June 2nd, 2010 by andy
Right now (as of June 2) there is a conversation ongoing at Webmaster World about the declining value of a #1 organic search ranking. The argument is that the #1 position doesn’t attract as much traffic as it used to (on Google in particular) because of the way that Google has placed ads and added ad sitelinks, etc… all around the top of the page. Not surprisingly there is much bellyaching by the SEO community many of whom have staked their pitch to clients on the claim that 75% of people skip over the ads and go straight to organic.
I have been labeled a PPC guy before, but that’s not quite accurate. I’m just lazy and cautious. I go for the most income for the least amount of effort and risk. If that result can be achieved through organic listings, so be it. However, that’s rarely the case in more competitive spaces. And while dramatic algorithm shifts are less likely today than they were a few years ago, I prefer not to put myself and the expense of my time at risk.
Besides, if you really think about it, does Google REALLY want you to get a #1 ranking? Sure, there’s the whole ‘user experience’ spiel from them and it’s true, to a certain extent. If they delivered total junk results, they’d go the way of Alta Vista, Lycos, Alltheweb, etc…. But they do walk a fine line with wanting to deliver quality results organically (where they make no money from the clicks) versus driving the visitor to the paid listings. Their stock share price doesn’t rise and fall by organic click-thrus. Of COURSE Google wants people to click on the ads and not the organic. But can they really be considered ads anymore?
Google has dealt with this tightrope walk by implementing the Quality Score on paid search, an algorithm that works similar to the organic algorithm. The most relevant ads/landing pages show higher. There are other benefits as well, like lower average cost per click. Quality Score has been around for a couple of years and Google is always improving/refining. Through this Quality Score refinement Google is making the paid listings just as, if not more, relevant as the organic listings.
I think what Google is doing is making the organic results supplementary to the paid listings with no decline in the sacred ‘user experience’.
Does this make me sound like a PPC ‘homer’? I prefer to think of it as walking with the wind at my back instead of in my face.
December 3rd, 2009 by andy
TV drives people to the web. Not exactly breaking news. But too often, TV advertisers fail to take advantage of the waves their ads create.
It’s something I’ve seen for a long time and now has a direct connection to this site. Almost two years ago JK Harris bought backtaxes.com. I wrote about it back in January ’08. Soon thereafter, I was ranking #1 when people went to Google to search for the domain. Even though you or I might go to the URL bar to put in the domain, there are so many people out there that will go to google or yahoo and actually SEARCH for the domain. So without intending to, I was getting a ton of traffic to that post driven by people who had just seen the ad. I happened to have Adsense on there, so I made a little bit of money from it. Accidental profit is fun.
Well, lightning has struck twice. Let’s go even FURTHER back to June 2007. I subscribed to Sirius radio at the time and one of the songs I was hearing a lot was ‘Electric Worry’ by Clutch. It’s very catchy and I couldn’t get it out of my head and I couldn’t buy it from iTunes at the time so I ended up watching the youtube video over and over again. I wrote about it here and soon after I began to see that I wasn’t alone in like the song. I would get a few visitors every day from people searching for the lyrics ‘Bang Bang Bang Vamanos Vamanos’. I thought that was kind of cool.
Fast forward to the beginning of November ’09. There’s a new video game being pushed for the holidays called Left 4 Dead 2. I think it has something to do with shooting zombies. In the commercial for the game, ‘Electric Worry’ is the background music. Bang Bang Bang Vamanos Vamanos. On average, 900 people a day are coming to that page from Google since that commercial started airing.
Lesson learned: TV pushes people to the web. Be there to greet them.
December 6th, 2008 by andy
Still crap.
On the upside, they raised the domain exclusion list option to 500.
On the downside…. you’ll need it.
November 20th, 2008 by andy
I bet this would be really cool if it weren’t created by Yahoo…
http://apt.yahoo.com/index.php
November 13th, 2008 by andy
I don’t believe I’ve ever had a friend come back who hasn’t told me the thousands they made in Las Vegas. With numbers like that, it’s a miracle that the poor city can stay in business! It’s not a charity folks! Do your part and give back!
Well, contrary to popular belief, not everybody wins when they go to Las Vegas.
The same can be said for domains. I’m always hearing about the big sales and great deals and it seems like nobody ever loses with domains! Well, not quite. I just kind of lost and won at the same time.
I recently had a domain that I bought on the aftermarket for $600 expire. I never transferred it out of the no-name registrar it was registered at and for whatever reason, it didn’t auto renew. Point is, I lost it. It wasn’t about the money, it was more about me losing a domain I clearly had desired enough to buy.
Well, I just got it back. For $8. Nobody wanted it and it passed through the expired domain vultures (of which I am one on occasion) and went back to open registration where I picked it up again.
So, I’m not quite sure how I should feel. I guess I’ll just be happy that I got it back. I even saved $17 by letting it expire and picking it up at my preferred registrar!
