Awesomeness

Jennifer Slegg of Jensense.com reports "Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st..."

As an official member of the MFA/Arbitrage Haters Association I can't help but sit back in my chair and laugh and laugh and laugh. Now if only Yahoo would step up or Google would stop letting Yahoo arbitragers buy traffic through Adwords we'd be all set.

Thanks for helping to make the web a better place Google. You rock!

Optimize for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR)

Greg Sterling recently posted an article on Search Engine Land about Google's launch of Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) search services.

Greg states "Search queries will be entered in the native language, translated into English and run against Google's index. Any retrieved pages/sites will then be translated from English back into the native language".

As anyone who has ever used Google's translation tool knows, machine driven translations often butcher multi-word strings. If I were promoting an English site and wanted visitors in other languages to be able to find my site through these new CLIR powered search services I would discover what phrases people are searching for in each of my target languages and what English phrase Google translator returns for these queries.

If the English translation of the original query makes sense grammatically it may be worth it to use Google's translation of the native language phrase as one of my targeted key phrases.

Of course, for anyone wanting to get a foot hold with readers whose native language is not English I would recommend just translating your content. I like to use Click2Translate for most of my translation needs.

If you don't have the time or the resources to translate your content, optimizing for CLIR may be a good alternative.

Quality Score and Ad Creative

Greg Meyers recently posted an article on "Google Quality Score Myths" on his blog Searchmarketinggurus.com. In the article he said that "what really effects quality score at the Ad/Creative level is any change made to the landing page of a Destination URL field."

In my blog post Optimizing for Quality Score Based Ad Ranking I claimed that changing any part of your ad creative would re-set your performance history. This was based on advice I had received from Google in the past.

Apparently this is not the case any more.

Quality score history is of course just tied to keywords and not to ad creative.

Changing your ad creative may change your quality score on the keyword level as click through rates, etc. change with the new ad creative.

Any changes in quality score will effect your ad's ranking (min bid) in a short amount of time, but any historical factors used to determine quality score are tied solely to keywords. In short, changing ad creative will not change any historical factors related to your quality score.

It still may be a good idea to leave a static ad in your ad groups to combat problems with updating ad creative and dealing with editorial review, but in so far as retaining your performance history there is nothing to worry about.

Thanks to Greg for posting about this and forcing me to review this issue again. It's always great to revisit something and learn something new.

I Googled iGoogle

So about now everyone knows about iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Home Page. With my ever increasing list of "i" devices (all from Apple), I'm a little worn out on the whole "i" concept. Let's see how many "i" devices I have in my home.....

1 Shuffle iPod
1 Nano iPod
1 Regular iPod
1 Video iPod
1 iTrip
1 iHome

That's a total of 6 "i" devices! With the iTV and iPhone firmly on my shopping list and the iRobot inevitably waiting to pop its head up as the next gift I receive, I'm sure I'll be well beyond my "i" quota by the end of the year.

What ever happened to everything being "e" something? Are the days of "Etrade", "Ebooks", and "e commerce" behind us? What's the next big prefix on the Internet? What ever happened to everything being "smart"? Smart phones, smart refrigerators, smart cars? Are we so lazy that we have to shorten everything to one letter?

For now I'm going to sit quietly and wait for everything in my home to be prefixed with an "i"; although I'm a little apprehensive about getting an "iToilet". In the mean time I'm going to be sticking to good old fashion acronyms. TTYL TFRMB.

Froogle Still Shown in SMS Searches

As reported on the "Official Google Blog" Froogle has now been re-branded "Google Product Search". A quick look at froogle.com shows the domain has been redirected to google.com/products and all references to Froogle have been removed from this interface, yet Froogle lives on.

When running a search using Google's SMS based search service results for "price" queries still return "Froogle:" with the results.

To see for yourself SMS a query to Google for "price:plasma tv". I'm sure there all kinds of little references to Froogle lying around and it will take some time before all are removed.

For now, the Froogle brand hangs to life one forgotten piece of code at a time.

A "First" in Ad Creative Trademark Violations

Once again a search engine has dumbfounded me by rejecting some of my ads after I make minor changes.

As part of a new campaign I'm launching, I needed to change one character on about 1000 of my Google Adwords ads. It was as simple as changing one three digit number to another three digit number.

One version of these ads contained the phrase "$x off your first month". The ads have been running for many months now with no problems. On this most recent update the only change I made to the versions with "$x off your first month" was changing that three digit number to another three digit number.

The ads were subsequently rejected because the word "first" was considered a trademark violation. Forget the fact that the ads were already running with the word "first" in them, the thing that bugs me the most is that a common English word would work it's way into Google trademark filtering.

