Lets talk ‘blackhat PPC’. After I read a article over at SEW sometime back about blackhat pay per click, I thought I would write about a few other sneaky tricks used within PPC. More specifically in the PPC affiliate marketing space. You see some pretty interesting methods used here in particular because there is that much more inter competition. Affiliates in competition with other affiliates, the merchant’s internal marketing department or agency, the affiliate network over merchant terms and of course the paid search system itself. In many ways the merchant, the affiliate and the network have the same goal; to increase visitors or sales to the site, yet each party has their very own self serving objectives which are anything but in unison.

There are a number of tricks I have seen used to bend completely flaunt many affiliate programs terms & policies. One of the most common PPC policies is to disallow affiliates from bidding against merchant brand terms, as the merchant will generally get that sale 99% of the time anyway not having to pay a premium to an affiliate for it. From the other side, obviously it makes sense for an affiliate to bid against brand as it cuts away the hard work of finding a niche as & they know it will convert. It’s a low hanging fruit.

Another popular affiliate network policy is to ban affiliates from sending traffic direct to a merchants site because the merchant or ad agency are already running a paid search campaign, the merchant does not trust affiliates to uphold their ‘brand image’ within adverts or perhaps for a variety of other reasons.

So, how do affiliates bypass these rules, working within the ad platforms own system while keeping under the radar of the merchant, the affiliate network and perhaps an ad agency keeping an eye on the SERPS? The price of getting caught might be a loss of commissions, getting kicked off the affiliate program or even the network all together.

Let’s look at some of the methods used -

1) Bidding At Certain Times – Brand bidding at certain times of the day or week when they know there is less chance of someone in-house, agency or affiliate network seeing the offending adverts. Evenings & weekends are the obvious choices or a couple of minutes here and there will often go unnoticed. Advertisers don’t even have to be at their computer to do this with Google kindly providing ad scheduling.

2) Geo-targeting – Geo-targeting of smaller individual locations or those where the merchant, their agency or affiliate network are not based. Advertisers can custom geo-target away from those areas, again thanks to Googles ever increasing Adwords tools inventory.

3) IP Exclusion – As Google explains “refine your targeting by preventing specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from seeing your ads”. Find out the IP of those you don’t want to see your ad and ban them so they can’t see your advert. Now that is naughty.

4) Advert Tricks – This is pretty sneaky & I have seen this more than you might think. This only happens if the merchant is running their own adverts against their own branded terms. The affiliate simply copies the merchants advert EXACTLY and bids higher to gain a higher ad rank that will replace the merchants own advert. At a glance the merchant will believe their advert is still running, although obviously it’s that of the affiliates. If the merchant digs a little deeper and views the destination url the affiliate might get spotted, but this method is generally used intermittently. If the merchant/ad agency notices they are no longer receiving clicks for there core keywords it will raise suspicion – so this is often used with 1, 2 & 5.

5) Masking Affiliate Urls – I have heard of software from some of the affiliate networks that claim to detect brand bidders by scraping the search engines and monitoring ad urls. (Although this is of course, depending on whether this detection system is not blocked by either 2 or 3 above in the first place). How do naughty affiliates attempt to protect themselves so their affiliate url is not spotted in adverts immediately? Well, by masking the url & affiliate ID within a url redirect. The likes of Tinyurl make this very easy for anyone. In fact, the affiliate might be using multiple redirects to make it a little harder again to be identified without proper investigation that might confuse the average merchant or online marketer.

6) Sending Traffic To A Different Domain – This is not rocket science. This can even be accomplished without setting up redirects, just a little understanding and knowledge of how the automatic and manual ad approvals work at the search engines. Advertisers can take advantage of the time between automatic approval and a manual review, but it’s actually even simpler for affiliates to trick the system after the manual review period.

