The Yahoo Directory and Paid Links

• Search engines, especially Google, have been very open about the fact that they are attempting to eliminate the practice of link buying, or at least track paid links so they can “de-weight” them.  Kinda funny for a company who makes a living selling links.  Granted the links they sell are marked and do not help within organic rankings, but still, a paid link.  Yahoo has somewhat stayed away from this topic, most likely because they themselves have the paid Yahoo Directory, which most seo experts agree helps a website within the Yahoo organic rankings (and likely helps within the Google organic listings as well).  And what about the DMOZ directory?  Maybe not paid, but it sure seems these days that you need to know (or pay) an editor to get in.  And what about Best of the Web?  The owner of this directory and the search engine representatives seem to be fine at any seo conference I have been to.  If I owned BOTW I would be fighting mad at a search engine who has publically declared war on my business model.  Sure, you may get some direct traffic from a directory, but when was the last time you used BOTW to find a website you were looking for?  The real value in purchasing a link within these high PageRank directories is for the back link to help with organic rankings.  Is a paid link less valuable then some guy posting a link from his MySpace profile?  The way things are headed, all the 12 year olds in the world will decide who ranks for what based on their social networking profiles.

Why SEO Matters

• Here’s a great article about people who flounder about thinking that Google is being mean to them, not that they are producing crap content on crap sites. Surely my site doesn’t rank because I have offended Google, or some bad sites are out there linking to me. It can’t possibly be because I have a site whose codes looks like something a cat coughed up, the content is mostly trapped in images, flash, or AJAX, and I have a navigational structure my users can barely move through, much less a search bot. The bottom line is, if you make your site right, you use good content and you obtain links, you will not be in “Google Hell”. The problem is you didn’t enlist the help of professionals and if you did, you didn’t follow their advice. I love when people blame the engines for not ranking them when they have done everything in their power to be ignorant about what they need to do and negligent about doing it. This is why professional SEO matters. Get serious and hire someone or go to Google hell.

Google Lies

• Well….maybe they do.  A while ago you will remember a change to the Google algorithm to stop Google Bombing.  This effectively ended the George Bush Offical White House .gov page from coming up number one in Google for the term “failure”.  There were few enough examples of Google Bombing that the SEO community seemed to accept the fact that Google did not manually change ranking results, but rather changed their algo.

   Enter Stephen Colbert…..the greatest living american;)  With his vast following from his hit TV show, he has number one rankings on Google for “greatest living american”, without, apparently, ever mentioning the words…only through incoming links using this text.  Sounds like Google did a little cherry picking.

Google Quality Score Bombs

• And here I thought Google bombing was at an end. Google recently “upgraded” their PPC system, AdWords, to take a closer look at the ad copy you use in determining their Quality Score. The Quality Score decides based upon your ad copy and the landing page where you should fall in the rankings, but more importantly, what your maximum bid amount for a specific keyword should be to even allow you to play the game. AdWords users recently were treated to a slew of “You must bid $5″ (or $10 in some cases) messages in order to even bid on a keyword. $5??? $10??? Really? That’s pretty steep, but okay, so it pushes advertisers to improve ad quality for some high volume competitive terms. That’s the idea, right? So how about this seen in 1 account for the month of February to date:

  Columns are (Status, Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Avg CPC, Overall Spend, Avg Position, Conversion Rate)

  

  So a keyword that has a CTR of 13.79% (and trust me the ad copy and landing page are extremely targeted) that showed pretty much #1 position at only around 14 cents per click (and is not even that competitive or that popular of a term) should now be set to $5 JUST to activate? How does that even make sense? Obviously the ad quality is good, it’s getting clicked nearly 15% of the time it’s shown! And the other keyword, it’s CTR is still a healthy 5%+, but it actually converted 33% of the time! It’s maintaining a #1 position for only 3 cents, but now Google says it should really be 5 bucks a click? That is just crazy. And it’s echoing across accounts everywhere. Suddenly seemingly well performing or highly specific keywords previously getting top rankings for realistic costs per click suddenly are being forced to pay premium (and not feasible) amounts per click.
  So this bears the question, who wants Google to do this? Honestly, it is a human marketers job to determine what is good ad copy or what is successful. I don’t need or want Google deciding if I have accurately targeted my audience with the offer or message to which they will best respond. Does Google honestly believe that their automated algorithm is going to have any chance at determining the nuances of what human beings respond to in EVERY single different market and demographic segment in the world? No, it’s not possible, and this first week of trials shows that. Google needs to apply their computer algorithm where it’s pertinent, and determining what is effective in driving and converting our customer traffic is not the place.

