Doing Google AdWords’ Homework

So an interesting thing happened the other day on the way to cornering the market on a keyword in Google AdWords. The situation began like this: I had been watching the sponsored scene for a product keyword for one of our clients for about 3 months. All of my search queries for the term during that time resulted in perhaps 3-4 sponsored results appearing along side the organic results. It was the prefect opportunity to take advantage of a very low competitive market on a high profit margin item which our client sells. I convinced the client that the time was right to enter into this particular keyword market and they agreed. So I set off to do my keyword discovery; In addition to utilizing our own research methodologies I also incorporated the tools that Google...

Posted by on Jan 19, 2007 in CPC, Rants & Raves, White Hat | 12 comments

Google “Ana-Busted”

Google Caught Spying with Their Own Software In the wee morning hours I decided to check the daily stats on our newly installed Google Analytics account. Know thy enemy right? Anyhow, much to my surprise, and great interest, I noticed a small plip on the screen to the far west of the continental US. Mousing over said plip low and behold the all too famous town of Mountain View, California appeared before my eyes. For those of you not with me that is the home town of Google HQ. To confirm my suspicions I clicked over to the â€Å”Network Location” of our Mountain View visitor and observed that â€Å”Google” was the answer. Further analysis revealed that they typed the url in directly and are using Firefox...

Posted by on May 18, 2006 in Rants & Raves | 3 comments

Has PageRank Completely Diverged From Indexing?

I noticed something today which I had heard vaguely in the past as occurring but no hard evidence was ever presented: A banned site with PR. Some of you may be rolling your eyes and saying â€Å”oldnews.com” but for those of you still with me read on, I think it deserves some analysis. This is especially true for those of you still clinging to traditional SEO. This means you link builders. My hypothesis: PageRank has nothing to do with SERPS Example: There is a site out there that I know has been banned by Google. This site was submitted for a re-inclusion and has, to this point, been denied. The ban occurred as all others have in the past. Pages vanished from the index and the PR flat-lined. After several months of zero progress a...

Posted by on May 4, 2006 in White Hat | 1 comment