WebProNews - WebMasterWorld

Brett Tabke Talks About PubCon’s Success

Mike Sachoff — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Mike McDonald of WebProNews chats with Brett Tabke, CEO of Webmasterworld, about all things PubCon.

Tabke said PubCon had "More than exceeded expectations this year and the buzz has just been fantastic. If you have been following us on Twitter, we are the number one ranking search term."

This year 30 percent of the sessions were focused on search down from last year. PubCon has grown in other areas and has not reduced the number of sessions.

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Tabke talked about his 26 Steps thread on Webmasterworld that focuses on how to build a Web site and make it successful. Tabke said," Anyone can build a one hit wonder but it has to be sustained for 4, 5, 6 years in a row."

Tabke creates the PubCon series by asking people what they would want to talk about. From there they try and mix and match speakers. "It turns out everybody talks from their passion. 'It's not just us coming up with this is gonna be hot, that's gonna be hot you go speak on that, you go speak on that.'"

Tabke says that "Search has matured. It's part of the whole picture. Google really led the way with Universal Search. They're pretty much an admission its not just about 10 little blue links anymore."

Pubcon: Brett Tabke's 26 Steps To 15k a Day

Navneet Kaushal — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:38:26 +0000

There's no need to introduce Brett Tabke's '26 Steps To 15k a Day'. The page, that was posted almost seven years ago, has had nearly 29 million page views and 15 million unique visitors. It has also been used as a training manual by numerous Fortune 100 companies. In this interactive session, Brett gives an insight at the controversial issues that the post had raised and how the relevance of this webpage posted in 2002 transcends to present times.

Moderator:

Brett Tabke

Speakers:

Brett Tabke,
CEO,
WebmasterWorld.com

Brett started out with some stats on the famous '26 Steps' Webpage. Some of his Webpage's achievements:

29 million page views.
5 million uniques.
200 copies over the web.
290 cease and desists have been issued so far.
It is the first chapter in Google Hacks. The post is owned by O'reily now.
Total income generated is $500 paid by O'reily for Google Hacks Book.
The webpage features 10,000 thousands back links.

One by one, Brett went over all of the points he wrote in the webpage back in 2002 and discussed over the same with the audience. Back then, Brett had written that it was enough for the initial document to have 100 pages. However, he said, now the number should be around 500.

The posts are not really supposed to be about SEO, but more about content, traffic and building a sustainable website. On asking the audience regarding their experience with website having less that 100 pages, most say that they (the experiences) haven't been satisfactory.

Regarding the domain name, Brett said that the domain name game is now much more complicated than ever and one can have a TLD (Top Level Domain) of his own.

About Site design, Brett stated that the criteria was and still is that the simpler the better. The advent of the iPhone has further confirmed on the notion. It is imperative that now every website is designed keeping the compatibility with mobile devices in mind. One has to adapt all current designs to iPhones.

Static sites are seemingly going extinct and there's simply no point in building up sites in HTML. But the most important thing was, is and will continue to be content. Content should have its purpose and not be there just for the sake of existence. Quality content cannot be substituted.

Matt Tuens added here that content was the main reason that Search Engines were created. One should ensure a certain degree of stickiness in their websites since people are too busy to go to twenty different sites. You can do the same by simply creating one site that could be the 'go to' site.

Brett moved on to the topic of user generated content. The reliance on UCG is a thing of past now. Back in 2002, outbound links were considered a delicate issue since each site was as good as to the ones they were linked to. Even now, Search Engines judge on the same criterion. One could practice cross linking to boost up PageRank on lesser value pages.

Shared hosting is unthinkable now for the simple fact that costs have dropped drastically and everyone can have a server of their own. About regular log tracking softwares, Brett stated that his team uses one they have created on their own and displayed the wide variation it shows from the results of other packages.

Many CMS (Content Management Systems) are still not spider friendly and this can be a major bottleneck in your SEO objectives. Ensuring that you are in the right directories is still a good way to enhance traffic. With the users becoming more web savvy than ever, gimmicks are still a hit. People tend to negate the importance of options, such as 'e-mail a friend'. These are still as valuable as they were earlier.

Targeted content is the key now. Smart content can get your business places. Matt Tuens goes on to elaborate on 'smart content'. You have to understand that everyone is trying to criticize and judge your content. Give information that your demography is looking for instead of irrelevant garbage just to get a good ranking, otherwise you will incur losses on sales, credibility and overall business in spite of a good ranking.

Comments

Getting More Out Of Marketing Conferences

Lee Odden — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:29:38 +0000

Now, more than ever, marketing companies and consultants need to get competitive for client dollars and what better way than advancing your knowledge and your network?

There are many options for companies and agencies to train digital marketing teams and to keep tenured employees up to date including conferences such as: this week's WebmasterWorld Pubcon, Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, numerous regional and niche events and an increasing number of web based offerings including SEMPO Institute and the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification program. I would be remiss not to mention the upcoming "Social Media Smarts" workshop in NYC covering all aspects of social media marketing including a strategy exercise and tips on building a business case for a social media effort in your organization.

Attending conferences is not cheap when you factor the increasing price of travel and hotels as well as pre/post and conference training fees, meals and taxi. Attendees and their companies are paying $2500 - $5000 per person per conference as well as the cost of time away from the office performing billable work. It's easy to see why webinars are on the increase and why those who are fortunate to attend these events need to get the most out of them.

