smxseattle07

July 4, 2007

The Top SEOs ‘Give it Up’ In Seattle for SMX

Early last month in a city known as “Seattle”, a group of search marketers attended a magical gathering called Search Marketing Expo. You’ve already heard about most of the magic that took place, but there was one meeting Lord Sullivan would not let the peasant bloggers discuss until one month after it occurred. Anyone who broke the honor code would be banished from the land of optimization. Well, loyal readers, the one month embargo has ended and now we may share our story.

The Give it Up session featured search engine optimization tips, tricks and secrets presented by top industry’s top figures like Matt Cutts, Jennifer Slegg, Mike Grehan, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Todd Friesen, Greg Boser, Bruce Clay, Stephan Spencer, and Jill Whalen. During the Give it Up SMX session we learned which search marketer prays to the almighty 301 redirect, who was taking potshots at the defenseless bloggers, who prefers pretty girls to boring blue text links, and at the end, which search marketer would be voted the Give it Up MVP.

The premise of the Give It Up session was top search marketers to get together and basically “give it up”, revealing their favorite and most overlooked search engine optimizations secrets.

Matt Cutts wasn’t on the panel but spoke first thanks to yet another Lord Sullivan disclaimer (we heart you, Danny. Really.): Matt would only be allowed to stay in the room if he shared one secret the audience found worthy. If the audience didn’t like his secret he would be banished. In this case banished meant standing on the other side of a thin cloth curtain. Ooo, harsh punishment, Danny!

Being a good sport, Matt took center stage and rattled off a story about a Bulgarian spammer who, thanks to a typo, got his hands on 7,000 domains with the PR of eTrade for free.

Matt explained about DNS, stating that when you buy a domain you also need to get hosting. When a domain holder doesn’t park the domain, a lot of times the domain registrar will set the nameserver to lamedelegation.org. This means the domain isn’t parked, it’s just kind of sitting out there. (Susan would be an example of a “parked employee”) Matt explained that millions of domains were parked at lamedelegation.org, but because site owners are prone to typos, some had set the nameserver to lame-delegation.org. A savvy spammer came along, picked up the lame-delegation.org domain, and was able to host a bunch of domains he didn't even own. He got all these free links just for a typo from the registrar when he didn’t own anything. Sweet.

Yeah, yeah, fun story. Sadly, this meant Matt got to stay. I was kind of hoping he’d get booted. (What? It would have been funny!)

Stephan Spencer spoke next and turned out to be the Give It Up Most Valuable Player, offering up 7 valuable search engine optimization secrets.

• Secret #1: Grouped Results – Google groups results from the same site together. To find the true position of an indented (grouped) result, simply add the parameter [&num=9] to the URL and see if the indented listing drops off. If not, add [&num=8]. Rinse and repeat until the indented listing falls away. (If the listing falls away after you add [&num=8] you know that listings true position is ninth.)
• Secret #2: View (Potentially) Cloaked Page When “Cached” Link Not Available – To do this, use Google Translate and translate the page from English to English.

  http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=en&u=URLGO ESHERE&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=9&ct=result

• Secret #3: Change Google Preferences to “English Only” – Stephan says that Google wildly overestimates its number of results. By setting results to English only, it eliminates all of the pages where it knows the page exists but didn’t bother indexing and/or crawling it. This will cut out about 2/3rds of the results.
• Secret #4: Free Analyst Reports – Get free analyst reports from Forrester by searching Google for “forrester research grapevine endnotes filetype:pdf”
• Secret #5: Build a link building spider -- Look for sites one-click away from Google. Where does Google link to? Now, that’s a nice neighborhood! Look for sites with a super high PR. With preferences for sites that already give link love to patron/sponsor. Find places to get links from. Volunteer to help them out.
• Secret #6: Cloak Your Home Page – For bots only, drop tracking tags and other superfluous parameters from the URLs of your links. Or, if you have search engine friendly versions of your secondary level pages, link to them instead. Use “user agent” detection and don’t “noarchive” the pages to obscure what you’re doing. Don’t mess with the content of the page – that gets into dangerous “black hat” territory.
• Secret #7: Link Build Your Existing Links -- Mine your existing backlinks for opportunities to revise the anchor text. Pull some favors with friends who link to you. It helps to be a blogger when reaching out to other bloggers. He lists two great tools to help with this:


• WeBuildPages’ Neat-o Tool (www.webuildpages.com/neat-o)


• SEOBook’s Backlink Analyzer (http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/)

Bonus Tips: Site owners can display all of their supplemental results by doing a search for [– site:www.yourdomain.com *** -qerdafjadfs]. Use “Sticky” posts to improve keyword prominence on your blog. On your blog, define unique title tags that aren’t just based the post titles (“SEO Title Tag” WordPress plugin). Participate on Mark Cuban’s blog (blogmaverick.com). It doesn’t “nofollow” comments! (Note: Add value to the discussion, don’t spam).

Shari Thurow followed Stephan and shared the following tips:

• Tip 1: Take a class: Shari says taking a class made her a better SEO. She recommends taking the class Organization of Information or Information Organization Access.
• Tip 2: Read These Two Articles:
  • J.M.Bates’s “The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the on-line search interface.”: Search is not a linear process. Shari says this article taught her that search encompasses more than just query behavior. Search encrusts a wide variety of behaviors, including but not limited to, queries. Refining, expanding, foraging, pogo-sticking, browsing, scanning and reading.
  • Michael Buckland’s “What is a document?”: Article taught her that not all “documents” are text based. Is King Tut’s mummy a document? Taught her the limitations of many content management systems.

Shari ends that you can gather as many tips as you like but you have to move beyond the cat and mouse mentality. As advanced searchers we have to evolve. Don’t be afraid to read articles.

Mikkel took the stage and offered to simply give attendees Matt Cutts’ phone number. Sadly, he was kidding. (C’mon, Matt. I promise only to call a few times a week.) Instead, he spoke about content creation and stated one of the biggest challenges to search engine optimization is to create original quality content for all the keywords you want to rank for. So, he asked, why not do it like the engines and make it computer generated?

I know this happened a month ago, but I do believe I winced the moment that question came out of his mouth. In fact, I’m wincing right now

Mikkel argued that computer generated writing is here to stay and that it’s going to get bigger. Computer generated writing is all about randomizing phrases and word replacements. Try and recall the 10 million spam messages you got this morning. Kind of like that.

Mikkel said computer generated content can be used for cloaking sites, developing great keyword rich filler text, to create foreign language sites, data feeds, etc. If don’t right, Mikkel told the audience that the text that comes out won’t look much more silly than the average blog. Dude! I can see you!

[Side note: I don’t know what was going on in SMX but it was seriously two days of Let’s Pick on the Bloggers. I cannot count the many shocked and exacerbated looks Matt McGee and I gave one another. The many speakers who took blogger potshots did realize we were all sitting in the front row, right? Maybe we need blogger hats and blogger T-shirts or something.]

Mikkel used the idea of Markov Chains to further confuse us explain his points about computer generated content. If you understand what Markov Chains are then you’re about 3 levels above me. All I know is Mikkel instructed attendees to use them to adjust content keyword densities, blend with other methods of automated content and to create keyword-based cross-linking. Basically, from what I understood, using Markov Chains helps your generated text to have the same “footprints” and grammar structure as non-generated text. [Feel free to comment and school me on Markov Chains. You won’t hurt my feelings.]

Bruce took the podium next and accurately defined the culture here at Bruce Clay by explaining “the way a lot of us learn is to play”. Yeah, that pretty much describes the Bruce Clay squad. We’re big on the playing learning.

Bruce offers up some tips:

• Siloing: Properly siloing a site can yield a traffic increase of 30 percent or more. Align subjects by query, not random groupings. Landing pages receive internal links across themes. Anchor text management is critical.
• Training: Experience tells us that success on a search engine optimization project more than doubles if the whole team understands what is happening. Arguing about every action slows down the process. Use training to pull the team together. Failure to speak the same language will result in missed expectations and blaming. Training is critical.
• Universal & Inter-Galactic & What’s Next? : Large brands aren’t looking where to go next because they’re afraid to embrace change. Understand that participation in the internet is critical to brand protection. Do it all – blogs, video, podcasts, RSS, social, etc. Make it a religion or be gone in five years. Think inter-galactic. (I’m sorry Bruce kept saying “inter-galactic", it’s just that he’s a really big nerd. It’s part of why we love him.) We really need to engage socially. From the standpoint of search engine optimization, we’re finding that a lot of the competitors we’re facing are not going to have the bandwidth to do podcasts; they don’t have the time for blogs, etc. If we do, we have a competitive advantage.
• Increase Traffic: He puts up a blackhat Meta tag and joked for people to put it in their site and help our traffic. Heh. Nice Bruce.

The days of adding a tag and beating your competition are over. If you think there is a magic pill, you need more training. Align your architecture correctly, Follow the right concepts.

Mike Grehan followed Bruce and gave attendees his “current thoughts”. Mike challenges attendees to think differently, saying that Google’s new Universal Search is ten times scarier than the algorithm update in 2003 that caused a lot of people to lose their rankings.

With Universal Search, everything is getting pushed down below the fold. Writing a compelling Title tag is important, but it almost becomes less important when there’s a provocative image staring users down on the search results page. Mike argued that he doesn’t care how compelling your Title tag is, if there’s a provocatively dressed woman on his SERP, that’s where his attention is going.

[Hmm, so far Bruce Clay employee’s like to play, throw out nerdy words, and to stare at half naked women. Way to represent, boys! :)]

It’s not enough to be on the first page when it’s only the first result that is above the fold. In today’s world, content is more than copy. There are tools and other media to worry about.

Jill Whalen took the stage next and covered several basic search engine optimization “tricks”.

• Alt attribute of a logo: Use keywords when possible.
• Alt attribute text = anchor text: Put a big money phrase or word in there, it will be linked to from every page of your site.
• Dynamic titles and descriptions:
• For titles – Use last three phrases from breadcrumbs in reverse order plus company name. Do your keyword research and name your categories after the biggest search terms. If you take the breadcrumb trail in reverse order you can put them in your Title. Example: “CostaRica 7-day Cruise - Royal Caribbean – CruiseLine – Company Name”.
• Dynamic Descriptions. Generic description at each category and page level. Substitute keywords appropriately.

Jennifer Slegg’s presentation was focused on linking. Talking about internal link love, Jenn advised always linking to new content from the home page and giving each content page at least 2-3 related articles. This will help you be seen by the search engines as a subject matter expert. Jennifer mentions something we tell our clients when talking about siloing which is not to bury pages multiple clicks or directories deep. If a user (or spider) can’t get to an important site page within two clicks, it’s too far.

When buying links, Jennifer advises site owners to vary keyword phrases. Mix it up with 10-20 variations and always check the backlinks of the link page. Avoid common placements, known link networks, and anything that’s already on Matt Cutts’ radar. Heh.

In regards to external link love, link to authority sites in your niche, use nofollow tags on reference links you cannot give a vote of confidence to, don’t link to someone just because they linked to you, and use target_blank for external links.

