Marketing Pilgrim

I would have sworn up and down that Google organic listings operated without any integration of Google AdWords or AdSense data. Every engineer I’ve see talk about the subject has said as much and even the AdWords help documents stated this was the case. That was until now.

Jeremy Mayes noticed that Google has deleted the documentation. It used to be located here. You can still see the page in Archive.org.

Quote from Archive.org Page:

Will participation in AdWords or AdSense affect my listing in Google’s free search results?

Google’s advertising programs are independent of our search results. Search results display on the left side of our results page; ads appear on the right and in the colored box at the top.

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Maybe now with the new evidence of Google punishing link sellers we can get a large scale movement towards content blended paid links; something that has been an uphill battle so far. Here’s a list of basic rules to live by when selling links.

Do not talk about selling links.

I have come across a large number of websites that openly advertise you can buy a link on their site. This is a big no-no. If you have an advertising page on your site, do not list anything about plain text paid links even if it is an option.

You DO NOT talk about selling links.

This rule is doubly important for off site advertising venues. Make your URL private within link networks. Most text link ad networks either by default, or as an option, allow you to hide your URL until after a link is purchased. Take advantage of this and if your network doesn’t have this option then you might consider switching.

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Yesterday I mentioned one of my favorite Google gadgets and today I’m going to talk about my least favorite gadget.

There is a lot of sensitive information stored in a persons Google account. Adsense, Analytics, Adwords, and the list goes on. If I were a Phishing scammer, a Google login would be almost as good as bank account information. Maybe even better as stealing money from a bank would draw the attention of the FBI. I’m not sure how much action I could get on a stolen Google account.

So why in the world is Google letting people add Google gadgets to the gadget directory that ask for Google account username and passwords? Take the Your AdSense Revenue @ iGoogle gadget for example. Based on the notes on the gadget page, the source code of the gadget, and the information found on the gadget publishers website, I would say there is a good chance this is a phishing scam. If a person was to do a normal gadget search and add that gadget to their iGoogle homepage without clicking on the gadget detail, it looks very official.

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As much as I try to remove myself from Google it seems I always end up coming back. The services and features they offer interconnect so easily and make life so convenient, how can I not? My new favorite Google toy is the iGoogle personalized homepage.

I think I also just found my new favorite Gadget. The Analytics KPI Gadget from the guys over at Monitus

From the Analytics KPI Gadget website:

Analytics KPI Features

* New: run multiple instances of the gadget to view several profiles at once
* View KPI from Google Analytics in iGoogle
* Color-coded results to highlight trends
* View week on week and month on month data
* Access multiple Google Analytics profiles
* Calculated KPI that may not directly be available in Google Analytics
* The gadget does not require login information, and no usernames or passwords are sent to an outside server. When you are logged in to iGoogle, the browser can access those Google Analytics accounts that you have access to. This is because both iGoogle and Google Analytics are on the same google.com domain.

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Blog comments have long been a link building tool for many SEOs (unfortunately). Before the nofollow tag, comment abuse ran rampant, and now with the nofollow tag in place, many people search high and low for blogs that have it removed.

I am personally against the nofollow tag. It’s one of the most absurd ideas to come out of the search engines in a long time. It has done nothing to stop the daily influx of automated comment spam it sought to stop.

That being said, I am also not one to remove the nofollow attribute from blog comments. All that accomplishes is attracting more attention from spammers. Next thing you know you’re on a few public yesfollow spam lists and probably hundreds of private ones. I can think of a few ways to turn a yesfollow blog into a good link building scheme that in the end, only benefits you. Luckily there are easier and safer ways to build link equity.

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There seem to be a million and one open source content management systems these days. Just look at Open Source CMS. The problem is none of the developers seem to actually grasp in depth search engine optimization issues that such systems create. That is until now.

ModX is still young compared to projects like Drupal and WordPress but that can be a good thing. It gives the ability to learn from others mistakes.

The issue I speak of is duplicate content by way of duplicate URL structures returning the same content. John goes into enough detail to make your head explode. The problem is so complicated that some engineer had to come up with a word for it that I couldn’t pronounce if I trained for a year in Tibet with monks specializing in SEO Kung Fu. Canonicalization! There I said it. Wait, that’s spelling, I still have no idea how to pronounce it.

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That’s because real businesses have real business models. So much of the web has been created by throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Only then do many entrepreneurs mold a business model around a website and most of the time unsuccessfully.

As the Internet grows into it’s teenage years, much as with real children, we see it starting to comprehend economic logic. Making money costs money. The majority of successful businesses around the world are built on the foundation of ROI (return on investment) not ROTSBFC (return on time spent building free customers).

Don’t get me wrong, the days of home based pocket change startups aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But unfortunately the percentage of those ventures that succeed is rapidly shrinking due to business people with investment capital entering the market online.

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So I’m sitting here listening to some old school jams, reading my daily mundane marketing RSS feeds, and preparing something to put me out of my misery. But wait, what is this? A blog post, and not an article, that is more useful than any article I have read in a month (or longer)?

I’ve covered link cloaking before. It’s usually not hard to spot. Those that do it usually do so in excess. While discussing SearchEngineWorld.com and possible link cloaking David Naylor brings to light that Google is showing site => redirect => site links compared to Yahoo only showing site => site links with a backlink check.

For example, a site that is number one for a very competitive phrase shows only 84 backlinks in Yahoo while the number two spot shows over 100,000 links. Using the Google backlink search you get a much better understanding of how this can happen even if the Google data is incomplete.

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Woke up this morning to find DavidNaylor.co.uk had been hacked and defaced. I don’t see any malicious code being inserted, only this note shown below replacing of all pages. Hopefully nothing more than the blog was affected and he is able to get the previous contents back up. I am wondering if this is the same person as before or just another random idiot.

Haxed hahahahahah

Black hat this, ****.

Update: Per comments by DaveN below, the site was moved and not hacked. He just enjoys humorous placeholder pages.

I see questions pop up in the forums every once in awhile with people asking if images that are linked to a website count as links. A link is a link so the answer would be yes. But what about images that are not surrounded by link (a href) tags. Can an image on it’s own count as a link? Well according to Yahoo Site Explorer they do.

I was reading a magazine the other day when I came across an article on JangoMail. Liking what I read I went to check them out. Being the SEO freak I am I had to check their backlinks even though my visit had nothing to do with SEO. Does anyone else here suffer from that disorder?

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Back in April Marketing Pilgrim reported Google was allowing select advertisers access to a new report named “Placement Performance.” It appears Google is as of today starting the official roll out of this report to all of it’s Adwords advertisers. The Placement Performance Report details the specifics of your ads running through the adsense network.

From the official Google release:

In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more visibility into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives. Designed in response to advertisers’ requests, Placement Performance reports offer advertisers both increased transparency and greater control over their contextual advertising, which ultimately leads to more relevant ads for users.

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What would happen to your business if you suddenly died in an accident? Would if fall apart or run smoothly in another persons hands?

Being Memorial Day I was thinking about our troops when it it dawned on me that out of the thousands of reservists who are now active duty, many own their own businesses and some probably own online businesses. What did they do when called up?

Whether it’s in relation to death or just incapacity to oversee day to day operations, we all need a plan to make sure our businesses are self sufficient and can provide for our families future. Here’s a good start for such a plan.

1. Create a will and a living will outlining my desires for the business.

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