The most important thing that conference attendees can do to get the most out of their time at events is to set goals. Managers sending individuals to conferences should be clear about expectations. Company staff should be sure to talk with others within the organization or team that have attended the same or similar events to gain their insight.

Depending on the purpose for attending a conference, goals may vary. Here are some common goals based on the various reasons for attending any kind of marketing conference:

Knowledge - How many sessions will you attend and how will you capture the information? Notes, photos, video (where allowed) When meeting new people, discuss the sessions with them. Compare notes with other attendees, it's a great way to network and to get other opinions. Before the conference, make a grid or a plan for which specific sessions you'll be attending. Often times, there is not much time between sessions and the difference between getting a good seat and standing room only can be a matter of minutes.

Networking - How many qualified prospects, marketing partners, vendors to outsource to and job candidates will you meeting? Each day, tally them up and plan how you will follow up.

Content - how will you leverage your conference experience to create new content for your company blog, articles, or process documentation? Set goals for how many youâ€™ll create each day. The content you capture and create can supply a company blog with numerous posts and show clients, staff and prospective clients that you are on top of what's happening in the industry. At TopRank, our staff are required to publish at least 3 blog posts for each day of conference attended. Set goals for how many blog posts, articles or other types of content will be created each day of the conference. It doesn't have to be all text, you can take photos of people, and presentation slides. Take videos where allowed.

Knowledge transfer - How will you pass on the information youâ've acquired to the rest of the team? At TopRank Online Marketing, our staff take the highlights and any specific tactics of use and create presentations which they share with the rest of the TopRank team. Knowing you will be required to present the information you are gaining with the team back at the office helps focus on takeaways and practical interpretations of the new information.

Socialize - Where there's a conference, there's a party. After hours events are exceptional opportunities for conference attendees to relax, network and share information. Make no mistake, post session networking can be an art form. Make a point to relax and have fun, but be clear about objectives and make a goal of attending a dinner each night of the event if possible. Some dinners are a tradition amongst long time friends, some are sponsored by vendors and some are at hoc events that occur as a result of like minded individuals wanting to continue the day's discussion.

As you can see, there are many more opportunities to get value from marketing conference participation than keeping up to date with an industry. Pre conference goal setting and planning, well defined processes as well as follow up and post event knowledge sharing can all multiple the value organizations realize by sending employees to educational events.

Not all organizations are positioned to take full advantage of these insights, but through simple analysis, it can become clear pretty quickly how much is being left on the table or to competitors who are sending the same numbers of people and incurring the same costs.

Understand the conference offerings, set goals and make the time to pre-plan conference involvement. Leverage content creation, networking, recruiting, competitive intelligence as well as prospecting opportunities and industry conferences can move pretty quickly from an expense with an uncertain effect to an investment with multiples of return.

Comments

adExcellence Accreditation from Microsoft Announced in UK

Navneet Kaushal — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:29:12 +0000

The moderator at WebmasterWorld, Receptional has said in a WebmasterWorld thread that he got an invitation from Microsoft, asking him for participate in the adExcellence accreditation program in the United Kingdom.

The program was launched as beta in the US just last month, see: Microsoft Launches adExcellence, the adCenter accreditation

The moderator, Receptor says “ I got an invitation to join "adexcellence" which is the new parallel to Google's university / adwords professional exam.”

If you would like to sign up for the UK program you can register here.

The discussion continues at Webmaster World.

Comments

A PubCon Recap

Bill Hartzer — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:31:58 +0000

Last week I spoke on two (yes, two) panels (at the same time) at the Pubcon conference held at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. I would to thank Brett Tabke and Webmasterworld for putting on yet another great conference.

I’d like to thank Lawrence Coburn for moderating, and Chris Winfield and Liana Evans for doing a great job with the “Social Media and Search” panel. I’m sorry I had to cut it short, but I had to speak on another panel. If you missed this panel I’ll be adding some additional notes about social media and search this week.

I’d like to also thank Jake Baillie for moderating, and Todd Malicoat and Andy Hagans for putting on a great show on the “Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies” panel. There were a few questions from the audience during Q&A and if you missed the social network I talked about during “Q and A” it was Skirt. I also will be adding some more info about linkbaiting this week, so stay tuned.

It is always great to see old friends and make some new ones and learn a bunch of new tips and tricks. Yes, there are still plenty of tricks out there.

One of the most interesting tips I learned that I cannot possibly repeat too many times: add pics to your blog.

Well, here are a few “shout outs” that might as well be considered “shameless plugs” for people who deserve a link:

Ash Nallawalla
Tamar
Mark Ashworth
Matt Stoddart
Suresh Babu
Shoemoney
Lee Odden
Mike
Michael Dorausch

There’s a lot of other people talking about Pubcon Las Vegas 2007, and here are a few other great posts you should check out:

Blogging Pubcon Las Vegas 2007
Pubcon 2007 Recap
Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies: PubCon Las Vegas Dec 2007, Day 1
SEO Texas Holdem Poker Tournament Big Success

Comments

Pics from PubCon

Lee Odden — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:52:43 +0000

The last day of WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon is literally a gathering in a pub. This is the genesis of how Pubcon was started, an informal gathering of members from WebmasterWorld.

