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...
Globalwarming Awareness2007 : Spelling Correction and Time-To-Index
While there is a lot of antipathy towards search engine optimization competitions such as the latest world seo championships with the globalwarming awareness2007 keywords, one of the few things they really offer in the way of quality information is the different patterns of indexing by the search engines and the related services each search engine provides. For example, each of the major 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) offer some level of keyword spelling correction. In the case of this particular competition, you can see that MSN actually offers the best keyword correction, Yahoo the second best and Google the worst. Google is unable to determine the obvious joining of 4 words into two. While Google often has accurate mispelling suggestions, it appears the search...
Code Name Gatineau: Microsoft’s New Free Analytics
Story Confirmed By Microsoft Employee Ian Thomas It appears that Microsoft Adcenter and Adlabs will soon be entering the world of Free Analytics Tools. Much like the heralded Google Analytics, Microsoft appears to be working on a project of its own, code named Gatineau. While it does not appear that Windows Live logins are working at this time, you can find a Sign In page. Currently, you are automatically logged out when attempting to get access. There is a page in the interim that comes up… Little is known about gatineau at this point. It...
Misreading of #3 and Proposed Experiment
Thank you to the numerous individuals who pointed out my misreading of #3 in Rand’s list of SEO questions unanswered. The real question he was proposing, which I misread, was whether or not link removal could actually injure a site beyond where it would have been if the link had never been posted. While my initial reaction is no, I think a simple experiment is in order. Proposed Experiment 1. Two pages (“Receiving Site A” and “Receiving Site B”) developed using the same 250 nonsensical 7 letter words with no title or meta on a new domain. (“Receiving Site B” will receive the treatment of losing a link) 2. “Linking Page A” will be chosen, with a link to both sites using a 8 letter nonsensical word. 3....
Response to SEO Questions by Rand Fishkin
First, a little note. I mentioned this to Rand when he was considering adding new companies to the SEOMoz Recommended Vendor’s page. At Virante, we use a brute-force method of research. When we want to know something, we run real experiments in the search engines so that we can exclude assumptions regarding the myriad extraneous factors that go into ranking. In our experimentation, we have covered several of the questions he mentions in his most recent post, Questions in SEO that I Can’t Answer. Check out Number 8 if you get a chance. 1. The Diminishing Value of Anchor Text The theory goes that if a page is linked to multiple times on a single page, the subsequent anchor texts (assuming they are unique) will carry less weight, or perhaps no weight at...
Industry Inbreeding
One of the more interesting pieces of data, in my opinion, is the relationship between sites that are ranking for a particular term. In some industries, sites do not link together at all – competition is so fierce that webmasters are unwilling to add a backlink for fear of improving a competitor’s rank. In other industries, sites trade links like 1st graders trade valentines cards (sorry if your site is the one without any link love). I like to call these link relationships as industry inbreeding: a unique situation where competitors (deliberately or not), link to one another despite the obvious implications of boosting a competitor’s ranks. Charting this data can be very useful as it can describe several phenomena. 1. Keyword Volatility In...
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