Why PPC Is Ruining The Web
Everywhere you go on the web you see pay per click ads. They are cluttering up pages and overshadowing the content you are trying to find. It used to be flashy banner ads that were the bane of the Internet, now Google Ads are taking up valuable web properties and making it harder for users to find what they are looking for. Text ad boxes can fill up to 30% of the screen real estate on some sites, and in a lot of cases they are appearing at the top of content pages and therefore BECOMING the content. The ads are what crafty webmasters are now using as the point to which their traffic is driven to.
This is the exact opposite of what search engines like Google preach, yet they are one of the biggest purveyors of text ad boxes with their AdSense program. It is not just the cluttering, the cost per click is being driven up by ad-only sites and are often denizens of click-fraud. Advanced practices like online proxy servers and cookie flushing plugins give AdSense site owners the ability to click on their own ads anonymously. This type of action and fraud is not easily apparent to Google since browsers like FireFox make it easy for users to hide their IP and online identity.
Pay Per Click Problems On The Internet
The major issues that involve pay per click can be broken down into two categories:
- Usability Problems - these issues revolve around how PPC ads are cluttering sites and making it harder for users to find answers. The usability problems are looked at from a user standpoint.
- Advertiser Problems - these issues are with the ads themselves. Click fraud, over priced keywords and low conversion rates are covered here.
Pay Per Click Usability Problems
We have already talked about how these ads are cluttering up sites and are making it difficult to find legitimate content. Sites that are ad-only are slowly taking over placement from legitimate, content oriented sites. The more that sites fill up their spaces with text ad boxes, the less real content can take the limelight.
A content oriented website must follow website usability rules to be successful. By putting AdSense ads in prevalent positions, a greedy webmaster is making it harder for users to navigate and find the products and services that they are looking for. Real content is being confused with paid ads. These types of sites are looking for quick money, not return visitors. The only way to stop this is to leave these sites when you come upon them. They are parasites and make honest hard working legitimate webmasters spend more time and money than we should. They are in direct conflict with Google’s policies, yet Google does nothing about it. It is up to us to not give them any credence by NOT CLICKING ON PAID ADS!
Advertiser PPC Problems
People that spend money on pay per click ads are not getting the return on investment (ROI) that they did just a couple of years ago. The reasons for this are many. The more experienced a web user is, the less likely they are to click on sponsored or paid results in the SERP’s. They are even less likely to click on them on other sites that use AdSense. That leaves less experienced users who are much less likely to convert into a lead or a sale and click fraud.
Click fraud is a huge problem for both publishers and advertisers. In case you don’t know the difference, an advertiser is a website that buys paid ads, a publisher is the site on which the paid ad is hosted on. Both parties can be victims to click fraud. Advertisers can have their ads clicked on by their competitors who want to drive them out of the bidding or just want to cost the advertiser money. This is the type of click fraud that is more well known. Google spends millions in click fraud reimbursement when advertisers can bring them proof that their ads have been clicked on in a fraudulent manner. The thing is, Google doesn’t reimburse money, they just give credit to the advertisers account, so the cycle just begins again.
The more prevalent and often less discussed type of click fraud comes from the publisher. Sites that are ad-only are more likely to click on their own ads and cost advertisers money. Google has a very hard time tracking this type of fraud thanks to the privacy technology that exists. I can spoof anybody using FireFox. A site or Google will have no idea what my IP is, what OS I am using or even where I am geographically. I am not a hacker and don’t know anything about programming, but I can hide my identity. These ad-only sites that live on click fraud have many resources available to them. There are keyword sites and services that you can buy that will give you a list of the highest paid keyword clicks on the Internet. They get updated daily.
When you see sites that are sub domains with no relevance to the keyword phrase, more than likely they are a fraud. An example would be: new-york-injury-attourney.somethingalltogetherdifferent.con. These sites will have little content, just enough to spoof the Google AdWords server enough to show ads for injury lawyers in new York City. Keywords having to do with personal injury are good for $25 to $50 a click in LA and New York.
If you run across these types of sites, don’t click on their links, leave! If you are an advertiser, research your keywords in Google and make a list of bogus ad-only sites. You can add them to the filter in AdWords. Be wary of any click charges that come outside of the true SERP’s. Make claims to Google when your traffic is not converting or if your analytics don’t match up to the clicks.
