April 2007 Archives

On a DigitalPoint Forums post, member Jon West notices that the searching for Google Checkout currently displays some interesting results: the Google Checkout page appears with the anchor text of "use google checkout on hibidder com free"

I was able to search for "Google Checkout" from two separate locations and was able to reproduce the result, which is below:

What could it be? Could the site have been hacked? Some members speculate that it was because of the ODP designation somewhere else:

I bet someone in the ODP is linking to https://checkout.google.com with the anchor text "use google checkout on hibidder com free" - and because the Google Checkout page doesn't have the no ODP tag, it is displaying what an ODP editor is using in some random category.

But then another member finds that hibidder.com is linking to Google Checkout, perhaps accidentally:

ok, it looks like http://hibidder.com/ is linking to https://checkout.google.com/ with the alt tag: "use google checkout on hibidder.com free", among other google sites.

So it doesn't look like they did it on purpose. Or even know what they did. Nice way to get their site known tho.

What do you think it could be? Digg the story and discuss it at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Danny also caught Jon's find and wrote on Search Engine Land about why this is occurring. Apparently, the text came from an ALT tag for an image! Do we need standards for pages lacking a title tag? Should the title be inherited from ALT tags? Not according to this example.

On DigitalPoint, WebmasterWorld, and Search Engine Watch Forums, adCenterEU of Microsoft has written in to inform the Microsoft adCenter community that adCenter is currently being upgraded to version 3.7.1.

He writes:

We are pleased to announce the arrival of adCenter 3.7.1. As communicated in advance of the upgrade, reporting will remain out of SLA until around Tuesday May 1st 2007 due to the massive amounts of data that we must process as a result of the upgrade.

Users ‘may’ see some partial data in our BI reporting for day, month, year when compared to hourly:

This is an expected side effect of the upgrade and catch up of data.

This is only affecting data after Friday the 27th of April. All data prior is complete for all grains – hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.

This is only temporary. We expect to catch up on the data end of day Tuesday 2nd May 2007.

Users will likely see blanks or ‘-‘ in the Keyword Performance tab (under the Campaigns Tab) instead of the actual keyword data. We are working hard to investigate root cause. The good news – there is a work-around:

Simply run a Keyword Performance report in adCenter and you should get the data you are looking for.

We'll keep you informed as the progress of this post-upgrade data catch-up.

It will only be fair to wait until after the upgrade is complete (tomorrow) before reporting any errors, although members already have concerns and requests for future upgrades.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint, WebmasterWorld, and Search Engine Watch.

This morning, Yahoo will officially announce an acquisition of Right Media which rival's Google's acquisition of DoubleClick. Danny discussed the purchase on Search Engine Land, saying that they purchased these outside companies because their own internal ad networks weren't good enough:

Both moves to me underscore how neither players' own existing ad networks have apparently been good enough for their display ambitions.

In the Search Engine Land article, Danny walks through why DoubleClick was a good match for Google: a large user base, an ad exchange network, and possible competition. Yahoo's acquisition is a "democratic move for ad sales."

A DigitalPoint Forums post references the New York Times article that also broke the story. DigitalPoint members wonder what will be expected of Microsoft, especially since they recently challenged Google for its DoubleClick acquisition. Interestingly, Yahoo! responded with an acquisition of its own, but Microsoft only asked the government to examine the purchase. I think that the strategic acquisition was the way to go here.

On WebmasterWorld, however, members question the leadership of Terry Semel and believe that Yahoo! is going to continually do worse. Again, I think that if you compare Yahoo to Microsoft, Yahoo took lemons and made lemonade. Microsoft just stared at the lemons and brought them to the government for review.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint and WebmasterWorld.

There have been publishers in both the Google AdSense network and Yahoo! Publisher Network who were banned due to their ads running on sites that were not appropriate. Some publishers are worried that it may happen to them.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks for Google to add an allow domain feature.

This feature will allow the publisher to specify which domains or IPs can show this publisher's ads. If the domain or IP is not allowed, the ads will not show. A security blanket for some worried publishers.

I like the idea.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have finally been able to find an advertiser who set up a Google Pay Per Action text ad through the help of Search Engine Watch Forums. The ad should appear as the next phrase " " and it should look like a standard text link.

There was some controversy over the text link unit but that seemed to have died down now.

In the past we reported on PPA in use but not the text link ad unit. This is the first known example of a text link ad unit live, as far as I know.

Again, here is the text link unit in real time for you:

Don't forget to try to mouse over the ad and you should see "Ads by Google."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread talks about Google's new audio ads. Part of that discussion, one member posted a URL to screen captures of the Google Ad Creation Marketplace.

Basically, the Google Ad Creation Marketplace is a place for those interested in Audio Ads from Google to have the ads created for them.

The Ad Creation Marketplace is a searchable directory of professional audio ad specialists that AdWords advertisers may use to locate someone to assist them in the creation of radio advertisements.
Ad creation specialists can help with every step of the process, from concept and scriptwriting to final production and file delivery. For advertisers new to the radio space, or who are starting a new campaign, the directory provides an invaluable starting point for finding the talent they need.

There is a huge FAQ over at http://www.google.com/adwords/acm/advertiser.html.

The early tests are beginning now.

If you want to beta test these ads, visit http://www.google.com/adwords/audioads/ and sign up.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It has been a while since I have compared Yahoo! Publisher Network with Google AdSense. I have seen threads over the past month or so, with complaints on the Yahoo Publisher Network.

A recent WebmasterWorld thread sums up all those complaints into one nice little package.

The issues publishers are noticing with the Yahoo! Publisher Network include:

• Ad targeting is extremely poor and getting worse
• Earnings are about two to for times less than with Google
• Click through rates on the ads are five to ten times less than on Google

Most of the responses to these numbers are in agreement. Most have agreed that Yahoo's ad are not as targeted, drive less of a click through rate and earn them less money.

I have not personally tested any of this but I am curious, so I am placing an ad below and I would love to see how relevant it is. Of course, I am not going to look at the earnings on this ad - so don't click it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As much as you explain that toolbar PageRank does not show you a result that you can work with, people still tend to obsess about PageRank. Go ahead and read Danny's PageRank Guide once again. In any event, on Friday we reported about possible buggy PageRank but now there seems to be a wide update in the toolbar PageRank scores.

Most people are noticing a drop of one point, while some are noticing PR0s and others are noticing nothing.

We have threads at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, WebmasterWorld and about a dozen threads at DigitalPoint Forums.

Gabs at Search Engine Roundtable Forums asks if Google is capping the PageRank displayed in the toolbar by a certain value if your site falls within a specific category. Easy enough to check, but I highly doubt it.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and about a dozen threads at DigitalPoint Forums.

Hey guys! How are you all doing? It's pouring here, but on a happier note, I have noticed that more and more trees are blooming, which means that spring is now in full force on this side of the globe. Awesome! This is perfect timing, too:

Earth Day

The search engine Earth Day logos should have indicated that something was up on Sunday. Ah, yes, it was that day that we honor and respect our habitat. Yahoo! had a pretty neat logo done in Flash with a windmill. Ask displayed a logo indicating a sunshiney day. Google's logo is most like the weather today: a blue blur where the sky meets the sea.

Continue reading "Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 4/27/07"

Ever since Google expanded Webmaster Central to include a link analysis tool, we have been collecting the raw data to analyze for later purposes. Last month, we saw some February and March link data. This month, let's look at April and put it up against February and March.

This month, only three of the top ten most-linked to pages made Digg's front page:

• Yahoo! Removes Category (Directory) Links From Under Search Results
• Google Wins in Kinderstart Lawsuit
• Google Sending Out More Google Coolers to AdWords Advertisers

Tamar did an excellent job organizing the data for me to look at and analyze a bit more. Here is our most recent linkage data from Google Webmaster Central's link tool. One thing stands out about this data is that the first article has 15,426 more links than the second most link to article - that is huge. Anyway, here are the most linked to article, based on April's linkage data.

Continue reading "The Life Time Value of Links Based on Google Webmaster Central"

Now that we know that toolbar PageRank does not mean all that much, in terms of ones ranking at this point in time - we can discuss a possible bug in the Google Toolbar.

A WebmasterWorld thread has dozens of people reporting that old and trusted sites are now showing a PageRank 0 (PR0) score.

If it happened to their site, some are clarifying that they have seen no significant change in traffic data. That is just one more sign that the toolbar PageRank doesn't impact your rankings directly.

But is there some sort of bug with the toolbar?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has released four new document patent applications. All four are on the topic of scoring a document. One is based on scoring documents on query analysis, an other on traffic analysis, an other on link criteria and the last is on age of the document.

• Document Scoring Based on Query Analysis
• Document Scoring Based on Traffic Associated with a Document
• Document Scoring Based on Link-Based Criteria
• Document Scoring Based on Document Inception Date

These four patent applications were released in the past two weeks. Even Matt Cutts is named on one.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that many users of the Google personalized home page have suddenly lost their customized settings.

The threads were endless. We have reports at Google Blogoscoped Forums, tons of threads at Google Groups (including this 300+ post one) and a thread at WebmasterWorld.

My Google home page remained fine, I believe (I rarely use it). Here is a screen capture of mine, which I sorely need to update.

Yes, it is currently raining here...

It appears that those personalized home pages that lost their data were restored at about 4:30am (EST) this morning.

Google Guide Jaime wrote that he appreciated the reports:

Yikes! So sorry about this everyone... but thanks so much for coming here to report it. We're now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon. For now, we're not entirely sure of this, but it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice.

The big question I know you'll all want answered is whether you'll get your homepage back once we sort things out... and the really honest answer is that I hope so, but I just don't know yet.

Thanks for all your patience and helpful details. I will update this thread as soon as I can.
- Jaime

Later, Google Guide Cameron came in to say:

Thanks for letting us know that this problem isn't related to your theme - it's really helpful to get this info. Another piece of information that could help us sort this out is your approximate location; if you feel like sharing, that would be great!

- Cameron

That was out last word from Google and then at about 4:30am (EST), people began reporting their personalized settings have come back.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums, Google Groups and WebmasterWorld.

I finally had time last night to read Danny's What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

This write up is undoubtedly the best explanation of Google PageRank I have seen in years.

Not only does it include a point I tried hard to stress in Why Do Some SEOs Want Toolbar PageRank To Go Away?, it also goes over every single other aspect of PageRank.

Here is the index of this article:

• Google's Definition: PageRank As Votes
• Recent Google Edits Emphasize PageRank Just One Of Many Factors
• PageRank For Searchers: Google Toolbar
• PR Stands For PageRank, Not Public Relations
• PageRank In The Google Directory
• PageRank For SEOs
• Seeing PageRank In Search Rankings
• PageRank Versus "Toolbar" PageRank
• PageRank Tech Talk
• Conclusion (Especially For Those Thinking I Don't Have Time To Read)

Whenever you get a call from someone asking you to improve their PageRank, send them there. :)

Again, a must read and a must keep article.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums post refers to a PC World article about recent malware being disguised by a Google Sponsored Link.

Roger Thompson of Exploit Security Labs posted today about finding poisoned Google sponsored links that surreptitiously direct searchers through malicious sites that attempt to surreptitiously install malware on your PC.

According to the article, on the morning of April 10th, if you searched for Better Business Bureau on Google and clicked on the Sponsored Listing, you'd find yourself on the BBB website as expected. However, before you actually reached the final destination, you'd pass through a site that attempts to exploit an Internet Explorer browser vulnerability and installs malware intended to steal very sensitive banking data.

Barry wrote about this a on Search Engine Land. He references yet another article from the Washington Post that reports the same story about how sponsored listings are being tainted to install malware that reportedly steals passwords and other sensitive information.

On DigitalPoint, a member asks if this will have an impact on the future of paid listings. I hope it does. In the PC World article, the writer says:

I'd love to hear from Google whether they screen purchasers of sponsored links or the redirection URLs they use.

I think that this is very important. Otherwise, the search engine will be under fire as others take advantage of the exploit.

On a similar note, AdWords accounts are being hacked. When Barry reported the story, there was no apparent association to GregOne's account being compromised to the malware within the sponsored listings. It may, however, be the case now. The WebmasterWorld is updated, and GregOne (whose account was hacked) writes to say that by clicking on one of the ads, there was a "redirect pointing to trackback.org that somehow installed an activex component without approval."

This is pretty worrisome. GregOne says, "I got hit on the 23rd of April, you'd think Google would have put a freeze on any links pointing to fasttrack.org." That would be a good idea.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Is Google watching your surfing habits all the more closely to target ads that would serve your personal needs? Perhaps you haven't taken note, but a member on WebmasterWorld did.

I'm currently working on my personal site and I just happen to read some of the ads.

They are very off-topic for my site. But they are exactly my interests.

He says that he has browsed related sites and discussed the topic within his Gmail account -- and he suspects that this is the cause of the ad targeting.

Google has enough information for the personalized ads to be pretty targeted, so I wouldn't be surprised at this direction. Other members feel the same way.

Very interesting! I haven't seen this myself and haven't heard any news, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google was starting to implement "behavioral targeting" - seems to be the future of advertising. And between Search and Gmail and a bunch of other programs, Google is certainly building up quite a bank of information on people's interests!

Barry says that this is very farfetched for the time being. I think it's a likely direction with all the information Google has amassed about its users.

Have you noticed these extremely targeted ads? Let the readers at WebmasterWorld know.

Google might have the highest market share, the most visitors, and is the most powerful brand of 2007, but the other search engines happen to exist for a reason: they satisfy the needs of users. A WebmasterWorld member actually finds Ask, which is the weakest of the four at the present, to be the best search engine. His claim is that "it produces much better results." Furthermore, to its credit, "Ask is naturally more difficult to game, and no Ask rep has needed to ask webmasters to rat on their colleagues - because it hasn't needed to."

Good observation. But his post went unanswered for several days until someone pointed out that while Ask does show promise, they have other issues: "poor spidering [and] very low caching ability." Worse, "their complete absense here on webmasters world, their refusal to engage with webmasters, plus the lack of referals does mean no one hearabouts gets excited about ask."

Another member has similar findings, especially after reviewing his server logs:

In my case, I can easily see that Ask/Teoma bot keeps asking for non-existing, deprecated URLs, which have been superseded over 2.5yr ago.

For some reason, Ask/Teoma bot is very slow to spider new pages, readily crawlable from the site's linking structure (or by consulting the sitemap.xml new standard), with deeplinks from other sites. Instead, many of its requests end up 404s (i.e. waste of resources, both its own and ours).

These observations do not boost my confidence in Ask's ability to find relevant content.

But there's more. Andy Hagans writes a blog post urging Ask (and Microsoft) to respect users' privacy. He considers it a "business opportunity" if the smaller engines would become a "privacy engine," so that user results are not stored for more than 2 weeks/2 months.

At a certain point, search relevancy is a relative commodity (is Google really that much better than is was a year ago?), and other priorities are going to determine where searchers hang their hats. For millions of searchers out there, the overriding “other priority” is privacy.

Hey, I hear you, Andy.

In 2004, Barry also reported about Ask.com as a search engine that shows a terrific amount of potential. Still, they could do so much more if they engage in the community. I think that would be a wonderful thing.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

On a Search Engine Watch forums post, a member says that he has many Google AdWords vouchers and wants to resell them.

The only problem is that they aren't for resale.

AdWordsRep, Google's Customer Associate, writes in and tells the user to proceed with caution.

Given that AdWords vouchers are not meant to be sold, I would advise against responding to any offer which offers one or more of them for sale.

He later reiterates his point:

...these vouchers are meant as a means for new advertisers to try out AdWords for a short time, on Google's nickel - not to be gleefully sold on well known auction sites - or, now, apparently, on this very forum!

Discussion continues at Search Engine Watch.

Back on March 8, 2007, I reported at Search Engine Land how Google Local Business Center Adds Photos, Attributes, Maps Corrections & Stats. I went through how I added photos and updated some attributes. But since then I have been waiting for Google Maps to update my listing and as of yesterday, I believe they have.

I noticed the images that I uploaded come into play at my local listings. The images shown in my business listing are images I selected and uploaded to Google Local Business Center.

Here is a screen capture of the listing now, after it was updated:

But, when I log into Google Local Business Center, it shows me that my listing was updated on Mar 8, 2007 but is still pending approval and "awaiting next update."

Weird.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I was prepped two days ago for a Search Engine Land post that announced Ask.com To Launch Contextual Advertising Product. In short, Ask.com's Search Listings division is launching a contextual product to compete with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and Microsoft contentAds. Ask.com's program is named ASL Contextual Advertising and will go live the week of May 21st on IAC's properties.

I honestly have no idea when individual publishers will be able to apply to join the Ask.com Contextual program, but as soon as I know, I will let you know.

The Ask.com blog posted a couple screen captures showing off a sample ad. Here is one of those ads:

How is this product different from our competitors, you ask? Three important reasons, each one a paradigm shift:

* It gives publishers more control over yield and relevancy
* It gives publishers more creative ad unit opportunities
* It allows both advertisers and publishers more control over where and what ads are displayed

DigitalPoint Forums has a pretty long thread on this announcement. They are extremely excited for a competitor to enter the market, outside of Yahoo and Google. Time will tell when they launch it to these publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I have received a couple emails asking me about what Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers are noticing since the change from Overture to Panama.

Don't get me wrong, we covered it a lot at Search Engine Land but there has not been much discussion at the forums on it. Here are the reports I have found on this:

• Preliminary Scorecard: How Effective Is Yahoo's Panama Upgrade?, Search Engine Land
• Yahoo! Panama First Look, Search Marketing Trends
• Feb 2007 Results: Yahoo ‘Panama’ Siezes Back Share From Google, Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has feedback from four different SEMs all saying that they noticed a drop in volume from Yahoo! Search Marketing since the Panama upgrade.

For me, I think the interface is much better and the account maitenance is somewhat easier. As far as performance, we are down quite a bit from where we were pre-Panama. ROI is similar, but volume is way down.

Our volume is way down too. We are actually at the point of deciding if it's even worth my time to manage Yahoo's campaigns any longer.

I've also noticed an extreme decrease in volume.

Now is this related to the the addition of the Yahoo Panama quality score factors or Panama itself, is hard to answer. But these reports are a bit upsetting.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google News Now (I did a search on "google news" ironically):

Notice the news results right in the middle of the page.

Google News Then:

Notice the news results at the top of the page, the way we are accustomed to.

Now, news is not always smack in the middle of the page. It can also be at the top, bottom, or in any of the top ten positions in the page.

Here is an example of searches I have taken at home but show news items at the top or bottom.

News results for DoubleClick Google search at the bottom:

News results for Gonzales Google search at the top:

Danny Sullivan will hopefully find out from Google "how the new changes will affect algorithms." If not, I am sure SEOs and Webmasters will analyze it to death in the forums.

For more pictures, including full size screen captures, check out my Flickr set.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

While I was on the Daily Search Cast with Danny Sullivan, we got an email from Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, who notified us about speaker pitches. Then Danny informed me that Search Engine Strategies Chicago this year, is the same week as WebmasterWorld's PubCon.

These are the two largest search conference out there today. So this is a huge deal.

SES Chicago starts on December 3rd and runs through the 6th. PubCon starts on December 4th and runs through the 7th.

Why is this such a big deal?

• Speaker Overlap is huge, I would estimate over 50% of those who speak at PubCon also speak at SES.
• Sponsor Overlap is also pretty big, many of the sponsors would have to double or divide their resources to be present at both conferences and monetarily.
• Exhibitor Overlap is very significant as well, especially for small companies that don't have a lot of people on staff.
• Press Overlap is not as big of an issue. For us, we can send people to cover SES and PubCon at the same time. But for smaller, one person bloggers, it won't be fun.
• Audience Overlap is also an issue, although the percentage is probably not as big as the ones above.

Who will win the head to head battle here? Tough call.

• Weather: PubCon Wins. Chicago in the winter is cold!
• Venue: PubCon Wins. Vegas is a lot more fun than Chicago, but Chicago is a cool city.
• Business Opportunities: SES Wins. I am pretty sure there is a more money to be made at SES.
• Networking Fun: PubCon Wins by a bit. While Danny Sullivan has to be at SES, the SEM community is a bit more loyal to PubCon. But since the business opportunities are the advantage of SES, I suspect this will shake things up.
• Educational Experience: About Even. Hard to say.

I would love to see which speakers are going where. Should be very very interesting.

I would like to conduct a small, anonymous poll, to see where most of you are leaning towards. So here it is:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums

It seems that a lot of well-known companies have webmasters (or legal departments) who just don't have a clue how to implement a robots.txt file. According to a DigitalPoint Forums thread, the United Kingdom based Daily Telegraph is looking to sue Google and Yahoo for accessing its content.

