Yesterday evening there were some big changes in Google search results as discussed on Webmaster World and reported by Brian Turner and Aaron Wall. However, the algo update or data push has been rolled back and rankings are back to as they were, at least for now.

Google were obviously equally unhappy with the search results as I was last night. In my opinion they were as poor as they have been in the last few years. A lot of big, big sites homepages went missing from the search results completely and much for the worse. I put this down to a bad data push rather than an algo change, but its hard to say. It certainly wasn’t obvious link buyers or sellers (or network schemes) who were targeted in the industries I know, it was far more random and unpredictable. In some cases non secure (http) versions of homepages were replaced with secure (https) versions even when the secure version had zero internal/external links. Strange behaviour indeed.

I actually managed to catch a screen shot of the ‘PPC blog‘ SERPS early yesterday evening. Considering this site ranks no.1 in Google UK for this term (has done since its creation) with sitelinks, it was quite strange to see it drop all of a sudden to 5th place. Not only that, as you can see there were 3 results on the 1st page, 2 of which were indented and strangely one being the homepage.

I could theorise as to what Google were attempting to do if this was an update, but I really don’t need to. This site is as white hat as it comes, all editorial links with zero link purchases/selling or exchanges and just good old fashioned unique content. So if this site ranks badly in the SERP’s, Google is quite probably going in the wrong direction. In my opinion of course :)

More seriously, there were multi million pound businesses just dropping out of the search results completely in some verticals I monitor. Not just one or two, but a number of big players in each industry. Is this a sign of things to come? No, as the changes were rolled back. But there is something obviously brewing.

I think the majority of the time everyone would agree with a big fat no on allowing affiliates to bid against their brand. Why pay an affiliate a commission for something you will get 99% of the time anyway?

However, there are times where clients of mine have agreed to a select few affiliates to bid against their brand and it is something I have been asked about a number of times since.

If you are unsure of the reasoning behind the closed brand bidding group, the logic is that by allowing a small number of top performing affiliates to gain extra commissions from the merchants brand it allows these affiliates to bid broader on more generic keywords or pay a higher CPC to send increased traffic and sales the merchants way.

Due to the change in trademark policy on keywords in Google, this might in some cases make more sense in terms of supporting brand protection, especially in higher CPC markets with more competition. But separate from this issue, I find the affiliate brand bidding argument extremely weak on the whole. What irritates me more than anything about this concept is often the lack of real thought gone into it like most marketing or business decisions should have.

In using a closed group of brand bidders the merchants aim is ultimately to increase their traffic, conversions or revenue (or whatever else the goal might be) by effectively paying the affiliate additional commissions, which does make sense. That’s fine.

But like any marketing decision for this to be measured accurately in terms of return and performance the merchant needs to know -

• The increase in extra traffic, conversions, revenue (the end goal)
• The amount of extra cost/commission paid to the brand bidders
• Any other extra cost involved (time, tracking, management whatever)

So Why Is This So Often Flawed?

• Ignorance - Very often, none of the above are even properly considered let alone set up to be tracked and measured accurately to be able to determine the performance

• Trust In Tracking & Affiliates - Tracking and measuring increases from the data can be inherently difficult to gauge anyway due to the number of factors involved. But even more so with a closed group the merchant needs to be completely sure that tracking is accurate because quite feasibly an affiliate can set it up however they wish. How can you be sure that every branded advert is being tracked separately? You can’t.

• Brand Ownership - Merchants are allowing affiliates to be the face of their brand. They will need to dedicate some time to monitor and police the ads and make sure they are representing their brand accurately. Also, if there are many adverts against the said brand, this can equally confuse searchers.

• Lack of Control - For large scale brands there are huge variances in brand related traffic that cannot always be predicted or controlled - meaning on occasions affiliates could all of a sudden receive a huge amount of commissions direct from the brand without providing extra in return.

• Higher CPC - If the merchant is also running a branded PPC advert, what extra cost are will they now be paying due to the increased competition from their own affiliates?

So Why Do We Still See The Closed Group Brand Bidding Model?