The only way we can do anything about this is to not go on ad-only sites. If they don’t make money, they will eventually go away. Maybe someday Google will adhere to their own policies and declare war on spam sites and ad-only pages.
Google Is Not Your Friend!
I know that is quite a statement – Google is not your friend. In fact while they forge the perception that they are this hip and cool bunch of guys and gals that got started in their garage, the fact is, they run their business with the same imperialistic techniques as the evil empire Microsoft. Google can be very convincing in how they operate, not as an empire out to rule the world, but as a lovable group out to make the world and the Internet a better place for all.
Google’s business tactics are down right scary, as is the amount of private data they are gathering about us and our websites. I am highly concerned that they are applying the data they are gathering through the toolbar, analytics, iGoogle, Gmail and the Webmaster Center and using it against site owners. Their so-called “war on paid links” is a perfect example of how Google is weeding out the competition. Anybody who owns a site and is selling links on it, is a competitor of Google, which is why they are devoting so much energy to stopping paid links. It has nothing to do with the watering down of the index or spoofing the index. Rather, it’s all about money – their money and our money.
If they are so concerned with the nature of things on the web, why don’t they stop allowing sites that have no viable content to place Google Ads on them? There is nothing worse than wasting time searching for something and getting caught in a loop of paid advertising sites that just link to other paid sites through Google Ads. You all know what I am talking about. More and more of these phony websites are getting into the index. What’s worse is that they are allowed to compete for ad space with legitimate companies and drive the cost per click up without delivering any actual content. We’ve all wasted a lot of time searching for products and weeding through the tangle of ad only sites.
So what are we to do about it? Google accounts for 65% of my referrer traffic. Even though I have no ads on this site and my revenue comes from providing services and not from my website, how would I be able to feed my kids if I lost my traffic from Google? Like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, Google is an all-seeing, all powerful overseer of the Internet and it’s either their way or the highway. My biggest problem with Google is the single-mindedness over paid links.
I agree that links to online gambling or casinos on a site about cat food is bad, but who are they to penalize both the advertiser and the publisher when a legitimate on-topic paid link deal is done? What’s worse is the manner in which they police paid links, by having other webmasters nark out their competitors in Google Webmaster Center. What stops a low placed website owner from snitching on a higher placed competitor just to hurt their placement?
Google’s so-called “war on paid links” is just another way for black-hat SEO to win over the hard working guys that optimize their sites, write solid content and use aggressive link strategies. It’s harder than ever to pick up links. In fact, reciprocal linking has also lost weight in the Google algorithm. So what are we supposed to do to earn links? Unless you post articles about Britney Spears, it’s unlikely that a website about network topology is going to generate lots of “buzz”.
I am a firm believer in paid links from relevant sites as well as on-topic paid posts by bloggers. Google should not take on the role as the Internet police. People like me that use paid linking should not be punished for making a content exchange that involves money. As long as the content is relevant, Google should back off. It’s time that we see Google for what they are – the enemy. The only way we can strike back is to stop paying them. If everyone took down their ads, stopped clicking on ads, and didn’t buy ads for just one day, Google would get a very strong message to back off! Just one day of lost revenue would certainly wake them up to the fact that their “paid link war” is bogus and we aren’t going to take it!
How Search Engine Wars Affect Your Placement
The major search engines are in an advertising war. They are in constant battle for advertising dollars and their market share can mean the difference between life and death or millions in revenue. The question is; “how do search engine advertisement wars affect my placement”?
The answer is “A Lot”!
The manner in which Google, Yahoo and Live go about their business can not only spell life and death for them, but for your site as well. All three of the majors are large publicly traded companies that need advertisement revenue to survive. The latest market share breakdowns show a widening gap between Yahoo and Google, but also show their commitment to bleed every cent out of their advertisers.
A new report by comScore Media Metrix is stating that the 4 majors, Google, Yahoo, Live and AOL (yeah AOL, I am wondering where ASK is and why it isn’t considered a major engine) have all seen an increase in audience, but a decline in Time On Site. The exception is Google which actually had an increase, but I believe that increase is BS. They are taking into consideration search tool bar traffic as well as the new iGoogle home page. In fact this report is missing important factors such as RSS and the advertising opportunities that are now arising within feeds.
