Does Google have something cooking for the upcoming holidays this year? Last year around the holidays did Google launch Google Checkout and promoted it heavily by providing free credits to first time users of the services. Many affiliates probably remember vividly the commission tracking issues (among others) that arose from the hastened implementation of the service into merchant ecommerce sites.

Gary Price of Resource Shelf noticed some increased activity recently in the domain space that involves Google in combination with coupons.

Google registered or acquired several domains to this subject over the recent weeks, including CouponGoogle.com, Google-Coupons.com and variations of those, including the various top-level domain .net, .org etc. Google does still not own GoogleCoupon.com though and GoogleCoupons.com is hanging in status "redemption Period" now.

Yahoo Shopping already provides coupons, which also appear via Yahoo! Shortcuts in the regular Yahoo! search results pages, causing some confusion in the affiliate marketing community. Google is currently a bit behind and merchants cannot yet leverage this powerful marketing tool effectively at the biggest search engine on the internet.

Google did some small steps last year when they introduced the option for businesses to add printable coupon offers to their local business center listings, but that feature is still widely unknown and not used by the vast majority of retailers on the internet. I did some local searches in Google Maps to find businesses in my area, which offer coupons via the Google service and did not find any (except for myself). A search for pizza places or consumer electronics retailers in my area is not yielding any results.

The organic and paid listings in the Google SERPs are still dominated by Coupon affiliates and other more or less useful results. There is a lot of room for improvement from a consumer, merchant and Google's point of view as well, who could promote and expand their Google Checkout product by making coupon offers available and easy to find.