There are numerous reasons from bad advice from affiliate managers to pressure to hit targets. However in some cases I have found that marketeers actually embrace the lack of transparency that affiliate brand bidding provides. That may sound strange, but there is a sweeping under the carpet mentality sometimes.

It means they can reach their targets without seeming to pay a higher cost to do it. It’s easier to hide marketing expense in what can be viewed as just improved affiliate sales by allowing affiliates to syphon from their own brand than actually just paying out a higher CPA/commission. There can be a blissful ignorance in gaining more sales using this method (at least more perceived sales) and far from enough thought or consideration which is scary.

Conclusion

A much more transparent method is to simply agree to pay a higher CPA or commission to the select top performing affiliates because this is effectively what the affiliate brand bidding concept is attempting to do. In a roundabout kind of way. However, this is much easier to budget, track and measure and offers the same basic premise of more money for more of whatever the said business goal is. Working closely with the affiliate and providing extra offers or discounts is also a great option.

Marketeers will still have the same overriding issue of measuring performance of what extra they are receiving against the extra outlay of cost - but it comes with much greater transparency and control. My advice would be, if you want to push affiliates and really get the most out of them and your campaign, don’t hide your true cost in a closed brand bidding group.

Do you have any arguments for a brand bidding group? I would be interested in hearing any. :)

Some interesting talk today of ways of using paid search to play with your competitors. I am sure many advertisers have noticed incorrect prices, promotions, erroring destination urls or just plain poor adverts for their own campaigns - whether it be down to an in-house team, their agency or affiliates.

It can be a very frustrating process tracking down who is running the offending advert and getting it amended to display accurate information.

The reason is anyone can run any advert as anyone else. I can run an advert with the display url set as any company in the world. So can anyone else.

Sounds strange that someone might be willing to pay to do this if they are an competitor. But by doing this a person or company can set about a negative ad campaign against their competitor. It could be a fairly minor thing to something much, much naughtier.

Take for example if I were a competitor of both DialAFlight and Flight Centre.

DialAFlight have just released a statement saying it is instituting legal proceedings against Flight Centre for infringement of their trademark.

Flight Centre say they have removed the ‘DialAFlight’ keyword phrase from their campaign. This is not the first time DialAFlight have warned Flight Centre apparently.

So imagine what a competitor can do to really wind this situation up by just displaying a little advert against DialAFlight as Flight Centre. I’d imagine that would not go down well.

Another example might be where all competition within a niche are playing nice, not bidding against each others brands out of respect. There is an almost unspoken mutual agreement in place of ‘don’t bid against me, I won’t bid against you’.

So you could shake it up a little and start running competitors adverts against your other competitors.

You might just find that the competitors you are running adverts against spot this and react by now advertising against the company you were acting as.

Time to remove your own advert and watch the company you have been advertising as now run their own advert against the competitor because they spot their advert.

Oh the fun.

I am certainly not recommending anyone to do this. In fact, I am recommending people not to do this as there are more intelligent ways to spend your advertising budget. But I have seen some cases of this over the past few months and it’s something to keep an eye as we might see more cases.

More on black hat PPC techniques here.

Its been 4 months now since the change in Googles trademark policy in the UK which opened up bidding on previously restricted trademarked keywords inline with the U.S.

I analysed the landscape 2 days after the change was put in place and noted that even in that short 2 day period many advertisers who decided to place adverts against their competitors keywords had already been slapped out of the bidding due to poor quality scores from low click through rates.

4 months down the line, have there been any further changes to the same brands?.

Interestingly, there are again less competitor adverts against the brands analysed previously which all had competing adverts against their brand (with some strange broad matches aswell).

• Tesco
• Asda
• Last Minute
• Amazon
• Confused
• Go Compare

Now that’s only 6 brands, so a very small sample size to say for sure. Using the Adwords preview tool removes any personalisation and does show some ads against the last two brands in particular. But notice the higher CPC markets such as car insurance firms have seen a reduction aswell. Elephant, Money Supermarket, U Switch etc all the same with far less paid adverts.

Why?

Click through rates are king in Adwords.

