http://www.ppcblog.co.uk A cynical look at Pay Per Click (PPC). Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:52:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/seo/hiding-links-in-flash/ 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+ ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/search-engine-marketing/always-get-the-dot-com/ 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 ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/seo/123-reg-hacked-awghfjuhrfgh/ This question seems to come up a lot still and while I believe sitemaps in general can be great for helping search engine spiders crawl your site and an effective way of spreading out linkjuice (with some nice anchor text) they can also bite you in the arse when not ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/seo/why-im-not-a-fan-of-submitting-sitemaps/ It's been a couple of days since Googles keyword trademarking policy change and it's interesting to see many advertisers have already been slapped out of the bidding. In a quality score world, its not as simple as bidding against any brand due to quality based minimum bids. Although you might ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/google-adwords/2-days-later/ I just spotted Google is showing onebox results for queries relating to English football clubs. A simple club search query brings back their next fixture. Screenshot below - Only seems to be Premiership clubs currently. Cool. Update - Google have now added last game results alongside the next fixture. As below - http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/google/google-adds-onebox-results-for-premiership-football/ Ok so the 5th of May lift on Google keyword trademarking date is nearly here. Are you prepared? Are your clients? Are you going all out aggressively to bid against competitors trademarks?. Are you going to start bidding against your own brand as protection?. Perhaps a mixture?. Or are you going to wait and ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/google-adwords/google-keyword-trademark-policy-change-are-you-prepared/ After Yahoos blog was hacked I spotted today that Amnesty seem to have a similar problem. Monitoring the SERPs for 'buy viagra' (ahem) I noticed an Amnesty blog post appearing in 8th. If you click on the link you get redirected via some onpage script to a pharmacy site... The cached text ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/seo/amnesty-international-promoting-viagra-too/ Good news for naughty affiliates. Nightmare for real brands. Google are moving inline with their policies in the US/Canada. We're writing to inform you that we're changing our trademark complaint procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how we handle the trademark complaint you currently have on file with ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/google-adwords/google-changing-trademark-policy-in-the-uk/ Quite an amusing spot by Jeremy over at PPC Discussions. Looks like the YSMBlog ("nofollow" for you I don't want to be linking to bad neighbourhoods) has been hacked (another WP exploit example) and currently has a 'buy viagra' link hidden in a noscript tag. Actually what I found interesting is ... http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/yahoo/yahoo-promoting-viagra/