Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

A new version of Yahoo's web crawler has been unleashed to slurp up the web. This new crawler is supposed to crawl the web faster and more efficiently than the old one.

O.K. it's not TV, but Matt Cutts has added Video to his blog. He's just sitting there in front of a blank wall answering questions, but I really like the idea--not in place of normal blog posts, but as a supplement to them. I've been thinking about adding some video to my main SEO business website. Maybe I'll add some to this blog, too...we'll see...I ain't Brad Pitt, but if Matt Cutts can do video, why not?

This sounds cool. Customization is always nice, plus with the gallery, which allows you to submit your custom buttons for any site you want, including your own. It could be another way to let people know about your site. If you get people to install the custom button, it could be a great source of repeat traffic.

One potential drawback according to reports, the new toolbar is only availabe in IE, not firefox. This could be only temporary, or maybe it's not necessary in Firefox since it's such a customizable browser anyway. Speaking of firefox issues, I've had problems in the past installing Google's extensions for firefox for some reason. They always say my version of Firefox isn't compatible, even though it's the most current version...maybe it's just me.

AdWords Blog announces hourly reporting this is a nice feature for us poor saps who don't know what time our clicks and (more importantly) conversions are coming in. This will allow us to see if certain times of day are more effective so we can use the new dayparting features of Adwords.

A great post about How Google News Indexes

Businesweek jumps into the fray with this article about Google's new click fraud reporting. I'm surprised these guys never bring up the issue of Adsense and other similar revenue sharing programs being the driving motivation behind click fraud. As an adsense publisher, I'm happy to make money from Google, but I can't help but think the level of click fraud would be so much lower if they didn't syndicate their ads and share the click revenue.

Businessweek talks about Ghosemajumder's suggestion to move towards a pay per action system rather than per click. Google's experimenting with some performance based stuff, but they'll never move completely to that model. They would lose too much revenue if they did that, not to mention that all their adsense publishers wouldn't like it either.

I think the title of this post pretty much covers it. here it is.

The main point is summed up in this quote:

"I would never say that the Internet isn't changing a lot of things, including perhaps consumption patterns. But in case I haven't made myself clear, I don't think it's changing things as much as Chris does."

This article by WSJ writer Lee Gomes refutes some of the claims made by Chris Anderson in the new book, "The Long Tail". Gomes basically says Anderson overstates the value and size of the long tail. The long tail is kind of a big buzz topic right especially with the book coming out and perhaps even more so among online marketers related to the long tail of search. I think it's good to have opposing viewpoints to keep people honest and to encourage discussion about things (Anderson's response on his blog). I think Chris Anderson has obviously thought about this and researched it a lot more than Lee Gomes, and I think Lee is just trying to be controversial about a book and concept that everyone else is raving about. I haven't read the book, but I plan to read it soon and will post a review when I get around to reading it.

The truth about the long tail is that it certainly does exist and will continue to grow--perhaps more quickly in some industries like music, movies and other media--as more and more people realize the breadth of what's available online. This is an important part of search marketing because as consumers begin to search for these "tail" products, if they can't find your site, you'll miss out on all those sales. I'm talking about the products that you'll only sell one or two of, but in aggregate it becomes a significant part of your business. I think another way the numbers can lie about the long tail is if you look at retailers who don't actively optimize their business to sell the long tail items. If all they offer is the "hits" that's what they're going to sell. To get an accurate idea of the real impact of long tail sales, you need to look at numbers from retailers who get the long tail concept and who actively target those keywords in the search engines as well as make them available through their internal site search.

It's not like Chris invented this long tail thing, he just brought the concept into our collective awareness. As online marketers we need to be aware of it and do all we can to (1) offer those products and (2) make them accessible to potential customers.

From Google's blog...they didn't have a lot to say on the matter, but offer a link to the actual ruling and the settlement info website. I'm sure they're glad to have it over with...although I'm sure it's not the last they'll hear on the subject.

Yesterday Google announced a new reporting feature on Adwords that shows how many "invalid clicks" you're gettting on your Adwords ads. The obvious problem with this new report is that it doesn't do anything about fraudulent clicks that aren't being tracked, it only reports on the ones Google catches, but I see it as a huge step by Google. None of the other PPC engines offer anything similar (not yet, anyway). The actual usefulness of these reprots remains to be seen. If nothing else, it will give you an idea of (1) how many fraudulent clicks Google caught, and (2) how prevalent click fraud is in your particular industry/keyword niche.

The reports are accessible under the "Reports" section of your Adwords account. Just click "add columns" on the report settings and you'll see the option to get reports on "invalid clicks." Google has more details about the new feature in their support section.

I did a couple quick reports to see how this thing works and one account in an insurance related niche had just over 4% fraudulent clicks (..er, invalid clicks) on a very small number of total clicks. Another one in a high CPC niche (credit repair) had 3.8% invalid clicks on about 2500 clicks. Another account had over 7% invalids from a couple thousand clicks--with a few smaller campaigns as high as 25% invalid clicks!

