A sub-domain prefixes the domain-name at the host level as such: ppcassurance.metamend.com. A sub-directory is a set of files that are seen as a suffix to the domain-name such as, metamend.com/blog.

Up until a couple of months ago, a general piece of SEO advice was
to separate distinct topics addressed under the same URL to
sub-domains. This was done to help search-spiders differentiate between
topics and also so search-spiders would treat the information at a
sub-domain as they might a unique website. Using sub-domains, SEOs
could conceivably capture a far larger number of Top10 placements under
the same keyword phrases for different parts of the same company. In
that way, SEOs could offer five or six (or more) of ten first page
placements as opposed to the more frequent two front page placements
under the same phrase.

Last week at WebmasterWorld’s PubCon show in Las Vegas, Google’s Matt Cutts explained to WepProNews
some changes Google has made to its algorithm to decrease the number of
listings from the same domain being displayed on the first page in
Google results. In most cases, Google no longer differentiates between
sub-domains and sub-directories though it continues recognize
differences in topic between main-domain and sub-domains in certain
situations.

In a post-PubCon blog post, Matt
notes that it is far easier for Googlebot to detect and spider files
contained in a sub-directory. It is also far easier for webmasters to
set up a site using the traditional sub-directory structure. This is
what Googlebot was designed to do and, with far fewer assumptions to
make about topical relevance between URLs, the sub-directory structure
is simplest for search engines.

For highly adventurous webmasters however, using sub-domains
conveyed a possibly unfair advantage when chasing a larger share of the
first page of search results. A cool SEO trick was to assign
sub-domains to different host servers spread around the country or
world. That way, Google would not detect and associated the same IP
numbers from the host-server. The idea was to make Googlebot think it
was looking at a unique website while still associating strong
placements gained at the domain and sub-domain with each other. For
almost three years, effective use of sub-domains was a well used
“secret” tactic.

According to Matt’s post,

“For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,”
which means that Google will show up to two results from each
hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to
show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for
some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google
could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In
the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely
to happen.”

Interestingly, Matt reports the change in the algorithm occurred at
least a few weeks ago. There has been little talk of the alteration in
SEO discussion forums or social networks, indicating that most SEOs
haven’t noticed. The topic was addressed because someone “…asked his
advice on sub-domains vs. sub-directories.”

Matt Cutts’ post on sub-domains vs. sub-directories is well worth the read as are the 96 (or so) comments that follow the post.

Some made by extremely well known SEOs ask questions about
sub-domains and unique circumstances such as languages (ie:
fr.example.com or de.example.com).

For instance,

Kalena Jordan asked,
“What about sites that target different regional markets? Does it still
make sense for them to use sub-domains e.g. australia.site.com,
uk.site.com and use the new Regional Association tool in Webmaster
Tools to indicate which searcher region each sub-domain should be
associated with?”

To which Matt replied.
“Kalena, using subdomains for stuff like fr.example.com or
de.example.com is still a great approach, because those sites may be
similar in idea, but the language is usually completely different.”

Matt’s answer gives a great clue into what Google wants to see at
sub-domains vs. what they would prefer to see in a sub-directory. There
are cases where the size of a site dictates the approach a webmaster
would wish to take. Large networks that create unique content for
different cities might be better served using sub-domains
(vancouver.example.com/, seattle.example.com/, nyc.example.com), if
information varies from city to city while sticking to a similar
topical format. (ie: tourist accommodation, local search, blue widget
factories, etc…)

The artful tactic of sub-domaining has likely lost a bit of the
power it used to hold however many SEOs say they will continue the
practice as it suits their research and deployment techniques.

In our own unending pursuit of quasi-scientific SEO research, we are
taking a harder look at how we use sub-domains with an eye to improving
SEO outcomes for ourselves and our clients. The traditional 4-week lull
around the end of the year is a perfect time to post and evaluate
experimental site structures, just to see what happens. If we see
interesting results, we’ll post them to this space next year.

Two days ago I was performing a rather dull set of SEO experiments
when I noticed something very disturbing. While testing Google’s SERPs
against keyword phrases inserted into the Metamend Facebook profile,
I found a Chinese SEO company had completely stolen the Metamend
source-code, images and all. The Chinese firm, Okwoo.com had slightly
altered and translated the site-text into a Chinese language but had
left blog postings (many of which I wrote) in the English language they
were originally written in. It’s called site jacking and it happens
more often than a reasonable person might realize.