Jennifer also spoke about linkbaiting and stated that carefully crafted link bait can get you a lot of links very quickly. She mentioned crafting things like Top 10 lists, useful tools, giveaways, quizzes, contests, rants, controversy and anything “shocking”. However, use caution. All link bait has the potential to backfire, badly. Even if you’re not the only one taking that controversial stance, you could be the one that everyone decides to jump on and criticize when things turn ugly. Before you say anything negative about someone, know their friends and who might jump in to fight their battles.

Todd Friesen followed Jennifer and started out by speaking about multi-variant testing. It’s not just for pay per click anymore! Site owners should use it to for natural search landing pages and to help bump up conversions.

[Side note: I’d like to call for a moment of silence. This is the point in the session where Matt McGee’s laptop finally died. It was at least the third time during the 48-hour period that I watched it run out of power. Dude, invest in an extra battery.]

Todd advocated thinking about buying links as “media placement”. If you are going to go out and buy links don’t buy from a site that’s not related. Also, if you’re a link network and you sell links, don’t think that Google doesn’t know about you. They do. The link campaign Todd is running pays out on direct traffic.

Todd touched on Mikkel’s Markov Chain rant and said it sounds nice but you can’t do that on a client’s Web site. If you’re looking for cheap generated content there is a company called Bizzarevoice that does reviews that are unique for every site. It’s real, great content and plugs in really well.

For larger sites, Todd advised dropping 3 or 4 of the top level categories into the footer where you typically stuff your legal info. His logic: No one cares about your legal info anyway. Give them category pages.

Todd ended by giving site owners some tips about moving a site from one domain to another. First, build out your XML Sitemap and get your new site all ready to go. Once that’s done, 301 redirect all the links on your old site to their new location on the new site. Launch your new site and submit your old Sitemap into Webmaster Central and Site Explorer. The engines will then go check out the links and work their way through your site map. You already have your 301s set up and so you’re encouraging them to check out the new URLs. Once the process starts you can submit your new site map.

Greg Boser was the last to speak and got some early laughs by thanking Danny for being way more flexible about things than that other search conference. Danny turned about 12 shades of red and it was cute. I really want to snuggle Danny. I know that makes me weird.

Greg talked about 301 redirects and how they can be used for good or used for evil. He thinks of it as a robots.txt file on steroids. You can use robots.txt to exclude links or you can 301 one copy of a page to another. The juice of the two pages will be consolidated and help that page to rank higher. He said the thing about Google is that it finds and credits links very quickly but the backlink won’t show up until about 45 days after Google finds it. This gives you time to mask where your juice is coming from, you know, should you want to do that.

He also mentioned the Googlebomb that has him ranking for Razor Clam Crudo and how Greg, Todd and Michael Gray used 301 redirects to win during the Dave Pasternack contest.

[Correction: It appears I misquoted Greg above. The true winner of the Dave Pasternack contest was James Beard Foundation's page. I apologize for the error.]

For small sites, Greg says you can buy links from crappy directories and test redirection to another popular site. If the domain tanks you can turn it off or direct it at a competitor. (Um, Greg!).

Danny chimed in after Todd to give two final tips:

• Use the NY Times Link Generator to read NYT articles without paying for them. You can find the URL at nytimes.blogspace.com.


• The Google blog, you can use the “create a link” feature to get some good traffic. Danny said you either want to be the first person to link or the last person because that’s where users’ eyes go. They won’t clink on links in the middle of the list.

And with that the session was over! If you didn’t hear the search engine optimization nuggets you were looking for, my advice would be to try and learn about SEO the old fashioned way – by buying your favorite search marketer a few drinks at the bar. For some reason that seems to help increase the flow of information. You didn’t hear it from me.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 4/07 at 7:00 PM | Comments (11)
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June 11, 2007

SMX, Ask.com and a Reader Poll

Between last week’s Search Marketing Expo and my jaunt back East, I’m a little out of the loop and I’m sporting more open browser windows than Susan has imaginary friends. [They aren't imaginary! They're virtual. --Susan] Let’s revisit what happened while I was flying around the country. Maybe I can get my window count under fifty.

Search Marketing Expo Is Over

Sadly, Danny’s Search Marketing Expo and our time in Seattle have both come to an end. I know, I’m sad too, but don’t cry.

Overall, and especially for a first showing, I think it’s safe to say that SMX was a huge success. The close-knit group, the quality of information, and the lunches that kicked all other lunches’ butt (for dessert we drank sweet baby Incisive tears), were top notch. If you couldn’t make the journey, we hope you found our liveblogging both fun and useful. If you were in town and forced to meet Susan Esparza, I apologize. Hopefully, you’re recovering okay.

And of course, we’ll post our coverage of Tuesday’s controversial Give It Up session as soon as the one month embargo has been lifted. Make sure to check back for it because with a month to re-read my notes, the Lisa’s got some stuff to say. I apologize for the wait. I tried to get Danny to reconsider and I was publicly taunted by several of the panelists. Yeah, you all know who you are. Todd.

(Bruce Clay’s Mike Grehan posted his thoughts on SMX on his own blog. Isn’t our little Robert Esparza cute? I’m so totally dead for pointing you to that photo so I hope it helped make your day just a little sexier. [Stop exploiting my brother. –Susan -- He’s so cute! He’s bringing sexy back to Bruce Clay! ])

Ask Goes 3D, Then Insults Women

I was lucky enough to be pulled aside, along with Andy Beal and the awesome Jordan McCollum, for a special sneak peak at the new Ask 3D interface last week and I must say I was impressed with the UI. The new era of Ask.com is everything we’ve been waiting for – one search for all verticals. I’d comment on it but it’s been out for a week so if you were interested I’m sure you’ve already tried it out yourself. Plus, Jennifer Laycock had a nice write-up and she’s way cuter than me anyway, so go read hers.

As for the UI, we’ll see if users like it or if it’s too much too soon. Props to Ask.com for being brave enough to release it mainstream instead of banishing it to a never-ending “beta” run.

Not awesome, however, is the new Ask.com commercial that depicts women as nothing more than sword-carrying sexual objects. Kind of disappointing to see Ask.com revamp their engine, spend all that time rebranding, and then promote it with confusing billboards and commercials that are likely to offend at least half of their demographic. Disappointing, indeed. [...there are no words. Wow, what were they thinking? --Susan]

What say you?

The Blog Herald declares that most top notch bloggers have one characteristic in common: selflessness. Do you agree?

I don’t. I was actually taken aback when I read that. Isn’t blogging one of the most narcissistic activities you can partake in? If top notch bloggers have one thing in common it’s that they’re good story tellers and they’re honest. Okay, if they had two things in common.

What say you?

Fun Finds

Andy Beal got Barry Schwartz on camera to talk about the best search marketing forums. I heart Barry. I just want to squeeze his little cheeks. I have the same reaction to Matt McGee. There’s something wrong with me. [Yes, Lisa. There is. --Susan]

Score a link from Google and get a Google mini for one low price of $1,995.

Google’s no longer invading the privacy of that girl caught displaying her underwear to the world. Hopefully the embarrassed female has learned the lesson the rest of us were taught in college. A cute belt goes a long way.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/11/07 at 5:20 PM | Comments (4)
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June 5, 2007

Beyond the Majors

Last session! I'm back in the Advertising Track for the Beyond the Majors session--considering I nearly died last session it’s a relief to be back in the very pretty Paid Search room. I picked my seat because there's a plug here. No dead laptop today! Just dead wrists. After this, I'm going to find an Advil the size of the moon. Also I think I have an ear infection. You get to hear about it because we're running a little bit late. Lucky you.

Lisa's over in the Give It Up session. Here's hoping Danny has a last minute change of heart and lets her blog it. I want to know what happens!

Okay, we're starting. Jeff Rohrs is moderating the panel of Scott Greenberg (Marchex), Matthew Greitzer (Avenue A|Razorfish), T.J. Kelly (LookSmart), Anton E. Konikoff (Acronym Media), Tom Paraboschi (Miva).

Anton Konikoff starts us off. His office is in the Empire State Building on the 55th floor.

Their company focuses on Paid Search and Contextual, SEO, Keyword Intelligence, Enterprise-wide Keyword...something

The oligarchs are the rich, powerful, the ones who control everything. Anton's Russian so you'll just have to imagine the accent and the picture of shady characters (they're in exile) that he puts up.

GYM are the major engines (he adds Ask is too, in his opinion), they're the oligarchs of paid. If we only had a few options, what would the world be like?

"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously" --Kissinger

He proclaims June 5 International Tier 2 Engine Day. Can he do that?

He thanks all other Tier 2 engines for existing. Quigo and Kanoodle get special nods for being cool with contextual stuff. More engines, verticals and international are mentioned.

When should you consider tier 2 engines:

• Large budgets and not enough inventory on GYMa
• Opportunity to lower blended cost/conversion
• Brand defense imperatives
• Client/boss insists on diversification - one client wanted to use 12 different engines (which may or may not be worth it.)
• Really good search engine reps.

What's to like about Tier 2:

• Lower CPCs than the majors
• Better and Unique Positioning (Kanoodle and USA Today)
• Fewer Bidders = more winners
• Different Footprint
• Tap into niche audience segments
• High touch customer support

According to Microsoft, 1% of market share is $100 million in revenue and $1 billion in market cap.

Challenges:

• Don't provide conversion tracking typically
• Lack of APIs and integration with big management tools means that you must do manual reporting and optimization is often necessary.
• Typically not real time results
• Don't always report on the same metrics as the majors and some don't include impressions
• Features sometimes don't exist (geo targeting, budgeting, testing for landing pages and multiple ad copy
• Distribution is not always top notch
• Click Fraud potential is thought to be higher
• Editorial guidelines are not always clear

You need to be smart and always do a cost benefit analysis. Your spend could be too low to justify the effort and time. Always evaluate your campaign. Searcher behavior and benchmarks are likely to be different from Tier 1 engines. Don't assume that clickrates or ROI will be the same. Launch with volume words that convert well in GYMa. Test broader keywords that are just too expensive in the majors. Ad Copy must be VERY targeted; use negatives. Start with low bids and test, test, test. Dedicated landing pages might be worthwhile, evaluate your situation. He recommends sharing your conversion data with the vendors; you'll save time.

Matt Greitzer steps up to the podium. He needs to speak more slowly. His company spent $151,000,000 in paid search and considerably less than 1% was allocated to Tier 2 engines. When you include verticals, the number is more like 5%.

Challenges as he sees it:

• Operation barriers--it requires a lot more effort with every new engine you add; learning a new UI, more time, etc.
• Quality Issue--both real and perceived quality problems. Customers don't want to test things that 'aren't going to work'.
• Low Volume--If you're going to get 2% incremental volume, is it worth the extra hours a week that you're going to put into it or should you spend that time on your google campaign?

He goes through a case study. My wrists thank him.

A couple of specific recommendations: He sees success in verticals for B2B, particularly with Business.com and Industry Brains. Also Quigo and Pulse360. In the travel space, he likes Trip Advisor, they offer good traffic. For the retail space, he likes Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, NexTag, Shopping.com. For retail, you can see a 10-20% increase in volume. You'll need to do feed management.

