My first blog apr

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:

You can see the whole screenshot here.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

And now for the banner ad…

Read the rest of this entry »

One of our tech guys pointed out this article from The Register that talks about a new technology Google is looking to push out called “automatic matching.” In essence of the article is that automatic matching will deliver your AdWords ads to terms that you haven’t bid on, but Google deems relevant, in an attempt to use up your daily click budget.

The example in the article would be that the shoe company Adidas might start having their ads show up on terms like slippers, not because they bid on them, but because they are similar to words like shoes and sandals.

It sounds like the rollout of automatic matching will be in beta, and available to bigger advertisers only at first. But if this goes AdWords-wide, I think it might be a major concern for affiliates…especially for people who have set their daily budgets artificially high to ensure their ads are served 100% of the time.

I can see the reason why Google would do this (money) but I’m hoping they are extra careful when it comes to serving the ads, and that they provide accurate tools to show you what terms you’re showing up on.

Read the article and share your thoughts. Do you think this will be a good thing for anyone but Google?

Thanks to James H. for the tip.

If this sounds like an interesting concept for providing better search results to you…

VortexDNA is a technology that came out of the insight that the way we structure our beliefs is governed by the mathematics of complex systems. What that means is that we know the structure our beliefs, and because of that we can then map out the structure of our intentional DNA, the intentions behind the world we create, and that’s basically the breakthrough, the technology. It provides a map of the way people organize who they are, literally who they are, through their belief systems.

…you should probably read this article from Gord Hotchkiss at Search Engine Land that discusses the work of Vortex DNA.

While this might not be the exact future of search, it gives some insight into what people are doing to solve the mystery of searcher intent (i.e. figuring out mathematically if someone wants a computer or a piece of fruit when they type “apple” into a search box.)

Enjoy. Have a great weekend. And safe travels to all of you headed to Affiliate Summit in Vegas!

Big news from Google, starting yesterday Google started a very limited test of video ad units on their search engine results pages (SERPs). In doing so, Google is taking a step forward (for better or worse) in giving advertisers more options of how to advertise through Google search.

Here’s a quick list of details on the video ad test:

• The test will be very limited to begin, and so far no one has reported seeing any of the video ad units
• To start, the videos will not be visible on the search page, but there will be a plus sign symbol attached to the ad that you can click on to open the video
• In the future Google may consider adding a thumbnail photo of the ad instead of the plus box
• Advertisers will be charged when someone views the video, or if the video is not viewed, when someone clicks on the text of the ad.
• Advertisers will only billed once if clicks occur on the video and the text ad
• Google feels now is the right time to try out the video ads in the SERPs since the currently are showing video results through Universal Search
• Google’s thinks that the video ad units could be used for branding as well as click throughs to websites
• Google will continue to focus on ad relevance - so you can rest easy if you think major advertisers will run “branding” ads on unrelated keywords

I for one am very interested to see where this all leads. From an affiliate marketing standpoint, I think it is time to start figuring out how you could leverage video ads for your promotions now. That way, when this program opens up to everyone, you can be one of the first in your vertical with a video ad.

On thing that worries me is to think that a year or two down the line your Google click-through rate might be dramatically affected by the quality of the videos you are able to produce. Kind of makes we wonder if the “little guys” are going to be able to compete with major players who have ad agencies and are already producing video advertisements.

Check out Danny Sullivan’s take along with some mock-up shots at Search Engine Land.

This may or may not matter to you depending on the level of craftiness you use on your AdWords accounts, but if you have been using different display and destination URLs on your ads, you’re going to have to rethink your strategy.

According to Barry Schwartz (hi Barry!), Google has decided to even the playing field for advertisers by tightening the destination and display URLs policies for AdWords advertisement. The good news is that this mainly has to do with redirecting and sending traffic to other sites, and not (as far as I understand) using display URLs that don’t perfectly match the destination URL.

For example, if we want to send traffic to our auto insurance landing page, which has a destination URL of https://www.insureme.com/landing.aspx?Type=auto, we can still use a cleaner display URL like www.InsureMe.com or InsureMe.com/Auto.

