Google Bites Into The Affiliate Market. Is PPA More Than They Can Chew?
Google has decided to expand its Adwords service to more than simple PPC (pay per click) advertising. They have introduced a service that resembles very much the traditional affiliate programs. The Pay Per Action program which has just entered beta testing, pays the publisher only when a certain key condition or action is made, like subscribing to a newsletter or generating a sale.
With Google’s enormous resources it seems that this will be the next big thing, but personally I somehow doubt it. Big Daddy is entering an unknown territory and they might lose a lot of the trust they are currently enjoying. The biggest possible setback is the fact that the sellers can unintentionally go over their budget, due to the snowball effect. It often takes some time between the moment that a visitor follows a link until he pursues the action tha pays. Given the huge numbers that Google deals with, some accidents will most likely happen where the publisher won’t be able to receive his commission in its entirety. There is also the issue of multiple leads which result in a single action. What if a visitor comes to the same site several times via PPA, through different publishers and then finally acts. Who will obtain the commission?
This is definitely a story that is worth watching. If you want to join the beta test, you can find more details here. You might also want to check their FAQ
Keyword Quest. An Inquiry On How SEO Is Made
Keywords, the little pieces around which SEO is built. The domain in which a single letter can make you or break you. I have had my share of Google love lately, but strangely enough the traffic that Big Daddy sent me was for the weirdest keyword combinations you could think of. Why would anyone on earth search for “300 google bomb” or why is “battle of thermopile” the keyphrase for which I rank well on virtually every single engine out there? A little post of mine is the one that did it and because the competition for them was relatively non-existent I see people reading my blog.
But what about the keywords I want to rank well. It is a dream of mine that one day when some guy in Peru or United States, that wants to find out how to use SEO, visits Google and types SEO blog will find me. Not on page 47, but on page one. The irony of the whole thing is that the little post I made about the Iranian google bomb, was the least optimized post on the whole blog. I had quite an interesting chat with a British friend of mine, which works as a website developer on this topic and he basically laughed when he heard the whole thing. He thought of it as normal. From his experience with a particular website, after a lot of promotion was made he found himself with 700 low competition keywords that brought him traffic in a matter of few months. The main keyword he was after though, only brought traffic 2 years later and only because he had never stopped in the meantime to optimize for it.
And then of course comes Doug’s story which was kind enough to expand the issue from the comment he made here. Now this is a truly incredible story and my hat is down to him. To get first page on Google, with a competition of roughly 200 million websites in less than a year and without spending a single dime, that’s nothing short of amazing.
I’ll let you draw the conclusions here.
SEO Dizziness. When Advice Comes In The Contradictory Version
I have made quite some lengthy posts on why backlinks are not apparently the only ones responsible for a specific page’s PR. Nonetheless they do hold a major importance as the only way a search engine could measure the relative importance of a major website. The more they are and the more authority they hold the better. So far so good and everything is so nice, dandy and clear that Captain Obvious would like to have said that.
Now of course, from the standpoint of search engines a backlink holds value as long as it is considered organic, which means that its placement enhances the information added and also that ideally the bloke that put it there was genuinely thinking about the information welfare of his readers, not about the 5 bucks he received to put the link there. This is also the reason for which Google seems to appreciate non reciprocal links over reciprocal ones. That’s what you would think, that’s what everybody thinks. Well not quite everybody. Take a look over this article called Are backlinks really that important? . You will quickly see that the author endorses the idea that reciprocal links work best. Now what on earth is one supposed to think now. The really strange part is the fact that the article promotes quite well the concept of reciprocal links and the effect that broken links have in losing the voting power of a certain page, but still this is a little bit too much. It’s nothing short of ridiculing the link development market and the ever complex mechanisms of developing n-way links to trick the search engine bots.
So what should you as a reader do? Well, quite simply, always be skeptical and always read more than one source and if the sources keep on disagreeing, despite their growing number then it is a clear sign that everybody makes educated guesses and everybody is as clueless as you on that matter. Now this is a refreshing thought.
When Politics Meet SEO. The Iranian Google Bomb
For all the political correctness that the Americans are known for, when it comes to international politics , Hollywood never hesitates to help Big Brother out. The latest scandal comes in box office friendly format and is called “300″. It depicts the “noble” Spartans fighting the barbarous “Persians” in the battle of Thermopile. Now of course nobody expects Hollywood to portray history accurately, coming from the country best known for Dracula I know that better than anyone, but this movie is regarded in the Middle East as typical propaganda, in the great tradition of “Black Hawk Down” and many other movies of this sort.
The Iranian government’s reaction was very specific to the countries of the region, it protested a lot but everybody ignored the protests. The Iranian diaspora (the Canadian and American ones more specifically) though took the battle further on the web. Hundreds of bloggers with Iranian origin have begun an effort to discredit the movie’s message by presenting a more accurate history. How are they going to do that? A good old fashioned Google bomb. If you don’t already know, a Google bomb is the process of linking with the same anchor text (which consists of the keyword phrase aimed) to a single website by many people. It always has a political purpose or a humorous one.
The Google bomb itself will point to this site and the anchor text aimed is “300 the movie”. At the time of writing, for this particular keyphrase the site was on 14th position, but the project has just started. Anyway this will prove to be quite an interesting twist to online activism and it will be interesting to see if this idea takes off.
An SEO Guide To Google’s Supplemental Results
Google’s supplemental results are a pretty much unknown variable in the SEO process. There aren’t too many articles on this topic, although a second look will reveal its high sensitivity and importance. Quiet often, understanding how Google creates these supplemental pages is beneficial in the effort of raising the SERPs (search engine ranking position).
If we were to stick with the explanation offered by Google we will not get very far. The first article is a very basic explanation aimed for the common users and it sounds like this:
“Google augments results for difficult queries by searching a supplemental collection of web pages. Results from this index are marked in green as “Supplemental.” “
The second reference is more complex, it is aimed at webmasters and can be found here
As you will soon notice, this explanation although more detailed is still not enough. There are some things we can learn from this limited resources though:
- The occurence of supplemental results is favoured by complex searches
- There are at least two separate indexes: a main one and a supplemental one. Depending on terms searched they are criteria to move a page from one index to another.
- The process of sending a page in one of the two indexes is completely automated.
- PageRank is not affected in absolutely any manner.
Not quite groundbreaking, but still rather useful. From this point on, we let Google alone and concentrate on empirical results:
A Way To Stop The Corporate Bullying. Bloggers Unite
Strange things happen when companies get pissed on bloggers for revealing their not so professional practices. Lawsuits are the most common answer and this is exactly what happened to Dillsmack when he wrote about Phoenix Imaging.
To read the entire ordeal that Dillsmack is going through click here
Obviously this has sent ripples throughout the blogosphere and this is where the bloggers should unite. What can bloggers do? How about putting the Dillsmack’s story as the first result in Google for Phoenix Imaging. You can help. Just make a post like I did and link to the story using Phoenix Imaging as the anchor text.
Now what are you waiting for. This is a real piece of SEO activism.
