Affiliates affected by AdWords policy change

Affiliate Marketing PPC No Comments
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Many affiliate marketers use Google AdWords to get traffic to their pages. Some indulge in arbitrage, where a cheap PPC click brings traffic that might click an AdSense ad on the landing page that delivers a greater payout per click.

A recent post in the Inside AdWords blog brings bad news to some affiliates and others who fall in these categories. They will be awarded low Quality Scores if they have:

  • Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information.
  • Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads.
  • Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer.

It would be interesting to know if such sites can be determined algorithmically. How can a human determine that a site has a “sole purpose” and no more?

Google is getting serious about quality and this should silence some sceptics who say that Google doesn’t mind who clicks an ad on any site — The following types of sites will no longer quality for cheap clicks:

  • eBook sites that show frequent ads
  • “Get rich quick” sites
  • Comparison shopping sites
  • Travel aggregators
  • Affiliates that don’t comply with Google affiliate guidelines.

I don’t know what is meant by a “frequent ad” — do they show ads frequently? Where? Again, this list is bound to include some advertisers who don’t see themselves as dodgy.

NetRegistry Dumps MSN/Live Search

Search Engines SEO No Comments
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NetRegistry’s latest newsletter had an intriguing headline, “NetRegistry Ditches Microsoft Search”, which sounds as important as the EU fining the software giant. It is quite a non-event, but worthy of some discussion.

NetRegistry offers a URL submission service called GoLive, which included submission to Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live). It will no longer submit to Live Search because it found that submissions take about 42 days to take effect, whereas Google takes 14 days and Yahoo takes 22 days.

Submitting a URL only to search engines is harmless but not necessary, as long as you can get a link from some other web site that is already known to the search engines, because the target website will be discovered through that link. Perhaps if you have no link friends, a submission service might help. When I was at Melbourne IT, I introduced products that included both directory and search engine submissions because some small business sites have no link providers and they could be waiting for a long time to get that first link.

Getting back to Microsoft Live Search, a lot of SEOs have been saying for a while that MSN Search (now Live Search) is both a poor search experience and it is harder to get listed there, or to be crawled fully. I have no clue what’s happening in Redmond, but 2-3 years ago they had a focus group called Search Champs. I wasn’t invited, but some well-known and capable search marketers were, and they had a great time listening to and sharing their views during their many on-site meetups. Who knows if any of their input was used, because I haven’t met anyone who thinks highly of Live Search as it stands today.

I am monitoring many tens of third-party sites for a research project (not much SEO work done) and I can confirm that Google picks up new sites within hours, not days, while Yahoo takes about two weeks. Ranking success for some of the noncompetitive Google sites came within a week and in most cases within a month, although very competitive sites will need off-page link love that could take longer. Yahoo ranking success came within two weeks for the noncompetitive sites. Barely one or two sites have ranked below 100 in Live Search after six weeks. Competitive sites take much longer, as they do in the other two search engines.

Will Live Search ever be a major player, disregarding the users whose home page is still set to MSN/ninemsn? I would like to think so, as competition is great for users.

Indian SEO Companies

SEO 4 Comments
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An unfortunate spat has unfolded between NYC-based SEO company MrSEO and Pandia, on account of this article: On outsourcing search engine optimization to India. Pandia is sponsored by eBrandz, as mentioned in the article, a point that seems to have provoked this unusual, generalised commentary on Indian SEO.

Writes Alan:

“If you want paraphrased, stolen content; spammy, outdated linkbuilding methods or cookie cutter solutions to your site’s unique problems, you’re probably better off with an SEO firm from India.”

I agree with Alan only up to a point and I would not generalise so strongly. In any country, including mine, there are many individuals who claim to be SEOs. Most of them appear to believe their own marketing collateral. I recently helped a travel website who had paid an Australian company for “SEO work” that included incorporating licensed content from Lonely Planet. Perfectly legal, perfectly rendered — and a perfect duplicate of the original text. Guess what? The travel site ranks nowhere for its desired keyphrases — no thanks to the so-called SEO who should have pointed out the fundamental flaw in that tactic.

SEO outsourcing is not the sole monopoly of India and if I examined, say, Egyptian or Russian SEO sites I am sure I could find something to criticise.