Scott Greenberg is the home town kid. They're headquartered here in Seattle. Marchex has three parts to their business: PPC, Contextual and Search Marketing. He's going to focus on Enhance Interactive which is the first of those three.

They focus on traffic quality. Their unbilled click rates are 10-12% which is about industry standard. They tailor their distribution to meet advertiser ROI goals. They have their own network as well as search partners. The network is local, verticals and touches more than 200,000 Web sites. On June 30, they're re-launching 100,000 of Web sites as well as all their zip code sites.

T.J. Kelly from Looksmart. Aw, he just got married a couple weeks ago. Congrats! He says he'd like help figuring out how he stops playing with his ring.

T.J. admits that they've had an interesting past. He talks superfast. Why do they all talk so fast?

He touts LookSmart's extended reach as a way of cutting down the time you have to spend on getting out there. They have publisher growth and are able to serve out ads further.

They have average daily search queries of 400 million and a fairly low average CPC.

Technology (adcenter, api, scalable platform) and Client Services (campaign tracking

Tom Paraboshi is our last speaker. Hi, Tom. Talk slow, I'm tired. (I know his name is spelled differently here, it isn't spelled consistently from his table card to the speaker list slide so I'm covering my bases.)

45% of people's time online is spent browsing. This gives tier 2s an opportunity to be there in places that aren't search.

Trends they've seen: quality not quantity focus, vertical specific traffic, PPC beyond acquisition, for branding purposes. Many advertisers are being priced out of the majors.

Miva recently launched their Precision Network. It is vertically focused PPC, spans 18 business categories, has lower volume and higher value, was developed in response to advertiser demand and is ROI focused. It is now out of beta.

He goes through case study.

Q&A notes

Landing pages for the second tier engines should be done on the most granular level that you have time for. Test, don't just give up on it. You wouldn't give up if it was Google.

They're building more tools all the time. Look into engines, they're moving to transparency and ask about tools. They're also working on offering ways to tailor traffic.

Wishlist:
-Ease of use from the Tier 2s.
-One point of contact and one interface for all the Tier 2s so that it's not 2%, 2%, 2%--it's one space with 6%.
-Quality needs to grow as well as quantity--verticalization is the first step.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 5/07 at 4:43 PM | Comments (1)
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Paid Search: The Giant Focus Group

After a very long break for lunch, Jeffrey Rohrs is moderating this afternoon’s Giant Focus Group with speakers Tom Leung (Google), James Colborn (Microsoft), John Kim (Yahoo!) and Paul Vallez (Ask.com).

[I’m kind of sad. This is my last bloggable session of SMX. Tear. Matt McGee and I tried to get Danny to let us blog this afternoon’s Give it Up session but he threatened death. Would Danny really kill The Lisa? That’d be some stellar link bait for the BC blog. Maybe I should take one for the team? Thoughts?

While I have a chance, I’d like to commend Danny on the excellent music selection at this conference. Unlike SES, this music doesn’t make you want to die.]

Onto the topic at hand, Jeffrey is getting things underway and says this is a presentaton-optional panel. It’ll be mostly Q&A.

Up first is John to talk about some recent trends in search and what it means for advertisers.

We’re seeing more search tools are being developed to improve user experience. Search formats and types are changing. Best of breed is still king. Off-browser search could explode. Ranking and matching based on personalization and community factors are playing a stronger role.

What does all this mean? Marketers need more data. They need ads in multi-media formats, more vertical fragmentation, more experimental models to emerge and things are getting less transparent.

John says they’re following the user trends. They know they have to be there and they need to develop a different type of relationship with advertisers. By talking to people they’re seeing a lot more organization silos becoming the norm, increased bifurcation of advertisers into sophisticated and unsophisticated advertisers, no more time for experimentation and new tools, more fragmented and customized needs, and more focus on interaction effects and advanced analytics.

The new YSM Commercial API program has launched. There are no feeds for API access. It’s open and transparent.

Up next is James. Oo! James has an accent. Cute.

James is from Microsoft and will be talk briefly about adCenter and adCenter Labs.

adCenter Labs is a partnership between adCenter and Microsoft’s research team. James tells people how they can get in touch with Microsoft. And then he’s done.

He’s done? No more accent? Come back, James.

He’s gone. Up next is Tom. Let’s hope we get to spend more time with him than we did with James.

Um, nope. Tom stands up, says hi, and then sits back down.

Last up is Paul from Ask.

Paul says Ask’s focus is to make sure advertisers have the right efficiencies to work with Ask’s system and that Ask is exposing data in a way that’s meaningful and provides a transparent view. They’re looking at the difference between search advertising and display advertising, and ways to be more performance oriented. They’re combing ads with virtual creatives – logos, graphics, etc. It’s about making the offer more relevant. They’re trying to close the gap between search advertising and display advertising.

Ask is differentiating themselves by implement URL stuffing, which allows marketers to include various elements into the tracking URL. Examples of elements include campaign IDs, match type, raw query information, etc. Advertisers want more data in real time.

Ask is also working with publishers to define vertical relevancy thresholds. Meet strict relevance vs. coverage needs.

Time for question and answer:

Moderator Jeffrey asks the panelists about trademarks in PPC and the uneven enforcement of policies. Any chance of creating tools so advertisers can find people running ads on their trademarks instead of having to hunt them down themselves?

The panel is left silent and everyone laughs.

Paul recovers saying it’s a hard problem to solve in an automated fashion. They have people manually looking.

John comments that Saatchi & Saatchi was fired for using Kurt Cobain’s trademark out of the UK (what? Can someone fill me in on this?) There needs to be a way for advertisers and agencies to manage their trademarks.

James asks in his cute accent how many people in the room want further clarification on the trademark policy? [About a third of the people raise their hands.]

Tom agrees it’s an important issue. Thanks for playing, Tom!

Next question: Google, you’ve got bid to position. I’m curious why you haven’t passed us a position parameter yet that tells us what position we were in when someone click on our ad?

Tom: You can do that today in Google Analytics. Would it be more convenient to do in Google Adwords? Yeah, I think so too.

Paul: That’s one of the areas we’re looking at to stuff in the URL. Heh, that made me giggle.

Question: I would like to see Google have an alt text feature to give us some way to specify misspelled keywords or plurals vs nonplurals. Google’s kind of behind the curve in regard to that.

Tom: He’ll be emailing every product manager on AdWords after the session. More giggles from me.

Question: On the Yahoo side, can I get more than one or two account people? On Google I get 4 or 5 people who specialize in something different. I’m trying to ramp up my Yahoo spend but I don’t have the support level.

John: I can’t speak for the number of people. He asks the questioner to talk to him after the session so they can talk about what she’s not getting.

Statement from the audience: Impression share is in important to me. I’d love to get impression share data emailed to me.

There’s an Ad Preview feature in the diagnostic tools that may help you.

Panelists James asks the audience what other types of information (other than impression, click stream info) they want. They have different algorithms to find different data. What sort of info beyond the norm are users looking for?

Lots of answers to this one:

• Anything that gives me some sense into how I’m doing relevant to my competitors. Right now I’m guessing at what’s good quality score and what’s bad quality score. I want something to show me where I should spend my time to prove. Some sort of benchmarking.


• If you could set up a competitive set for industries. Maybe something users can create on their own. Something that says here’s where you fit compared to others in your industry. I get that from Yahoo.


• I want to see custom reports from MSN. With all the info that’s out there, I can’t get it in one report.


• I’d like to get average CTR for position and aggregated AdWords data.

The issues that Paul brought up in regard to the URL stuffing is helpful because there’s a different combo of all the variables that works for each keyword at any given time. We just need more information because we’re constantly evaluating it.

Nick from Bruce Clay is in the audience (Bruce sent him to watch me) and gives the reps things he wants fixed.

Things to fix:

From John, our Nick wants AB ad testing so he can say this ad converted better over that ad. I find it much easier to use the internal tracking because it’s a lot quicker and it’s all right there.

At Microsoft: You’ve done a better job at the spreadsheets but he still getting lost in the UI. If you want to import stuff you need two spreadsheets and you’re duplicating data.

Nick always wants an acronym database. James says there’s an acronym tool in adCenter. There’s one in Yahoo, as well.

And that’s it. Off to the super secret session that I’m allowed to take notes on but not blog for a whole 30 days. Thirty days? Danny's trying to kill me.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 5/07 at 3:28 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Pay Per Click, smxseattle07

Better Ways

After another delicious lunch, we're back with our moderator and host Danny Sullivan for the Better Ways session in the Organic SEO track. Panelists this time around are Alex Bennert (Beyond Ink), Greg Boser (WebGuerilla), Jim Boykin (We Build Pages), Christine Churchill (Key Relevance), Todd Friesen (Range Online), Cameron Olthuis (ACS) and Aaron Wall (SEO Book).

Danny starts off by explaining why he's dressed casually today--people yesterday ragged on him for wearing a suit yesterday. Should we have casual conferences going forward, he asks? Lots of support for that one. Me included, I'd kill for a pair of shoes with one inch heels instead of three.

Danny asks who is trying to hire SEO analysts. I put my hand up. We want writers too. Please? Help?

Apparently Danny's vision of this session was 'Better ways to do boring stuff'. Then he got the pitches in and discovered there was no "better ways". (Except for Christine's. Yay, Christine.) So we're going to do a kind of SEO technique clinic instead; all Q&A. My poor, poor wrists. They promised us advanced stuff and this session should deliver. I already can sense that my fingers are going to fall off trying to keep up. I'm totally not going to get anyone's name. Sorry.

Question: Ideas or recommendations for larger clients who are concerned about rep monitoring, especially in SMO space.

Cameron: You need a lot of education, reinforce that you're going to be doing a lot of rep management and keep a close eye on it.

Aaron: Reach out to people who are speaking positive about them.

Greg: don't expect it to get any better. It's always going to take six months and hundreds of meeting to get anything done.

Alex: We had this problem with a company that wanted to start a company blog. They couldn’t get it through legal so they ended up with a sponsored blog in the space.

Question: How would you scale link-bait or back links? Tricks, tactics for links on a mass scale without having to do much? (Like PPC, set up the campaign and check it once.)

Aaron: Find the non-commercial related links. Spend a couple thousand on premier content then run ads on Google for that.

Christine: We used to give out little awards. They have longevity. Linkbait is often short. Try to look at something that's going to have

Todd: We have a lot of interns that just kinda do what they're told (so long as they're told to do it). Have them do directory submissions. Just buy links--we think of it like a media placement. Another thing that we do is widget building. When the HTML is imbedded there's a rotating link.

Jim: We do it the no pain, no gain way. Write to people as a human. You need to offer them something of value. Prove you're human and offer them something of value.

Alex: You can build it into part of the business. Matching service. Every new provider, they get an incentive if they provide a link back.

Cameron: Empower a brand evangelist. Give them the resources and let them do the linkbait and viral stuff.

Danny: You can file a suit that something's been stolen from you and then put it on digg. Alex: We have a client that's doing that. Their entire PR is set aside for the lawsuit. (Danny's joking. I hope.)

Question: does anyone have a way of logging into a lot of social networking groups very quickly?

Cameron: I don't know of any. If something's worth doing, it's worth taking the time.

