Webmaster Stuff

Best SES Session - Are Paid Links Evil? We’re only half-way through SES San Jose but I think we’ve already seen the best panel discussion of the event.

“Are Paid Links Evil” saw Matt Cutts go head to head with Greg Boser, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio.

The room was packed with marketers all hoping the session would live up to the hype of its carefully crafted title - “session bait” anyone?

Google announces a simple new way to embed Google Maps Starting today, Google Maps users can add a map to their website or blog just by copying & pasting a snippet of HTML. This new functionality enables Google Maps users to share and disseminate geographic information in the same way that YouTube users share videos. Bloggers and webmasters no longer need an API key or knowledge of Java Script to put a Google Map on their website or blog.

Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads.

Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network—connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We’re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers.

Our New Webmaster Portal and an Invitation to the Private Beta Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO.

And Google is probably going to cost us more money, Improved top ad placement formula now in effect Two weeks ago, we posted about an upcoming improvement to the formula used to determine which ads are placed in the top spots above Google search results. The change offers advertisers more control over when their ads achieve top placement, while also increasing the quality of our ad results for users. Today, we wanted to let you know that the improved formula is now in effect.

Ya, but improved for who?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Contextual Advertising, Google, Linking Strategies, MSN, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Webmasters No Comments » August 2007

Deceptive Pay Per Click Ads

Ben Edelman has once again done some research, but this time he is talking about deceptive pay per click marketing. He takes search engines to tak in their practice of allowing deceptive pay per click advertising, how they profit from it, and gives examples on how much they could profit from it.

Read Google’s voluminous Adwords Content Policy, and you’d think Google is awfully tough on bad ads. If your company sells illegal drugs or helps customers cheat drug tests, you can’t advertise at Google. Faking documents is no good either. Google also prohibits ads for fireworks, gambling, miracle cures, prostitution, radar detectors, and weapons. What kind of scam could get through rules like these?

As it turns out, lots of pay-per-click advertisers push and exceed the limits of ethical and legal advertising — like selling products that are actually free, or promising their services are “completely free” when they actually carry substantial recurring charges. I begin this piece by presenting example ads from more than two dozen distinct advertisers. (All ads were observed on September 15 or later.) I then explain why this problem is substantially Google’s responsibility along with the evidence suggesting Google’s profits from these scams, and I offer a mechanism for interested users to submit other false or deceptive ads. Source: False and Deceptive Pay-Per-Click Ads

He gives users a way to submit deceptive ads they find on search engines and a complete list of such ads.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Contextual Advertising, Google, Research No Comments » October 2006

Yahoo and Oemji.com, A Match Made in Heaven?

Lot of stuff showing up recently about click fraud, online partnerships and whose watching the store, so this one should come as no surprise, Doing Business With A Controversial Partner part of the big click fraud story on Businessweek titled Click Fraud: The dark side of online advertising which I talked about here.

Yahoo turns ads over to a company associated with suspicious clicks, inflated bills, and “rogue” software. The relationship between Yahoo! and an obscure Web site called Oemji.com illustrates why a growing number of companies are worried about where their online ads are turning up and who’s actually clicking on them.

Yahoo recycles ads to Oemji even though several leading Internet security firms claim the site’s owner also distributes software that can deceive and annoy computer users. Yahoo’s own correspondence with Oemji’s parent, Oemtec Ltd., confirms that the online giant knows about the controversy. Yet Yahoo continues to send ads to Oemji that advertisers and online experts allege result in dubious clicks and inflated bills.

Questions about Oemji have arisen elsewhere. Computer security firms Sunbelt Software Inc. and Aladdin Knowledge Systems Inc. have posted consumer warnings, calling Oemji Bar a “browser hijacker,” meaning software that can replace unwary PC users’ search engines without permission, sometimes as they download other software from Oemtec.

Four other security firms, including giant Symantec Corp. (SYMC ), have issued alerts about a different Oemtec product called SpySpotter. Available until last month at spyspotter.com, this program is supposed to clean computers of spyware — programs that can track users’ Web surfing and send them pop-up ads. But Symantec and the others say SpySpotter is actually a “security risk” or “rogue” product, because it can install itself without permission and send exaggerated spyware warnings to entice PC users to sign up for a $29.95 annual subscription. “SpySpotter for a very long time has had a bad history of being force-installed or stealth-installed on people’s PCs,” says Eric L. Howes, who heads research on pernicious programs at Clear-water (Fla.)-based Sunbelt Software.

This is why advertisers need to demand accountability from advertising firms like Google and Yahoo, they want to keep all of their information a secret and tell you click fraud is no problem, nothing to see here, move along. They run their little reports and just give everyone the basics, and act like we should all be happy, but with online advertising pulling in billions and billions of dollars, their word is just not enough.