Through the efforts of Brett Tabke and the community, it has grown into one of the finest search marketing conferences with thousands of attendees, major corporate sponsors, top notch speakers and a spirit like no other event. There’s a real sense of community and “co-opetition” amongst participants that makes it a great place to learn and network.

Here are my final favorite photos from Las Vegas Pubcon and a few with friends from iEntry afterwards.

Wynn Las Vegas

Sport coating the BOTW colors

Danny Sullivan and Melanie Mitchell

Greg Boser and friends

Search Engine Land on Mike’s dome

Rich, Tiffany and Mike from iEntry

Ceiling at Blush

Shadow Bar

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A Holiday Treat from Google & Yahoo

Rene LeMerle — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:52:34 +0000

Both Google and Yahoo! have decided to provide website owners with a "holiday season treat" by updating their respective search results (SERPs) - simultaneously!

Both the major search engines have been executing some algorithm changes causing the usual ranking turmoil for webmasters and site owners over the last week.

While Google has made no formal announcement, the subtle mention of some tweaks associated to the new site links enhancement "twice the sitelinks" might have been the clue.

Site owners have been sharing mixed stories in the forums, with one reporting his listing dropped from being ranked 19th to outside 1000 - overnight. Others are suggesting their listings have been up and down in a matter of days. Here's a couple of the other comments at webmasterworld:

"...My biggest site has been jumping from SERP#1 to SERP#-16-20 and back several times..."

"...my ranking is fluctating and in whole there is loss in visitors..."

Yahoo! on the other hand announced the changes with the release of its X-Robots-Tag support. According to their post:

"...we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process."

At this critical time of year for most online businesses, these index and ranking updates will be an unwelcome surprise. Have you seen your rankings change over the last week? - if so, share your experiences.

Comments

Microsoft Regionalizing Searches?

Navneet Kaushal — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:41:34 +0000

Microsoft seems to be regionalizing searches observes Woz on a thread on Webmasterworld.

He says "just noticed today that it seems to be regionalising results automatically. I.e., being in Australia, live.com is automatically serving results focused towards, but not necessarily from, Australia."

However he also observes that "They have added an "Australia Only" tick box which indeed does only return results from Australia, but there seems to be no simple way of turning off the regioanlisation for general results." Why not? One may ask, are they still testing it.

In the same thread Bill observes "I see a few local listings at the top if I search for something like "sushi" or "pizza". I'm seeing a few local listings in Tokyo for shops. (However I'm in the other half of the country.) I don't see a Japan tick box though."

Different regions different happenings!

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Google To Limit Subdomains In SERPs

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:18:27 +0000

Subdomains may no longer result in several individual listings on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs). Word from Matt Cutts at PubCon Las Vegas says that soon subdomains will be treated like folders, limiting results to 2 URLs per domain.

News of the impending change comes via a thread by "Tedster" at WebmasterWorld:

"Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn't get any more information than just that basic heads-up."

The change could be beneficial to some and costly to others as some lose dominance in the search results and others gain exposure by moving up.

"The implications can be huge for companies," writes Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand. "Besides for the traffic implications, companies need to also worry about reputation management issues."

Blocking Adwords Qualified Professional Pages

Navneet Kaushal — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:37:03 +0000

In a thread titled, "Qualified professionals blocked on Google" at WebmasterWorld, a new face of Google came into limelight. At the AdWords Robots.txt file, one can notice something like this- "Disallow: /*?"

Technically speaking, it means that Google disallows all Google AdWords Qualified Professional pages. To make it more clear, have a look at another example of one Google AdWords Professional page. Notice closely, the way the URL is typed “https://adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalStatus?id=” Since Google disallows /*?, Google won't index them fully.

Moreover, some 1,300 pages at Google are already indexed at adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalStatus? But the truth is that these pages are not fully indexed. The pages are like linkage data, and that is why those are listed in the index. But still it is not clear as why does Google not index them? The best part is that Google has approved these AdWords advertisers, and now the pages are blocked from being indexed.

To be a part of the forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, click here.

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Microsoft Live Search Plans Leaked by Employee

Navneet Kaushal — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:46:29 +0000

Just ahead of the big event scheduled to take place next week in Silicon Valley, Microsoft landed up in a big problem.

Akram Hussein, one of its employee has posted details about planned changes for 2.0 version of Live Search. Earlier the company was not ready to unveil the changes to even reporters. Microsoft has taken down the posted blog, but the folks at Liveside.net managed to capture the images and the details Hussein provided.

According to the post changes will include:

products details & reviews

a celebrity search which will rank stars by 'celebrity xRank',

an improved video search that will allow motion preview of a video search result.

These changes are made to make a headway against market leaders Google and Yahoo. The new Live Search will look something like this.

Members at WebmasterWorld showed a mixed reaction. Any how the charm of the official release was spoilt by this act.

Comments

Google Looks For URL Suggestions In Search Result!

Navneet Kaushal — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 19:01:56 +0000

In a recent thread at WebmasterWorld, some members have reported that Google is asking searchers to suggest some URLs for specific searches. "Help improve search for everyone" is how Google is asking for suggestions. Google asks the users to

Click a link to submit a link. The link open a form where you need to login.

Google explains: “If you click yes, we'll save this suggestion with your Google Account so we can use it to improve your search results. This is an experimental feature and, based on this experiment, we may come up with other improvements in the future. Like all data in your Account, your suggestions are subject to our Privacy Policy. If you want to delete one of the suggestions from your account, just repeat your search and click "withdraw" next to the saved result.”