Please keep in mind that there is no company in our market with the registered trademark of "first" so I'm sure this isn't the cause was. Furthermore I was using it a way that in no way would violate anyone's trademark.

I understand the need to filter ad creative for trademarks, but I would hope that Google were smart enough to differentiate between actual trademark violations and the use of common English phrases.

One way to go about this would be to associate trademarks with a list of key phrases. For example if I'm advertising on airline related terms the word "united" should trigger a trademark error message (needs human review), but if I'm advertising for a political campaign I should be able to use the phrase"united" with impunity.

We know Google can easily do keyword association for trademark filtering because of their keyword suggestion and broad match capabilities. I'm just hoping I won't see the day when every word is trademarked and I have to prove to Google I'm not using common English words to violate someone else's trademark.

Inside AdWords: AdWords Editor's "Top 10 Favorites"

Here's a good post from Google detailing a few of my favorite Adwords Editor Features.Inside AdWords: AdWords Editor's "Top 10 Favorites"

If you haven't played around with Editor yet give it a go.

Adwords Reps Moving in the Plex

This past weekend my company ended up moving offices here in Austin. Ironically, our Adwords reps also ended up moving to a new building in the Googleplex.

Supposedly it's a brand new building a little ways off the main campus. There is no restaurant, but there are snack areas and the chefs from the main restaurants in the plex make food in advance and bring it over. Gotta love those Google perks.

Yahoo Talking Smack About Google's Usability

http://www.pcmag.co.uk/vnunet/news/2184316/google-usability-lacking

Considering my disdain for Yahoo's usability on the PPC side I find if very funny that they're giving Google lessons in usability. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks.

Here on some of my thoughts on Yahoo's PPC usability in particular...

"You can't open up campaigns, ad groups, or keyword settings in new tabs. I love being able to go into Google and open up multiple adgroups in new tabs in Firefox. This is a great way to quickly make tweaks on problem adgroups. Thanks to Yahoo's Flash based interface this isn't an option."

"Editing your campaigns through spreadsheets is a pain. Google has given us a nice tool in the Google Adwords Editor where we can easily paste in cells from a spreadsheet to update things like ads, adgroups, campaigns, and keywords. Generally there are no more than 6 or 7 rows needed to update any element. In Yahoo, I have to enter 30 rows of information for every element. I also have to make sure I upload the spreadsheet in a specific format. No easy cut and paste here."

Google Hijacking Unresolved Domains & 404 Error Pages?

As recently announced in the New York Times, Google will start reporting sites sending traffic to Adwords customers utilizing the Google content network (Adsense).

"In the next few months, Google’s advertiser reports will begin listing the sites where each ad runs, Ms. Malone said. She added that advertisers on the Google networks would soon be able to bid on contextual ads on particular Web sites rather than simply buying keywords that appeared across Google’s entire network."

This is an important step for Google because advertisers can easily identify sites which either don't convert well or convert very well. This allows for a much more targeted approach to CPC bidding. These reports will come in very handy in combination with Google's recently announced support for CPC in site targeted campaigns.

Now, I have already seen the reports for my content campaign, and I noticed something very strange. My own domains (not running Adsense) were appearing in the reports. So why is Google charging me for clicks from a site which was not running Adsense?

Basically what's happening is that on certain Dell and Gateway computers where there are pre-installed Google Toolbars, unresolved domains and possibly 404 pages are redirected to an Adsense ads page.

This is also happening with AOL customers, but I'm not clear as to whether this is tied to the Google Toolbar or if this is some DNS based redirect in place by AOL.

If the domain that the user received the error on is your domain (possibly through a 404 message) or "close" to your domain (via an unresolved domain) then your domain will show in your content network logs if the user clicked on your ad via the Adsense page served in its place.

Since a good number of people bid for their own brand through the content network it is probably safe to say that many advertisers will start seeing their own domain in their Google Content Network site reports regardless of whether they run Adsense or not.

Now I have some problems....

Problem 1 - 404 Hijacks:

I have no direct evidence that 404 pages are being replaced with Adsense pages, but the fact that my own domain is showing in my logs makes me think that this a 404 hijack situation. If it was simply a misspelled domain (unresolved domain) why wouldn't the misspelling be represented as a non-resolving domain in the reports? Furthermore, I do see misspelled domains in the report which are only one letter off from my primary domain. Why wouldn't that show up as coming from my primary domain?

I'm curious to see if evidence will surface that Google, Gateway, Dell, and AOL replace 404 pages from a domain with Adsense pages. 404 pages are designed to show the user that they have made a mistake and to offer them additional navigational options. Replacing 404 pages with Adsense ad pages borders on low brow adware techniques and would be a big black eye for everyone involved.

