Sorry for the old story, but WTF, I can’t believe this one at all, Google are now going to allow other people to bid on my trademark protected brand.

icture the scene in boardrooms up and down the country where the owners of some of the most respected businesses have spent years of hard work and millions of pounds to build up a world class brand they have investing in quality throughout their operations to boost conversion rates, and develop a prestigious brand that has core values, and ensures a high conversion rate from potential customers.

Then Google shift the goal posts, and after years of recognising the value of brands and protecting them, they stop all this, and allow anyone including lazy affiliate marketers to perform the lowest value campaign possible and piggy back on a brand, while forcing the original brand owner to pay more for every click through to their website.

While Google claim that this change will not affect businesses to a great extent - after all, if I want Nike, I’ll buy Nike, even if there is an Adidas advert appearing in Google - it will.

Take British Airways as an example, they have spent years developing their brand, and people searching for it will more than likely be looking to book a flight.  This means that all the travel companies in the world can bid on the term BA, which is a trademark, and get a customer that is statistically likely to convert. All the investment in the brand that encourages a customer to choose a product from that brand is subverted by the affiliates and agents who simply pay 3p or whatever to get a customer.

Now to a certain extent, I can understand where Google is coming from, after all, this is the age of the Internet, the age where everyone is a publisher and there are a million shops with a market of one, and to these small businesses, brand is not important.  The temporary nature of the web means that there is no need for some companies to build long term relationships with their clients, and no value to them in having a brand.

Google could so easily have been one of these companies, and to a certain extent they are, I use them for email and to search for things, they are also the basis of my career, but if Live Search started offering better results, or HotMail was opened up so I could integrate it into more things, then I would switch.  I have no loyalty to Google, like they have no loyalty to the advertisers like BA who spend literally millions with them each year.  Its a sad state of affairs, but for me, the thing that takes the p!ss most about this somewhat casual attitude to the value of other brands is that Google have recently been super protective of their own brand - claiming that no-one should use the Brand name Google as a verb, as in to Google for something.

There is always a danger in double standards.

I recently got the Vista SP1 upgrade downloaded to my PC by Windows.  Predictably, this being Microsoft, the upgrade didn’t work properly, and caused a problem with my laptop’s sound card. 

This was particularly annoying because I wanted to watch a movie on the train, and nothing I could do with the PC includig rolling back the version of the upgrade would get the sound to work again.

After looking around for help everywhere, I found that the only solution was to download the correct driver from this page. No idea why there was a problem, other than the arrogance of the Borg.

Anyway, the driver works now, and I managed to watch the movie.

I’ve been reading a lot of people bleating about how they’ve been banned from Google AdSense lately. They all seem to have exactly the same story about how their account was closed for no reason just after they had reached that magic $100 dollar mark, and all of them are complaining.

The fact is, no-one gets banned without a reason. Google have very strict guidelines about what you can and can’t do when using the system, and most of the people who have been banned have breached these guidelines in some way.

There is one main reason why people are getting banned by Google, and that is Fraud. Clicking on your own ads - even if you only do it once - is stealing. You are stealing from the people who pay to advertise, and you are stealing from other publishers, because money that they should have earned is being paid out to a thief. No-one “Accidentally” clicks on the adverts, they do it on purpose, and they do it for personal gain. This is theft, and quite qimply, anyone who engages in it should be prosecuted. The only reason that Google aren’t chasing the fraudsters through the courts in addition to banning their accounts is because this would cost them more in the long run, and undermine trust in the system.

Another reason why people are getting banned is because they don’t bother to read the terms and conditions of serving the ads. FFS. I have a job, I read the contract before I started, anyone who enters into a programme that involves the exchange of services for cash should read the contract before they start. But they don’t.

There are a whole list of terms that Google impose on publishers, and they do it for a reason. The advertisers who are using their services are doing so for a reason, to promote a product, and contrary to what you, with your blogspot blog and stolen content might think, they do not want their adverts associated with you. They do not want their advert to appear next to profane content or badly written and designed layouts that trick users into clicking on an advert that doesn’t really interest them.