Another factor is the amount that these engines are spending on Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube (Google) and Flickr (Yahoo), but again these reporters are missing the 100 million spent on FeedBurner by Google and how their total control over RSS and the advertising that goes in the feeds will allow Google to dominate yet another market share. To add your AdSence code into your FeedBurner feed you have to be invited to do it. This is very similar to Google’s invitation only GMail ad campaign. They want to make you seem special in getting to put ads in your feed, just like you were “special” to get a GMail account.
So Google is the 500 pound gorilla in the search engine room and making their advertising space larger and larger to accomodate more marketing inventory. By doing so they are also selling out the natural or organic side of search, which is why so many of us used Google in the first place. The second that there are ads on iGoogle, that will be it for me!
All the reports and Metrics are fine for advertisers that spend big money, but how does it effect us normal people? The truth is, the advertising trends are much less relevant to a site owner than the changes in how search engine results pages (SERP’s) are being put together. All the majors have instituted advanced media, news, video and user-generated content into the SERP’s. THIS is what we need to stay focused on. How to obtain placement in the new world order of multimedia SERP’s.
Google has Universal Search, Yahoo has Search Assist, Live was created with Web 2.0 in mind (yes Microsoft actually got a leg up on the Internet for once) and ASK just unveiled its new multimedia search program. In fact you should give ASK a try when searching for news or media. Its search is in my opinion the best out there. The Teoma search algorithm is nearly as good as Google used to be, and it is very difficult to spoof Teoma the way Google can be baited and stuffed. This leads to more relevant search results on ASK then on either Google or Yahoo. I also like ASK’s ad space. It’s not so much the search engine, but their partner sites that make ASK a good buy. Excite, Bloglines, iWon, and Evite are just a few of the media spaces that are driven by Teoma.
All in all, the best thing you can do is to have as much Web 2.0 applications as possible in your Internet Presence. Social Network Marketing is not a fad, it is the future. More and more people are getting their content driven to them, rather than going out and finding it. To leverage those users, your site must have an RSS backbone and be media conscience. If your site doesn’t have a blog, get one, now! Take the time to plant your RSS feeds, articles and site. Avoid paid directories and be careful not to buy links from sites that are not relevant to your content.
Related Posts:
- Changing Face Of Google – Universal Search Explained – post about Universal search and how it will effect your website.
- Yahoo Update – Search Assist – Yahoo’s Search Assist changes the SERP’s and how users use them.
- RSS Brings The News To You – Overview of how users are having content driven to them, and not going out and searching for it.
- RSS Real Simple Syndication Overview – Everything you need to know about RSS.
- Social Network Marketing – Web 2.0 Explained – How to leverage Web 2.0 on your site.
- Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing – Overview of Web 2.0 SEO and how they come together in a powerful online marketing combo.
Yahoo Update – Search Assist
Yahoo is joining the party with its new “Search Assist“. Google’s Universal Search and to an extent the new Microsoft Live Search have been intermixing the SERP’s with more than just web page results. There are two ways to look at this trend, from a user standpoint and from a SEO standpoint. For the most part as a user I like Universal Search, especially with the added functionality of personalized searching through iGoogle. From an SEO viewpoint I like all this because it validates what I have been telling my clients for years “get with Web 2.0, Social Network Marketing, multimedia and not just SEO”. Read Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing for my philosophy on Web 2.0 and SEO.
How Yahoo’s Search Assist Will Change The SERP’s
By following in the footsteps of Google’s Universal Search, Yahoo is giving more credence to Social Network Marketing and multimedia content, as well as giving more weight to user generated content than it ever has before. Read my post The Changing Face Of Google – Universal Search Explained for more details on what Universal Search is.
While I do cover usability in this blog, it is from the webmaster standpoint. How to best get your site set up for users and lead conversion. That being said, this post is going to cover how Yahoo’s Search Assist is going to effect your placement, and what you can do to take advantage of it. Like I said with Universal Search, if you do things like me, in other words you blog and have multimedia going on like videos and podcasts you will be fine. These new Web 2.0 centered searches are looking for fresh content sources, and reward sites that put out fresh content with increased weight in Yahoo and PR in Google (if they ever get around to updating page rank that is).