The discovery posed deep problems on many levels, the least of which
was the series of phone calls that overtook the better part of the
afternoon. It’s never much fun to tell the president that you’ve found
a problem, even when you are not the one at fault. The way these things
inevitably turn out, when you find and report it, you get charged with
fixing it.

Aside from the insult of having a bunch of strangers steal our
source-code, the incident of site jacking could cause a cascade of
problems for Metamend. Thinking about effective and efficient damage
control, we had to look at potential issues one by one to figure out
which were the most pressing and how to prioritize our responses.

The first issue broached was the question, “Are we somehow being
associated with their deceptive practices?” The most honest answer is,
“We don’t know.”

Metamend has worked hard for its excellent reputation. We have no
idea how the Okwoo company operates except knowing they steal
source-code and site content. They could be distributing malware
through their site, a practice Google recently cracked down on. There
is an image link included at the bottom of their INDEX page that does
not appear on the Metamend domain that leads to a suspicious looking
software distribution page at c6.50bang.com/. This is definitely an
association Metamend would, under every other circumstance, avoid with
extreme precision.

They are using our in-house SEO tools on one of their pages, making
them available to their site visitors. We can probably cut their access
off immediately by banning their IP range though there is little we can
do about damage the association might have already caused in the
algorithmic eyes of the engines.

We have established that Okwoo is using a java-script to re-direct
URL requests so their site visitors would not necessarily know they are
using tools from another domain. The java-script also limited our view
of links back to the Metamend site from theirs. That’s one of the
reasons the jack went on for more than six weeks without us noticing.
We are hoping that the script also created a spider-proof firewall
between Okwoo and Metamend preventing search bots from associating
Okwoo’s access to our toolbox with Metamend’s general profile.

The next issue of concern is that of duplicate content. Okwoo
scraped content from the Metamend Blog as recently as September 5,
retitling it “../index-5.htm”. Literally hundreds of links from that
and other blog entries accessible through the index-5 file are directed
(through the javascript) back to the Metamend domain.

Along with duplicate content comes confusion for site visitors. The
Okwoo site is a visual copy of the Metamend site. It uses our colours,
images, logos and tools. We can read the English language text that has
not been translated into Chinese and confirm it is an exact duplicate
of content found on the original site it was scraped from. We can
assume by the layout of other pages that Okwoo copied them directly and
translated the text into a Chinese language. Even their corporate name
is a blatant copy of our own. They call themselves Okwoo Software and
Design. Glance to the left to see what our full corporate name is.

To make matters stupider, they have not changed the meta
descriptions used on pages throughout the site. Each mentions Metamend,
exactly as we first wrote them. Could a reasonable person be left with
the mistaken impression that Okwoo is an extension of Metamend into the
Chinese market? Maybe…

While Metamend has no pretensions of being a player in the
burgeoning Chinese SEO market we would like to be sooner or later. We
have every right to protect our name, brand and image within that
market and any market we might choose to serve now or in the future.
The Internet is a global marketplace. The use of our images, source
code, written content and SEO Tools creates the potential for confusion
on the part of Chinese and international web users. That is obviously
unacceptable.

Clearly the theft and repurposing of our content presents several
problems and issues that require immediate attention. Like we don’t
have enough work to do already eh?

There is not much we can do about damage already done. The
content-theft and site-jack has gone on for more than six weeks. Okwoo
is established in the indexes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. A search under
the keyword phrase “Metamend in the community” puts Okwoo on the first
page of results in all three engines. Chances are there hasn’t been a
great deal of consumer confusion as yet however the engines might
perceive something amiss somewhere in a chain of cross links, duplicate
content and malware distribution, and take decisive action against us.

Luckily, there is a way to request the copied content be removed
from search indexes and establish one’s innocence through
disassociation. Unfortunately, it is an ugly tool to wield. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects content creators from having their work stolen and republished without their permission.

Using it, website owners can ask the search engines to remove
incidents of stolen content from their indexes. While it will not
necessarily compel Okwoo to remove our source-code and content from
their servers, the three complaints Metamend filed with Google, Yahoo
and MSN sets out a reasonable and logical request that they remove
reference to Okwoo from their search results until Okwoo stops using
our source-code and content. That should limit their motivation to use
the stolen content now and in the future.