Their statement, as quoted in the Guardian Unlimited, is that they are concerned that these search engines are accessing content for free and don't give them proper credit.

Our ability to protect content is under consistent attack from those such as Google and Yahoo who wish to access it for free. These companies are seeking to build a business model on the back of our own investment without recognition. All media companies need to be on guard for this. Success in the digital age, as we have seen in our own company, is going to require massive investment... [this needs] effective legal protection for our content, in such a way that allows us to invest for the future.

Apparently, they're clueless about implementing a robots.txt file that will prevent search engines from accessing content "for free." As of this writing, this is its current robots.txt file:

# Robots.txt file # All robots will spider the domain

User-agent: *

Disallow: */ixale/

Not only that, but they have the ability to remove content from the SERPs in Google and in Yahoo.

It is a bit disturbing how many people are concerned about search engines (which ultimately give them more visibility!) The claim that search engines don't respect their rules goes both ways. Daily Telegraph, I imagine you have rules you want Google and Yahoo to respect. Well, the search engines have rules too. Follow them and you'll be fine.

Feel free to add your two cents on the DigitalPoint Forums thread.

Does anyone find it irritating to visit a page that features ads that do not actually relate to the product being offered? According to a WebmasterWorld thread, this is actually a constant concern. The culprit? Well, for one, a lot of newspapers are responsible, but it is happening everywhere.

A member writes in to say that this is happening to him:

My local newspaper's website recently underwent a complete overhaul and now they display AdSense ads prominently. It's amazing how many of the ads are just plain outright misleading. The landing page/site is an actual site, not a page full of links, but what is offered is not what is promised in the ad.

He is hardly alone:

In my country, the most widely circulated newspaper has blended ads and ad links very well with navigation and I am sure they must be getting tons of clicks.. Bikini babes, lingerie tag lines do generate a lot of cliks. Where they lead to is very diffn..

A member mentions that he's already banned 200 AdSense abusers -- and that's the limit.

I've also seen so many fraudulent ads by AdWords abusers. I've banned many of them, but already reached the 200 limit.

Their link titles look attractive and optimized for relevance--they 'tell' consumers what they want to 'hear.' But they mislead the public, leading them to, among other destinations, a search engine whose results are new ad links of another online advertising company other than Google.

People who utilize AdSense are just getting frustrated:

I felt like putting a warning notice on my site:

"If you find ads misleading, please report to Google... Apologies in advance. Google has an awful screening system... if the domain listed in the ad is weird, the ad is probably bogus. Google offers many useless, time-wasting, misleading ads. Its team of talented engineers is currently working on a solution."

Google needs a craigslist bad ad flagging system.

I understand their frustration, since it goes against the Google AdSense Program Policies. Further, I don't see how clicking on an irrelevant ad that promises something else could possibly yield a decent ROI.

If you want to see PPC to PPC to PPC to PPC (in other words, additional AdSense abuse), check out a video demonstration we displayed at the end of last year.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, a member mentions that he has recently bought a domain from an owner who previously was banned from Google AdSense for violating TOS. He says that he is unable to get a response from Google and only that they have provided him with their Policies.

He is presented with the following advice:

You need to email Adsense support and make it clear to them that you purchased these domains, and ask them to unblock/clear them to show Adsense ads for you.

It might take a few days to get everything done, but as long as you act openly with them, there should be no problem. Don't put your own ads on them until they respond it is okay.

I'm not sure if this will help him as it seems that it appears that he's gone down that road before.

To prevent owners from running in circles, I have a suggestion instead to tie this into Google's AdSense Console. After all, there is similar functionality in Google Webmaster Central which has capability for webmasters to submit a reinclusion request. As I understand it from recent interview of Vanessa Fox by Rand Fishkin, the Google Webmaster Central is being consistently improved upon. I'd imagine that the Google AdSense portal is being worked upon as well. Maybe it would be a good idea to enable functionality for the portal to submit similar AdSense reinclusion requests.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

GregOne posted a thread at WebmasterWorld and HighRankings Forums about how his Google AdWords account was hacked into. By reviewing both threads and all the posts, I was able to piece together some of the story.

It appears that some external program gained access to his computer. The program then logged into his AdWords account, set up several ads that redirected to "places like orbitz.com and business.com" and also tried to install "activex remote desktop program" on those computers through the redirects (to infect other computers). Then it blocked access for that computer to login into AdWords by setting the local host files to 127.0.0.1 adwords.google.com (which means if someone on that computer tries accessing adwords.google.com, they get a not found). This prevents this computer from logging into AdWords to see if changed have been made to the account.

In addition, the password for the account was not changed so he was able to login with a different computer to see these changes. Also, he noticed that the credit card information in the account was not his. Possibly a stolen credit card from someone else, which is weird to me.

Pretty nasty and potentially costly computer exploit. So beware.

AdWordsAdvisor at WebmasterWorld told GregOne that a private message was sent his way.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and HighRankings Forums.

WebmasterWorld moderator, martinibuster, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld documenting a pattern he is seeing recently with Google. He is asking, not telling, if people agree or disagree with his theory. In short, he is noticing that Google is apparently ranking sites that have their keywords in their URL/domain better then Google has in the recent past.

One of my sites with the keyword in the domain (no hyphens) jumped up to number one and started making unprecedented amounts of money. I checked it's backlinks and referrals and DMOZ/Yahoo but no change. The only change was Google giving my site a boost because, and I can't explain this any other way, because of the keyword in the domain. I've not done any promotion to that site at all. Zero.

I've also been seeing an unusual amount of parked domains that are exact matches for the keyword sitting at the top, although they seem to have been dialed back today.

Like with most of these threads, some agree and some disagree.

I have seen some cases of this being correct and some cases of this not being correct.

Of course, there must be some other factors that are hard for these webmasters to isolate. So the discussion continues...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In a Search Engine Watch Forums Thread, AdWordsRep, the official Google AdWords representative for the forum, called radio ads magical.

The thread is a discussion on if one should try Google Audio Ads or not.

AdWordsRep comes in and says this:

I have to say that radio has always held a bit of magic for me. There is just something about 'hearing your name' on the radio that is too cool for words. Way back in the day I won a minor radio contest (over the phone between songs) and waited with huge anticipation to hear my name actually announced. It was such a big deal - and I can still remember exactly how it felt. I can imagine feeling that same way being a small business advertiser hearing my own ad while on the road, coming home from work. So, for me at least, 'simple' audio has a lot of power.

Yes, I know I am spinning this story, but sometimes a blogger needs to have some fun. There is indeed something special magical about being on the radio. But there is no magic to the metrics you get from search ads - it is pure analytical (outside of some of the copy-writing, I suspect - but then there you have A/B testing).

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums Thread.

The twenty-seventh edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. We talked about Google and Yahoo's first quarter earnings. We discussed the pros and cons of Google's new web history solution. Google News put the Virginia Tech news in the enterainment catagory. We discussed some PPC and SEO topics and much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

You can listen to the MP3 file with our new player directly below:

Topics We Covered:

1. Google's (GOOG) Earnings Impress While Yahoo (YHOO) Gears Up For Q2 Earnings
   
2. Google Goes Beyond Search History With Your Web History
   
3. Google News Categorizes Virginia Tech Massacre as "Entertainment," Raises Questions
   
4. A New Way To Remove Content in Google.com via Google Webmaster Central 
   
5. Google Webmaster Central Provides Users with More Detailed Anchor Text Data
   
6. Google Link Tool & Anchor Text Tool At Webmaster Central Goes Down
   
7. Is Too Much Content A Bad Thing For SEO & Search Rankings?
   
8. Microsoft's adCenter Quality Score Update Hurting PPC Relevancy?
   
9. Google, Ask.com & Yahoo! Earth Day Logos
   
10. Google Stumbles With "Queryless Search"
    
11. Social Media Optimization: Are SEOs Part of the Problem?
    
12. Yahoo Partners with eBay and PayPal to Improve the Online Shopping Experience
    
13. More Signs of Google Grouping Search Results by Category
    

Lightening Round:

Continue reading "Search Pulse 27: Google & Yahoo Earnings, Web History, Virginia Tech, Remove Content, Anchor Text, SEO Content, PPC & More"

For a ten-year-old company, this isn't half bad. Barry reported it on Search Engine Land, and it was picked up on DigitalPoint as well. According to Gary Price, Google has placed #1 in Millward Brown Optimor's Brandz Top 100.

Here's the chart of the top 10:

Yahoo was ranked #42 with $13.2 billion.

What do you think? Are these results accurate? According to the folks at DigitalPoint, they may not be completely accurate, but Google is still way above the rest.

• porn
• offensive language
• hate posting
• malware

The article scanned 614 blogs that were chosen randomly and states:

According to Scansafe's Monthly Global Threat Report for March 2007, a surprisingly high percentage of the Internet's blog sites-- up to 80 percent-- contain "offensive" content, with six percent hosting active malware.

Then again, the study only looked for a single post -- which could also be a comment -- to deem these sites offensive.

To be added to the list of those deemed potentially offensive within a business context, a site merely had to contain a single post containing profanity, or worse.

But the word "China" is as prevalent as some of the most offensive words in the English language:

"There were as many blogs with the 'F-word' as the word 'China'", said ScanSafe's Dan Nadir.

Oops. What does that really say about us bloggers? :)

At the end of the day, Brett mentions that the important lesson to take from this is to be aware of this in corporate environments. I'd definitely agree.

For more information, please see the ScanSafe press release and report (PDF).

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

What do you think about Google bombs? Do they devalue the quality and relevancy of search, or is it a beautiful thing? A WebmasterWorld member finds Google bombing all part of the "beauty of search." He references the PC World article that discusses that Stephen Colbert is now the "Greatest Living American" in the Google SERPs. I also reported on this yesterday, and Danny covered it at Search Engine Land as well.

The member wonders how Google removed the previous apparent Google Bombs, particularly with regards to the miserable failure of George Bush. From Matt's post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, it appears that it is in fact a tweak of the algorithm. One wonders how this works for relevancy of other results, though. I don't know if I agree with Colbert being the Greatest Living American (sorry Rand). :)

Regardless, it is questioned about whether Google Bombs should be allowed. For one member, it is seen as "stuffing the ballot box." Therefore, another member suggests that these pages not be ranked if the terms that are being linked in the anchor text are not present on the page that is being linked to.

As for "failure," earlier this month, George Bush ranked for it again after his personal web page said "failure." Danny discussed this on Search Engine Land.

Feel free to contribute to the discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As you know, Yahoo! partnered with eBay and PayPal to create Yahoo Checkout. By signing up with Yahoo! PayPal Checkout, you can get a shopping cart icon in your Yahoo! Search Marketing ads.

This is basically how Google Checkout worked when it first started. Then I looked into if there were any benefits to the Google Checkout icon on your AdWords campaigns. In short, some people saw an increase in traffic, with a static level on conversions; which means they saw more sales.

My question is now, does Yahoo Checkout have the same impact? Increase in traffic, same level of conversions, but an increase in sales due to the traffic increase?

There is a forum thread at WebmasterWorld waiting to be filled up with feedback from Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers who use Yahoo Checkout.

Many sites are referencing Webbsnack for describing how to add a snippet of JavaScript to test out the new Google user interface, they are testing on some users.

The test looks like this, provided by Webbsnack:

It is a combination of several tests I have seen in the past from Google. Combing the drop downs with a new top bar to make this up.

As Webbsnack shows, you can test it our yourself with this JavaScript:

javascript:document.cookie="PREF=ID=fddb01133a87d314:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1177334998:LM=1177334998:GM=1:S=OOg0FEVzpPplxe9J; path=/; domain=.google.com"

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Danny Sullivan's new conference is coming this June 4th & 5th. This specific conference is named Search Marketing Expo Advanced 2007 and will be held in Seattle.

Danny has an excellent post at Search Engine Land named 9 Reasons To Attend SMX Advanced. You should check out the two track agenda and here is a list of some of the speakers who will be presenting. The conference will take place in the Bell Harbor International Conference Center.

We will be providing coverage of the event. Tamar and I are going, plus we may have some volunteers pitch in to do the coverage. New conferences excite me, so I personally hope to be typing less and chatting with people more at this conference.

There is a Search Engine Watch Forums thread on the conference, with advice on hotels and I suspect we will see some parties announced there. Some people are getting together to organize going to a Mariners baseball game on Sunday the 3rd at 1:00 pm.

I remember the outstanding and overwhelming Reaction from the Search Community on Danny Sullivan's Departure. It was amazing how the search community stood behind Danny at that time. This is probably why I am even more excited for this new conference.

Also in June are SES Toronto a week after SMX on June 12 & 13th and followed by SES Latino in Miami, Florida on June 18 & 19th. I will probably go to Toronto but probably skip Miami (just can't handle three conference in one month).

Forum discussion Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Google is inviting SMXers to their office Monday night. Very sweet!

There are three different PPC managers who have all noticed a significant drop in the traffic they are seeing from Google AdWords. A Search Engine Watch Forums thread shows where three different PPC guys report as much as a 25% drop in traffic from Google AdWords.

Member Shmuel said, "Our traffic is down as well. We're only down about 10% impression wise while our conversion rate is pretty steady." Member PPC agreed, "Yes, I see this as well."

Maybe this is related to Google Turns AdWords Yellow & Changes Click Behavior? We already reported on the Impact of Yellow Google Ads & Click Through Change on CTR & Sales.

Overall, it appears there are now less clicks in those top ad spots.

The numbers reported in those threads seem to be consistent with the new thread. So maybe they are related?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An extremely lengthy debate has commenced on WebmasterWorld about paid links after Matt's earlier post about Google seeking out reports from webmasters who acknowledge that other sites are selling links.

A very frustrated user writes in to say that he is entitled to monetize his site just as Google can monetize by selling ad space:

Google has a problem with their algo. It is in large part due to their dominance as a search engine. They can solve their own problem without infringinn on the right of others to make money....

If Google can sell adspace, then I can damn well sell ad space. Further, I can do so according to my own policies and guidelines, not those imposed by Google.

He's not alone. Google sells links, so why shouldn't webmasters be penalized for doing the same?

But others are taking Matt's announcement seriously. If you add nofollow to paid links, you're safe. If you diversify, you'll do better.

An interesting quote has come up:

"Their attitude is more like: 'You can do anything you want to your pages, and we can do anything we want to with our index---like exclude your pages.'" --Google Hacks (O'Reilly)

The discussion is pretty extensive. There are many individuals supporting adding nofollow to these paid links so as to inform Google that you are they will not promote competitive sites, but there are others who feel that this is hurting them substantially. A few members have to emphasize that the concern is only about paid links and not other links.

What do you think? The discussion is still heated, and you can write in at WebmasterWorld.

The case of American Blind & Wallpaper Factory vs. Google is continuing. According to a WebmasterWorld post, a judge refuses to drop the suit against Google. The post references a news article that says:

American Blind & Wallpaper Factory, the top US reseller of window blinds, charged in its lawsuit that Google abuses trademarks by allowing rivals of a company to buy ads that appear when consumers search the web for information on that business.

This is exactly what I covered last week. Google does have a way of reporting AdWords violations. Then again, this case has been around for quite some time.

The WebmasterWorld members are pretty unsure about how to really approach these violations, but another member points them to a Google AdWords blog post about preventing unauthorized advertisers from using trademark terms in their AdWords copy.

So, why was this case not dismissed? From the article:

Fogel wrote in his decision: "The large number of businesses and users affected by Google's AdWords program indicates that a significant public interest exists in determining whether the AdWords program violates trademark law."

From the discussion on WebmasterWorld, I suppose that is very true!

For more information, we suggest reading Google Gets Mixed Bag in Latest Ruling in American Blinds Case from Eric Goldman.

Li Evans writes in a Cre8asite Forums thread referencing an interesting post on Pronet Advertising by Muhammad Saleem about whether SEOs are part of the problem in social media optimization. In the the post, Muhammad references a SEOmoz post where Rand Fishkin offered to award his readers for linking the anchor text "Greatest Living American" to Stephen Colbert's website, ColbertNation.com. Surprisingly, the effort paid off. At SES NY, when it was mentioned at a forum, it was ranked nowhere. As of this weekend, it is ranked #1. In the Cre8asite Forums thread, moderator Li asks if Muhammad has a point.

One of the members, iamlost, feels that the problem is faulted to how Google weighs links.

Much SEO behaviour that non-SEOs find objectionable is a direct result of the SEs (notably Google) giving sheer link quantity a value....

Google either actually can not or (my view) chooses not to clean up mass blog links even after they are lost into site archives. The SEO link rushers are but a symptom of a SE disease. Beating on a symptom will not cure the problem.

I just searched for "Greatest Living American" on the Big 4, and all of them ranked ColbertNation.com for the search term on the front page except for Ask.com. Only Google ranked #1. Therefore, this may be a correct assessment.

The other problem is that there is dislike in the industry when there are contests being held out of "boredom." Because of this ranking tactic, the discussion continues to say that there the increasing concern that SEOs are snake oil salesmen. Danny Sullivan addressed this concern on Search Engine Land not long ago. Bill Slawski writes in to explain that there are all too many search engine optimizers who are not truly SEOs:

There are small business site owners who will only link to people who link to them, creating reciprocal link pages and Triangular Square Oblong Trapezoid link patterns. These are people who aren't SEOs and link only to improve their pagerank rather than adding links on the basis of providing value to their visitors. This is not SEO. This is not an SEO tactic. This is a sad and misguided practice.

I think that the underlying concern is whether relevancy is key. Muhammad has a good point indeed. These tactics are scrutinized too much within the industry and legitimate SEOs' tactics are questioned.

A very deep discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

In a Google Groups thread, a member notices that Google categorized the Virginia Tech incident of last week under "Entertainment" and was appalled. The user asks:

It's really, really disturbing that today Google is listing stories about Virginia Tech killer under "Entertainment." What in the world are you thinking?

A user with a similar concern emailed Google and they replied to him explaining that the algorithm was responsible for the "offensive" classification.

It's just an automated algorithm, I contacted them, not that they are likely to read the complaint this month and got an automated response saying that stories are just grouped by the search engine. Effectively anyway. Might as well read it yourself:-

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This is an automated reply to your message about incorrectly grouped stories in Google News. Because Google News is compiled solely by computer algorithms, articles may occasionally appear in the wrong section or cluster. We're working to improve our technology, and the information you've provided will help us do this.

Frances (Google News Guide), from the Google News Team also wrote in to clarify:

Hi guys,

Thanks to everyone who reported this and to geordie for sharing the (correct) explanation. Being completely automated is a bit of a double-edged sword--no human can dictate what content appears on the homepage which means sometimes errors like this happen. The problem has been fixed, and stories about Virginia Tech should no longer appear in the Entertainment section.

I know how offensive a mistake like this can be, and I want you all to know that we took this error very seriously. Our hearts go out to the families and friends affected by this tragedy.

Frances

Another member, Jon Hendry, wrote in to say that "To hazard a guess, the 'Entertainment' category is actually more of a 'Media and Entertainment' category, so any stories about the media coverage of VT will end up there." I suppose that this makes sense. With an automated system parsing through millions of news stories, the categorization mishap is bound to happen. As long as Google takes this information and uses this to improve its algorithm, this is a lesson well-learned.

Discussion continues at Google Groups.

In fact, 83.7% is the highest revenue share ever recorded. The lowest recorded is 77.1% in the forth quarter of 2004.

Of course, these are not the exact numbers AdSense publishers are seeing. Some publishers have special arrangements with Google and they earn more than normal publishers.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has someone reporting that he noticed a robots.txt file has been indexed and marked in the supplemental index at Google.com

It is clear that Google indexes robots.txt files. The thread creator wants to know what is means if a robots.txt file is in the Google supplemental index.

I agree with g1smd that "There are no advantages or disadvantages. It just is."

So leave it as is and let Google worry about it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ask.com, Google and Yahoo! all sported logos for Earth Day yesterday. I did not see special logos at Live.com or even Dogpile (but I may have missed them). Here they are:

Ask.com redid their home page:

Google went cold with their logo:

Yahoo! had this cute animation, which I took a screen cast of and put on YouTube. The video is pretty stretched out, so please keep that in mind.

Here is the Flash file from Yahoo (they may move the file off the server in the future):

Last year's Earth Day designs can be found here and 2005 over here, and Google's 2004 here.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread comments on a V7N Blog post named Excess pages polluting your website?

In short, John Scott of V7N, explained how he decided about a month ago to remove a large number of pages from his site that met the criteria of being "xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses." Then, about two weeks ago, he noticed an increase in search referrals of about "7,000 per day." He feels that this may be due to a direct relation to removing some of the "excess pages." Which takes him back to this big debate on content versus links, which John is clearly for links. He said:

Content (marketing copy, etc) may be king when it comes to converting visitors, but for search engine rankings, link weight, domain authority and intelligent distribution of link weight appears to be much more effective, even when it means removing content.