After the submission of the new URL is done, it takes you to a 404 page that is at http://www.google.com/reviews/w/nominate.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. Unofficial SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Google Testing Search Result Categories

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:36:09 +0000

Google appears to be testing categories in its search results, according to reports in a webmaster forum, dividing results under headings like "comparison shopping" and "reviews."

It does just appear to be testing, as when I type in a term like "dvd player" or "digital tv," the same old Google results I'm used to pop up. But the Tedster at WebMasterWorld found something different and Barry Schwartz has a screenshot he's posted on Flickr and SERoundtable.

The leading theory is that this is part of Google's burgeoning Universal Search, and responses, as might be expected, are mixed. Tedster explains:

Even more than a simple "commercial" and "informational" taxonomy, there could also be classes like brochureware sites, trademark holders, businesses with a physical world presence, manufacturers, B2B, multi-topic (encyclopedic) and on and on. One factor Google could then tweak would be which classes of sites to force integrate into the results for which kinds of search terms.

This forced crazy-quilting of Page 1 might well push more users go to Page 2 - and that may even be seen as a potentially positive evolution at Google.

But as there always somebody in the crowd quick to naysay*, one forum user suggests the "average searcher" may be annoyed with suddenly having to move beyond page one to find what they're looking for.

Well, guess we'll see won't we?

_{*This is why they invented Prozac, conspiracy theorists, to quell protests and, arguably, control overpopulation by making the masses happy and sexless, a new strategy thrust on humanity for establishment-favorable conditions where religion fails – watch out that one day they'll add SSRIs to the water just like they do fluoride, so your smile is pretty as they do whatever they please, right? And you wondered why bottled water was suddenly bad for you? ;-) The preceding was dark humor, in case I scared you to death.}

Google Disables Supplemental Results Command

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:54:25 +0000

Evidence is mounting that Google is disabling or has disabled the query command that allows webmasters to show pages included in the supplemental results.

A member of the WebmasterWorld forum broached the subject by nothing that the command site: yaddayadda.com ****-view wasn't bringing back supplemental results.

The problem was confirmed, and eventually explained by "jakegotmail":

[Matt Cutts] stated people are concentrating on it to much, like the early days of PR. So they made TBPR only update every 3-4 months. Now sup pages can't be found with a query.

I feel this is a terrible comparison, and webmasters have a very valid reason to see which pages do not rank. TBPR is one thing, but a supped page is something worth noting and assessing, bottom line.

So there you go, people wouldn't stop picking at it.

Over at Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz added the new development to evidence that Google is poised to drop the supplemental results altogether.

But there is hope that maybe Mr. Cutts will take a cue from his poll and include a way to view the results via Webmaster Central.

Google To Ban Ephedra Ads

Doug Caverly — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:28:47 +0000

Google’s crackin’ down - some AdWords users have received an email stating that the company will soon forbid any advertisements related to the drug ephedra.

You know, ephedra - the dietary supplement that the FDA banned in 2004. Attention to detail is a commendable quality, but I can’t quite figure this move out; after all, Google’s Content Policy has already outlawed “drugs and drug paraphernalia,” as well as “prescription drugs and related content,” so the new regulation seems a bit redundant.

In any case, I owe a hat tip to Barry Schwartz for discovering Lou Pickney’s post on the WebmasterWorld Forum. Pickney’s the fellow who received Google’s email, and he writes, “Google will no longer accept AdWords ads promoting the sale of ephedra or ‘ephedrine-based’ products.”

Pickney then adds, “It actually surprises me that it took this long for Google to make the move.”

A few posts down, Meg Geddes weighs in on a question about selling pills on the Web. “I work in the rehab field on the AdWords side, and that’s what we see over and over - people can’t get them from their doctors anymore, so they get them online. I dunno how, because I thought it was illegal too, but they do.”

‘Tis all very mystifying, but Google’s ban of ephedra isn’t likely to meet with many objections.

PPC Traffic; International YouTube; Safer Results

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:46:24 +0000

SERoundtable looks at a WebmasterWorld thread to find out What Type of Traffic Can You Expect from Yahoo Ads Compared to Google Ads.

The results are pretty surprising: for identical campaigns, with higher bids at Yahoo, Google still sent 30 times the traffic that Yahoo sent. The anecdote is most likely an anomaly. Other commenters on the thread note that they would expect to see Google sending 4-5 times the amount of traffic that Yahoo does.

paidContent is covering Google’s Press Day in Europe with YouTube Launching Nine Country Sites; UK, Brazil, Japan Included. The other six countries are France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Poland and Holland.

paidContent described the country-specific pages as having unique content on them for now, but they later will evolve to include “narrowing ratings and comments, as well as the main video, channel, categories and community sections, down to a country-specific level.” Several of the countries, most notably France, have home-grown movie sites which may prove to be stiff competition for YouTube.

Interestingly, this comes exactly one week after Flickr announced its expansion into seven new languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, overlapping with YouTube’s expansion this week (Flickr is also rumored to launch a Japanese site soon). Picture vs. movies–who will win?