As an example, lets say an affiliate wants the advert display url to be affiliatename.com, but they want to send traffic direct to a different domain, merchantssite.com. By playing nice at first, affiliates can simply set up their advert with the same display url and destination url to affiliatename.com. The affiliate can allow their advert to go through manual approval. It takes roughly 48hrs (in the week) for the advert to pass through manual approval in Adwords (ads can even be paused during this period) before the affiliate can whip in a keyword level url for the real destination they want to send traffic to. Keyword level urls take precedence over ad level urls and they do not go through manual approval like adverts do.

Another method that is frequently used to get past the one display url per SERP policy from the search engines is to simply send traffic to affiliatename.com and after the manual approval throw in a server side redirect over to the site of choice. That way the advert has not been amended and will not get manually reviewed again.

7) Using Broad Match To Bypass Trademarks – Here in the UK, businesses can protect their trademark brand names in both adverts and keywords on Google by submitting an application. While this method can be very effective for some brands, it can also sometimes be bypassed by the use of broad match. Take the well known car company ‘Land Rover’ as an example. For sometime they protected their band online on Google and hence the keyword ‘Land Rover’ was a trademarked term and would not display ads when used as a keyword. An easy way to get around this was simply having the keyword ‘Rover Land’ on broad match and sure enough it would trigger the advert against a search for ‘Land Rover’. It can be as simple as that. So while trademarking can work great for some businesses, it can easily be bypassed for others.

These are just some examples of blackhat PPC in the affiliate marketing space. All of the above tricks can be spotted if you know what you are doing. The ad preview tool goes a long way to help, but is by no means full proof.

So if you’re a merchant, how sure are you that your PPC affiliates are playing nice?

Google have introduced some nice new features to the Adwords keyword tool over the past few days and they have continued with the introduction of a new ‘keyword analysis’ page. It aims to give greater transparency into Googles quality score by breaking it down into two main components, keyword relevance and landing page quality at individual keyword level.

You may have noticed that the little magnify glass next to each keyword now has an extra arrow, which brings up the following when you hover over with a mouse -

By clicking on the ‘details and recommendations’ link it takes you over to the new keyword analysis page. I went through a few campaigns to find a keyword with a ‘poor’ quality score to highlight the kind of advice you get, as shown below.

The report does not necessarily give you that much more information than you could probably work out yourself, but I do like the breakdown of components which will help provide a little more transparency into what element might be the problem in a keywords performance, especially for the everyday advertisers.

A bigger picture of the screenshot can be found here.

Yahoo rant.

Run a search for ‘Directory’ on Yahoo UK. What kind of results are these? Lycos top, Wiki twice, no sign of Dmoz or their own Yahoo directory, UK or .com on the first page. If the algo can’t do it, surely you need a little manual intervention Yahoo?

In fact, even a search for ‘Yahoo directory‘ does not bring back their actual directory at the top.

If ever a handjob was needed…

I’ve been away for a while relaxing in the sun, so perhaps it’s the the reality of coming back to England to sub 10C temperatures that have caused me to feel quite so negative.

The number of posts and discussions regarding paid links is at an all time high as Google attempt to scare sites away from purchasing links for pure SEO value. With that Google recently penalised a high number of web directories which were obviously deemed to be ‘low quality’ directories whose main purpose were for search rankings, not the user.

So while Google catching and penalising web directories is one thing, catching and penalising or limiting the value of paid links from every site on the internet is a very different thing. Take a look at Rands recent post, where he highlights the sheer scale of paid links from sites he merely ‘stumbled‘ accross.

Now those are only sites he has come accross at random. Now take a competitive industry such as hosting and a run a search for a highly competitive generic keyword for that industry. Run some analysis of the back links to those sites that are ranking in the top positions. You will see the percentage of paid links gets a little higher than Rands examples.

Paid links in footers. Paid links in sponsors and supporters sections. Paid links on homepages of directories. Paid links in the form of WordPress theme ‘sponsoring’. Paid links on sites with completely unrelated content with keyword rich anchors.

Clear paid links without the ‘no follow’ attribute, bought for search engine ranking value.

So the reality is – Paid links still rule.

Googles algorithms for catching these types of paid links is at best, not very good (I mean, take a look at the crap site that ranks for SEO) and a lot of catching these types of paid links is manual.