This brings me onto the fact that there is about to be an explosion of bans at the end of May.

You remember those additional terms that you agreed to recently, the ones you didn’t bother to read because you were so desperate to click through to find out how much money you’d earned from your network of 5000 one page websites that are published using RSS and promoted through traffic share programmes?

When you agreed to those terms, you agreed that you would put a disclosure paragraph on your website about how any users visiting the site would have cookies added to their browser by the adverts that you were publishing. But of course, you didn’t bother to read that did you, because that would be too much effort, to actually think about what your responsibilities to your users were.

The fact is that Google cares jack about micro publishers, and when they get the opportunity in 6 weeks to clear out a vast amount of dross from their inventory, they’re going to do it.

To my mind, its fairly brave of Google to actually take a stand to protect users from shady people who build hundreds of crappy content free websites that serve one purpose - to get in the way of finding information. With their source of income gone, a lot of these sites will pack up and move on.

Of course there will be the usual weeping and gnashing of teeth about how evil Google has become, but what the people doing the complaining will have forgotten is that Google’s responsibility is to their users, shareholders and employees, and by enriching the user experience by eradicating the poor quality sites from the Adsense programme, they will be benefiting all of these groups.

I’ve decided to make a change to my theme, because people kept thinking that this was a blog about Dogs.  Anyway, the new one is clean and less cluttered.  I am in the process of designing a WP theme of my own, however it is still some way off.

If you want to get great results from your SEO campaign, you only need one thing:  The WWGD wristband:

 Any time you get confused about where you are going wrong with your SEO project, simply look at the wristband and ask:

“What Would Google Do”

 Order your’s now - just $5 EACH.

One of the central tenets of the Google Webmaster Guidelines was that “there is almost nothing that your competitors can do to harm your rankings”.  Well not any more it seems.  I was searching for that very phrase in the webmaster tools as part of an induction for a new junior, and it is conspicuous in its absence.

Google have been a bit ban happy lately, with a number of high profile companies falling victim to a penalty for paid linking, and the fact is that your competitors are able to do something to harm your rankings.

They can report you for paid linking via the web master tools console.

My suspicion is that Google have had to remove the clause for legal reasons to cover themselves in the event that a site gets banned because of malicious activity from a competitor. (ie their competitor buys a shedload of crappy links from PPP or Review Me, and then reports them for it).

If this happened, it would be an unfair restriction of trade against a company due to activities they had no control over, and with that phrase left in the webmaster tools, Google may well have ended up being liable for a substantial compensation package.

In light of the recent penalties that have been handed out, I wonder how long it is before the old “my competitor did it to me” excuse gets trotted out, and by the same token, I wonder how long it is before someone actually gets a payout to cover loss of earnings due to a ban.

Holistic search is not a new concept in internet marketing, however as the SERPS get more competitive and other agencies get more intelligent in their marketing, it is going to become even more important to leverage the full benefit of all the different areas of data that you can get.  In a year or two the web is going to be so competitive that any edge you can get will be essential. 

 Intelligent targeting of keywords through SEO will be able to give you a competitive advantage because you can concentrate fully on targeting the PPC campaign at the search terms with the lowest cost per sale or cost per acquisition, and your SEO efforts, which will deliver the “free traffic” can be dedicated entirely to these sales.  There are also many other ways in which the data from analytics can be shared to develop the best possible campaign for clients (or your own business).  This is the first in a series of posts about ways in which a holistic approach to SEM can be used to boost business.

There is a lot more than your ranking to consider when compiling and completing your SEO campaign.

I’ve always focused my optimisation efforts on an ROI model.  By this I mean that the campaign is built around the value that it is able to deliver to the client.  With this in mind, it is essential to be able to squeeze the maximum value from every appearance.

While a lot of my work is still built around the idea of getting the rankings:

• link building
• content analysis
• site structure work

I am also now very focused on the idea of traditional marketing and its impact on click through rates.  Digging right into the data provided by my analytics solution gives me a great deal of vital information that can help to improve the site.  I’m lucky in many respects because I also have access to paid search data for many clients, and I can build the various testing information that this gives in order to improve the natural search.

