Search, Marketing and Whatever

Yesterday I was doing some research on auto related websites for a client and ran across a respectable looking ecommerce site that I swear I will never purchase from.  The reason?  They weren’t respectable sounding! Continue reading →

I’m sitting in SEOClass in New York and Brad Geddes just made the comment “Google actually sucks at SSL’s”.  Aside from enjoying it when people say Google sucks I was amused because the example he showed is something that I run into quite regularly. Continue reading →

If you are a webmaster and a facebook member you need to check out the new WebmasterWorld group that was recently created by Sugarrae.  The group has over 60 members and has been up for less than 24 hours so you know this is going to be a fast growing group.   Continue reading →

Nielsen/NetRatings recently stated that Wikipeida (the online user generated encyclopedia) is the top online news and information destination after adding roughly 20 million unique monthly visitors in this past year.  While Wikipededia’s value as a “source” is hotly debated what shouldn’t be is how they added such a large number of new visitors.  The answer to that is quite simple, Wikipedia is Google’s new favorite toy much in the way that blogs were a few years ago.

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While you might be tempted to think I am advertising my own line of shirts it’s just not true. What is true is that I will be picking up a couple of these shirts for the kids. Continue reading →

Recently I mentioned that Google is hoping webmasters will tattle on people who have purchased paid links. According to Google they have a number of ways to determine the use of (or sale of) paid links but they are also appealing to concerned webmasters everywhere to help them out. I am not a fan of Google encouraging people to report on others linking behavior but that’s not the point of this post. Instead I’d like to mention why I don’t think it will really matter much in the long run.

Since Google considers paid links a “sin” I thought I’d compare paid linking to another popular sin - prostitution. Continue reading →

Google would like us to pretend we are in the third grade and they are the teacher. That’s an apt analogy for paid link reporting being added to Google’s webmaster tools as third graders love to tattle.

And I quote:

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You can hear people all over the blogosphere typing as quickly as possible about the startling news Google Webmaster Central product manager Vanessa Fox dropped on her personal blog, Vanessa Fox Nude. Vanessa has been the face of Webmaster Central at search/webmaster conferences for the last couple of years and by all accounts she has been well receivced in that role. Now she is headed off to Zillow a real estate start up company.

What’s particularly interesting is one comment left on Vanessa’s blog read,
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The Back Story

The two internet behemoths Google and eBay have been at odds recently over the issue of payment services. Google has launched Google Checkout to allow consumers to pay for items and services online which is a natural competitor to PayPal owned by eBay. Thus far Google Checkout has not been a rousing success made all the more clear by the fact that eBay has refused to accept Google Checkout to pay for their auctions. In an uncustomarily blunt move Google decided to nudge it’s advertising client into changing it’s mind by announcing a “Google Checkout Freedom Party” at the same time and location as eBay’s “live” event a conference for eBay merchants. The plan: to entice upset eBay merchants to protest eBay’s decision on Google Checkout.

The Reaction
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In a recent WebmasterWorld forum thread a group of Adwords advertisers discussed the recent update to the Quality Score system that has been rolling out over the last year. Quality Score is Google’s name for their system of judging the value of a particular advertiser’s ad and landing page in conjunction with the keyword they are bidding on. The theory is fairly simple. Advertisers that don’t offer a good experience for Google Search user’s will have to pay more to advertise there. If you want to bid on the keyword “soccer cleats” but your landing page only has baseball cleats on it then you are offering Google’s user a bad ad clicking experience, they didn’t get the information or product they were looking for. Or if when the user attempts to buy soccer cleats on your site they are taken to a merchant website to complete the purchase rather than on your site that is also considered a bad experience by Google. Afterall, the user could have gone directly to the merchant rather than taking extra time (and clicks) to get there.
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