Back in the not so distant past when I was still wet behind the ears and finding my way, like most newbies I was on the quest for the “perfect PPC keyword”.

I’ll admit I stalked a few people trying to figure out what they were bidding on, at some point I probably even resorted to begging for just one secret keyword. I figured once I had discovered that magic keyword things would be perfect. I would make more money, quit my job, buy a Ferrari, solve global warming and enact world peace. The truth of the matter is I was looking for a cheap easy handout, I was looking for a PPC enabler.

Sure I would have made some money in the short term but like many keywords, it would get more competitive over time, and profits would dry up and I’d end up back in the same place looking for a handout. I got lucky and nobody ever gave into my begging (probably more for their own economic protection than my well being). If I knew which keyword to bid on without understanding how to find them myself I really wouldn’t have learned anything. It’s the whole “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” thing.

To head off the more determined person who is thinking “well how am I going to learn how to do PPC and landing pages right if no one is willing to show me an example”. Ok here’s what you do go ahead and click some sponsored listings and study them and see what works and what doesn’t. Before some ding-nut gets in my face about how I’m encouraging click fraud slow down junior, and visit this page, type in some keywords and click some ads. The last time I checked nobody gets charged when you click ads on that page.

Right now I really prefer low maintenance keywords over anything else. I like keywords I can log in and check once every week or two and make sure they are working and I’m making money. I’m ok with giving up a little profit so I don’t have to micro-manage prices on a day to day level, automated bid tools just scare me. Don’t obsess over finding keywords that make hundreds of dollars a day, or thousands of dollars a month. I’m quite happy to find a bunch of keywords that will make me a few hundred dollars a month for 15 minutes of work every week.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a PPC Keyword Today

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Earlier this week I blogged about how the company running the “the algorithm killed jeeves” campaign dropped the ball by not having done some predictive SEO and PPC. It appears somebody got my message and things have changed.

Before my blog post there weren’t any PPC ads now there are two [how the algorithm killed jeeves]

clicking the ad brings you to the Ask homepage. What’s the lesson here, don’t afraid to question the big corporations. I’m just one guy with a big mouth working at his kitchen table wearing snoopy pajamas. However I made enough noise that a bunch of people had to have a meeting and react to it, and it’s probably not the first time either (up for some hoax marketing next week Matt … just kidding). Don’t be afraid to challenge authority and stand up to the big companies, because you think you’ll never change anything. The internet is powerful tool, and if used properly, and in a coordinated fashion, you can absolutely get the attention of big business, organizations, news, media, and the man on the street.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How Small Bloggers Can Affect Big Companies

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According to Google Adwords I’m a pretty poor michael gray

Here’s a screen shot from my adwords control panel showing the quality score for my name:

According to Google I have a poor quality score for my own name. I had to raise my bid to $0.40 this weekend with the quality score bug but haven’t had a chance to drop it back down since then. You’ll also notice I’ve got some negative keywords to make sure I’m not showing up for irrelevant searches. Looking at the other sponsored listings we can also see that my high bid places me much higher than the other advertisers

The problem here is while I may be relevant for my name, I’m only important to a small niche of people, the population at large isn’t really interested in me so I have a really low CTR for my own name

Now where this logic falls apart is when I bid on Matt Cutts name I had a much higher quality score and paid less per click

I’m more relevant for Dave Pasternack’s name than my own

I’m more relevant Jason Calacanis name than my own

I’m more relevant for Ted Leonsis name than my own

So basically what’s happening is because I have a more common name than any of the people above, and there are other more “famous” Michael Gray’s I’m less important, relatively speaking, and forced to pay more for a keyword I that more accurately describes me than one which doesn’t. Sometimes the most logical solution to a problem isn’t the best one.

Tags: sem, google, adwords, search+engine+marketing

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Poor Poor Michael Gray

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The SEO space is a buzz with “SEO is/isn’t Rocket Science” and “SEO is/isn’t like Baking a Cake” and every other silly analogy anyone can come up with. Here’s the thing it’s stupid argument, not worth the effort and really worth polluting your the SERP’s for your name over. Since I offer reputation management as a service I figured I’ll give a few quick pointers on how to fix things.

First off I can tell that you’re concerned, playing with your name is a dangerous thing. How do I know you’re concerned you’re the only person in the company who has their name as a link in the footer on your company’s website

Secondly you’ve also gone to the trouble of creating two different pages for yourself (see 1 and 2). Here’s the first tip for you that’s really not what Google is talking about when they say create unique pages, you may want to have a look at When Unique Content Is Not Unique to get a better understanding on the concept. However the point of this post is not to dis your “SEO-FU” it’s to help put an end to the Dave Pasternack SEO Contest.

Here we go step number one come out and say “I made a mistake SEO is Rocket Science”, “SEO is Harder than baking a Cake”, “SEO is a skill”, period. It’s not really a debate about if SEO harder then PPC, because I do both and can tell you there is skill required to do either of them well. Do that and you’ll get some press.

