Why doesn’t Google allow advertisers to buy “Proper Names”? Proper name searches are one of the most popular searches that people do on search engines right? What are five top things that you do on the internet nowadays?

1. Check your email
2. “Google” someone
3. Read news on how McCain is losing in the polls
4. Check your flailing stocks
5. Facebook (has that become a verb yet?)

That is just my list but is probably true to a certain extent. I think I must Google someone at least once a day and people are always looking for lost friends, loved ones, and classmates. Google a while back made a decision to scrub all paid sponsored listings for any “Proper Name” searches. Why would you turn your back on all of the revenue that could be made from those searches? There must be millions of searches a day on people’s names that Google could be monetizing and they use the excuse that users complained that there were paid ads on their names and that Google was invading their privacy. Couldn’t they just create rules around advertising on “Proper Names” so that they weren’t deceptive or confusing as to what the product offering was?

Just imagine how many advertisers would probably like to advertise for Proper Names such as public record companies, White Pages companies, Reunion, Classmates.com, Friends Reunited, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, LinkedIn.com, ZoomInfo.com, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Just do a search on Google for “Neil Clark Warren“, shouldn’t there be ads for books on Dr. Warren, links to eHarmony.com, etc. Neil Clark Warren is the founder of a very popular online dating service, eHarmony.com. His name alone probably gets searched 1,000’s of times a month for people doing research on his Relationship Compatibility Test.

Now if you do that same search on Yahoo you will see a full marketplace of ads on Neil Clark Warren and guess who is buying an ad? Yup, Amazon.com and a couple other book stores since he is a published author. Is this finally making any sense to you? The only sense I can gather from it is that Google thinks that they should be able to get you all of the information you need on people in their natural search results even though most of the public record information isn’t crawlable content on most websites.

For full disclosure on the topic, I used to work for a public records company that spent a good deal of money on public name searches and when Google made the decision to remove all proper name searches they weren’t too happy. I currently don’t have a client that buys proper names but still to this day can’t understand why they are still not allowing advertisers to buy generic names. Instead, we have to read IMDB and Wikipedia listings on people if they are important enough to have a page created on their name. Come on Google, get with the program dude.

-Brian R.

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This is my week to rant about Google so just let me be for a second. I have been doing random searches everyday in areas and verticals that I don’t typically search on just to find some funny search results that don’t make sense or where the SEO pro’s have worked the “Google Algorithm” also referred to my me as “Google Love’s How Popular I Am” tool. We already know Google doesn’t care about your inbound links or your PR link backs or your PageRank score. They get their data from Analytics, Feedburner, links from trusted sources which are usually news publications (Authority links), Registrar info on the age of your site, how active the content is and the list goes on. So what happens when all of your competitors are employing the same tactics to Google? Check the “Nordstrom Coupons” search example below:

Isn’t this reminiscent of how Altavista.com search results used to look back in 1999 before they went under?

Now let’s look at how the search results used to look back in January, 2001 now that Google has published their own ‘way back index machine’ for us to view the Google 2001 results for Nordstrom Coupons:

What has changed in 10 years? Looks like the consumer is getting a pretty shitty experience and where are the ads? Oh, Google doesn’t think that advertisers should be able to buy this keyword I guess because it isn’t relevant even though tons of those same advertisers are now SEOing the hell out of it. This results are starting to look a little homogeneous.

I wish our friends at Mahalo.com would hurry up and get all of their index filled up and start spending some money to get some mind share in search.

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I think that there is huge anti-trust issues with the proposed Yahoo-Google advertising partnership. Google says they will backfill their advertisers into areas where Yahoo doesn’t have any advertisers.

Yahoo President Sue Decker recently wrote on a Yahoo company blog that the nonexclusive Google deal is simply a way of “backfilling” search queries with relevant ads that Yahoo doesn’t have in its network. The idea is that with millions Yahoo users making so many search queries, it is simply not possible for any one company to maintain a large enough repository of ads to make a relevant match with every query. “Not even Google,” she wrote.