If you cannot maintain a high enough CTR, you will have to pay through the nose to appear, often meaning it’s completely unrealistic from an ROI perspective. Google recently announced further changes to how it calculates quality score, meaning an even greater emphasis on relevancy and CTR.

Google still profiting from the change

So while CTR has meant it’s extremely difficult to bid against high volume previously trademarked keywords, just how many more advertisers are bidding against their own brand as protection now?.

Back in June Hitwise noted a big increase in paid brand searches -

“Before Google’s changes took effect (4 weeks ending 12/04/2008), 9.2% of the search traffic that the top 100 online brands in the UK received from their top brand term came via a paid listing on a search engine. However for the his figure went up to 11.2% - equivalent to an increase of 22% - during the first four weeks after the changes took effect (4 weeks ending 31/05/2008).“

So the question is now - Should advertisers still be running branded adverts incurring that cost when it’s so difficult for competitors to appear there? Would the money in many cases not be better spent elsewhere?

If you have competitors bidding against your brand it makes sense to protect youself - but how many advertisers are now running an advert against their brand without any competition ‘just incase’?

Has Google scared advertisers to spend more merely through fear of protecting themselves?.

It would be interesting to see a further update by Robin Goad and the Hitwise team on the changes.

It’s festival season and I have been browsing here and there getting all excited about seeing some great bands and having a few beverages in the sun rain.

Anyway, NME is first for music news (apparently) but it also seems their forums have been totally nuked by spam. The main forum boards has a nice toolbar PR of 6.

All forums are subject to a little spam but what gets me is the location based forums have had this problem from at least July (I got bored of going back) so it seems nobody at NME is really paying attention.

Forums are a great for the stickyness of your site - building relationships with visitors and having a captured qualified audience for the commerical side. This forum should really be huge in the current climate.

So why have NME left it to rot exactly?

There is still some debate whether the search engines place any weight on keywords used within page urls and that’s actually what I wanted to quickly test. So I set up a couple of pages from this blog and included unique words within the page url, one separated by hyphens (dashes) and the other by underscores. Obviously the unique ‘words’ were not used onpage or anywhere else including linking to the page. The pages were set up as separate pages rather than posts, to ensure they were not syndicated or linked to from anywhere else.

Although a very rough kind of test, I wanted to see whether using keywords within the url only would be enough to pull back the page by itself under search. Second, I wanted to see whether Google is treating underscores as word separators as suggested they might some time ago.

Hyphens (dashes) In URL - /test-ljkdldlk-hdhdhdjqe/

• Searching for the two words with a space (”ljkdldlk hdhdhdjqe”) brings back the page
• Searching for one of the words individually (”ljkdldlk” or “hdhdhdjqe“) brings back the page
• Searching for the two unique keywords together without a space (”ljkdldlkhdhdhdjqe“) did not bring back the page

Underscores In URL - /test-lhdldkjjgjk_lkhjhnues/

• Searching for two words with a underscore (”lhdldkjjgjk_lkhjhnues”) brings back the page
• Searching for one of the words individually (”lhdldkjjgjk” or “lkhjhnues“) or together with a space did not bring back the page
• Searching for the two unique keywords together without a underscore “lhdldkjjgjklkhjhnues” did not bring back the page.

Conclusion

First of all, it looks as though hyphens and underscores are still treated very differently by Google. Currently underscores are still not being treated as word separators from these tests. The results match Matt Cutts comments from back in August 2005 on how Google would return the pages under search.

By no means do I think this was the best test in the world, but it does suggest that Google do give some weight to keyword use in urls, no matter how minor the weight might be.

Sometimes its good to analyse these things in context aswell - We know already that Google and Live seem to completely ignore the use of meta keywords (Yahoo and ASK give them some weight), while keywords used within a meta description alone are not enough for Google to retrieve the page under search (only with the use of anchor text aswell). So this gives us some idea of the weight keywords in a url may have.

Ok, so I was just reading the official Google blog today about their new 3D virtual experience product called Lively when I noticed some big red lines.

Anyone who uses the SEO for firefox extension knows that red means the ‘nofollow’ attribute is being used on a link.

