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Late last month I spoke at the “Successful Online Advertising conference in Auckland. One of the questions that came up during the session on paid search was around the tactics of gap surfing and bid jamming. A lot of people in the audience didn’t know the definitions of these terms; in fact, many had not even heard of them before. I’d guess that many of my readers are similarly unfamiliar with these two concepts. So I thought it might be useful to define them.

First off, bid jamming is something you can do in Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture). Bid jamming is when you increasingly raise your bid amount to just a penny below the top bidder who has foolishly set their maximum bid amount way too high. This forces the top bidder to pay that max bid amount per click, whereas you only have to pay one penny more than the bidder underneath you. Of course, this can cost the competitor a lot of money quite quickly but, if you are not careful, you can get bid jammed yourself in the process.

Gap surfing is a tactic for ensuring your bid is no more than it needs to be to maintain your target rank. So if you are happy to be lower than #1 position and you don’t want to pay too much, you might want to use this tactic. In a nutshell, you scan through the top ranking ads and find the big gaps in bid prices and you bid at the bottom of one of those gaps — e.g. the biggest gap within the top five positions.

I would recommend staying clear of bid jamming, and I would employ gap surfing only if you have a bid management tool that supports this capability. I wouldn’t try and accomplish it manually. Particularly since Google AdWords doesn’t even show you everyone’s bid amounts, so you’d have to continually revise your own bid amounts and monitor your position until you figured out the gaps.

As you can see, there is a lot of complexity and subtleties in pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising, and we’re only scratching the surface here. It goes on to include sophisticated web analytics, and constant automated revisions of bid amounts based on the web analytics data (e.g. the technique of dayparting). Trying to manage pay per click campaigns without the proper tools is like showing up at a gunfight with a sword.

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Russell Brown, Auckland author for Unlimited, conveys the message of marketing change. (as foretold in The Cluetrain Manifesto) Today’s consumers do not have the same shopping trends as they did 5 years ago. If companies want to compete and capture a piece of the market share, they need to seriously focus on the consumer’s needs and wants.

Blogging is a vital part of the marketing mix needed to accomplish this.

Brown references how modern day marketers are making the Web a better place. One of these marketers is Netconcepts, Founder and President, Stephan Spencer.

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A few weeks back I blogged some advice here for business bloggers who might want to consider text link advertising as part of their blog marketing mix.

Well, there’s been a lot of controversy as of late about buying text links. Blogger Phil Ringnalder published a scathing post accusing publishing house O’Reilly of being a search engine spammer. O’Reilly’s founder, Tim O’Reilly, responded to the accusations on his own blog. Google engineer Matt Cutts posted a comment to Tim’s post admitting that Google has decreased the voting power of sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation of some of their outbound links. Ouch!

Matt’s (and presumably Google’s) position was loud and clear:

If you don’t want your own site to suffer the same fate as O’Reilly, you better tag your link ads with a rel=nofollow attribute so that you don’t pass any PageRank score to your advertisers.

In my mind, that doesn’t seem quite fair. Website owners and bloggers work hard to build a content-rich site with good PageRank score. Google’s black-or-white stance on this equates to a diminished earning ability for these websites by insisting webmasters cut off the flow of PageRank to their advertisers. This of course decreases the value of the link ads to those advertisers, and consequently the revenue likely to be realized from them. Granted, no savvy advertiser is going to buy a text link ad solely based on PageRank score, but PageRank does factor into the equation.

This makes me wonder what Google’s position is on BlogAds.com is, which is part banner ad, part text link ad. A good blog ad contains useful content. Why shouldn’t the blogger be allowed to “vouch for” (by not tagging the link with nofollow) the links contained within that ad if they so choose?

Most “white hat” SEOs such as Christine Churchill believe text link advertising is a legitimate practice. I agree with her.

I wonder what Google would do if all the websites across the Internet decided to take all their banner ad inventory they have and bypass the click-tracker redirect that counts all the clickthroughs. Suddenly all these new votes would start counting all over the Internet for commercial advertisers and sponsors. Wouldn’t that throw Google for a loop!

So what is the bottom line here for bloggers who are looking to advertise? It’s basically this: be discriminating in your link buying. Text link advertisements are not inherently evil. Just don’t buy ads on sites where any of the other advertisers on the site are misleading, deceptive or misrepresentative. By that, I mean things like the following:

1. Setting the ad’s link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn’t accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
   e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims “The North Face” but that isn’t The North Face!
2. Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
   e.g. the “Discount Vacations” ad on DailyItem.com points to one of Orbitz’s many “doorway pages”.
3. Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can’t see it, only search engines.
   e.g. Doing a “View Source” on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
   
</noframes>
<a href=”http://www.icrossing.com”>Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a href=”http://sev.prnewswire.com”>Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
</frameset>


And it goes without saying that you should refrain from such practices yourself when you advertise.

