Search Engine Tigers

While doing a little updating on my Local Search slides for Search Camp Philly (pcphilly08) I noticed that between February and tonight Google has modified their disclaimer text at the bottom of each PPC geotargeting page. Take a look, back in February -

…and now -

As you can see they’ve now pushed it front and center that “You may receive clicks from outside our targeted locations”.

Back in November, when it was uncertain as to who would be getting the nod from each of the two main parties, I did some searches for each of the candidates, to see which political candidates were bidding against each other PPC wise.  Back then, I only found McCain bidding against Romney, Giuliani, and Brownback, and Ron Paul bidding against McCain and Brownback.  Now that we’re through the first 2 races, and there are no clear winners on either side, I thought it would be interesting to take another look and see who is targeting who at this point.  Has anyone decided that this is a possible way to engage potential voters for other candidates and convince them to switch?

On the Democratic side - not officially.  There is an ad up against Barack Obama from a “Men for Hillary” blog, that stresses that it is not an official site, and Barack has his own site in the #1 spot for his own name, but not against Hillary or John Edwards (who has the issue that he shares his name with a TV psychic).

On the Republican side - John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson all have their own campaign sites in the top spot, while the other candidates, including Ron Paul and Mitt Romney do not.  What about for each other’s names?  Well, yes, there is one candidate that has taken advantage of that opportunity, and is currently purchasing PPC ads against the name of a close competitor.  Will it make a difference?  Time will tell…

After looking at the organic results for the next Presidential election, I thought I’d take a look and see what’s going on PPC wise with the campaigns. Looking at the SERPs for each of the Democratic candidates, there’s no competitive bidding going on against those names.  With Bill Richardson being the only candidate bidding on his own name.
On the Republican side it’s a different matter. A search for Mitt Romney displays a PPC ad for John McCain. A search for John McCain displays an ad for Ron Paul, a search for Rudy Guiliani has just John McCain, and a search for Sam Brownback has ads for both McCain and Paul (with the McCain one being about the Brownback endorsement of McCain). Searches for Ron Paul and Fred Thompson have no PPC ads from other candidates.

So it looks like the Republican candidates are starting to grasp hold of PPC as part of their campaigns, placing ads on candidate names that they feel they may be more ideologically tuned to, so they have a greater chance of converting their supporters. As the races heat up over the coming months, it’s going to be interesting to watch and see exactly how this changes.

Li Evans put out the latest installment of her Women of Internet Marketing Series today, one of her questions to Carrie Hill was

Simon Heseltine, Bill Slawski or Scott Orth?

which generated a response of

Hmm - Bill Slawski I think - I love his patent application stuff. I’m way to short-attention-spanned to do that myself so I love that he breaks it down for us. I have enjoyed Simon Heseltine’s recent foray into geo-targeting. It’s great for travel.

So in case anyone has popped over to this blog, looking for that ‘foray’, it’s actually over on RBDRodeo - ‘Local Targeting for your PPC Campaigns’, although I do have some older posts here on geotargeting (yeah, it needs updating), and I am going to be speaking at SES-Local in November on ‘Best Practices for Using PPC for Local Targeting‘.

While doing a search to determine differences in SERPs due to personalization, I noticed that when I was logged in and receiving personalized results there were PPC ads displayed. When I logged out and performed the same search, no PPC ads.  At least there was the same number of organic results…

As Google has stated, there’s no issue with bidding on competing brand terms, as long as you don’t use a trademarked term that you don’t own / have the rights to in your PPC ad.  One quick thing that I want to point out is that if you are bidding on competing trademarked terms, don’t use dynamic keyword insertion in your ad…

Ok, one more post on Nick Stamoulis, but this time it’s not really about him. In the comments on my post on Scraping SEMPO for keywords he pointed me to a positive article on his bidding strategy, and invited me, and everyone else to go bid on his name. Now, while I’m not going to do that, I took a look to see if anyone had. Someone has…

From the sounds of this ad, this company/site is affiliated with him, however if you look at the about us on their site, he’s not listed. However, they are the site that had the article praising him.  So they’re drawing people to their article, right? Not really. The landing page that they have in the ad is their main page (the destination URL is the same as the display URL), since that article is from mid July, it’s long gone from the main page. A visitor to their site, expecting to see information about Nick Stamoulis would be disappointed, and most likely click the back button.  Had they pointed it to their article, the visitor could read what they said, and if they liked the article maybe they’d subscribe to their feed, or contact them about their services.

This is a great example of why the landing page that you select for your PPC ads is an important factor.  When the landing page doesn’t match the ad, or provide the information that a user is likely to need, the chances of a conversion plummet.

So PromediaCorp, you know what to do now…

While doing a Google search for my company - RedBoots Consulting - I noticed a PPC ad over on the right hand side for a Nick Stamoulis.