So what are Google applying the ‘nofollow’ attribute to on their own blog?.

Their own ‘What We’re Reading’ list, which includes respected industry sites such as Phillip Lenssen, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable & Traffick amongst others.

Can Google please explain how that can make sense?.

Google are actively saying they read these sites, they get value from these sources which they must respect enough to link to in the first place. Yet they won’t allow any pagerank or link juice to be passed unless its to another Google property?

Googles nofollow advice from their help center in summary -

• Untrusted content (comments, where there is a lack of editorial control)
• Paid Links
• Crawl prioritisation (’Sign in’ links etc)

So which of these exactly does their own reading list fall into?.

The Hypocrisy is scary. This is exactly how the nofollow attribute should not be used.

Say One Thing, Do Another

Use ‘nofollow’ for sites you can’t vouch for or necessarily trust is how Matt Cutts has always expressed it.

“In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links.“

So why do Google add nofollow in this case on content that is editorally controlled?.

Matts own words on what makes a great link -

“So, what are the links that will stand the test of time? Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an editorial link by someone, and it’s someone that’s informed. They are not misinformed, they are not tricked; there is no bait and switch involved. It’s because somebody thinks that something is so cool, so useful, or so helpful that they want to make little sign posts so that other people on the web can find that out.“

The funny thing is, Googles own link based algo is what made them the biggest search engine in the world and yet they are contradicting it by creating a FUD campaign that even their own employees have failed to understand.

Google created the directive, they created the rules on how it should be used and yet they don’t adhear to them. Taking away the hyperlink structure of the internet is destroying themselves in the process.

Interesting experiment by the Neutralize Guava guys over on Search Engine War blog where they tested and proved that Google is now indexing links in flash.

Next up for them to prove is whether text in a flash button acts as an anchor on those links… :)

Pretty big achievement by the Google/Adobe engineers, flash still won’t offer the same kind of information html tags will but it is a start.

Anyway, good news if you were of the mind to have a site that needs to hide the odd 10K keyword rich article with some nice juicy links own a flash site.

Anyone thinking free flash intros, movies/widgets?.

I always wanted the ppcblog.com domain, but unfortunately it was registered before I got the chance.

At the time, the .net & .org were available aswell as the .co.uk and nobody had built a brand around the name ‘PPC blog‘ in the same way there were seo blogs seemingly everywhere.

About 2+ years ago when I developed this site for a little fun the ppcblog.com domain used to redirect over to payperclickblog.com and the site was aptly named after that domain. This was great as I always wanted to work with the shorter url and ‘brand’.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book is however the owner of the domain which his wife Giovanni and he have decided to develop in the past week, seperate and away from the payperclickblog.com domain.

Aarons SEO Book is a fantastic resource, so I have no doubt this new site will be equally full of great regulary updated content. Regular enough to stay in the Toprank search marketing blog list (ping) which I got kicked from for not updating regulary enough…

As I have never really had a goal for this site other than to share random thoughts, have a nice testing platform for ideas or vent frustration it doesn’t bother me that it shares the same name. But it does highlight the importance of getting all the TLD’s you can if you want to establish yourself globally and block out competition.

Geographical filters are pretty strong, unless you are a high authority domain and in my view you still can’t rely completely on Googles Webmaster Central (and others) to set geotargetting for the sub directory/folder route. Getting all relevant TLD’s for each country in my opinion can still be the safest way to go. Which I might expand upon in another post as I am going off subject.

Anyway, so don’t get confused guys with your .coms and .co.uks - or do and I might get more traffic. ;)

Another example of a Wordpress blog being hacked and injected with hidden links to viagra, tramadol and the like. Their blog is on a subdomain of the main site - http://inside.123-reg.co.uk/

If the self acclaimed ‘UK’s largest web host’ can’t protect their own blog or even spot they have a big problem, what hope is there for the average website owner?. I’m guessing this probably isn’t helping their domain rank.

Maybe they will give me a free hosting account for letting them know about the problem…

Maybe not, lol

Btw - Patrick at Blogstorm suggested using Google alerts to keep an eye on hacking.