You can find bad SEOs in any country and the problem is exacerbated by the nature of the beast — there is no generally accepted measure of “good SEO” and there is relatively little authoritative training material. If you are going to the Webmasterworld conference in December, you might hear a thousand, overlapping opinions on what good SEO means. Incidentally, I am speaking about SEO101, sharing the podium with Bruce Clay and Bill Slawski.

Although there are many Indian English writers with impeccable writing skills, they are not in the SEO writing business. I know just one excellent India-based writer who is in the content writing game and there seem to be quite a few at Chilli Breeze, but the latter don’t come cheap. SEOs in general tend to have a web developer or web design background and have “picked up” SEO along the way.

I have outsourced some content writing and linking work to a few Indian SEO companies including eBrandz in Mumbai, whose offices I have visited. I know exactly what I need to be done, so I get quality work. Some of these companies manage the SEO and PPC work for major European and US companies and I can only assume that their clients are happy. Some of them work for US and Australian SEO companies, so many customers never know where some of the SEO work is done.

I believe that some US SEOs are pricing themselves out of the market — some “experts” charge US$500/hour — great if you can get it, but this could be driving some customers to seek cheaper options offshore. In my hands-on SEO days I picked up a lot of US and UK customers because Australian SEO pricing is in-between Indian and US/UK pricing and the time difference and language differences aren’t too severe.

Let’s see how this topic unfolds.

Does client-side JavaScript act like a 301?

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Before you shoot me for saying that, take a look at the following SERPs for apcug.org (I am on its board but not involved with the decision that moved it to apcug.net two years ago) and check the total page count in the index:

Compare with the results for apcug.net

The Google and Live results show the same count for .net and .org, which is unlikely. Yahoo’s results are quite different and more likely to be accurate.

The webmaster of the day had placed a client-side JS “location.replace” statement in index.htm of the .org, but that should be invisible to the spiders, right? There is no meta refresh in the page or a 301 via other means. The .org page returns a 200 header response, as it should.

Why are G and L showing the same indexed page counts for .org and .net?
Please comment.

Dynamic URLs – Yahoo!

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Yahoo! Site Explorer has added a feature that enables you to specify your URLs in a more search-engine friendly manner.  If the site has been submitted to Yahoo and authenticated, you will notice a new button called Dynamic URLs.

Dynamic URLs

If my URLs looked like this:  http://example.com/store?prod=1&sid=23yadh56, I could use this tool to strip out the “sid” (session ID), which is a good thing. I could also rewrite some URLs such as http://example.com/blog?src=rssfeed to read http://example.com/blog?src=yhoo_srch.

It is a good option, but would I use it?  If Yahoo! were the only search engine, then yes, but since there are three big SEs out there and any number of lesser engines, I’d rather use mod_rewrite at the Apache level to fix all my URLs. Read more about Dynamic URLs at the Yahoo! site.

SearchCamp Chennai Unconference

PPC Search Engines SEO 1 Comment
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I stumbled upon this event (http://searchcamp.in) by accident and then found that two of my friends – Milind Mody of eBrandz and Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm are among the people organising an exciting event in Chennai (aka Madras) on October 6 and 7. I note other well-known names who will also help to make it a success.

Billed as an unconference, it is a low-priced (Rs 500) opportunity to connect with SEO and PPC exponents and experts. Check out the website. I cannot be there but wish them all the best.

Comment: They seem to use the term “SEM” to mean PPC and other paid click solutions such as CPA, but then that is what the main ad networks want people to believe. For those of us from traditional marketing backgrounds or expert watering holes such as Webmasterworld, SEM = SEO, PPC, blogs, press releases, articles etc – anything that helps your marketing through a search engine.

Google CPA, Meet Google Checkout

Click Fraud Search Engines SEO No Comments
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I was reading a CNET blog post Google deems cost-per-action as the ‘Holy Grail’ by Stephan Spencer. At the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, delivered a keynote in which she talked, inter alia, about the Cost Per Action (CPA) model for advertisers and that it is a long way off.

In a CPA scenario, the advertiser pays only when a pre-agreed action takes place, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, speaking to the advertiser by phone, etc. Google has been testing CPA with select AdWords advertisers in several ways.

