Recently, Google has undergone a behind the scenes upgrade to improve their infrastructure being referred to as “Caffeine.” The goals behind this change are to make searches faster, more accurate, and increase the relevance of results. In the early stages of what should take months to fully develop, the faster speed is most notable, but the number of search results offers the biggest clues into what is to come.
Using the tool www.CompareCaffeine.com, you can look at side-by-side results for both regular Google, and the new “Caffeine” version. To unravel what the impact of the upgrade could be, I tried a number of searches to compare both speed and number of results. In each case I ran the search three times and recorded the differences. My searches were for “insurance,” “car insurance,” and “cheap car insurance for ford mustang.”
Search Term(s)
Google”Standard”
(vs.)
Google “Caffeine”
“insurance”
Average Speed
.14 sec
.08 sec
# of Results
421,000,000
490,000,000
“car insurance”
Average Speed
.2 sec
.08 sec
# of Results
106,000,000
44,700,000
“cheap car insurance
for ford mustang”
Average Speed
.23 sec
.12 sec
# of Results
616,000
596,000
From the above results, the most noticeable difference is the speed. “Caffeine” returned results in about half the time in all three tests. As for volume, it appears that the longer the keyword the more relevant the results became based on the number of listings returned. While “Caffeine” returns more results than regular Google for a generic search on “insurance,” when I refine what I’m looking for, they produce less results.
What does this mean for affiliates?
It appears that the space for long-tail keywords will become smaller, but more targeted. Displaying in the first few pages has always been important, but if the focus is going to be on relevance, make sure you are adding unique value to an insurance shopper’s visit. There has been an increase in penalties for simple redirect sites recently, and it may be time to develop your content to add value and justify being ranked higher.
So what can you do?
InsureMe offers a product for affiliates in our top two tiers allowing them to host the form on their site to avoid such penalties. If interested, talk to your affiliate manager about ways you can increase lead volume to enjoy the benefits of being in this group.
So have you heard the news? Microsoft has completely taken their offer off the table with Yahoo and now Yahoo and Google are going to team up–eventually.
No need to go crazy now with trying to figure out what you are going to do if/when Google and Yahoo combine their paid search ads, personally I don’t see the government allowing it (but that’s just my opinion)…monopoly anyone??
Anyways, from the reports yesterday, nothing is supposed to go into effect until September so we all have time to figure things out.
If you’d like to read more on it, Yahoo news has given some insight into it, as well as Search Engine Land.
Does that mean you CAN bid on trademark terms?
Ethics are icky and sticky when it comes to online marketing and advertising. We still haven’t reached the true outline of what that means, or when there is a serious violation of privacy whether it be personal or business information and names. Seriously, folks, here we are in another long drawn out election year, where we, as our American duty, have to pick out who the truth teller is. I can hear some politicians state the following quote from Darby Conley:
“Ethics are so annoying. I avoid them on principle.”
Where do we, as internet marketers stand with the so called “ethics”? Sometimes, because we stand on the cutting edge of marketing and advertising, some ideas that seem good could turn out to be “unethical”. There are loose definitions, such as Google’s take on trademark terms.
And if you want to read s’more stuff about trademark bidding, here are Yahoo’s stipulations.
The AMA has a code of their own set ethics.
Most affiliates dont have a lot of cash to spare when theyre just starting out. (After all, thats why they become affiliates, right?) Whether paid search is their game of choice or they prefer experimenting with SEO, tips that help them enter the arena without spending an arm and a leg are always welcome.
Well, if youre a new affiliate–or even a seasoned pro looking to cut costs–heres a suggestion you might not have thought of: try using colloquialisms. Thats right, if you can find and use more informal terms (or those same terms in another language) and substitute them for terms more difficult to rank on or more expensive to bid on, you might just find yourself a profitable niche!
If youre wondering what Im talking about, or you think Im speaking another language, check out this recent post over at the SEOmoz blog on the subject. Itll explain things in more detail–and put a new twist on the long tail!
Writing for the web may not be your cup of tea. After all, who but a seasoned web writer can craft SEO-friendly text, insert a phenomenal call to action, and convince visitors they simply have to have whatever you have to offer–especially when its as boring as insurance?
You can! Whether you enjoy writing on the side or you can barely construct an understandable sentence, knowing what NOT to do when writing landing pages is just as important as knowing what TO do. The premise? If you can avoid making mistakes up front, youll save yourself a lot of time and frustration on the back end–no matter what your level of experience.
