Weekly Search Buzz Roundup: Microsoft and Yahoo Break Up, SEO Debate Back, & Dinner with Barry :: Search Engine Marketing News
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dear all, it is raining and icky outside, so today’s a good day for a buzz roundup. Enjoy. 
Landing Page Load Time: Check
Your Google AdWords Quality Score now factors in your landing page load time. If you have a fast landing page, you’ll get a great score. In other words, get good hosting!
Google Adwords Enforces Display URL
It only took a few months since Google wanted to enforce the URL display policy so that the landing page URL would match the display URL in Google AdWords campaigns, and now the policy seems to be in full force with pretty much accurate reporting.
Strange Google Rankings Still Plaguing the Internets
Barry likes to coin phrases, and in this case, floating four seems pretty accurate. He mentions that some results in position 4 seem to be floating around — they show up on the first page, 4th ranking, but then later disappear. There are at least two people who noticed this strange behavior and we’re not sure what to make of it.
The minus 60 penalty is not an illusion, according to Google. Google has admitted that it’s a real penalty, and that this penalty usually involves cleaning up spam.
In our May 2008 Google SERP update, we’re seeing some big traffic declines, which may be related (or not) to the aforementioned symptoms.
Google AdWords and AdSense Reports Displaying Incorrect Data
Earlier this week, AdSense and AdWords data was not being properly recorded and Google’s engineering team took a looka at it. The next day, Google acknowledged that they fixed the problem but some people are still reporting inaccurate data.
Microhoo is Not in the Future
After all that anticipation, Microsoft has decided not to buy Yahoo. So long, Microhoo.
Setting Your Geographic Location in Google Webmaster Tools May Not Work
It seems that setting your geographic location in Webmaster Tools may not necessarily give you the rankings you’re hoping for. For example, if you have a .com and you’re in the UK, and you set your site to the UK geographic region, you’re probably not as lucky as the person who has the .co.uk domain, it seems. UK people, give the US folks your .coms (I’m talking to you, Tamar!) 
Please Tell Me that This is a Joke
If Google AdWords are really going Comic Sans, I’m going to puke. Worst. Font. Ever.
Yahoo’s Universal Search is Here
It’s time for Yahoo Universal Search, at least in India where Glue Pages are in beta. My verdict: very nice.
Monday is the Best Day for Google AdSense Payouts
Want Google AdSense money? Yoru best bet is to focus on monetizing your Mondays. We polled you, our valuable readers, and found that most of you are making the most of your dough on the first day of the week. I guess that’s when people get click-happy from work boredom.
SEO Debate is Back
We love SEO. Seriously. Every day, there’s another debate about SEO, and a bunch of people always come up to defend it. I am waiting for Danny Sullivan’s post on how SEO is here to stay. I know he’s working on it.
Win a Date with Barry
We’re having a reader survey, and the winner gets some schwag and a free dinner with Barry. Now this guy is a fun date, so I suggest that you all participate right now!
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Customer Service Protocol 101: The Revised Edition :: Web Optimization Techniques
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by Jane Copland
I apologise for another Facebook-centred post, but something interesting happened to me this week. I also realise that it is a bit strange to title an original post, "The Revised Edition," but this is indeed a complete re-write of my first draft. My initial post was titled, "Cusomter Service Protocol 101: Threaten To Ban Your Most Loyal Users," and it was quite the diatribe. You see, on Monday Facebook threatened to ban me. They said I had been caught spamming. I became very angry, as I hadn’t spammed anyone. I’m also one of Facebook’s biggest fans in an environment where everyone has something bad to say about the company.
This is the pop-up I received whilst reading a message thread between myself and Julie Joyce, who claims that she didn’t find my early-morning ramblings particularly spammy at all:
I read through a selection of items on Facebook’s Warnings page which highlights some of the things you aren’t meant to do with certain features. I did notice that some of its rules about how one is supposed to use its private messaging system are a little over the top, but I didn’t think I’d been sending messages at quite the rate that would set of its spam warnings:
Facebook has determined that you were sending messages at a rate that is likely to be abusive. Please note that these blocks can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Unfortunately, we cannot lift the block for you.