Finally, eMarketer reports on McAfee’s latest search engine report card: Search Engine Results Getting Safer. We’ve covered the same survey’s previous results in May 2006 and December 2006. The improvement has mainly been in the sponsored results, but paid listings are still 2.4 times more “dangerous” (likely to lead to adware, malware, viruses, etc.) than organic results. Four out of 100 search results link to dangerous sites.

Comments

Google: From Direct Marketing to Branded Ads

Aaron Wall — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:05:05 +0000

Ad Relevancy & Quality Scores

Google has again and again touted the value of their targeted marketing, but most of the fortune 500 ad dollars are not spent on targeted marketing. A couple weeks ago in a WebmasterWorld thread many advertisers complained about getting killed by another quality score update.

What quality score actually means probably comes down to one of two things

your site is a thin affiliate site or something else they once needed to fill a market niche but now is viewed as noise

you have not created enough organic value and/or have not yet spent enough money building your brand

Google Hates Most Affiliate Websites

Some key quotes from the WMW thread...these two show the trend against affiliate sites in general

Too many outgoing affiliate links and you are toasted

So on my basic two types of sites, when I send the visitor to another domain to buy, I'm getting severly penalized ( a new affiliate "penalty"), but if I have a another party's lead form on my domain, I didn't get hit.

and this one shows that the change is not a short term one

A Google Adwords customer service rep said that they do not systematically target affiliates as a whole, nor sites with affiliate links. But, she said they are taking more steps with each landing page tweak to weed out sites that do not add a certain level of "value" to their visitors (as other posters to this thread have mentioned). She wouldn't tell me if this "value" is human-determined or algo-determined, again saying that she didn't know.

If your site is not the type of site they would white-list in the organic results eventually they are going to look to dispose of your position in the ads as well. As soon as enough brand advertisers find your space you are no longer needed. Thanks for sharing the keyword data needed to tell the brands what to bid on, and best of luck getting traffic from somewhere else.

If you want to see where paid search quality filtering is headed, look at how the organic algorithms have changed. Nothing better to glimpse the future of PPC than to read the documents about how they expect humans to rate organic search results.

Expanding the Role of Brand Related Advertisements

In that same WMW thread Skibum posed the following question

Why attack long time advertisers regardless of their business model who are providing consumers with what they are looking for while using broad match to show more ads triggered by keywords they were not intended to run on?

I recently saw a Dollar rent a car ad at the #1 ad position for Forex, which is not a cheap keyword.

As the day passed Google's CTR numbers showed they expanded that ad out too far and they made that ad less broad. They can automate spreading out brand ads too far, and then pull them back if the relevancy scores are too poor.

When it comes down to it, it is all about money. As Google commoditizes everything that is not a brand they need to collect more money from brands. The reason Google is pushing video hard is because they want to lead that ad market. It is no suprise to see Google leading in innovation in the video ad field. There is no better way to create inventory than to get it from your already established near infinite traffic stream.

The Cadillac Escalade video ads are taking the place of the textual Ford Explorer ads. Google has no brand allegence. Whoever is willing to overpay for exposure right now can buy all they want from Google.

Even when Google can show relevant ads, they still prefer to show brand ads if they think they will pay more. Consider a Michigan counties page where Google shows the following ad links.

Those are relevant. But what ads does Google also target to that page?

A lot of car donation charities are non-profit shells wrapped around dirty high margin auction houses (just look at the $20/clicks ad pricing).

A pharmaceutical ad from a company with a patent an a marketing budget larger than their research budget.

"The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion)." - Marcia Angell

Given that ad targeting, it doesn't seem that Google is so pure, does it? One of the guys at WMW said the following

You guys are AdWords arbitrageurs. Although I'm sorry that your little gravy grain went off the rails, as a Google user, I can say good riddance to your garbage Web sites. Google, and users, want actual retailers to come up top in search results for sellers of a product, not parasite Web sites linking to actual retailers.

In a few years that same guy will probably be whining about how Google destroyed his business, but just like the other websites that died, Google doesn't care about him. What they want is decent relevancy WITH as much profit as legally possible. The more they cut out middle men the bigger they can make their chunk, even if doing so hurts relevancy and result diversity.

How do they get any more efficient than automating ad targeting while turning the text link into an unmarked ad unit? And they have patents for ad targeting based on how big of a risk taker you are:

"Examples of information that could be useful, particularly in massive multiplayer online RPGs, may be the specific dialogue entered by the users while chatting or interacting with other players/characters within the game. For example, the dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users."

How can anyone else compete in the ad market?

Comments

Is Google Replacing Affiliates With Big Brand Spenders?

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:07:22 +0000

Google's search for utmost relevancy is hitting affiliate marketers hard, who are noticing their best converters diminishing as keyword prices raise. Relevancy has been the company's buzzword, but critics say it's more about the Almighty Coin (pr. Kwan).

Is Google Replacing Affiliates With Big Brand Spenders?

Complaints began surfacing about a week-and-a-half ago at WebMasterWorld as affiliates felt the brunt of Google's most recent quality score update.

The eight-page conversation thread is kicked off by a representative of online marketing company Internet Marketing Solutions Group:

So I've had a campaign running for keyword and I happen to have keyword.org as the domain. Ad and landing page are all about keyword. Suddenly overnight all the keywords that were getting double digit CTR's have been reevaluated to "poor" and I've been asked to pony up 20X more per keyword.

Anyone else seen this and why would this be when everything is relevant? BTW I don't use analytics or anything else to allow any tracking of conversions from their side, but I can tell you the kw's that got bumped up high were converting.