To find out what makes landing pages go wrong, check out this handy-dandy article I ran across. If youll take its pointers seriously and avoid common missteps, even you can write landing pages that rock!
So flip the switch, shed some light on the subject–and start writing great landing pages now. You really can do it!
So as you’ve already read James (the traitor–just kidding we still love you James!) decided to leave last Friday and we’ve decided to keep the blog up and running.
It’s going to sound a little different than what it did when he wrote because we are going to have multiple people writing through out the week so get ready for some variety!
With that being said, you should check out our newly updated blogger profiles and read a little bit about our new bloggers.
We were also thinking that it would be great if we could get some input for you, our readers, as to what you needed help with and what type of stuff you wanted to read about. So here’s what we’re asking of you–if you have any ideas please send them our way. Would you like to know more about PPC? More about SEO stuff? Or just general affiliate goings on? (We’re also up for giving updates on the Colorado weather…but that’s probably not all that interesting)
Let us know what you want in the comments and we’ll give it to you!
As some of you may already know (if you follow me on Twitter), Friday is my last day here at InsureMe. I’ve had an amazing, life changing, and exciting 5 years with InsureMe and deciding to leave wasn’t an easy choice. I’ve been given a new opportunity with a start-up in Europe, and at this point in my life it feels like time to take a chance and step out of my comfort zone.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain
One of my greatest joys over the last two and a half years has been writing this blog for all of you. It truly was a labor of love, and all of the feedback, comments, and relationships that have grown from the blog have made the process of writing almost 700 post worthwhile.
Hopefully over the years you’ve read at least one thing here that has helped you be more successful as an affiliate marketer…if that’s the case, I consider this blog a success.
The good news is that InsureMe plans to continue posting to this blog going forward. While post might not be as frequent as they currently are, InsureMe has a team of talented online marketers here that will continue to add tips, tools and news to the blog to help you succeed in your affiliate adventure. So make sure you subscribe via RSS and keep an eye out for future posts.
If you’d like to stay in touch, or follow me on my next adventure, track down my personal blog and website, which is easily found by searching for “James Omdahl” on Google. You can find my contact info there if you want it.
Thanks so much for reading and stay tuned…more InsureMe Affiliate Blog goodness is on the way…
For the first time I have spotted an instance where Yahoo! is calling out an email spammer right in their search results. Let’s look at the screen grabs.
At the top of the search results, Yahoo! shows this message:
And then in the results they show this:
And when you hover over that, Yahoo! pops up this:
Looks like Yahoo! might be trying to differentiate themselves as the company that protects users from spammers. The real question is, if a company is so bad that they flag them, why show them in the results at all?
As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.
As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.
I ran across this downloadable and printable SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet today, and I’d suggest you make yourself a copy and keep it somewhere close by. The cheat sheet covers many of the important rules and best practices for SEO web development, which includes:
Important SEO HTML Tags
Search Engine Indexing Limits
Recommended Title Tag Syntax
Common Canonical Homepage Issues
301 Redirects for Apache
Important Search Engine Robots
Robots Meta Tag
Common Robot Traps
Robots.txt Syntax
Sitemap Syntax
If you hire someone to do web development for you, you may want to pass this list on to them. Making sure your site is built properly can make a night and day difference in your search engine rankings, so do what you can to make sure things are built right in the first place.
Here’s a link to the PDF, and here is a link to the SEOmoz post about the sheet.
OK, so I had never heard of the AdWords Change History Tool until today. Yeah, laugh if you want - but I bet there are a number of you out there that have never heard of it either, so this post is for you.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Change History Tool, it is a feature in AdWords that allows you to look back on the account changes you’ve made in since 2006. In doing so, the tool helps you remember what changes you made that could have caused a change in your accounts performance.
To access the tool, just login to your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools” under the “Campaign Management” tab. Once you have done this, click on “My Change History” and enter a date range.
The way I see it, this is an invaluable tool these days, especially for people who are managing large AdWords accounts that require constant tweaking to try to increase ad ranking and decrease cost-per-click. By utilizing something like the Change History Tool, a PPCer will be able to better interpret the effects of account changes on their quality score/ranking/etc.