For some reason his name sounded familiar to me, so I did a search on my old company - Innovectra - and, lo and behold, there was the same ad, once again… the only ad. This got me thinking, apart from me, what was the connection between the two companies? My first thought was that both were SEMPO members, so to test this theory I went over to the SEMPO membership list and did some more searches - Bruce Clay, Fathom SEO, Ingenio, 360i, Flying Point Media, G3 Group, Kinetic Results, JumpFly, Performics, Sitelab International, The Search Agency, TopRank Online Marketing - each one had the exact same ad from Mr. Stamoulis displayed. Now admittedly, while virtually every SEMPO member company that I tried had the ad, I did find one that didn’t - Keller Williams Realty- but that is most likely because he scrubbed the list, or those ads were taken down. Why could they have been taken down? Well for starters that display URL contravenes the Google AdWords guidelines.

Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you’re advertising… The display URL field cannot be used as another line of ad text…Avoid gimmicky repetition

So by repeating that phone number in the display URL, it becomes invalid as attempting to go to that page pushes you to his custom 404 page (the destination URL behind it is fine, it’s the display URL that is invalid).

As for non SEMPO members, I tried a few, and he didn’t show for any of them - Commerce360, Calafia, Marketing Pilgrim, Small Business SEM, Marchex, Search Marketing Gurus - which leads me to think that my original hypothesis is correct, and this guy sourced his PPC keyword list directly from the SEMPO member list. Yes, it’s an open list that anyone can access and get, and he is a paid up member of SEMPO, but it just doesn’t feel right to me.

Marchex has announced that today it will be launching over 100,000 new websites, totaling over 1 billion pages of content. These websites are both targeted at local searches (i.e. denverautorepair.com, 90210.com, etc), as well as specific verticals (locksmiths.com). Rather than aiming for a central portal on one domain, similar to an IYP site such as SuperPages, Marchex is hoping that these thousands of sites will each be relevant enough to pull searchers in as they’re discovered through the SERPs. However, one thing that you will notice if you go to these individual sites is that they have a very similar look and feel (which you would expect with 100,000 pages being launched at once), and that they all link, in some way, to myzip.com, which can show the exact same information as the individual pages.

Looking at their robots.txt, you can see that they are basically shutting the crawlers out of everything on myzip.com

User-agent: *

Disallow: /-/home/

Disallow: /-/results/

Disallow: /-/detail/

Disallow: /-/about/

Disallow: /-/terms/

Disallow: /-/privacy/

Disallow: /-/guidelines/

In fact, the only page that I found on myzip.com that could be crawled was the portal page (http://www.myzip.com/-/portal/?p=Portal&). So maybe this is because they’re only having those 100,000 individual sites crawled? After all, they’d get some benefit from the urls right? Well, here’s the robots.txt for denverautorepair.com

User-agent: *

Disallow: /-/results/

Disallow: /-/detail/

Disallow: /-/about/

Disallow: /-/terms/

Disallow: /-/privacy/

Disallow: /-/guidelines/

Aha! A difference! They’re not blocking the /-/home directory on this site. So what is there? All of the unique content? Well… not quite, it’s the same content on each page in that directory, but the sponsored listings are different…

Marchex is looking to distinguish itself in scale and quality from the so-called “domain parking” industry that often prey on accidental visitors to their sites by serving up low-quality advertising links on random pages
From the Reuters article

…such as serving up ads for buying homes in Florida on a page about Denver car repair???

Now while it’s true that this is a relevance quirk on Yahoo’s side, (I reached this page by clicking on the “See sponsored links for: Florida” crawlable link on the site, which is populated by Yahoo), the fact still remains that Marchex is allowing these pages to be indexed . Of course houses in Florida on a Denver page isn’t the most fun example, so how about this crawlable page on locksmiths.com stuffed full of Carmen Electra ads, because when you need a locksmith, you obviously need something to take your mind off being locked out of your house / car…

Admittedly, this is a small sample that I’ve looked at, but it does look a little strange if they’re trying to distance themselves from the domain parking sites, yet the only pages they’re having crawled are those with different ad sets, especially when those ad sets may not be related to the content of the page. It could be that they’ve not yet ‘launched’ these sites fully, and the robots.txt files may be changing, so I’ll check back tomorrow and see if they’re still the same or not, but still…

**update - 2 days later - Looking at the robots.txt  files for denverautorepair.com and locksmiths.com, I don’t see any change, so it looks like this is how they intend it to be. 

So Yahoo recently updated their PPC quality score, which now includes your conversion metrics.  What this means is that if you have conversion tracking in place, Yahoo will use that to increase your quality score, which effectively means that you’ll be paying less per click than you were before.  Why would Yahoo want to do this?  Well, it’s a smart thing, if they can identify those ads that are converting, then they’re obviously the more relevant ads.  Giving those relevant ads a leg up in the rankings can only help the relevance of their SERPs as a whole.  Also, this is going to push more people to using their conversion tracking, which will give them more of a complete picture of the effectiveness of their system, and what company doesn’t love to get more data on their business?

Barry over at SERoundtable goes the darker route, asking what is to stop Yahoo from, at some point in the future, increasing the price for converting ads.  After all they’re making money for that company, so why shouldn’t Yahoo get a bigger piece of that pie?  I don’t see that happening, because apart from the PR disaster if they tried it, people would just then switch off their conversion tracking on Panama, and just track it through their analytics software.