Filling out a DMCA complaint is not an easy undertaking. Each engine
requires a unique complaint filled out in a specific manner. A DMCA
complaint is a legal document requiring a sworn statement that the
information provided is true. Spurious complaints can be met with a
fine of up to $10,000. The complaints must be mailed or faxed and, with
the exception of MSN, will not be answered if sent via email.

Here are links to the complaint process as outlined by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Read each very carefully before writing or filing the complaint. Google will also publish the complaint at the website Chilling Effects in order to provide a measure of transparency to the process of removing content from its results.

Filing the DMCA complaints is the first step in what we hope will be
a short and successful journey. We’re prepared to take whatever steps
are necessary to prevent the theft of our code and content and
potential confusion on the part of consumers and search spiders but
would rather just go about doing our daily business without such
distractions.

I have a pretty good feeling that someone over at Okwoo will see
this writing sooner than later. Hopefully they will have the good sense
to remove all Metamend code and content from their domain as soon as
they realize they’ve been caught.

A shift away from link based scoring methods would be an enormous
step for Google to make however, looking at the evolution of the
Internet, it is a logical step to make. Information transmitted over
the Internet is changing rapidly as are user-habits. While it will
continue to be a primarily text based medium, today’s Internet
infrastructure allows easier access to a multiplicity of file types and
formats, many of which are not conducive to the link-loving Google grew
up on.

Predictably, user-habits are changing as rapidly as improved
technology or interactivity allows them to. Perhaps the most prescient
example is the social network revolution currently being fronted by
Facebook and MySpace. Internet users are beginning to use their social
networks as web-portals, the same way they once used Google and Yahoo!.
Social networks are all about linkage however many if not most links
found within social networks are useless from a search ranking
perspective.

These two factors, combined with the anticipated expansion of
Google’s reach into the cellular phone market and a few recent patent
applications lead me to speculate Google is radically reworking its
primary ranking algorithms. Relevance and location are in, links are
likely on their way out.

Two Google patents particularly pertaining to the relevance of location are Shared Geo-Located Objects and Ranking and Clustering of Geo-Located Objects.
Both outline how Google uses information drawn from various sources,
including files shared amongst Google Earth users, to figure out which
documents might be most relevant to unique users. These scoring methods
demonstrate a movement away from algorithmic assumptions made through
link-analysis, placing greater weight on objective comment from users.

Another patent, Identification of Semantic Units From Within a Search Query
shows how Google is paying more attention to the intent of its users
than it did the intent of site designers or search marketers. By
tracking and matching similar keyword searches, Google is trying to
anticipate the information needs of its users over the recommendations
of web designers and search marketers as expressed in placed links.

Google’s movement away from link-based SERPs can also be seen in its
graphic interface and in the result-sets returned to searchers. Over
the past year, Google has experimented with several means of delivering
information and search results to its users. Far from the basic blank
face Google has long displayed, users are now searching Google
interfaces that resemble news and information portals. The iGoogle
homepage is the most stark example. Attempts at the personalization and
“Univesalization” SERPs two others.

Google and the other major search engines are bringing more
information into search results from a wider variety of sources. As
those results begin to better reflect what each individual searcher is
seeking, the means and methods of ranking those results are shifting.

SEOs should be looking for ways to vastly improve each document they
work on from a user experience perspective. Knowing Google tracks the
movements of search-users from query to completion, SEOs should think
about how Google perceives the paths taken by each site-visitor as they
extract information from any given document. Links will continue to
provide pathways for search spiders to pursue however the enormous
weight applied to links is likely to wane in importance over the coming
months.

Your task, while not impossible might certainly look implausible.
Taking on and beating an established competitor is a daunting
challenge, especially if that competitor has enhanced their search
placement through SEO.  Fortunately, you likely have a few newer
promotion tools at your disposal some of which your competition might
not be using.

In April 2007, Enquisite Search Metrics measured US search referral traffic through the Google network
and found that Images, Local and News collectively drove 6.52% of all
incoming visitors from Google domains. With Google serving over
4billion search requests each month, 6.52% represents over 613,496,932
search referrals.

Each of these Google venues can often be seen in the general search
engine results pages at Google, especially when the search user is
signed into one of Google’s membership services such as Gmail or Google
Docs. Unfortunately, searching these parts of Google can be time
consuming as there are few (if any) automated SEO tools designed to
perform competitive searches.