OK so what is Search Assist and why should you care? I think the biggest effect Search Assist will have is on how users search on Yahoo. When using Yahoo’s Search Assist, the top row of advertisements or sponsored results are in some cases gone! The natural SERP’s are at the top and the ads are on the right. This is going to appeal to a lot of experienced searchers who will avoid paid listings like the plague. I have found that drilling down into the concepts or links within the Search Assist will eliminate the top ads. My feeling is this is a glitch and they will get those ads back in. My beef with Yahoo has always been the prominence of paid or sponsor links in the SERP’s. I personally don’t trust sites that are either so new that they aren’t in the organic SERP’s, or that are older but don’t have any links to them. That doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling especially when I’m looking to exchange money online.
The graphic below is a search for “data recovery” without the Search Assist activated:
The red arrows show the tab that you use to activate Search Assist as well as the non-paid organic SERP’s location without the Search Assist. The tab opens the window which supposedly helps figure out your “intent”. That is what all the search engine people are calling their intuitive search updates. They think they can glean a users intent by certain keywords and possible search history like Google does in the Personalized Search.
If Yahoo feels that you are having problems finding what you are looking for, the Search Assist box will “automagically” appear. That isn’t my term, blame Tim Mayer on the Yahoo Search Blog where they talk about Search Assist. Below is a screenshot of the Search Assist in action for “hard drive data recovery”:
Where the link finger is, that’s the new Yahoo Search Assist. The fact that it is “exploring concepts” and placing media related and user written content in its search matrix, is very good for sites that embrace Web 2.0 and SEO. Also note that the organic content is at the top and no ads appear, except on the right hand side. There are usually at least 4 prominent ads for that term, so the organic listings are now in full view!
Using Search Assist Output when Your Blog Is Part Of A Website And Not A Stand Alone Site
If your blog is part of an existing domain then you have an opportunity to really take advantage of these changes and use them to your advantage. The key is to plan your content properly so your posts are linking in to the home page of your primary site with your top keywords in the anchor text. When you are blogging about a subject covered by sub pages to your home page, then link to them in your posts. If you are unsure of what I mean by sub pages, read my post on Website Linking Strategies which explains links and pass through ratio (now called “link juice” by the masses).
By using a foundation of marketing pages on your core website, you can use the blog to promote those pages with posts. In return you can also link to your posts from the website pages. The best solution is to actually have your blogs feed appear on your foundation pages. I use CaRP Evolution to turn RSS to HTML as well as adding XML-RPC and ping services into the header of static non-blog pages. I have been testing these tactics on a couple of websites and so far the results have been excellent.
By incorporating dynamic content into static pages, and using your blog as a promotional tool, your site will stand a much better chance of appearing in SERP’s that are flavored with Yahoo’s Search Assist and on Google’s Universal Search.
Using Search Assist Output when Your Blog Is A Stand Alone Website
If a blog is your entire website, read my article WordPress SEO Promoting WordPress Pages with Posts for more insight on using solid SEO strategies for building foundation pages within your blog for promotion. These tactics along with the inherent RSS, ping and XML-RPC in WordPress will insure that your site gets the exposure within these assisted search tools from Live, Yahoo and Google. Obviously you will still need incoming links and content to keep the spiders coming to your site and ranking it high in the SERP’s.
Looking at Yahoo Search Assist from a site owner standpoint, there isn’t a lot you can do other than maintain good practices to offset the changing search engine indexes. By using all the tools that WordPress has to offer, or keeping your static site updated and fresh, you will at least have a fighting chance to gain more exposure. Embrace social network marketing so all your traffic source eggs are not in one basket!
WordPress 2.3 Changes
Well the new version of WordPress is here and it is great! While some people are complaining about lack of plugin compatibility, the pros far outweigh the cons in version 2.3. With a little tweaking WordPress is a powerful SEO machine. It is a very good content management system, but what separates it from other database driven CMS’s is its inherent support for SEO. There are several plugins that are vital to good SEO that I have written about. Most of the key plugins still function. One of the best changes to WordPress 2.3 is its capability to show when plugins have new versions. It also eliminates the need for a WordPress version check plugin since it tells you in the dashboard if a new version exists.
