Vodka listings raise eyebrows

Google has had a longstanding policy against advertising liquor, along with guns and gambling. Frank Watson at SearchEngineWatch found it surprising, then, when a search for [vodka] brought back Google Shopping results.

The search brought back results from various vendors, along with prices. "Now that does seem like they are contradicting their own rules," writes Watson.

Oddly, similar results are not returned for other liquors like gin, rum, tequila, or whiskey. Likewise, searches for other banned products, like handguns or shotguns, brought back no Shopping results. Watson concedes it could be an oversight.

SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan weighed in on the issue, disagreeing that Google was violating its own policy because Shopping results are not the same as ads. On Sphinn, he comments:

[T]hat's not a "Google Checkout" box that's appear. It's Google Shopping results….Just like regular Google web search, you have paid and unpaid results in shopping…. You could argue that if Google wants to ban things in ads, they should ban the same things in editorial results. But Google's never claimed to be consistent here, when I've talked to them about it in the past. Some things they don't want ads for (some things they also by law can't take ads for), and that's it.

Glitch or not a glitch, hypocrisy or not, Sullivan makes a good case. It's still odd only [vodka] brings up anything.

Buyout The Best Sites, Beat Google

By David A. Utter - Thu, 05/15/2008 - 11:28am.

Mark Cuban suggests a new way to stop Google

Mark Cuban suggested Yahoo or Microsoft could payoff the top five sites for each of the top 25,000 queries on Google, have those sites leave the Google index for good, and bring Google's normal traffic for those sites into the rival fold.

Tech billionaire and NBA team owner Cuban must still be reeling from his Mavericks being ousted from the playoffs already. He's got a doozy of a post up on his always entertaining Blog Maverick site about beating Google the old fashioned way, by buying off their most valuable search results.

"How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted?" he asked. "A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average?"

Cuban's post included the suggestion these sites dump Google's publisher network in favor of the one operated by whoever buys them out, effectively recouping whatever investment the rival site made to get those sites out of Google's index and revenue stream.

Per site, it could be a lot. Financially, a Microsoft possesses the resources to pull this off, but the real issue isn't the sites, but the searchers who expect to find the best results for a top query when using Google.

John Battelle flatly stated "no one would do it," as far as selling out and leaving Google entirely. He suggested Cuban should try the strategy out, since he has the money to do it.

Inertia presents the real problem in getting people to switch search engines. They use Google out of habit, plus the idea that everyone "Googles" anyway. There's no motivation to switch. People would just treat the next batch of search results as the ones they want and click from there.

"Time to go back to the drawing board on beating Google," Andrew Parker said of Cuban's suggestion. Indeed, it seems it will take a lot more than money to overcome the inertia that keeps people tied to Google today.

Google Says You Can't Buy The Top Ad Spot

By David A. Utter - Tue, 05/27/2008 - 8:10am.

The ad clicker should benefit the most

Wealthy businesses and smaller operations all compete fairly when it comes to testing ad quality, and thus a placement at the top isn't a divine right for anyone.

Ad quality becomes a bigger issue in the coming weeks, as Google plans to subject advertisers to landing page load time assessments. Speedier pages, which will mean those without lots of plugged-in third-party content, will receive better ad quality scores.

Google's strategy considers quality as king of the advertising and visitor relationship. Relevant search results are no longer enough; it might be suggested that certain competing search engines would suit people as well as Google does for queries.

Better ad destinations make the organic search results look that much more valuable. Google's strategic shift from quantity to quality ads over the past few months means they believe the company makes more money from a single well-conforming ad than several less-pertinent ones. Google isn't about to leave money on the table, and neither should its clients.

The issue of ad quality appeared in a post at Google's Testing blog. Alex Icev wrote about the team and process involved with ranking the quality of search results, and how that transitioned into work on the advertising side.

"We needed to change a system that was predominately driven by human influence into one that (built) its merit based on feedback from the community," Icev said. He detailed a little of the process behind this, especially in the context of moving poor performers out of view:

The idea was that we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad's landing page was not relevant, or if users don't like an ad's content. We want to provide our users with absolutely the most relevant ads for their click.

Even though the big change to scoring ads based on concepts like landing page speed hits everyone, we think the bigger spenders have an advantage, and always will have, when it comes to bidding for certain lucrative keywords.