For example, in its Click to Call experiment, the advertiser bids, say, $25 as opposed to $2 per click to have a high position (subject to other factors, such as Quality Score) but pays only if someone clicks and speaks to the advertiser via the Google-arranged phone call. The high bid makes it fair to regular PPC advertisers who pay for every click, fraudulent or otherwise, who are also bidding high to be in the higher PPC positions. The CPA bid could be 8 to 12 times higher – I have no idea how it is worked out, but Google has access to the conversion stats of advertisers if they choose to track conversions for online transactions. Where e-commerce is present, it is easy to tell what percentage of clicks end in transactions.

If CPA does catch on, Stephan opines that SEO will become more diversified into helping clients with conversions, perhaps by offering organic search cost-per-click (CPC) which is offered, coincidentally, by his own company. 🙂 Yes, a few SEO companies are already offering similar solutions.

Google apparently uses the example of buying an airline ticket to explain the CPA scenario. As things stand, I don’t think this would happen. For one, affililate commissions on airline tickets are low and probably impractical for cheap fares.

Google Checkout and CPA

Google SERPGoogle’s PayPal-like offering is Google Checkout, which I rarely encounter in real life, where PayPal is still king. Over 12 months ago, Om Malik wrote about some connection between Google Checkout and CPA, and a few others linked to his post, but I haven’t seen the obvious killer connection that is staring Google in its face.

There is some unused space on a Google search results page that could be reserved for CPA without making it too expensive. For example the 8 ads on the right could have some CPA ads interspersed, say in the fourth and lower positions. Or they could start below the least attractive 8th PPC ad but be highlighted to draw eyeballs that would not otherwise be looking here. The usability experts can work something out. Or, Google could use something like Peel-Away Ads for CPA advertisers.

The way Google can win at CPA is to leverage Checkout by offering cheap CPA clicks to advertisers who switch to it exclusively for e-commerce. As Checkout transactions are visible to Google, it would be easy to measure the conversions (Actions). How about a tiered price structure:

  • Sale CPA = 50% of Checkout sale amount or Average CPC rate x 5, whichever is lower
  • Form Completion CPA = Average CPC rate x 3

I am just throwing some numbers there – don’t take them literally. The final numbers should make business sense to the advertiser.

Google Maps go fuzzy

Search Engines No Comments
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The Sydney Morning Herald reported “MUCH of Sydney’s city centre as it appears in the satellite images on Google Maps Australia has been fuzzed out, just weeks before the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.” Naturally, Google has blamed it on a “commercial issue” with its imagery supplier, just as there was an issue with maps of Washington DC. I believe Google completely and implicitly and so should you.

Fuzzy map

(I too had “technical issues” with my  screenshot above)

It would help everyone henceforth if all conferences requiring top security are held in Davos, Switzerland – a place that seems to have no other useful purpose. This would solve all commercial issues and we could get on with more important matters.

The Planet’s 24×7 support isn’t

Other No Comments
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The PlanetI was cancelling my dedicated server at The Planet (EV1) and noticed that cancellations have to be confirmed by telephone or chat. I tried to reach customer service or technical support, both of whom are advertised as 24×7, but both were offline. Perhaps their definition means “24×7 during business hours”?

Pay for more Google storage

Search Engines No Comments
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I have a Gmail account but I never use it. I have so many domains that I don’t need to rely on Gmail or Hotmail to store my email. Unlike many business owners who use Hotmail or Gmail as their official addresses, I think it is more professional to use one’s business domain for email. For those who use anything that is free, Google has bad news.

Storage fees at Google

Unless you receive a lot of emails with large attachments, you shouldn’t reach these limits, but if you use Google Apps or Picasa Web Albums, you will need extra space before long.

Become a Google Business Referral Representative

Search Engines No Comments
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Make as much as $10!

If you live in the US and have access to a PC and a digital camera, you could make as much as $10 by becoming a Google Business Referral Representative. To earn this, you will have to be accepted by Google and then you will visit local businesses, get their details and pass them on to Google. At this point you will get $2. When the business confirms the accuracy of the details, you get another $8. No, you cannot claim any expenses. This is really cheap data collection for Google. Comment below if you plan to sign up.

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