A number of affiliate marketers echoed "eljefe3," relaying their own troubles.

"Pexcornel" writes:

My account had 700 groups with some 5000 keywords on a 1300$/month budget.
Only the best converting keywords are disabled. From 0.26-0.30 to 10$

And that type of complaint goes on for eight pages. So what's happening? SEObook.com's Aaron Wall thinks its not just about relevance, but also about replacing low-budgeted affiliates with big-paying brand marketers.

"As soon as enough brand advertisers find your space you are no longer needed," he writes in a detailed blog post. "Thanks for sharing the keyword data needed to tell the brands what to bid on, and best of luck getting traffic from somewhere else."

Comments on these developments are welcome (and encouraged) below. Has the latest Google quality score update sent you digging for money to keep up with the big boys? Are you going to be able to?

eBay Live, Paid Search

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:40:44 +0000

Steve Lobo, Senior Manager Search Marketing at eBay gave an informative talk on paid search at the eBay Live conference in Boston.

The two Internet marketing channels are paid and organic search. Organic search has no payment influences and relies on optimization of various pages and site developments. Results will differ by search engine and algorithms.

You should target users where they search, Google, MSN, and Yahoo. You can reach demographics across the Web by using AdSense and site targeting. Choose the right keywords and customize the message to increase brand awareness.

eBay paid search attracts millions of potential buyers per day to eBay sellers. eBay has one of the largest portfolios on every major search engine. eBay sellers can take advantage of eBay paid search by using rich and specific keywords in listing descriptions.

Other things sellers can do are use the paid search suggestion box, utilize attributes and keep your account information up to date. Collect data about consumer behavior in your store and use eBay and search engine tools to grow your portfolio.

Web sites that are good resources include Search Engine Watch, WebmasterWorld and it must have slipped his mind but also WebProNews and WebProworld.

Yahoo Slurps Somewhere Else

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:44:23 +0000

The migration of the Slurp is complete, says Yahoo. Over the past few weeks, the search engine has been transitioning its crawler, dubbed (disgustingly) "Slurp," to a new address at crawl.yahoo.net. Adjust your server logs as necessary and join the curmudgeons who are unimpressed.

Too little (or too much, by some complaints), too late, it would seem.

The Yahoo Search Blog reads:

...all machines crawling as Slurp are now in crawl.yahoo.net. You can see this change in your web server logs, where the page accesses from inktomisearch.com are being fully replaced by crawl.yahoo.net contacts. Note that this does not cover other Yahoo! crawlers, such Yahoo! China, and other verticals, like Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel, etc., which have their own user-agent.

Don't fret though; there is no need to change your robots.txt file because the crawler user-agent is still Yahoo! Slurp. If you use IP based filtering, there is no need to change that either, since the IP addresses from which we crawl remain the same. However, please ensure that your network or firewall setup does not keep crawl.yahoo.net out as we won't be able to include your content in our results.

Be sure to click that link to get more enumerated information.

Over at WebmasterWorld, the crowd is a bit mixed about it (but only a bit), the loudest complaint, from "IncrediBill," who notes not only is it the move a year-and-a-half too late, but has gone overboard.

Why do we need to allow an army of Yahoo spiders to redundantly abuse our servers?

Is it a conceptual problem that Yahoo can't share pages already downloaded?

When I posed that question to one of their engineers I was given a lame excuse that the various crawlers had different needs….

Funny, Google managed to make some of their crawlers share CACHE, so we know it can be done.

Negativity often rings louder and truer than other things, but there is at least one voice in that forum who thinks Yahoo's update is "a small evolutionary improvement above" Google.

Even if in our hearts, we know that's not true. :)

Yahoo Autos Condemned For Cloaking

Doug Caverly — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:14:01 +0000

The automotive world can get pretty shady, but it still came as a surprise when Yahoo was recently caught “serving keyword stuffed pages to the SE crawlers and regular pages to the average users.” This is known as “cloaking,” and it took place on the Yahoo Autos site.

Andrew Gerhart first noticed the problem on Monday. Gerhart collected screenshots to prove his point, and as he notes, Yahoo Autos is clearly in violation of Yahoo’s own policy regarding “search content quality.”

“Normally, I could care less if someone is spamming or using shady techniques,” Gerhart writes. “BUT, I don’t feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the ‘quality guidelines’, penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they’ve made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Yahoo! is doing above.”

Gerhart continues by asking, “How is that fair? With one hand you’re going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.”

I should pause here to say that every fault Gerhart found with Yahoo Autos is a real one - a discussion in the WebmasterWorld Forum corroborates everything, and Search Engine Roundtable adds, “Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has confirmed on [the] May 22nd edition of The Daily Search Cast that Yahoo Autos has changed the page since this has been reported.”

But there’s one other interesting angle to this story, and it relates to Gerhart’s position as Director of SEO for Primedia Automotive. As WebProNews reported, Primedia started a “Ride of the Month” contest last week, and that contest will involve a game for Microsoft’s Xbox 360. So it seems that someone with ties to Microsoft is pointing out problems with Yahoo.

Interesting, yes, but again, it doesn’t in any way counterbalance the fact that Yahoo Autos was cloaking.

Does Google Investigate All Bad SERP Reports?