So while Google are preaching for everyone to halt buying paid links (unless of course they are paid links through pay per click) and those selling links to add ‘no follow’, they are still ranking those sites buying links at the top of the SERPS. Until the time comes that Google can find a way to devalue or restrict the impact of these types of paid links, it will simply not stop. Why should a site decide against paying for a link for search ranking value when there competitors are all so clearly reaping the benefits from doing so?

How quickly or if at all Google will ever really be able to get a handle on all website paid links I do not know but my guess is that it will take a very long time. So should you hang on from paying for links when they continue to be so successful?

I am not saying you should go out and buy a tonne of unrelated crappy footer links from sites purely for search ranking. But Google have to understand that if their algorithm does not allow you to be as competitive through pure non paid link building, then how can they expect you to conform?. They simple fact is, sites with paid links continue to dominate the SERPS. There comes a time where if you can’t beat them, you have to join them.

Do you think that if Incisive Media could go back in time, things might of been done a little differently?

I don’t know what happened, I am looking at this purely from a business point of view.

You see the peak in traffic for Search Engine Watch around November 06?. No coincidence this is around the time Danny Sullivan left SEW. It’s interesting to see that SEW traffic from this point has pretty much halved and both sites actually follow similar trends from this point.

I know to many in the industry that this would seem a given or obvious. But still, its amazing what one person can do to a business.

Gone are the days when you were able to stuff a meta keyword tag full of juicy keywords and actually rank for them. The experts agreed it was of ‘slight importance’ and was only relevant to Yahoo and misspellings.

Its interesting to see Search Engine Lands meta keywords read -

meta name= “keywords” content=”qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad”

So lets test the theory using these misspellings.

A search on Google.co.uk -

qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad

A search on Yahoo.co.uk –

qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad

A search on Live.com –

qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad

A search on uk.Ask.com –

qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad

All of the above search engines have an up to date cached page with the above misspellings as meta keywords yet only two seem to pay any attention to them.

Google and Live.com/MSN ignore them completely with zero of the above searches bringing back any results. Only Yahoo and Ask bring up the SEL homepage for all of the searches which highlights they still give them some consideration.

So, is it still worth including the meta keywords tag? I’ll let you decide.

Interesting post over at Hitwise, which analyses search volume around the UK’s Big Brother contestants.

Not suprisingly, its not the winners that always top the searches, but attractive females. More annoying than attractive I would say, but the stats speak for themselves with Nikki topping the list from 2006 and Amy Alexandra and Chanelle for 2007.

Lets see how much volume there is still for these searches…

Selected advertisers in the UK are now able to trial a new tool released from Google that aims to help provide advert ideas for those who have lost inspiration.

The 3 step process requires advertisers to input information about their business before the tool provides 4 suggested adverts.

From the tests I ran, the suggested adverts seem to be way off in terms of quality, so don’t expect this tool to do all the hard work for you. In fact the disclaimer at the end sums it up nicely -

“We cannot guarantee that template ads will improve your campaign performance. We also reserve the right to disapprove any ad you submit. You alone are responsible for the ads you run and for making sure that your use of an ad does not violate any applicable laws, including trademark laws.“

Screenshots of the full process can be seen here, here, here & here.

Oh and here.

Update – This has been in a beta in the US for quite a while according to the Seroundtable.

Should you be able to submit 6 seperate articles within a space of 9mins? I’d say probably not…

A search for ppc blog normally brings up a familiar list of sites, however a new site called blogs.linux.org.bd/ seems to have suddenly appeared in 3rd position. At the same time a blog (that hasn’t posted for a while) payperclickblog.com has disappeared off the SERP completely. The description snippet Google have pulled looks very familar…

Now check out the cached page. So the cached page is actually that of payperclickblog.com. Its just been associated with the other domain. Why? My guess would be a 302 redirect…whether accidental or malicious I wouldn’t know.

The Linux blog site is down it seems, so I can’t see a redirect response. Archive.org suggests the site is an Linux news aggregator of somekind.

Looks like 302 hijacking is still alive and kicking.