Number two pick up the phone or send an email to work out a deal to get the contest called off. Donate any and all prize money to charity. Of course for step two to work you will have had to do step one.

Step three spread some love back to the SEO community. At SES NY in April why not sponsor the most kick ass party you can, call it the “SEO is Rocket Science Party”. Don’t try and be clever and change it to “SEM is Rocket Science” you’ll undo any good with one letter, and your office is a few blocks from St Agnes Cathedral where I went to High School and I’ll have to come by kick your butt in person if you do. Instead of girls with red hair go for sexy rocket scientists (to be fair get a few hunky guys in costume too). Heck as a fun stunt why not light off a fake rocket that sends streamers flying around the room or something.

Step four have the “take your picture with Dave Pasternack” event at your booth. Why would someone want to take their picture with Dave? Well they would if he was wearing a big frog costume. What think you’re too cool to dress up like a frog, if Danny Sullivan can wear lederhosen you can dress like a frog.

So what ends up happening instead of a bunch of negative, attack slanted SERP’s you get some funny pictures and you at a party. More importantly you don’t have waste company time, money and energy doing damage control and you can get back to work. So how ’bout it Dave are you big enough to rise to the challenge, admit you made a mistake, and move on or do you enjoy all this nonsense?

Tags: seo, sem, dave+pasternack, did-it.com

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Dave Pasternack of Did-it.com How to Fix Your Problem

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I know Werty showed something similar to this at pubcon, but this is as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 12 sponsored ads on a page and almost no way out but to click the ads. Yes I know there are two links in the upper right but well seems a bit like an MFA site to me (screen shot and full shot after the jump)

Full shot

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Google MFA and No Way Out!

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I’m not exactly sure what caused all this secondary fuss about no-follow and reviews lately but I think it’s time someone pointed out that Google is being extremely hypocritical about the entire thing and using fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to corral web publishers to their way of thinking.

What we first need to do is get a bit of history lesson, Sherman set the Wayback Machine to January 18th 2005. Visiting the Google Blog we can see a very public and high profile announcement about the no follow tag Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

If you take notice of the title of that page and read through you’ll see plenty of guidance that no-follow is being used to prevent blog spam and should only be used on areas with user generated content. Let’s repeat that because it’s important no follow was implemented to combat blog spam, plain and simple, end of story, period.

So when did no follow get associated with text link advertising? For that we have to go back to the O’Rielly Radar Advertising incident on August 24th 2005 to a comment made by Google Matt Cutts O’Reilly Radar > Search Engine Spam?

As others have noted, if you’re going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links. Tim points out that these these links have been sold for over two years. That’s true. I’ve known about these O’Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a “link:” command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext. Google’s view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda’s. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page. Posted by: Matt Cutts at August 24, 2005 09:31 AM

So exactly what happened in those 8 months that made Google decide to alter a technical specification that was already accepted, who knows? Did Google issue a press release about this change like they did when they introduced the tag, not as far as I can find. Did Google bother to update the Webmaster Guidelines, again the answer is no, but we’ll come back to that a little bit later.

What happened on August 24th was the start of a grass roots campaign by Google to alter the way the web worked to suit it’s own agenda. The main tool in this campaign, creating fear, uncertainty and doubt or FUD in the minds of webmaster and web publishers across the globe. Over the coming months we’d have perfectly orchestrated displays to plant the seed that Google sees and knows all, as webmasters feared hearing the dreaded words “so tell me about your backlinks” (see another version of tell me about your backlinks). This campaign continues taking advantage of Google’s dominance in search, it’s hard to ignore someone when they are responsible for 70% or even 90% of your site’s traffic. This builds momentum and it even gets so bad Google can get away with saying things like “Google Senses Much” and people assume the fetal position in the corner wimpering with fear. Excuse me but exactly when did Google start to know if I’ve been bad or good, did they put Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny on the payroll?

Hey Google if you know so much how come you still haven’t figured out craig’s list is spamming you with 90 subdomains of duplicate content. If you know so much how come you get confused with duplicate meta content instead of actual on page content and only list two pages from a site [threadwatch.org]. If you know so much why are we still having 302 redirect problems in 2007 when Yahoo solved this years ago? It’s simple Google doesn’t know as much as they would have you believe, but instead they want to keep you in the dark, obfuscating data by “breaking the link command” and altering the way the “site:” command works.

Earlier in this post I mentioned the Google Webmaster Guidelines lets revisit that page. Under general guidelines we have the following statement:

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

Except for SEO’s who may have modified their browser settings no one else can see no-follow tags, the only one who cares about them are search engines and their spiders. So in essence what Google is really saying is:

Make pages for users, not for search engines, except when we arbitrarily change the rules without notice and don’t bother to tell you until after the fact, and don’t update our webmaster guidelines to reflect those changes.