Now the Cre8asite Forums thread digs a bit deeper into the theory. Before we analyze some of the responses in the thread, I would just like to say that this removal of content from V7N is most likely not related to the increase in search referrals. I believe this was all about timing and how many people noticed a Google update about that time. I have several clients that saw significant improvements about that time as well.

The thread is calling for John Scott to reverse what he did and see if this has the reverse affect on his search rankings.

Barry Welford, the thread creator summarizes at the end of the thread:

Firstly I believe that the dilution of page rank transfer by cutting out the number if internal links from a web page is probably a minor issue. Unless you were changing this by an order of magnitude or even say down to a quarter of what they were, then this won't help much.

On the other hand I think it's good to have lots of content on the website given the 'long tail' nature of searchers' keyword queries. So I would leave all web pages up. However Bill's suggestion of revisiting web pages and editing them to make them stronger is excellent.

There is no doubt, I tend to see fresher posts on more of the fresher types of queries, ranking higher. I.e. a post on Google's first quarter results for 2007, the fresher the post, typically, the higher that post will rank in the search results. But this not always the case.

Cre8asite Moderator EGOL also goes back to one of his theories that larger Web sites may require more links than smaller sites to rank well.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

It's been two weeks without me because of SES and I know you've missed this little new Search Engine Roundtable column that highlights the events within the search community.

So, what did happen in the past two weeks? (To be fair, I'm highlighting them all!) We've been presented with financial reports, broken accounts, immersion in new social media endeavors, and new functionality. Where to begin...

Continue reading "Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 4/20/07"

A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread mentions that the Google (GOOG) is performing very well in the stock market, with a net profit of 69%.

What is the secret to Google's financial success? Advertisements. From the DigitalPoint forums discussion:

yup, making profit on both advertisers and publishers. smart price the publishers and decrease the quality score of the advertisers, thus charging more and more for keywords. it's a no lose situation for them as long as they control both ends of the equation. no wonder they are making money hand over fist...

On Search Engine Land, Barry refers to additional articles related to Google's Q1 earnings, including the financial tables.

Meanwhile, Yahoo (YHOO) has performed dismally in Q1 with a 11% decrease in earnings, despite its release of Panama. A WebmasterWorld thread has more:

The drumbeat over Panama raised expectations

Barry weighs in on the financials of Yahoo as well in Search Engine Land. One of the articles he references is that Yahoo is evaluating whether Terry Semel, Yahoo's current CEO, is truly the man for the job.

Discussion about Google's earnings continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld. Discussion about Yahoo's earnings continues at WebmasterWorld.

On a recent WebmasterWorld thread, a member asks how the multitude of identical news stories in Google News are handled.

Question: how does the dupe issue effect google giving me credit? The articles are identical but I am not sure how the templates or their presumed trust factor will effect them.

He monitors the addition of the numerous news stories and sees that they are initially all indexed. However, he then notices that after a period of time, those other pages got moved to the supplemental results.

These findings were supported by another WebmasterWorld user, who wrote:

Initally they will all be indexed. Then some will fall out of google entirely, many will be go supplemental. Then all will drop to low pr...

In one of the Google News Support pages, Google says that the news articles are weighed in by its algorithm and relies on "collective judgment of news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the News homepage." I assume that all other pages are supplemental.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In a Google Groups thread, a merchant from the United Kingdom asks if he can bill his customers in USD rather than in GBP:

Can I bill in USD, rather than in GBP and they pay via a USD credit card?

Deborah, from the Google Checkout Team, responds with the answer:

If a customer places an order with a U.K. merchant, the purchase will be made in GBP. If a customer places an order with a U.S. merchant, the purchase will be made in USD.

If you have any further questions about this, you can feel free to respond in the Google Groups thread.

Imagine the Google search results grouped by category. Let's say we do a search for DVD players and up comes two results per category. The categories include:

• Comparison Shopping
• Reviews
• Stores
• References
• Forums
• Blogs
• News
• Manufacturers

That is exactly what more and more people are seeing in the Google results. Here is a screen shot taken from Lee Odden, note Philipp Lenssen spotted this also.

Not only are these results no longer ordered by pure "relevancy," they are now first grouped and then ordered in relevancy.

For example, using the case of DVD players above, if we have ten results on the page, they are all ordered by relevancy. Then Google decides to group them. Now, the most relevant result will probably be the first result, which is it in the dvd players case (i.e. bizrate.com is number one in both examples). But what if the next relevant result is the 6th most relevant result but the only other result on the first page that falls within the same group as the most relevant result (i.e. videohelp.com in our example)? So the top two results, in the grouping case, will be the 1st relevant result and the 6th most relevant result. Is this an issue?

Here is an image illustrating the example above, for a full size image click here:

There is even a WebmasterWorld thread on this and I also posted a summary at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday Google announced that they are renaming the "search history" section to "web history" because it is now a more fitting name. Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History by Danny Sullivan is the ultimate and most detailed write up I have seen on this. Danny explains that the change in name is "to reflect how it has expanded to track what Google users do as the surf the web." Of course, this can mean some big privacy issues - so I would recommend reading Danny's article to understand more about the expanded features you can get in your "web history."

- View your web activity. You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? With Web History, you can.
- Search the full text of pages you've visited. Web History allows you to search across the web pages, images, videos and news stories you've viewed.
- Get personalized search results and more. Web History helps deliver search results based on what you've searched for and which sites you've seen.

The forums just starting talking about and the early onset is confusion.

But some are thinking about the SEO implications:

I think the implications of this would become bigger for SEO as it becomes more popular. It adds another criteria for the SERPs and its something that is hard to control depending on the algorithms used to determine the results given due to personalisation.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Kevin Gibbons started a thread at our forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, noticing that LinkedIn is not properly labeling one of their Google AdSense ads as an advertisement.

Google requires that all ads should be labeled with "Ads by Google" or some other form of label so that people know these are ads.

The top, one line ad on the LinkedIn page is not labeled as such. There is an ad unit on the right side, in a box, that is labeled correctly. Here is a screen capture.

As you can see, there is nothing describing to a human user that this top link is an ad. If you mouse over the link, you can see that the destination URL takes you through a Google AdSense link.

Is this against Google's terms of service? I assume they are a premium publisher, but even premium publishers are required to mark the ads as ads.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Side note: If you want to connect with me, my profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/rustybrick and I think you can email me at barry.schwartz at gmail dot com to connect.

According to a DigitalPoint Forums post, the Google Webmaster Central team has expanded the product offering in the Google Webmaster Central toolset. Vanessa Fox has provided the Google community with information on these new features, which include:

• The number of phrases shown has been increased to 200.
• Variations of each phrase are shown (capitalization variations, as in the following screenshot):
• Siteowners who had previously not seen the anchor phrase report may have access to this data now.
• Due to popular demand, reports showing the most common individual words in anchor text are available.
• The number of common words in anchor text and common words on a website have been increased to 100 each.

A Google Groups thread also covers this new find but also discusses the downtime that Barry wrote about earlier. Vanessa Fox replied to the thread to let everyone know that data should now be available:

All the data should now be available. Please let me know if you experience any problems.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

A Search Engine Watch Forums member asks about the tremendous discrepancy between results on three Keyword Research tools: Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, and Overture. He is concerned that these tools provide no accurate information.

One of the members provides some excellent feedback. The reason for such discrepancies is related to the source of the information, the time the information was gathered, and the keywords are processed differently as well. He suggests that you should use all of the information and get averages to resolve any inconsistencies.

The main challenge is that all three, WT - OV - KD, are very different beasts and so there can be no direct correlation between them.

For example:-
1) all three draw their data from very different sources,
2) their data is drawn over different time periods, OV one month, WT three and KD twelve months, and so the count figures would need some rationalisation
3) all three have different data cleansing systems, eg., OV de-pluralises, de-punctuates and sometimes alphbetises the words in the search phrase, so again that muddies the correlation waters,

and so on.

So you have to figure out what parameters and algorithms you are going to apply when combining the data.

I would suggest the first step would be to generate monthly equivelants (WT/3 & KD/12) and then perhaps do some averaging. Even then, the eyeball is perhaps the best filter.

Kinda like comparing Oranges, Lemons and Grapefruit in that they are all from the Citrus family but are very different and individual fruits. Combine their juices though and you have a rather interesting Citrus tasting drink with some attributes of all three.

Another observation came from a keen member who acknowledged that the discrepancies may be intentional, but that there are other factors as well. All of the tools should be used together.

I'd add that WT draws from a very small sample of web searches, so that its data isn't very useful for infrequently-searched phrases. I've seen WT skewed dramatically in certain keyword areas, probably by search marketers in those areas who wanted to muddy the waters.

OV data, on the other hand, suffers from lots of automatic rank checking, which tends to happen in more competitive and frequently searched terms, so it's exponentially skewed at the top end. OV has recently forced stemming on certain searches, I've observed, which makes it useless for assessing many phrases.

The Google External AdWords tool, another tool you should put into the mix, is skewed by the algorithms that Google is applying for AdWords buyers. It has the largest sample size, is the least likely to be skewed by test searches, and of course has demographics that come from Google.

This is some very good information. You can read more at Search Engine Watch.

Google yesterday announced that its old Froogle product has been replaced with Google Product Search, according to a DigitalPoint Forums post.

According to Google, results will "refocus the user experience on providing the most comprehensive, relevant results in a clean, simple, easy-to-use UI." They also mention something that is likely more important: ease of purchase with Google Checkout.

Search Engine Land also has more intensive coverage of Google's new offering, with screenshots of the old Froogle and the new Google Product Search. The article also shows additional perspective from Marissa Mayer, VP of Search and User Experience at Google.

On DigitalPoint, members were happy about the switch, mostly due to the name change. Personally, I thought Froogle was very clever. Were people not using it as much because of its name or because of the interface? I suppose we'll never know, but I'm looking forward to giving Google Product Search a try.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

According to a Google Groups thread, Google accidentally deactivated a batch of email accounts. Gmail Guide of Google writes in to inform the community of the issue:

We have been actively investigating a batch of accounts that were accidentally disabled and are currently in the process of re-enabling these accounts. This error occurred in an effort to target a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and keep your inbox free from spam. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we re-enable these accounts as quickly as possible.

As numerous users reported problems with their accounts, Gmail Guide posted an addendum:

We have been diligently working for the last few hours to identify affected accounts and we have now re-enabled access for most of these accounts. If you are still seeing a message indicating your account has been disabled, please be patient and you should be able to login again very soon.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

The issue has not been addressed since Friday, but if you are encountering any similar issues, you may contribute to the discussion at Google Groups.

On a Google Groups thread, Google representative AdSensePro refers readers to a Google AdSense blog post stating the following:

...our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

We occasionally receive questions from publishers interested in using traffic exchanges to bring traffic to their site. While these services may help advertise your site, we don't recommend using them, as they may also result in similar invalid activity.

Members who have since contributed to the Google Groups discussion agree that traffic is good, as long as it doesn't encourage clicking ads. An owner of a traffic program also contributes to say that there are traffic exchange programs that do not condone clicking ads (although there are some that do). He requests that Google not serve ads on pages if advertised in an exchange. I do not know how practical that is for Google because they may not necessarily know if sites are involved in a traffic exchange program, just like they do not necessarily know if users are selling or buying paid links.

However, I think that his last concern is legitimate:

While there are some people who are out to cheat the system, most people are just looking to get more visitors to their blogs. I don't think it's right to penalize people for advertising their website.

I should also note that this should not be overly confused with social media services such as Digg. A recent study on the impact of high traffic due to social networks and AdSense showed that there are few, if any, clicks during a traffic spike as a result of these services:

Here's the thing about trying to monetize your digg traffic: don't bother. There is literally no point. Your best possible bet at getting money out of a digg article is by using Adsense. We've tried on a few of our articles, to test and see how the traffic might convert, and have seen absolutely nothing but dismal results. At best, you can probably expect to make about 1/2 a cent per digg.

Google is checking the Google Groups thread for feedback, so if you have anything to add, feel free to join in on the discussion.

Related articles: How Digg Traffic Impacts Your Google AdSense Account, Is StumbleUpon Considered Auto-Surf Traffic and Against AdSense TOS?, Encouraging Clicks of AdSense Referral Products is Allowed, and How Digg Affects Your Google AdSense CTR and Earnings

I reported earlier this week that adCenter advertisers noticed a drop in traffic, which we later found out was due to them adding a quality factor to the ads displayed in live.com.

Microsoft claimed that "this improvement will ensure that we maintain a high quality of ads and relevance to the Live Search user. But the folks over at DigitalPoint Forums disagree.

One person explained that his "quality site has plummeted in the rankings, yet there are sites where the url and the landing page does not even match up." Another person added, "the pages that do rank for advertising on certain keywords that I have also bid on have poorly broken english splattered all over them." Yet another agreed, "the sites that rank at the top are utter rubbish and with urls not even matching up."

GuyFromChicago, a respected forum personality in the PPC area, has posted examples at his blog of the relevancy issues adCenter is having right now. He explains that "the ads I'm seeing being served by adCenter now are the worst I've ever seen...on any search engine," and then provided several examples.

This makes me appreciate the quality score updates both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing has completed in the past.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Various sporadic reports from both DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld that Google's Webmaster Central Link Tool is temporarily offline.

I tried it myself, just now and it seems to be offline for me as well. I am told "Our system is currently busy. Please try again in a few minutes." Here is a screen capture:

I believe Google is doing an update of your links in that tool. When I logged in yesterday, it was up, even though some reported it as down. And I noticed my link count went up about 70,000 links or so. But I have yet to analyze the data and bring it to you. I will.

As of right now, the tool is still down.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Update 8:15am: Now it is back up but shows me zero links.

Update: 8:50am: Also the top anchor text report is down, probably related...

Google has announced that they are offering a StumbleUpon type of service. Google Offers "Queryless Search" & Personalized Recommendations from Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land explains it well. In short, Google uses your search history to determine which sites you like and then if you click on the "recommendations button" in the Google button, it will take you to one of those sites, randomly.

We'll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. Just add the button to your Toolbar. (In order to use this feature, you need the latest version of the Toolbar.)

I installed it on my Firefox browser on my Mac, and the button looks like a pair of dice. Here is a screen capture:

What if you don't have the toolbar? No worries, Nathan Weinberg explained you can just bookmark this URL and it will do the same thing (if you are logged into Google).

There is also another feature they launched that "allows you to add a "recommendations" tab to a Google personalized home page. To enable the feature, simply add a new tab, name it "recommendations" and tick the "I'm feeling lucky - automatically add stuff based on the tab name" checkbox." But honestly, I think this was available in the past.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

Cre8asite Forums moderator posted a thread named Official Google Channel On Youtube. Yes, there is an official Google YouTube channel located at youtube.com/google.

The channel has a collection of videos specific to Google. The featured one right now is a video titled "Northwestern University talks about Google Apps." But you can also find videos from "Eric Schmidt at the Web 2.0 Expo" added just under 24 hours ago. The videos date back as far as two months ago, with Gmail Theater Act 1.

Ruud says that "Google itself now less loyal to Google Video." Well, we do know Google spent a pretty penny on YouTube. We also know that Google said that YouTube will be more of their community focused project, whereas Google Video will be more focused on search. So, in my opinion, it makes sense to build a Google video channel at YouTube over Google Video.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Digg users love Google. (Digg top-user wannabes: take note!) From Bush's failure to Google's recent "SEO firm" acquisition, Google is all over the news.

Two weeks ago, one of the White House web editors added the word "failure" to George Bush's homepage. Previously, in what we know as an attempt in Google bombing, a search for "miserable failure" in Google would bring Bush's page up in the #1 result. Google fixed that at the end of January. The White House undid this once they put the word "failure" on his page, and Search Engine Land took note. The mistake brought this Digg finding to the front page. Oops. As of this writing, the "failure" reference to the White House page is gone. Shucks.

Around the same time as "failure" was rediscovered, Google launched 1-800-GOOG-411 , its free 411 service. This also got popular on Digg, and yesterday, Barry tried it for a naughty purpose: free prank calls . Yeah, that was a popular Digg too until it was buried.

In other interesting news: How much does Google's CEO Eric Schmidt really make? Apparently, he only gets $1 . His personal security, however, cost the bulk of what he ended up pocketing: $532,755.

And then, last week, Google acquired DoubleClick , and consequently, now owns an SEO firm, Performics . All of this is really disturbing to Google's rivals, particularly Microsoft.

And on the social front, Li Evans, who contributed to the Search Engine Roundtable coverage of SES NY 2007, wrote a great guide about the variety of social media sites on the 'net . So if you choose not to Digg, you could always Reddit or use Netscape, among the 300 other social networks that Li highlights in different areas. (Okay, there are not that many!)

That brings me to my final point. Even though there are eleventy billion social networks and news sites on the Internet, for now, this still a Digg Digest. If you want the story to be covered here, make sure you Digg it. ;)

On the Search Engine Watch Forums, our author Chris Boggs found a very interesting article written by HackerSafe that "brags" about its link juice.

In the article, HackerSafe claims that "the security certification does improve search engine optimization."

The security firm was exhibiting at SES this week and discussed how offering three one-way PR6-PR8 text links from ScanAlert’s Hacker Safe Merchant Directory helped sites such as Vermont Teddy Bear Company and Stacks and Stacks raise organic search placement.

Chris found this very troubling that HackerSafe was essentially bragging to the world about the power that they have. But forum members see that this could be a problem for HackerSafe, since Matt Cutts addressed paid links just a few days ago and asked people to report this activity.

I happen to agree with Chris. He writes:

I am not totally buying this as being the sole or even a major reason for the success of the site...

Having worked in web development and on e-commerce sites in the past, I do understand the mentality that buyers feel much more comfortable buying from sites that have a familiar SSL certificate logo (e.g. GeoTrust, Verisign) on the site. This itself boosts confidence of buyers. Was it the fact that HackerSafe is involved in a link building effort? I wouldn't think so in the least. The credit they are taking is not likely due to a link-building effort.

Let Chris and other Search Engine Watch readers know what you think by joining in the discussion.

Postscript Barry: As per Dan's comment we learned that HackerSafe is actively and publicly promoting, "Boosts Google rank with over 100 Million cross-links."

Here is a screen shot:

Pretty impressive.

Is the Google Phone a reality? Indeed it is, according to a DigitalPoint Forums post. Google has apparently partnered with Taiwan manufacturer HTC (High Tech Computer) to manufacture the phones which are slated for a 2007 worldwide launch.

What is the community sentiment?

For one, multiple users think that if the Google phone is going to sell, it needs to be better than the iPhone, the leading contender in the mobile market at the present.

If it can beat Apple iPhone, sure i'll buy. But iphone is too cool..

Others are hoping that the cost is right. But once upon a time not long ago, Eric Schmidt said that phones should be free. Maybe they'll cut the consumer a good deal if it displays AdSense ads.

Even others wonder what Google is trying to achieve here:

Why does Google need to sell phones?

However, I (and others) think that answer is obvious:

sure, if the phone's browser could display google ads, why not?

Engadget has more coverage as well.

Discuss the Google Phone at DigitalPoint Forums.

The twenty-sixth edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. We discussed our extremely comprehensive and detailed job covering the SES NY conference. We then had a 15 minute conversation about paid links based on some recent blog posts by Google's Matt Cutts. We had a brief conversation on Ask.com's new algorithm, Edison. Followed by yellow Google ads, a Google.com update, support for sitemaps autodiscovery, the DoubleClick acquisition and much more. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

You can listen to the MP3 file with our new player directly below:

Topics We Covered:

1. Search Engine Strategies '07 New York Session Coverage Roundup
   
2. Matt Cutts of Google on Paid Links Again
   
3. Ask.com To Launch New Search Algorithm Code Named Edison
   
4. Impact of Yellow Google Ads & Click Through Change on CTR & Sales
   
5. Google.com Search Results Shake Up on April 10
   
6. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com To All Support Sitemaps Autodiscovery
   
7. Sitemaps Ping URLs at Google, Yahoo, & Ask.com
   
8. Updated: Unusual Fall in MSN adCenter Traffic Last Night Due To adCenter Adding Quality Factors
   
9. Google Acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion, Faces Challenges by Competitors
   
10. Will Google's Purchase of DoubleClick Affect Google AdSense?
    
11. Response to Eric Schmidt Wired Interview: Should Consumers be Afraid of Google's Control?
    
12. Yahoo! Updates Site Explorer Capability to Allow for Mobile Site Submission, Report Spammy Sites
    
13. Google Voice Search: Easy & Free Prank Calls?
    

Continue reading "Search Pulse 26: SES NY, Paid Links, Ask.com's Edison, Yellow Ads, Google.com Shakes, Sitemaps, DoubleClick, Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Voice & More"

In an attempt to improve the consumer shopping experience, Yahoo! announced yesterday that it is looking to partner with eBay's PayPal and will add shopping cart links to sponsored results for merchants who accept PayPal Express Checkout. A WebmasterWorld thread looks at this partnership more closely.

