SEO UPDATES

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Now, onto some AdSense news from a few days ago (in case ya misted it!):

JenSense broke the story of Google’s own AdSense page being hijacked in the SERPS of Google.

This is just silly. Someone thinks they can hijacks a Google page get away with it? LOL. Not.

Jen sez:

When you decide to hijack a site in the Google serps, it makes sense to do one that will benefit you in some way, while not raising yourself too high on the search engine’s radar. So, it obviously makes perfect sense to go and hijack the Google AdSense site

This is the best though. Kevin at All-In-One-Business.com replies back in the comments:

I want to thank JenSense and others for posting this thread.

Thanks for the comment Air Charter. I just got off the phone with two different tech writers explaining why I would have a meta redirect on my site.

It isn’t an attempt to profit from either Google’s page rank or some cloaked affiliate link.

I am no hijacker. In fact, I’m not sure how I could in any way benefit from this link.

The simple fact is this: I write and syndicate articles all over the web. I used to put into those articles direct links to sites I was talking about.

A couple years ago I had a problem when I had written and syndicated several articles about GoTo.com when they changed their name to Overture. There were dozens of websites to notify and ask them to update the links in my articles.

So I decided to begin using meta refresh redirects rather than listing the URL’s directly. I can then keep the links current in all the articles I write.

Hopefully Google will look at this and decide to make some changes so this won’t occur. It’s hard to believe I got a number 1 listing without trying.

Can anyone these days ever just admit when they’ve f’d up and come clean? Feh.

JenSense reports that Adwords advertisers can now negative filter publisher sites:

AdWords advertisers now have the ability to add AdSense publisher websites to a new tool called “Campaign Negative Sites”. This means that advertisers who have one or two websites they wish not to have their ads appear on (whether they are competitor sites or just sites they deem as lower quality) can now easily add those URLs to the filter, and their ads will no longer show on those sites, while still be able to run unaffected on all other publisher sites.

I have been a beta tester of this awesome feature, and am very happy to see it finally released to everyone – for both the advertiser and the publisher benefits. Speaking from experience, it works very well, as other advertisers will hopefully be discovering too.

Sounds like a great way to increase your AdWords ROI and keep your ads off of low-quality “webspam” sites, etc.

(via SEO Book)

… unless you have the legal budget to back it up.

Google Blogoscoped reported how SEO Inc. dropped out of Google’s rankings for virtually every SEO-related term, including their company name.

SEO Inc. fired back with a cease & desist notice.

Some people / companies will never learn.

After sending the cease & desist, Boing Boing eventually picked up the story.

A tiny little weblog post on a not-so-widely-read blog suddenly gets BoingBoing’d after getting the lawyers involved, and probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Boing Boing readers now have a negative impression of SEO Inc.

Andi Baio broke another webspam story recently, this time on Syndic8 hosting articles on their various sub-domains.

An update on the article reads:

May 6, 2005: Philipp Lenssen reports that Syndic8.com was removed from Google’s index entirely. By e-mail, a Google engineer also confirmed that the Google AdSense account for Syndic8′s ad affiliate was terminated.

I agree with Aaron Wall in the comments, who states that it’s Google’s responsibility to make sure people aren’t cheating AdSense. If their quality control for the AdSense program was more rigorous, this wouldn’t be an issue. They’re passively supporting this practice by allowing people to profit off it.

Ouch! That’s pretty harsh, but I guess they had to make a lesson out of someone for all this “webspam” + AdSense that’s floating around out there.

Google, currently the most popular search system, is today rolling out its new advertising program. The L.A. Times reports that Google intends to capitalize on the $9.6 billion online ads generated last year with its new program:

Advertisers will be able to search Google’s database for websites relating to specific subjects, then bid on how much they’re willing to pay to place either text or display ads on each site. The program builds on a limited test of graphical ads launched on partners’ websites late last year.

For some, such as TheStreet.com’s Kevin Kelleher, Google’s move signals a return to a past marketing model–at least, in appearance. This is because

The plans would further detach many of the ads Google sells from its search engine, expanding the company’s role of broker to advertisers seeking to place ads on third-party Web sites.