Navneet Kaushal — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 01:23:03 +0000

A statement made by Google recently bagged lots of critical feedbacks on a WebmasterWorld thread. In a Google update on spam reporting Google claimed that they will investigate all bad SERP reports.

Google said, “Currently, we investigate every spam report from a registered user. Spam reports to the unauthenticated form are assessed in terms of impact, and a large fraction of those are reviewed as well.”

A comment on WebmasterWorld thread states, "Google had repeatedly said that they looked all bad search results reports
And they just said it again.”

Another one says, “I have been thinking this for quite some time as I have reported a site hidding text etc for months and it has risen in the serps and not dropped. I also feel all this sudden losing key terms is the act of this so called panel and not the algo so now I fear we are at the mercy of rouge panelist who may know nothing about a site structure but just like what the stupid thing looks like.”

Do check out the thread to know more about the critical comments Google received for its post, An update on spam reporting.

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YPN Stops Displaying Ads to International Visitors

Navneet Kaushal — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:35:34 +0000

Yahoo! is trying to get its act together with regard to click fraud. The first fall out of Yahoo!'s efforts is banning of foreign site visitors from YPN ads. Yahoo! is intent on restricting internal ad frauds by barring visitors from certain countries from viewing the ads.

Search Engine Journal has reported that visitors, specifically from India, are part of the restricted viewers group. Members at Webmasterworld Forums have experienced a significant drop in their ad revenue. According to one of the members:

My belief is that YPN has simply stopped displaying ads for untargeted countries (or stopped counting them). One of the two sites has a portion of its traffic from India — about enough to account for the report differerence.

According to the Search Engine Journal post, this might be one of the first steps by Yahoo Search Marketing’s new ‘Click Fraud Czar’ Reggie Davis, who is tipped to "hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!’s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues."

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Microsoft to Improve SERPs

Navneet Kaushal — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:34:07 +0000

A WebmasterWorld thread informs about Microsoft's claims to take over the Internet search. An article on NYTimes reports about Microsoft's future plans.

Despite a lack of visible progress in catching up with Google, the leader in Internet search engines, Microsoft says it still believes that it will eventually turn the tables by improving the quality of its search results and by changing the way computer users search.

However, the comments to the thread does not agree with Microsoft's claims.

They have been saying the same thing for years, and their SERPs are getting worse if you ask me. Up until about a year or so ago, I was still able to find relevant results in MSN, but now a lot of searches turn up spam. Getting sites ranked in MSN is so easy that even minor SEO can get a site ranked and dilute the SERPs.

Microsoft has been able to win over the digital world with its windows, Vistas being the latest addition. Microsoft has the potential, but it needs to raise the bars to a great extend to match upto Google in the near future.

Another comment says:

Microsoft will get a lot better, don't doubt it. They can easily spend the next 5-10 years working on this stuff and not worry about the financial aspect of it as they will continue to have billions pour in from Windows.
MS DOES create some really nice stuff, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Direct X, etc. They will eventually figure out this internet thing too I'm sure.. (but they have a looong way to go!)

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Microsoft Overcharges, Refunds, Charges Again

Navneet Kaushal — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:06:03 +0000

A couple of weeks back a major Microsoft AdCenter bug costed advertisers huge amounts. This bug made the advertisers pay a blasting amount as compared to what they have bid for. However, this bug was soon fixed and before the advertisers could even raise their brows they were paid back.

However, a WebmasterWorld thread now reports that Microsoft have refunded advertisers by excess amounts.

I had 1400-ish bucks in incorrect clicks. They credited my CC the $1400, even though only $400 had been actually charged to my card. So, then they charged my card $1000 to even it out. They did give me a $200 ad credit for the trouble–which was cool.
THEN, they charged my card another $2000 in mystery charges that even they haven't figured out yet.

Pretty frustrating,

I'd advise everybody to go over your invoices carefully.

Well, we were overcharged by about $4k, and then we were credited by about $8k, and then they took back the over-credit, and supposedly TODAY they have it all right. At least, that's what the guy who called me said. I'm going to have to have my customer call his credit card company to be sure. What a mess.

First the advertisers were over charged. Microsoft accepted the fault and refunded then they charge them again. This situation sounds amusing, however, this might be far from amusing for the advertisers.

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Is Yahoo Becoming a Clone of Google?

Eric Enge — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 01:15:52 +0000

Brett Tabke recently opened up a forum thread on WebmasterWorld titled: Yahoo SERPS vs Google SERPS - If you can’t beat em - join em?. Brett also provides a screen shot comparing the results screens of the two engines.

It’s also interesting to consider the changes made in Panama. I was staring at Yahoo! Search Marketing’s new spreadsheet template and it struck me how similar it has come to the Google AdWords spreadsheet format. For that matter Yahoo is using a very similar algorithm for ranking ads, and this was at the heart of the Panama release.

To be fair, there are still significant distinctions between the two companies. Yahoo! is much more advanced as a publisher of destination sites. One can’t overlook the way they took a solid lead in the Question and Answer space with Yahoo! Answers This is a recent product launch that has done extremely well, and Google recently withdrew from the same space.

But it sure will be interesting to see how this evolves in the search space.

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Cloaking Concerns Over WebmasterWorld

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:36:15 +0000

The issue of website cloaking bubbled to the surface of the search engine optimization world again, as a handful of noteworthy names debated the tactic and WebmasterWorld's alleged use of it over time.