Yahoo! has introduced a PayPal Checkout Program with more information for how merchants can sign up.

Since PayPal is still a familiar household name and Google Checkout is a relatively foreign entity, this seems to be a win in the forum community:

I'm excited about this. I've always liked PayPal and I'm rooting for Yahoo to do great things. It seems like Y may win this little battle.

Chris Sherman covered this topic on Search Engine Land. After speaking with Rich Riley, Yahoo! Senior Vice President, about how this differs from Google Checkout, Chris received a response that is quite similar to my own opinion: the number of PayPal customers is huge (over 100 million!) and this partnership is a great thing for Yahoo!

I have also included a screenshot of the shopping cart link:

The one thing that confused me was that nothing happened when I clicked on the icon or hovered over it with my mouse. In due time, I suppose.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

As many know, yesterday was a rather important day for Google Docs when they announced that they are pregnant with a baby. Well, not really, but the Google Docs and Spreadsheets family intends to branch out into the world of presentations. Yeah, that's right, a DigitalPoint Forums member noted that this is Google's PowerPoint alternative. WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Land have coverage as well.

What does the community think?

It's great for collaboration:

Might be very useful for collaborative presentations (no more emailing ppt file around).

But Google is expanding way too fast and might as well soon have its own operating system (which isn't entirely farfetched):

Can't believe why google want to spread its business to every area!

may be next day G will have their own Word, Excel, .... and then OS

What do you expect now? Anxious for them to give birth? Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday Google announced a the AdWords blog a new bidding option named preferred cost bidding. Google prepped me the day before for my post at Search Engine Land on this feature. Honestly, after the call I was still not 100% clear on the benefits.

What is preferred cost bidding?

You select the average price you'd like to pay per click (a preferred CPC bid) or per thousand impressions (a preferred CPM bid). The AdWords system then automatically works to hit this target price.

For example, if your analysis shows that a click on your keyword-targeted ad is worth US$0.75 to your business, you can set a preferred CPC bid of US$0.75. The AdWords system will then adjust your bid on individual ad impressions to bring your actual average CPC as close to US$0.75 as possible. Your ad may be placed in a range of positions as the system works to give you your preferred cost.

In contrast, the traditional AdWords bidding method lets you set maximum CPC or CPM bids. You specify the most you're willing to pay for each individual click (for keyword-targeted campaigns) or each thousand impressions (for site-targeted campaigns). You may end up paying any amount up to the maximum bid that you specify.

The FAQs can be found at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10775.

The benefits of preferred cost bidding?
I was told this gives advertisers more control over their campaigns, also allowing advertisers to stabilize their costs and save time so they don't have to manually adjust their maximum bids, which saves time.

Reaction to preferred cost bidding:
Advertisers are not giving this new bidding option a warm welcoming. The largest discussion on this new feature is at WebmasterWorld where we have several posts that all show a negative reaction to this release. Here are some, but not all, quotes from the thread.

I'm glad they keep adding features because it's so easy to master the simple set of tools they had so far ;)

Sounds like a great way to overspend. I wouldn't touch this one with a 10-foot pole.

I for one would prefer they worked on fixing some of the existing issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports finding the destination URL change dynamically as you mouse over a Google AdSense ad.

For example, as I mouse over an AdSense ad, when I look in the status bar at the bottom, I can see the end of the URL change from &nm=01 to &nm=02 to &nm=03 and so on.

Here are screen captures:

At nm=94:

At nm=130:

I have never seen this myself, but that doesn't mean it is incredibly new. If you like to see it in action, I will place an AdSense ad below (please do not click on the ad, just mouse over it and look at the destination URL).

Very interesting find.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Vanessa Fox of the Google Webmaster Central team announced that Google Webmaster Central now supports the easy removal of content from their index.

In short, if you login to your Google Webmaster Central account, you can easily remove content (individual pages, directories, entire site or cache copies) from Google.com, if you have verified the site. The blog post also explains new ways of requesting the removal of content that you do not have access to.

Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a very detailed write up on how it works. If you are interested in understanding it in detail, read Danny's post. If you just want a quick glance at how you can use it, check out the Google Webmaster Central Blog because they have tons of screen captures.

I am not going to get into how it works or how you make it work.

This was announced later last night, so we currently only have a thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

Overall, this is a nice step for the tool. We know Yahoo added the remove URL feature to Site Explorer earlier this year. But Google's approach is a bit more detailed. But still, nice to see these features and ways to interact with your content via Google.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Inside AdSense Blog announced support for Greek and Romanian publishers to place AdSense on their site. The ads will then target Greek and Romanian advertisers in Greek and Romanian languages.

In addition, Romanian publishers (not Greek) can add AdSense for Search to their site.

How do you do it?

If you're ready to get started with these languages, just log in to your AdSense account and follow the wizard located under the AdSense Setup tab. You can also contact the Greek team at adsense-el@google.com and the Romanian team at adsense-ro@google.com with additional questions.

DigitalPoint Forums has some early feedback on this release.

The English version looks tidier and the CPM explanation in Romanian sounds weird so I'll stick to English for now.

It's not really worthy making a romanian site with romanian ads on it. you'll only get $0.01/click unless it is Real Estate or Travel site where you get $0.05.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there is a way to complain to Google about trademark infringements within meta tags. The member writes:

Two of my competitors are using my trademark in their metatags - who exactly can I contact to complain about this? This is not adwords but natural google search.

Many members are skeptical that contacting Google will yield results. One says that it could be reported as a DMCA violation:

Well, Google might do something (see its DMCA procedures page), but it can't make any web property do anything. This is best dealt with between you and what you consider to be the offending sites.

However, another member disagrees with him:

If your site in in the U.S., I doubt it very much.

I'd use Google's Adwords policy as a guide: in the U.S., Google permits Adwords advertisers to use trademarked terms as keywords, but not in the ad itself (unless the use in the ad in non-infringing).

In Europe (not sure about other areas) Google does not permit the use of infringing trademarks as keywords.

As to what the law actually is, my understanding is that it's still an unsettled area. Google is doing what they feel they can defend in a given country.

It seems to me that the use of trademarks in metatags MIGHT be considered as equivalent to their use as keywords.

Ultimately, a member brings up the point that this isn't a DMCA issue, because trademark violations are not equivalent to copyright violations.

The post also references an old yet valuable thread by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch related to lawsuits that have been made about trademarks within meta tags. In the article, Danny writes that using trademarks may not be wrong but people have sued others for such perceived violations. The article lists several lawsuits that have resulted due to using trademarked terms in meta tags.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums posting reveals how a member who used heatmaps increased his AdSense earnings after he discovered where people would click most frequently on his site.

A number of tools that provide HeatMaps are discussed, including:

• CrazyEgg
• ClickHeat
• Click Density

Additionally, a link is provided to the AdSense Help Center page that answers the most ideal ad placement locations are.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint.

An interesting finding was discovered in a DigitalPoint Forums thread that references a study that says that men prefer Google as a search engine and women prefer Yahoo. From the thread:

About men, he states:

Men tend to see it as an office, a library, or a playground--screw the community, this is about function not family.

Men tend to be more intense Internet users than women, being more likely to go online daily (61% of men and 57% of women) and more likely to go online several times a day (44% of men and 39% of women).

About women, he states:

The report found that women are more enthusiastic communicators, using email in a more robust way. Not only sending and receiving more email than men, women are more likely to write to family and friends about a variety of topics, sharing news, joys and worries, planning events, and forwarding jokes and stories.

While both sexes equally appreciate the efficiency and convenience of email, women are more likely than men to value the medium for its positive effects on improving relationships, expanding networks, and encouraging teamwork at the office.

I think this is an interesting observation. I commented from my own personal perspective that I seek out social networks, many of which are Yahoo! properties, but I personally think that the search engine itself does not include those "community elements" that are so heavily emphasized.

Interestingly enough, I discovered another post that showed that female Internet users outnumber males. This is is even more interesting considering that Google is the dominant search engine. I'd love to know what kind of sampling was taken for the study, since I question the accuracy of the data with the information provided.

Still, the psychology behind the study is an interesting one. Perhaps I'm just a bit biased because I'm so immersed in this technology and in social media as well. :)

To further test such hypotheses, Microsoft has an interesting adCenter Labs Demographics Prediction Tool. One can certainly have fun with this. I see that Barry did, but his findings were different.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

The question about trademarks is often a tough one and one that is revisited time and time again. Barry's first post that I've noticed on this topic about competitors bidding on the RustyBrick name back in 2004. The question seemed to have resurfaced in a HighRankings Forum post, where a user asks how he can protect his website name against trademark violations.

The user is presented with the Google Trademark Policy, which states:

Google takes allegations of trademark infringement very seriously and, as a courtesy, we're happy to investigate matters raised by trademark owners. Also, our Terms and Conditions with advertisers prohibit intellectual property infringement by advertisers and make it clear that advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.

The trademark owner is not required to be a Google AdWords advertiser in order to send a complaint. Please also note that any such investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google. In the case of an AdSense for Domains trademark complaint, an investigation will affect only the domain names of sites in our AdSense for Domains program.

Therefore, Google acknowledges that they will investigate any trademark violations in its AdWords campaign and anyone -- even if they're not AdWords advertisers -- can file reports. This is good news for anyone who is concerned.

A similar thread was discussed last week at Search Engine Watch Forums where members agreed that Google will work to prevent your competitors from using your trademarks.

Google has a number of forms that anyone concerned about trademarks can file for review by the AdWords team. If you are in the US or Canada, you can use the form here. If you are outside the US and Canada, you can use the form here. Basically, Google asks you to fill out a complaint form and then you can either email it to a designated email address, mail it to a physical address, or fax it to one of Google's phone numbers.

Last week, in the same Search Engine Watch Forums thread, a number of users did have concerns about Google enforcing trademarks too strongly. Some more natural search terms were being rejected. Google has responded to these users to let them know that it was a technical glitch that has since been resolved.

Forum discussion continues at HighRankings and Search Engine Watch.

In response to a Wired interview with Eric Schmidt, a Cre8asite Forums member found some troubling comments made by Mr. Schmidt.

First, he found Google's desire to learn more about the user particularly irksome. In response to a question about improving ad quality, Schmidt says that Google is seeking out personal information.

What does it take to improve the quality of ads on Google?

More computers, basically, and better algorithms. And more information about you. The more personal information you're willing to give us - and you have to choose to give it to us - the more we can target. The standard example is: When you say "hot dog," are you referring to the food, or is your dog hot? So the more personalized the information, the better the targeting.

Schmidt goes further to state that Google will soon find out what users are watching, which again troubles the member:

Now, let's look at television. Every one of the next generation of cable set-top boxes is going to get upgraded to an IP-addressable set-top box. So all of a sudden, that set-top box is a computer that we can talk to. We can't tell whether it's the daughter or the son or the husband or the wife in a household. All we know is we're just talking to the television. But that's pretty targetable because family buying patterns are pretty predictable, and you can see what programs they're watching. And if you're watching a YouTube video, we know you're watching that video.

Moderator Barry Welford has some important feedback regarding this approach.

Google like many other smart, arrogant companies thinks it knows what's best for its customers. ... What they're missing out on is the whole customer-centric view that customers want to decide what's best for them. Customers want to be in control. ... Google should really factor this reality into its strategic planning.

Others feel that this is the future and it just so happens that Google is in it:

So as you see, what Google does and plans to do for me is not so much a case of Google forcing a certain future upon us; Google itself is part of that very future.

Is it scary? It certainly seems so. With Google in control of so much information, people are worried.

You can offer your perspective at Cre8asite Forums.

Update: The adCenter blog posted that they made an update to the algorithm that ranks the ads. They now take into account relevancy and quality factors such as "content of the ad and landing page, keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, substantive content on the landing page, and duplicative nature of content in overall search results."

A WebmasterWorld thread has very early reports of an unusual drop in traffic from live.com and MSN adCenter. Here are the two reports both stating a drop of about 75% of their traffic from Microsoft's PPC engine, adCenter.

Just noticed a 75% drop in my MSN traffic yesterday. At first I thought It might have been a resuly of changing ads on my account but now I believe its more of a system problem.

Yes big drop around 7 PST. More than 75%. Both UK and US

This is still very early, so it may be nothing or it may be the signs of something big happening with adCenter.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Google sent an AdSense publisher an email that $1,233.46 has been deducted from his account due to invalid clicks. The publisher posted the email he received from Google:

Thank you for your email.

As you know, we recently completed an investigation into invalid click activity that we detected on your account. Based on the findings of our investigation, we've deducted $1,233.46 from your account earnings. This amount represents the earnings previously credited to your account from invalid clicks, and the deduction of these earnings will be reflected in your next scheduled payment.

In addition, because the amount of this deduction may exceed your April earnings, we've placed your account on payment hold for this pay period. Any outstanding earnings will roll over to the following month, so you'll be paid out in accordance with our normal payment cycle.

Lastly, I understand that you may want more information about the invalid activity we found on your account. However, because we have a need to protect our detection systems, we're unable to provide our publishers with any details about their account activity. We appreciate your understanding.

I have no proof of the authenticity of this email, but I would guess it is real.

In any event, it appears this publisher was aware that this may happen. In fact, he calls himself lucky for not being banned. He said, "I am lucky I am not banned" but he blames the invalid clicks on "proxies" who have tried to "sabotage" his efforts as a publisher.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A couple weeks ago Google launched Google Voice Local Search. We know Google has been working on this for a while, glad to see it is live.

Basically, you dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from a phone (I suspect a pay phone works also) and tell it what you want.

I tried it out by calling myself in my office.

1. Dialed number
2. GOOG 411, experimental
3. What city or state?
4. What business name or category
5. Listed business details and said I'll connect you
6. The phone number that the Caller ID displayed was 800-466-4411

So I suspect kids can use this to dial the local bar and play prank calls. Here are some ideas on prank calls Bart Simpson used. :) I would think Google has thought of this, so I am not too worried. Heck, they have tons of web spam filters, so applying some of those brains to prank calls, can't be too hard?

In any event, the voice recognition worked very well, even over a speaker phone. It was easy to use and I liked it.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Google Pay Per Action has now been out for just under a month now and I wanted to circle back and give you some early reports on the types of numbers both publishers and advertisers are seeing.

Advertising With Google Pay Per Action
One advertiser opted and created Google Pay Per Action ads and reported his findings in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread. In short, the set up was easy but the results are poor. He has yet to see any impressions on his PPA ads. Here are his notes on Google Pay Per Action from the advertiser's perspective.

-Setup in adwords was easy, since google has segregated PPA ads at the campaign level under a new "Pay-Per-Action" tab (your regular ads are placed under a "Standard" tab.)

-Setting my "PPA bid" (maxCPA) was slightly confusing, since in the beta test this is done in the "Conversion Tracking" area. I assume this will change in production. (In general it would be great to have total flexibility on the payment side, with the option to pay for ads any way we like: CPM, PPC, PPA and even change anytime we want. But I assume that would require a huge system change.)

-Anyway, we do lead generation, so I set my maxCPA at $10, which is what I expect to pay/lead from my current cost/conversion stats.

-I did *not* need to change or modify the existing adwords conversion tracking code on our website in any way - which was a big relief.

-However, so far the PPA ad has received no impressions, so the need is on the ad distribution side of the house i.e. getting adsense publishers to run these ads. We're in a very specialized vertical market, so this does not come as a big surpise, but until I see some distribution I cannot evaluate the ad performance.

Publishing With Google Pay Per Action
Let's flip things around and look at the publishers side of things. As Tamar reported, I told a story through pay-per-action. In fact, Google emailed me to tell me they liked the idea and explained that you can show a maximum of 6 Pay Per Action ads on a page (which is why the remaining are not showing). So what did I see?

(1) I have documented the steps on publishing pay per action ads on your site at Search Engine Land. It is fairly easy.

(2) One thing I would like is the ability to filter ads by ad type. So if I only wanted text link units, it would only show me advertisers who are offering such units. Google told me this may come, but right now they do not support this filtering option on the AdSense side.

(3) Stats: I have received almost 5,000 impressions on those ads to date. Keep in mind, the ads are on a single post in my personal blog. Of that, I have realized only about 35 clicks. And, as of right now, I have earned zero dollars.

I suspect as more and more publishers and advertisers experiment with Google Pay Per Action, more and more publishers and advertisers will begin to see results. Keep in mind, I have isolated one advertiser and one publisher (me) in this case study. So the results are far from statistically significant.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Yahoo! Search Blog has announced that Yahoo! Site Explorer is out of beta. Yahoo has also announced that Site Explorer has added functionality for users to submit sitemaps for their mobile device-friendly websites through the control panel. WebmasterWorld has discussion on the mobile-friendly submission and a WebmasterWorld member also notes that authenticated users are also able to report suspicious spam sites sites through the tool as well.

I have included screenshots of both new features.

In Yahoo! Site Explorer, when you view your submitted sites, you can click on Manage to add feeds for mobile browsers:

When you view your site's Inlinks and hover over a specific link, you will see the "Report Spam" button as such:

The spam report feature is being received well, but some question whether this could hurt site rankings if too biased:

The report spam does sound interesting and it was mentioned before who is to say what is not related content?

Webmasters could easily harm their rankings by reporting sites that they do not see as being quality sites or relevant links, however, Yahoo could see that site much differently. Subsequently rankings could suffer as a result.

I sure hope there is a human element to review the spam reports in the backend.

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

We had a tremendous amount of coverage during the Search Engine Strategies conference, and every time we were in the Press Room, we saw another WebProNews video being filmed. Members at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint forums discovered this particularly interesting interview between Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz interviewing Vanessa Fox of Google's Webmaster Central.

The interview covered many different topics which are summarized below.

Is Google Base worth it? Vanessa says yes for sites with structured data, such as real estate listings or recipes. It is a separate searching system and you can refine your results. Google Base is a great product for results that can be refined.

Getting on Google News: If you're accepted to the program, you can submit a news sitemap through Google's Webmaster Tools.

Google Sitemaps Initiative Offering Sitemaps in 18 New Languages: This has always been available, but now the content is available in 18 languages so people can learn more about it without having to learn English.

Sitemaps Support through robots.txt: The syntax of this is:

Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/sitemapfile.xml

Vanessa says that it is still recommended that you initially submit your sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools so that webmasters can determine whether their sitemap file has any errors.

What does Vanessa think about other search engine "Webmaster Central" portals? It's great. Yahoo SiteExplorer just went out of beta, and it works well. All engines should have such tools.

Can we get support for the following in Google Webmaster Central?

• Delete URL: We've had a URL removal tool for about 6 years. It's certainly a possibility to port to Webmaster Central.


• Live PR Score: I'm not sure about that one.


• Will Google ever compete with Alexa? Not likely due to privacy concerns.


• Link sorting: Vanessa says that she will pass the request on.


• Seeing supplemental results and why they are supplemental: Vanessa can see the expansion into determining where pages have problems but not getting too specific.


• Will we see penalties for people who buy links in Google Webmaster Central? We'll start paying more attention to paid links. (Days after this interview, Matt Cutts addressed the issue of paid links.)


• Information on who is linking to 404 pages: It's possible, but the best way to deal with this is with a redirect, because you may not be able to get that broken link fixed.

Is it possible that submitting a sitemap can get an orphaned page -- that has no pages linked to it -- indexed in Google? Possibly, but it probably won't rank well. It might rank for non-competitive terms.

What about results that are not wanted by a user? Will sitemaps affect that? The most important thing is about user experience. Is this page what they wanted, or is it a hop to get to pages that they want?

What happens if I want to move to another site through a 301 redirect? If I verify both of the sites in Webmaster Central, is there a way to keep the rankings? It is possible if we are able to verify ownership for both sites. Other things you can do now is that you take the pages from the old site and put them on the new site as-is and redirect one-to-one. A lot of people who do this move restructure the content, so it gets harder to pinpoint the issue. While it is a natural time to redo your site, just do everything a step at a time.

With regards to parasite hosting and I host my content on an .edu site, do you think that there may be too much trust that Google is putting in this domains, and do you think that that might slide in the future? We're always looking at our algorithms. We always look at improving user experience and spamming the search engines is not the best user experience. We have a team that works on this, and we have an authenticated spam reporting tool in Webmaster Central. Hopefully, you will see these results improve.