This post is based on material taken from on my own blog across three separate posts: Link buying - ethical or unethical?, Buying links - Google’s perspective, and Buying link ads - the ethical debate rages.

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In this teleseminar, Netconcepts’ founder Stephan Spencer talks with buzz marketing experts Dave Balter, Luanne Calvert, Ben McConnell, Jackie Huba, Jim Nail, Jerry Needel and Emmanuel Rosen.

Learn what buzz marketing is, how to implement an effective buzz marketing campaign and why word-of-mouth can be a wonderful tool to add to your marketing arsenal.

Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2

Download the Transcript: PDF (300 K)

Produced by MarketingProfs.com

 

 Buzz Marketing Podcast Roundtable Interview [105:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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In this teleseminar, Netconcepts’ founder Stephan Spencer moderates a panel of email marketing experts, including Chris Baggot, Rok Hrastnik, Eric Kirby, Jim Sterne, and Shar VanBoskirk. The output of which is an insight into email marketing’s true power and potential. Produced by MarketingProfs.com.

Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2

Download the Transcript: PDF (300 K)

 

 Email Marketing Teleconference [106:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Here we are, the last session of Search Engine Strategies. It’s been a great, but exhausting conference. The session I attended was on SEO Tools. Three of the five panelists provided their Powerpoints on their websites (just so happens they were the three best presentations), which you should definitely check out because they show screenshots of these tools in action. Download the first two Powerpoints from www.webuildpages.com/ses and the third from www.epiar.com/ses.

Jim Boykin:
Wayback Machine
Find Age of Website Tool
Poodle Predictor (spider simulator)
Copyscape (website plagiarism search)
URLinfo
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
KwMap (a keyword map for the whole Internet)
Hubfinder (looks for co-occurring backlinks, which may be authoritative links that help satisfy topic dependant link authority algorithms. To use Hubfinder enter a subject, and / or competing URLs to analyze linkage data of top ranked competing sites via the Yahoo! API.)
Keyword Tracker

Todd Malicoat:
Domain/server level information: Whois Source, DNS Stuff, and Check Class C IP Address (this last one is to make sure the links that you plan on buying are on different class C blocks)
Competitive information tools: GoogSpy, SwitchProxy extension for Firefox
Backlinks & offpage information tools: Pages Indexed, Backlinks Domain, PageRank, Allinanchor, Keyword Density tool, Yahoo! Link Harvester
Keyword information: Google Sets, Keyword Density tools, Google Suggest, Snap.com Keyword Stats
Header & page level information: Server Header Checker
Spidering & indexability: Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Sandbox Detection Tool

Ken Jurina:
Firefox extensions: SEOpen, Web Developer, Search Status, PDF Download, Roboform toolbar, Search Keys, IE View (all downloadable from http://extensionroom.mozdev.org)
Web CEO
Click Tracks
LiveSTATS
Roboform
Marketleap Link popularity check, Search engine saturation, Keyword verification

Bill Hartzer:
OptiLink
OptiSpider
Keyword Combinations
Keyword Helper
URL Trends domain analyzer (it also supports notifying you via email or RSS when changes happen)
Sources of other tools: www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, www.digitalpoint.com/tools/, www.seotoolset.com, www.seochat.com/seo-tools

Paul Bruemmer:
Alexa
RankingManager
Linxviewer
Yahoo! Finance
Hoovers Pro Plus
Print Screen Plus

Well I wanted to blog many more sessions than I did, but it ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully for you, dear readers, there were many other capable bloggers blogging the SES sessions. In particular check out the coverage on Search Engine Roundtable blog.

By the way, a big hello to all the bloggers I met for the first time at SES, including Scott Miller, Aaron Wall, and Barry Schwartz, to name a few.

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I’m a bit behind on my conference session blogging. Waaay too many parties going on; doesn’t leave much time for blogging. The Google Dance last night. Yahoo! party at Great America the night before. And tonight I’ve got another party to go to. Yesterday I spoke on RSS. I’ll post a recap on that session later.

I just attended “Search Engine Q&A On Links”, which was great. Lots of useful advice from Google and Yahoo! about linking (nobody seemed to want to ask poor Ask Jeeves any questions). It was funny how obviously diametrically opposed the engines were to the immediately prior session on “Buying and Selling Links”. It’s hard to reconcile the two different sets of advice. Matt in the hallway before this session was adamant: “Don’t buy links!”