On the other hand, if we wanted to use a different site’s URL as the display, like www.InsureMeBlog.com, but we sent the click to a page on www.InsureMeBlog.com that redirects to www.InsureMe.com, that would not be acceptable. Also, we couldn’t send traffic to another URL if it had identical content to www.InsureMe.com, and we can’t promote InsureMe in the ad and then send traffic to a URL different from www.InsureMe.com.

I have a feeling this may be a reaction to some of the wild AdWords tactics that were pointed out on the Shoemoney blog recently - and it is unclear whether there will be algorithmic or manual enforcement of this policy.

From what I understand the changes will take place in August of this year, so if you’ve been getting creative with your display and destination URLs, it might be time to start coming up with a new plan.

Quick post today.

Check out Danny Sullivans thoughts on Googles objections to the Microsofts Yahoo! takeover bid.

With Google looking like they are ready to battle Microsoft on this one, its hard to tell if they are scared or just trying to slow things down.

Well, it finally happened. Microsoft, sensing the weakness of lucky-too-be-#2 Yahoo! has pulled out its checkbook and offered $44.6 billion for the intarwebs most trafficked portal.

Rumors of such a move have been around for quite a while. In this post from May 2006, I mentioned a discussion I had with Forrester analyst about Microsoft picking up a stake in Yahoo!. Funnily enough, the analyst laughed about the possibility of that happening (she actually clarified her stance in a blog post where she called the possibility of such a move as “hogwash” sighting the strength of Yahoo! and Microsoft. Sometimes I really wonder why people even listen to Forrester’s online marketing analysts. Yes, I am ranting.)

Needless to say, if the transaction goes through there will be some serious implications for affiliate marketers. I would hope that Microsoft would have the good sense to kill its AdCenter platform and switch everyone over to Yahoo!’s Panama (and while they are at it they should trash the Live algorithm and use Yahoo!’s instead).

More importantly, I would hope that a Microsoft and Yahoo! would find a way to get their search traffic numbers up so that search marketers would have a reason to spend more time optimizing for and bidding with Microsoft/Yahoo!.

In the end, I’m hoping this goes through. I think Google needs some real competition, and Microsoft and Yahoo! have proven that they are no match for the big G when they are working alone.

What do you think? As an online marketer do you think Microsoft buying Yahoo! is a good thing or a bad thing? Leave a comment!

[For a more in-depth analysis from the search marketing field, check out Dannys post.]

I received news from our CFO Mike that the PPC Summit, which he was planning to attend, called its registrants informing them that the conference has been cancelled. While this is not the first time I have heard about a search industry conference being cancelled, this is certainly the first time I have heard of one being killed A WEEK BEFORE IT WAS SCHEDULED TO HAPPEN.

That’s right, the people at PPC Summit have announced a cancellation a week before the conference was supposed to happen, leaving at least two people I know holding plane tickets for Dallas, Texas that I’m sure won’t be 100% refundable.

Even less impressive is the fact that the people who throw the conference, Alteract Marketing, have no mention of the cancellation on the site, with the only hint being a message that says:

Please call 800-507-2958 ext. 703 for information about the Dallas PPC Summit. Registration is closed.

I’m not sure what happened, but after this I would advise anyone thinking of spending money on any future PPC Summit events to reconsider. Any company that pulls a stunt like this doesn’t deserve your business.

[Update: Another company that is going to be peeved about the Summit, Lyris, who just put out this press release in the last hour. Guess they didn't get the message.]

[UPDATE: Mary from the PPC Summit left a very good response to this post in the comments. Sounds like they did a lot to try to take care of their attendees. Make sure you read it!]

I have heard many rumors about Tamar Weinberg. I have heard she is one of the top diggers on Digg. I hear she is amazingly connected in the online world. I hear she is a prolific blogger and user of social media. And I hear she can levitate.

Ok, I made that last one up.

One thing I can confirm is that Tamar Weinberg has managed to write the Mother Of All Blog Posts. The post recaps the best blog posts of 2007 and links out to over 250 sites.

Total insanity.

Read the post here. It is best read when you have some time to kill…somewhere around 2 1/2 years or so.

Just warning you.