You can watch the video here:

Discussion continues at Cre8aSite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Friday's announcement of Google's acquisition of Doubleclick has created a storm of posts in a variety of forums about the challenges this acquisition will pose to competitors and Google AdSense and AdWords publishers. A DigitalPoint Forums user asks how the purchase, if at all, will affect Google AdSense and AdWords Publishers.

Do you think it will boost Adsense's publisher's earning, as we all know that DoubleClick is market Giant in Advertising services?

What's the short term answer? Most members feel that the acquisition will not affect AdSense publishers.

For the long term solution, this might actually help them:

Ithink they will open a new way of advertising. Like said in another thread, they will use the research & tools to diplay ads that users are more likely to click, thus increasing ctr and eleminating some fraud. When CTR is naturally high, I don'tthink people will cheat the system as much. They may even track AdSense related websites to see if such things do happen.

Do you agree? Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

In one of Google's costliest acquisitions, on Friday, the Google blog announced (as did the Google AdSense Blog and the Google AdWords blog) that they were acquiring the DoubleClick online advertising firm for $3.1 billion. A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the acquisition more closely.

Is Google an ad agency or a search giant? One reader feels that as Google continues pursuing advertising channels, advertising is its primary focus:

Wow, changes the whole makeup. Guess Google is now officially an ad agency that just happens to dabble in search.

Not everybody is optimistic:

The conflicts of interest are almost too many to list. This should make a lot of people nervous about their data.

Google's strategy is heavily questioned. Did were they trying to sink Microsoft? Many readers felt that way, especially feeling that Google is challenging anti-trust laws.

Obviously Google overpaid (in all cash too), but its more of a strategic move & Sergey's thinking would be in the big picture $3.1 billion dont matter much.

Wow, thowing away 3.1 billion just to shut MS out on a temporary basis. Google is completely insane.

Can anyone say anti-trust? If the Dept. of Justice lets this go through, they will be creating what Microsoft has on OS's. It will be too late to stop them after this. Hopefully someone there is listening. Even though, the EU would probably also have objections. I would be surprised if their competitors do not submit anti-trust issues too. Google not evil? Yea, right.

It certainly feels that Google, with its finances, can control a lot of online properties. How much is too much? Another WebmasterWorld forums thread shows that Google is already being scrutinized for the purchase.

According to a Marketwatch article, competitors are asking the government to look more closely at the purchase.

"Google's purchase of DoubleClick combines the two largest providers of online advertising delivery and is going to reduce substantially the market competition on which Web sites rely on to provide advertising," The Journal quoted Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, as saying. Smith said that, taken together, Google and DoubleClick would handle more than 80% of the advertisements served up to third-party Web sites when a user pulls up a page, the Journal reported.

Forum members see that this may be a valid argument. In fact, Techmeme already covers a number of blogs that are reporting about Microsoft's desire to have an extensive antitrust review.

Forum discussion regarding the acquisition continues at WebmasterWorld. You can discuss the competitor challenge at this WebmasterWorld thread.

About a week and a half ago Google Turns AdWords Yellow & Changes Click Behavior. In short, Google changed the top sponsored results background color from blue to yellow and only counted a click of that ad if it was on the title of the ad itself.

I wanted to wait a bit to see how this may be impacting advertisers. I have some information for you now.

A WebmasterWorld thread has continued discussion on the impact.

One member named lynnemezine said that they are seeing "both a decline in CTR on all ads and fewer clicks on any positioned T1-T3." He is frustrated because he doesn't know if the drop off is due to the yellow background or the change in click behavior required to be taken to the advertiser's page.

Advertiser, "Israel," said that although his clicks are down "quite a bit" his sales remain the same. This member is happy about the click through change, because it drops the number of "accidental" clicks on those ads - which I personally agree with.

SanDiegoChicken said that he has seen a "20% drop in CTR, across 12+ campaigns with over 400,000 impressions this month.

Overall, it appears there are now less clicks in those top ad spots. The big question is why? Is it due to the ad color change or the click behavior change or both? Everyone agrees that CTR is lower, which does impact one's ad ranking in AdWords. But are sales less?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last week, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com To All Support Sitemaps Autodiscovery. So how do you ping these services to notify the search engines of an update to your Sitemaps, if you do not want to wait for them to find it themselves?

Softplus at Cre8asite Forums posted the URLs you can use to ping the various engines. Here they are:

Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

I did not test these myself, but they seem accurate.

Note, there is no URL listed for Microsoft's Live search. Why? I suspect they currently do not support Sitemaps. Which brings me back to my lingering question, Is Microsoft's Live Search Ever Going to Add Sitemaps Support? They have been promising it since November 15, 2006.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

It is 2007 and we have yet to have the big debate on paid links this year. Matt Cutts of Google has changed that with his dual post on how to report paid links and hidden links. Let me quickly summarize:

(1) Matt explains you can and should report paid links via the Google spam report forms.
(2) Matt said there may be a new form out in the future to just report specifically paid links.
(3) Google is trying out "some ideas" to "augment" Google's "existing algorithms" with paid links.
(4) Matt explains in the hidden links blog post that you should "at least" provide a machine readable way to disclose you have paid links (i.e. redirect link or nofollow).
(5) It seems the preferred way is to have a human readable way to disclose paid links (i.e. label text links as paid or sponsored).

I think I covered the guts of Matt's posts in those five points above.

As you would imagine, there is a ton of discussion brewing over these posts. You can see a lot of the blog discussion referenced at Techmeme. Let me summarize the forum discussion for you.

WebmasterWorld has some recent discussion on the topic and here are the posts that jump out at me.

Matt didn't address paid directories. Yahoo directory & BOTW (and maybe a few others) charge for submission reviews not inclusion. Not every site is accepted. The reason those directories are regarded as quality resources is because of their strict editorial policies.

I don't see a difference between the above, but I do at the same time. Some directories take high editorial discretion such as those mentioned. Others will take anything. Some bloggers paid for reviews won't do a review on a site or product they aren't pleased with, showing the same editorial discretion. Some publishers won't link to sites (aka advertisers) they don't review and approve of. Others will link to anything.

Google has a problem with paid links messing up their algorithm. Then they need to fix the problem instead of trying to scare the hell out of publishers hoping they'll fix it for them.

There is a clear distinction between a directory which charges for a review, and a blog that is simply a list of paid links. Simply put, a directory becomes "trusted" as a hub or authority on the subject. It does not mean a blog cannot be an authority, however, it's been made clear that selling links is a no-no.

Search Engine Watch Forums has some nice discussion on the topic as well. Here are some quotes for you.

I think the fact so many people are so angry tends to indicate that it is a good idea.

DigitalPoint Forums has two different threads, one here and the other here. In both, you can read the fear in the SEOs and Webmasters posts. In bright red...

Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, & DigitalPoint Forums.

The twenty-fifth edition of the Search Pulse is now available for download. Ben and Chris chatted about how the search community celebrated April Fools Day. They also brought in Rebecca from SEOmoz to discuss their new Ranking Factors document. They discussed Google changing the AdWords from blue to yellow (I think). They talked about how Yahoo! has shortened the search ad descriptions. The search engines united with auto-discovery on Sitemaps; including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com. Plus many more topics. The topics we covered are listed below, in order of priority (based on search community buzz). You can download the MP3 file and listen at your convenience.

You can listen to the MP3 file with our new player directly below:

Topics We Covered:

1. Search Engine Community & April Fools Day
   
2. SEOmoz Ranking Factors Version 2.0 is Released
   
3. Yahoo! To Require Shorter Descriptions in May/June 2007
   
4. How Important to Search Engines is Site Age?
   
5. Does "Freshness" Mean More in Google?
   
6. Google Turns AdWords Yellow & Changes Click Behavior: How Will It Change CTR?
   
7. Sitemaps & URL Submission (Sitemaps Adds Ask.com & Autodiscovery)
   
8. Google Personalizes Maps by Adding "My Maps" Feature
   
9. Google Undergoing Fundamental Search Changes?
   
10. Should You Outsource Link Development in SEO?
    
11. Sneaking Around Buying Links
    
12. New Google Logo on AdSense Now Official
    
13. Is There Any Benefit to Google Checkout Badges?
    
14. Yahoo Announces Alpha Personalized Search
    

Continue reading "Search Pulse 25: April 1, SEOmoz Factors, Google Yellow Ads, Yahoo Shorter Descriptions, Sitemaps Autodiscovery & Microsoft and Ask.com Join Google and Yahoo, & More"

Chris Boggs, our Associate Editor, has a new column at Search Engine Watch. The first article he wrote he named Just One Agency Point of View in the "outsourced" section.

Chris explains:

In this new column, I hope to be able to provide an insight into the world of big agency workflow processes, of course without ever being so specific that I'd get myself in trouble, especially with regards to clients. I imagine I'll get to occasionally brand our successes, but we do leave more of that to our weekly newsletter, Avenue A | Razorfish's Search Marketing Trends.

The article is being discussed at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Good job Chris!

Big thank you to Kim Krause Berg, Debra Mastaler, Chris Boggs, Greg Meyers, Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Barone, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Carolyn Shelby, Tamar Weinberg for helping me out with this awesome coverage. Here are the sessions we covered, somewhat in order.

Here are the fifty-plus sessions we covered at SES NY 2007.

1. In House: Big SEO
2. Video Search Optimization
3. Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies
4. Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
5. Benchmarking an SEM Campaign
6. Online Video Advertising
7. Advertising in Social Media
8. Mobile Search Optimization
9. Where Are Your Spending Your Client’s Money?
10. Advanced Paid Search Techniques
11. Ads In A Quality Score World
12. In House Big PPC
13. Keynote Conversation with Steve Berkowitz
14. Sitemaps & URL Submission
15. Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic
16. Link Building Basics
17. Introduction to Search Marketing
18. Web Analytics & Measuring Success
19. Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
20. Converting Visitors Into Buyers
21. Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
22. Writing for Search Engines
23. Meet the Search Ad Networks
24. SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
25. Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix
26. Earning Money From Contextual Ads
27. Fun with Dynamic Websites
28. Landing Page Testing & Tuning
29. Search and Branding
30. Robots.txt Summit
31. Successful Site Architecture
32. B2B Tactics
33. Social Search Overview
34. Creating Compelling Ads
35. SMO - Social Media Optimization
36. Images and Search Engines
37. Search Behavior Research Update
38. Social Bookmark Strategies
39. Shopping Search Tactics
40. Organic Listings Forum
41. Microsoft adCenter: Today and Tomorrow
42. Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues
43. Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
44. Local Search Marketing Tactics
45. Search & Regulated Industries
46. Wikipedia & SEO
47. Linking Strategies
48. Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One
49. Link Baiting and Viral Success
50. SEM For Non-Profits and Charities
51. SEM Agencies: Working With Ad Agencies
52. CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Moderated by Sara Holoubek, a “Free Agent Consultant,” as well as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO.

First speaker is Janet Driscol Miller, from searchmojo, in Charlottesville, VA. They have had a great experience in partnering with Ad Agencies. There are natural synergies between SEMs and agencies. Agencies are seeing requests for SEM/SEO, and many do not have in-house expertise, and this can be difficult to build. SEM firms offer full-service marketing through partnership. This means low-cost lead generation, and allows the SEM firm to focus on SEM and leave the sakes to someone else. Also, working with agencies leads to an increased possibility for acquisition.

There are major challenges, though: you have to find the right partners. Each needs to pick the right SEM/Agency for them. There can be operational issues such as billing (SEMs often have a different type of billing structure that agencies). Some recommendations: relative to your assize. Track records of success. Boutique agencies are less likely to have an SEM person of staff. Do your homework: remember the brand is now associated with the agencies. Don’t be afraid to cold call/network with agencies. She heard another panel where an agency person said “one of the happiest days of my life was when an SEM firm came through the door,” which made her very happy to hear.

Solving operational issues: create an integrated process flow. Use flow charts and project plans and insert SEM process into it. One problem that is common is that an agency will redesign and client site without informing the SEM, which can lead to major issues. She emphasized regular updates in training. Can the agency sell your service? It is important as an SEM to enable that. Train them regularly in the basics, and then they can always call you in on a sales call. One way they have achieved this is through handbooks. They created handbooks to all partners, specific to their needs and processes.

They also recommend dedicated account managers. The SEM will assign an account manager to each partner, to facilitate easy and rapid communications, Use co-branded marketing activities to promote the partnership. For example, use an email announcing the partnership to the agency list. So, should you lower prices to allow for agency markup? Not always needed, and this depends on the fees. She never lowers the fees for any body. She finds that SEM firms are in high demand, particularly by agencies, so she doesn’t feel the need. However, she does find ways to make the partnership mutually beneficial. You can work with the agency if needed to find creative ways to compensate, such as perhaps using a PPC setup fee instead of adding to the management percentage of ad spend fee. They are always open to testing models.

Contractual issues can exist. Try to be transparent versus white label in the approach. You can keep the brand presence, and maybe represent the firm as a trusted partner. Otherwise what may happen is someone meets with her and then Googles her name and finds out she doesn’t even work for the agency. Thus, you should always be transparent if possible.. Mutual NDAs are recommended – otherwise there may be situations when the SEM ends up training the agency to do their job. Make it easy: use a blanket services agreement, and append service agreement with a statement of work, instead of starting from scratch.

In summation, try to make it easy to work with agencies. Do not limit to only ad agencies: there are interactive agencies, marketing services, PR agencies, customers. Remember to evaluate the relationships on a regular basis.

Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media next. He will present: Working with Ad Agencies: “Transparency versus Opacity.” Just in case, he defines Transparency as “Full client visibility.” Opacity is “white label partner.” Pros and cons of each: transparency first. Pros: the client relationship is open. Can help influenced decisions over marketing and budget. Also, there is more credit for work. The downside: Two clients, agency and the client/brand. This leads to the need to establish credibility twice. It can be challenging for the agency partner to articulate the value proposition.

Opacity has pros and cons as well. Pros: There is a less intensive service relationship. This can be an incremental sales channel without being involved in the Business Development. At the same time, you will not be getting credit for the work, and there is less influence of strategy. Search may not be automatically integrated into the broad campaigns. Also, the issue of having project work versus ongoing, and this may not have an extended shelf life.

What are some of the major reasons agencies prefer an opaque relationship? Many agencies fear change. The client demands search, it is outperforming everything else…so what if the clients knew? This makes the years of experience with the client obsolete. He showed an example of an agency that actually had to hide the effectiveness in SEM so that they wouldn’t lose the other media. There are downsides for SEMs as well: Retail business, through an agency, case study: they got a ten-to-one return on 100K product, and were never able to cite it as work/success.

He shows a mini case study for a major electronics retailer. They felt strongly about SEM being integrated and actually brought them into the meeting with the agency. The results were excellent, thanks to the total integration. He cannot share specific results, but they are “killing it.” In the end, he feels transparency is in everyone’s best interest. Everyone is able to work towards their strengths. It allows for joint proposals and pitches. It can be very powerful when a specialist goes in with the ad agency to a cline to pitch the new business. Also, the coordinated execution helps the rest of the project.

Scott Orth from GTS Services in Portland, Oregon. Shows a Reebok TV commercial on slide titled, “why cant we all get along?” It is the Terry Tate commercial (office linebacker). Very funny… the idea is that if you are an SEM working with a traditional marketer, you may have issues with conflict. But aren’t we the same anyway? He shows traditional marketing and their online equivalents: PR = SEO. Media Buy = PPC. Creative/storefront design = Website. In the example he showed, he felt that the emphasis on driving traffic to the site to see more Terry Tate videos was not strong enough (they had a brief image of the reebok.com domain at the end of the ad under other verbiage). People tend to search for ideas within the media piece and search around that.

He does a short case study about work with a Corporate HVAC company. The environment included three players: SEM, Web Development firm, and traditional agency. The problems: working independently, ad and brand messages were not integrated, the site design was based on web and technical details, and the primary SEM goal was the increase of traffic.

So, after the creation, problems were: Directories, Titles and META descriptions were not reflective of the global message. Imagery and content did not match. Solutions: traditional agency lead the initiatives and shared media plans. The SEM realigned organic SEO and PPC campaigns to match up with offline campaigns, and they had a three way partnership to do a full site redesign, focused on SEO and usability. Results: Streamlined branding and messaging. Traffic from search jump 53%, which was incredibly successful because it was global brand that already receive millions of visitors. The interactive tools they designed were also an instant success. Lastly, targeted conversion increase 59%.

The secret to success: knowing who to blame for mistakes. Learn to point fingers, trash-talk traditional marketing. Finally, communication, how will the client know their traditional agency suck without you telling them (laughs from everyone – he says obviously he is kidding with these). So how to make it work? We’re on the same team, sharing different skills – remember that. Share plans, brainstorm together! Give regular presentations. Assist in sales pitches…doesn’t only mean that you have to go to the pitch, but at least work with them in the creation of the pitch. Remember, it’s all about success – use test campaigns. He also feels you can “get in the door” with PPC, show some success, and then move towards organic once they are convinced of the value of search. He feels that PPC best aligns with traditional media so it works well at the onset.

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines, Friday April 13, 2007 12:30 pm
Organic Track

Moderator: Danny Sullivan

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, GrantasitcDesigns.com
Jim McFadyen, CriticalMass
Dan Crow, Google
Amit Kumar, Yahoo! Search
Ryan Johnston - Critical Mass

This is the final session for me today and one of the last for the conference. Again, it is being held in a ballroom sized room and it's cold in here (but better than being in some of the hot rooms.) I didn't have info in advance on who would be moderating, but Danny Sullivan just appeared and it will be he who moderates this session. Two minutes to go and the room is starting to buzz and fill up.

Danny is at the podium and cracking jokes. Last session of the last day. This will be the "best session" he jokes. The web has evolved as more people are making use of css, ajax. Issues for SEO? Shari leads off.

Shari:

I think everybody who attends the last session deserves a reward. CSS - html addition that allows webmasters to control design, font, link appearance, etc. It’s a text file. SE's can read it. Decreases download time of page. Easier to control elements on a page. Communicates visited and unvisited links. Ability to control look of a site. SE's monitor hidden links. Disadvantages - end users have to have the fonts you call in stylesheet. users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers; they often prefer odd typefaces found in print. Css hyperlinks clutter a page. Sometimes there is unusual text wrapping when a stylesheet is changed, like changing font sizes. CSS can be used to hide text on a page. SE's don't use alt text to determine relevancy. Some people use h1 tags as workaround and they make a lot of content h1 tags in CSS. CSS layer coordinates are something SE's can detect. Some SEO's try to hide content in negative coordinates. CSS makes it easy to put layers on top of each other, making it easier to use CSS to hide text. They myth is that you can use CSS to hide things from SE's. Drop down menus are not considered spam because text is meant to be read by humans and so are the links.

Put all css into separate directory. Make a different design for mobile, she recommends. Not just changing the css. Should you robots exclude css? No. SE's don't want you to hide CSS or JavaScript with robots.txt. She highly recommends css. Increases page load times. Make sure your websites display properly on browsers. Not all elements need to be css. Some images are fine rather than doing it by css.

Ryan and Jim co-present:

We use tools like AJAX all the time. Used for some high end clients. Tech has been around for 7 years. Asynchronous JavaScript XHTML. X is for data formatting. AJAX is not a programming lang. Nothing to install or download. All browsers are enabled. AJAX not supported by SE's.

Full/ partial /none are 3 groups of support. SE's and AJAX don't mix because of the use of JavaScript. Makes it hard to locate or index content. If AJAX delivers your content, this is the problem. Every pg needs to be an html, php, aspx page. SE's must find and index them. Every page must have content that exists on the page. All links must be in html. Test by turning off JavaScript. If pages are there, SE's will find them.

AJAX enhances the user experience. Engineers come in and change anchors on the page to change function to AJAX calls. Ensure your baseline app supports non-AJ users, including spiders. AJ can help a site be more interesting for users. make it run faster. offer assistance, like Google suggest.

Ex - Rolex.com

copy in nav
wanted nav accessible from every page

They didn't want all content indexed by SE's. Solution was AJAX.

AJAX breaks the normal browser refresh. This means content does not always correspond to the URL. No history, no back button. Major usability issue. They use JavaScript to update urls, won't refresh the page and fake an entry into browsers history. Advises not to cloak. Our research suggest duplicate content should not be an issue as spiders don't index past the # sign.

[This is a very techy presentation. He is having trouble showing his examples from a live site due to FLASH. It's hard to take notes on this session because he is showing AJAX solutions in use.]