I think Google is doing the best job of catching click fraud and owning up to it, but I can't help but wonder how much click fraud still sneaks under the radar.

In their blog post, Google accuses click fraud activists of overestimating how big the problem is due to financial incentive to do so...this may be true, but couldn't the opposite be true about Google and friends on the opposite end of the spectrum? Don't they have a HUGE financial incentive to make click fraud seem like a tiny issue? The actual size of the click fraud problem is probably somewhere in between the two estimates, but I have a feeling it's more towards the higher end estimates.

Google is trying hard to get us to use the term "invalid clicks" rather than "click fraud." I doubt that will happen, but this is Google we're talking about...anyway, it's the weekend, so I haven't had time to read them, but they reference a couple very documents that sound very interesting, especially the 47-page report by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin from NYU.

I'm interested to see how much Dr. Tuzhilin's report reveals. I think click fraud is a much bigger problem than Google lets on publicly, but I also think Google does the best job of filtering out those useless clicks and being proactive about refunding advertisers' accounts for fraudulent (invalid) clicks. As an advertiser I like to know what Google's doing to catch the fraud, but I also worry that it might give fraudsters too much information and ideas for ways to beat the system (which is why Google has been so close lipped in the past).

» Todd has second thoughts about his guesses about what that cached error message from Google eally means...he recommends Detlev's explanation and also references a couple others (T eh Xiggeh, Wesley Tanaka). Pretty interesting stuff, but way over my head technically. Hey, I'm a marketing guy, not a programmer!

This news is a week old now, but my excuse is that I've been on vacation...anyway, I noticed that Google is now allowing us to opt out of the ODP listing info for SERP snippets. That's been a pain for some sites, so it's a very welcome change (one that MSN led the way with, BTW).

Todd Malicoat is the first one I've seen really dissect the "secret sauce of Google" that was noticed by earlier this month and confirmed by Matt Cutts to be the actual secret algorithm of Google...well, he said it was real anyway, but surprisingly wouldn't elaborate beyond that.

Anyway, Todd's guesses are pretty interesting. Keep in mind that this is all speculation, but Todd's a very smart guy, and his assumptions make sense to me.

I like SEOMoz's new page strength tool. It's getting so much attention (and traffic) they had to take it offline, but it should be back up soon. It ranks web pages on a scale of 0-10 (sound familiar?), but it also shows all the factors that went into determining the ranking. The PageStrength score itself won't do anything other than make you feel proud if yous is high. The data it provides can be useful when used properly. There are tons of tools out there. Some are better than others, some free, some quite expensive. Bart reminded me just today about the free SEO tools on Bruce Clay's SEOToolset. Aaron Wall has some of the best free SEO tools I've seen, including backlink analyzer and the new firefox SEO extension. Speaking of tools, I met Phil Burns yesterday and he was telling me about a very interesting SEO research tool his company has developed. We're going to get together soon so he can show me how it works.

Keyword and market research are fundamental to any successful SEO initiative. With so many tools out there and so many different factors to measure and analyze, it can become very easy to collect tons of data and then not know what to do with it. Making the connection from research findings to applicable search marketing strategy is one of the keys to success in the search engines.

I got an email from Gary Angel related to a comment I had made on one of his articles. I went and checked out his blog and this guy has some great insight into analytics especially related to search engine marketing analytics. Check him out at http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/.

I've added his feed to my daily read list and added him to my list of SEO/SEM blogs...which reminds me, I really need to update that list. I read something like 50 blogs a day now, I should at least add some of the best ones to that list...

According to the Adwords blog, Google is updating their automated process for weeding out crappy landing pages. Here's a blurb from their blog post:
From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we're launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.

Basically, they're trying to get rid of some of the junky made-for-adsense and affiliate landing pages that clutter the Adwords results. It's not clear (to me) exactly how they evaluate the quality of a landing page, but they do provide a set of guidelines for landing page quality.

I think relevancy is a good thing to check for--by that I mean, does the ad copy accurately describe the content of the link that will be clicked on--but who's Google to decide the quality of a landing page? They can't fairly base it on the amount of content. A page with 5 words might be exactly what I'm looking for even though it doesn't contain a lot of robust and unique content about the topic. This is PPC ads we're talking about, not organic search. I don't know how much they can filter sites out without taking a serious cut out of their revenue because those junky pages are all I see on a lot of search results. If you want quality you click on the the organic listings, if you want to buy something you click on the adwords links. Am I right?

This article from businessweek is what I like to see in the mainstream press to get the word out about the value of professional search engine optimization.

It's officially independence day...12:01 on my computer's clock. Hope no one is reading this until sometime on July 5th. Enjoy the holiday. I've got a little 3 year old boy with a freshly broken arm that I'll be helping to nurse back to health, but I'm sure I'll find time to watch a few fireworks, eat some hot dogs and icecream and maybe even watch a parade. 'Aint it great to live in America.