I’m not sure if this goes for all verticals or just insurance, but our friends over at Yahoo! are having a really tough time filtering Xanga spam sites out of their search results. Here’s an example of our site in a Xanga sandwich:

The funny thing is that it looks like Xanga has already deleted the spam insurance blogs and thrown up a page to explain the blog is gone, and Yahoo! has indexed the deleted page. Funnily, the pages still remain at the top of the results at Yahoo! (in the case above the Xanga spam blog is #1 for the term “home insurance”).

If there is anyone out there from Xanga, do us all a favor and slap a “noindex” meta tag on your “Site Status Message” pages. And if you are a Yahoo!, don’t you think it’s time to get this cleared up? If I was a normal searcher and I saw results like this, I would think your search engine was broken.

Maybe easier said than done, but with the way things have been going at Yahoo! recently, you’d think they couldn’t afford search quality issues like this.

Word came out today that Google is putting together a potentially new offering called Google Knol, which may be a lot like a Google’s version of Squidoo, except with zero penalties and more link juice flowing through it.

Danny Sullivan has the scoop over at Search Engine Land if you want the good, the bad and the ugly of the project. And as Danny points out, Google is not sure if it will ever introduce Google Knol to the world, as it’s just a concept being tested internally right now.

One thing I will say is if you’re an affiliate who’s willing to try out new platforms, and you’re not afraid to build content, you might want to keep a close eye on Knol. Early adopters (and beta testers) could profit handsomely from it.

Wiep.net has just come out with the results of a survey that polled top search engine marketers to find out what linking, on page, on domain, and dampening factors have the most weight with the search engines. The report is well worth the time for anyone who does SEO.

The top factors for each category were:

• Link Factors: Anchor text
• On Page Factors: Page authority (in inbound links)
• On Domain Factors: Domain authority (in quality of backlinks)
• Dampening Factors: Robots.txt excluded page

Aside from ranking and variance numbers for the factors, the survey also includes comments from the various search experts that adds a lot of insight to what they think works and doesn’t work. I know I came up with at least one optimization tactic to add to my to-do list from digging through the comments.

One thing I found interesting was that once you got past the main factors listed above, there were a lot of differing opinions about what factors mattered and how. It’s a good reminder that all SEO tactics work better for some sites than others.

One word of warning - if you decide to download the .PDF of the report, please remember that the background is black, and that is how it will print. I’m pretty sure I burned through a toner cartridge printing it out. (Who makes a .PDF with a black background anyway? CRAZY!)

[Thanks to Barry for the heads up on this one.]

I don’t get Forrester. I mean, they describe themselves as a “market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.” But then you get a blog post from one of their top marketing analysts that says this:

When I kicked off the research for Forresters 5 -year Interactive Marketing Forecast this past August, I had originally intended to also include affiliate marketing in the projections. I got a great run down on current trends in the space from Steve Denton at Linkshare and John Ardis and Dave Osmon from Commission Junction. However, in the end I ended up cutting affiliate out of the overall sizing…

However, I continue to get a lot of inquiries about affiliate marketing. So, it seems a relevant area to address through some dedicated research. The inquiries I get are often around how to set up an affiliate network, what pricing to expect from vendors, how to manage affiliate marketing alongside other CPC or CPA-types of marketing (like search or behaviorally-targeted ads). But Id love you to help me gauge the interest in this area. What are the primary questions you are asking about affiliate marketing? Is it a hot or cold area for your company? Im crafting my final Q1 research agenda and would like to think about how/whether to include affiliate marketing as a doc topic. Many thanks! (see the full post here).

To me, if I am a company that is all about “forward-thinking advice for global leaders” I would think at some point before the year 2008 they would have produced at least one report focused on affiliate marketing. Actually, scratch that, I would expect that they would have produced some research before the year 2004.

I’ve been on a couple calls with Forrester, and when it comes to online marketing, they always seem to be up to date on the news but a year or more behind the trends. I kind of understand it, since Forrester analysts are researchers, not people actually involved in the online marketing business, but c’mon, just thinking about researching affiliate marketing now? I bet there are a number of Forrester clients who are missing out on millions in revenue because they are waiting for Forrester to validate affiliate marketing as a channel in the online marketing mix (although I could be overestimating Forresters influence).