The most competitive keywords spur advertisers to improve their all-around page quality. When all other factors are equal, the bid spend makes the difference. Advertisers spend more, and Google profits. With luck, the visiting ad-clicker benefits the most.

10k ppc experiment part2

10k ppc experiment part2

This is a second and final post to my experiment with pay per click engines. This is mostly based on my theories and social engineering. Please make sure you do your own research before jumping into PPC. For a smarter approach to ppc check out graywolfs excellent series called Adsense Arbitrage:

• Automation and Button Pushing
• Keyword Selection

Final Target Acquisition:

So I feel somewhat comfortable with Adwords but I still felt that I could get more bang for my buck… well more buck for my buck to be technical. So I started doing some research more research. What is it that we are selling? Well in order for a Ringtones ad to “convert�? a user has to put in there phone number then they are text messaged a pin code they must enter into a site. This I a very nice 2 step process for a payout unlike some other things. Who is most likely to freely give out there phone number? Ya… your kids.

So we know we can already eliminate Nextel because they cant use any of the Ringtones offers were are doing. Now lets look at some further demographics of our targets. After doing a quick Google search we see that the average age of cellular phone users is 21. Also you can see that Verizon Wireless customers are very choosy and like to shop around. I attribute this to the fact the have the oldest userbase in the industry with an average user age of 25. In my mind this makes them not such a good target. The next highest age on average is Sprint with an average age of its users being 23. Sprint also has the 2nd most corporate clients behind Nextel which makes them (in my opinion) less likely to submit there phone number to a website for some “No Charge�? Ringtones.

So I am going to target Cingular and T-mobile users. Cingular in my opinion is the best demographic to target. They have an average age of 19 years old. T-Mobile is VERY close with an average age of 19.5.

Now I check this data with the data from my previous conversions:

Cingular: 38%
Tmobile: 34%
Sprint: 25%
Verizon 18%

This is just going off of my previous Adwords data this means that for every 10 Cingular people that are clicking on my ad I am converting 1.8 For Tmobile 1.7 and you can guess the rest.

So if the offer pays 15$ and I have an 18% conversion that means I am Grossing 2.70 cents per click. For 38% I am grossing 5.70 cents per click.

So now we have some numbers to work with. Lets move on before my head explodes.

Adwords: I run all offers on only the Google network. I do not run on any content network (ask.com earthlink. etc) I just find that I get a bad return on those. I am sure they work fine for other niches but for me its not doing it. For the most part with Adwords I set my bids and had a max budget of 300$/day. Fire and forget. I stayed strong on my Adwords bids. I have data that shows what I need to spend to convert so there really is no guesswork involved. If the bid goes up then I am not showing ads. If it comes down then my ads are in full effect.

CPM Targeting for the win… Here is a dirty secret. CPM target sites where the only good content is the AdSense ad. Here is the deal… with AdSense lets say it costs you 6$ to be #1 for Verizon Ringtones for search results… but ohh wait, what is this??Why it’s the #1 ORGANIC Google result for the phrase “Verizon Ringtones�? and it only costs me 10$ CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or roughly 1 cent per impression). Since this ad is really the only relevant content it converts REALLY WELL.

In general site targeting these sites is a really good investment. These guys only build these sites for 1 reason… to get AdSense clicks and the other dirty secret about them is they convert really well because the user gets exactly what they were searching for. The key to finding them is just searching on various search engines. Google for the most part does not feel these sites should get good organic listing but that does not mean that they are not making money off of MSN and Yahoo ranking these sites high. Make sure you search them also for these kinds of sites.

Yahoo Search Marketing:

Yahoo Search Marketing was quite a bit more fire and forget then Adwords. I did not have to write 80 million ads to get my quality score up and this was really pretty simple. I scraped about 15,000 terms up using overture inventory, Google suggest and some other tools around the net for anything related to “Ringtones�?. I went ahead and approved any bid that it said cause I was going to edit them later…. MISTAKE!!! I had stayed up all until 5am to get all these terms in and it said it would take up to 3-5 days to approve them… well crap. I am going to bed. Then I wake up and they were approved and I burned through about 1800$ DOH. Some clicks were as high as 8$!!! I did get some return on my investment but my first day of yahoo was a bummer due to my lack of foresight. I now have set my daily budget to 300$ and also adjusted all my approved bids to 13 cents. Amazingly enough I got a decent amount of traffic from this that was converting. I really like yahoos placement targeting where you can specify where you want to be placed. I choose to be in position 3 and while that made my average cost go up about 600% I also got a TON more exposure.