AJAX is used to accommodate url updates and handle deep linking. Looks at gucci.com. It's a pretty site. Easy to move around. If you remove the JavaScript, there is nothing on the pages. No content. It breaks every rule for SEO. All images, all JavaScript driving it.

Amazon is viewed next. Shows how AJAX handles interface and menus. Amazon Diamond search. Site works without JavaScript.

Panel input:

Dan Crow - Google
Says Google is moving towards indexing css FLASH, AJAX, JavaScript. They say there is no change in the present state, but expect a major shift in the future. They're interested in this technology. If you think everything is hidden behind JavaScript, someday that will longer be true. Be cautious about your assumptions about how you build your websites because they are making changes.

Amit -
It's our fault we can't index programming. We don't want to stop you from designing for your users. He states that what is built for accessibility is also built for search engines. CSS and JavaScript would like it not be hidden by robots.txt. If you have a problem with this, let Yahoo know. If technology you use requires clicks to use a form, makes it hard for SE's. They look at content and references from other sites. AJAX that doesn't allow urls to change is a problem for SE's and bookmarking because descriptions are in those urls. SE's don't know exactly which url is the actual inbound link that is making the referral.

[Note: This session was about conflicts, or not, with CSS and AJAX with search engines. It was a little hard to follow if you don't know about AJAX and what it is used for. It was interesting to hear what the search engine reps had to say. I think as AJAX solutions become more popular, we'll be hearing more about this and getting more details on actual applications for use.]

Provided by Cshel!

Vertical Track | 10:45a-12p

Moderator, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Ettore Rossetti, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Save the Children
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Kevin Gottesman, Founder, Gott Advertising

Audience is fairly light. Anne encourages the audience to move closer.

First Speaker: Ettore Rossetti

1. Apply Pareto’s Principle to SEM. (20% of the searches result in 80% of
the clicks)
2. Find Your Search Niche, being small and finding your narrow niche is
better than being big and broad and general. Try to be #1 for a very
narrow category than fight to be #1 in a broader category that might
already have a leader.
3. The Brad Pitt Effect. Informally named after the “butterfly effect” in
chaos theory. Unanticipated effects from non-intuitive actions or causes.
4. Actionable Advertising. Discover what times of year/day/whatever your
visitors are more likely to convert. Be aware of these peaks and valleys
in traffic. Know when your browsers buy.
5. Searcher Intent = Expectation. When searcher intent and results
delivery connect, the result is a win-win outcome. Make sure your call to
action perfectly matches the result after the user clicks.
6. A click is not a Customer. You cannot communicate back to a click.
Therefore, a click is not a customer, nor is it a lead. It’s an anonymous
suspect with the potential to become a prospect. Be aware of your
conversion rates and what you’re actually paying for. Make sure you
qualify your customers before you communicate/convert them?
7. Measuring holistic results. Search marketing is part of a greater whole
of integrated activity and needs to be tracked and measured holistically.
Make sure you’re getting a “panoramic” view of your online marketing
efforts. If you focus in too narrowly on a single aspect, you might miss
more important details or trends.

Second Speaker: Kevin Gottesman

Non-profit is not a dirty word. People have real money, they spend real
money and they’re using real budgets and buying advertising and developing
strategies, etc. A few years ago, non-profits seemed to be (or at least
have the reputation to be) all about getting free pub and just praying for
some conversions.

Client Goals and Types of Campaigns:

1. Fundraising:
a. Get peoplel to renew or join,
b. Get EOY (end of year) donations, etc
c. Appeals for specific assistance or types of donations.
2. List building
a. Breaking News – Have a baseline campaign running constantly so that
when a breaking news event happens, you can just add in a few new keywords
to take advantage of the search spike in the 2 or 3 days after the story
hits.
b. Core Issues
c. Seasonal – Take advantage of seasonal events and tweak keywords
accordingly.
d. Petitions – If the primary goal of a campaign is to get people to
sign/send petitions to congress, whatever, then once you’ve successfully
completed the petition action, send them to a page inviting them to join
your organization. Piggy back an additional action on the campaign and
take advantage of the traffic.
e. Land based events – Rallies, petition drives, food drives… non-online
events.

Google offers “Google Grants” for non-religious, non-political
not-for-profits to run free keyword campaigns. Many groups who are taking
advantage of this make the mistake of driving all the traffic to their
homepages, rather than to a specific call-to-action page, rather than
hoping they dive deeper past the homepage and choose to act.

Potential members and donors are online searching, donating and joining
daily.
Look for them where they are searching for your information, mission,
cause or event.
$200 billion donated by individuals in 2005
SEM and SEO are long term, necessary investments for all non-profits and
charities.

Third Speaker -- Nan Dawkins

“Missed Opportunities”

#1 PPC
• Overly broad keywords and terms
• Mismatched keywords
• Failure to fully utilize Google Grants

#2 Failure to be seen – Multi-channel visibility
• PPC isn’t the only way to be seen on the SEs. The cost of PPC is going
up, and will continue to do so. A multi-channel strategy helps you appear
more time on the search results page; the more likely you are to get a
click. The more clicks, the more conversions. Plus, the more times you
appear, the better your brand exposure is as well.
• ROI is higher with multi-channel strategies

#3 Social Media Strategy

What does social media have to do with search?
• Brand recognition, improves CTRs dramatically.
• SERP shelf space and reputation management.
• Social media can boost the number of quality links which boots your
organic rankings… in other words, better search visibility.

Social Media Examples:
• Wikipedia, blogs (your own, your supporters),
• MySpace/Facebook (local organizing),
• Vertical social networks (Change.org, Hot Soup, 43 Things),
• Ning,
• Flickr (photo sharing from events),
• Second Life,
• Video

Don’t start a social media campaign or effort without a sound strategy,
because a misstep or poorly executed effort could inadvertently alienate a
large group of very vocal people.

#4 Testing and Tracking

Make sure you have analytics and use them. Make sure you’re looking at
your log files and regularly audit your traffic, clicks, see what search
terms your users are clicking on to get to your site, etc.

Moderated by Jeff Rohrs
Presented by Rand Fishkin, Cameron Olthius, Jennifer Laycock, and Chris Boggs

Rand Fishkin is up first. He gives a background of linkbait evolution (18 months). He presents a quote from Matt Cutts about linkbait as a powerful tool.

Linkbait, above all other tactics, in marketing, has the greatest chance for high impact.

How do you leverage this? Linkbait is about getting content on the web that is worthy of being shared.

Rand shows us the linkerati - web researchers, journalists, and bloggers. Linkerati dominate the linking on the web. Browsers and customers do nothing compared to the linkerati. They are very important and you therefore should target them. They mean rankings, branding, mind share, and getting the word out about your product.

How does linkbait help you rank if you provide content that does not relate to your site? A page that has many links will help the global authority of your site. The 2,000+ links spread the link love throughout your site. Doing this consistently will help your entire site rank better. Example: Wikipedia. They rank for every arbitrary term but that's because there's a great amount of links to other pages.

Sample of successful linkbait: Worst College Mascots on drivl.com. It ranks very well for college mascots. Celebrity Nudity Awards on Drivl.com - it ranks #5 for nudity. These pages have several hundreds of thousands of page views, several thousand links, etc.

But if you're not in this industry and you need something practical, think about this - Rand discusses linkbait about a drug rehab firm - a drug identification chart - ranks #1 for illegal drugs. It was launched via Digg and got over 100,000 views and many links, etc.

Some content strategies: lists (best of, worst of), list of tips, howtos, problems, benefits, resources, teaching resources, humor/irony, controversy, interviews, breaking news, product reviews, poll results/data results, aesthetic beauty, tools, comprehensive reviews, great insight, and many more.

If you are looking for what these people are looking for, look through the linkbait portals (a lot of people a day look at content on those sites). Digg.com is an example (2mil+ visitors daily, tech/web centric but has news/photos/offbeat pieces, 50-100 votes required for homepage, 10-30k visits on average after the homepage, somewhat over 1000+ links after a few weeks). Reddit.com is another example (500k visits, broader in scope, 20-40 votes required for main page, 4-10k visits average, and 600+ links after a few weeks). Netscape.com is more of a news centric site (250k visits daily, 20-40 votes required for main page, 4-8k visits average, 300+ links per article). Del.icio.us popular (1mil+ visits daily, developer centric, 20-30 for main page). StumbleUpon (3mil+ users, all subjects, 70% thumbs up, 50-5,000 visits that are continuous, 25-250 links).

Other portals: popular blogs and sites
- Michael Arrington of Techcrunch
- Boingboing.net suggestion page
- Engadget
- Lifehacker
- Slashdot
- Techmeme
- Scobleizer
- Daily Kos
- The Huffington Post

Rules for Linkbaiting Safely: keep in mind about IP tracking, geography of users, groups, profile identification, and spam submissions. Digg is pretty savvy about acknowledging ways to game the service.

Cameron Olthius speaks next. How does viral search success impact traditional search?

1. Improving your rankings: there are three types of linkbait - content pieces (flash games, written content), widgets (e.g. MyBlogLog), and mashups (content from more than one source to make an integrated experience).

2. Reputation Management. There are two ways to use social media for reputation management. Control the top results through social media profiles. You can also contain the negative buzz before it goes viral. An example is Comcast Customer Service - search Google - #1 result is comcast.com, #3 result is a blogger's rant, and #5 result is a YouTube video of a Comcast guy sleeping on his couch.

Where do you monitor? Social media sites, blog search engines, and comment trackers.
What do you monitor? URLs, company name, product name, public facing figures, relevant keywords, and competitors

Participate to keep the good buzz going or to turn negative to positive. This can lead to more links.

3. Rank social media pages (like on MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia). Create profiles and control small linkbait here - the sites here have such high authority so it will be easy to rank.

Our third speaker is Jennifer Laycock, who says she will cover viral side. Linkbaiting in its purest form is about getting links, and it's not about branding. It's great about a new site launch. Viral marketing is all about marketing. It gets you the links but it's more about building your brand, driving conversions. It's getting past the traffic.

Why would you do viral marketing? (1) The cost is in the idea - there is no placement cost (no PPC, banner ads, etc.) This is word of mouth marketing. (2) A good viral campaign creates brand evangelists and increases your credibility. (3) It also has a rapid response rate (between blogs, discussion forums, and email).

How do you create these viral idea? Find out what sparks passion within your customers. Find out what hasn't been done before. Come up with something new that nobody has tried. Ask yourself how the idea will benefit your users. Find out if your audience will risk their reputation on it.

Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader, not because they are important to the originator.

You have to think of a viral project from the very start - formulate your marketing campaign out of that.

Viral marketing works through relationships. Social media speeds this up. Find ways to work through these relationships to get these to spread.

How does it spread? You launch via opinion leaders. Find out who the thought leaders are who would be most interested in this linkbait. Once you reach them, it goes down the line.

A few techniques: "send a friend" links on your website; one-click access for social bookmarking; integrating the ad (e.g. like signatures in Hotmail). Another one is exploit motivators - "cool factor" Gmail accounts. Use existing networks - people are already talking, so find them and get your services talked about. Take advantage of other people's resources.

Be ready to act: Jennifer has a personal site called thelactivist.com. She mentions her personal battle with her CafePress shirt that said "The Other White Milk" which was apparently a conflict with another trademark. She was battled with the National Board of Pork who issued a cease and desist letter to stop selling this shirt. She took advantage of this in viral marketing, which she calls "a match made in social media heaven." Something will fall into your lap and you can jump on it. She prepared a blog post with a PDF. She had a buzzworthy hook (she played upon how the Pork Board said that she's ruining pork's good reputation). She posted the blog as a call to action. People came in and read her blog. She had links to the bottom of her blog for social media sites. She planted the seeds (emailed mommy bloggers and others in the search engine world - that was enough for the publicity) and motivated linking (by adding a section that listed who covered the story). The result was that the traffic spiked 400% in about a week, there was a branding spike (people looking for her blog name), there was a topical blog spike (pork board, Jennifer Laycock, thelactivist.com, etc.), she had a sales spike (700% increase), and she had a community spike of people who are now visiting her blog. Eventually, she got a sincere apology (especially after they said "how do I make the calls and emails stop?" - the audience laughs.) They revoked the cease and desist and donations were made to the milk bank.

Jeff adds how quickly the National Pork Board reversed their decision after this increased buzz.

The last speaker is our very own Chris Boggs. (Hi Chris!) He talks about leveraging the community. In searchenginewatch.com, there is a "forum roll" on the forum homepage - you don't have to feel competitive. Find a community where a lot of people within your industry belong and that's a way to pass links along. He shows us Barry's own Link Farm.

In other community love, Chris shows us SEOmoz's recommended list of competitors.

Chris then tells us about the My Super Proposal site where this one anonymous individual wanted to propose to his girlfriend on the SuperBowl. It ranks pretty well for a superbowl proposal, but not for "will you" yet (#1 result for "will you" is "how will you die?" - the audience laughs).

Purists think that link baiting should not include link building efforts.

You should research your backlinks - Yahoo! Site Explorer. Logfiles are also a great way to understand information. Check Technorati to see what people are saying. Look for anchor text and locations of new in-links (webuildpages.com and seobook.com).

Chris then presents an example from Neil Patel - "My 50 Favorite Blogging Resources" - Posted 11/13, and by the 19th, 1292 referrers sent traffic to that post; 4358 Diggs, 1762 Del.icio.us, 2851 Stumbles, Yahoo MyWeb 641 links, and 521 links on Furl.net. Traffic incrases over weeks also.

There is Good and the Bad - for example, as mentioned earlier, Comcast Customer Service.

He shows us savetoby.com - a guy said he would kill a rabbit if he didn't get $50,000 in a given amount of time. The more you can spend on being creative, the better chance you get.

Another example is Norelco's ShaveAnywhere.com (with title Philips Bodygroom), which was a viral initiative and got 750,000 uniques.

Viral can blow traditional marketing away if done properly.

Remember: there are risks when you want to consider, like on Norelco. If you search for Norelco now, #2 is Philips Bodygroom, which could cause people to consider other options and not want to work with Norelco.

Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One, Friday, April 13, 2007 10:45am
Organic Track

Moderator: Dana Todd, SEMPO and SiteLab

Speakers:
Shari Thurow, GrantasticDesigns.com
Matt Bailey, Site Logic Marketing

Was just interviewed by Mike McDonald of Webpronews again. I thought I'd be more relaxed, the second time around (1st interview was in Chicago), but I was still afraid my words would come tumbling out too fast and I wouldn't make any sense. He and videographer, Richard Easterling are professional, comfortable with what they're doing and do their best to put interviewees at ease. We discussed usability a little and how it relates to seo, which leads me into the next session I covered, presented below. This session is in a ballroom size room and it is full.

Dana Todd arrives. She is the moderator. She's surprised to see so many people show up on the last day...cold room. Every visitor is important to convert. You need to think about making your website perform. Introduces for Shari Thurow. She's a lively moderator. My favorite so far!

Shari is first. Dana and I have been with the conferences since the beginning. She calls it "search usability." Website usability vs. search usability. She loves Jakob Nielsen's view that usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces or web pages are to use.
Are you giving users enough info when they arrive? SEO and usability are not that different. Focus groups measure opinions. There is a herd mentality, the one who disagrees will likely go along with the majority. Usability. Measures whether person finishes a task. Did they click a button? Did they add to cart? Not a matter of being a cool site. Are they completing a desired task and if not, why not? Balance between user and business goals? The customer is not always right. We have to balance what the majority expects. Usability. Addresses search behaviors. Queries, browsing, surfing, pogo-sticking foraging, scanning, reading, berry picking. Search is not a linear process. If people are jumping back and forth between search results pages, that's negative search behavior. They're not finding what they’re looking for. Scent of info, sense of place, user confidence, info arch vs. site nav, interface - key concepts in search usability.

Scent of info = term highlighting in search engines is one ex. Google uses it in titles, ad copy, html title tags, term highlighting in snippets, some urls can provide scent of info. Too much highlighting bugs people because it seems like keyword stuffing. Primary and secondary text serves SERPS. Html tags, copy, meta tag desc.... Whenever a page provides scent of info and sense of place, not irritating to users. Show people a page for 8 seconds, and remove it. Ask them if they remember what the page was about. If they can't recall, not enough keywords to give sense of place. Good places to put keywords are top left. Recommends H1 tag. Breadcrumb trails are good for keywords. Main body.

What do you want people to do? Put that in the middle in the page and or above the page fold. Embedded text links are good for keywords. Navigation links. This is providing a sense of place for people and it also ranks well. She's showing an example of how pages can be optimized for SEO and are people oriented at the same time. Her illustrations show placement of copy, labels, content and links that illustrate this balance. Do your keyword research first, and then do you IA based on that. Site nav is part of the interface. Categorization is the IA, and how you do nav is the interface. She shows primary, secondary, and lower level navigation. Asks users in tests, What level are you viewing? If the IA and interface are keyword focused, people recall data easier, and where they are on a site. This is not keyword stuffing. It's logical placement of keywords to support the people who are visiting the site. She shows how this also ranks pages at the same time.

Nav schemes - text yes, FLASH now. User what your users prefer and put supplemental text links at the bottom as alt. Graphic nav, make sure you have relevant cross linking. Number 1 design mistake is cross linking. Cross linking is internal. There are vertical - breadcrumb, cat/sub/product and are a "you are here" directive. Breadcrumbs help form a mental model of the site. Don't make the homepage the main emphasis. Embedded texts are great because you look at a page of content and it is boring but links are keyword focused and provide scent of info. Alphabetical nav links can be helpful for some search scenarios. The key she points out is to provide alternative nav for different types of users and needs. Alternative links for products are good for things like related products, for ex. Sitemaps are huge positive. It's a map of sites global nav. If you have to submit your sitemap to engines, then your IA is poor. Keywords in urls count. Characters in URls are stop signs to SE's. Hyphens in urls are not the end of the world. What urls will your users remember better? Dynamic urls are hard to recall. Directors or subs? Both are fine for people and engines. Sub domain or main domain? Both are fine with SE's and people. Whenever possible your urls should reflect your sites arch.

She's over her time limit. She's going to talk about MedicineNet.com. She got the project of making the site of making it user friendly rather than seo friendly. She shows examples of on page optimization for human goals. Then they tracked and it shows skyrocketed conversions, ROI with no zero PPC investment. Shari is a detailed speaker. This is my third time covering this session. Her strength is in the fine details and illustrating to the audience on-page placement of elements, which I can't do justice for in this post. Her screenshots are a better way of communicating her ideas. She shares a great deal of info.

Matt Bailey is next.

Once you get involved with usability you fall in love with it. The reason you are here is because you want people to do what you want at your website. Get people to your site. Why spend money on seo when you neglect to measure where they're going and what they can't find? If they can't find it, its not there. It doesn't exist. Same as seo. If not in engines, it doesn't exist.

Homepage should have clear directions. SEO links out to the rest of the site and keyword focused navigation. What you sell must be very evident. Exit and bounce rates, when they search and they land on a page that has no info on what they just searched for, they will leave. They need a reason to stay and go somewhere from there. There must be a goal for your visitors. He shows Hall of Shame sites.

You can shop now or enter the site, which one should I do? Funny ex. of a site for cars. Users have a sense of fear in their choice. "I made a wrong decision at the very beginning” They want to shop but also want to go into the site. Pet site example - he has the audience cracking up. Is there anything on the homepage that shows it’s a store? It says product not products. Nav needs to be more desc. of what people will find. Shows a wine site. Ads from Google on a homepage are illogical because it takes people off your site. The color contrasts were terrible. Black links. Dark colors on dark colors. You need high contrast colors.

Taxonomy= good organization. User research comes in handy. What do people call your products and how do THEY group it? Not you or your company. New customers? Existing customers? Address your users’ needs immediately, right from the homepage. Understand what your visitors are looking for. Bring it forward. You can divide up by categories, as one suggestion. Groupings by how people do tasks. By price? Ratings? Popular? He shows a wine site that constantly changes their homepage based on research on how visitors conduct tasks on the site. This analysis explains what they want to do and the site nav and content, and keywords back it up and support this.

You need an established hierarchy of categories. For seo, multiple links with keywords. Customer based nav groupings. Don't hide links. Make them look like links. Buttons that don't look clickable are a no-no. Don't make people think about what they need to do. Use keywords in product links, Alt text, captions and labels. When you group in product pages, don't put so many categories on one page forcing a long scroll down. Don't clump all products on one page. Don't be afraid to add new pages. Shows an example of missing sub-navigation and faulty nav. Shows example of sub-navigation that is redundant. Stop selling so much. Far into a site, people want to focus on just the product, not all the other stuff you throw into the top and side spaces. Shows a good ex of ThinkGeek site and how they do sub-nav well. Other ex. is nav by type, price, etc. Call products by what they are. Be product specific about product content. For seo, call products what they are. The want benefits, value prop., how it connects to your users vs. just product stats. Sales decisions are emotional decision. You need to sell to the logical and emotional sides How will product make my life better? Problem solve keywords. Make your nav solve problems.

