive:

Thank you for calling Google Adwords. We are closed today in observance of the Christmas Holiday, thank you.

Then it hangs up! No way to dial an extension or contact anyone with technical issues. Am I expecting too much? I understand they love their employees and would love to give them all off, but they still have responsibilities and an obligation to help their customers.

I am going to assume they are off Saturday, Sunday, and Monday as well. Great! Four days of an interface glitch I can't do anything about.

Google, how about sending some of that love to your paying customers?

Yo Mamma's Got So Many Links......

Randfish, from seomoz.org, reported some interesting information after the Search Engine Q+A on links a few weeks ago. Below are the quotes from each search engine’s speaker:

Yahoo!: “…Yahoo! wouldn't try to pick one post out of twenty or fifty on every blog that might be running advertorials or paid reviews just to stop link value from that particular post. If the engine looked at the site and saw that in general, the outgoing links were of high quality, there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material.”

Google: agreed with Yahoo!, but added nothing in particular.

Ask: “…Ask was quick to note that if the link were off-topic, Ask would be likely not to give that link much weight, but I pointed out that most advertisers would buy links from highly relevant blogs, not just for the search engine value, but because they wanted the qualified, relevant traffic from click-throughs as well as branding.”

MSN: “MSN agreed but didn't expand and when Tim Converse from Yahoo! jumped back in to say that it really wasn't worth an engine's time to going picking out paid links with that granularity, all the other panelists were vigorously head-nodding and verbally agreeing.”

Aside from this somewhat shocking reply to the questions at hand, an effective method of detecting paid links would not be able to penalize a site because of the potential to wipe out one’s competition with a sabotaging link campaign. Yet, if these paid links are snuffed out and revealed for the Trojan Horses they are, search engines can potentially disregard all potential value completely.

To further complicate matters, sponsored blog posts are given the thumbs-up, yet buying text links is certainly frowned upon. Paid text links are often positioned isolated from relevant copy, lacking additional information, and frequently located on irrelevant sites. Paying for links within blogs typically ensures some degree of semantic quality from the surrounding copy, as well as context for the text link to serve a valuable, or at least seemingly valuable, purpose.

For now at least, it seems paying within blogs is the safest route, but there are no guarantees about how long you’ll be given this allowance before the search engines have gotten what they need from the learning experience, and begin just one more shift in another metric.

It's always nice to rely on good old fashion family and friends who share similiar interests with your site.