(The panelists are a little confused by the question. They think he wants to know how to get friends on the social networks. A little explanation clears up that no, he just wants to log in.)

Christine: Sounds like someone needs to create a tool for it.

Todd: Use roboform.

Danny: Session manager with Firefox. (Aaron says that it's built in now.)

Question: How about a keyword research tool that actually works?

Todd: Have you seen Microsoft's new keyword research tool? It's pretty good. (AN: I've heard the same thing, by the way.)

Greg: Why do you think they suck?

Christine: You need to look at the sources of that data; for example, Wordtracker uses meta search engines and they're starting to look at it from ISPs. She says that it's not the hard number that you need to know, it's the relative number that is what's important.

Alex: If you see furniture is 10x greater than kid's furniture, the number might not be right but the relationship probably is. (Other panelists agree.) The real data is your referral data.

Danny polls to see who uses which keyword research tools; I think everyone's lying because the number of hands that went up are super low.

Question: Linkbait: In the beginning you put an icon and a link to digg. Now there are a million. Are there any good ways to consolidate or any research that says how much is too much?

Cameron: He prefers not to do it at all. If it gets submitted too often, you could be banned or buried. No more than 2-3 if you do use them and use the ones relevant to your user base.

Question: How do you explain to a corporate client the value of unrelated links from unrelated sites?

Cameron: They do tend to end up being relevant. The people who pick it up and link back to it and blog about are the ones who are relevant and interested.

Todd: It's going to spread through your group of interests so it'll go from one person who is interested to another person who is interested. If you're using link networks, that's different.

Christine: You should have a balance. You want a variety of sources. Press releases, directories, social media, professional organizations, etc.

Greg: Link baiting and social media is about stuff for general support not for keyword relevance really. You have no control how people link to you. You still have to go out and get focused targeted links.

Cameron: You can influence it by coming up with proper titles and URLs but you don't have control.

Question: How many targeted links would you go after a month?

Aaron: Depends on your site's size and it's relevant to the field.

Greg: -agrees with Aaron- You want to make it look natural. What's your site like, what's the level of trust. Know what your site can stand.

Jim: it's not a sheer numbers game, it's a quality game. If you get a backlink from someone's subpage and that page has a 1000 pages linking to it, that's better than someone's link page which has no links in.

Todd: -backs up Greg and tells a story from his bad boy days-

Question: How do you deal with cultural differences like editorial styles aren't compatible or designers who don't want to compromise?

Todd: It's about education. You need to explain to a client how search engines work, why you have to talk about certain things in a way that's going to help. Make it as simple and low maintenance and low impact as possible. What you're dealing with is really a resource issue. You need to make it simple for them.

Greg: If they give you grief, I just fire them. There's always someone in the space who will listen. Lawyers ruin everything.

Alex: danny once wrote an article that I refer to a lot. Any good designer makes sure they're cross browser compatible and the bots are just another browser.

Christine: You're always going to have clients who won't listen no matter how much you tell them. Sometimes you just have to wait for them to learn it the hard way. Make sure they know what's going to happen but if they won't listen, then they won't. If you can show them good numbers, that helps.

Todd: We have a client everything's in Flash; they have unique URLs. They're never going to change it. So we just built the entire site again and that's what gets served with a user-agent cloak. It's not any different from the flash site but it's readable.

Greg: We use cloaking to prove our point with clients like that. We would build the site and serve it and they'd start to believe when we put it in the engines and it started to rank.

Danny references the NYTimes article that discusses how newspapers are addressing the need to write headlines for the search engines. 25% of newspaper visits are driven by search. And now we're onto the SEO is BS debate. Oh please don't go there.

Man, Danny's brilliant. Which is one of those things that Seth Godin would say wasn't useful for the readers but really? Danny's brilliant. The guy knows so much about search. Okay so we're talking about how search engines are the third browser and they're the browser that everyone uses. It's more than IE, more than Firefox. There's nothing for search engines to support in Flash, even if they could extract the text, it would just say bouncing ball.

You have to understand the difference. Danny compares it to a great visual television ad that plays on radio and it's just 30 seconds of silence. They're different media.

Advice from the audience: Never mention SEO when you're trying to convince a client to change how they write--they'll tune out. Tell them they're not writing for search engines, they're writing for the people who use search engines.

Question: How relevant or important is page freshness? (There's a specific example here but I'm skipping it.)

Jim: Google will try to feed in a fresh article or fresh page that may not last. If you have a page that's been around since 1996 and you suddenly change it, the old links may not mean as much because what they were linking to is not the same.

Todd: Google's backlink command are lying to you. I know a site had 5000 backlinks and Google said they had 8. SEO is not a one time deal, it might be a freshness issue but it could just be that that's the day that Google tweaked their algo.

Greg: Check your header dates. See when the page was last modified. It might help, might not.

Christine: I have pages I haven't touched for 8 years that are still ranking.

Danny mentions another NYTimes article, summarized by Google Blogoscoped. Google Keeps Tweaking It's Search Engine is the headline. You can look it up.

Question: Any tips for optimizing Google Base stuff?

Todd: We do feed work but we don't talk about it at conferences.

Danny: To my knowledge, they're taking more and more databases. If you have database driven information, they'll take it. I don't think they're subbing out organic for base it's that they're crawling base itself. It seems like they're not internally certain which area they want to go. Go ahead and try base. There's going to be Google Real Estate or Google Classified down the line.

Question: Something about MLS distribution in Google Base, people scraping the MLS

Greg: There's never a level playing field.

Todd: These spaces are spammy and you don't take a sword to a gunfight.

Danny pulls up a help page for Real Estate in Google Base. Mentions universal search and how it's affecting the way the search results pages on Google appear. For an example he pulls up a search on [Madonna]-- the SERP is her music discography link, wikipedia, wikipedia, Google News, more organic listings, a Google Local result... New example [New York Dental Schools] SERP: Google Local replaces the first three listings.

[I have a dream speech] SERP: Four organic, then Google Video.

Goes over to Ask.com to see their new SERPS. It's incredibly slick. Very dramatic.

Danny says regarding Wikipedia: Get them one spot on the page and get them out of my way.

Use Google Local. If you're local and you're not using it, do it now.

Question: Favorite tools

Greg: We used to have this link tool called Project Mayhem but we don't use it any more. All our stuff is internal.

Todd: Favorite Firefox extension-search status. Web developer toolbar. Aaron's SEO for Firefox extension--modifies your SERPS. Xenu Link Sleuth (everyone's a big fan of this one.) -- find broken links, redirects (Christine adds that you can do a file export and you get great reports.) Sam Spade's desktop.

Cameron: Serph--it's a relationship management tool. Links into the

Jim: Top Ten Analysis Toolbar-- you can find it on we build pages.

Danny: Groowe--changes toolbars; firefox version has social media sites.

I can't feel my fingers anymore. Thank goodness we're over.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 5/07 at 3:10 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Ask, Google, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Social Media, smxseattle07

Penalty Box Summit

After a break and a yummy cupcake, we're back for our first Organic Search Engine Optimization session. Danny Sullivan is our moderator for today's Penalty Box Summit. Speakers today are Peter Linsley (Ask.com), Aaswath Raman (Microsoft Live Search), Tim Mayer (Yahoo) and Matt Cutts (Google).

Danny and the panel put on hockey masks (because it's about penalties, geddit?) I cheer for the Ducks and inadvertently set off Danny's rant about Orange County sports teams. Whoops. (Go, Ducks!)

Okay, back on topic--Danny explains that we're going to be focused on improving the general level of understanding and applying penalties, not dealing with single site issues.

Tim Mayer is up first.

Tim comments first on an unfortunate misquoting of Yahoo's commitment to search. Guess what? They're really committed to it and they feel personalization is an important part. It was "unfortunate and [they're] obviously very committed to search". It's okay to be shocked.

He emphasizes that spam is about INTENT with which you use techniques and the EXTENT to which you use a technique rather than the specific technique you use. There are legitimate uses for almost every technique. IP cloaking for geographic targeting, for example. The important thing is be smart about it. Use it to help, not hurt, user experience.

The acceptable line varies by industry, some categories are more competitive. If you're doing optimization, you should be appropriate for your industry. [Susan's Hint: You can use the SEOToolset and Free Tools to get a baseline on your competitors.]

Tim says that he has a link internally that can report a quality problem in the index. Webmasters can report spam through Site Explorer. About 70% of the spam reports they receive through the tool are legitimate spam, the rest is just noise. The tool also allows you to report spammy in-links so that you don't get penalized by association.

Tim refers people to the Webmaster Resources. Come on, Tim. This is the advanced crowd. We already have those memorized. He goes on to discuss what to do for a re-inclusion request. Tell them "this is what I think I was penalized for, this is what I've done to clean it up." They'll review it pretty quickly.

Peter Linsley is up next. They just launched the new Ask.com last night. "For you livebloggers, go check it out". Not right now, Peter. I'm blogging. ;)

Peter talks fast. Here we go:

Candidates for penalty are: hurting the user experience and gaming the search engine. Areas for penalty are links and content.

Gaming includes: Cloaking, Keyword Stuff, hidden text, link farms, scraper sites--basically all SEO Spam 101.

Hurting the user experience includes: Dead pages, no content, dynamic content. Pages that are different every time damage the user experience. Pages with no utility at all are hurting the user experience.

Warning signs of a penalty: drops in traffic, drops in rankings (duh.)

Don't let the spammers leverage your site. If you have a blog, moderate your comments, don't publish your access logs, etc.

Re-inclusion requests are looked at case by case.

Peter mentions sneaky JavaScript re-directs which are the most irritating in the world.

...wow, you should see the CAPTCHA he just put up. It's a math equation and there is not enough caffeine in the WORLD. I'm sure that Matt looked at it was all like 'Oh, that's EASY.' Whatever, Matt. The point is, make sure you have a way to keep out the spammers. Don't let them abuse you.

Aaswath Raman is up next. He's going to review guidelines, why they use penalties, how they handle them and blah

He repeats what Tim said about spam being about intent and targeting the search engine for gaming.

Example: starwarsactionfigures.com links to starwars.com (okay) but also to cheapcasinohandbags.org (suspicious). So they evaluate to see if it's just an affiliate or if this is a case of trying to game the engines.

On the page level -- being useless to users (strings of keywords, etc) is cause for penalty

On the link level -- in-links from bad neighborhoods and out-links to suspicious pages

On a general level -- Deceiving users through redirects and misleading information

Suspicious or spammy behavior may cause a ranking penalty. More blatant or harmful spamming could be cause for de-listing. It's like a venial or mortal sin--one means a single Hail Mary, the other send you to hell. That's my analogy, not Aaswath's.

webspam@microsoft.com is their email. They are working on better ways to improve their ways of getting feeding. All de-listed sites are automatically reviewed.

Matt Cutts is up last. He's going to read a list of spammers. This should be FUN!

He says he was going to do a "you might be a spammer" joke. "If you've left 10000 comments..." but he thinks that we probably already know what spam is. Yes, Matt, we do.

If you can keep someone from spamming because there are better ways to make money, that's the way to go but really, there will always be spam. So they try to counter it. They want to make the user experience as good as it can possibly be.