The upgrade of WordPress is always pretty easy and this update is no different. I was able to get it up on 17 blogs in a couple of hours. It is important to deactivate all your plugins before this update if you normally don’t do that. I like many webmaster can get pretty lazy when it comes to upgrading, so this time cover all the bases since there are many changes to the database in this upgrade. So please back up your database before updating, especially in 2.3. The WordPress site has a list of compatibility issues with themes and plugins here. This page is the features page with all the new stuff, but also has links to the plugins and themes compatibilities. The list is incomplete, but for the most part if your theme is widget compatible you should be all right.
Major WordPress 2.3 Features
The most obvious feature is tagging. WordPress has really gotten on the tagging bandwagon, probably in response to SES in San Diego where everyone was talking about tagging. One of the most obvious compatibility issues is with Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin was named as one of the most important plugins at SES, so it is a little weird that it won’t work with the new WordPress. Granted a lot of its features are now standard in the new upgrade and I am sure the developer will have a new update out soon. I personally have issues with a lot of tagging. I agree that tagging can be useful for posts that fall under multiple categories, but I have concerns over duplicate content issues that can arise from some tagging strategies.
Duplicate content is one of the biggest vulnerabilities with WordPress and giving search engines multiple ways to list the same content is dangerous. I use Technorati to handle tagging and tag clouds. The question is “How much does tagging help usability?” This is a big topic, but I prefer search over tags as a means for visitors to find what they are looking for on my site. Cluttered and long pages can easily disrupt a users concentration as they are searching for information on your blog. Deep link navigation and bread crumb navigation are the best ways to let your visitors know where they are, and where they have been. Previous and Next buttons can get confusing quickly.
One of the best things about the new tagging feature is the related posts by tags. Being able to have all the posts within specific tags listed can help users find all the info that your site has to offer on any given subject. The problem will be in filtering the output so you don’t have too many options for a user. Again cluttered sites are hard to follow and won’t get return visitors or high page views. If you aren’t sure of the difference or importance of these metrics read my post: Hits, Visitors, page views explained.
The tagging features eliminate the need for the following plugins:
- Ultimate Tag Warrior – this plugin is pretty hard to use for regular people like me anyway.
- Jerome’s Keywords – I always used this and was always irritated by how it would loose the keyword filed if you didn’t add the custom key “keywords” in the custom fields. I am still testing how this effects the meta tags.
- Simple Tags – I still use this because of its additional Technorati features.
- Bunny’s Technorati Tags – I always used Simple Tags so don’t know much about Bunny or her plugin.
If these were paid solutions I guess you would wonder if WordPress is becoming the Walmart of content management systems by pushing out the little guy. I will keep everyone informed on how the many tests on tagging that I am running are going.
Along with more features within the visual editor and tagging, the new WordPress also takes care of a couple of permalink and domain problems that have plagued them in the past. You now have control over the www and non-www version of your domain. We all know that Google can see the www and non-www version of a site as 2 different sites. Even though they have solved a lot of this in the Webmaster Center where you can assign the proper FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of your domain, it is good to have that backed up by WordPress. They have also fixed some of the slug and URL naming issues that occur when importing blogs like Blogger sites which tend to cut off the post title in the URL.
WordPress has always given you the control over the URL through the slug, but now you can be safe in importing or creating long URL’s with their new support of “pretty URL’s”. I know that there are experts out there that claim the URL isn’t important as much in blogs, but I disagree. I go as far as to end the URL string with a .html. While this might not matter to spiders, it does resolve canonical name issues that happen when the trailing slash is not included in the URL string. Yahoo might not care, but Google definitely does. I use the .html in the permalink to resolve this problem. Read more about it on my post – WordPress Permalinks Changing Links On An Existing Site - for more info.
The bottom line is WordPress 2.3 is a great update and worth the time. Back up everything and take it slow and you will be fine. I only scratched the surface of all the features. I have found the new version to be fast and clean. They did an awesome job with this update of WordPress.