Archive for February, 2007

Links for 2007-01-03 [del.icio.us]

  • Top Ten Common PCC Mistakes at SEO News Blog
    Many affiliates lose hundreds maybe even thousands of dollars from their campaign because of stupid mistakes so I decided to write the top ten lethal mistakes that makes many PPC campaigns fail.

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Google AdSense Account Terminated - What Should You Do?

Once you have decided to take your marketing campaign to Google’s AdSense pay per click program, you agree to a number of rules including:

- No hidden pages. You must have a clear hierarchy and each page needs at least one link to get there.
- No broken links. If you link outside of your site, make sure you check your links often. No more than 100 links per page.
- When designing your site, create one that is helpful to a user; don’t design a page for search engines. Make sure you clearly define what your site is about.
- Your TITLE and ALT tags should be precise and descriptive.
- You need a site map to help users find what they are looking for if your menu doesn’t.
- No hidden text.
- No redirection of your site

Even if you follow all these design rules, you may still be at risk of losing your AdSense advertiser account or have temporarily been fined a penalty in the form of your ads being removed from rotation on other sites. The penalty may go away with time, but it’s best to double and triple check your site then file a re-inclusion request (instructions below.) Include in your request which changes you’ve made and that it won’t happen again.

Your competitors might have a plan that could get you banned. It’s called “click bombing” and it’s against Google’s policy.

Click bombing happens when someone, be it a competitor or not, repeatedly clicks the pay per click ad for a business in order to raise flags with Google. Google rates their ads based on relevance, so the more an ad is clicked, the more relevant it becomes, and the higher up the list it moves. This has made it very easy for business owners to move themselves up the relevance list, so Google countered this practice by red flagging any business that has a significant spike in AdSense hits. If the hits all trace back to the same IP address or addresses, the advertiser is removed for “invalid clicks”.

Finding out about this strength in Google’s search engine, sneaky competitors have started to exploit it by purposely clicking the competitions ad again and again, in order to ban the ad.

If this has happened to you, or if you’ve been banned for violation of any of the design or technological terms of your contract, you can sometimes have it overturned by contacting customer support. You can contact Google support by visiting http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py. Make sure you type “Re-inclusion Request” in the subject of the email. Keep your request simple, short and to the point. No need to threaten Google that you’ll stop advertising with them or list how long you’ve been a customer.

It is imperative, though, that you run reports frequently and store the data outside of your Google account. This will help prove to Google that a click bombing happened should you be removed. You are not guaranteed a reversal, however. In fact, most pleas to Google to have a banned account go unheard.

If you don’t get a positive response from Google, you may want to check out some of the other pay per click programs, like Yahoo! Publisher Network or the many affiliate programs online. (Source: quickonlinetips.com)

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Google PPC: Content or Search?

When advertising with pay per click Google gives the advertiser two broad options. Advertising in search results, advertising in websites content or indeed many choose to do both. Advertising in search means that results are displayed in Google under searches, and in its distributors search results. Google content advertising applies to those websites who choose to incorporate “Adsense” into their websites. As adsense rapidly expands, it is now viewable on millions of web pages throughout the web. However, many advertisers are shunning this in favor of merely advertising in search results.
There are several reasons for this, and the first is trust. This has been a result of smaller websites, through to adsense empires choosing to embark on Click Fraud. Although this issue occurs in search it is far less dominant. Those who commit Click Fraud on search are those trying to weaken a competitor’s ROI. With Adsense the same applies, along with the website owner trying to increase his revenues using similar tactics.

Another reason why website owners are choosing to market out with content is the motivation of the buyer when he is on a website. Someone who is on a different website, other than the advertisers might be there for entirely different reasons. For example a website discussing the disadvantages of Adsense, would actually return adverts for those selling “Adsense Websites” for example. People may click on it, but they are unlikely to buy after reading a negative review. The other reason could be that the person on the adsense website was actually looking for what is the best color palette to use. The person therefore would not find the advert relevant, but might click on the advert in a care free manner.
Adsense websites are also often rejected by the advertiser because they feel it involves more administration. Checking through websites to see how relevant they are, and editing their bids to ensure they still appear on a page. With some words having a network of over 500 websites, it is surely a tedious and expensive task. Although this is the case, many also find that their Adwords account returns websites, that don’t even appear to be trying to support their keywords. The example which is ripe, are those advertising under legal phrases who appear on adsense websites “terms and conditions” and “privacy policy” pages.

Although many are rejecting content advertising, there are still those who feel it provides a similar ROI to search. A reason for this can be found through in the fact that more and more advertisers are only choosing search. As this occurs the advertiser has less competition so the price of the word reduces. Advertisers are also finding a good ROI from publisher’s websites who decide to actively promote the advertiser’s services within their content. An example of this can be realized from when someone is discussing printing services, and actually directly recommends the advertiser’s services. This is a positive move for both the publisher and the advertiser, and a good way for publishers to move forward. Despite this, publishers still have to remember, to not be too obvious in doing this, or savvy buyers will definitely calculate the publisher’s intention.