Over all I was surprised at the lack of features with Yahoo Search Marketing. I mean these guys have been doing this the longest right? (Formally known as overture) That’s what I thought anyway… I hate having to wait DAYS to see if my listings get approved… and also I found the editing of listings to really suck. If I wanted to change something even if it was the website address it almost always got denied… They defiantly have some improving to do.

MSN AdCenter:

Ok positives first… MSN is by far the cheapest place to buy clicks. You can get tons of good 5 cent clicks. Also the traffic seems to convert 3-4% better then any other PPC program I tested. Also with MSN I did not have to write assloads of ads. It was pretty much fire and forget.

The downsides to AdCenter:

* There is not much traffic… even for top phrases. I had set my budget on AdCenter to 300$/day and it never got close to that.

* Import/export really sucks… forget trying to mass import large-scale keyword lists. I ended up doing them about 100 at a time and that… sucked….

Adbrite:

Adbrite is really the true diamond in the ruff. You have to search for them a bit but you can find them pretty easy. I never paid more then 8 cents a click and got many clicks for around 2-3cents.

Adbrite is somewhat a different monster then the others. You pay on a time period based level for the most part so you want to encourage users to click on the ads as much as possible. Because it costs you the same. The goal for Adbrite is to get as many clicks as possible.

The Bottom Line:

Over all the 40k experiment turned out to be a really profitable experiment. I have tried not to focus too much on specific numbers because people always get so hung up on figures. In order to comply with the broad TOS seemed to be shared by most of these PPC engines I am not going to specifics. I will say that on the whole Adbrite performed by far the best bang for the buck. I will say that Adbrite performed the best profit wise and CPC wise. Also keep in mind that I only played in the Ringtones arena and my methodologies produce many different results then others.

In March using these 4 networks I budgeted $40,000.00 Of that $40,000.00 I was only able to spend $28,932.75 for a total gross return of $144,329.29 for the month of march from cj.com and azoogleads.com Ringtones affiliates. The last parting words I have is do your homework. Find out what you need to spend to make a profit then stand strong on your bids. I HIGHLY recommend not using any automated bidding software for PPC-> affiliate.

Good Luck!

Note: I was SUPER sick when trying to write this post and jacked up pretty good on cough meds. I will do follow up posts.

Written By: ShoeMoney

Organic SEO vs. PPC?

By Kara Ratliff - Tue, 11/06/2007 - 9:58am.

So, what’s it going to be? Spend the time and effort cultivating your organic search engine marketing plan or just offer up the cash and invest in a pay-per-click program? Which is better for you? Both?

Organic SEO vs. PPC?

It’s a question most, if not all; businesses will eventually have to ask themselves in the course of developing their Internet marketing strategies. Which alternative offers the best return on investment? Which one is more easily managed?

When you purchase visitors or "clicks" from a search engine, this is called "pay-per-click" (PPC) search engine advertising (or PPCSE). Pay-per-click search engine advertising allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by "bidding" (paying) for keywords related to your product or service.

On the upside… you’re free from the headaches and worry of trying to figure out what any given engine’s algorithm is up to and how it impacts your position. It’s scalable and controllable – you know exactly how much you’re spending and (ideally) have a good idea of what you’re getting in return. It’s also very fast. No waiting around here… just sign that check and watch your results.

On the downside, it costs several coins – sometimes quite a lot of them actually, to get really good results. The low hanging fruit of paid search has long since gone now that mainstream advertisers and Fortune 500s have jumped into the space. Paid campaigns are also not without their headaches. Coming up with effective keywords to bid on is a job in and of itself. Managing what you’re spending on what keywords, measuring their returns, adjusting your spends and playing the PPC game intelligently is a full time gig.