Nevertheless, research is the first step in any SEO campaign. For
SEOs, knowing one’s client means knowing their competition. There are a
few new steps to competitive research on top of the typical examination
of competitors’ sites, SERP placements, link-networks and keyword
targets. With new places to promote a client website, many of which are
within Google’s network of applications and search technologies, one
wants to find which web marketing opportunities the competition is
using and which they are not using.

If you find competing websites in News, Maps (local) or Images,
study the wording they use in tagging, titling and file-naming. Take a
look at how whichever file was found is associated with the
competitor’s site and how the file fits into their overall link
structure. Now, use your superior SEO skills to out-optimize them.

The easy tying of Google News, Local and Images

Getting a press release or story into Google News can drive a huge
amount of traffic to your site in very short order. News results are
seen by Google users in several ways. They are often accessed through
news.google.com but can also appear as part of general search results
under relevant keyword queries. Though searches from news.google.com
only generated 0.32% of referrals in Enquisite’s study, a well placed
story there is fed to users through RSS feeds, Google Alerts and
through external content aggregators.

Getting placement in Google News can be difficult however as they only spider sites that meet their specifications.
If you do not have access to a news site or blog that is spidered and
listed in Google News, using a press release company such as SEO-PR,
PRWeb, or Emediawire, (there are dozens of others as well) is a quick
method for content inclusion. While the costs of using a professional
release service can run as high as $1000 per release the rewards of
having a story appear at just the right time can be enormous. It is
important to note, most of the power is in the headline and first
paragraphs of the release. Also, many press release firms do not
publish hard-links in their copy. It is always wise to write important
URLs out in brackets (http://www.pleasedonotcutthisout.com) and to
insert the URL of a contacts page towards the bottom of the release.
Lastly, include the first few paragraphs of text from the press release
on a page in your client’s About or Press page with a link back to the
original press release.

Though Local Search is one of the most important areas to get
placement in for any sized business, many don’t pay it much attention.
Using a placement in Local search for leverage is fairly simple.
Include a Google Map on your client’s website explaining how people can
find your client’s business location. If your client is a destination
business (tourism, accommodation, etc) or a brand-name with multiple
locations, inclusion of a Google Map is helpful to site visitors. It is
also helpful when thinking of the growing importance of mobile search.

Of all secondary Google search applications, Google Images is the
largest driver of search referral traffic with 4.19% of all US results
in April 2007. To get placements there, make sure all images are tagged
with descriptive Alt tags and the image name corresponds to the
strongest keyword target. The page an image resides on and the text
surrounding an image also have an effect on Google’s interpretation of
that image. General SEO rules apply.  When applying a link (or treating
a pre-existing link) against an image on a client site, SEOs tend to
place a text-link directly below it in order to guarantee a spider will
properly follow it. Be sure that link is keyword descriptive and
includes a unique title tag. Lastly, if possible include images or
thumbnails of site images in your html sitemap with corresponding
text-based links beside those images.

Google’s ability to incorporate references from its vertical search
tools into general (or universalized) results is one of its greatest
strengths. Each of Google’s verticals presents opportunities for SEOs
to further increase relevant traffic to client sites. The trick is
tying them together with creative and user-experience enhancing links.

My last post involved social networks and SEO for social media.
While this has been an overly hot topic for the past six months, it
only recently reached a tipping point at which working social media
became an essential service for well run SEO shops to offer. The
tipping point(s) as I see them rest on two specific social media
properties and their affect on way people use search and search engines.

The first is Facebook. Though Facebook is a relative newcomer, its
rise in popularity has been extraordinary as it rapidly displaced
MySpace as the critical place to find or be found. Over the last sixty
days, Facebook have seen one of the greatest growth periods of any
major online application. In the past two months, Facebook has acquired
hundreds of thousands of new individual users and, more importantly,
user-generated network groups. These network groups focus on
commercial, political, social and personal issues and provide a
platform for networking, discussion, mass-communication and ultimately,
some form of action.

For example, much of the social organizing for next week’s Search
Engine Strategies San Jose conference is taking place in Facebook
groups. Similarly, there are several local business events here in
Victoria organized via specific Facebook groups. It is an easy and
virtually instant way to reach out to dozens or hundreds of people
sharing similar interests and because it is so easy, it has become
integrally popular. Fortunately, profiles found in Facebook are not
spiderable and therefore do not appear in search engine results pages.

The second major social media application that has made an enormous
impact on the business of search marketing is the Wikipedia. The wiki
based “people’s encyclopedia” is considered one of the originators of
the social networking format as well as one of the early definers of
the period called Web2.0.