Shows a toilet aquarium site and everyone laughs. Site homepage is one big graphic, and everyone boos. Landing pages, does this page meet my needs and expectations? Shows his now famous Butt Paste web page. It's on a baby site. Has everyone in stitches. It was featured on Oprah. Search is for diaper rash ointment. That keyword is on the page in one place. But product is "Butt paste", a product name which is not what people search for.

Shows example of third party shopping cart on another site. New UI to deal with. Shows a sushi site. Has a buy button but no price. What happens if someone clicks a buy button. Shows a science site...rubber band powered racers. The page had 3 different product names on one page reinforced with content and big visible buy now button. Shows a real website warning that failure to review company's policy may be damaging financially to the user. Funny. He shows a product page with content that clearly describes product benefit to the user if they use it. Asks for review or upload you using the product. High rank because of extra content. Where do people enter and exit your site. Hilarious screenshot of with people using search engines and he represents Yahoo and Google with MSN sneaking onto the page. Avoid using slang. Words that are lost in translation. International users - not everyone have 5 digit zip codes. Not everyone lives in a state. Show shipping before they buy. Make pages easy to navigation, easy to find.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson
Presented by Justilien Gaspard, Greg Boser, and Jim Boykin

Detlev introduces the session and says that link building is core to developing a presence in the search engines. Good links can build good traffic in their own right.

He introduces Justilien Gaspard (justilien.com) who has a link building business and is a contributing author to SEMPO Institute and an author of SearchEngineWatch.

He says that for linking, some methods work better than others. You should find one that fits you best.

One of the ways to do this is through directories that are made for people and that people use. People found things through directories before search. There are low-quality directories around now but you should look for older ones that have been trusted by users and search engines. Trusted neighborhoods are important.

Niche and vertical directories are also neighborhoods that are trusted and often overlooked. He only uses directories that rank well in Google. (e.g. search Google for "travel directory" if you are working in the travel industry and submit to the top results.) The one time fee is worth it for many of these.

Other good directories are local directories, organizational directories, and chamber of commerce directories.

When you're looking for them, look at whether human edited, what they are listing (sites you want to be associated with or spammy ones?). How many links? (Less is better), age, and high-quality backlinks. PageRank is a litmus test - don't focus so much on it. The backlink is most important. Avoid directories with nofollows, selling sitewide links to mortgages/pharm, or few pages indexed.

Some tipes: follow their guidelines and appear natural (use good anchor text that are not keyword stuffing or look like you're using an automated program). Have non-spammy sites.

Another thing that is important is content + research which will yield links. Find out from your customer service what people want and focus on content for that. Do keyword research and find out what is attracting links in your industry. Don't reinvent the wheel. Look at the top 20 results in your keywords and see what tools and resources that your competitors create that attract links. Don't copy them but do something similar.

You can use blogs, wikis, and forums as well. Blogs help and establish you as an industry expert. Blogs also attract attention from the press - you can get contacted for interviews, etc.

You need to be proactive. Promote. Don't sit and wait for links to come.

A good way for promotion is to find influential media - reporters, newspapers, televisions, radio stations, and bloggers. Some media directories are Gebbie Press (gebbieinc.com) and Burrelles Luce (burrelleseluce.com).

Take advantage of social media for promotion - Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc.

Another way to link is press releases. Press releases and social media - progressive media relations.

You want to build a solid foundation, create useful content, promote it, and use social media for promotion.

The next person who speaks is Jim Boykin, CEO of WeBuildPages.

He says that links can be looked at as currency. If you get a link from a good trusted website, that's like getting quarters or dollars. The quality of backlinks is important - how you're linking.

Submitting to search engines is long dead. They find you.

Meta tags and on page optimization without backlinks is dead.

Don't use the Google toolbar to look at your backlinks. The best way to do this is on Yahoo linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com

Don't link a bunch of your sites together. The IP addresses of the sites are important. Google is a domain registrar now. They know who owns what, even if you use Domains By Proxy.

Link trading is dead. Here's why - if you link out to 500 places and they all link back, this is not beneficial for you because the results get filtered out.

Buying PR8 and PR9 is semi-dead. Some of these might not count in Google.

Getting new sites ranked quickly for competitive factors is dead.

4 Trust Factor categories: unique content, who do you link to (and their neighborhoods), who links to you, and is your link found within the content?

On Google, the "similar pages" link gives you a neighborhood of pages in your linking network. Similar pages share common backlinks.

Google is getting better at seeing link maps - who links to who. What is the neighborhood, what is the trust? www.touchgraph.com shows you this neighborhood.

Solutions: produce good quality content, link out to other related/trusted sites, get good quality places to link to you, and get your links within the content of a webpage. Block level analysis - if the header is the same and navbar is the same, the things that the search engine will analyze is - what is that middle area (that differs?) You want your links in a different area - the middle area - within the content. Add lots of text to your homepage, make sure your existing pages have content, add new pages (resources, FAQ, testimonials, manuals, guides, tips, linkbait, etc.)

Who do you want to link to: trusted sites, edus, govs, non competing resources

Natural backlinks are best. Think: do backlinks look natural or "SEO'd?"

The better links you have, the better you rank.

Greg Boser from WebGuerilla speaks. He focuses a lot on competitive analysis - analyzing what others are doing to build our own strategy. A lot of people don't understand the trustrank issue. What are good links for you and what are good links for your competitor are two totally separate things. Older sites have more leeway with regards to what's accepted algorithmically. Newer domains have more trouble.

Linkbaiting strategies can help the whole domain. The problem is that sometimes there are links from sites that are not contextually relevant. Forbes.com hosts pages that are not about finance that still rank well - that's becoming a problem. Ultimately, Google will have to find a way to make domain trust contextually related.

When you are linking, think ahead - find out where people are headed. Google is going down that road to focus on contextually related domains.

Danny Sullivan is moderating the session. He ask about who has heard of wikipedia?
Many people raise their hand. This is a pretty packed session. My laptop had a case of senioritis so I missed the first few mintues. Sorry Neil.

Neil Patel is up first, and starts explaining about wikipedia and what it does. He talks about the Colbert report and his campaign to make sure the elephant population was well represented. He explains how wikipedia is beneficial and what not to do on wikipedia.
How to do you add links to wikipedia? Only add reliable links from authorities sources. Neil next discusses how to add images. He gives an example of a bottle company and putting an image of a bottle that improved the brand of the company. Wikis are everywhere.

Jonathan Hochman is up second. He says wikipeida gets more pageviews than myspace and other areas. He says we have a lot of bright SEO’s here, but wikipedia ranks first for the term search engine optimization. SEO have enough reputation problems already, so try to remember wikipeida isn’t a linkfarm. The wikimedia Blacklist means “no links for you”. He says there are people that like to hunt for spammers. The blacklist is a bad thing, because you will not get a link from wikipedia or all the other 2000 wikis out there. Search engines could eventually look at this public list and take it in account. Yet that is doubtful. Wikipedia links actually deliver traffic. To reduce spam wikipedia adds no follows. Ha, he mentions the attempt of some SEO’s to create entries for themselves in wikipedia. These are the non-notable people. He explains that Matt Cutts was non-notable because the majority of people don’t know who he is. You need to state your cause. I wonder if Jon is an editor? He says that articles that fail to assert notability, supported by reliable sources, are nominated for deletion. Writing an article about yourself or a client is a conflict of interest. He says not to get involved about an article about yourself or your competitors. He says read the conflict of interest guidelines. Barry Schwartz posted an article on wikipedia about himself. Wikipedians jumped on this article to delete it. There was a few editors that changed their minds about Barry’s article and decided to keep it. Barry is notable they decided. COI doesn’t prevent you from participating. Learn the policies and customs and work with other editors to get your points into the article. If you have an article you have no control to edit that article or influence it in any way. He puts up an example of the Criticism of Wal-Mart page. On this page Wal-Mart can not do anything about this page. Ideally, the page needs to have a pros and cons section of the article. With an article about yourself, you can delete spam, remove slander, revert vandalism, and state your view on the article talk page. He also gives an example for Green Zap, and how the companies reputation was ruined because they did some bad things and it found its way into the search engines. Oh my! Wikipedia is a bit stick for generic search terms. Even if your own site can’t outrank the competition, Wikipedia probably can.

Don Steele from Comedy Central is up next. He is here to talk about how wikipedia works with Comedy Central. Comedycentral.com is the online arm of Comedy Central Cable Channel. They use a lot of methods to market their content in a diverse manner we can create momentum, capitalize on buss and are constantly driving traffic to Comedy Central. He puts up a video of Steven Colbert about changing a wikipedia entry and that enough people believe it, then it becomes true. So why do we care about wikipedia? Traffic volume and soccues in SEO made wikipedia a vital channel for us to understand. Our content is highly reference and referred on Wikipedia. Make sure information is accurate and up to date. Make sure our site has the information being referenced. Wikipedia has become a relevant traffic driver to comedycentral.com. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report is an example that sends traffic. He says that they had 90,000 visits come from wikipedia in one month. It’s a top 5 traffic driver. He says they are saving $20K a month by using wikipedia and the traffic is coming to comedycentral.com. 9AM Wednesday morning they announce a new south park show. He shows an example of the wikipedai article. The episode plays on TV and then their appeared 900 entries on the southpark page about the episode and it becomes a little community about that episode. The Da Vinci code was really the Hair Club for Men and so on from the Southpark story. Don talks about the benefits of wikipedia. They identify relevant content and post references on discussion pages. Wikipedia editors become decision makers. All of our discussions have been added as they are relevant and do meet the standards. If you are marketing content, make sure what is appearing in wikipedia. Monitor traffic from wikipedia. Good presentation.

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink is modding up this panel. The room is suspected to be fairly roomy this morning, due to it being the last day. And it seems pretty empty as they start the session.

Heather Frahm, co-founder, Catalyst online is up first. SEM in the pharma industry.

She explains how competitive this category is.

80% of american users searches for health information online. 66% begin at search engines and 27% go to health vertical search engines.

Those who use search engines are 2x more likely to view third party health sites and 3x more likely to view pharma sites.

Regulatory benefits is the control they have over paid search. Pfizer purchased "high cholesterol" and showed a Google ad for it. She shows more examples of these types of searches.

Best Practices Process:
- Educate and involve regulatory team
- Present and approve corporate policy via regulatory
- Expedite regulatory review

Paid Search Best Practices:
- Safety information on every web site page
- Condition and brand in text/URL: one click away from safety info. Compliant and minimize destination disappointment
- Do not bid on a competitor;s brand name or trademark terms

She then showed more examples. Use negative keyword phrases, this is standard ppc stuff.

Organic Search Marketing & Regulatory Issues:
Best Practices:
- Don't include competitors drug names in your tags
- Visible and non visible content should be approved by marketing and regulatory teams
- Present key-phrase research to your regulatory team
- Guidelines dictating content is close to sixth grade reading level
- Misspellings (spelling multiple sclerosis)
- Popular keyphrases but incorrect circumstances (high blood pressure symptoms)

She then shows Botox's home page, and showed how they are cloaking it for Google. Showing one page to the user and one page to the search bot.

Authoritativeness - Linking Practices:
- Text links approved by regulatory team
- Links from US based sites for us approved drugs
- Careful of making claims ("cures")
- Stay away from bad neighborhoods
- Integrate your PR efforts
- Optimize your press releases
- Link back to the branded site (but some don't like to do that)

Martin Murray, Chief Executive, Interactive Return is next up.

SEM for the drink industry....

There is a wide diversity of cultural acceptance of drinking world wide. Different countries and cultures accept no minimum drinking age. He shows the various laws across the world.

The Regulatory Bodies:
- Century Council
- Distilled Spirits Council of the United States
- The European Forum for Responsible Drinking
- The Portman Group

Guidelines:
- Not have the alcoholic strength of the drink
- Encourage immoderate consumption
- Incorporate images of people under 25 years old
- Suggest any association with anti-social behavior, illicit drugs, sexual success, social success, enhanced mental or physical capabilities

Google's Content Policy:
Google won't allow ads for beer or hard alcohol (yes wine) as of Q4 2006. Now that has changed a bit, depending on the countries.

He shows examples of beer sponsored listings in the Google UK engine. In Google.com, he showed wine sponsored results.

Yahoo permits alcohol sponsored ads.

There are other concerns, for example if you go to a page on drinks, you need to enter your age in an age verification page, plus what country you are in. This can stop a bot from entering your site.

I have to step out for a bit, sorry....

Li, let me know if you want me to post your slides. Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360

If you log into your Google AdWords account and click on a campaign, you may notice a new look plus an announcement about a new look.

Here is the message:

We've recently redesigned the AdWords Campaign Summary page for Standard Edition users. The new design looks much like the page you're used to, but has a few spicy new twists.

Grouping by Media Type. AdWords is starting to add many new types of advertising, from text and image ads to video and beyond. This new design groups various campaign types together, so that you can see how all campaigns of a given media type are doing.

Most users will see only one grouping so far: Online Campaigns. This includes text, image, video, and mobile ads. As other types of campaigns are introduced in the future, you'll see additional groupings added to your Campaign Summary page. This should give you a clearer view of your account, and of your performance in each kind of ad medium.

Show All Campaigns. This feature has been simplified. Pick your date range, then click the appropriate link to make your choice: Show all campaigns, all campaigns except those that have since been deleted, or only those campaigns that remain active.

Create New Campaigns. The links used to create new campaigns have moved. Formerly they all were found at the top of the Campaign Summary page. Now each link can be found in the title bar of the campaign groups. For instance, to create a new online campaign, go to the Online Campaigns group and click the link reading Create new online campaign.

No More Click-to-Call Tab. If you've been testing click-to-call ad campaigns, you're used to seeing the information about those campaigns on a separate tab on the Campaign Summary page. Your data on those campaigns is now in one of the new media groups. You'll find it just below the Online Campaigns grouping.

New Date Picker. The date filter has moved to an easy-to-find spot underneath the Campaign Summary page title. The pulldown menu can still be used to choose preset time frames like last seven days. Or, use manual entry to select any dates you like. The manual entry includes a new calendar feature to make finding dates even easier.

We hope you'll find that these changes make using your account even easier. As always, we thank you for using AdWords.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

The Google Blog and Google Checkout Blog both announced last night that Google Checkout is now available in the UK.

Now, shops in the UK can offer Google Checkout to their customers and benefit from increased sales, higher conversion rates, and lower transaction processing costs. From now until 2008, merchants that offer Checkout in the UK will receive free transaction processing for all of their Checkout sales. And just so buyers don't feel left out, we're giving them £10 off all orders over £30.

Google Checkout launched in the US back in June of last year, after much speculation.

Google Checkout is running a similar promotion encouraging the UK base to use Google Checkout by giving off £10, which is a lot more than $10 US dollars.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread first spotted this, even before they made it to the respective Google Blogs.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, Google had a special logo up for Russian astronaut, Yuri Gagarin.

The logo looked like this:

When clicked, it took you to a search result for Yuri Gagarin.

The first result was a Wikipedia entry for Yuri Gagarin. I wonder how much traffic that Wiki entry received?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

This session is a question and answer with Danny Sullivan.

Question: Where is search going to be in three to five years?
Danny: I wouldn't be surprised if search is very similar to the way it is now with a box and results. If you type in New York Hotels, instead of getting 10 links, you will get a big map and listings will come out of a local guide with a thing that says "Or do you want to search the entire web?" For "Madonna videos," you'll see a list of videos. Search engines will get smarter to present the vertical results rather than jumping through hoops. You'll still see Google as king of the heap, and Yahoo will be there. I think that Microsoft will be there but they might be splitting up a share with Ask - Ask.com is just hanging in there. I tend to think that we'll see more human intervention in the search results. In the future, it may be possible for people to vote on the results and influence the rankings. Maybe there will be new exciting new verticals. Google and Yahoo will likely acquire a lot of these verticals.

Question: What technologies are you excited about in that 3-5 year timeframe?
Danny: So far, I haven't seen anything that has made me jump up and down. I was pleased with Hakia and its internal language search. "Madonna nude" doesn't need a lot of natural language interpretation. What I thought was interesting about what they were doing was tapping into other data sources and building out nice content pages to answer this information. I don't know if that will revolutionize things. I do look at social media sites like Digg and find it fascinating but don't know if it will translate into improved search results. These sites are so undemocratic though - maybe we can be the top Googlers from this. I don't see a lot. A lot of new properties are overhyped and overpromising and will be gobbled up by the major search engines.

Question: When will the "incentivizing" of search engine spamming through AdSense break?
Danny: Didn't it break already? Google tried to make it very expensive. On the other hand, it doesn't cost a lot of money to put a scraper site on blogspot. It is still an issue if you get bad conversions. I think they will get a handle on it but they will have to drag their feet to do it. I think the web search people hate it. Danny then asks: Why does Wordpress have so little spam compared to blogspot? It seemed to be because Wordpress is running their Akismet trackback spam checkers. Blogspot doesn't have such a spam checker, however. There is more that they can do.

Question: We are serving products to baby boomers. They are grandparents and are not computer savvy. How do we target them?
Danny: That's not a search thing. There are sites that are designed for people who are older. Crusty? (Someone says "Cranky." Danny says "Oh.")

Question: I currently use WebPositionPro for visibility reports. I run monthly reports and a colleague told me that I could be banned. Is that true?
Danny: You are running analytics, right? That's more important than reranking reports. Secondly, the issue with web position and ranking tool is that they put a burden on Google. If Google sees a specific IP doing this, it will ban it. If you are on a shared IP address, it will affect hundreds of sites. I'd relax if you do it once a month or so, but if you do it all the time, be careful.

Question: Can we get your $0.02 on the impact of personalized search on SEO?
Danny: When you go to personalized search, person A might see my ranking, but someone else might not and the incentive to rank will be a lot less. It will be harder for me to blatantly spam. It doesn't make SEO go away, though. If I still have the key ranking criteria, I have a best shot. He then provides an overview of personalized search and explains how people need to just be signed into Google to get personalized results. For the SEO side, the results are definitely different. The results are not that dramatically different, however. One or two things change.

Question: Couldn't, as a resolution to the personalized issue, Google implement a toggle button?
Danny: Yes, but they don't want you to do it.

Question: Does Google want more personalized data to charge the advertiser?
Danny: Microsoft is the only major service that does heavy demographic targeting.

Question: As long as we are talking about Google and how you are using your influence to change things, I hope I'm not the only one who has problems with parked domains that have Google ads.
Danny: You can. When these people opt out of the content network, they opt out of any links on those sites that are hard coded. Those links that are hardcoded are part of the content network. Someone at that site did a search at that site and they got your result (which you are paying for) from the search network. You can't opt out of the search network. Lobby your Google representatives.

Question: Who is going to win the local space?
Danny: Who knows? Does anyone from the local search space want to self-declare that you've won? I went out to lunch with someone and noted that local search had too many features and I don't know what features I need. This guy told me "we are the best local search!!!" (He's kidding.) The difficulty I have is that I live in a small town in England and I know what people do. Local search doesn't help me. I suspect that the winner will be one of the major players. The major search engines are often the major search utility companies. If you are a smaller search, you tend to go to the major utility company.

Question: How will do you use Craigslist for local search?
Danny: Craigslist has great listings. Anyone who has local service will get that data in there. Google is crawling this data but not in a structured way. Google Base is taking listings and making structured data. I don't think that Craigslist is going into the Google Base system. I think it's just a regular web search. Someone says, however, that Craigslist is going into Google Base.

Question: How many people here are from small to medium sized manufacturers who want to promote their own search?
Danny: You realize that this audience doesn't answer, right?

Question: Can you tell us stories about your SES experience? What were your biggest disasters?
Danny: In San Jose, I lost a bet about the World Cup so I had to wear Thomas Bindl lederhosen. At the end, they ran out of food at the Google dance. Tim Myer from Yahoo is there with Paul Garney, head of Ask with a Google web guy. They were mocking each other jokingly and Paul got onto the chair and said "Look at me, I'm Yahoo! I'm the tallest of them all." At one conference, a guy ran off the stage and said "I can't do this" (he returned the next day). Back at a conference, Sergey once spoke and it was hard to get Yahoo to attend. Back then, Yahoo controlled the web. I was afraid that they were going to get attacked -- physically attacked -- after they started asking questions. However, someone came up and said "I want to thank you for coming out for us today." There were tears and hugs and it was a really sweet moment.

