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:

Diagnosing The SEO Health of Your Website by Jill Whalen
Link Development Tool Shortcuts for Firefox by Rae Hoffman

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.

A good question indeed.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Make sure you read the full post, Expand Your Keyword List For Free: 6 Keyword Tools You Should Be Using (but probably aren’t), for a full rundown on what each tool can do for you.

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.

Check out Dannys post about the keynote here.

Terror.

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.

Check out Marks post, How to Tell Your Domain is Banned in a Search Engine.

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.

If you want to get a JR Screen Ruler of your own, head to the Spadix Software site to get it - it’s free!

Now if you excuse me, I’ve got some more hats to measure.

[via]

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.

If you are looking to learn more, I’d say your best bet is to head to the Dewey update thread in the WebmasterWorld forums. By reading through the various comments you’ll be able to see:

• 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.

To see this report you need to do the following:

Read the rest of this entry »

I love this guy…

[via]

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:

UberAffiliate Q&A # 1
UberAffiliate Q&A # 2
UberAffiliate Q&A # 3
UberAffiliate Q&A # 4
UberAffiliate Q&A # 5
UberAffiliate Q&A # 6
UberAffiliate Q&A # 7 is the video - check it out:

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.