Like Facebook, Wikipedia is immensely popular. This is generally
considered a good thing. Known as a fairly decent reference guide,
Wikipedia has a self-correcting mechanism made up of thousands of
volunteer editors who can spring to action when specific postings are
misrepresented, wrong, overtly commercial or in some other way cross
the line. Information from Wikipedia is considered accurate enough to
make it a citable source for some students.

Unlike Facebook, Wikipedia is spiderable. Naturally Google would
want to place a Wikipedia notation against searches for keywords the
notation relates to. This is seen as a good thing by many searchers but
it presents a number of difficulties for the SEO/SEM industry and,
oddly enough, for Wikipedia itself.

There are a number of complaints in the SEO sector about high
ranking Wikipedia listings found in the Google SERPs. With one spot
virtually guaranteed to Wikipedia, competition for the remaining nine
placements is that much more difficult. Earlier today, SEO Black Hat
posted a list of the 15 top searches done by New York Times readers in
the past 30-days. They compared that list with the placement of a
Wikipedia listing in Google search results. Here is what they found:
(full list: Google Exposing their Flank to Wikipedia)

“The wikipedia came in

1st: 5 times

2nd: 7 times

3rd: 1 time

4th: 2 times

None: 2 times”

(As Wikipedia sometimes receives two listings in search results, the numbers do not add up to 15.)

There are also allegations that some editors within the Wikipedia
system are corruptible, much like the complaints leveled against DMOZ
editors two years ago. Last Thursday, SiteProNews.com published an article by Ross Dunn, “Is Wikipedia Corrupt?“.
In it, Ross notes that some see Wikipedia’s editors as dictatorial,
mean-spirited and have the power to seriously harm an individual’s
reputation. The piece provides links to forum discussions in which
others say their reputations have been damaged in Wikipedia. It is
beginning to feel like another DMOZ at which a volunteer organization
with inordinate power over Google results develops a culture built
around such power.

One of the niftiest observations I’ve ever made about computer and
Internet users is the way huge masses flock to one application or
another just long enough to make a huge buzz before moving to the next
one. It is a phenomena that has happened many times before.

Wikipedia is obviously enduring though, like the Open Directory
Project (DMOZ) before it, it rests on the good will, strong energy and
clear intent of its administrators. The jury is still out on Facebook’s
longevity but it has become one of the most popular destination sites
on the Internet and is clearly the most popular in commercial social
networks.

Both are having enormous effects on how search and Internet users
find information but, since such power is increasingly resting on two
applications, for search marketers, this new world is simply not big
enough.

The biggest change is the death of “traditional SEO”

Dead is taking it a bit far. SEO is not exactly dead. A better way to describe it would be to say it dyed.

SEO has evolved so far and so quickly in the past six months that it
as a practice is hardly recognizable from its humble roots, much like a
Neanderthal placed beside any given Homo sapien. The thread that ties
the past to the present is search. Everything still comes down to some
sort of search.  Nevertheless, the traditional view of SEO services is
over. Having languished in a virtual state of stasis for most of the
past year, the concept of traditional, SERP based SEO went to rest
sometime in the early spring.

With the introduction and rapid advancement of social networking,
the attention of the search marketing world and Internet users has
quickly spread outward, away from the common search engine results
pages. While Top10 (first page) placements are still extremely important traffic drivers,
information seekers rely on social media, RSS feed-readers, specific
vertical search tools and multimedia as frequently as they do on
traditional search engines. (That’s why the traditional search engines
are branching so far out into the social media)

This has led to a surge in the development of SEO based techniques to
work within social media environments. Clients now require social
profiles for their businesses, themselves and their key staff, along
with the proficiency of a skilled social networker to keep those
profiles popular and polite. Fortunately adaptable SEOs will find many
of these tasks fall within skill-sets that are very similar to
“traditional SEO”.

Another critical service popping up in many SEO firms is called
reputation management. With literally thousands of potential venues
open to anonymous or unmoderated postings by the public larger
companies often require professional assistance monitoring and
maintaining the numerous representations of their online reputations.
All too often though, the majority of us don’t need someone else to
make us look bad online. We’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.

Take a second to think about this question. How many profiles do you have available to searchers in how many different venues?