Yahoo and Google ads end up on to many websites that are just crap and there just to get people to click on links, and lots of people will either hit the back buttons, or they will click on something just to get away from some of these pages. Not to mention all of the click fraud scams going on with paid to read clubs, etc, online advertising can make you lots of money, but it can also cost you lots of money if you aren’t careful. Always check your return on investment and test campaigns before you start marketing “big time”. And a good suggestion is to just let your ads run on the search engines network and not the content network where most of the crap and the terrible ROI comes from, if you are going to let your ads run on the content network, then you should price your clicks CHEAP!

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Click Fraud, Contextual Advertising, Google, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo No Comments » September 2006

The Dark Side of Online Advertising

Another big click fraud report came out today, Businessweek Click Fraud The dark side of online advertising. It hits home with a lot of people because they have the same experiences with Google, if Google wasn’t so secretive about how they combat it, people might not be so put off by them when they say its not happening. I myself had an issue with some form of click fraud, whether intentional or not, a former porn website ended up as a parking page at Godaddy and was sending me clicks for such things as access your pc from anywhere, remote access, etc. About 3 or 4 hundred clicks total if I remember right, not one conversion, not one sale, I bet those people didn’t stay longer than a second, but the fact that it was a former porn site did not matter, as they said the clicks were targeted because they clicked on the adds. Sure, I can see why now, it was part of some scheme, but because I don’t spend that much on Google Adwords, I noticed it real quick and added that site to the blocked list, and eventually, took myself out of the content network entirely, because most of it doesn’t convert at all.

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising. He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann’s faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S. Fleischmann, who has an economics degree from Yale University and an MBA from Wharton, has used specially designed software to discover that the MostChoice ads being clicked from distant shores had appeared not on pages of Google or Yahoo but on curious Web sites with names like insurance1472.com and insurance060.com. He smelled a swindle, and he calculates it has cost his business more than $100,000 since 2003.

It goes on to say that most consultants and experts think the range is 10 to 15% of all clicks are fraudulent and that totals to about 1 billion dollars a year in click fraud. Say that out loud, Yahoo and Google are getting half of that, so 500 million a year would be a decent sized loss if they blocked all click fraud, a reason some people think they don’t do as much as they can against it. Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars worth of advertising money that used to be purchased in newspapers and television, and the reason for a lot of it is that all these clicks are easily tracked and can be attributed some worth. But with more money comes more con artists and apparently a lot more scams.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to $29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc. About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to “impressions,” or how many people view them. Yahoo executives warned on Sept. 19 that weak ad spending by auto and financial-services companies would hurt its third-quarter revenue. Share prices of Yahoo and Google tumbled on the news.

With the advent of paid to read programs, there are thousands and thousands of people clicking on ads to make money, as a form of revenue sharing, the owner gets the users to click the ads and he shares a small percentage with them. People from Kentucky to China all talk about making money by clicking these ads, from $25 to several thousand dollars a month, and this is cash they wouldn’t be getting if Google and Yahoo blocked them, money Google and Yahoo would not get either.

“It’s not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet,” says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months. Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was “way too easy,” he adds. Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. “Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to stop fraud], it’s not having much of an effect,” he says.

But big advertisers and small businesses can’t get nearly as much traffic without Google and Yahoo, which is part of the reason it goes on, if everyone would quit advertising with them until they fixed it, well they would fix it fast, but that is not going to happen as they would lose sales to their competitors and others.

In June, researcher Outsell Inc. released a blind survey of 407 advertisers, 37% of which said they had reduced or were planning to reduce their pay-per-click budgets because of fraud concerns. “The click fraud and bad sites are driving people away,” says Fleischmann. He’s trimming his online ad budget by 15% this year.

Google and Yahoo insist there’s no reason to fret. They say they use sophisticated algorithms and intelligence from advertisers to identify the vast majority of fake clicks. But the big search engines won’t disclose the specifics of their methods, saying illicit clickers would exploit the information.

Nothing to see here they say, nothing to see.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Click Fraud, Contextual Advertising, Google, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo 2 Comments » September 2006

MSN Invites Advertisers to Test ContentAds

Looks like Microsoft is ramping up their advertising efforts, inviting advertisers to test their ContentAds system, which is supposed to begin this fall. Hopefully, as Jen says, this will end up running on non Microsoft sites as well, much like Google Adsense and Yahoo’s offering.

The email invited advertisers received mentioned the various MSN properties than contextually targeted ContentAds would appear on, such as MSN Real Estate and MSN Money, as well as others linked from the main MSN portal. However, it was key noticing the exact text (emphasis mine in the following) and what it means for publishers.

Content Ads is Microsoft’s next product that allows advertisers to place content-targeted, text-based advertisements primarily on Microsoft-owned properties including MSN Money, Real Estate, and many others within the www.msn.com portal.

Always good to get new players capable of sending traffic, even if you have to pay for it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: ContentAds, Contextual Advertising, Google, MSN, Microsoft, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Yahoo No Comments » August 2006