As an advertiser and agency that represents several paid search clients we are concerned that Google will apply its muscle to popular terms that they have decided should cost more to advertisers which will raise our costs across the board if we are now buying them from Google via Yahoo.

How could the Department of Justice not see this as anti-trust where Google already commands somewhere around 70 percent of the search market and pairing up with Yahoo will mean that we will be forced to play by their rules and algorithm changes that will favor squeezing more and more out of their already upset advertising community. Google is already exhibiting unfair advertising practices by conveniently protecting large branded searches and letting large brands buy the “trademarked” search terms of their smaller competitors. It is a one-way street where big business is protecting big business and the giant just gets bigger and bigger.

Google has even launched their own “Advocacy” website:
http://www.google.com/yahoogooglefacts/

Doesn’t this look like what you usually see when politicians are sending out slander campaigns against each other. The simple fact is that Yahoo should get their game up and not sell out to Google but maybe team up with Facebook or MSN and try to get some marketshare from Google. Getting in bed with Google at this stage in the game only makes them more powerful on all fronts and reduces Yahoo’s value proposition as a brand. Yahoo is expected to make an additional $800 Million a year from this partnership. Short sighted gain for longer term losses in my eyes. Yahoo, you are bigger than this. Step away from the 800lb. gorilla, roll up your sleeves and make your damn search results better and don’t do it by listing “Wikipedia” at the top of the page like Google and MSN. Try to find a small but popular brand on large search queries in Google and you’ll only see site the large brands, newspaper, .gov links and wiki-sites. (example: travel). Why does Tripadvisor.com have to buy that keyword? Answer that and you might have the answer to what is wrong with Google’s so-called “Algorithm”.

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Google has been making some very poor business decisions lately mostly in the way they handle their advertisers in Google AdWords. When I first bought an ad on Google (I believe I was the 3rd person to do so) it was presented to me in a 3-ring binder with a list of keywords that I had to purchase. There was no cherry picking or keyword negatives. I met with my sales executive in their old Mountain View offices and I believe there was about 120 people back then mostly programmers and only a handful of sales people.

I believe the CPM was around $55 initially and we purchased our block of keywords for a one-year contract in order to block out any other competitors in the dating space from appearing on those keywords.
Remember that this is pre-AdWords and there was only two ad spots on the page that were both highlighted in pale green and blue. The sponsored ads appeared above the natural results and never to the right side of the page.

We enjoyed this position for quite sometime and the traffic was great and converted well for us. Eventually we were able to refine our keyword lists and the internal estimation system got more accurate in projecting our spend for the next year.

Then came Google AdWords, this meant that we could no longer protect our positions and that the entire marketplace was going to open up in a bid environment. I fought this hard with David Scocco, who I believe was the head of vertical markets. I didn’t understand how they could cancel our contract and allow all of our competitors to now come in and fish in our waters when we had build out the opportunity with Google and now our keyword lists were getting shared by other Google sales groups to our competitors.

The sharks then filled in the tank and all of the ad spots were occupied instantly in our category. I then began to understand why Google had introduced this model to let the best advertiser and ads trickle to the top and that we wouldn’t be bullied out of our positions as long as we had a strong CTR and bid. It started out as a bull fight with some of the companies fighting for top position on several keywords but then everyone settled into where the CPA’s were working for them.

Now let’s fast forward to Google’s operations today and how tons of media companies are laying off employees and losing face with their clients because Google has decided to put strict guidelines on trying to increase their dying CTR’s by arbitrarily raising bids to $5, $10 and in some cases $100 levels making them impossible to buy anymore. Most of these keywords are directional searches like “Dell”, “Kayak” or “Match”. There is no longer a landscape of advertisers on those keywords.