Try to consider everything from a database of church members to the
dating site one might have signed up with to the websites of local
business association. Now add MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog,
and any other larger social network you or your business might have
joined. Though much of it might be restricted to members-only searches
an enormous amount of personal and business information is floating
around to be discovered, vetted, and compared with that of other
potential employees or vendors. For some, that though constitutes a
reputation management problem. Who better to find and attend to such
problems but companies that already specialize in performing searches
and creating high ranking documents?

The final nail in the coffin of traditional SEO was the introduction
of Google’s personalized results. Though personalization and
localization will be good for adaptable SEO firms, the direct interests
expressed by each unique user will increasingly determine which
documents are consistently placed in that user’s results. That means
SEOs will have to do more work on each file doing little things such as
placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking
(which requires the establishment of even more business profiles) and
building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO
tasks covering titles, tags, text, structure and links.

Covering all those bases is not a simple task but much of the basics
remain the same. The principle application of search is used in an
increasing number of venues. While each search application differs from
venue to venue, they perform the same ultimate task. Most fall into a
limited number of types that experienced SEOs have likely dealt with
before. For instance, tagging images at Flickr or documents at Digg is
much like adding the keyword meta-tag was for Alta Vista. Similarly,
writing great personal or business profiles is much like writing a
strong description. The same principles apply from keyword to copy.

Full-scale service is going to cost a lot more for SEO firms to
provide in the near future. A worry in the business end of the SEO
industry is that tomorrow’s services (slowly being introduced today)
will cause a shake-out in the industry as less adaptable firms fall by
the wayside and smaller business clients struggle to afford an
increasingly expensive set of services. The small business situation
will cause its own short-term stirrings in the industry as the
standards of SEO services start to imitate other vertical markets.

For businesses currently relying on SEO services as a primary
traffic driver, the warnings have gone out long before this one but… 
Adapt now. Your advertising dollars are already moving away from the
mainstream media (newspaper, TV, flyers, etc…) and towards the digital
media. That trend will make digital media the number one advertising
venue by 2011 according to the influential VSS Communications Industry
Forecast, issued earlier this week.
While hardly advising immediate abandonment of the mainstream media, I
strongly advice a hard look at how next year’s marketing budget is
going to be used. You’ll likely get a lot more mileage from the viral
power of a 3-minute YouTube video than you would from a month of
localized 30-second spots. At the same time, you might want to take a
very close look at what others are saying about you or your business
online. If you find that nobody is talking about you or your business,
or that they are talking trash, you might want to do something about it.

The bottom (and hopefully last) line is simple. A new generation of
highly wired consumers is looking at monitors more than they are print
or television. The weight of their bulk is fundamentally changing how
they and other consumers use the Internet. Though it is and likely
always be about search, it’s not necessarily about search engines. Like
I said to start, a shake-up is coming in the industry and like most
shifts it is going to produce interesting results.

Two years ago, Richard Zwicky, a well-known, long-term SEO stepped away from the search marketing company he had founded, (Metamend), to concentrate on search traffic analytics. Using a unique method of tracking organic click data, Richard started another firm, Enquisite Search Metrics. Richard’s goal was to create a program that accurately measured the impact of expenses spent on Internet marketing, starting with organic listings. After receiving rave reviews for its initial product, Enquisite moved on to build what appears to be one of the most innovative and accurate gauges of PPC traffic vs. PPC ad-spend. Enquisite is releasing it this week under the name PPC Assurance as a white-label product other firms can offer to their clients.

PPC Assurance gathers data telling you when and how visitors arrive at a landing page or website from any given ad in a PPC campaign. Offering a granular examination of all paid-click referral traffic, PPC Assurance finds and reports irregularities in your click stream or any deviance from the parameters set at the start or during the paid advertising campaign.

Using a four-color coded chart, PPC Assurance shows Good, Suspect, Bad and Unknown traffic patterns. The last two, Bad and Unknown are indicators of invalid and at times, fraudulent click activity.

Good traffic is graphed in green. Good traffic is that which conforms to the pre-set parameters of the ad account. If, for example, one wanted their PPC ads shown in New York, Chicago, DC and Boston only, PPC Assurance would graph clicks from those cities in green. This tends to be the norm across all measured ad networks however, there are several days when spikes into Suspect, Bad, or Unknown traffic are caught and displayed by date and time.

Suspect traffic is graphed in yellow but tends to be the least noted click-type. Clicks measured as Suspect could come from just outside a set geographic area or come from IP addresses known to visit the site with “acceptable” frequency. A yellow line indicates there might be a problem and further investigation may be necessary but it is not as urgent as Bad or Unknown measurements.