Frankenbits & Wordtracker

• About a week ago I decided to go on dogpile.com and search for frankenbits. I’m not sure what a frankenbit is or if anybody has ever searched for it, but it was for a purpose. I went into Wordtracker about an hour later to see if this term would show up in their database; it hadn’t. I waited intently for the listing to show up, checking it daily, during my lunch hour of course. Finally the day came, today…Wordtracker showed that frankenbits had been searched 3 times in the past 90 days, and because of this it suspects that frankenbits gets searched 5 times per day everyday around the globe.

  Not so Frankenbits.

  Sure some idiot did a few frankenbits searches, but when somebody is looking for terms to bid on for frank or frankfurter stuff they may see that frankenbits is the most searched term in the world, so they will bid $7.00 on it (not that it would matter, I’m sure they’d end up paying $.01 per click). But when dealing with such small numbers as 2 searches in 90 days, its nearly impossible to gain understanding from that knowledge. It could be a freak accident, a joke, a rouse. Wordtracker is sometimes a helpful tool, but with such small volume, a lot of the numbers loose meaning.

  I hope I rank for frankenbits.

Stupid Web Related Court Decisions

• A court in Belgium ruled that Google News violates copyright laws because they crawled and cached articles from a subscription news site. Uh, maybe I’m stating the obvious here but a couple things come to mind right off the bat. In order to get your pages into Google’s index it has to be crawled. In order to be crawled is has to be either a) not password protected at all or b) served to the spider unprotected specifically. If you don’t want your content indexed, then don’t leave the door unlocked. There are dozens of ways to keep the crawlers out, you can block them with robots.txt, by IP from the server level, or just throw a password mechanism up. You just can’t add a public page to the world wide web and then complain when it gets viewed, that’s like standing naked in your front bay window and complaining of peeping toms. We see this time and time again, a full fledge legitimate court of law having a complete failure of common sense all because it relates to this mysterious “interweb” series of tubes thing. Maybe we need to require some kind of certification class for judges before they are allowed to rule on anything internet related.

Cost Per Conversion Tracking

• ROI Revolution just posted a really cool spreadsheet for using with Google Analytics to determine cost data for campaigns other than Google AdWords. Great for figuring the cost effectiveness of that banner ad campaign or paid link submission.

Yahoo’s Panama Is Pretty Presumptuous

• Apparently Yahoo knows how I want my pay per click ads organized better than I do.  After setting up many, many PPC accounts with the old Overture system, organizing the terms into logical (at least to me) categories, Yahoo took it upon themselves to re-organize the account when it was move to the Panama system.  

  It appears they took each variation and made it into it’s own category.  So if you had 20 terms in a bucket and each term had a different destination URL or ad tile, they made 20 new buckets.  If I wanted them organized this way, I would have put them that way to begin with. 

  Are the programmers at Yahoo so messed up that they actually think they know how I want my ppc account organized better than I do?  I hope these guys aren’t the same ones who created the new Yahoo landing page algo or they may think bidding on bunny and sending the traffic to a porn site is ok.

Google and Backlinks

• Google recently added detailed backlink information to the webmaster tools system for your site. Pretty good stuff, way more info and easier to use than the old link:site.com method. However, this makes me wonder, is this moving them more towards completely nixing the link: feature? Use to be that you could use that to get a full and complete rundown of the competition’s backlinks like you can in MSN and Yahoo still. Now that information is rarely complete if even available at all. Usually you get some random number of backlinks that is always about a third of what the other engines report and if you click past the 3rd page you get the truncated results message.

  My guess is soon you won’t have that info at all and you can only learn about your own site’s backlinks. Whatever, as long as MSN is out there running search technology 5 years behind we’ll still be able to get the scoop on all the different places competing sites are getting their links from.