OK maybe I’m having a little fun at Google’s expense, but they have fairly well established history of this kind of hypocritical contradictory approach, my particular favorite comes from Googles Page on SEO where we find this quote:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.

Later on the exact same page we find this

For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee.

First they tell me no one can guarantee anything and then they tell me I should make sure I get a guarantee, excuse me if I wrinkle my brow like Mr Spock and inform you that’s highly illogical.

Let’s turn our attention to the review issue, in December of 2006 we have the Ramblings About SEO » Blog Archive » Weighing in on Link Buying (again!)

Matt Cutts Says: December 20th, 2006 at 1:01 pm I think you put this pretty well, Eric. Search engines want links to be real: editorial votes based on quality and merit. With Yahoo, you’re paying for the reviewing service; Yahoo rejects plenty of submissions.

However just over a month later we get this Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » What did I miss last week?

Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

Did we get another policy change that nobody told us about or is it just Yahoo who’s allowed to do paid reviews? Confused so am I.

Here’s the kicker want to know what’s really wrong with Google’s stance on reviews, by making a big stink about it they are going to drive it back underground. The way reviews are now they are disclosed in a form that humans can read, understand evaluate and make decisions about on their own. If you can’t figure out sentences like “this has been a sponsored post” or “the following has been a paid review” you’re probably the kind of person who believes headlines like search engineers practice cannibalism. What’s really happeneing is we’ve got another FUD campaign going, this time designed to stamp out paid reviews in an inconsistent, arbitrary and undocumented manor. Some people are allowed to do it, some aren’t, and we don’t know why, rather than take a risk people will just decide not to participate, due to a lack of a clear answer. What happens then, the market goes underground, the disclaimer requirement fades away, and no one, especially the people viewing a page know what editorial forces might be at work behind the scenes influencing that page. Way to go Google and good job of putting the users needs ahead of your own!

Tags: google, seo, advertising

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Google’s Policy on No follow and Reviews is Hypocritical and Wrong

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I was on Greg Niland’s GoodKarma Radioshow earlier this week talking about a whole bunch of things and dropping some hints, tips and tricks. Sorry about not letting you know before hand but it was all very last minute. Listen to or download the podcast from WebmasterRadio

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Webmasterradio Shameless Self Promotion

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Since I live on Long Island in New York where some of the Taco Bell E.Coli 0157:h7 food poisoning incidents have occurred the story has been fairly front of mind for me. However I though it might be interesting to share the SERP with some of you from other spots who don’t get some of the geo-targeted advertising.

Here’s a current shot of the SERP’s from New York on 12/19/2006

Firstly kudos to TacoBell.com for buying adwords. Even better to put up a section in the latest news area of their website with a letter and video from the president of the company addressing the issue. They get a big fat F for trapping it behind a flash application making it impossible for me to link to it (see Why Advertisers Love Flash and Ajax, and Why it’s Really Stupid). They also get an F for not uploading it to You Tube. However an A+ for creativity for the people video spamming YouTube for Taco Bell
with fake Britney Spears videos however they get an F for execution and overall content.

Looking at the other advertisers I think that YourLawyer.com did a much better job of constructing an ad than MarlerClark.com did (nice use of dynamic text guys). What’s also interesting is nobody has jumped on the [Olive Garden] who had a norovirus food poisoning incident (see Norovirus suspected in Olive Garden illnesses | Chicago Tribune).

Lastly lets look at the technorati serps for [taco bell] since Taco Bell doesn’t have a blog they have no way to interject or interact with the message that’s being put out there. Remember the time to prepare for a crisis in reputation management isn’t when you are in the middle of it, it’s before hand when you can act in a rational methodical well planned and thought out manner.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Taco Bell and E. coli O157:H7

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I know there were a few people who were using site targeting on this blog, and it wasn’t something I had a problem with. However on one of my other websites site targeting was being used so much that my earnings were spiraling downward. Since there is no way to turn of site targeting on a site by site basis (it’s a master account setting) I had to turn it of completely.

As an advertiser I never opt into the content network. Even though I can bid with lower prices I get crappy results. I did however use site targeting for some products where the content was spot on, and the quality of the site was above average overall. So I’ve got mixed feeling about this. I like being able to site target individual websites, but I can see how it can also work against the publisher. Being able to opt in/out on a site by site basis would be step in the right direction.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Removed Site Targeting

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Shoemoney rocks the house, but I managed to get in a name drop and few sentences in an article on Google Arbitrage Bitten By The Google Spider – Forbes.com

Critics say the new restrictions have missed the mark, punishing people like Kris Jones who run legitimate Web sites. Search engine marketer Michael Gray says Google’s new scoring has led to an uncountable number of “false positives,” particularly for coupon and shopping-review sites like Jones’ MarketShareBuilders. “It’s frustrating,” Gray says, “because you don’t even know why you failed the test.”

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Shoemoney and Graywolf in Forbes.com

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