Search Engine Tigers

For those who aren’t aware, l337, l33t or leet is a term (derived from elite) used primarily in online gaming in reference to someone who is (or believes they are) superior to others. There’s also a language that’s sprung up around this, also referred to as leet, where numbers that kind of look like the letters replace the letters in words. i.e. ‘A’ is replaced with a ‘4′, for more info on this you can look at the wikipedia entry on leet-speak. So where does Google fit into this? Well, they’ve put out an interface for people that speak / read leet. Take a look at their leet interface here.

As I mentioned in my last post, I met a few well known people at SES Chicago, and you can see how much of an impression I made. Over at SEOMoz.org I’m mentioned as “someone”…

I obviously made more of an impression with Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay, with her post titled “It’s all full of stars”. I’m actually mentioned by name, although she did forget to mention that I’m nice

So tonight, I hung around the restaurant and bar for a little while, and the place was full of Bears fans, with no real SEO people in sight. So I headed back to my room, to eventually head back to the Irish pub for a nice plate of fish and chips. After I ate, I walked over to the other bar and heard an Australian accent, so I made a comment about the Ashes, rather quickly I was introduced to Dave Naylor, Aussie Webmaster (Frank), ShoeMoney, Andrea ShoeMoney (his sister, who is starting up her own conference series), Todd Friesen, and a few others (such as James Fleet AKA Captain Kiwi). As the evening went on Stuntdubl showed up and, after complaining about how people kept buying him drinks (what a hard life), he bought me a couple of drinks. I met Bruce Clay, Lisa Barone, Rand Fishkin, Rebecca, and many more (Danny Sullivan, Dana Todd, etc). Of course none of them knew who I was, but by the end of the evening a few of them remembered my name, and I wasn’t the one that set fire to the table or sprayed a straw full of mudslide over Rand’s jacket…

Seriously though, this is my third conference, and it was nice to be able to stand around with people in the industry who have the recognition, and listen to what they had to say about the industry. Now I did pick up a few tidbits, but they were ‘off the record’, so I’m not going to put them in here, instead I’m heading off to bed.

Update: I just found a picture of James Fleet, Dave Naylor, Shoemoney, and myself over on Shoemoney’s site.

If you have a website and you want to put mapping information on it so that people can find out your location, how do you do it? Well, if you get a snazzy GPS system for xmas you can go to your business and find out that way. But what if you don’t? Well there are plenty of ways to find your location on the web.

Google provides an api to allow you to query their database and get your location, as long as the address is found in their system. The data that they are using appears to be a few years old, so the chances are if your street is fairly new, you might not be found. On Google it’s a 2 step process to first register and get an API key for your website, then to actually send the query to their database through a url i.e.

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave,+
Washington,+DC&output=xml&key=ABQIAAAA-xQrwlLORM9lqIAYOLDFB
RQxjlcwaanVZIaMa_7hO2Evpk0tvRTOn77yY6QyLPNQmDizgSUsXhpuqQ

The return for this query is in XML format, with the co-ordinates being displayed, should they be found. Should they not, then it’s time for option 2.

Yahoo skips the need to register, and just gives you a url to query, which returns data in the same format as the Google XML.

http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YahooDemo&
street=1600+Pennsylvania%20Ave&city=Washington&state=DC

From my experience, the data in the Yahoo database is much more current than that in the Google database, but there are still instances where I’ve not been able to find an address in Yahoo, which then leads me to option 3. This is a site by InfoSports and displays a map of the US. You simply zoom in until you find your exact location, then click on the map. This then gives you the coordinates, and away you go.

Protecting your online brand reputation is a topic that quite a few people have written about, heck there’s even a session at SES Chicago about it. Today I ran across a website detailing one homeowners lack of satisfaction with their builder. The site is aptly named CW Stinks, which states how the homeowner feels. The site is fairly new, and hasn’t yet been crawled, but the homeowner feels so strongly that he’s paid for ads on Google. I emailed the owner of the site to talk about what he hopes to accomplish, and he said that he wants to rank no.1 for CW Custom Builders, but until then he’s willing to pay for the clicks, and he wants to protect other people from the heartache that he’s had to go through. He has informed CW of his site, but has received no response from the company.

I wonder if he manages to rank above them for their own name whether CW will contact him, or if they’ll try to do some SEO to get their own site listed back up top. Time will tell, but from looking at their site now, they have the same 2 badly chosen keywords on all pages – “home & front”, and the same title on every page, so he stands a good chance of getting up there.

If you’re going to be there, I’ll be the one wearing the shirt at the top of the page, come up and say hi. I don’t bite, and I can treat you to my mostly English accent (think Dave Naylor if he’d been over here in the states for 14+ years).

With the need to transfer some campaigns from one account to another we hit upon the idea of using the nifty free downloadable tool direct from Google – Adwords Editor. This allows you to make bulk changes to your account while offline, get them just how you want them, then upload them back to Google. This worked fantastically for us, much easier than deleting and re-adding the campaigns by hand. Within an hour or so the campaigns were re-assigned and up and running in their new accounts.

Then we noticed the problem, our geo-targeted campaigns were now generating a lot of impressions and clicks. Going into the campaigns we noticed that the geo-targeting was now lost, and the campaigns all had a “All Countries and Territories” scope. This wasn’t a good thing, as these campaigns were for local companies, and we don’t want to be paying for people in Seattle, WA clicking to view a website for a landscaper in Fairfax, VA (let alone people in Bangalore). Contacting Google, they promised to investigate, and within 2 days of us contacting them they informed us that

Currently within AdWords Editor, campaigns using regional targeting may revert to targeting “All Countries and Territories” upon being transferred from one account to another… I understand you were unaware of this feature…

They then went on to give us a credit for that day on all clicks during the affected time (about $200). The wording in the email is interesting though, apparently a ‘feature’ is something that ‘may’ happen…