Google Ranking Problems - What Ever Happened to Avril Lavigne?

So Avril Lavigne is getting married. Why should I care? hehehe

While it is sad that I search for said information, it is interesting to note that Garbage.com is the top ranked site for both Avril and Avril Lavigne. Where is the relevancy on that one Google? Is Google trying to say she is a Stupid Girl?

Steve Balmer says they will catch Google on relevancy in 6 months, although Google continues to increase their marketshare, and today launched Google Earth and a truely personalized search service.

Screenshot images of Avril search results below Garbage ranking for Avril on Google.

Garbage ranking for Avril Lavigne on Google.

Yahoo! Search DMCA, Copywriting Advice, Google AdSense Supports Warez Sites

Yahoo! DMCA Policy:
bogus, removing sites without ANY sort of notification. They really ought to work on that. (from TW)

Bad Copywriting Advice:

You can also use copy from the site (no links), like the section where it says, "The only current SEO Book on the planet. Buy the industry standard #1 ranked SEO Book. What do the search engines think?" Etc.

Especially copy on this page:
http://www.seobook.com/buy-now.shtml

How can a copywriting professional offer such advice on an open forum?

Google AdSense Feedback:
Questions for AdSense...

  • Why are many WAREZ sites use AdSense as a business model?

  • Is it proper to use the AdSense spam report feature on WAREZ sites?
  • What if Google ignores that feedback?
  • Is Google telling webmasters that stealing is fine, and they support fraud?
  • Do they want people to run clickbots on their system to get them to actually accept feedback?
  • Are clickbots and other scam software products the only way to force quality into the AdSense program?

Google Video Player

Google to launch an in browser video player, which will likely be compatible with their upcomming payment program.

The recent issue of Business 2.0 had an article about the resurgance of Akamai, and you have to wonder how far Google will span their business model with how cheap they store and serve data.

If Google is willing to store and stream unlimited free data just to have access to it that is going to be a hard for others to compete with.

If Google gets first mover advantage in multimedia search (due to hosting content free and setting up the first viable micropayment network) then they further solidify their market dominating position in general web search while bringing in another revenue stream.

Danny Sullivan posted a brief comparison between the new Google video offering to some of the other video products on the market. Danny said:

The key difference in what Google Video will offer compared to other services is inline playback. Rather than having to depend on having a particular plug-in for a particular video format -- which your browser will often annoyingly opens in a separate window -- Google Video will provide its own lightweight plug-in to display video right within the results.

Nowhere to Click: Google AdWords Ads Without an Ad Title

Somebody got creative over the weekend. Not sure how they got it past the automated ad tester, but I searched Google for Asian to compare their ads to Ask Jeeves ads and found the top AdWords ad did not have a link and title associated with it (and I tested on two browsers on two computers).
Google AdWords ad without an ad title.
Wonder how you get the ad to #1 with a 0% CTR? You could make the ads funny too, like:

I can only afford
two lines.

or

AdWords Ads
half off sale.

I think they know what they are doing. hehehe (they not being Google)
Google AdWords ads image.

The Perfect Shopping Mall: Inside Google

I may have been drinking a bit too much Kool Aid recently, but this post reviews why I think Google has a better business model than eBay... Although I want to, I have yet to read the book called The Perfect Store: Inside eBay. eBay has seen slowing growth, has limited feedback mechanisms, and the announcement of Google's payment processing service is a shot across the bow at eBay.

Buying Cycle:
Sure people buy a large amount of stuff on eBay, but many people only go there AFTER they are in the buying mood. Many people use the web to research, and eBay clearly misses out on that opportunity. Recently they bought Shopping.com, but that brand and service is still targeted at the later ends of the buying cycle.

Google's business model allows them to profit many times along the entire buying cycle, and their new payment processing will allow them to collect a percentage of the sale when people finally buy.

An Ad Everywhere:
Want to search for something? Here are some ads. Reading something interesting? Here are some ads. Checking your email? Here are some ads. Want to buy something? Buy it through Google Wallet.