Also exciting (and the way I learned about this tool), PPC Hero announced that Google will be adding some graphing features that will give advertisers a more graphical look at how the changes effect their accounts.
If you’ve got an AdWords account or 20, make sure you start taking advantage of the Change History Tool…it could help you answer some of the magical mysteries of AdWords.
Aaron Wall has put together an insanely comprehensive blog post that shows how you can put a value on a #1 Google Ranking. At over 5,000 words, the post is epic, but certainly worth the time…and since it is so long, I’ll make this post short.
PPC Master, John Hasson found a way to increase his Google AdWords content network conversion rate by 35%, and decrease his cost for conversion by 46%..
How?
Dayparting.
For those of you not familiar, dayparting, or ad scheduling as Google calls it, is the process of setting different bids for your PPC keywords depending on the time of day the search is being conducted.
So for example, if you knew you got your highest conversion rate from 5 PM to 7 PM, but extremely low conversion from 11 PM to 8 AM, you could set your cost-per-click to a higher or lower number to make sure you get the higher converting traffic and you get less of the lower converting traffic.
The funny thing is, I don’t know if there are really a whole lot of people who bother to use dayparting features when they are available. To many people it seems like setting everything up might be a bit too complex and might not be worth the time.
But seriously - if you could increase your conversions by 35%, and your cost-per-conversion by 46%., wouldn’t you?
Check out John’s blog post to see how he determined what times to run various bids, and how he made dayparting boost the effectiveness of his AdWords content campaign.
One of our PPC peeps, Brittany, found a very interesting article for all you PPC folks on Search Engine Journal today. The article, Google Leaks Quality Score Variable (Pscore, mCPC and thresh) in Search Results, show some screen shots of what one can only assume to be quality score data appearing in the search results.
The data is broken into 3 different variables, which are:
Pscore - no one is totally sure what this is, but some believe it is a numerical value that represents the statistical significance of the match to the search term
mCPC - thought to be maximum cost per click
thresh - didn’t see any speculation on this variable
If this is accurate information, it’s terribly interesting to me that these three numbers would show up in the search results. The example shown in the SEJ article is for the term “warwick honda dealer” and shows that out of the two AdWords results, the corporate Honda website is likely bidding much higher than a non-official Honda site. The interesting thing is that the non-official site has a higher Pscore, which could mean it is considered more relevant that the corporate Honda site.
Of course, with anything like this, I’m left with more questions than answers. Namely, are these the only three scores that are used to determine placement? Also, why would something like this end up in the visible search results? Is it something that is normally visible to Google employees only? Finally, what the heck is “thresh”?!
Let me know your thoughts on the leak…and if you figure out what a thresh is.
Let’s face it. Google is in a tough position when it comes to user privacy. Google wants to give users the best possible experience and the most relevant search results and ads, but since everyone is different, they need personal user data to give the best results. However, most users don’t want Google to keep track of their online activities.
So what to do?
Well, if a Google patent application uncovered by Bill Slawski is any indication, Google has decided to use a lot of information to improve their ad serving through AdSense. And by a lot, I am talking everything from individual click activity, to your interest in certain topics, to mouse hover activity in certain regions of a webpage, and even your facial expressions.
When you pull the privacy element out of the mix, the solution would be fantastic for users and advertisers both. Users would get AdSense ads they may actually be interested in. Advertisers would get more targeted users, meaning higher click-to-conversions, and a better ROI on content matching through AdWords.
But then there is privacy. The patent application lists some potential concepts of learning user interest and intention to creepy new levels - specifically “user eye direction relative to the document” and “user facial expressions.” Not sure how they plan to get that info outside of a controlled environment, or if it’s just in there to future-proof the patent. Either way, “watching” how the average user surfs the Internet and reacts to it outside of the browser window just seems to be a bit too intrusive to me…even more intrusive of tracking click and visited site activity.
Like the Google’s ideas or not, reading Bill’s analysis of Google patents is always interesting and usually gives some insight into the way Google views the world and its role in it. Head over to the post, have a read, and let me know what you think. Does the patent seem as creepy to you as it does to me, or does it seem like business as usual for the GOOG?
First off, apologies for the lack of posts over the last week. I was out of the office so things got a bit stale. I’m playing a bit of catch-up on work, but hopefully the posts will settle back to their regular intervals now.