Cloaking Concerns Over WebmasterWorld

Cloaking was much simpler to understand in years past. Dracula wore one. The Shadow practically embodied the concept. Romulans and Klingons made use of cloaking throughout Star Trek's history. On the Internet, cloaking holds a more serious place than it does in the fantasy of horror, mystery, or science fiction. It's very much a fact that some sites can and will disguise their content to present themselves as one thing to search engines, and something different to human visitors. WebmasterWorld received scrutiny and discussion recently. Famed Googler Matt Cutts blogged about the latest episode in the cloaking saga, evidently after discussing it privately with Philipp Lenssen. Matt recounted a short history involving Philipp and WebmasterWorld; he has concerns about what people going from Google to WebmasterWorld may see:

When I get a chance to tackle Philipp’s most recent report, I’ll be looking at consistency: when a Google user clicks on a search result at Google, they should always see the same page that Googlebot saw.

What people see formed the focus of a late February post Philipp wrote about Google allowing misrepresented result snippets. That now appears to be resolved:

In a nutshell, the WebmasterWorld discussion forums – which frequently pop up in Google search results – often served a registration page on a different URL instead of the content the user clicked on in Google. Matt now indicates that he investigated on this behavior and discussed it with Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, who then implemented code changes around January 8. The common behavior is that you can now see content of WebmasterWorld pages fine the first time you click on the result.

WebmasterWorld's Brett Tabke responded to Matt's post and explained why Philipp and others have seen results that don't always go to content:

As most know, wmw has been the target of extreme amounts of bot activity over the years and has taken proactive steps to fight it. Our first and foremost job is to the regular members of the site. I have done everything I can think of to stop the bots from the cable and dsl isp’s. I have even gone so far as to ban entire TLDs some of time (china, russia) where heavy botnet activity exists. I think we have finally found a system that everyone can live with and keeps the content open for everyone, but slows down the bots. I say slows down, because there is no way to stop them.

Matt still plans to look at WebmasterWorld in relation to Philipp's February post. One person who would like to see the whole cloaking issue put to rest is Danny Sullivan, who aired his views on the subject, including a long history of other cloaking issues:

Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh. I guess now that the SEO industry has had the required twice-yearly debate about the reputation of SEO, it's time to do the go round about cloaking once again. The comments are now up over 100, as people rehash things that have been hashed, mashed, rebaked so many times before.

It's a "stupid, stupid issue" that Danny wants to see SEO get past once and for all. ---

MS AdCenter Bug Makes Advertisers Pay Huge Sums

Navneet Kaushal — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 23:51:56 +0000

A major Microsoft AdCenter bug costs advertisers to shell out huge amounts. This bug makes the advertisers may a blasting amount as compared to what they have bid for.

A Webmasterworld thread addressing the same issue has tremendous amount of posts where affected advertisers have addressed the situation.

My daily spend increased almost 10-fold from $140 to over $1350 yesterday!

At one point yesterday I was charged $131.87 per click for 6 clicks in an order where my max bid is 82 cents per click. In another order I was charged $47.50 for 1 click in an order which the max bid is 55 cents.

I was charged $581 dollars for 4 clicks, maxCpc set to .19 cents….

This situation definitely seems to be getting outrageous. However, AdCenter Blog addresses the issue and says that the problem has been resolved. They also add that the advertisers will be compensated at the earliest.

Some of our adCenter advertisers are seeing high cost-per-click (CPC) and spend amounts in their accounts. I will update this post with more information as soon as I have it, but I wanted to let you know that this issue is now resolved and those of you who were overcharged, we're working on a plan to credit your accounts for over-charges as soon as possible.

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How Sites Are Ranked in Yahoo! Directory

Navneet Kaushal — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:49:43 +0000

A WebmasterWorld thread inquires how the sites are ranked within the Yahoo! Directory. Search Engine Roundtable explains in a post that the sites are ranked in Yahoo! Directory on the basis of popularity.

Search Engine Roundtable says:

Yahoo! has a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Resources section, where they list out sites included in the directory in order of "popularity."

Yahoo! defines popularity as:

By default, Directory site listings are presented sorted by popularity and relevance. Sites that are most popular with users or the most relevant to the category appear at the top of the site listings. The order of web sites or web documents is based upon Yahoo! Search Technology. If the category is large, the listings will display over multiple pages with pagination displayed at bottom of the page.

Sagerock on WebmasterWorld says:

So all you have to do is make your site more popular. Basically, that means more people need to click on your directory listing than on other peoples' listings.

However, Yahoo! says 'order of web sites or web documents is based upon Yahoo! Search Technology.' Now if only it was clearly mentioned what is the working of popularity algorithm, it would have been all play and no work.

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AdWords CPC Price Gouge Bug Fixed?

Navneet Kaushal — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:33:12 +0000

Search Engine Roundtable has reported the fixing of Google AdWords CPC Price Gouge Bug. The bug pushed up minimum bids to unnatural highs for some keywords. Webmasterworld members have reported relative normalcy over the weekend.

my accout is 75% or more back to normal.

The problem with singular/plural keywords has been resolved for me. In my situation this appears to be a technical issue with adwords which is now resolved. I still have some keywords disabled requiring high min bids to reactivate but these really are poor performing keywords.

Discussions at Webmasterworld Forums.

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