It makes me wonder why anyone looking for online marketing advice would spend thousands for their service. You can get better information from keeping an eye on Search Engine Land.

End of rant…everyone have a good weekend.

For most of us, the end of the year is a great time to look ahead and plan for the future. Although January first is really just another day when it comes down to it, we all look forward to our annual new start, and the opportunities the New Year brings.

But as we all know, what happens in the past usually dictate how things will develop in the future (unless you’re a financial planner, who are required by law to disagree with that statement), and as the overused George Santayana quote goes, those of us who forget our past are destined to repeat it.

With that in mind I thought today would be a good day to point out Andrew Goodman’s post about how fat the search industry has come since 2003. Andrew, who is currently attending Search Engine Strategies Chicago, is reflecting on the themes, sessions and topics of the Search Engine Strategies conference of 2003, and comparing it to what’s happening in 2007.

Read Andrew’s post for a trip down memory lane that includes mention of directory submissions, the recognition of blogs, and getting to know the (nails on chalk board) portals.

In the video below, Google spam Czar Matt Cutts give a breakdown of what is included in the Google search results page, and how Google chooses what to display there. While some of this video might be old news to most of you, there are some helpful tidbits that helped clarify some things for me. Here’s the video:

Something interesting from the video was that Matt mentioned that Google knows that the word “car” and the word “automobile” are the same thing. While this isn’t too hard to fathom, it is something interesting to ponder this concept when doing PPC and SEO for terms like “car insurance.”

Also, Matt mentions the Google Experimental page in the video, which I never knew about. If you want to see some of the search concepts that Google is working on, check it out.

Last week Google took its most aggressive swipe at paid links so far by wiping out the visible PageRank for sites in the Pay-Per-Post network. From an objective point of view, this is a pretty smart move by Google. In effect, Google is breaking PPP’s business model by broadcasting that they’ve been devalued. I’m sure it’s not the last time we’ll see Google target specific linking schemes with a total PR smackdowns.

This is yet another warning to SEOs that if you are going to buy links, you better be covert about it. The days of the open, visible and public link buying are over my friends. The underground link market will become the mainstream link market. Link buyers are going to find themselves having to sign NDAs to get into the underground, and many linking programs will become invite only. Luckily, it’s in the link seller’s best interest to send out a lot of invites…so if you aren’t invited to the party yet, chances are you will be soon.

Google is on a rampage folks. Who do you think will be the next to face the GoogleWrath?

For coverage on the Pay-Per-Post and link buying story, refer to the following posts:

Is Google Going to Expand its Punishments of Paid Links? - Eric Enge
Are SEOs Still Buying Links? - Barry Schwartz
Google Goes After the Everyday Blogger - IZEA Blog (the PPP company blog)

So I just finished reading How the Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself on the DM Confidential site, and I got to say I’m a bit annoyed. Maybe this article was just written to get some links, and if that’s the case, congrats to the author David Rodnotzky, you got one. But seriously, if links were your goal you could just write an article called Why Puppies Should Be Refined and Used as an Alternative Energy Source. That would get you way more links.

[Note to self: write article titled "Why Puppies Should Be Refined and Used as an Alternative Energy Source" tonight for personal blog...I need more links.]

The thing about the article that gets me going isn’t the assumption that affiliate marketing is going the way of the Dodo, it’s that the article is based off the premise that affiliate marketing is all about the “wild west” days of affiliate marketing, and without the wildness, affiliate marketing doesn’t exist.

I totally disagree with David on this. In fact, I’d say that affiliate marketing is evolving into more mainstream and legitimate form of marketing. Yes, there will be a shake out of affiliates who don’t have the skills to survive or the will to adapt. But affiliates will thrive by evolving into highly skilled, legitimate marketing businesses that just happen to get paid on a CPA basis. And guess what David, the best affiliate marketers are already running their businesses like they are businesses - they don’t treat them like one time score at Tombstone Bank.