Another reason why advertisers are opting for content is to increase their scale, however this can also be done across other search engines. The fact however still exists that those who choose content advertising should choose the Google Adsense network. It is regulated far and above yahoo’s and others equivalents whilst its superior network of publishers means the advertisers will benefit from being able to spread their message through a diverse range of websites.
Despite Adsense being the best PPC content distributor, it certainly doesn’t compare to search for the advertiser. On search the leads are more qualified, more regulated, and less fraudulent. This has seen advertisers consistently choose search over content. Despite this advertiser’s should always test adsense and see if it can provide the ROI they are looking for. Some advertisers say that content provides a better return for their business than search. This varies, however in general search remains King for PPC advertisers.

Links for 2007-01-04 [del.icio.us]

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Links for 2007-02-08 [del.icio.us]

  • If You Don’t Leave SEO Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
    SEO is a dying art and I’m prepared to show you why with concrete evidence. The main reason? Search engine personalization. This may sound great and a relief that our SEs are improving everyday to show us more and more relevant results but for SEOs ever

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Links for 2007-01-15 [del.icio.us]

  • Globalwarming Awareness2007
    Globalwarming Awareness2007 is a new contest dedicated to cause of bringing global warming to the World’s attention. Please add it to your bookmarks and check daily for updates.

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Links for 2007-01-05 [del.icio.us]

  • Development Blog › WordPress 2.0.6
    We have a pretty important release available for everyone, it includes an important security fix and it’s recommended that everyone upgrade. This is the latest release in our stable 2.0 line, which we’ve committed to maintaining for several more years

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How Adsense Changed the Internet

Ever since Google came up with the master idea that is AdSense, the web has transformed in a variety of ways no one would have ever suspected. Some of these are good changes others aren’t.

This is a small exploration of how a brilliant marketing scheme has taken the web by storm. It deals with the changes advertisers and publishers and even website visitors have undergone ever since AdSense has become a daily part of our on-line lives.

Even before AdSense came out a lot of people were advertising through AdWords. It ensured a lot of publicity through getting your site listed at the top in Google search queries. It took away a lot of the pain and price of SEO and the large amount of time you had to wait until you were finally on top. It made launching a website, a realistic way to instant profitability instead of a long term strategy with no immediate returns.

Through the use of AdSense, the possibility appeared of having your ads appear on just about any site on the Internet that has anything that even resembles your company is all about. And so it’s for that reason that AdSense has brought a new sense of advertising to the Internet. Before PPC poorly ranked web pages had to advertise offline to get any real initial exposure.

Companies no longer have to hire expensive professionals to create extremely elaborate advertising campaigns. There are no high costs of running your ads on websites which you have to personally look for.

All you do is come up with a couple of meaningful words for your business, sign up with Google AdWords and let Google take care of the rest of the equation. Although it requires day to day management automation saves significant time for advertisers.

Of course, probably the largest change in the way the Internet works due to AdSense comes from the publishers’ point of view. Whereas one would previously have to jump through many hoops to get a website to even support itself now people are making fortunes off their sites. This leads to motivation for content, and resources for web surfers.
That generally means site publishers have to worry more about what content lies on their site, and the overall way their pages look rather then be concerned with the economic specifics of maintaining a site’s profitability. Although time is invested in adsense, a large capital investment is not.

It’s no surprise that the blogging phenomenon exploded when AdSense came out a few years ago. Anyone could just write a page about a subject he was passionate about and making a living out of it through AdSense.
And thirdly, one can’t ignore the impact AdSense has had over the casual everyday web surfer. Whereas people used to not even notice banners altogether (which psychologically is a very interesting thing to observe) the situation is completely different for text ads.

People nowadays will take a long look at a sponsored ad. Why? Well because the whole setup brings forth a feeling of confidence about the advertiser. People don’t ignore a text ad as easily as they do a graphical banner.
Another thing to note is that graphical banners have become even less profitable nowadays. It is because of this that many people are walking away from affiliate type networks to AdSense.

Of course, there are bad effects as well, with people making websites solely for the purpose of running AdSense on them and just as well, with a large phenomenon of ‘click fraud’, people creating artificial clicks for various reasons.
But Google does try to control such behavior, and really isn’t to be blamed for such individuals’ actions. All in all Google AdSense is transforming the way the Internet works and it’s doing so mostly in a good way.

Now those with ideas can write them down, and make money from them. Those looking for content can find it easier, and those looking to attract a customer base can do so in a targeted way. Adsense has changed the internet through supporting the economic interests of businesses, and the utility of consumers.

Links for 2007-02-06 [del.icio.us]

  • Interview With Sphere’s CEO Tony Conrad
    Sphere’s CEO Tony Conrad aggreed to take my questions on the company and on where it’s heading. If you don’t know what Sphere is check out Sphere’s about page and Sphere’s blog. They describe it as an advanced search algorithm helps you discover

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Links for 2007-01-06 [del.icio.us]

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