Trackable, Precise & Easiest Ads to Buy:
There are a few oolies, but generally those ads from Google are the most precise and some of the easiest ads in the world to buy. They also allow people to buy using different mechanisms. You can create search only ads, also place those ads on content, target them to a region, and target them to a language.

Google also offers free tracking so they can collect more market research data.

If you are worried about click fraud on content sites you can buy site targeted ads on a CPM basis. Eventually they will probably add features which allow you to limit the number of times any one person sees your content ads.

Could I afford to run branding ads on About.com? Not until Google site targeting came about. By making the ads available in quantities small and large they get more participants in their ad auction, higher ad prices, and more ad revenue.

Limited Value of eBay Feedback:
The numbers and text eBay feedback comments are limited in value. In the hotel lounge at SES London one of my friends was looking at an item and said the guy selling it had a 97% possitive feedback. Immediately the guy sitting next to him started explaining how that is not a good number. Is it? I don't know, but a 3% return rate is not uncommon for many products sold over the web. eBay has a ton of community feedback, but most of the members still remain faceless.

Trust, Value, & Price:
We tend to be willing to pay more to people we trust. Trust is much more of an emotional issue than a mathematical one. Over the weekend MasterCard announced a breech of 40 million credit card accounts, which happened through what consumers likely feel is a nameless faceless middleman. Until I read articles about it I did not know it happened or who CardSystems Solutions was, and now all I know is that they suck. If people trust you at the other end of the purchase they are more inclined to trust the steps in between.

When items come from a faceless vendor, with mostly textual sales copy, and a one off relationship, it is hard to build a brand and tell a story. That is the flaw of eBay, currently it is limiting how well it can allow it's members to tell stories. There will always be some disconnect between true value and price. Why not host merchant blogs or value added story building tools like that on eBay?

Saving Money & Paying for Certainty:
There is nothing on eBay which deeply motivates me to build a relationship with a merchant instead of bidding a few dollars cheaper to buy the same item off someone else.

The whole frame of mind at an auction is "let me save a few dollars". People pay a premium for the story that goes with something. They also pay a premium for certainty. For some reason I think the Fletch DVD is out of print in the US. I will probably end up paying $20 more for it to know I am getting a certain price instead of going through the auction process at eBay.

Hollow Shops Not Building Trust:
I searched for eBay shops and was brought to stores.ebay.co.uk. They have featured merchants on the home page. Look at how ugly these shops are:

  • Golf Madness - nothing sells golf like bright ugly red?

  • Candle City LTD - I am not sure why, but it FireFox there home page has huge flashing text. what is that?
  • Look Cool for Less - the name stresses save money. not pay extra because you are worth it.

Those were the first three shops I looked at. The individual product pages look so ugly and modularly built that they remind me of Geocities (or Todd's favorite site). The fact that those sites were the featured ones tells me that eBay, merchants, or consumers must not take that idea too seriously.

Brand Extention:
Recently Forbes did a piece on brand extension, stating that consumers believe many brands can be stretched. Some have suggested that Google might want to buy a merchant with a recommending service like Amazon.com (see Epic 2014), but Google has access to far more information, and could probably create a better recommending program.

Pure Data:
Google bought Urchin, and also offers free tracking with their AdWords product. They could afford to give away Urchin, but they charge for it to keep the data more pure. Essentially they are providing a poor tax to filter out anomalies and smaller poorer sites.

Urchin not only allows them to track their own search service, but it also allows them to see shifts in market share, as well as how well competitors monitize their traffic and merchant ROI from competing services.

While it is likely Google will profit from their payment system, they may also want to create that service to have access to more raw data.

Ad Recommending Engine:
When you buy site targeted ads Google asks you to enter a few sites and a few keywords to recommend where else you might want to advertise.

Adgooroo lets people see some of the best terms their competitors bid on which they are not yet bidding on. Based on competing site ad buying habbits and conversion details Google could know where you should be buying ads. Of course, there will be limits to what advertisers define as acceptable sharing of information, but after the information becomes widely available elsewhere it might be considered acceptible for Google to share more data.