They alert webmasters that they might be having issues so that they can take action and correct the problem. When that happens, they can do a re-inclusion request and everyone's happy.

Yesterday, Pat asked why the guidelines were so brief (You&A with Matt Cutts). As a result, the webmaster guidelines were beefed up LAST NIGHT. Good Lord, Googlers, don't you ever sleep? Oh wait, it's been in the works for a while. Wow, they're all linked to a specific page on the actual issue. Yay, time for more dissection.

Matt likes that the new pages are written so they don’t automatically assume that you're a bad guy. They explain how things can be interpreted as spam. The whole webmaster guidelines silo is much bigger and deeper now. Cool.

There are a lot of Googlers whose job it is to get feedback. Matt mentions Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik, specifically. These are the people you should mob if Matt is busy.

If someone reports off-topic porn, they want action now, so google reserves the right to do manual edits but by and large they want to take care of things algorithmically. Matt doesn't say that he thinks there needs to be a scalable and robust solution but I know he's thinking it.

They send out emails in 10 languages to try to help keep people in the loop if their site is in trouble. They distinguish between types of webmasters (as he said yesterday) and they do treat them differently. Mom and Pop shops that have trouble will get alerts so that they can fix it. They're not really spending too much time on the serial spammers who know full well what they're doing.

There's a leveling off of keyword importance. Once is good, twice is better, 900 times you're past that importance threshold and you're probably looking spammy.

Matt says that as a search engine, they want a clean index, not just clean scoring (of pages).

Matt discusses the trouble a while back with people sending out fake emails spoofed to look like they were from Google. Email is not authenticated. Someone was sending out the fake emails with an .exe. Google will not do that. He wants to look into how they can authenticate their communications to prevent this from happening again.

They're going to change the name of the re-inclusion request to something like a reconsideration request. They'll take into account the kind of webmaster you are. If you're clearly a novice, you're going to get a little more leeway than if you're a hardcore SEO. This whole crowd is screwed.

Danny promises to show us how Search Engine Land is spamming. There's a CSS hidden text or something. This whole thing was confusing to me. The SELand logo is actually their background. He tries to get the text cache from Live Search, they don't have one. He tries to get it from Google but they have a bug. He finally gets a text cache somehow and tries to show us the hidden text...but it's hidden. This is SO AWESOME. They have a note in their CSS file that says 'we're not spamming, well we are but suck it up for another week until we fix it'.

Enough about Danny's spamming, let's move on to other spamming. What would people like to see? Should it be a free for all? Should it be tighter? Should it be like that new search engine with the Hawaiian name and be manual?

Q&A Highlights

If I mention your question without mentioning your name, comment and I'll edit. I can't see everyone from here.

Why is Penn State being ranked for Buy Viagra (because they've been hacked, not because Penn State wants to sell Viagra)? How come Google isn't better about manually banning this kind of spamming?

Heh, Matt just said scalable and robust again. It's his new phrase. They typically refer to take an algorithmic approach to removing spam but he thinks there's room for using humans in a 'scalable' way.

Tim chimes in to agree that humans can be 'scalable'. Aaswath says that ultimately the fix for Viagra spam will have to be algorithmic. Peter agrees and says that people could work every day for the next 10000 years and not even touch the amount of cleaning they'd have to do to fix the Viagra problem.

Danny does a quick tour of the SEs. Ask does well, Live doesn't have any .edu links (Tim: But they're not relevant! Danny: At least on the others I can buy Viagra.) Speaking of Yahoo, they have an .edu 404 page as their second result. Oh, now we're going to that Hawaiian named engine. AHAHAHA. They're not relevant and the ones that are come from .edus. I love this session!

Real estate, travel, home schooling... Different industries have different levels of normal. Link rules in real estate are different because reciprocal links are more common so they're looking at that.

The search engines look at a larger set of queries so their 'we're doing well' isn't always the webmaster's 'doing well'.

Someone wants penalties to be announced. Don't just penalize them, announce it and say they did something wrong. Lots of the audience agrees. Even more want a way to look up a way to see if their site has a penalty or not. Matt says 'yeah, that'd be great but then you also tell the spammers which techniques are still working'. Tim reiterates, they don't want to clue people in to what tricks are being missed by the engines.

Pat (feedthebot.com) wants the ability to know that his site is definitively under a penalty. How do I do a re-inclusion requests that actually get results?

Matt: We take them very seriously. Some people think you have to admit guilt but they're trying to soften the message a little. You don't have to grovel but you do have to try to be honest. If you don't know but you fixed some stuff, tell them.

Open-sourcing the resolution process says Michael Martinez (I think?). Danny calls it 'wikispamia'. Matt says having other people vouch might be interesting but there would always be someone out there try to game the system. He mentions that Neil Patel has 30 digg aliases, by way of an example.

Danny says there needs to be a way to say 'this wasn't an intent to deceive but I'm getting penalized anyway.'

In a discussion about DUI laws and how to build pages to explain them, Matt calls Wyoming unimportant. Then he has to bribe people with Google Webmaster t-shirts to not tell Wyoming about it. I didn't get a t-shirt so I'm blogging it anyway. (I wouldn't except that I'm bitter because they're supercute long sleeved and black! There's a heart on the sleeve!)

Danny says rather than monopolizing the engine reps for twenty minutes, give them a business card with the site on it so they can check it later. Matt chimes in and says that you can write it up ahead of time too. They like that.

Quick requests from the audience:

--We should be able to report spam in the SERP not in a separate form.
--Please let us know you at least got the message. It feels like sending messages in to a void.
--Full list of the actual penalties.
--Get more input from the webmaster about the site.
--Trusted webmasters (Lots of applause for that)
--Clean site badge.
--Trust API through Webmaster Tools
--Max Keywords per tag (Danny: Don't use the tags. Et tu, Danny?)
--Stop being afraid of spammers and provide more transparency.
--Better train your ad reps.
--Ban Viagra (Danny: just give it away! You can afford it!)
--Details on time penalty
--Negative rank on the toolbar
--Caution about banning the entire servers
--Bad neighbor API (Danny calls that silly talk)

Last words:

Aaswath: We love you.
Tim: Give us feedback on features in site explorer. It's digg-like.
Matt: We love you infinity times infinity, especially Wyoming. We're trying to improve communication. Keep talking to us.
Peter: We love the feedback. At the end of the day, we just want to provide good results.

Awesome session.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 5/07 at 12:22 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Ask, Google, Live Search, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, smxseattle07

Pump Up Your Paid Search

Jeffrey Rohrs is moderating this morning’s Pump Up Your Search panel with speakers Brad Geddes (Local Launch), Ben Perry (iProspect), and Matt Van Wagner (Find Me Faster). If these gentlemen talk as fast as Misty Locke, I’m quitting and taking my giant cupcake with me.

The sound in this room is seriously strange. It sounds like Brad is speaking into a fan. It’d be funny if I didn’t have to actually hear what he was saying.

Okay, Brad decided to start while I was contemplating the silliness of his voice. He begins by talking about day parting. With day parting, marketer can display their ads based on the time of day or specific days of the week. You can also change your bids by the same variables.

Who should use this? Businesses who only want advertise during business hours, businesses who advertise based upon their buying cycle, and advertisers who track their ROI on a daily or hourly basis.

This is relevant because it allows marketers to target ads based on their understanding of their users buying cycle. Do they buy at night? On the weekend? Every industry will have a relative conversion rate. How does that affect your business? Is there a huge different between 4am and noon? Probably.

Brad presents a case study for a B2B lead generation company. Tuesday was the highest day of lead generation, then Sunday. Knowing this, you may want to place a higher bid on those days to ensure your listing gets in front of your audience. Should you be bidding lower or not at all when you know your customers aren’t likely to be surfing?

Time zones matter. If you were in Seattle and you’re in stocks, you’re going to get conversions early in the morning since the stock market opens at 8am on the East Coast. You want to make sure your ad appears during those times.

When do you get paid? Looking at an electronics company, conversions were organized by pay dates. Change bids upon buying cycle.

Short term results: Accounts were reorganized and bids were changed by ad group, time of day and day of the week.

How are the engines helping marketers? Google AdWords has ad scheduling and Microsoft has day parting. He notes that Yahoo Search Marketing is still working on their program.

To take advantage of ad scheduling in Good AdWords, simply go into your campaign settings and play with the different options. Simple mode allows you to pause and resume campaigns based upon time of day and day of the week. Advanced mode also allows bid changes by the time of day or day of the week. You can change bids based on a percentage. For example, maybe on Monday at 1:00pm-5:00pm you want to use 60 percent of the bid.

Microsoft adCenter allows day parting. When you log in, you can choose what days you want to run your ads. Microsoft will pre-select times for you so you’re somewhat limited there. When you go to actually bid, you can set what you want to pay. If unchecked, ads will only appear if you’ve selected the day of the week or hours of the day. If checked, ads will appear at all times at the default max CPC. Microsoft uses an incremental bidding system.

You can also use day parting for time sensitive offers. It’s not just your current CPCs and conversion rates. You can also use the data to connect with individuals. For example, in the service based industry, Friday afternoon is a dead afternoon. Maybe you want to increase business but putting out different ads to engage those buyers.

Or maybe you’re not trying to target a day that is slow, maybe you want to simply beat the competition. Offer free delivery before noon or present some other immediate call to action. Look at your sales cycle to see how people interact. There are times when you need to change your conversion metric. You don’t want the same thing from customers at different times of the day. You need to know who you’re marketing towards.

Up next is Ben to talk about campaign set up considerations. He gives attendees a series of tips.

Set up your campaign correctly: Map out your account structure before even touching the engine interface. It makes life a lot easier, improves quality score and the big three have essentially the same structure. This will help you to streamline the entire process.

Consider ad serving, reporting and ease of use: Don’t mirror your sites structure unless that is the best structure all around. Use as simple a structure as feasible.

Do not use engine daily budget to guide your spending: Hitting your budget or even coming close throttles your ad serving. You want to serve ads as if you have an unlimited budget. Otherwise, you’re paying too much per click,

Use Google’s Website Optimizer to test new traffic sources: Get as much volume as possible. How do you do this? Create a new landing page. Create an MVT test that taps each of your main customer types. Send all traffic from a new source to that page only. Let the results tell you whether the source has value and to which customers.

Buy tangential keywords carefully, or not at all: Search marketing works because of direct relevance. Contextual ads are usually a cheaper way to accomplish the same thing.

Use broad match (with negative keywords) to reach maximum volume under a CPA target: You can’t predict all the ways people search. This gets you to an optimal volume state faster. However, it depends on good keyword selection. You must mine your data for negatives.

Think about your ad position as a side effect of your ROI equation, not as a level for driving the campaign: There’s nothing magical abut position. Using it as a level for driving campaign makes you lose money. Calculate your bids based on your ROI equation and let position fall where it may.

Use geo-targeting strategically: When targeting most of the country, use a national campaign as the base with geo-targeted “overlays”. Why? Because often using only geo-targeting leaves so much volume on the table that it’s worth paying for clicks you can’t use.