In the other corner we have "Organic" or "Natural" search engine optimization (SEO). Generally speaking, organic SEO consists of optimizing your web pages to enhance their position in the naturally occurring search results. Asking what goes into organic SEO is a lot like asking what goes into a Twinkie. You start with sorbic acid, which derives from natural gas. Ok really organic SEO consists of making sure the search engine spiders can crawl and understand what is on your web pages. Once they understand it, you need to make them like it more than all the other web pages with the same/similar information.

It’s about as easy as it sounds. In essence, you are just making sure your content on your page is in good shape and then start trying to move your pages up the results by doing things like cultivating inbound links from other sites. Inbound links dictate your "link popularity" so, by acquiring (ahem… however you do so) links that point to your web site. You can boost your rank in the search results.

That established, we decided to ask some of the experts which type of marketing most sites should be using: organic SEO or PPC? Executive Vice-President of SiteLab, Dana Todd, a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney Media Group, Inc. have both been there and done exactly this with both methods.

Jeremy felt like, as a rule of thumb, the majority of bloggers should generally use organic SEO because they aren’t really selling a product. For those companies and sites that are trying to sell a physical product, PPC has quicker results.

He said, "Whenever you have a physical good, that you know what it's worth and you know what that value is, then it's real easy to use Pay-Per-Click. You know exactly how much to spend to make money."

Dana Todd emphasized the fact that everybody can benefit from organic SEO. Dana says, “(each form of) Advertising has a completely different place in your media mix. We would never recommend, here at SiteLab, that you do one or the other; you always do them both wherever possible."

Jeremy and Dana both felt that neither method was sufficient by itself and indicated that everyone should look at trying both if at all possible. For some sites, depending on your goals, it often makes sense to allocate more or less resources to one form or the other. However, for most sites looking to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy, most any plan should include components of both.

To find out more details of the interview with Shoemoney and Dana Todd, you can watch the video and gain helpful tips of how to start and what to do when tackling marketing online.

About the author:
Kara Ratliff is a reporter/anchor for WebProNews.

CEO Says SEO A Waste Of Time

By Mike Sachoff - Tue, 02/27/2007 - 3:49pm.

Is search engine optimization a waste of time? According to one man in the UK it is.

Anthony Fallon, CEO of Warrington Web Works, a UK Web Publishing company says that search engine optimization is both a waste of time and money to businesses and he can support his argument with proof.

Fallon says that businesses who are using distribution technologies, such as RSS, writing content for the benefit of site visitors and the improvement in Google’s search technology means an end to jockeying for the top ten coveted positions in a search engine.

He asks the question, “Is this the end for the SEO Industry?”

Last week Fallon wrote an article called “SEO Mind Crime” for Warrington Web Works, a site he writes for to keep readers up to date on web 2.0 technologies.

In the article he weighs in on why SEO is a waste of time and money.

The idea for the article came from a meeting with a client.

The client had been quoted $29,000 for search engine optimization services from a competing company.

The competitor was guaranteeing a spot in the top ten of Google for three years for popular industry keywords in the natural search results.

“Not even Google can guarantee that!” says Anthony Fallon. “You can’t just tell business owners what a waste of money SEO is, you have to prove it. The SEO industry has all the statistics they need to bluff the money out of the coffers of any business.”

To prove that SEO is waste of time he told his readers as a test to search for his article “SEO Mind Crime” on Google over the next few days.

The article was posted on Wednesday and 24 hours later the article appeared at positions 3, 4 and 6 on Google’s first page.

This was out of 826,000 indexed pages and Fallon believes that is proof why SEO is no longer needed in Web 2.0.

“Web 2.0 it’s all about your visitor,” Anthony added. “The new distribution technologies like RSS will get your message out there without any magic or manipulation of search results. The quality of Google’s Search technology is really coming on in leaps and bounds. If businesses can get in front of their customers without stuffing their content with keywords, it has to be a good thing. As for the SEO Industry, good riddance I say.”

About the author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews.

SEO Does Have A Future

By Michael Gray - Fri, 05/09/2008 - 3:07pm.

Now Shoemoney is a friend of mine, but regarding his post SEO Has No Future today, I am forced to disagree with him. Not only does SEO have a future but judging by the number of SEO clients I am turning away, and the number of job offers I am receiving on weekly basis to take on in house positions, all during a shrinking economy and a recession, the future is looking pretty bright for SEO …

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created. Want to solve that problem require your designer read Designing With Web Standards before they give you a single markup or deck.

