Monday, March 28, 2005

SES conference in New York

Most recent SES conference in New York provided us some important issues about SES which I would like to pass on. As we know Google is working hard to change its algorithm, but in future we must be concerned about what happing with Yahoo! And MSN! According to comScore - http://www.comscore.com/, Google now commands only 36%; Yahoo commands a 29% share and MSN following at 15%. Yahoo amd MSN are gaining market share from Google.

Another Topic from comScore which every one is interested in is that over 80% of the search volume is initiated by 20% of “heavy searchers”. You may want to use this knowledge in keyword selection and go after those niche words. The thought being that if searchers that generate most of the traffic are somewhat heavy searchers, logic would follow that they would tend to be more sophisticated searchers, based on how often they search. Keyword selection will be most important part in future.

Link Spamming and Google

Google is working against LinkSpamming in a Big way. After introducing of nofollow tag, it looks like Google is adjusting their algorithm to better detect and neutralize several strategies of traditional Linking (LinkSpamming). Most likely are: too many links with identical link anchor text, too many links all originating from same domain, too many links going to home page and few going to other pages or none of them going to other pages, off topic links.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Method Of Hiding Links From Google

As of 18th January 2005, Google, together with other search engines, is recognising a new attribute to the anchor tag. The attribute is "rel", and it is used as follows:- A href="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html" rel="nofollow" link text /A The attribute tells Google to ignore the link completely. The link won't help the target page's PageRank, and it won't help its rankings. It is as though the link doesn't exist. With this attribute, there is no longer any need for javascript, forms, or any other method of hiding links from Google.

Dangling links

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet..........Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." -

extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Page Rank

Equation to calculate PageRank (PR) was published by Google long back when they where developing PR, it’s as follows:-

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A,
'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has,
'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

But now Google uses a variation of it, no one out side Google knows about the variation. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Victim of Click Fraud

While the search engine take this stuff very seriously (At least Google and Overture), They are at mercy of bots and hackers constantly assailing their systems for their own nefarious gains. By now most people out there realise they have to have virus program installed on their computer or they are bound to get burned by a vicious attack. The same thing is true of your web site. If you are a PPC advertiser, eventually your are going to get hit with fraudulent clicks, especially if you are in any of the competitive channels.
Overture and Google catch the majority of them, but your campaign is still going to get hit by at least 5 to 10 percent clicks that are not real. this number is not now, nor has it ever been, 50 percent, by the way. That's another myth that's being touted around the web right now that simple isn't true. I personally know lot of advertisers both large and small, who are getting at least 5 percent conversion rates from their PPC campaigns and that just wouldn't be possible with 50-percent click fraud rates.
This is your campaign and your livelihood. Do yourself a favour: Before you spend a whole bunch of money on PPC advertising, set up Tracking URLs. Take advantage of conversion tracking from overture and google, and buy yourself a good click-tracking solution.
Some Good, inexpensive ones include WhosClickingWho.com, Click Auditor from KeywordMax.com and ClickTracks.com. Not only will these programs inform you about nefarious clicks, but they will also tell you about the real ones so you can determine how much you should actually be paying for clicks.
With your clicking information in hand, you can go to search engines and Question any clicks that you know are bogus. The search engine companies will research on this, and if they find the clicks questionable you will get refund. Partnering with the search engines this way to safeguard your business, and no one benefits when click fraud is allowed to continue.
Another way to safe guard against click fraud is to be very careful when selecting smaller search engines to work with. many of them simply don't have the resource to invest to safeguard their advertisers from fraudulent clicks -----> you all know Them ;)

Friday, March 25, 2005

Trade Mark ---> OFF the Mark

Bid on Brand Name and Make Money will this work for Long?
Big brands are defending against others that link to their Trade Mark. Gico sued Google and Overture in May 2004, Saying that use of its trade marks when selling advertising in search engines constituted tradmark infringement and raised various state law cause of action. Google filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that it had no legal merit and that the state claims where insufficently pleeded. Google and overture are tied to trademarked brands such as Geico or Nike for there commercially driven searches.