Google updates Adwords PPC Quality Score - introduces Quality Score column

Google has recently announced a number of improvements to the Google Adwords “Quality Score”, both in terms of reporting and the Quality Score algorithm itself. This should have significant effects for Pay-per-click specialists.

The two revised changes that Google will be introducing are as follows:

• Greater transparency - via the introduction of a new Quality Score column within the Adwords interface. This will include showing a minimum bid and as well as a Good, OK or poor label for the applicable keyphrase. You can select this column by clicking the ‘Customize Columns’ option in one of your ad groups (selecting this will also automatically populate the column for all other ad groups within that campaign).

  The quality label will provide a quick overview of the quality of your keywords, or alternatively provide you with the minimum bid for a granular understanding of your Quality Score.

  Remember, the lower the minimum bid is for a keyword, the higher the Quality Score, and vice versa.

• Quality - will also be improved as part of the new improvements to the quality score algorithm. Google have introduced minimum bids for keywords to improve the quality of the ads. This should in theory make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads.

  “First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we’ll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.” - Google Adwords blog

To read the full post go to http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/quality-score-updates.html or the Search engine land post

Add comment February 20th, 2007

Did-it…Done it … Its all getting a bit silly….

I had some time for the Did-it/SEO isn’t rocket science/is dead argument being argued in the online marketing arena over the last couple of weeks, in no small part due to Dave Pasternack’s recent article, however Mark Simon’s (Did-it’s Vice President of industry relations - Crisis Manager perhaps) recent foray into the domain, only serves to enflame the situation and highlight every aspect they are trying to argue against. I will however state that the response of the SEO community as a whole hasn’t been that well handled, and if the industry is to be as well respected as more traditional sectors such as Offline then really such character assassinations should be very few and far between.

Mark Simon’s recent post on Mediapost merely served to highlight why Did-its recent campaign is nothing more than a PR stunt, and in my personal opinion merely highlighting the changing trends of online marketing from merely search engine focussed to offerings including Online PR & Social Media.

To read the Mark Simons article click here

And the fuss it`s caused - http://www.threadwatch.org/node/11507

However his post did raise a couple of interesting and valid points most notably

“That doesn’t mean that it’s curtains for SEO firms. They’ll still be in high demand as experts on information architecture and site usability. They’ll help clients build sites that their searchers are really looking for, and that their searchers can use. They’ll cease to have value in reverse-engineering the engine algorithms, but they’ll still have value in helping clients create truly relevant Web sites. “

I can’t help but agree to certain parts of that comment, however whilst the algorithm is still manipulatable, the services for “optimisers” will still be required, and until search engines can factor in something that is not in any way open to “abuse” or the general public change the way they use the web, the market will always be “buoyant”

The overriding factor that will determine whether or not the benefit outweighs the investment. Whilst traffic from search engines such as Google remain the primary source of traffic and the ROI from organic search high, the value an SEO’er will remain at a premium.

Add comment February 13th, 2007

Google lifts the lid on links

Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, there appears to be a new function added to the system providing us search engine optimisation specialists, with not only a new plaything but a useful tool in order to analyse inbound external linkage to a website.The post on Google Webmaster Central, highlighted that “Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.”

When in this summary view, click the linked number and go to the detailed list of links to that page.
When in the detailed view, you’ll see the list of all the pages that link to specific page on your site, and the time we last crawled that link. Since you are on the External Links tab on the left, this list is the external pages that point to the page.”

Whilst it still doesnt give a totally comprehensive figure to work of (when comparing it to Yahoo Site Explorer and link:) it does at least present useful analysis over the effect/structure of inbound link activity something all us search engine optimisation experts find useful

To read the full post click here

Add comment February 6th, 2007

The did-it / didn’t it saga rolls on.

Graywolf has posted a brilliant response to the the “is SEO rocket science”, which unfortunately continues ahead full steam

To read the full post click here

Add comment January 29th, 2007

The evolution of SEM

Recent articles by both Gord Hotchkiss and Andrew Goodman both investigated the reasons why Search Engine Marketing firms werent being acquired for large sums. Gord argued that much of this could be attributed to the fact that SEM firms were deemed too tactical and lacked the skills to segment and profile applicable demographics. Andrew Goodman went on to say he agreed with Gord assessment however his analysis of the “current reality” was incorrect.

To a certain degree I have to agree with much of what Andrew Goodman had to say. For example:

True, a big law firm that serves big corporate clients almost never acquires a small firm that has some specialty they’d like to add. And that’s the closest analogy with the notion of, say, the world’s largest ad agency acquiring my very small SEM agency. The law firm just hires new associates or recruits partners with different skill sets. Is that because the small firm is “too tactical”? Or just too narrow/small to have the marketplace leverage to *force* a buyout? If the little guy starts actually taking the big guy’s customers, that’s when the big guy takes notice.

So that leaves us a little closer to the answer: if ad agencies are the likely acquirers in the scenario where the target client is mostly larger enterprises, the only leverage a boutique agency has is either in their client list and growing cachet in their own right, or some expertise that the agency will take too long to develop in-house.”