Look at the keyword “Dell” a little closer. Don’t you remember searching for this keyword at one point in time and seeing advertisers for Dell accessories, re-furbished Dell’s, Dell coupon codes, Dell printer ink cartridges or even a competing Sony Laptop ad. Do the search today to only yield an official “Dell.com” ad and also Dell.com in the first natural result spot.

How does this benefit the consumer at all? Google is now deciding for us what we were looking for when we did this search instead of letting the marketplace compete with each other to offer us other options.
Obviously if I was just looking for Dell.com’s website then I could have easily navigated to it directly or clicked on the top natural result. Google is bleeding money that they used to make on these searches because not-so relevant advertisers had to pay a premium to be on these keywords before. Now they are only making money from the brand itself and the CTR on branded terms is usually in the 0.10 – 0.25 CPC range as they are relevant and click well.

You can do this search across a bunch of different brands and verticals including online education. Do a search for “University of Phoenix” and you’ll see the same thing. The Official UoP ad and UoP listed in the #1 position in natural search. What happened to the competitors of University of Phoenix ads? If I was investigating going to an online university and only knew of UoP then I would like to see other competitors ads in the “Marketplace” area but instead Google has made the decision to protect this brand.

Do a search for “Plenty of Fish” in Google and you’ll see that no one is advertising on that keyword. That is because it will cost you $10 / click to buy a free dating service keyword where your acquisition costs for a user are around $6 which means that if every single click converted you would still be under water.

This keyword gets searched well over a million times a month and Google isn’t making ANY money off of the term but there are plenty of dating companies that would love to “fish” in these waters and buy the term from them.

Now here is where I really think there is a larger issue that needs to be brought to the federal level. Google is protecting a lot of the large brands terms but not vice versa. Do a search for Match.com and then do a search for Perfectmatch.com. Why is there no advertisers on Match.com but there is a full marketplace of advertisers on the Perfectmatch.com trade keyword. How can their “Algorithm” determine that advertisers shouldn’t be able to buy Match.com because it hasn’t historically performed well for advertisers which is what they told me.

-Brian

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Have you been wondering how you can get your site included in Cuil.com but can’t find anything anywhere on their site? I am always looking for alternative SEO and natural search traffic options and did a little digging around and found the Cuil.com webmaster info page at:

http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

From that page, there is a link that says “Please let us know” – nice SEO anchor link huh? Well, that link takes you to this page:

http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback.php?to=crawl%20me

To: Crawl Me
From: put your email address here
Site URL: http://www.mysite.com <– be sure to include the http://

or you can send them an email directly to: crawlme@cuil.com

Something tells me that the form will work more efficiently. Now cross your fingers that they start gaining some momentum before Google takes over the Earth.

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If you are trying to get a higher click through rate on your ad in Google in order to reduce your CPC in your Google AdWord’s campaign here are a few tips and tricks that I recommend you implement and use.

Google has recently (sort of) introduced new quality score measures where they are looking for the most relevant ads to appear on keywords based on a combination and mixture of click through rate, bid price and landing page quality score. This is partially in response to a bunch of junk or non-related ads appearing on some keywords across verticals that they didn’t belong to. Google has really put the squeeze on us as advertisers for others bad behavior. This has caused tons of my client’s keywords to raise to levels that they can’t afford anymore and caused me a ton of grief trying to figure out the balance on getting the algorithm to be friendly again.

I have focused much of my recent attention on A/B testing ad copy and creative along with matching landing pages for specific location or genre based keyword phrases. One of the easiest low hanging fruit methods to increase you CTR on Google is using their keyword insertion tool in your ad title. I have seen click-through’s double easily just by using this tool. Your ad also appears Bolded which makes it jump out on the page when listed next to several other paid ads.

Here is the context that you need to use when applying the keyword insert tool:

{KeyWord: Your Brand Goes Here}

By using an upper case “K” and “W” the keyword phrases will then be capitalized and look more relevant as a match to the web searcher.

Example: the user types in ’seattle barbershops’ and if you use the keyword insert tag above your ad might appear like this below.