Facebook has several features in place to limit the potential for abusive or annoying behaviors on the site. One of these features is a cap on the speed and frequency at which a user sends messages to other users.
I am not the first person who has been unfairly warned or banned for various crimes. It seems as though you can be done for anything, including (apparently) refreshing a page too often or using the site’s search feature too much. Good thing Twitter doesn’t get upset at you for refreshing its pages, or I’d have been ousted when I put it on auto-refresh about a month ago.
I assumed that I’d been sending messages to Julie too quickly. We were using the message service as a Chat client, which is also apparently verboten. The problem with the stringent rules Facebook has on what you can do with its message services (and a whole lot of other features) is that those rules are carefully hidden. The warnings page isn’t exactly easy to find. You can break their rules rather easily, it seems:
Please note that even if all of your conversations were legitimate interactions with friends, our message service is not a chat client, and should not be treated as such.
This astounded me. You cannot tell me that my conversations are taxing the servers to breaking point and they’d be doing a lot better if I used their new Chat client or, better still, someone else’s. Can you imagine this coming from Gmail? In my pissed-off state, I imagined it for you.
Surely it isn’t a good practice to provide services and limit their usage in ways that most people wouldn’t think of? Online, unless we’re explicitly told, I think we tend to take the liberties of web services for granted. Go through the Warnings page: would you ever have thought that a couple of those things were against the rules? Surely the lesson here is that you shouldn’t be surprised when people break your rules if your rules are a) hidden, and b) unintuitive.
However, when I stepped back from how pissed off I was, I could see why Facebook has some of the idiotic rules. (In my original draft, that sentence was in the present tense.) The company has a reputation as the home of privacy and purity online. Recent failures aside, its reputation as being relatively safe was deserved. There is another lesson here: once you start really angering your loyal users, they stop being loyal.
Imagine my surprise when, almost twenty-four hours after my message to them, I received the following email:
"Hi Jane,
We are aware of the problem that you described and hope to resolve it as soon as possible. This warning is an error and you can ignore it without consequence. Sorry for any inconvenience. Let me know if you have any further questions.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Sydney
User Operations
Facebook"
I immediately had to delete about half of this post. To me, this looks like a real reply from an actual human being. This is very different to Rand’s current communication with Twitter about the Twitter username "seomoz." As you can see, Twitter indicates that twitter.com/seomoz does not exist, but when we try to register it for our own use, the system tells us that the name is taken. Having contacted Twitter some days ago, Rand still hasn’t heard back.
It’s kind of sad that I’m impressed by the fact that I received a response from a real person. I’ve heard so many negative stories about what happens when you try and contact companies like Digg that I expected to be treated in a similar fashion. My only experience with contacting Facebook in the past was in 2005: I was researching online hate speech for a university project and wanted to include Facebook Groups in my discussion. I received responses back then, but the site is a different animal now to what it was three years ago.
I realise this is a little off-topic, but it highlights the connection between customer service and loyalty. The little episode also shows the dangers of creating rules that many people will unintentionally break whilst carrying out totally legitimate tasks.
Perhaps it’s also a lesson in letting machines decide what constitutes spam (again, see the Warnings page for a full list of offenses. Some are totally legitimate. Others are questionable). Of course, from a search engine’s perspective, they must rely on computers to go at fast speeds through data that a human could never begin to comprehend. In the space between Google and a site like SEOmoz, for example, sometimes a bit more human interpretation could be of use. For now, I’m thankful to Sydney from Facebook for not kicking me off. Although I’ll wait a couple of minutes before I send Julie another message.
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Yes Shoemoney SEO Does Have a Future :: Expert Advice on Web Site Optimization
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Now Shoemoney is a friend of mine, but regarding his post SEO Has No Future today, I am forced to disagree with him.
67 Vote(s)
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The Google Content Ad Fraud Lawsuit: Just the Facts, Ma’am :: Search Engine Tools
May 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Google’s being sued for tricking advertisers into advertising on its content network – but the truth may be more damning than the lawsuit claims. Or is there a fatal mistake in the lawsuit filing?