Problem 2 - Unresolved Domain Hijacks:

At the very least Google, AOL, Dell, and Gateway are inserting ads on unresolved domains. Sometimes domain owners want to purchase a domain and leave it unresolved. Now this isn't the greatest approach from an SEO / Internet Marketing point of view, but that's the domain owner's prerogative. This is a good strategy to lock in valuable domains (or misspellings) so your competition can't utilize them.

Now, in some situations your unresolved domain is being served Adsense ad pages without your permission. Of course, your competitors can bid on your brand name through contextual advertising; so in effect your competitors can show ads on your domain without your permission and without you even electing to have Adsense hosted on your domain.

Furthermore, if you advertise through contextual advertising on your own brand you are paying for clicks being generated by someone who entered a domain you own to begin with!

If Google is showing ads on domains without permission (either through 404 hijacking or unresolved domains) will you be able to target that domain through a site targeted campaign? Is it time to start buying site targeted campaigns for misspelled unresolved domains?

I do not think that any ISP, toolbar, or search engine should replace the content on a domain with ads. In the era of net neutrality I'm surprised that Google would participate in prioritizing and inserting content onto properties they don't own. At the very least I think it's time to take a second look at what you're doing with your unresolved domains.

Click Here for Googlebombs

Back on January 25th the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced "By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs."

Googlebombs as you may know is the practice of linking to a specific site using specific link text (anchor text). The most well known case of Googlebombing involved George W. Bush's site ranking for the term "miserable failure". Of course the term "miserable failure" was never mentioned on his site, but because enough sites linked to his site using that term his site ranked for it.

In Google's blog post they stated that they are trying to stop this practice algorithmically.

"Algorithms are great because they scale well: computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages. That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages."

So the question persists did Google change the results by hand, implement a limited filter on the sites they knew were being bombed, or did they implement an overall algorithmic change?

I have a few examples which seem to indicate the changes were either done by hand, or the filters were only applied to sites they knew about.

Example 1 - "Click Here"


As you can see the top 3 results are for Adobe, QuickTime, and RealPlayer. None of these sites have the phrase "click here" on their web page yet likely have thousands of sites linking to them with the anchor text "click here". You could argue these sites were Googlebombed for the phrase "click here".

Example 2 - "home"


Now the top two results here are the New York Times and the LA Times. They do have mentions of the word "home" on their home pages, but there is no significant keyword density or specific information on the site which would indicate the site is about the topic "home". The reason I included this example is because I would suspect that this Googlebomb was caused by internal links (thousands of articles on their sites with "home" links pointing back to the main page).

Example 3 - "This Site"


Again, the top three results don't have any mention of the phrase "this site" on their home page. This is likely the result of other people linking to these sites with the anchor text "this site".

My conclusion from all this is that you can still get away with Googlebombing, but as soon as Google finds out they're either adding that site to a special algorithmic filter or they're changing the results by hand. I do not believe there is an overall algorithmic filter which prevents sites from ranking for terms merely by the anchor text pointing to them.

Google Supports CPC for Site Targeted Campaigns

Google is now running a beta for CPC bidding in site targeted campaigns.

Google Site Targeted CPC Announcement

Site targeted campaigns allow you to advertise in Google's content network (websites running Adsense) on a site by site basis. The idea of site targeted campaigns is that you can more easily manage your bids. If a particular site is performing very well you can increase your bid without increasing your bid on all the other trash sites included in Google's content network. You can also walk down bids on under performing sites without removing the site all together from your campaigns.

Up until now the only bidding option for site targeted campaigns was CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). The biggest problem with this is that you're paying for people to see your ad rather than clicking on your ad. CPC (cost per click) bidding allows you to only pay for people who click on your ad. This gives you a much better chance to track your advertising spend in relation to actual visitors to your site.

In my industry a lot of the sites with Adsense ads on them have unusually high "impressions to unique user" ratios. This means that only a hand full of users create a large number of impressions. For me, paying for impressions is an incredibly inefficient way of bidding as impressions do not accurately represent the potential for sales. Furthermore, as time goes on many web users will start to develop banner blindness to Google's Adsense ads. This means that impressions will start to represent fewer and fewer clicks.

CPC bidding allows me to manage my bids in relation to actual traffic. In the case of sites with high impressions to unique user ratios, CPC bidding allows me to keep from paying for my ad to be shown to the same person over and over again.

I welcome this development over and Google and I have already signed up to become part of this beta. If I get in I'll post my experiences here along with another beta I'm part of (site performance reports).

Google's Master Plan Video

Interesting perspective on the growth and direction of Google in relation to relevancy. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely?