Google Adsense

What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance

Written on July 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Yahoo has provided an update on the current status of the transition over to Bing’s search technology.
On the organic side, Yahoo began testing Bing powered results. They are currently testing Bing powered results on about 25 percent of the traffic. They hope to transition over to Bing fully, sometime in September [...]



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What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance

Google Testing Maps In Top Right AdWords Spot

Written on July 6, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Google is testing a new map placement for local results. The old placement was in the organic, left hand side, listings, where Google would stick a map for local intent queries. Some are reporting seeing a similar map moved from the organic side to the paid search side, above where the AdWords ads [...]



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Google Testing Maps In Top Right AdWords Spot

Google Playing With Local SERP’s

Written on July 5, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Sometimes in search you are alerted to something that is a bit dramatic in its presentation. Google has been experimenting with their positioning of the most critical elements of a local search SERP and it makes for some interesting “What if?” questions.

This new look SERP was brought to my attention from Mike Blumenthal’s blog. If you want to be on top of local search information Mike will certainly help you do that (or one of his readers in this case). I was able to replicate the result so here it is

The changes are pretty stark. The map moves to the top of the right hand column and actually scrolls down as you scroll down the page. The Place Page snippet is so integrated with the organic search results that it looks very much like an organic search result but with the map ID icon giving it a prominent place in the searcher’s eye. Also, rather than the usual “more info” link the anchor text is Place Page.

One of the images shown on Blumenthal’s blog actually shows these local results occurring before any other organic results.

So what might this mean? It means that the Place Page is uber significant to Google. It also means that Google is telling the directories of the world that their run in the organic SERP’s for local searches may be coming to an end. I think that is a GREAT thing because most directories are simply not that good. I would much rather get an actual local result right away when I am looking for local information. This kind of result set also makes more sense in a mobile SERP so Google may be trying to make these results commonplace so people can expect a certain result whether on a desktop / laptop or mobile device (preferably an Android device )

So keep an eye on this if you are interested in local search. Oh, if you are not interested in local search then you are just not paying attention.

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Google Playing With Local SERP’s

Here a Link, There a Link, Everywhere a Google Ad Sitelink

Written on June 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Back in March, we told you that Google’s Ad Sitelinks were a huge success for…Google.

OK, maybe advertisers liked them as well, but if you weren’t careful, you could find your ads see a 30% increase in click-throughs. That all sounds great, as long as you were prepared to cover the cost of those increased clicks.

Anyway, Google would like more of your paid search spend and is rolling out Ad Sitelinks to all advertisers and throwing in a new one-line format to boot!

When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad. Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.

As a reminder, Sitelinks look similar to the algorithmically displayed Sitelinks found in the organic results. The new one-line format will look something like this:

So, who’s happy with SiteLinks? Who’s not?

The rest is here:
Here a Link, There a Link, Everywhere a Google Ad Sitelink

Google Showing Shopping Results Without Explicit Search Intent?

Written on April 7, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

The tnooz blog reported that after searching for [hotels] off the Google home page, he was shown hotel room prices directly in the search results. Here is a screen capture:

Now, we know Google was testing hotel prices in Google Maps via AdWords but these are prices directly in the organic results.
How is [...]



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Diagnosing Google Crawl Allowance Using Webmaster Tools & Excel

Written on March 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

Posted by Tom_C

There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ - it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge - all you need is:

• A verified Google webmaster central account
• Google Analytics
• Excel

If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Laurie on how to read log files &

Google’s SiteLinks Program Very Good …. For Google

Written on March 24, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

Last fall Google made it easy for brands to make their paid search ads around their own branded terms stand out with its SiteLinks program. The idea being that these brands should have some advantage since they are, well, the brand.

Seems like a great idea except when some of these brands have been getting their search bills. The program works so well in some cases that the search spend because of these special ads have gone up dramatically for some.

AdAge reports

A typical search ad contains one link, or sometimes two — one to the advertiser’s home page and sometimes one geographic link. Ad Sitelinks allows advertisers as many as five links in three lines of text. Macy’s, for example includes links to “free shipping deals,” “shop online,” “find a store,” and “account login,” in addition to a link to its home page. Toys “R” Us includes a link that says, “Buy one get one free little tikes!”

An SiteLink ad for Toys R Us looks like the one below.

The trouble is that often times a searcher will click on the paid ad instead of organic ad that they would have clicked on in the past. Google meanwhile gets to sit back and say that their program is a success because the brands are getting their clicks. Of course, they are also pretty excited about the extra search revenue being wrung out of some of these advertisers.

These deeper links bypass the advertiser’s home page but are giving them a huge increase in click-throughs; Google estimates a 30% to 40% increase over standard search ads. That click-through success has caused trouble for some marketers: Consumers searching for a brand using Google will click on the sponsored ad and not on the organic result. And all those clicks on the Sitelinks ad are also driving marketers’ search ad bills up 30% to 40%.

Not everyone is all that upset though because the extra cost, while sometimes capturing their existing customers, are allowing for a brand to take up considerable real estate in the SERP’s. One such brand, Nationwide Insurance, sees the program as a winner because it allows for greater flexibility in their search messaging.

For a company already spending 50% of their digital marketing budget on search, Nationwide is happy to reach existing customers and sell them additional products and services.

“In contrast to the organic results, I control the experience there,” said Chris Cotton, director of interactive marketing for the insurer. For existing customers, he said, “it allows me to demonstrate other products they may or may not have.”

So as with most things Google somehow manages to have its cake, eat it and then do a “burp and blow” over everyone and come away with accolades for innovation and more cash in the coffers. Time and again what looks like a scheme to extract more money from advertisers to some can be a complete advertising blessing to others. Good work if you can get it, right?

How do you view these ads? Are they a good thing or a bad thing for the overall market? We know they can work for the brand itself but what about others?

Continued here:
Google’s SiteLinks Program Very Good …. For Google

Ask.com Leads the Charge to Monetize the Second Click

Written on March 23, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Ask has removed referral data from many of their ads, leaving advertisers flying blind. Ask.com, which has long been known as one of the leading Google AdWords arbitrage plays, also syndicated their ad feed to the point where Google forced them to turn off syndication. From there Ask has look for new ways to arbitrage search. They have created an automated deals section…

Which has over a million pages indexed in Google!

And the Ask.com search results themselves are a bit rough. Some of them promote featured articles from other IAC parners

Many of them have Ask.com answers in them, which scrapes questions and answers from across the web and wraps them in ads.

And some of the search results have multiple lead generation boxes on them (without any disclosure).

A good chunk of them have Wikipedia listed, but wrapped in ads & hosted by Ask.

A few more vertical ad types and/or general purpose web services (to complement answers, news, local, lead generation, Wikipedia, FreeBases, PPC ads) and a search engine would have no need to send searchers anywhere but to advertisers and itself.

I have no doubt that Ask’s search results monetize at a higher rate than Google’s, but that aggressive monetization also costs them marketshare. It is a trade off every business faces: maximizing short term yield, while keeping the business healthy and growing in the market.

Given that Google has been testing lead generation AdWords ads, pushing maps hard (while testing ads in the maps results - along with beta tests in big money categories like hotels), paid inclusion in their product search, and product images in the organic search results … it wouldn’t be surprising to see Google clone whatever looks like it is working good for Ask.

But Google will have to move slower on many of these fronts, because if they move too quickly they won’t be able to defuse the blowback and anti-trust concerns. Given their recent user privacy snafu, and the current brand ad push where they are now trying to promote the categories they once claimed to have hate, the last thing they want to do is give people more reasons to distrust them and give regulators more reasons to give them another look. So new features launch as a limited beta test / experiment to a subset of users (and in many cases free to advertisers) to slowly release their business plans in a way that does not create too much concern. Small steps bring limited regulatory interference, and by the time concerns are voiced they can say “we have done that for years.”

But as the Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) of the web, I wonder if it is a good idea for Google to make blog posts with titles like Now it’s easy to switch to Google Apps from Microsoft® Exchange. The broader they spread search, the more likely they are to find their words working against them at some point. They can’t claim to be agnostic while self serving ads and writing how to guides on switching away from competitors.

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Ask.com Leads the Charge to Monetize the Second Click

Keyword Spy Review

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Keyword Spy offers 3 different accounts.

• Research
• Tracking
• Professional

The countries available within a Keyword Spy account are:

No other competitor really comes close to the breadth of their country offerings.

Keyword Spy Research Account

Keyword Spy’s Research account gives you access to the following data

• PPC Ads (ad copy, the keyword, estimated search volume, estimated CPC, the position last seen of an ad and it’s average position, total days seen/days checked. You can also see the ad url and destination url of the ad in addition to other keywords being bid on for that particular ad, as well as an estimated ROI.
• PPC Keywords - showing individual keywords, ROI, search volume, CPC, total profitable ads, affiliate ads on that keyword, days seen, last/first seen
• Organic Keywords - showing individual keywords, position in the SERPS, total search results, estimated CPC, and the URL
• Competitors in PPC and Organic results.
• Sub-domains

The research portion does *not* include organic or PPC overlap coverage, which kind of stinks especially when you consider the price point they charge.

You get access to their Top 1000 sites and keyword reports which can be previewed here.

You can search by keyword as well. A Keyword search will show you:

• PPC Ad Copies with Keyword in them
• Up to 1000 related Keywords
• Misspelled Keywords
• PPC Competitors
• Organic Competitors

You can filter with these metrics but you can only apply 1 filter to the results at a time. Which can be bothersome if you are doing large scale research as they limit the exported data to 50,000 keywords.

Research Account Metrics

• ROI- they compute this as (Days Seen*Percentage Seen/Number of Days Seen since Last Seen). Below is a screen shot of their formula. Again, this is based on the assumption that the PPC advertiser is shrewd and on top of things. I don’t particularly care for this metric. ROI to person A can be much different than ROI to person B for a variety of reasons.



• First/Last Seen- Last seen is the last day KS saw the ad (they scan daily) and First Seen shows the first day KS saw the ad (I believe its back to August of 09 as of this writing).
• Profitable Ads - Ads that are profitable based on their internal metrics (like ROI and such) out of total number of ads.
• Affiliate Ads - Ads that are affiliate ads (based on destination url) out of total ads found.

Screen shot of PPC keyword tab showing the above mentioned metrics:

Keyword Spy’s Tracking Account

The Tracking account option gives you real time tracking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for your PPC and Organic campaigns. This can be useful in checking out your coverage and competition across all three engines. You can also benchmark your data with the competition’s scraped data.

Of course, the question is do YOU want your campaigns being monitored by a spy tool that makes its money but showing advertisers their competition’s organic and PPC data??

You can read about more of their tracking/alert/coverage type options here, but outside of tracking and coverage you get:

• Landing Page Intelligence - shows current landing page, ad copy, and destination URL for a particular landing page.



• Organic and PPC overlap data (only between 2 sites) and quite frankly, this is much more research than tracking and should really be included in the research account IMO.
• Benchmarking in PPC/Organic Listings (below is a screen shot of the organic one, they are fairly similar)

So the tracking account is really more for tracking your campaigns across the 3 big PPC engines with some nifty benchmarking and gap analysis features but I don’t see it as being overly useful for smaller PPC advertisers, although the coverage options might be a good fit for those in competitive markets across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In general, Spy Tools aren’t all that great at looking into smaller sites and markets simply because the resources required to be accurate with somewhat sparse data would be overkill and far to costly. This is why I do not really feel the tracking option is going to be a good fit outside of pretty big PPC advertisers.

Professional Account

The Pro account combines the Research and Tracking account features (up’s the overall trackable keywords, export limit, and query limit) plus gives you access to a couple new features:

• Affiliate Intelligence
• Affiliate Reports

Affiliate Intelligence

This tool gives you access to look at products and ads being used by 132 affiliate networks.

You can click through on any network and be shown their offers by URL with searchable affiliate ads for those products.

Affiliate Reports gives you access to big players in the affiliate marketing space such as CJ, LinkShare, Clickbank, ShareAsale, etc. Here you can access top affiliate products and top affiliates by product id and affiliate id respectively. You can also use affiliate product and affiliates id’s to search in the destination URL field to try and find additional products/ads they may be promoting.

Keyword Spy mentions something about “Anti-cloaking” technology but they do not elaborate on it. However, color me skeptical that these affiliate options are able to uncover properly cloaked links by top affiliates. So while this may be good for help in looking at potential affiliate products, as well as finding affiliates who do not cloak their links, I’m really not overly impressed with these features but they can be somewhat useful when first starting out.

In Closing

Keyword Spy is a feature rich membership and they have a deep database. For me, if I had to pick just one tool I would opt for either SemRush or SpyFu as both supply solid PPC/SEO competitive intel at a much more reasonable price. Although, if I were a serious PPC player their tracking account might be quite nice (still have reservations about giving a spy tool company my campaign data though.

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Keyword Spy Review

SpyFu Review

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo

SpyFu is one of the more feature rich tools, but probably has the least attractive interface out there. SpyFu offers SEO and PPC spy tool options along with their own keyword research tool.

The SpyFu toolset covers US and UK markets.

SpyFu’s toolset includes:

• SpyFu Kombat
• SpyFu Classic
• Keyword Ad History
• Domain Ad History
• Keyword Smart Search
• A Variety of Top 100 Lists

SpyFu Kombat

With SpyFu Kombat you can look at overlapping and site specific keywords for up to 3 websites. For the PPC version you can also see a chart which goes back over a period of a few years showing the overall amount of keywords being bid on by all three sites. You can also rollover the chart to see keywords specific to just 2 of the sites if you feel the 3rd site may not be doing as good a job (or vice versa) as 2 of the other sites. It will also show you the PPC budgets of the sites as well as the number of organic keywords ranking in the top 50 results for said keyword.

When you click on an area of the circle chart it will show you the keywords in whatever bucket you click, to the right of the chart. You can view and download those keywords for your own use. As you can see I am on the ads tab but the options are similar when you click on the organic tab (on the top box, the organic one on the bottom shows you total organic keywords).

Switching between the organic tab and the ppc tab (as well as the overall # of organic keywords + PPC ad budget should also give you an idea of which of the bigger sites are more into the PPC or SEO side of things which can be a good barometer to look at if you happen to be concentrating on one area over the other.

SpyFu Classic

SpyFu Classic is the “flagship” section so to speak. This is where you enter one domain on the home page and are presented with a TON of data including:

• Daily AdWords PPC Budget
• Links through to SpyFu Kombat
• Average Position of Ads vs # of Advertisers
• Estimated Value of Organic Traffic (estimated traffic with a variable of CPC factored in)
• Paid Traffic Compared with Organic Traffic Estimates
• Subdomains (useful for looking at how a site might break out parts of the main domain, perhaps a good spot to look for niche keywords???)
• Top Ten Paid Keywords w/ Keyword Ad History (links through to full Keyword Ad History tool)
• Total Paid Keywords
• Total Organic Keywords
• PPC Competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords)
• Organic Competitors (with a link to overlapping keywords)
• Category

In addition to searching for a domain SpyFu let’s you search by keyword as well, as shown below:

The data here can be useful, as you can see the:

• Estimated PPC, Clicks, Cost Per Day, Total Advertisers…all with trend data
• Top Ten Domains Advertising on the Keyword, with Domain Ad History
• Additional Keywords Purchased By Relevant Domains
• PPC Ad Copy with a Link to Keyword Ad History
• Top Ten Organic Results with Title, Meta Description
• Related Terms
• Related Concepts (based on semantic relationships)
• Categories

Keyword Ad History

Keyword Ad History will show you, via color coded bars, how often the keyword appeared in a domain’s PPC campaign along with any changes in the ad copy (all of which can be exported to excel). It shows a year’s worth of data up front and goes back to 2006 via the Bonus History Button.

So it’s pretty straightforward, which is what I like about SpyFu Tools. No over-reliance on “in-house metrics” it’s just “here’s the ad history of the keyword”, plain and simple. Typically, if you see a keyword being advertised on by a good PPC advertiser consistent then you can look to apply that ad copy technique to a niche market of that larger keyword. If I were advertising for “hotels in Oklahoma” I might pay attention to what ad copy has been successful, over time, for that main/core keyword “hotels”.

Domain Ad History

Domain Ad History is similar to Keyword Ad History except it shows the keyword history of a particular domain:

This tool is useful in looking at keywords that have been successful for your competitors (or larger players in your niche) and which ones they tried and abandoned (which could be ones for you to avoid out of the gate). All of this assumes the domain you are researching is competent PPC advertiser.

Keyword Smart Search

The Keyword Smart Search tool in SpyFu uses semantic word relationships, publicly available keyword data, and PPC campaign data to return a list of keywords related to the keyword(s) (up to 10) you enter. As you can see, you can also filter by CPC, search volume, and you can also exclude keywords:

Here is a screen shot of the results page for Keyword Smart Search:

For me, I prefer to use the PPC keywords and the Organic keywords found in either SpyFu Classic or SpyFu Kombat. I like to use other tools for pure keyword research (Google tools, Microsoft Ad Center Intelligence, and Wordtracker). Primarily, I feel SpyFu is at its best when used as a competitive research tool versus a keyword research tool.

A Variety of Top 100 Lists

They have a list of all there Top 100 Lists here.

In Closing…

I find their tools pretty useful for competitive research. I don’t use their Keyword Smart Search much as described above but the amount of data that they give (in a straightforward fashion) at the price points they give is quite a nice combination. SpyFu makes its way into my toolbox on just about every project.

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SpyFu Review