Google could even recommend bid prices and use competing advertiser details and web browsing patterns to tell you what parts of your sales cycle they believe are weak and how you may be able to improve them.

Thought Recommending Engine:
Search personalization, semantic web applications, and social filtering help guide people to certain channels and new ideas, helping people find what they love, and helping the ideas spread (causing the ideas to be refined and creating more content to place ads on).

Owning the Stock Market:
Having the most pure data means you have better data than anyone else in the world. Company insiders have some data tha Google does not know, but Google does get a deep snapshot of many businesses, buying trends, and better data about your competitors than you do.

Google could also look at link and news citation data or query volume for business related issues, and perhaps even predict when buyouts or mergers will occur. Eventually Google will probably buy or create something similar to Technorati just for the market research data. Perhaps they could do that with Google Sitemaps (I am not sure, but I do not think Google Sitemaps has a ping feature yet).

Google roughly knows how much value there is in nearly any market at any time. More importantly they can spot market shifts and buy or sell shares in near real time.

Investors are somewhat attached to their money and trade with emotions. Google has access to a large investor userbase which they feed news to and recommend thoughts to. It is not uncommon for a small cap stock to gain 10% or more from being mentioned on certain sites.

Google could create self training genetic algorithms to make bets for or against companies based on internal data. The program could teach itself how to make snap judgements based on self training criteria. This data could be used as one data point, or entirely automated - without any human interaction.

So long as Google was right 51% of the time they would make a ton of money, and surely it would be easy to create something that was right more frequently than that with all the data they have.

Imagine how Google could leverage their reach, their data, and their market capitalization in the stock market. Even if Google did not directly use the data imagine how much money investors would pay to access it.

Employment & Scalability:
Google has made scaled computing cheap, can recruit the top talent in the world, pays millions of dollars to outside sources to create content for it's engine, and scaled their internal system to be able to employ cheap remote workers. Their search data will soon be accessible almost anywhere, especially as the cost of communication continues to drop.

The Perfect Product:
I don't think Google will end up selling physical inventory directly because:

Filtering data is what search is all about, but Google could end up collapsing under its own weight if their hunger for data causes them to lose focus on what originally made them successful & the space is constantly evolving. If Google doesn't screw that up and do not lose their trust factor by collecting more data than people want to give they are poised to be the most powerful and richest company in the world within a decade IMHO.

Google to Offer Payment Services

The largest online ad and information broker wants to broker transactions too. No real details exposed, but this (WSJ sub req) is not a real surprise:

Google Inc. this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may heighten competition with eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, according to people familiar with the matter.

It will be interesting to see what sort of walls Google builds as they expand into other verticals.

You can't dip your toe into certain markets without a strong desire to shut out competitors, but if the moves are too blatent people will shun Google. Their search algorithms and business practices will get called in question much more frequently now. A while ago, due to that hum dinger too much similar anchor text filter Google rolled out, PayPal was not ranking for its own name. Now you will have people asking if things like that are an accident or a feature.

I can't see some marketers wanting to share transaction history details with their ad broker, but if the roll out is smooth and smart Paypal could be screwed. Interesting times indeed.

Notice how this news came out on a Friday evening after the market closed, so Google could generate spin and press all weekend long.

Google Hand Editing "Search Engine Optimization" for PPC?

A friend told me that recently he has seen huge changes in Google's search results for search engine optimization.

Overture, SEMPO, and Search Engine Watch are all in the top 10. Is Google relying more on related community / hub links, placing more value on word relations, or placing more value on human review?

My friend has stated that arcoss the wide variety of sites he tracks that this is the only large change he recently noticed. Anyone else see any shakeups recently?

Is Google trying to get people to think SEO is PPC? That would be evil.

Update: I did a bit of digging around. My other site does not have much in the way of anchor text for search engine optimization and the Google API shows it ranking at #73 for search engine optimization. Perhaps they are better understanding that search engine marketing and search engine optimization are related. Yet another indication of how important mixing anchor text is & will become.