From my own perspective, Andrews comparison there was spot on. From my own personal experience, traditional advertising organisations have been painfully slow on the uptake in terms of Search Engine Marketing, focussing on the potential challenges it presents rather than any long term benefits it can bring, as part of an integrated campaign. Much of this leads to an “ignorance” of search engine marketing, what it entails, and exactly how it fits in with both offline and direct activity.

Such organisations only start taking notice, once the figures become too difficult to argue against. Over the last year or so the number of organisations entering the online marketing arena has increased substantially, as a result of new startups, web development agencies moving into the search arena and offline agencies starting to take notice. One of the bigger acquisitions in the UK Search marketing arena this year saw Global Media buy BigMouthMedia for around £50 Million. However these acquisitions are few and far between at the current time.

However many of these acquisitons are still taking place between organisations within the Online marketing arena itself, and whilst there are a number of integrated agencies such as i-level and Connectpoint offering a full integrated marketing solution, these still tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Much of this IMO opinion is still down to some pessimism of an integrated approach and much has been said of who is better placed to deal with online marketing, ie is it the integrated agency or the boutique agency.

Much is made of search marketing and its fit in the marketing arena. It should however be considered that in comparison to traditional offline advertising, online (search) marketing is still very much in its infancy (Google only started in the nineties for example), and thus has still a considerable amount of evolving to do. It should also be considered that search IS evolving at break neck speed, with personalised search, online PR, convergance technologies (mobile/voip) and social media all having entered (to a certain degree) the mainstream over the last couple of years.

One thing is for sure, it is only a matter of time….

Add comment January 29th, 2007

Google’s January 2007 Search Engine Update

Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted his regular “weather report” on Google ranking and indexing issues. Covered in it were news of visible PageRank updates, supplemental listings, filetype command changes, lost home pages in country-specific results, an update on the disappearing sex blogs, concerns that CSS is being spidered to detect hidden text, duplicate content worries, the Minus 30 penalty and what to do if Google thinks you are a malware site.

PageRank Updated

Matts first point of call was PageRank , where he highlighted the now quarterly update of PageRank. For example our PR has gone up from 2-4 (mainly due to some well overdue TLC over the christmas period). It should be highlighted that this shouldn’t impact search rankings too drastically, since Matt says these scores have already been in use there. Some older data centres are also continuing to show PageRank from an older infrastructure.

Links of interest - Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar PageRank Update Being Reported from Search Engine Roundtable
Google Pagerank update or outage from Dave Naylor

Supplemental Results

Matt’s next port of call, was supplemental results. His first point was to allay those fears of people who have supplemental pages on their site. It should be noted that

• Pages in supplemental index haven’t fallen foul of a Google Penalty
• Sites will do well even if they have some of their pages in the supplemental index.
• Supplemental pages can rank and produce traffic.
• Should be noted that pages in the supplemental index, dont carry the same “link weight” as pages in the regular index

It also doesn’t sound reassuring to say, “we’ll check the good stuff first, then the other stuff only if we need to.” What if some good stuff for whatever reason is in the second index? That’s a fear some searchers had in the past — and it will remain with Google’s revival of this system

Danny on his SearchEngineLand website asks the question: Why not simply expand the existing Google index, rather than go to a two tier approach?

“The supplemental is simply a new Google experiment. As you know we’re always trying new and different ways to provide high quality search results,” said Google spokesperson Nate Tyler.

“OK, it’s new, it’s experimental — but Google also says there are currently no plans to eventually integrate it into the main index. Basically, the supplemental index is a way for Google to hit less important pages in specific instances when it can’t find matches in the main index. Trying to search against tens of billions of pages all at once is time consuming and expensive. Far easier to hit just the “best of the web,” exactly as Inktomi used to do — and for exactly the same reasons. But it’s a continuing reminder that Google can’t do it all. No matter how great those machines are, they have to divide up that index. The “best of the web” might still be tens of billions of pages, but divisions still raise concerns.”

Links of interest - Supplemental results

Breaking Out of Google`s Supplemental Index - Matt McGhee
Gone Supplemental? - Matt Cutts

Filetype Command Changing?

Want to know all the .doc documents in Google? The following command in Google will not return the results you expect

filetype:doc

Google insist on the command also having a search query term, like this:

filetype:doc seo

Country-Specific Results & Lost Home Pages

Matt Cutts also detailed some issues with .com domains hosted outside of the US. To read about this, follow the link at the bottom of the page.

Duplicate Content drama
There has been a lot of blogs and forum posts regarding duplicated content recently including A Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues from Search Engine Roundtable which covers a WebmasterWorld thread with some advice for those with issues, and More Tidbits on Google’s Duplicate Content Filter covers another thread with a ton of advice from Google’s Adam Lasnik (Thanks Search Engine Land for this one)
There is also the recent interview by Rand Fishkin with Vanessa Fox which highlighted how Google dealt with duplicate content issues, which I posted about recently.

To read more about the update, please feel free to visit the following links