I’ve been digging through my feed reader today and finding a number of gems. The greatest in my option that I have run across so far is a post from Barry Schwartz titled US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter.
The post discusses the recent case Standard Process v. Banks which looked at trademark infringement as it related to SEO. In the process of deciding the outcome of the case, the court got up to date on SEO and decided that the use of META keyword tags was immaterial to the ranking of a particular webpage.
Barry’s post is based off the analysis from law professor Eric Goldman, which can be found here, which includes a quote that I love. It is:
Lawyers, on the other hand, have been living in a parallel fantasy universe where keyword metatags single-handedly divert unwaveringly brand-loyal customers to piratical competitors.
Gotta love that.
This brings up an interesting SEO tactic - don’t try to figure out SEO, let the courts do it for you.
Kidding.
Two more articles of SEO interest for you to peruse over the weekend:
Funny how the SEO world works. SEO practitioners have this inherent problem - when they figure out something works it is both sensible and rewarding to push that method as far as they possibly can. Unfortunately, pushing any SEO tactic too far is almost guaranteed to result in restrictions or rules being implemented by Google to curtail the successful tactic.
One interesting story that illustrates this point is the story of Matthew Inman and his site JustSayHi. You can read the full post, Widgetbait Gone Wild, over at SEOmoz, but for those of you who prefer the Reader’s Digest version, here it is:
Matthew created an online dating site called JustSayHi
Matthew built widgets that displayed information for various quizzes that people took - in each widget was a text link that pointed to JustSayHi with beneficial anchor text
Due to the popularity of the widgets, JustSayHi ranked #1 for “online dating” and many other competitive dating terms - the site had over 500,000 members
With the encouragement of the site’s parent company, Matthew started using their widgetbait technique to promote other offers, including payday loans and EDU sites
Google discovered the widgetbait scheme and decided that, even though people willingly put the widgets on their sites and could remove the text links if they wanted, the use of widgets to cross-promote other web properties was a violation of webmaster guidelines
JustSayHi was dropped from the Google index and was not allowed to return even after a reinclusion request
Since JustSayHi was dropped from Google, Matthew started a new site OnePlusYou to try to get a fresh start and move over the JustSayHi users
Matthew used the same widget technique, but in a way that seemed to fit the regulations of Google, since they were only linking back to the site that distributed the widget
Google changed the rules again and said that OnePlusYou could not use keyword anchor text on the widgets, and were forced to change all of the anchor text to OnePlusYou
In the end, Matthew is left wondering how linkbaiting - a method that was once embraced by Google - has suddenly become regulated and grounds for penalization.
This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. Today’s PPC Hero post got me really excited since it covers one of my favorite things - free SEO/SEM tools.
The list cover 4 different keyword tools that can help you expand your keyword list, research keyword volume and trends, and even identify a general cost-per-click for different keywords. All important things to understand before you start a PPC or SEO effort for a particular product or service.
Out of all of the tools I think the one I like most is Spyfu.com. Specifically, I really like the data they give on the CPC range for keywords - something I’ve been missing since Yahoo! went all “black box” with their Panama platform.
I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, Un-Clutter & Optimize Your Account with Better Organization does a good job of laying out some of the basic guidelines to organizing a PPC account. While the post is a few months old, I don’t feel like any of the info is outdated.
The post does a good job of explaining what seems to be one of the more important aspects of AdWords success these days, account organization. It’s funny to me that account organization has become so important - and it really shows that there is, in fact, a fairly complex ranking algorithm running behind the scenes at AdWords.
I mean, I remember setting up InsureMe’s first PPC account and basically just tossing in keywords in whatever way made sense to me and my reporting needs at the time. Now we’ve got the fear of Google not liking the way our accounts are structured to worry about - and an accounts success or failure can depend upon the number and type of words you are putting in an AdGroup.
So if you are looking for some real world advice about PPC account structure, check out Amber’s PPC Hero article here.
BONUS: Aaron Wall recently gave a candid interview about the present and future of SEO to Marketmou. It’s certainly worth a read if you’ve got a few minutes.
I’ll admit it. You can do some amazing stuff with Flash on a website. Great animations, interactive elements, stylization - but Flash is often used at the cost of natural search findability.
But not always.
While the people who practice Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have traditionally avoided Flash sites like the plague, there are ways to make Flash content accessible to Google’s crawlers, as long as you know what you are doing.
Eric Enge wrote a very helpful post for anyone who wants to use Flash on their websites called How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly. In the post he describes how you can use Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) and SWFObject to properly implement SEO friendly Flash.
Give the article a read, and let me know if you’ve ever been able to successfully rank a site that uses a lot of Flash.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land is holding his SMX conference in Sydney right now. Turns out Danny had a keynote with Google’s Marissa Mayer and was able to get some interesting information out of her about a new search feature called “previous query.”
Previous query is a concept that is already implemented in Google’s paid search results. Basically what this functionality does is looks at the previous query made and will display different ad results based on the combination of the two queries. So let’s say you did a search for the word “Munich” and then did a new search for the word “car rental.” Using the previous query functionality, Google would modify their paid results to reflect a search that more closely resembles “Munich car rental.”
In their talk, Marissa told Danny that users can expect to see organic search results that use previous search style search behavior. In my mind announcement wouldn’t be a big deal, except for this - users will not need to be signed into a Google account to see the previous search functionality - previous search is cookie based, so as long as your browser accepts cookies, you’re going to be affected.
From an SEO standpoint, this could be big - especially if you rely on people doing one word queries to find your site. As Danny points out in his post, this will make many “single word” queries bring back queries of two or more words, depending on your previous search.
What should you do to optimize for this change? From what I can tell, nothing really. Based off the search results shifting I’ve seen on Google as of late, it’s getting harder and harder to safely say what you rank for a particular keyword - and the addition of previous query will only make your actual positioning on Google that much more subjective.
If there is any advice I would give it would be that its really time to make sure you have a good grasp on non-ranking related metrics to evaluate your SEO success. Look at visits, pageviews, leads, sales, whatever - just don’t rely on search rankings alone - chances are they’re not going to be the same for everyone.
That’s the feeling an SEO gets when it looks like their site has been banned by the search engines. Even if there is no real reason for a search engine to ban your site, suddenly not seeing your site ranking for a keyword can touch off a sense of panic that will get your heart racing.
Normally the panic is unfounded. Your site may have just slipped a few rankings or could have been indexed incorrectly for some reason.
It has happened to me.
Google bot decided to swing by InsureMe.com right in the middle of a site update once, and our site was suddenly cached as a blank screen. When I checked our rankings the next morning, we had dropped magnificently. It was a disaster.
But the good news was, we weren’t banned or penalized. After some quick checks I realized the issue and we were able to react accordingly. After a couple days Google reindexed the site in its correct form, and our site quickly made it back to its original positions in the search results.
Knowing how to check and see if your site has been banned is a fundamental skill for anyone who cares about their site’s search rankings. Mark Jackson at Search Engine Watch has written up a nice article that explains how to check and see if your domain has been banned by Google, Yahoo! or MSN - and how to go about getting it un-banned if it is.
Quick! Raise your hand if you can accurately guess the exact pixel size of an image by just looking at it.
Anyone?
I’m guessing not. I’m also guessing that I’m not the only person who has been in a situation where you need an image to be a particular size, but you’re not sure how big it is.
Enter the JR Screen Ruler. This little download can give you an expandable moveable ruler on your screen - just perfect for quick measuring of images, webpages or the size of Ivan the Terrible’s hat (200 pixels!).
Also cool, the ruler will give you size in pixels. Inches, Centimeters and Picas.
Not sure why, but it seems that I’m running across a number of statistics this morning that I’m finding interesting, so I thought I would share. The first bit of information is coming from Search Engine Land and discusses the results of a recent iProspect study that describes user behavior and search results. The most interesting stats were:
68% of search engine users typically click results on the first page of search results
Only 8% of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result
49% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results (this number is up from 40% in 2006).
If anything, these stats showed me how important being on the first page of a search result really is - but the third stat also shows that searchers are becoming savvier when it comes to search queries and are more likely to change a search if the results don’t look right. To me, this shows me that searchers will incorporate longer, more specific search queries, which is good news for people who try to profit off of the “long-tail,” as long as you’re on the first page of the search results.
The next set of data is auto insurance related and comes from the folks at comScore. In a recent press release, comScore released data that shows that search-referred auto insurance quotes increases by 36% in 2007.