Using Multivariant testing of different creatives through the PPC campaign lets me get an indication of what will encourage users to click through to the website, and I can then build these learnings into the descriptions that I write for each page.

I read recently that Google do not place much weight on the description in terms of its value to their ranking algorithm, so I can use this more creatively.  Things that work well in this include using the brand of the company I’m working with, building in a particular special offer to encourage users to click through, and adding an explicit call to action.

 For me, the most successful format for a title and Meta Description in terms of boosting click through rates is as follows:

Buy [PRODUCT] online | [WEBSITE NAME]

Buy [PRODUCT] online from [WEBSITE NAME] from just £[PRICE].  Visit the website now for the best deals on cheap [PRODUCT].

In circumstances where the brand is really recognisable - such as with a major retailer, I will use the website name before the product name.  My research has shown that a well known brand appearing at the front of the title and close to the beginning of the description can boost the click through by as much as 5%.

When you are competing for every click and need to be able to demonstrate high quality traffic and better conversions as part of your SEO Campaign, it is vitally important to get the most out of every potential users.

It appears as though Yahoo are integrating even more of their web properties into their natural search results.  as the image below shows, Yahoo are now highlighting results in their natural search results that have been picked up and tagged in del.icio.us:

What does this mean for SEO?

Well, to my mind, the main effect of this implementation by Yahoo will be to boost the number of click throughs to highlighted pages.  The votes in del.icio.us not only highlight the result in the SERPS, they also serve to legitimise certain results in the eye of users:

“If 200 other people found this site useful, then it must be a good resource”

While I can only applaud the use of social bookmarking data in terms of enhancing the relevance of the overall search results, I can’t help worrying that it will just lead to greater levels of abuse, and undermine the confidence of users in the long run.

About 2 months ago I had my motorcycle stolen from a car park at a station by some nasty little chav who would benefit greatly from a spell in the forces.  Anyway, the police chased the little scrote but he got away - unfortunately he didn’t crash and get maimed, but there you go.

I contacted NIG Insurance company the following day, and suffered almost immediately from their poor service.  Now this company were not exactly shy when it came to requesting their money for the premium, however, when it came to actually doing anything that might involve them paying out.  Well, I’m sure you can guess what happened next…

So here we are, the bike was recovered less than a week after the chav stole it, but it took NIG Insuance more than 2 months to arrange for it to be investigated by an engineer.  This is despite me ringing them on a weekly basis to chase things along.

 Anyway, after 2 months of waiting, I finally got a call this week to say that my bike had finally been inspected and the insurance company had agreed to pay for the work to be carried out.  Fantastic, except no it isn’t.  Some parts for my bike need to be ordered from Italy, and NIG insurance company are refusing to pay out for them to be express delivered, “because it wouldn’t be covered by your policy”…  This means I am now waiting another 30 days for the delivery of the parts, which are, as I write probably being loaded onto a donkey for a lengthy trek through the Alps to get to me at some point later in the year.

Well, I’m effing sorry mr NIG insurance, but it’s your bloody fault that it’s taken 2 months for the inspection to be carried out, and its just not good enough that you are unwilling to pay out £35 for some parts to be air freighted so that I can get my motorcycle back and actually use it.

Of course, the irony is that the garage are charging NIG Insurance £5 per day storage charge while it is on the premises, meaning that over the 30 days that it takes for the parts to arrive over land, they will actually get invoiced £150.  But you try telling the farking Phonetard in the essex call centre that their business would actually save money - and could possibly retain me as a customer

But they won’t.

NIG Insurance - You Suck

Merry Christmas everyone, I hope you managed to get all the shopping done - and didn’t limit yourself to buying from online shops you have an affiliate code for…

 Anyway, I hope you get exactly what you want this year - except position number 1 in Google for Loans - I’m having that.  Santa Promised!c