Seattle Barbershops
Browse Listings & Reviews of
Seattle Barbershops on Yelp.com.
www.Yelp.com/Seattle/Barbers

actual ad example:

The other tip you might want to implement at ALL times when writing your ads is to Capitalize the first letter of each word and to use ampersand (&) instead of and and at least one call to action word like “Try”, “Browse”, “View”, “Sign-up”, or “Today” and maybe an exclamation point at the end of the call to action phrase!

Now get in there and get your hand dirty under the AdWords hood. Tuning up your car is a little more easier nowadays it seems then running a healthy CPC campaign on Google.

-Brian

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And finally the moment that we have all been so anxiously awaiting, a new search engine to battle the Google giant. I have always been an advocate for the small guys. Cuil.com was created by Ex-Google workers, Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier. They have kept a low profile, raised $33 million in venture capital and in the end launched Cuil, pronounced “cool” today.

The first thing I did was look for a Submit URL page. I found a webmaster info page that had an email address for now on site submissions. If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, just let them know:
crawler@cuil.com

Twiceler is the name of their robot Web crawler. The user-agent is “twiceler.” They understand that many small sites are bandwidth-limited, so support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.

More info can be found at:

http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore. Let’s see if these guys can pull it out and make some noise in the search space. If I was Microsoft I would be trying to get some investment going on this project as it seems like a small dream team at work.

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Our good and sometimes evil friend over at Google are always squeezing the algorithms in how they rank your paid listings against your competitors that are buying the same keywords in an effort to show and reward relevance. This can be a frustrating game for mom and pop shops and agencies to manage as keywords very important to your business can be turned off in a flash without any warning.

Here are some best practices that I teach and use to stay in good graces with the ‘mean’ algorithm:

1. Keyword Insertion. This is a super-duper important one to use whenever possible. Here is the tag and a good secret that not everyone is aware of: {KeyWord: YourName.com}. What basically happens when you use this tag is that the keyword or phrase search will get inserted as the link title and will be capitalized only if you capitalize both the “K” and the “W” (That’s the secret). By including your domain name or trade name then that’ll appear if the keyword phrase is too long as they won’t truncate it for you. I could almost stop right there as this step is so overlooked by most SEM shops. The other great benefit is that your keywords will be “Bolded” when displayed which usually results in higher CTR and lower bid pricing.

2. Use the Keyword or Keyword phrase in the description text field. I didn’t realize until recently how important this was in making sure that your are buying relevant keywords. If you have to break out and build new smaller ad group buckets then take the time to do it on important keyword(s). Google takes this into the consideration factor when weighing out your quality score.

3. Your Display URL. I as a measure of best practice always Capitalize my URL’s and don’t put the www. in front of them. Example: Meeta.com instead of www.meeta.com. It just jumps out at you more and is easier to read and remember.

4. CAPITALIZATION. While we are on the topic this might be the second most important best practice to follow to a “T”. You will end up fighting your brand managers and anal copywriters but don’t sleep on this one at all. Hold the line. Capitalize The First Letter On The Ad Description Text So That It Jumps Off The Page.

Example of all 4 Best Practices in play:

Your ad should look like:
{KeyWord: Meeta.com}
100% Free Dating Service!
Meet Local Singles Today.
Meeta.com

Another quick tip is that you can use superlatives in your ad description. I usually try to get a good short call to action and one exclamation point in the ad.

I’ll do another article on landing page optimization soon and how to use the Google conversion counter free tool.

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I recently did a SEO presentation at BizJam and got a few questions about SEO and flash websites and came across this posting in Google’s Blog by Software Engineers at Google, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

Now even though Google is one of the only engines that can now effectively crawl flash files there are a few other techniques that you might want to explore that include inserting primary content into the Javascript function called SWFObject 2.0. The primary content can contain links, headers, styled text, and images— basically anything you can add to an regular HTML page. With SEO copy writing applied to the primary content, Flash then becomes a non-issue for SEO.

-Brian

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