The release goes on to explain some interesting specifics about quote requests based on search type. The findings show:
Branded organic search traffic yielded 11% conversion to a quote request
Branded paid search traffic yielded 19% conversion to a quote request
Generic organic search traffic yielded 22% conversion to a quote request
Generic paid search traffic yielded 33% conversion to a quote request
I find these numbers interesting for a couple reasons. First, I always thought that branded search traffic would yield higher conversions since the search is specific to a brand name. Second, I was surprised that there was such a big difference between organic conversions and paid conversions. I would assume that that paid clicks would be taken to a webpage that is more conversion oriented than the natural search page - but a 50% increase is quite impressive.
Anyway, if you’d like to see more from the SEL post, and see some stats on blended search results (Universal search) head on over. If you want to see the full press release with other interesting auto insurance facts from comScore, click here.
Starting at the end of last month, Google started pushing out an algorithm/index update that seemed to be one of the more extreme updates they’ve done in recent memory. Actually, may people noticed that Google’s behavior was very similar to the “Google dances” of old, as rankings were mixed up throughout the different Google datacenters over a number of days.
This kind of extreme update is unusual for this day and age since Google usually pushes out smaller updates on a gradual basis, and usually the changes aren’t as extreme as this update, which has been dubbed Dewey.
I’m not sure if the days of the mega-update are back, or if Google just decided to make some changes this go-round that had a broader effect on the results than usual. Either way, for anyone looking to better understand the process of a large Google update, and the hubbub it creates, this is a great opportunity to get up to speed.
What happens to people’s rankings while Google is pushing an update
The massive amount of speculation that surrounds a Google update
Different IP addresses for different datacenters that are out of sync (or at least were at the time)
Webmasters pointing out new exploitable holes in the new algorithm (even thought they are usually fixes pretty rapidly)
How Google’s Matt Cutts (or other Googlers) will often ask for feedback from
webmasters during a major update
If anything, reading through the comments on the thread will give people newer to SEO a good idea of what Google updates looked like a couple of years ago. And for veterans, it’s almost like a trip down memory lane.
I’m guessing this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this update. I’ve been seeing ranking shifts for most websites ranking on the first page for major terms for a month or two now…so I wouldn’t expect the results to “settle” quite like they used to in the days of major Google dances.
If SEO is an art form, then link sculpting is one of the major tools that an SEO artist has at their disposal. I’ve spoken before about using the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to maximize the flow of link juice to your most important pages, and reduce the flow to the least.
But what many people don’t know is that they may have some link equity somewhere on their site that they don’t know about. Maybe someone linked to an article on your site randomly and you never noticed the link. Maybe someone picked up on a blog post of yours and pointed a link to that page. Heck, maybe a page on your site got included in an academic directory and you never noticed. Seriously, I’ve seen it happen.
Knowing where all your inbound links are pointing is essential to being a proactive link sculptor, and luckily Google provides a tool in their Google Webmaster Tools interface that can help you see where all of your inbound links are pointing.
Paul Bourque, better known as UberAffiliate, has been putting up a number of question and answer blog post that are full of interesting information affiliate marketers, especially PPC.
So far there are a total of 7 posts, 6 are text and one is video. All of them are worth a scan/watch if you have the time. Here are links:
Big ups to Paul for being so open and taking the time to answer a ridiculous number of questions. If you’ve got a question for Paul, you can leave a comment on the UberAffiliate blog.
One of our affiliates was checking out the Google results last week and was surprised to see that Google was obviously in the process of testing out some new versions of the results page.
Here’s a screen grab, you can click it for a bigger view:
As you can see there are a number of things going on this Google results page, including:
AdWords ads showing up with a bright yellow background on the top and the right
A video results section is showing up under the AdSense ads on the right sidebar
A news results section is showing up under the video results on the right sidebar
A big “searches related to” section running at the bottom of the page
The affiliate also reported that he saw other iterations of these results showing up, including one where the video results section was running on top of the AdWords sidebar on the right side of the page.
Very interesting stuff. But why would Google do this?
I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page - and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.
Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:
Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools
All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site - which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.
Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.
Ok, the title of this post may be a bit dramatic, but the truth of the matter is that video on the internet is growing rapidly, and the affiliate marketers who are able to master video creation and advertising strategies will be much more prepared for the future of online advertising.
Just yesterday Hitwise came out with data that shows that UK internet traffic to online video websites increased by 172% between this February and February 2007. That’s 172%! The report goes on to say that in the UK one in every 45 visits was to an online video website. (You can get more details here).