Anyways, without any further ado, here’s the session recap:

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves:
Be cautious of: reciprocal links and purchasing links
Avoid: link farms, cloaking pages, invisible or hidden links that trick the crawler
Become an authority on a subject
Focus on your busines and content. Rest will follow. [I say: “yeah, right…”]
Teoma uses subject specific popularity: garner respect in your industry, subject-specific text based links can be understood. (hubs and authorities model)

Tim Mayer from Yahoo!:
Here’s some important news!! Yahoo! has just launched a brand new service: Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search. Stop scraping the Yahoo site for backlink results and use Site Explorer instead. Access via an API is offered too. And you can export as a CSV file.
Yahoo has 19.2 billion web objects in its index. Over 20 billion objects, when you include the audio and video.
Plans to use community to improve search quality. Social search = within a trusted network, where someone within your network vouches for a site.
Create natural linking strategies. when things start to look unnatural, is when you’ll start getting into trouble. We look at intent (linking to plasma TVs, diamonds, and Viagra all on the same page) and extent (i.e. what looks normal. Having everything on the page as links or 200 links on the page is too much!)
Yahoo! offers a much more comprehensive sample of backlinks than Google, but not a complete set of backlinks. New system (Site Explorer) will be reasonably comprehensive, in his opinion the most comprehensive out there.
It’s unnatural to link to sitemap-1 sitemap-2 sitemap-3 sitemap-4 sitemap-5. If you are doing this, you’re headed in the wrong direction.

Matt Cutts from Google:
Good links are earned links, links that are based on editorial discretion.
Create services that really useful. e.g newsletters, an article a day, syndicate through RSS (attribute my article and give me a link). start a blog.
Matt launched his blog today: mattcutts.com
Think outside the box.
Only SEOs and librarians do backlink searches. Historically we decided to dedicate a subset of our servers to backlinks. Only a sampling of backlinks would be displayed but only for a threshold of PageRank 4 or higher pages. A suggestion was made to show backlinks for lower PageRank pages too. We liked that idea so we now show a random sampling of backlinks, including low PageRank scoring pages too. We show twice as many backlinks as shown before, but still it’s only a sampling of the backlinks.
In graph theory, a clique in every node in the graph is very unnatural. So don’t link to every single node in your network of sites; it’ll get flagged.
For dynamic sites, you’re very safe if you have fewer than 2 parameters; keep the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits, and don’t name a parameter “id”. Googlebot sometimes tries variations of URLs by dropping parameters, but we only do that deep level analysis on big, quality sites.
Another good approach that alltheweb came up with: spider would always go 1 dynamic page deep from a static page.
Search engines only grab 100k or 200k or 500k so be careful loading up a huge page with a lot of links.
PageRank isn’t as important as SOME people make it out to be. BUT it’s NOT like “PageRank? Oh yeah let’s shuffle that one under the rug! That was sooo 4 years ago!”
“BO” = backlink obsession
We export PageRank only once every 3 months or so.

Technorati tag: Search Engine Strategies

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I attended the “Search Algorithms: The Patent Files” session first thing this morning. The panelists were Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind, Dr. E. Garcia of Mi Islita.com, and Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search, Become.com. My favorite presentation was from Jon. He was not overly technical (Dr. Garcia lost me at the advanced mathematics talking about calculating dot products of vectors) yet he gave solid advice. Here’s what he had to say, in summary:

Take these patents with a grain of salt, because…
- patent applicants don’t need to use all the stuff they include in a patent application.
- patent applicants don’t have to disclose all of its features in a patent application.
- and they recognize that SEOs and their competitors are pouring over their patent apps.

With that said, there are some valuable learnings from the 2003 Google patent. Search engines may take into account: CTR on your page in SERPs, rapid changes in content, rapid growth of in-links, and length of time users spend on your site.

So which of these actually impact your rankings? Some are red herrings, such as:
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): it’s too easy to distort (e.g. through clickbotting, which is evil and likely to get you penalized). Probably CTR is used for demotion only. In other words, high CTR won’t help your organic rankings, but low CTR may lower your rankings.
- Time spent on a site: when users hit the back button almost immediately, it can signify an irrelevant page or 404 error. However, if this was used then this would in effect reward black hat tactics like mousetrapping and endless pop-ups — tactics that trap users within a site.
- Rate of change in content: Most recent crawl date, last time the content changed, registration date, and first crawl date mostly impacts crawl frequency, not ranking. Duplicate detection technologies are used to find meaningful changes in site content. Meaningful changes in site content do not include putting today’s date or today’s weather on the page — it doesn’t help rankings. When a site changes its IP address, it is often re-evaluated because it is possibly under new ownership.

According to Jon, what’s not a red herring is:
- Rate of change in links: Most Search Engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandboxing, link aging). A sudden jump in in-links (e.g. from link farming and interlinking and triangle linking lots of domains) can draw scrutiny. There are exceptions for ?ĺspike?Ĺ sites (editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blog posts, lots of web searches).