Last up is Matt with a presentation titled “Used Fish, Old Socks and a New Attitude”. Sweet title, Matt. Matt is going to talk about dynamic keyword insertion.

DKI has become more important because the three majors now offer the ability the opportunity to do things with dynamic keyword insertion. Microsoft put DKI on steroids.

Yahoo never invested in DKI because until they rolled out Panama they didn’t need it. They had the perfect formula for determine relevance: one keyword, one ad.

Pros of DKI:

• Improves your click through rate
• Improves quality score
• Improves ad relevance
• It’s the secret sauce that all experts use

Cons of DKI

• You lose control of what your ad is going to look like
• Too complex to understand
• Decreases your conversion rate

Matt looks at some DKI ads gone wild, examining queries for used cigars, used fish, used underwear, and paid search advertisements.

Dynamic keyword insertion is when you have a campaign with a lot of different words and instead of having one static ad you can customize your ad in an automated way. It’s a way to save time. Who wants to write a billion ads? Susan!

Yahoo says that the insert keyword feature reduces the number of ads you have to manage and can help increase the relevance of an ad by automatically including the appropriate keyword.

How does DKI work? You have a user search query. If a user puts in Starbucks, your keyword list will pick up their query in your keyword list.

On Google, you can insert dynamic text into titles, headlines, descriptions and the displayed URL. Default text is displayed if title, descriptions or Display ULR exceed character limit.

How to control word casing for dynamic text,

[keyword] – starbucks coffee -- all lower case
[Keyword]—Starbucks Coffee -- 1st world initial caps, all lower case
[KeyWord] – Starbucks Coffee -- all words initial caps
[KEYword] – STARBUCKS coffee – 1st work caps, all other words in lower case
[KeyWORD] – starbucks COFEE -- last word caps, all others init caps
[KEYWORD] – STARBUCKS COFFEE -- all words, all caps

For proper casing of acronyms:

Instead of this {KeyWord: Driving Scholls in NH}, use this [KeyWORD Driving Schools in NH]

Remember that Google DKI inserts the keyword from your ad group, not the user query. So, it picks the word in your ad group that caused the match.

Yahoo did not need DKI until Panama was released. Panama options for dynamic text – title and description. Ad controls features include the ability to put in default text and alternative text.

Microsoft went all out on dynamic text. Full set of text insertion tools. Word casing is completely in your control. Set of parameter available at keyword level. Works with content ads, too. Online help is very good.

You don’t need to know syntax, Microsoft pre-programs it for you. You can put dynamic text in title, text, display URL. You can set dynamic text at the keyword level.

He encourages attendees to play and go create some crazy ads.

Best practices

• DKI works best when your ad groups are tightly organized.


• Phrase Match is used, rather than broad.


• One dominant word that varies only by part number, size, color, model, etc.

DKI is less successful when paired with conceptual campaigns (things described different in different parts of the country) and when branding is more important than clicks.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 5/07 at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
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Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?

Morning. Everyone will be happy to know that Susan and I both arrived on time to this morning’s session. And I still had time to dry my hair. And get coffee. How sweet it is!

But enough about my morning. Jeffrey Rohrs is moderating this morning’s paid search debate with speakers Robert Ashby (Microsoft), Peter Hershberg (Reprise Media), Misty Locke (Range Online Media), and Chris Zaharias (Strategic Initiatives Efficient Frontier). Let’s get to it.

Jeffrey explains the format for this morning’s debate. We have the “Dead Team” and the “Not Dead Team”. Misty and Peter are on the “Dead Team” while Chris and Robert are on the “Not Dead Team”. I think I am so going to hate blogging this.

First up is Misty.

Oh, good heavens. Misty is the fastest speaker in the history of the world. I want more coffee. More coffee!

Misty says that bid management is not dead but the belief that a magic black box can understand your past, your present and your future is. It is simplistic to think that one tool fits all needs or solves all marketing challenges. (Had that been suggested?)

She says she is not here to debate whether technology provides efficiencies. She is here to challenge how we view search marketing and explore the many variables that challenge to be the “be all/end all” technology. She’s here to encourage you to think outside what you think bid management is.

She offers three principles why bid management is dead. She also says she hates me and that’s why she’s talking so fast. [Oh, like she even knows you exist. Not everything is about you, Lisa. --Susan]

• The basic build and fundamental of a bid tool is lacking
• It’s simplistic to think of search engine marketing as just keywords
• Does take into account consumer intent

Search engines are no longer bid to position: Limited data means uninformed bid decisions, which impacts promotions. Bid management tools are limited by time. It takes too long to gather information. They ignore conversation rate factors related to landing pages and path to conversion. Trends that do not follow exact dates or those that require anticipation of the marketers. They don’t allow marketers to influence bids by news, people, fear and life.

Simplistic Tunnel Vision – Search is not just about keywords. It’s about generating demand and not just waiting to capture it. It’s about optimizing the influence between online programs and search marketing.
It’s also not about the last click to conversion. 71 percent of store purchases can from online search. Bid management tools ignore the offline marketing campaigns.

Consumer intent: Consumer intent cannot be managed by a tool. Marketing is an art, not a science You can provide efficiencies through tool management but viewing search as direct marketing alone can do all is limiting your growth.

Next up is Robert to cross examine Misty’s statement. Hopefully Robert speaks slower than Misty. Otherwise I get to hit Susan in the face. (She’s sitting next to me. Dude, find a friend.)

Robert starts off, “Misty, Misty, Misty”. For serious, Robert. Did you hear how fast she was speaking?

Robert asks: How can you possible expect humans to manage a tail of thousands of keywords again? Misty quips that he’s misrepresenting her point. She believes tools have a place, they’re just not the end all be all of search marketing. Misty didn’t get the note that she’s defending the Tools Are Dead position, methinks.

Misty concedes that big management tools can help, yes. But they’re not the best way to run a search engine marketing campaign.

Robert says there’s an open question out there that says there are influences that affect search engine marketing. But aren’t those influences representing customer behavior themselves?

Misty argues that bid management tools have a delayed reaction because they have to take into account all the information. You cannot put a bid management tool on your system and walk away and not look at it. It’s not just the consumer path. It’s also the marketing intent.

Robert: Think of it has having not a hammer but a steam hammer to run a better campaign. How else would you manage your search engine marketing campaign without tools? Yeah, I’m with Robert.

Jeffrey yells time before Misty can answer the question.

Chris is up to tell us why bid management is not dead.

Chris says he’s going to start by explaining the history of bid management to give us some context. Aw, thanks, Chris.

The history of bid management is that back in 2001-2 there were people taking advantage of search and buying keywords. They knew they had to track things so they built spreadsheets to see what keywords they should bid more on and which ones they could drop. The early bid management firms took advantage of a transparent bid market, but that all went away when Google and Yahoo entered the space. Bid management is not a viable option because the search engines are no longer transparent. There are many proofs that not only does bid management exist today, but that it works well.

[I don’t get this debate. Of course bid manage exists today and of course it’s necessary. Why are we here? I could be sleeping. Or at least getting more coffee.]

The first proof he offers is a simulation of the sum total for an advertising campaign on a particular search engine. It shows the set of operating points for a campaign. There are at least 5-7 firms that provide these stats. They’ve built systems that can take historical impression, click costs, margin data, update it in real-time and build a meaningful understanding of the operating points for a keyword set, which can then be turned into an automated action.

Second point: The biggest challenge in search today is that advertisers’ and their agencies do not have enough time to do all of the things that add up to advertising and merchandising because they’re wasting their time trying to manually do what these tools do automatically. People can’t do the things that matter most, improving ad copy, improving landing page conversation rate, because they’re stuck looking at math (ew, math).

He believes that while Misty is right, the reality is there are very few agencies that can scale to offer appropriate bid management services.

There are at least a dozen firms that have built and are selling big management systems. He lists companies like aQuantive, DoubleClick, 27/7, Did-it, etc. They are all selling bid management services. Some are even getting acquired by larger companies for huge sums of money. Yeah, aQuantive and DoubleClick!

Also, there’s a reason Google charges for its API, he says. People are using it. Every major search engine has an API; those that don’t are buying them. Automated campaign optimization does not apply to engines with opaque bid landscapes.

Up next is Peter to cross examine Chris’ statements.

[My wrists are going to fall off. I am so totally serious.]

When there was complete transparency in the marketplace the only way to get a higher position was to bid higher. Are there additional ways you can do that today?

Chris: Absolutely. You can improve your click through rate, conversion rate, you can buy keywords people aren’t buying, etc. However, agencies don’t have the time do to that because they’re trying to manage their bids manually. They’re getting lost in all the math. Math eats people.

Peter: Is it true that quality score creates the scenario where two advertisers are required to pay different CPCs for the same keywords? Absolutely, says Chris.

Peter asks: Let’s say we’re bidding on the same keyword but the engines require us to pay two different prices. Don’t I already win because I’m required to pay higher?

You have to react to not just one keyword but to the whole portfolio of keywords so you can react and optimize your whole set of keywords. It can be done, but most firms don’t have the time to address that.

Misty and Peter now get a four minute rebuttal. I wish I took debate. I’m so confused.

Peter says they’ve been asked to take a position that is somewhat overstated. No one believes that bid management is absolutely dead, but it is no longer associated with search marketing. There was a time where as long as your ads were relevant, you could buy your way into the results, however, you can’t do that anymore. When you could, your success was dependant on bid management.

It’s not about how much you can pay anymore, but whose ads are more relevant. There are any number of variables – ad copy, landing page content, etc. All of these things determine what you’re going to have to pay. He doesn’t want to underestimate the power of bid management, but it’s really just one variable in a much larger equation.

Peter says his sense very early on was that bid management would become monetized over the long term. If history has shown us anything, that would be a consideration.

What happens when these things are given away for free? The value gets put into the adjacencies into the commodity. From our standpoint, successful search engine marketing comes down to creating relevant ads, good keywords, good copy, good landing page, etc. Also taking account things that are going on in the offline world. Bid management is just one variable.

Misty says she can’t better Peter’s comment, Thank goodness. I mentioned she talks really fast, right?

Robert disagrees that bid manage is dead. It’s a foundation by which you’re allowed to do other things. When you look at the foundation of the building, it’s what you use to set up what you can do. You don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, but you have to. If you don’t, it will sap your resources. If you don’t watch what you’re doing, you’ll blow your entire budget on a very limited reach. Bid management allows you to focus your energy on other things and the metrics that you care about. You can quickly react when your business changes its goals. It allows you to quickly optimize. You can devote your time to things that you care more about. Like eating cookies!

What are the variables that you want to take into account in result of taking that bid? Google, Yahoo and Microsoft deploy technology to predict what customers need. There’s no reason why a bid management system can’t do the same thing for you and allow you to focus on your customer, not the bid.

Chris says that search engine marketing is operating in search and content. It’s about making search more efficient. The same auction systems that are now powering search are going to find their way into the larger advertising market. The only way that will not happen is if we have a catastrophe. It is absolutely critical for advertisers to have systems in place that let them capture and analyze the data so they can manage their campaigns. Bid management is absolutely not a commodity. It’s the core system of all mediums, not just search.