Question: I want to go back to personalized search. Can you find out who searches? Will people stop searching?
Danny: There was an incident with AOL search when they released user data and the NY Times found a woman. But people were still using the search engines.
Question followup: But the search engines will now target my habits.
Danny: Why would it register to you that they are targeting you? You're going to Google and getting specific results based on what you are searching for. People might be more concerned about it in the future and lawmakers might make it an issue in the future, but it doesn't seem to be problematic now. Right now, we can't operate without search engines. Even if you turn off personalized search, potentially, your IP address can get traced back to you.

Question: I'm with an SEO agency and we have small businesses. Is the supplemental index going to make it difficult for small businesses to get better rankings?
Danny: Supplemental results means that "your page is not important enough for our really important index." It doesn't mean that it won't rank. Google just decided not to revisit it again. It's rare that I see them ranking. I'd be a little concerned but I wouldn't freak out about it.

Question: I have an audience poll. I don't know how many of you went to the mobile search session. I went to it and came out of it and didn't think I learned much. Does anyone else feel the same way? (I actually read up a lot on it.)
Danny: There were 2 mobile search sessions actually.
Question followup: I didn't go to the other one.
Danny: Oh. I see. It's really difficult to cover in a general conference a topic like that in depth. That's why there are vertical conferences. We could run an entire track on it but then we'd get in trouble for not focusing on video search or other types of search.
[The lights dim. Danny asks, "Do I have to go?"]
I understand. I'm sorry. The other problem with mobile search is that - do you know how hard it is to do mobile search?
Question followup: They're doing it in Asia.
Danny: How many people here market in Asia on mobile phones? (Laughter.)

Note: Sorry for the typos, especially with regards to names of people.

Provided by Cshel!

11a-12:15p | Vertical & Retail Track

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speakers:
Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing
Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.

Talked a little shop a bit with Phil Maher from LocalLaunch! and Dale Petruzzi from Batteries.com. Saw Thomas Bindl. Room at about 80% capacity by one minute til.

Greg Sterling starts us off. How many ppl have ever been to this session at a prior SES? 3 hands go up. So it’s a fresh audience. Greg says even if you’ve heard this before it’s good to stay fresh and up-to-date.

Marketplace overview:

What is local search? Comscore defines local search as geo modifiers or using a local search engine of an Internet yellow pages site. Sterling’s definition is “Local search is a process where users seek information online, the ultimate intention of which is an offline transaction at a service or business level…”

This market is fragmented, invisible and hard to track. New local search destinations launch every week. All these new sites fragment the traffic and confuse users. Local searches are also frequently invisible to the search engines because they’re lacking geo-modifiers. This also contributes to user confusion. 109 million users of local search engines and online yps. 400+ billion dollars influenced by Internet. Of total US retail spending, e-commerce represents 3 percent.

Forecasts show local spending online is like 2.5 mil. Ad spending online. Marketers give local search advertising gets mixed reviews as per Marketing Sherpa. Ppl still optimistic and excited about Local Search. Traffic fragmentation is still a huge concern.

Emerging LS segments: Word of Mouth/Social (Yelp, Lilaguide, MySpace), Verticals (theknot.com, citysearch.com, zillow.com), Mobile (WAP-based local search, text, voice search/free DA). All make the world much more complicated, but are emerging technologies in local search.

First speaker, Stacy Williams

Reiterates immense fragmentation in local space. Breaks down various players in the segment. She’s going to go over how to get free listings and other strategies for leveraging local search.

Big SEs: Data from Bill Tancer’s blog… less than 1% of the search results in the big ses comes from a special local search db. The best bet is to get into the main search results. Use best practices for SEO, and use keywords including geo-descriptors. Use physical address in footer (text, natch) and that helps the SEs determine you are a brick and mortar business and they can place you accordingly. Submit business profile directly to major SEs. Many sites buy their data from data warehouses, so if you’re not providing your own business info to these sites, they might be using 10 year old info. When writing your business profile, write it
long (1000 words) and then create pared down versions of it at various lengths (500, 250, 150, 100). Other things you need to know: year established, years in business, operating hours, languages spoken, products/services, prof. associations, special deals, geographic areas served, etc. Some sites just publish what’s sent to them, though most have some means of verifying you are authorized to submit changes/new info. Agencies should remember to share the passwords for their clients accounts with the client. Always track everything you do. Even if your profile is mostly correct, find something to tweak anyway because once you begin the changes can help you add a lot more data that you normally wouldn’t know was even an option at the free level. (She puts up URLs for the big search engines business listings).

Local Online Search Engines: Local.com (free or $40/mo). TrueLocal (will tell you how many clicks you get/can expect in your zipcode), superpages, YellowPages.com, SwitchBoard (can’t submit directly), Dex, YellowBook.com.

Business Data Providers: daplus.us. She doesn’t like the interface there. If you have to change your listing, you have to print it out first and then re-enter the WHOLE thing (ew). Acxiom, Localeze (supplies listing to MSN).

Review Sites: Insider Pages, CitySearch, Judy’s Book, Yelp.

Why Bother? Be found by local prospects. Ensure online data is accurate, complete, etc. Build back links. Dominate the SERPs. (Take up as much real estate in the SERPs as you can and leave less for your competitors to fight over).

(Ppl have been filtering in, room is pretty full. Ppl standing along the walls)

Second Speaker, Patricia Hursh:

Local Search Advertising, Why? Ppl are increasingly searching locally. Marketers are increasing their local search ad budgets. Local search ads are effective. Local search is part of the overall customer experience. Patricia shares her recent local searches… find a sbux near the hotels she stays at for conference, other search was she needed directions to an AMC theater in a different town.

6 Tips for Local Search Advertising: 1. Integrate multiple PPC targeting methods. 2. Focus on the customers’ decision criteria. 3. Capitalize on the “local speak” advantage. 4. Drive in-store visits and phone calls. 5. Research available ad positions. 6. Local search isn’t only for local companies.
1. When you’re running a ppc campaign, use geo-targeted /ip targeted campaigns. Figures out where the user physically is to better target the ads displayed. Google and Yahoo reward local relevance if the search is clearly local. In some verticals, you’re trying to reach ppl who aren’t already in your local area, like in Real Estate. So use local keywords. Combine using local keywords AND geo-targeting for best results.

2. Focus on Customer’s Decision Criteria. Consider what the user is searching for, extrapolate what is the most important consideration for the customer, and tailor your ad copy accordingly. (See slide… good examples).

3. Capitalize on “Local Speak”. Write culturally relevant ads. Use local lingo. Focus on the local aspects of your business. Differentiate yourself from the big national players.

4. Drive In-Store Visits or Phone Calls. If primary goal is to drive foot traffic or calls, focus on local search ad products that provide maps, phone numbers, addresses, online printable coupons, etc.

5. Research available ad positions. Google Local Business Ads are displayed on Google Maps results pages. Yahoo Local Listings are displayed on Yahoo Local results. However, there is a tremendous amount of cross-over with main search results. (See slides)

6. Local Search for Big Brands. Most popular types of local searches involve real estate, new and used cars, mortgage brokers, restaurants and hotels, etc. Many of these types of businesses are big national brands, not local. There will be a “big awakening” soon when the big guys will realize they need to be leveraging local search more.

(Wow, LOT more ppl squeezing in and craning necks to see over the standing ppl)

Third Speaker, Justin Sanger.

Big businesses are turning to the yellow pages type companies that they’ve been working with for eons to help with the big brand’s local search efforts.

We are Witnessing a Consumer Revolution: The birth of a new savvy local consumer.

Local consumption isn’t new and local search in actuality is a reflection of our everyday life. 80% of all purchasing activity takes place w/in a 5 miles radius of our homes.

What’s new now is the Internet and its ability to augment our traditional local activities. Kelsey Group says 70% of local consumers are using the Internet to find products and services locally.

Local search innovators are continuously making the “next big announcement”. Each innovation, through its unique displays and ad serving conditions, yields the possibility of new and valuable local advertising inventory. Problem is, all these new innovations with their new beneficiaries aren’t actually benefiting proportionately to the hype.

Local Search Fragmentation: It’s only going to get worse for advertisers. Better for users, as consumers drive the LS marketplace and the demands of these new users are significant.

Constructs of Local Search Behavior (Fragmentation of User Behavior)
• Social Networking
• Special Events
• Life Events
• Health
• Shopping and business look-up
• Travel and Transportation
• Work Life

All aspects of local search. All reasons users are turning to the Internet. Local search has been around forever and has multiple constructs. In order to move forward, the industry needs to understand the fundamental constructs and then fill/serve one (or some) of the specific constructs.

What is missing? Local connotes geography and search is merely an action. So is the revolution we describe really just about a geography search? No. What’s missing is the definition of the behavior construct. Right now, there’s a proliferation of “horizontal” search sites (everything to everyone).

Further segmentation of the already segmented local search utilities. Google and Yahoo understood that the local searchers’ needs and display req’s are different from the “regular” search user, and they wisely segmented the local search out from the main search. They knew they needed maps and directions, etc. To gain usage/critical maps, they’ve both also reincorporated the local search results into the main results page (like what Stacy was saying) to increase exposure for the new segment.

Horizontal local search engines must transform themselves into deep, vertical local search/info aggregators. There will be a convergence of vertical and local. Vertical players currently lead from segmented and niche content perspectives, but they lack critical mass. Horizontal players have or are approaching critical mass, but lack rich, structured, segmented content. Both groups need to address their shortcomings.

Structured Business Content Imperative. Vertical and LS require structured content. Where does the LS data and content come from? Offline-derived local content. Internet-indexed local content. Syndicated-authority content. User-generated local content. Advertising products.

(You’ll need to download the slides; Justin talks *fast* and the slides have tons of info)

• Think beyond your website
• Think atomization
• Study the SERPs
o Authoritative algos point you in the right direction, ride the coattails
• Find vertical authorities beyond the norm including trade orgs and
directories
• Run searches on Google Maps and look for reference sites
• Back-link check your competitors.

Question to Justin: Ppl who have a service based business but have either no physical location or an undesirable location, and you come to the consumer rather than the other way around. How do you still use Google Local/Maps?

Justin: Find the vertical sites where they cater to your business needs.

Question: Any other platforms that allow you to advertise a local address?

Patricia: It’s a difficult issue that our clients are struggling with right now.

Question: Strategies for tracking online influenced transactions.

Greg: Loyalty cards, phone call tracking services, coupons (must be redeemed physically), etc. Some new stuff in wireless.

Stacy: Phone calls are probably the easiest to track. Clickpath serves up dynamically generated phone numbers which gives even greater granularity to your tracking.

Greg: Sometimes just flat out asking the user “Where did you hear about us?”

Question: We just acquired a national pizza chain, and we’re running ppc local campaigns for the national change. Any advice?

Patricia: Make sure all the individual locations are registered in the SEs with their local addresses, include local keywords in the campaigns, etc.

Question: Does getting into all of these directories require manual submission or is there a way to outsource it or something?

Greg: Justin runs a company that offers those types of services.

Carolyn Shelby is the webmaster several sites, including a national plumbing manufacturer, and the city guide for Greater Lafayette, Indiana.

Moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs from Optium. The panel has changed slightly since past versions, with each speaker actually presenting their own PPT. He says there have been some great changes in the past year.

First speaker will be John Marshall, the CEO of ClickTracks. They have a natural bias towards what happens when people click on an ad, since that is the world in which they live. Distinguishing a badly designed ad from click fraud is difficult…they look familiar.

They did a case study and noticed they suddenly got lots of traffic from one particular ad. It looked suspicious, but was it click fraud? An alternative explanation was that is was an ad that appeared on a new affiliate site. The affiliate generated low quality clicks. They went through the thought experiment. The clicks were not converting into sales. Lots of clicks from India. Does this mean it was obviously CF? However, it is entirely possible that the ad was picked up by a publication hosting AdSense that is particularly targeted towards India. The ad sounded interesting to the readers, but when they find out you are in the UK and don’t ship to India, they go away.

Back to case study…came from many diff IPs. Mostly (89%) from the US. They had various user agents, loaded images, activated JavaScript and did the things that real browsers would normally do. However, the majority was going to one page, and the referrer just kind of “looked wrong.” In the end, they submitted it as questionable and got a refund. The moral is that detecting CF from actual traffic can be difficult. They don’t see the type of stuff like repeated clicks from one IP address. Encourages attendees to move away from a model where you think some sort of automated system can tell you if CF exists. This potential problem requires human judgment. It requires a knowledge of your specific website and visitor demographics. For example, if you have an average time on site that suddenly looks low.

An effective approach uses computer-assisted detection for the obvious stuff like repeated visits from an IP. If using a “lack of ROI” to tell you something is wrong, this wont work. For many keywords, there literally is no ROI. Look at campaigns which are different in some sort of definable way. There can be false positives, like airport metal detectors. You should fix poorly-performing ads just as quickly as you would “fix” click fraud. The techniques described, by giving false positives, still provides a value since the overall campaign will benefit from the changes suggested. Like the airport metal detector, you want to tune the system or mental protest to create more false positives than not. The reason being, like with an airport metal detector, you’d rather have that than false negatives.

Next up is Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google. He is excited to be able to present slides this time around. Asks some questions. Where does CF come from? Main incentives would be to attack advertisers and inflating affiliates. Numerous methods are used: Manual clicking, click farms, pay-to-click sites, click bots, and botnets. Shows a screenshot of a botnet console…in some cases these are very sophisticated.

Important to distinguish between CF and “invalid clicks.” CF is difficult to ID, since there is a question of intent. From a theoretical perspective, if they could read people’s minds, they could create a set that included click fraudsters. Like John said, you want to make sure that if you are sensitive enough you will actually catch the activity. There will be some examples where they don’t catch it. They throw the net widely enough so that they have a statistically confident feeling they will get them right. There are a significant number of clicks marked as invalid. The advertiser then doesn’t pay for a real click, so that is good. They are thus providing an enhanced ROI, in a way.

The actual systems that they use is complex and involves numerous algos, etc. There are three principle stages: 2 proactive and one reactive. The proactive methods are filters and offline analysis. The reactive is investigations, which are relatively rare. All advertiser inquiries are investigated by the quality team. CF estimates vary widely. 2004 50-70% (?). 2005 30% of clicks (marketing Experiments). 2006 15% (outsell) 12% (Click Forensics). The reality at Google is that there are a significant (<10%) number of clicks detected as invalid. This wide net ensures nearly all invalid clicks are detected proactively. Reactively detected invalid clicks are negligible proportion (<0.02%).

Google wants to see more over-reporting versus underreporting. By checking each of the advertiser complaints, they can continue to fine tune their reactive technique. So where do fictitious clicks come from. Clicks that actually never happened would be reported by an advertiser. For example, one person reported 20 CF suspects during a time period when only 5 clicks occurred during that time. They found this was a basic problem of ignoring a basic fact of web analytics. Most versions of Firefox and IE will technically reload a page that looks like the original click on the listing. The way to resolve this is to use redirects, or AdWords auto-tagging. ClickFacts and ClickForensics both ask that all their advertisers use auto-tagging.

There are many features unique to Google. They have the only industry actual reports of clicks not counted. Averages are meaningless from the POV of an individual advertiser, they must look at their own data. Google is trying to become more transparent over time, but the challenge is that they do not want to educate the fraudsters. He compares the problem that crime forensics teams now have due to a wiser public able to hide crime more efficiently thanks to shows like CSI.

Next up is Tom Cuthbert from Click Forensics. He wants to talk about progress that is being made on the CF front. He is hearing things are improving. They have been building their team with even more talented individuals to help detect the problem. Search providers have made great progress, with Google’s plans for IP exclusion functionality to Yahoo naming a VP to oversee the issue (who will speak next. However, none of this eliminates the need for a third party monitoring. Other industry progress includes an awareness of CF at an all time high. IAB Click Measurement working group. Click Quality Council meeting monthly. And the “Enhanced Click Fraud Network” launches (from Click Forensics). They give free reports up to 100,000 clicks each month.

The numbers: Overall threat level by quarter. In Q3 and Q4 2006, the numbers increased to close to 14% overall, with 19% in the content network the overall average. Terms that cost over $2 have a click fraud rate of over 20%!

What is next? They have been constantly enhancing their products and services. They like the site exclusion process. They also like the ad scheduling feature of their tool, as well as the country of origin functionality. They recently were named the best tool to fight click fraud, by Inc. magazine. In the next few months they will also comment on things beyond CF, that are also areas that advertisers need to monitor that make up different pieces of the “bad click” family.

Last is Reggie Davis, who has been working for 2 months at Yahoo! as their new VP of marketplace Quality. He spent the last several years managing litigation at Yahoo, including the big CF case (?forgot the name). Their goal at Yahoo! is to create the world’s highest quality search and display advertising network. It is clear they need better disclosures, the executive commitment, and build industry leading technologies and teams. They want to move from the paradigm of front-end filtering and back end refunding based on submitted reports. They want greater visibility and control for advertisers, and more dialogue.

Numbers never disclosed before: between 12 and 15% of overall average clicks coming through have been tagged and discarded. They feel that a percentage of it is CF, but also some lower quality traffic. He shows a graph which displays how the filters work based on rulesets. Thousands of filters are used to assess all attributes of each and every click. Other initiatives: improved publisher assessment. They take actions if they feel that partners are violating terms. Partners using popups, etc have been terminated. They also are seeing an increased advertiser adoption of conversion tracking tools, which helps. They are also making improvements to the matching technologies. They have seen a significant reduction in the number of claims made by advertisers.

Shows some quotes from various advertisers that are happy with panama. He announces today for the first time the new Yahoo! “Marketplace Quality Center.” This is a one-stop location for advertisers come in (password protected) and do research around this subject. They decided to setup the privacy center to be very simple and also thorough. Some pages allow for the advertisers to submit a click inquiry. They will then do the analysis. The area also includes “how-tos” for installing conversion trackers, detecting suspicious activity, etc

Initiatives for 2007: quality-based pricing. Domain blocking will be released in 2007, allowing for the advertisers to help shape the overall quality of their campaigns. Continuing detail in their investigations. When refunds are provided, there will be better clarity and analysis of the reasons why. They also will strongly support the IAB efforts. Next steps are industry definitions and standards, audit against those standards, and let’s keep talking!

I got here a bit late, but most of the beginning stuff is just promo stuff as expected. Quality, inventory, yada yada. I will only chime in when I hear something new.

The showed stuff from adCenter beta...

Molly is now up...
She is talking about customer service. Here sides are pretty hard to read, due to the background.

Then talks about the adCenter community team. Talks about how they help people in forums, blogs, etc.

NEW: They are launching adCenter Accreditation with official tutorials, verification and logos.

Unlimited negative keywords on the campaign level coming this Summer.

Now there are Q&A

Ask.com is set to launch a new search algorithm code named Edison. The new algorithm will combine Teoma and Direct Hit, two search engine technologies that Ask.com purchased a few years back, to bring about a new algorithm, Edison.

I was reviewing the social search panel where Apostolos Gerasoulis, co-founded Teoma Technologies, know own by Ask.com. Apostolos has leaked this information in that panel.

I have confirmed the existence of Edison with Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com. Jim was not able to give me any more comments or details on Edison.

So I decided to meet with Apostolos Gerasoulis this morning, and I received some more information about Edison. Here is what I got for you.

(1) Direct Hit and Teoma were the original social search engines.
- Direct Hit which was purchased back in 1999 by Ask, uses click data to determine relevancy for rank. So the more clicks, the higher the click popularity, the higher a page would rank.
- Teoma uses hubs and authorities to determine relevancy. In a sense, it uses the "wisdom of the crowds" to determine relevancy and show the best results they can.

(2) Apostolos explained in his presentation this morning that they will be combining the best of both Direct Hit and Teoma into one engine.

(3) Apostolos also explained that they have been tagging for three plus years. So for example, if you do a search at Ask.com, that search query you used, will be associated with the pages you click on Ask.com. So if you search on "cars" and click on the first result, the first result will be tagged as "cars" behind the scenes.

It is my understanding, the new Ask.com search algorithm, code named Edison, will consist of these three components and more.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Update: Ask.com issued a statement which I posted at Search Engine Land. I also wonder if it is named Edison because that is where AG lives and works.

This is a question and answer forum about blackhat and whitehat techniques from some of the experts of the industry in both arenas.

Moderated by Detlev Johnson
Speakers: Bruce Clay, Todd Freisen, Dave Naylor, Jill Whalen

Question: We had a blogger account for the past few years, and we moved to Wordpress and we have scrapers. How do we establish authority on the new site so that people don't rank higher for our original content?
Jill: You need time to get that authority. You can't really fake authority.
Todd: After you use the blogger.com platform, once you move, it's gone. You need to move that content over.
Bruce