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Hello from sunny San Jose. I’m at the Search Engine Strategies conference - THE place to be if you care about search. I’m going to be blogging the sessions, so stay tuned over the next 4 days.

Here’s my first installment: a recap on the session I attended before lunch today on “Earning from Search & Contextual Ads”. Panelists were: Jason Calacanis, Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc., Will Johnson, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc., Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager of Google AdSense, Google Inc. and Jen Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com.

Jen from JenSense.com started the panel off:
Jen started off by comparing and contrasting AdSense w/ Yahoo’s new YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network). Similarities include…
- very large pool of advertisers
- real time stats
- neither will tell you the revenue split
- can’t show both YPN and AdSense ads on the same page

Differences include…
with AdSense:
- 4 ads in smaller font
- international publishers ok
- offers additional tools & services
- more competition for higest paying
- multiple ad units per page
- “smart pricing” (CTR taken into account in pricing)

with YPN:
- 3 ads in a much larger font
- beta for US publishers
- only traditional ad units
- fewer publishers means less competition
- same ads on multiple units
- no smart pricing
- in future will be able to transfer your earnings to your advertising account

Many alternatives to AdSense and YPN:
- Kanoodle brightads: avg $0.35 earnings per click (EPC). 30,000 advertisers in network.
- Adsonar: thousands of advertisers
- Clicksor: avg $0.20 EPC. 4,000 advertisers running 20,000 campaigns. Will pull ads from other ad networks if insufficient clicks.
- Chitika: avg EPC $0.50
- Mirago: avg EPC .21p (approx $0.31 USD). you must invoice them. 12,000 advertisers
- ContextWeb: over 40,000 advertisers
bidclix: avg EPC 0.30. 11,000 advertisers
- Others include Miva Adrevenue xpress, Quigo, etc.
Rhetorical question from Jen: “When will MSN jump in?”

Optimizing tips:
- Placement: Bottom of page is bad. Good practice is to make link color the same as other links on the site. Anther good tactic is to place the ads on the left column where the nav usually is.
- Proximity:
- Ad unit selection: Try a variety of sizes and test.
- Ad unit colors & borders: Don’t use the standard ad unit colors / layout. Mix things up to prevent banner blindness. Try both complimentary and contrasting colors. Most sites find hidden borders yield highest CTR. like 2 or 3 times
- URL filters: Don’t do it as a way to get higher paying ads to appear. Only block your direct competitors or your own websites.

Testing:
- Use AdSense or YPN channels to track highest CTR & earnings pages. AdSense or YPN may perform better. Try both.
- Test on non-holiday weeks
- Try switching ad placement, ad unit sizes and colors
- Keep track of what works and what doesn’t
- Never assume that what works on one site will work on another.

(more…)

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Any search engine optimization consultant will tell you that links are the currency of the Web. They’re also the currency of the blogosphere. Without any inbound links, you’re just blogging to yourself. In Mike Grehan’s seminal piece “Filthy Linking Rich“, he explains how those rich with links just keep getting richer.

So how can new business bloggers get a jump start in the search engines? Simple: just whip out your wallet. The business of text link ad buying has matured, and it’s on the up-and-up. We’re not talking about “buying PageRank”… what we’re talking about is a totally legitimate business practice of buying text ads where you choose your hyperlinked words carefully based on keyword research and your advertisement appears on a reputable, relevant website. And of course, it links directly to your website, sans click tracking, so the ’search engine juice’ flows unhindered. If the practice weren’t legit, would you see such well-respected link-building pundits as Eric Ward on the board of the link broker Text-Link-Ads.com?

Buying links is not quite as simple as I make it out. Yes, you can use a broker and they’ll happily take your money. Caveat emptor! In order to make an informed purchase, you’ll need to evaluate the quality of the links using a number of criteria. Here’s such a list of criteria, courtesy of the ABAKUS SEO Blog:

1. Inbound site traffic and page traffic.
2. Inbound dot gov and dot edu links.
3. Click though traffic you get from the page.
4. Site in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
5. Age of domain and time of domain being used (longer the better).
6. Inbound links shown to that page on Yahoo (link:http:www.domain.ext/page/).
7. Ranking of page for the keywords it is optimized for.
8. Relevance of theme of site and page to your site and page.
9. Alexa ranking (lower is better).
10. Deep link compared to home page links.
11. Location of link.
12. Length of allowed description text.
13. PR of page (still matters a bit).

Personally, I’d also add to the list:

1. Appearance of any link advertisers on the page that would attract the attention (negatively) of the search engines (e.g.: casinos, Texas Hold’em, Viagra, pharmaceuticals, insurance, Rolex, etc.)
2. Quality of the landing pages of the existing link advertisers (if you find any are spammy-looking, turn and run!)
3. Placement of the link. (i.e.: being relegated to the bottom of the page as footer links is not ideal)

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