If you look at the value chain of search I will be the first to acknowledge that more important than working with us. You need to work with technology because the things that do matter the most are the marketing and the merchandise. The situation we see in marketplace is the advertisers who all know they need to do these things aren’t able to get to them because they’re stuck in a never-ending match calculation. The role of bid management is to do in an efficient way what needs to be done so advertisers can focus on more important things.

Misty and Peter get three min to wrap up.

Oh, no. Misty is speaking again. Cries.

She thinks the other boys agreed with her statement: You need tools to get the job done. It is not humanly impossible, but it is more efficient. She uses bid technologies, the difference is real search marketers (!) look at it outside of just a bid tool (smack!). In our company, we don’t sell the technology, she says. We don’t name it and we don’t push it. A keyword is just as important as the TV advertisement you put out there. How you manage that is by expertise, not bid management alone. Thinking of a keyword as just a word will limit your growth. You have to think about the human influence. That is not a high match equation.

Peter: All three major engines use some form of quality bid system. That’s been very frustrating for advertisings, but if nothing else it put the M back in search marketing. It’s not just a big math equation. At the end of the day it is absolutely marketing.

A hand poll shows that the audience didn’t change their opinion. It’s probably because they didn’t have their coffee this morning. Big hugs for everyone.

Q&A

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 5/07 at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
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June 4, 2007

Keynote Conversation with Satya Nadella

Almost done with day one, folks. Don’t wimp out on me now.

It’s time for introducti -- oh, no! Danny just introduced Satya as a “15-year-old” instead of a “15-year veteran”. Smooth, Danny. In case you don’t know, Satya Nadell is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s new Search & Advertising Platform Group.

When talking about Microsoft, Satya says that there’s a lot of fire and desire in Microsoft’s teams to do stuff and to contribute. The question they’re facing right now is how do they go from where they are and show that innovation. He says that in some ways, Microsoft has very little to lose. (Did he really just say that? They can’t be the right attitude.)

Satya speaks about Microsoft’s Search & Advertising Platform group and says there is logic in bringing the ad and search sides together because there’s a lot they can do together. The fact that Microsoft has a full page that has to be relevant to users’ means there’s plenty of room for integration. Bringing the engineering teams together is something Microsoft is focusing on.

[Good heavens. Satya talks faster than Michael Gray. How am I supposed to keep up with this? And at the end of the day, no less.]

Danny: What do you see as the biggest challenge you have to deal with?

Satya responds that at some level when you are 10 percent share in the US, you’re forced to face up and realize that that’s the challenge. How do you grow that share so that advertisers are getting more eyeballs? How do you make a present a better search experience so that advertisers want to associate with you?

If you look at the total number of unique searchers using Microsoft, Satya says its approximately 55 million unique searchers a month. That’s about 50 percent of what Google has. That’s not bad. He says that Microsoft has over 500 million users worldwide. That’s a lot of users. They want to crack the code and figure out how to keep those searches. That’s where you’ll see them do a lot of experimentation.

Overall, being able to really get contextual search around the entire Microsoft network and increase engagement is perhaps job number one.

Danny: How do you do some of the distinguishing between Google, Yahoo or Ask?

Satya says it takes a lot to be in the search business. He feels like if you think about the sophistication of the Microsoft platform they’ve finally reached a level of maturity, a level of investment.

Danny: How do you differentiate? You realize there’s something beyond the page with ten blue links.

Satya says 3D is where Microsoft differentiates itself. They think that 3D Web will happen. It’s great for new advertising and for mapping locations. Microsoft also has a rich mobile application.

He says they’re trying to get high share in some of the verticals. He repeats his “when you’re only at 10 percent share” mantra and says verticals are a priority. Satya doesn’t think he’s in the search game only to win or get their fair share in the verticals. He wants to do both, but at the same time they feel they have the leadership in some of those verticals and they’re going to take it.

On the ad side, he talks about last year’s launch of adCenter and comments that Microsoft is pretty happy with it. The thing they mostly want to focus on right now is based on the feedback they’ve received. They want to improve the quality and the usability of adCenter. They’re going to put a lot of emphasis on basic usability. They’ve also been doing interesting things at adlabs.microsoft.com.

Danny asks Satya about Microsoft’s recent acquisition of aQuantive and asks if that isn’t a conflict of interest.

Satya says Microsoft definitely wants to keep them. If you think about it, he says, aQuantive has cracked the code on this one. It’s fair to say there will be a different lens with Microsoft involved, but they intend to make sure that the flexibility Avenue A has to service their clients remains. The fact that Microsoft is publisher and has a technology arm won’t affect the way things are run. The clients of Avenue A can be assured that Avenue A will have all the same policies to protect their interests.

Changing focus, Satya says that at the end of the day, MSN is where all of Microsoft’s traffic is. They have to keep pace on MSN as a portal. That defines everything. You’ll also see them innovate with the Windows experience.

Danny asks Satya how he prepared himself for his new role at Microsoft.

Satya says the best way to really energize yourself late in your career is to jump into something new. Hell yeah, Satya! He says the past month has been really refreshing for him. His job is to take Microsoft’s friction and enable their team to do their best work.

Microsoft’s long term dream is to create the best search interface and provide the best search results for a given query. We’re in the first phases of search innovation, he says.

During the Q&A, one attendee asks if Microsoft would extend financial rewards to users who promise to use Microsoft search.

Satya laughs and says he’ll ask his boss. Hee.

Danny asks Satya if there are any glimmerings of pause for their mapping service after the privacy concerns that arose after Google’s released its street level view.

Satya says it’s something they’ll track. At the end of the day, you have to ask how much you want to put the users in control. If users feel that having the imagery outweighs the privacy concerns, we’ll listen. But if the privacy concerns are paramount, then you’ll see us find some kind of equilibrium.

Danny: In the past month, we’ve seen Google Universal Search come out. What’s Microsoft’s take on that?

The short answer is that Microsoft is working on it. They really believe in taking advantage of full page real estate. There’s a page architecture that’s evolving the same way Google’s is.

When asked why users should use Live.com he responds because there is an aggregation of a lot of features. Search is one of those real universal things. Every query is different. Every searcher has a different need at a different time.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/07 at 6:30 PM | Comments (0)
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Personalized Search: Fear or Not?

I’m considering getting a restraining order because Danny Sullivan has followed me into yet another session. This time he’s here moderating (read: blatantly stalking) the Personalized Search panel with Matt Cutts (Google), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Gord Hotchkiss (Enquiro), and Tim Mayer (Yahoo).

Danny starts off talking about personalized search at Google. He says Google is starting to shape results based on users’ search activities, which is why we’re all here. It hasn’t reshaped everything (yet) but it could be more dramatic in the future. Danny jokes that the State of California law requires Wikipedia to be on the top of Google’s search results so that may never change. Hehe.

Personalized influences will determine where sites are ranked in your results. Google wants to know if you’ve add a site to your Google Personalized Home Page? Is it in your Google bookmarks, search history, Web history?

Danny stresses that Google is the only major search engine to be personalizing results. Yahoo and Ask are harvesting some information but have yet to launch a full attack. Google is likely to be even more aggressive with personalization over time.

In case you’re wondering why only Google and Yahoo are represented at today’s session, Danny says that Microsoft and Ask declined his offer because they didn’t have much to say about personalized search. Insert your own joke here.

Gord is up first to talk about search personalization.

In personalization, results revolve around users, not algorithms. It’s about their search history, current tasks, Web history, social patterns, etc. Today it’s difficult for site owners to look at an individual user. With personalization, optimization will happen around themes not keywords. It will be about the long tail and forcing sites to develop based around users. You have to know what your users are looking for.

Sites will have to become more sticky. Marketers must get people to their site earlier and make them want to bookmark and engage with it. Gord predicts we’ll see a lot of sites building up content and functionality. For every theme we’re going to see circles of importance. These will be inundated with offers for RSS content, widgets and gadgets.

Something else that will become important is user intelligence. We’re going to see an emergence of click stream-based intelligence tools. Engines will introduce more profiling tools for paid, which will be used by SEO. Social bookmarking sites will become even hotter as personalization will enable scalable social search. More use of profiles/personas in SEO.

On the blackhat side of things, Gord says they’ll start using more spy and adware in SEO to see where users are going and spending their time. They’ll study the next “hot buzz” and build interests around it.

Up next is Michael, who is a HUGE fan of personalized search. Only not really.

Michael says this is a really exciting time for blackhat SEOs. Not that there are any in the room. He argues that Google is making it really easy for SEOs to trick their clients. Clients will look at their sites while logged into their Google accounts, see their sites at number one, and be impressed by all the good work their SEO is doing. Heh.

Michael kids that Google is launching personalized search in order to help their PPC program. He says that PPC will offer a really safe alternative to companies who are looking for the stability that personalize search can’t provide.

The big thing with all of this, says Michael, is that it’s forcing customers to become Google addicts. By trying to take advantage of personalized search webmasters become dependant on all of Google’s services. The more users trust Google the less likely they are to experiment with other searches. He’d rather see users experiment with alternative engines and services.

To be fair, Michael offers some suggestions for how Google can improve personalized search.

• Stop hiding that people are logging in in a very obscure part of the screen.
• Be clearer on the SERPs when a result is a personalized search and not a normal result.
• Make it easy for people to turn off or opt out of personalized search. Michael asks if anyone else had trouble signing out of personalized search and a bunch of people applaud.

Tim is up next to calm the audience down after Michael’s dramatic Google-is-going-to-kill-you performance. Tim talks about the ways in which Yahoo is using personalization.

Session-based personalization: Understand the intent of the users based on queries and clicks during a specific session. The challenge is figuring out when a session ends. When are they done doing research on topic A and heading to topic B?

Interest-based personalization: Understand the interest of the user based on their own declared preferences or user behavior inside or outside of the search context. The challenge users sometimes do searches outside their interest or normal behavior.

How will this impact search? Search queries will get shorter. More of the top ten should be relevant to the user, assuming a strict intent is extrapolated from the query.

Impact on SEO: A better matching of the results that appear. Give the search engines enough content per page to help it determine the topicality of that page.

Tim says Yahoo has taken a more social approach to personalization. Yahoo users active in social products, such as Flickr, Answers, Del.icio.us, upcoming, etc can help them discover content that is interesting to them and their community. Social search applications can help you save, store and re-find information that is important to you.

Matt Cutts is up next.

The idea behind personalization is that Google wants to make the results better for our users. (Aw.) People think about things in different ways. Matt calls on Jane and says if he asks her what a Kiwi is she’d have a different answer than someone who doesn’t hail from New Zealand. Poor, Jane. She looked so startled when Matt called on her. Total high school flashback.

Matt makes some sort of Monty Python reference and says that personalization should not be a surprise. Google has been talking about it. Don’t pretend you didn’t know it was coming.

He then starts talking about the benefits of Google’s Web history and how it can help remind you of useful searches you did a month ago. Yeah, Matt, still not drinking the Kool-aid. Sorry, dude.