Every industry evolves. Its inevitable, like sunrises and Brittney Spears. We don’t say that the airline business disappeared because they switched from prop planes to jets. It’s still the airline business; it’s just faster, bigger and more efficient…once you get off the ground anyway…and if you don’t check your luggage.

Aw crud. You get the point.

RANT WARNING

Ever since content match became an option on Google AdWords (you used to not be able to opt out), many advertisers have treated this piece of the AdWords Empire with a great deal of skepticism. Who can blame them? Most of the AdWords content traffic we get is of much lower quality than search traffic, as our conversion numbers support.

Google, in there never ending quest to make as much money as possible help advertisers deliver relevant ads to the users of various web properties, is constantly trying to improve the click-through-rate of contextual advertising (since higher CTR = More $). Even with a fleet of certified Stanford geniuses on the case, Google has yet to up this conversion to a point that is worth much attention for many online marketers, and more importantly to you, affiliate marketers.

After years of using engineering brainpower to try to get AdWords’ content match feature utilized by more advertisers, it seems like Google might have switched tactics to using marketing brainpower instead. In their most recent Inside AdWords post called Google Content Network Tips: Part 1, Google uses a lot of space talking about using contextual advertising to:

“raise awareness for your business and create demand among your potential customers that can be captured later by your search campaigns.”

HUH?

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Halloween!

You know where Halloween is really happy today? The Googleplex, that’s where. At least they better be happy with their stock price breaking $700 a share for the first time today. Pretty amazing to think about since they just broke the $600 a share mark less than a month ago.

On the other side of the search world, Yahoo! is rolling out an update to their crawl, algorithm and index today. All is looking well from where I’m sitting, but beware of some spammy sites popping into the results from time to time. Here’s some info from the Search Engine Roundtable (hats off to Barry and team for the killer Halloween theme at SER).

Finally something for all of you tech lovers out there - Nabaztag the rabbit. If you’re feeling lonely and want an artificial friend/butler/newscaster/feed reader then Nabaztag might be for you. Check out this Yahoo! Tech article for more info, visit the Nabaztag site here.

Have a safe night - eat too much candy.

SEO Book’s founder Aaron Wall has gone koo-koo for videos as of late…which is good news for those of us looking to learn more about SEO. Aaron’s videos span a number of SEO related topics, and thanks to the magic of YouTube video embedding, here are a number of the most recent videos:

How to Create Elegant Search Spam (great fundamental SEO tips):

[Click through for more videos]

Read the rest of this entry »

No Google isn’t sending out Googlers to go all America’s Funniest Home Videos on paid link sellers, but they are doing the next best thing - removing PageRank from sites who sell links. From what I’ve read Google started doing this over a week ago, but a new round of sites that are known for selling link (and some that aren’t) are getting a symbolic kick to the groin from the Google spam team.

Why is lowering PageRank an effective way to deter link sellers? Mainly because people who buy links pay more for links from sites with high PageRank…so when the PageRank drops, the value of the links on the site go down. Also, sites that are getting hit with PageRank decreases are likely to have already been tagged by Google to not pass any link juice…so in effect, Google is killing these sites’ ability to sell links meant to improve search rankings. (Of course, if you are buying links just to get traffic from a site, spend away.)

Of course, a move like this will only hasten the move of the linking market to the underground…where a lot of link buying activity has headed. (Or at least that’s what I’m hearing.)

The amazing Barry Schwartz provides us with a list of some of the larger penalized sites and also links to a plethora of reports from other bloggers on the switch. See Barry’s post here.

[Update: TechCrunch has another theory about the PageRank update...they think it has to do with interlinking between blogs such as AOLs Weblogs Inc. Read up here.]

If you are working away today and looking for something to listen to in the background I’d suggest listening to the latest episode of SEO Rockstars from Webmaster Radio. The show always covers interesting topics and I learn something from just about every episode that gets put out (although new episodes are rare there days).

The episode recorded on 9/25/2007 was particularly interesting when Greg Boser, a well know user of the darker side of the SEO force, talks about how his company is spending a good amount of their time on content creation and the development of WordPress themes for their clients. Greg also mentions that he is pretty much done with chasing the algorithm like he used to do back in the day.