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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3 Tips to Kill Passive Verbs & Wasted Words :: Pay Per Click Campaigns
May 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
One of my worst writing habits is writing filler text, the most common offense being passive verbs. Here are the 3 things that help me write clearer using fewer words:
- Read every day. We emulate what we consume. When I go months without reading books I can feel my writing getting looser. Many great authors, like Stephen King, also offer free writing tutorials.
- Stylewriter highlights writing errors. It costs $150, but is cheap if you want to write for a living.
- Twitter offers 140 characters. Many 160 character messages fit in 140 characters when optimized.
What are your favorite writing tips & tricks?
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How to Sell Remnant Ad Inventory :: Google Page Rank Update
May 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.
“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales. Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent.
The two logical options from there are
- set a floor price on house content and show fewer ads to offer a better user experience
- look at currently hot stories, key markets in the weeks and months ahead, and market positions where you are close to leading but do not yet dominate and advertise your own products and services
- Advertise branded widgets that go on third party networks which help get your brand exposure on those as well. ESPN should have made an official NCAA bracket gadget rather than letting that traffic and branding and traffic go to Google
- add interactive features to your own site which increase brand loyalty and reduce content creation costs…which end up making the ad networks a more viable offering for back-fill content
- If the ad networks are too cheap buy out inventory on competing sites to further distance yourself from them as the market leader.
All of those strategies allow you to buy market-share in your vertical on the cheap. The more of your market you own the better you will be able to sell ads for. If ESPN was 60% of the sports market Nike would be required to buy ads with them, largely based on ESPN’s terms. Part of being remarkable is about creating featured content, but an equally important piece is making sure you are branded as the leading source. There is no better place to market your content and ideas than your own site.
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Trip-Wire Marketing: Stealth and Position Create Explosive Results :: Search Tools For Web Pros
May 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by webwordslinger.com
Trip wires are used by guerillas and regular military to set off explosives or warn that a parameter has been breached. The enemy breaks the wire hidden in the undergrowth, detonating a grenade strapped to a nearby tree. Or, the intruder breaks a trip wire to set of a warning bell.
Trip wires rely on two key elements: stealth and positioning. Both are important to the effectiveness of the tactic. If the wire isn’t properly hidden, it may be spotted by a sharp-eyed scout. And, if the trip wire doesn’t cross a well-beaten path, what’s the point, guerilla warfare-wise?
Trip wire marketing relies on the same two principles: stealth and position, and the tactic is useful in improving both SEO and conversion ratios.
Where’s the Message?
There’s no guarantee that a site visitor will come through the front door. Deep links, buried beneath several drill down screens, may serve as the access point for a visitor depending on the query words employed by the search engine user.
That means a visitor may never see that glitzy home page, and never read about the benefits of a site owner’s goods or services. If the primary explanation of service benefits is described in an article in the site’s archives, key sales information may well be missed by potential buyers.
Trip-Wire Marketing
Marketing and promotion are about pushing the right buttons and creating need. The guy in the $65K Jaguar needs the prestige and status. Otherwise, he’d have bought a Camry. The needs that drive purchases are broad. The need to love and be loved, the need to belong, the need for respect, power, money – just some of the human motivators that turn browsers into buyers.
The key to boosting sales is to position trip wire text links along the well-beaten paths of the web site. Metrics analysis will reveal access points by popularity. Trip wire links to sales and ordering information should be placed within sight of all access points.
Visitor activity will determine where to place trip wires. For example, a visitor may access the site through a side door, read the informational article listed on the SERPs, and decide she wants to learn more. A trip wire link, right there, pushes the right buttons in the right place on the site, linking the visitor to the appropriate page.
Thus, a site owner must not only understand the motivations that drive sales, s/he must also have the opportunity to push those buttons and encourage the most desired action (MDA).
SEO Benefits
Spiders follow links. However, bots don’t always crawl each site page the first time through. In fact, Google provides a look at what pages are in its index and which have been missed.
Trip wire links provide crawling spiders more avenues to explore, keeping them on-site longer, leading to more complete and accurate indexing faster.
It’s not just what your site text says, it’s where the text is positioned that delivers maximum benefit. Well-traveled site paths should employ trip-wire marketing tactics to improve conversion ratios and encourage crawlers to stick around a little longer.
Paul Lalley
editor@webwordslinger.com
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