Search Banter

So, it’s officially official. Seth Godin is going to come to Salt Lake City on the 24th of May. The conference will be held at the Salt Palace from 1 to 4 pm. We hope to see all you local internet marketers there!

The other day, I had an old friend email me who said he found my blog in the search engines. I was pretty excited to hear from him and so called him up. In our conversation, I asked how he found my blog and he told me he found me by looking up my name on Google. I was pretty sure that my name was nowhere to be found on Google yet, but he said he found it by typing in “Nelson James Utah”. I was number one in Google. Of course there aren’t that many people named Nelson James in Utah, in fact, there are only 97 people in the entire United States with my name, so I may be the only one in Utah. Anyway, I had never thought to look me up by state before.

Still, my goal was to show up for the keyword “Nelson James” by itself. Well, good news friends. I did a search in Google today and I just happen to be on the first page for my name. Again, I know this isn’t a huge success story, but it was a good test to see how fast you can get a site to show up for niche keywords (this one took me 36 days). Of course I’m not stopping at #9, but it’s a good start.

Link to Nelson James - Google Search

If you haven’t heard of the new Google TiSP, you have to check it out. Yesterday, Google announced that it is offering FREE in-home wireless broadband service with a free self-installation kit which includes everything you need to get started. While you are looking at this incredible project, keep in mind what day it was yesterday

There is a pretty amusing flash game created by Pro Net Advertising called Search Engine Smackdown. If you haven’t played the game yet you need to. Even if you don’t know jack about search engine stuff, It’s a funny game. The players consist of the high and mighties of the internet realm such as Bill Gates, Sergey, Larry, and so forth. It’s good stuff.  

Have you ever been looking for something in the top results of Google and been taken to a spammy site? Do you have competitors that aren’t adhering to the Webmaster Guidelines? If so, Google wants you to do something about it. Stephanie, from the Google Search Quality team in Dublin, says that if you report spam from your webmaster account, Google will look at the report and if it’s legit, they’ll take action.

Of course there will be a fair amount of people who are thinking about reporting all of their competitors and then they’ll show up #1, but that is exactly why Google has you report spam from your webmaster account so that they can track who you are just in case you abuse the priviledge. And then guess who they’ll consider as spammy?

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In celebration of their 10 year anniversary, Yahoo is going to offer unlimited email storage. This should be taking place within the next month I believe. Sounds like a great plan. Some of you may be asking, “How are they going to offer unlimited storage?” If you think about it, I can’t even fill up my Gmail accounts so far and I get a lot of mail. I’m guessing they are banking on the fact that most people are like me. I only hope that there aren’t too many people who abuse the unlimited factor. Anyway, it’s still pretty awesome.

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MSN or Live (whatever you want) recently announced that they are disabling any advanced link search commands due to “mass automated usage.” This means you can’t use the link:[your website], linkdomain:, inurl: or any of the other advanced link funcionality at MSN anymore. It sounds like they are going to try and make it so that any manual queries can still be made, but for now everyone is being punished.

Hopefully MSN solves this problem fairly soon because it’s a tool we use frequently and I believe that by disabling this tool, MSN is only going to lose more users of thier search engine. Way to go MSN or Live (or whatever)!

Something I didn’t realize about quality score that I just recently stumbled across in the Google Adwords Help Center was this and I quote (speaking about the factors that are considered in the quality score): “These factors include performance variables like keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, overall historical keyword performance with Google, and even the user experience on the landing page or site associated with an ad.”

That last part got me. I wonder just what Google is looking for there. Do they track the amount of time spent on the page? And if so, does more time or less time give you a better score? You would think more time, but some people create landing pages for their ads where the sole purpose of the page is to get them to click off the page to go to another page on the same website (such as a checkout page). These pages shouldn’t be penalized for doing exactly what they are designed to do.

Maybe Google doesn’t track time spent on the page, but what else could they track?

Google is taking another big step in their advertising. They are now testing something called cost per action which will only charge advertisers for actions visitors perform on their site such as registering, downloading something, making a purchase etc.

There are many who belive that CPA will take CPC and Cost per Impression out of existance, but I’m not one of them…at least not yet. I think CPA is a brilliant move and it will appeal to many advertisers out there who are looking for this end result, but I also think that there will still be a large market for CPC. There are some types of websites that are only looking for traffic. Their sites don’t necessarily have or need a call to action.

It will be very interesting to see where this goes. I hope to be involved in the testing.

For those of you who believe that scraping other site’s content and putting it on your site will help you rank well in the search engines, this post is for you. A recent post by Kaspar on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog says that scraping content from other websites in an attempt to dupe the search engines is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and will get you penalized once your site is found - which usually doesn’t take too long.

Does this mean that if you’re scraping a small amount of relevant content that you will be penalized once the search engines find you? Not necessarily. Having scraped content that is relevant to your page and site is not a problem as long as there is unique content on the page as well. The search engines do pretty well at differentiating between a site that is attempting to fool the search engines with scraped content, and a site that has a bit of scraped content that is relevant to the users of that page. Just make sure you have other high quality content that is useful to your visitors.