Anyway, SEO Rockstars is a worthwhile listen for anyone doing online marketing so check it out!

I ran across an interesting post last night from Steve Rubel claiming that a pay-per-click recession is looming. Steve bases this claim on the following reasons:

1. Clutter - too many ads being displayed for search terms
2. Declining Relevance of Traffic/Transition to Cost Per Action - advertisers are going to want to pay for action, not clicks, in the future
3. Rising Costs - cost per click is getting too expensive
4. Marketers Spread the Ball Around - online marketers will move their ads to social media, behavioral targeted ads, etc.
5. Search Ads Are Viewed as Untrustworthy - people don’t trust search ads

Steve makes some interesting points, some I agree with but most I don’t. Here’s my comments on the topic:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my daily routines is to go into the InsureMe Commission Junction advertiser account and approve or decline potential publishers. Generally I enjoy doing it since I like seeing all of the different sites and tactics publishers are using. But one thing that really bothers me in the process is that I often don’t have enough information to make a good decision on accepting or declining publishers. Let me explain…

When I look at new publishers, I am primarily looking for the following:

1. At least one website that has something to do with insurance or something related to insurance (cars, health issues, property, finance, etc.)
2. Someone using only approved methods of promotion…meaning no software
3. No incentives being offered (incentive site traffic, even if it is charity incentives, causes more problems for a lead generator like us than it is worth)

Sometimes the approval process is fairly cut and dry. You applied to us with Burburry coat Blogger spam blog? Declined. You use software to drive traffic? Sorry. You label yourself as an incentive site? Buh-bye. You have an insurance related site and promote through search? Welcome aboard!

The problem is the grey area that a good percentage of publishers fall into. For example, you might be a reasonable successful publisher but have yet to build an insurance website, but don’t want to until you have some offers to promote. Now from my end, I will likely decline you, only because I have no way of telling what your intentions are and you have no easy way to tell me them either.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think about linking a lot…since it frustrates the heck out of me and all. For this reason, a lot of the reading I do has to do with link development.

The last few days have been fairly active as far as link news goes and the two posts listed below will get you caught up on the knowledge, drama and linking shenanigans that keep the SEM world interesting.

First, the Link Juicy Blog has a really good interview with Michael Gray up that dives into the world of linking from SEO. The interview covers subjects from link baiting strategy, the offline origins of “link bait” marketing and the ongoing debate about how Google is dealing with paid links.

There are certainly some worthwhile morsels in this one, so take a gander at Michael Gray Interview: Advanced Linking Strategies.

Second Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal reports on the Google PageRank update/smackdown that seem to be going on as well as other strange linking phenomenon that are being reported around the web. There seems to be very interesting (if not a little scary) things going down behind the walls Google right now.

Read his article here - Google PageRank Update & Link Selling.

[Stories via Sphinn]

There is some exciting news for older adults who are less than savvy on the net. According to a national publication Google is launching “The Google” to help older adults surf the World Wide Intarwebs. Here is a quote from the story:

The Google will have all the same information currently found on regular Google, but with the added features of not stealing your credit-card numbers or giving your computer all kinds of viruses,” said Rick Tillich, The Google project director. “All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen, type thegoogle.com, and press return–although it will also recognize http.wwwthegoogle.com, google.aol, and THEGOOGLE typed into a Word document.”

Ha ha ha…ok, so the “national publication” this story came from is The Onion (a fake newspaper), but seriously, Google might be able to make some money with something like “The Google.” Read the whole story here.

Happy Friday, have a good weekend!

[Bonus - An SEO post worth reading from Jill Whalen.]

Jordan McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim points out that Yahoo! is in the midst of an index update as we speak. Sounds like they plan to have it done soon, so we’ll see what the end result is.

From the searches I’ve done in the insurance space, it doesn’t seem like there is much different for InsureMe.com…but usually when I make a statement like that something dramatic happens, so we’ll wait and see.

Jordan’s post points to some potential issues with 301 redirects being misread during the update and also an improvement in ranking for some high authority, keyword heavy sites.

We’ll see what the end results will be…but I hope for increased rankings for everyone who reads this.

Get the 411 on Yahoo! here and here and here.