Until programmers and developers learn that cool widgety, pop-up, slide-out, spinning flaming skull javascript based mystery meat navigation is completely uncrawlable, and renders your website invisible to every search engine, and an SEO has to come in design a flat text based alternative navigation, SEO is alive and well. Until your programmers and developers learn that no matter how sexy the UI is, if your users and customers cant figure out what to do, SEO’s with a firm grasp on usability will always have a job. Want to solve that problem give everyone on your team a copy of Don’t make me Think by Steve Krug still relevant after 8 years.

Until CEO’s learn that flash websites with lots of eye candy and sizzle are great for entertainment, but don’t work because they break basic web functionality like the back button, an SEO is always going to be needed to bring things back down to earth. Want to help them really get the point, show him the flash website on an iPhone, then get them to read Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed and Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.

Until old school marketing people like Peter Sealey stop thinking of search engines and the company website as an afterthought and SEO is always going to need to convince executives this interweb thing isn’t just a flash in the pan. Until companies start to realize they are slowly losing the ability to control the message and need to embrace that customers can control what the internet says about you, an SEO is always going to have to use techniques to address reputation management problems. Want to fix that problem start handing out copies of Small Is the New Big by Seth Godin.

Until Advertising and Copyrighting departments learn that the medium is shifting from a top down model to a more conversational one to one model, an SEO is going to have talk about content. Until companies start to understand you have to be more than brochure ware and solve someone’s problem if you want people to use and link to your site, and SEO is going have direct content creation. Want to solve that problem reread the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Until Public Relations departments understand that a press release isn’t exciting or useful to anyone except journalists and reporters, an SEO is going to have to explain viral marketing. Until clueless people like Clive Thompson realize that fame, ego, and cold hard cash can motivate people, you are going to need an SEO aware social media consultant to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot. Want to fix the problem read Tipping Point, Made to Stick and Trendsspotting.

Until your legal department realizes being politically incorrect is really an asset, an SEO is going to have to explain the concept of appealing to the linkerati. Want to fix the problem get them to read The Big Moo.

Until Web 2.0 startup companies and Venture Capitalists start considering SEO as part of their business plan from the start, an SEO is going to have to save a company from shooting itself in the foot at every turn. Want to fix the problem get everyone to read the Dip.

Until everyone realizes that a good SEO is also part marketer and all they have to do is push the right buttons we are going to have these debates about SEO being dead or not. Until people realize just like good lawyers and bad lawyers there are good SEO’s and bad SEO’s it’s really just a semantics debate.

The question is are you learning anything from the debate? Are you learning how to get links from it, how to get attention, and how to turn them into billable accounts and hours? If you aren’t, and you are just in it for the drama, then you really aren’t an SEO, you’re an SEOFakester (&tm; sugarrae).

About the author:
Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org.

SEO Has No Future -

SEO Has No Future

I did a interview last night and was asked some really really good questions. One of which was what is the future of SEO?

My honest answer is there is no future in SEO. From my experiences I am seeing Google SERPS results strongly influenced by Google Toolbar data, Google User history, and Google Analytics data. Googles combination of SEO and social voting via toolbar/history/analytics will continue to sway more in the realm of social voting. I feel this technology will only get better. I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing. After all if you read the spam as defined by Matt Cutts (Google Lead Spam Engineer) he says:

“Web spam is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their Web site shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up,” - Matt Cutts

That is most SEO at its core. Sure you add title tags and meta descriptions but then you have to incentivize people to link to it. You are now seeing lots sites rank for stuff that have the goofiest URL structure, unoptimized title tags, and bad description tags.

Some of the best examples of how the Google algorithm is more favoring social voting (via above methods) are seen with the Google Sitelinks. I have had things show up on sitelinks that were completely noindex/nofollow and had no meta description or even on page content yet were the first item listed in my sitelinks… coincidently they were also the most trafficked item on my site.

So in my opinion there just is no future in current SEO for Google anyway. Its not going to happen overnight but it is happening.

Please keep in mind I am not a professional SEO and have never claimed to be. My opinions above are purely based on my experiences.