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: Search Engine Marketing BlogNewsweek on SEO
Newsweek Magazine has a write-up in the December issue about the world of SEO (talk about mainstream coverage!). Quote:
[Search engines] deplore the so-called black-hat SEOs who use unsavory techniques, like spamming the Web with dummy pages full of links, in an effort to make their sites appear popular. But they are increasingly tolerant of ethical or “white hat” SEOs like Fishkin, who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site. … It’s good for Google and SEOs: better-organized sites increase the amount of content in Google’s index, while improving SEO rankings.
Matt Cutt’s, the Google employee interviewed for the story, has some additional information in this blog post. It seems, Google was already aware of the “black hat” SEO featured in the story, and actually used them as an example in a workshop, just days before the story appeared!
Landing Pages Now Influence AdWords Quality Scores
It’s no secret that the ranking order for AdWords advertisers has been determined by a combination of both factors that combine into a total Quality Score.
However, Google has now announced that landing page quality will be another factor:
Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score — the landing page — which will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads.
…
Advertisers who are providing robust and relevant content will see little change. However, for those who are providing a less positive user experience, the Quality Score may decrease and in turn increase the minimum bid required for the keyword to run.
It seems, that at least some advertisers, are not so happy about the change because of the blurring of lines between content optimization & paid advertising, as well as the additional workload required.
The question it seems is, with hundreds of thousands of advertisers, and millions of unique landing URLs, who will determine the quality and how? Whether it’s hand checking when complaints are received, looking at PR scores for landing pages, or simply looking at URLs that AdSense publishers frequently filter, it’d be great if Google was open about their methodology for …
Google Offers Click-To-Call Service
Google, always innovative, is now testing a “Click-to-Call” service as part of their AdWords offering.
Under certain keywords, some people will now see a phone icon alongside AdWords listings (for screenshots, see Greg’s Blog Posts).
The Click-To-Call FAQ explains how this new service works:
When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Then, chat away on our dime.
We won’t share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you’re connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can’t see it. In addition, we’ll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time.
Some of you may remember FindWhat’s (now Miva’s) Pay-Per-Call program, which worked by charging advertisers based on in-bound calls to a 1-800 number. While Google removes some of the friction, by having advertisers call the users, but their system is susceptible to prank-call abuse.
It’ll be interesting to see what Google’s pricing is like (FindWhat used to charge a minimum of $2/call), as well as whether or not …
You Have to Try This on Google.
Google is now offering a new glimpse at exactly how their spider views your Website.
Try this:
1. Login to your Google account (AdWords, Gmail or Analytics)
2. Enter your Website URL at the bottom of this page.
3. Verify your Website by creating a uniquely-named, but empty HTML file and uploading it to your server. Click on the “verify” link to view instructions on how to do this. More info about verifying your site.
4. Click the “View stats” link
So what exactly can you find out?
- The most popular queries that your Website shows up for
- The top queries from which you get clickthroughs
- Crawl statistics: Pages succesfully crawled, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages that generated HTTP errors or were unreachable
- The PageRank distribution within your site
- Various indexing stats (pages indexed, etc.)
This is an awesome troubleshooting tool for all Webmasters, and something that hopefully the other search engines will copy soon.
MSN AdCenter: A Preview
It’s no secret that MSN is preparing to take on Google AdWords & Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) in the Pay-Per-Click advertising space.
Searchenginelowdown.com has an review & screenshots of the new AdCenter interface and some of the cool features that MSN will be rolling out.
Highlights include:
- Geo-targeting by country, down to specific cities: Great for local businesses
- Age & Gender Targeting (wow!): Targeting only people old enough to have a credit card? Female Retirees? Male Teens? You will now be able to with this new feature. You can even bid different amounts per-click, depending on the gender or age group.
- Time Targeting. This is useful, if for example, a large number of your orders are placed over the phone. By targeting by time & date, you can restrict your advertising during hours which your phone reps are available to answer the phone
From the looks of it, the interface is more AdWords than Yahoo! Search Marketing - which probably means that Microsoft invested quite a bit of time and resources in focus groups, and usability studies, to ensure they “get it right”.
If you’re a PPC Advertiser based in the USA, you can register for the MSN AdCenter Pilot …
Danny Sullivan on Google Print
Danny Sullivan has posted an excellent analysis of the technical issues involved with Google Print, in Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn’t Reprint.