Google Site Targeted AdSense Ads

This page was linked to from various site targeted AdSense ads to explain a bit about how the technology works. There are a couple links at the end of this post which also point to a few ways to creatively use Ads by Goooooogle.

Easy to Set Up:
I just set up my first site targeted AdWords ad account. Setting up a campaign was fairly easy.

This post is my intro to the site targeted ads, if you are interested with my thoughts of it click on and read with your bad self. hehehe Overpriced Impressions:
While there is lots of active discussion on them, I tried to avoid CPM advertising on most of the major SEO forums because I know that its not uncommon for me to generate 50 to 500 page views myself in a day when I am in the posting mood.

The $2 minimum CPM for forums is probably a bit rich for my business model, especially when I can participate in the threads and be seen as part of the activity instead of part of the ads. I might advertise on them soon, but am not yet.

Business Model / Quality of Business / Why to be Social:
I spent a couple hours picking out sites to advertise on, but some people have far more profitable business models than I do. Shortly it will likely get to where site targeting is not a viable option for my current business model, but I might as well try it out while its new.

A good link broker (hi Patrick) or an SEO firm can make far more money than my business model because my business model currently lacks recurring fees.

One major benefit my business model has over most others is that I spend most all day reading and playing on blogs & forums, and thus know many people who are hip and help market my stuff for me. Another benefit I have is that I have low living costs and limited infistructure, so I could change quickly.

Keywords & Site Targeting?
Some people have recently told me that the site targeting also allows you to target keywords on those sites, but I did not see that feature. Likely it will eventually be added. Yet another reason why primarily designing a site about a niche is huge: making efficient ad sales easy to target, automate, and buy.

When you pick your initial content sites to advertise on it allows you to add a number of keywords with the seed set of sites you entered to help refine the concepts you are interested in and offer other similar sites you may want to advertise on. Some of the suggestions were a far miss, but a large portion of them were dead on.

Another useful feature would be allowing you to specify filepaths. Currently it looks as though they only allow site and subdomain targeting, which can make it hard to reach other parts of sites with huge forums.

Context Without Search:
In the past you could not buy contextual ads without also buying in on Google.com search ads as well. With the new CPM program you can buy text ads, graphic ads, or annimations. When you place your bid it is a max bid. Google does a bunch of math to convert your CPM max bid to a CPC to compare it to the AdSense contextual ads for pricing purposes.

By picking what sites to advertise on, and shifting the ads from CPC to CPM, you lower your clickfraud risk profile.

A Low Noise Hello:
One of the best deals with the new CPM program is that you can make sure certain site owners know you exist for a low price. With blogs sometimes you can do that with a comment or a trackback, but it is not possible with many sites. A site targeted ad might be a good way to say hello.

If you randomly start seeing a bunch of ads from my site on your site then I probably targeted your site.

Other Cool Things:

  • Whenever there is breaking news you can quickly add that site to your account to make sure you advertise where large active streams of new traffic are.

  • In the same way that Google makes irrelevant ads pay a premium for having a low clickthrough rate on Google, this program also uses community feedback (in this case peer pricing pressures) to help ensure the ads stay as relevant as possible.
  • This program helps quality publishers get more value out of their content while lowering the fraud risks associated with participating in AdSense.
  • Displays clicks and cost per conversion with each URL.
  • Allows you to bid different prices on each URL within a group.

The Down Sides:

  • Just like all Google ads, the system is a bit unpredictable. I put in a max CPM and ad spend amount, and odds are my real costs will be nothing like I bid and I will get less impressions than the associated amout that I bid for.

  • There were no suggested CPM bid prices, or expected costs listed, just estimated pages viewed in the past.
  • If large advertisers buy up the best ads by overpaying for the best content sites that means that the average advertiser, which may be locked out of many of those sites, might not have much left but the clickfraud and scrapper sites to pick through.
  • When initially selecting a seed set of sites it helps suggest many others. It seems as though after you set up your ad group you can't get that feature back again without starting up a new ad group? But then again I am tired and maybe I missed something.
  • Sometimes I might want to advertise specifically because I want to reach a site owner, but Google considers clicking ads on your own site as clickfraud.
  • It is probably a bit easier to fake page impressions than ad clicks, and Google will quickly be dealing with another form of fraud.