Matt asks who thinks personalization is the death of SEO. No one is brave enough to raise their hand. Matt says there will always be a need for sites to present themselves well. SEO will never die. Personalization may change the game a little bit. Whenever there is change there’s opportunity. If you’re the SEO who’s crying about progress and change, you’re doing a detriment to yourself. Instead, figure out how to make your site sticky and how to virally grow it. Matt doesn’t think SEO will be exactly what it’s been like in the past but personalization won’t be such a big change that people won’t recognize it.

This is very important: If you want to turn off personalized search for a particular query, just add this parameter “&pws=0” to the end of your query string. Write that down somewhere.

Matt tries to make us all less scared of Google and tells us that Greg Linden blogged that personalized news search improved click throughs about 40-50 percent. Poor, Matt. He’s really getting desperate. :)

Notable Q&A Moments:

What are you going to do about shared computers? People don’t know to log in and out of accounts.

Matt: It’s an interesting problem. If you look at Google’s Web History product it breaks things into sessions. If you wait long enough Google will break it into a session. The results will still be better overall even if they became muddied by two different searchers.

Personally, I think this is so not Google’s problem, but okay.

Tim says the best way to opt out of Google personalized search is to pick another search engine. Tim, 1: Matt, 0.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/07 at 4:59 PM | Comments (2)
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Inside the Auction Black Box

Last session today for me. Once again, our moderator is the talented Jeff Rohrs, whose name I misspelled at least twice earlier today. Joshua Stylman of Reprise Media, Jonah Stein of Alchemist Media and Dan Sundgren of Efficient Frontier will be our panelists this session. Jonah is stepping in for Jesse Stricchiola who is out sick. These fabulous lads will be explaining to our audience of experienced PPC gurus and one very confused blogger exactly what goes on inside the paid search auction. My wrists hurt so we'll hope that things are succinct.

We've got a couple minutes here while they deal with some sound issues. Yay, a break!

Dan Sundgren is up first. He starts off with a quote from David Ogilvy emphasizing how your job as a marketer can add just as much to the product as any

Quality score inherently is about being obsessed with being user experience. Google's success is based on doing good for the user and the quality score is there way of feeding into that.

To really understand quality score, you need to understand that Google built it to reward a good user experience. He believes that Google will try to put less and less ads on the page, trying to give people what they want, making things cleaner, simpler. It's counter-intuitive but so is Google.

It's extra important now to understand Quality Score because as Google grows in ad spaces (video, tv, radio, print) they're going to extend their auctions to those areas too. The evolution of paid search is toward better user experience and better return. From CPM to CTR and now to CPA.

Doubleclick and Google Analytics have made Quality Score based on more than just CTR. Landing pages quality is a component.

AdRank is the formula Google uses to figure out where an ad should be placed on a page. Google likes fairness, they want the little guy to have a chance to play in the same space as the big guys because the competition is better for business all the way around.

The minimum bid on a keyword changes based on the general quality score for that word. A better quality score can get you higher up in the paid results without paying more per click.

"Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon." - David Ogilvy. Dan emphasizes that it's important to drill down. Don't accept surface answers. It's a complicated question.

Josh Stylman is up next. He's going to cover the other quality score engines: Microsoft and Yahoo. He mentions he's got some differences of opinions here, so this should be interesting. Summer 2005 was when Google introduced the idea of a Quality Score.

Quality score philosophy is about Punishment with Google and Reward from Microsoft and Yahoo. Google will raise cost for low quality and will deactive ads that are too low. MS and Y don't ask quite the same premium. It's on average $1.00 more with Google and only $.10 and $.08 with Yahoo and Microsoft.

Part of the trouble of course is that Google has a 65% market share. You have to play with them and that means they can charge more. It's a premium that you pay to be in the space. By comparison, the lower costs in the other engines reflect their attempts to attract advertisers to them so that they can attract distribution and gain market share.

Google uses many more data points than the other two. In Yahoo and MSN, you really only have to worry about CPC keyworded-targeted text ads. It's easier to figure out pieces of the blackbox. MSN offers day-parting and demographics, both of which are justification for getting advertisers to increase their CPCs. It's not necessarily a bad thing, if it's worth it.

Editorial review can be hit and miss. Because it's human, there's not always a logical pattern to what gets rejected and approved. Josh would like to see more automation there.

What defines relevancy? You can make the CTR higher and kill your conversion rate. It's possible to make sure that everyone wins but you need balance and make sure that there is actually conversation going on.

Jonah Stein is going to be covering CPA. He doesn't have case studies, since the program is fairly new. What is Pay per action? It's an experimental model, Google as a super affiliate. You only pay when something happens. It's a nice risk free model and you never leave prospects on the table. Not only that it's better on click fraud.

On the other hand...you're sharing the value of the customer with Google. They get to know how much you think your customer is worth. It distorts the web, turning everyone into a marketing site. And it can increase costs overall as more advertisers get into the space. It turns Adsense publishers into affiliate channels.

The ultimate danger is that it turns Google into everyone's Silent (or not so Silent) Partner. Aaron Wall calls it Google's invisible hand--you have to be willing to share a lot of information with them in order to get the best results. They already collect a huge amount of data through a huge variety of channels. Jonah lists them; it takes two slides. I'm pretty sure I see Rebecca writing them all down so check with her later on if you're interested.

Looking ahead: PPA is here to stay. It's too soon to know the ROI but the biggest threat here is to affiliate players--Google is cutting into that business model.

Q&A highlights:

How do misspellings and synonyms work if they aren't on your landing page? Josh: Structure them at the campaign structure level. GYM anticipates that savvy marketers will buy those keywords and you won't necessarily be penalized for them. Jonah: You're not necessarily going to get a bad quality score for ads with misspellings. Dan: Did You Mean is really good piece that people are using more and more.

(My battery is dying, I may not finish recapping this session.)

Use your analytics to make sure that you know what you're doing. Don’t ignore data points. Don't try to blow out the space and don't let other companies make you panic. Spend your energy improving your conversion.

People who said 'Google's only going to be a search engine' either didn't know what Google was doing or didn't realize what being in search really meant in an era of ubiquitous information.

(There is still about 30 minutes left but I only have five of battery power so I'm going to post this now. Look for more brilliance from this session from the other recappers.)

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 4/07 at 4:11 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Live Search, Pay Per Click, Yahoo, smxseattle07

Paid Search and Tricky Issues

After lunch, we're back in the very cold paid search track and again, Jeffrey Rohrs from Exact Target is our moderator. This session's speakers are Bob Carilli from Shop.com, Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media, and Michael Sack from Idearc Media Corp. They'll be discussing the challenges of dealing with trademarks, duplicate content, match types and getting fast support, just to name a few. Hopefully we'll get some good advice to make paid search just a little less complicated. Jeff mentions that we're going to be hearing from audience members too. If they have expertise in an issue, they can chime in.

Mona Elesseily will be speaking first. She's covering three issues in her presentation: TM policy overview, TM and affiliate policy in specific engines, and customer service and tactical recommendations.

Trademark issues are tricky because PPC keywords are often trademarks. There are a lot of grey areas. Rescuecom v. Google was a huge win for the search engines in September 2006. But there are just as many if not more cases that hold that trademark use in ad buying is infringement.

Mona reads an anecdote that mirrors, in a search engine's view, what happens when a user goes searching. The trademarks are guideposts, not the be all and end all of search. When you're shopping for jeans, you might intend to buy one brand of jeans but end up buying another.

Google's trademark policy:

• Will remove from ad copy but won't disable keywords.
• Trademark terms are a consideration in the Quality Score

Google Affiliate Policy:

• Can point to parent company or create own age
• Only displays on ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top level domain
• Quality Score is still a consideration.

Yahoo and MSN: block competitive keyword buys

Yahoo: Block all competitor URLs or Company Names regardless of trademarks and doesn't allow bidding on trademarks.

Yahoo Affiliate:
Must have a distinct URL
Must clearly indicate their affilitate relationship on the landing page.

MSN: Doesn't allow advertising in keywords or ad copy that constitutes TM infringement. This is the toughest policy in search

Affiliate: One per URL but affiliate and parent can show up on the same page occasionally. Mona thinks it needs worth.

Customer Service:

In general, help is there for you, you just need to know how to push. Keep in mind that sometimes it is in the search engine employee's best interest to help you. Form a relationship with CSRs. If you aren't getting the answers you need, hang up and call back to talk to someone else. It's person by person.

For Yahoo and MSN: It's worth testing the trademarked terms to see if they appear on a block or not. Most are but some aren't.

Do you get better service at high service tiers? Maybe, maybe not. If you get an awesome rep at the higher levels, then yes. If not, then no. But not all the awesome people are at the highest levels.

Jeffrey asks how many people are having trouble with competitors bidding on their terms? (A lot.) And how many are bidding on competitors? (About the same amount.) And how many are both? (There is, as you can imagine, a very large overlap.)

Bob Carilli is up next. Discusses Shop.com's customers. Largely female.

Ways that Paid Search is tricky:

• Trademark issues
• Campaign organization
• So called anomalies
• Working with APIs
• Internal awareness
• Partner relations
• Ads gone wild

Trademark issues - Cease and desist letters come in, they do research on the claim, explain broad match to the company (we're not really buying your keyword). Third party ads cause problems too, through contextual advertising. Getting permission from various people is getting harder. Have been using tactics like misspelled trademarks, which causes the owner to contact them and get them to give permission to use the trademark as a keyword.

Campaign organization - shop.com deals with millions of keywords. Need to juggle quality dynamics, minimum bids, duplicate keywords, constant reorganization. He feels like it's getting harder and harder to get answers from the engines. Reorganization can lead to keywords becoming duplicated and then campaigns get shut down.

So called anomalies - Penalties, Changing Rules, Misinformation -- hard to get straight answers even at a higher level of service

Working with APIs - Incomplete Documentation -- Google is constantly updating (every two months) and the questions aren't answered, the docs are complete, account execs can't give you answers. Hopefully Yahoo will be better.

Internal Awareness - Correcting the idea that paid search is like flipping the switch. Educating the other people in internal teams to understand how search works. Getting everyone to pull on the same end of the rope.

Partner Relations - working with partners can be tricky. You need to keep them in the loop without spending all your time holding their hands. It's important to build a relationship and manage expectations.

Ads Gone Wild - Policing Keywords so that embarrassing and inaccurate ads (roadkill on ebay, etc). Design a review process that keeps those things from happening.

Michael Sack is jetlagged. He quotes a Chinese proverb "those who say it can't be done shouldn't stand in the way of those who do." He doesn't believe that search is tricky.

Today he's discussing match types: Exact, Phrase, Broad. Different engines have different labels. Google as Expanded match, Yahoo has Advanced match. You need to learn what each phrase means for yourself, don’t count on your rep to understand it. Often they won't. You also need to learn to expect different behaviors and different results.

Why use Match Types?

• To capture the "tail" of search term
• To discover new keywords
• If you don't have time to manage your campaign

That last bullet was originally "if you're lazy". Match types can be a quick fix.

How does Google matching work:

• Exact Match - [sheet music] -returns- Sheet music
• Phrase - "Sheet Music" -returns- Popular sheet music, Free sheet music
• Broad Match (really is Expanded) - Sheet Music -returns- Print music, Song book

Broad match can hurt you, because it's possible to show up for something that isn't relevant. Monitor it c