The thrust of Danny’s argument, and I agree 100%, is that indexing the content of a book so that it becomes searchable is not the same thing as creating or publishing a copy of the book. He is correct about that, but his post perpetuates a misunderstanding about how search engines work. This misunderstanding is part of the reason why publishers think Google is “stealing” their intellectual property.
Danny describes the search engine index as resembling a big spreadsheet (emphasis added):
I’ve described the index… to being like a “big book of the web.” But it’s not, really. It’s more like a giant spreadsheet, where all the words of a page are in one row of the spreadsheet, each word to a different column, then the next page in the row below that, and so on.
Actually, the index is far less readable than a spreadsheet, because search engines are storing word occurences, not documents, when they create their index. It’s not a row for every document, it’s a table of occurences for every word.
If the word “defenestration” appears …
Google’s Hidden Protocol
Google’s URL removal page contains a little bit of handy information that’s not found on their webmaster info pages where it should be.
Google supports the use of “wildcards” in robots.txt files. This isn’t part of the original 1994 robots.txt protocol, and as far as I know, is not supported by other search engines. To make it work, you need to add a separate section for Googlebot in your robots.txt file. An example:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sort=
This would stop Googlebot from reading any URL that included the string “sort=” no matter where that string occurs in the URL.
So if you have a shopping cart, and use a variable called “sort” in some URLs, you can stop Googlebot from reading the sorted (but basically duplicate) content that your site produces for users.
Every search engine should support this. It would make real life a lot easier for folks with dynamic sites, and artificial life a lot easier for spiders.
Google Update Update
Yes, Google is updating, changing, shifting, call it anything you like but don’t call it dancing. So what’s happening? Search results are shifting around like mad, that’s what’s happening. What does it mean? I can’t tell you until it stops moving, which may take another couple weeks.
We’ve been watching this since about last Friday, and my phone has been ringing off the hook. Everyone who thinks I called the November 2003 update correctly is waiting for me to pull another rabbit out of my hat… I can’t promise a rabbit, but I will have an opinion once this thing settles down and we can look at what’s changed.
Right now, it’s not over, and we can’t do anything but watch, or more appropriately, do something productive. Unfortunately, it’s my job to watch these things, so I press on….
As does Matt Cutts, director of search quality at Google and the man who must:
- pretend that he isn’t GoogleGuy
- direct this kind of thing to happen in the first place
- deal with all the positive and negative feedback
- direct the inevitable adjustments
- make an effort to explain all this to the webmaster community without actually explaining it.
Matt is posting “weather reports” on his blog, and that’s a …
Stop The Texas Hold ‘Em Guy!
One of the most annoying forms of search engine spam is comment spam, and other automated attacks on dynamic sites intended to plant keyword-laden links to the spammer’s web site.
One spammer in particular seems to be exceptionally prolific. Although I don’t know if this individual is male, female, or in fact an artificial intelligence of some kind, I’ve taken to calling “him” the Texas Hold-Em Guy, or THEG.
THEG will attack any vulnerable script. I thought I was pretty safe running the off-brand WSNLinks for my webmaster resources directory, but it too was attacked by THEG.
We could wait for every software developer to build in better security, then wait for THEG to defeat it, but it’s an endless cycle. Even a CAPTCHA won’t stop THEG, but have no fear… there’s a better way.
All poker fans know that the most relevant resource for information on Texas hold ‘em is the Wikipedia, don’t we?
So why isn’t every blogger linking to that wikipedia entry, with every possible variation of texas holdem, texas hold em, texas hold’em, and texas hold ‘em in the anchor text?
Fight the THEG, link to Wikipedia today.
Keyword Intelligence - coming up short?
Keyword Intelligence is Hitwise’s entry into the ‘budget market’ for keyword research tools. At first glance, it looks promising: Hitwise is a major provider of competitive intelligence information, and their high-end offerings certainly are attractive to online marketers*.
Don’t give up your Wordtracker subscription just yet, though. While Keyword Intelligence does represent a different dataset (based on tracking the surfing habits of approximately 25 million users), different doesn’t necessarily mean better. Because of the way they obtain their data, it’s very skewed toward the consumer end of the market, and even on consumer-type search terms, the data is pretty shallow.
Priced at $89.95 per month for the entry-level product, KWI costs nearly double what Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery ask for a monthly subscription. So, for the extra money, what do you get? Well, you get a couple things that Wordtracker (WT) and Keyword Discovery (KD) don’t offer - country-specific data and industry-specific search terms.
For country-specific data, you can choose from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. You get one country at the entry level, then each country costs a little extra. As far as I can tell, this is one of the few options available to those who …
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