Bonus creative site targeted AdSense ad ideas:

SEMphonic Competitive Analysis, Yahoo! Buys VOIP Player Dial Pad

SEMphonic:
New SEO competitive analysis tool. I have not tried it, but it seems similar to Adgooroo.

Bundles:
of fun & software. Google Toolbar bundled with WinZip

Washington Times:
switched from Google to Yahoo! Search.

Relevant:
EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers <-- I need to take a peak at that.
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000859.html

VoIP:
Yahoo! buys Dial Pad. they also bought Blo.gs

WordPress vs MovableType:
Jeremy Z switching to WordPress. surely thats not a good thing for MovableType. Also, why is the Yahoo! Search Blog using MovableType instead of their Yahoo! 360 or whatever?

More on Google's Secret Review Labs & Why Google Hates Affiliate Sites

Henk posted a couple more posts about his interactions with GoogleGuy on WebmasterWorld, as well as explaining his reasonings for creating the Search Bistro site:

The published insights are not that spectacular. But insight in Google's evaluation of websources is rare. I wanted to forward the details to the web community to get some discussion. Why? People should know how a search engine works. Basically, it's a stupid thing. Intelligence has to come from the user. If he/she doesn't ask a smart question, he/she gets a stupid answer.

Spam Guidelines:
In my last post about Google Search quality evaluators I also forgot to post a link up to the Spam Guidelines document (doc) that Henk posted.

GoogleGuy requested that the documents not be posted, so they may get removed. Downloading copies for internal use and training may be a good idea. The spam guidelines document goes on to show a number of sites deemed as search spam and how / why Google would evaluate them as such. Since affiliate marketing or reselling pay per click ads are the usual forms of search spam most of the examples fall into those categories.

When comparing spam sites to good sites the document states:

To appreciate the difference, ask yourself this question: would any user want to go to www.bookfinder4u.com rather than directly to Barnes & Noble? To http://us.store-directory.org/dvd/movie/B00005JM5E.html rather than to Amazon? The answer to the former question is Yes, because at Barnes & Noble, the user would not be able to see any direct price comparison between the B&N’s price and competitors’ prices for any given item; the answer to the latter question is No or Indifferent between the two.

They also bolded the following statement:

To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site’s existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?

They also go heavily into reviewing hotel sites, stating IAC properties are whitelisted, and showing many spam sites, offering additional tips such as:

One cannot both be an affiliate of others and offer affiliation opportunities. So the presence of the link to become an affiliate is your hint that the site has its own booking functionality and can complete transactions for its visitors.

Automation VS Unique & Useful:
As a summary, most search spam sites are heavily automated and provide little useful, unique, or compelling to the end user.

Recently Rand did a review of a paper about link spam as well, stating

The paper also notes the common achilles heel of spam pages - automatic generation.

and

It is also the opinion of the author that link spam will eventually require such sophistication and effort that it lose its ROI and become a less effective tactic than attempting to obtain natural incoming links through quality content and legitimate promotion.

Why the Spam Guidelines Document is Useful:
Google's reviewers may not be used to directly effect search results, but at the very least they are used to help train the relevancy algorithms. By seeing how Google trains them you get to see what Google wants. If you know what they are looking for it is far easier to give it to them.

Just like pay per click, SEO is a game of margins. Search engines aim to decrease the margins on both fronts so they can extract maximum profits.

Automation can bring great returns until it is caught. Algorithms, editors, search reviewers, and other webmasters who may link to you all look for reasons why people should WANT to visit your site instead of thousands of competing sites.

Due to a lack of sophistication (especially within the young MSN Search) many people are still making large sums of money from low quality bulk affiliate or AdSense websites.

Owning a few of those types of sites might be a good call for creating passive revenue streams, but most webmasters who like the web would do well to create at least one great site about something they were passionate about.

Further coverage on the Google search review labs:

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