As more and more people are watching video online, and as viewership and usage increases, so do the opportunities to advertise through and with video websites. As an affiliate marketer, you still have the opportunity to be a first-mover getting into the online video advertising world.
Admittedly, at this point video advertising seems to be more of a branding move for more traditional advertisers, versus a direct response channel (see this article for proof). But as Google continues to struggle to monetize sites like YouTube, I think they will do whatever they can to make advertising more viable for all types of marketers, including performance marketers.
Outside of YouTube, Google is still trying to figure out how to make video AdSense ads work for both their advertisers and publishers. As video becomes a more accepted form of media on the web, more people will be willing to click on these video ads, and more publishers will be willing to run them on their sites.
If I were you, I’d take some time and start learning more about the online video advertising world. I think that the affiliates who get it will be the ones most likely to profit from it as this market develops.
Got slammed with stuff this afternoon, so this post will be short.
One of our folks over here at InsureMe forwarded me the banner ad below, and I have to admit when I looked at it, I gasped and then started laughing uncontrollably. I mean, the banner sure gets your attention, but is it effective? We may never know, but feel free to weigh in on it in the comments section.
It’s been a while since I have checked out the SEOmoz blog, but since there has been a serious lack of interesting information being published on other sites (*cough*-Search Engine Land-*cough*), I decided to check in and see what Rand and friends were up to.
Now aside from having some of the most photogenic people in the search business working for them (I mean look at those profile photos - it’s like a geek modeling agency over there), SEOmoz tends to do a nice job of putting out actionable SEO advice, although mostly just for paying subscribers. Today though, I was excited to see some advice on the free site that discussed some recent test results from the Mozers.
In the post, Rand describes the findings of an experiment with the effectiveness of multiple links to the same URL coming from the same webpage. What they found was a bit of a surprise to me - when there are multiple links to a single URL on a webpage, Google only counts the first link on the page towards the distribution of both link juice and the anchor text of the link.
In the past I’ve always thought that each link passed link juice to the destination URLs on a webpage, duplicate or not. For example, if there was a webpage with five links on it, with 2 links to webpage A, 1 link to webpage B, 1 link to webpage C and 1 link to webpage D, I assumed that the following was true:
webpage A would get 40% of the link juice from the page
webpage B would get 20% of the link juice from the page
webpage C would get 20% of the link juice from the page
webpage D would get 20% of the link juice from the page
But based off of SEOmoz’s testing, the real link juice distribution would look like:
Most affiliates dont have a lot of cash to spare when theyre just starting out. (After all, thats why they become affiliates, right?) Whether paid search is their game of choice or they prefer experimenting with SEO, tips that help them enter the arena without spending an arm and a leg are always welcome.
So as you’ve already read James (the traitor–just kidding we still love you James!) decided to leave last Friday and we’ve decided to keep the blog up and running.
As some of you may already know (if you follow me on Twitter), Friday is my last day here at InsureMe. I’ve had an amazing, life changing, and exciting 5 years with InsureMe and deciding to leave wasn’t an easy choice. I’ve been given a new opportunity with a start-up in Europe, and at this point in my life it feels like time to take a chance and step out of my comfort zone.
Funny how the SEO world works. SEO practitioners have this inherent problem - when they figure out something works it is both sensible and rewarding to push that method as far as they possibly can. Unfortunately, pushing any SEO tactic too far is almost guaranteed to result in restrictions or rules being implemented by Google to curtail the successful tactic.
This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. 
I ran across a post on the PPC Hero blog today that I thought I would share with you. The post, 
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land is holding his SMX conference in Sydney right now. Turns out Danny had a keynote with Google’s Marissa Mayer and was able to get some interesting information out of her about a new search feature called “previous query.”
Starting at the end of last month, Google started pushing out an algorithm/index update that seemed to be one of the more extreme updates they’ve done in recent memory. Actually, may people noticed that Google’s behavior was very similar to the “Google dances” of old, as rankings were mixed up throughout the different Google datacenters over a number of days.
If SEO is an art form, then link sculpting is one of the major tools that an SEO artist has at their disposal. I’ve spoken before about using the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to maximize the flow of link juice to your most important pages, and reduce the flow to the least.
I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page - and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.
It’s been a while since I have checked out the 
