One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on [...]]]> Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

• Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
• John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
• Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
• Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
• Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
• Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a [...]]]> I think any reasonably competent SEO has the good sense on how to tell if a directory is ‘good’ or ‘eh.’

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a business owner in working with a full-time search engine marketer is that the SEO spends their professional life being a search geek. Most ‘normal’ business owners need to spend their time knowing the ins and outs of their business.

Here are a few warning signs about if that ‘directory’ is crap:

• Are they indexed? I had someone ask me about submitting to a ‘directory’ that I was quickly able to determine wasn’t even indexed in Yahoo or Google. This is not the sign of hot traffic referral waiting to happen! The site: command is a good one for people wanting to get involved with their web site to learn.
• Age of domain. Now, I know that a lot of normal people don’t know how to use whois, but it’s really quite simple. If the domain is fairly new and the directory isn’t associated with someone you’ve heard of, caveat emptor.
• Request for reciprocal link. I recommend all suspicion of any reciprocal link request, but if this directory is prominent enough to drive traffic to you, why do they need you to link to them? In general, they’re going to have hundreds of outbound links, you probably have fewer. This means your link to them is likely more valuable than their link to you. So why bother?
• Have you heard of them? If you haven’t heard of them, will your clients have heard of them? It won’t be a good source of traffic if no one uses them.

There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively [...]]]> This one’s for the Funk King of Minneapolis, Paul Jahn.

There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively or negatively — ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions. On Yelp everyone is above average; company CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that 85 percent of local businesses on the site get a three-star or better average rating.

The article is pretty good, so I won’t rehash it here. One thing that notably isn’t mentioned is ‘business owners posting wretchedly fake reviews in some mad faux-SEO urge.’ I’ve seen some awful, awful fake reviews — no real human writes like these reviews, or would say these things about a business such as that reviewed.

The visual range depictions discussed in this article won’t do much about those written reviews, although they’ll show the bias in the starred reviews a little more strongly. On the other hand, Paul and I have discussed that if a reasonable person found these fake reviews, they’d make a sane reader less likely to go to a business. Even though there’s massive response bias in even real reviews, at least they’re real.

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its [...]]]> In all the hub-bub about Google Universal Search, and the impact of Web History/Personalization/iGoogle on results, there’s something I don’t know that I’ve seen, but seems like an inevitable next step:

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its behavioral targeting category. Given that it’s being said that Web History is impacting search results for users, and now we have Universal Search impacting the results pages… it’s really a no-brainer to have these elements hit the profitable part of any given search page.

While Mom-n-Pop PPC advertisers may not use much in the way of behavioral targeting features, if available, big-brands and agency PPC buyers will be all over it.

He doesn’t mention Google Analytics, but I think GA also factors into Google’s reach for control. There’s some extent to which I [...]]]> I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook wrote a great post this week about Google and the ‘death’ of affiliate marketing. He really focuses on AdSense publishing, but I believe it goes further than that.

He doesn’t mention Google Analytics, but I think GA also factors into Google’s reach for control. There’s some extent to which I believe that the ‘free’ implementation of GA may have a greater price than many perceive.

First, it’s free up to 5 million page views/month… unless you’re displaying AdSense. Then, it’s unlimited. By doing both AdSense and GA, you’re providing Google a lot of traffic data on your site.

…the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may retain and use any data they collect via one’s use of the GA service:

Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

Generally speaking, they cannot disclose specific, identifiable information about your site data to others without court order or consent. However, nothing within anyone’s privacy policy I’ve ever seen or written restricts a company’s ability to take the confidential data and use it internally.

I just think this opens a huge can of worms. You run a business that you want to develop qualified leads from search engines. You are handing a complete picture of all your traffic issues to one of your traffic sources — who can then learn all about where all your traffic is coming from, not just the traffic they’re sending you (or the traffic they can identify via people using Google Toolbar and Web History…).

Obviously, with some sites, this gives Google insider information to bid on other services to absorb into empire. This could lead to a better bid… or an early bid that’s lowball, but more than a lot of people ever thought to hope for. With many others, it gives them information to create speedbumps and roadblocks to search optimization.

This is why I typically tell my clients to pay for an analytics package, and why the company I work for provides an analytics package. It just seems safer and less fraught with peril.