Google, in other words, is looking more and more like an advertising company than, as they oft described themselves, an information dispenser. In doing so, they are stepping up their challenge of Yahoo!’s, AOL’s, and MSN’s plans to dominate the online advertising space. Yet Google may endanger their own lead as a search system by changing Internet users’ perception of the company. Today, Google is highly respected for the simplicity of its product(s) and for seemingly adhering to the philosophy they have promulgated, “Don’t be evil.” By focusing on advertising, however, Google may be viewed as more concerned with the bottom dollar than the quality of its information-dispensing products. Google may not quite be evil yet, but with their expanding forays into new adverising programs they’re certainly less angelic than they’ve heretofore presented themselves.

Great article over on the ClickZ network that talks about Google’s new patent filing:

Google reveals in the filing its ranking algorithm is organized to thwart overly aggressive marketers. It confirms something search marketers have long suspected: Google watches how fast new links to a site appear as a way to detect and penalize search engine spam. If too many new links appear in too short a timeframe, the site may be penalized, or even banned, by Google.

According to the filing, Google also watches how many new links with identical anchor text emerge. This is another clue links may be suspect or mass-manufactured. Additionally, Google monitors the rate at which links disappear to identify the degree of relevance and sort out spam. If Google does these things, you should assume other engines do something very similar.

If you were to switch to an affiliate platform that caused all your affiliates to link directly to your site overnight, all using the same anchor text, red flags would very likely be raised with Google and other search engines. Your site might be banned or, at the very least, experience a sudden decline in rankings. Either scenario costs a lot of money and take months to repair.

Read more here

Just came across this great thread on Webmaster World.

If you are running AdSense on your website, and haven’t yet experimented with the new Ad Links unit, you should definitely give the entire thread a good read.

Some highlights:

I have tried AdLinks in two different locations on a 3 column layout:
(a) middle of right column
(b) top of left column (just above site navigation)
Results:
1. Location (b) receives 5 times as many clicks as location (a).
2. Location (b) has increased total earnings by 125% whereas location
(a) made no noticable change to anything.

And this comment:

I included Ad Links as soon as it came out and so far I’m very impressed.
Targeting spot on which is good for publisher and advertiser alike and earnings up more than 32%!

We’ll see how it pans out for the rest of the month to judge whether it’s the novelty factor or an accepted more highly focussed results page for the visitor.

Anywhere from 32% to 125% isn’t bad!

There seems to be a bit of confusion regarding the CTRs (click-thru ratios) for Ad Links, and when you actually get paid.

Google only makes money (and hence you only get paid), when the visitor clicks through on the second link via the Google Ad Link results page.

It’s key that you implement Ad Links effectively, otherwise it’s possible that your CTRs will drop and you will be penalized under this new Smart Pricing thing that Google has going. (This is all just from the thread – the Smart Pricing thing seems to be in beta or alpha stage – details are sketchy.)

Good luck! I’ll report back with my results in a week or two, after trying out a few Ad Links formats on some of the new Niner sites.

Not a whole lot, it turns out.

Meta tags were originally intended to help search engines index web pages more accurately and to give people a little bit of control over their sites’ keywords, descriptions, etc.

Then they started being abused. Search engines recognized this abuse and made meta tags less important to search engine ranking. Now, many of the major search engines (like Google) simply ignore most meta tags.

Here’s a rundown on meta tag support from Search Engine Watch’s “How To Use HTML Meta Tags“:

• “Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.
• Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
• Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn’t worth the time to implement.
• Meta Everything Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.”

So are they worth it?

Well, they won’t be what make or break your site ranking, but it can’t hurt to have them, just in case — especially for the benefit of smaller or country-specific search engines.

Just use them wisely: Your description tag should include a succinct blurb and a few keywords (but not too many: keyword-loading can be grounds for exclusion from certain search engines), and your keyword tag should include words that are relevant to your subject area (but don’t repeat them too often: that’s another search-engine no-no).

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