Bad traffic, measured in red, is exactly what one would expect it to be. As the color suggests, when you see red, you have a problem. A surprising percentage of traffic is shown in red, indicating PPC traffic that falls outside of stated campaign parameters. While stopping short of calling this traffic fraudulent, PPC Assurance lets advertisers know they have a problem in this particular part of their ad campaigns.

There could be dozens of reasons for clicks coming from regions or even continents falling outside the areas chosen for any given ad campaign. For instance, the first to sets of numbers in IP addresses originating in the UK and in Albania are often the same. Similarly, the use of routing technology in SE Asia often mimics IP addresses originating in Japan and South Korea, causing false-identification of the actual place the click originated from. Another reason is that PPC Assurance has caught a click-scammer based on one or more of hundreds of heuristics and characteristics common to click-fraud.

The last type of click-traffic is called Unknown and measured in black. Unknown clicks can be caused by a number of factors but are most often seen as clicks that happened on the ad but could not be tracked as following through to the landing page or site. When the number goes above 7%, it is thought to be bot-traffic. 5 – 7% of all web users turn Java Scripts off when surfing the net. These users are difficult to track and often appear as unknown clicks which are discounted from any reports sent by PPC Assurance.

Knowing the veracity of your click stream is one thing. Doing something about it is quite another. One of the best features of PPC Assurance is the reporting function that prepares and submits invalid click activity reports, including a refund request, to the ad networks. Providing all data needed to successfully file for a refund. The reporting feature can be set by percentage of ad-spend, by date, or by number of invalid clicks measured.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In online advertising, prevention comes from knowledge and knowledge comes from measurable statistics. Because Enquisite is releasing PPC Assurance as a white-label product, any SEM firm, ad agency or service provider can brand it under their company name, offering clients a seamless set of account and data protection services.

In short, the work-load involved servicing each client has increased significantly. That’s why there are a growing number of tools search engine optimizers use in the course of their daily toils.

Before we dive into the tool shed, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. These aren’t cool power tools like drills, table saws and jackhammers. SEO’s should be so lucky to get to play with those tools. These tools are more like shovels and screwdrivers.
Advanced SEO involves a lot of drudge work. That it is a high-level intellectual career does nothing to relieve the monotony of reading, measuring and assessing lists of potential keyword targets or back-link opportunities. Even working on the social media aspects of client-files gets to be a drag when you don’t have the time to enjoy the social aspect of it. I just wanted to let you know that before you click away from this post to follow one of the links below.

Every SEO operation has an appropriate tool. The first thing an SEO does with a new website is work to find out as much about that site as possible. There are several areas that need to be covered to do an effective website evaluation.

1. Using the Right Browser

Using the right web browser is an important first step. The vast majority of SEOs use Firefox instead of IE7. Firefox is a stronger web browser and as it is open source software, several SEO related tools have been developed for it.

My personal favourite site research tool is SEO for Firefox made by Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com/. This tool is invaluable because it provides so much information at the click of a mouse-button.

SEO for Firefox shows:

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

That pretty much gives you instant access to the background of any site.

The only other tool needed to fully explore the history of a website is known as, The Wayback Machine. Found at Archive.org, the Wayback Machine shows every spidered version of websites at a specific URL from the date that URL was first discovered by Archive.org. This is important in determining if sites at that URL have, in the past, been used for spamming search engines. It also gives an SEO a good history of the site, allowing the SEO to estimate the historic view Google or Yahoo might take towards that site.

2. Figuring out how the site is built

Though it doesn’t take long to figure out how a site is built, SEOs are interested in gathering several pieces of critical information. Knowing what technologies are used, the file and server structure, and the depth of any product database is key to considering the right approach to take to working on the site.

The first and simplest tools SEOs use are universal to any web browser. One is the Ctrl-A keyboard command. This will highlight every character and carriage return on a page. This is the fastest way to determine if there are instances of hidden text, pixel images, or hidden links.

A second is View-Source. An examination of critical areas of the source code, including header, link-paths, content layout and footers is done to get a sense of what needs to be worked on.

The last thing common to all Mozilla browsers is the ability to turn CSS and Java Scripts on and off through the View and Tools tabs. These functions allow SEOs to look for hidden scripts, text and links embedded as, or covered by, CSS or js files.

OK… That’s a lot to start with but this was the easy stuff. Tomorrow we’ll be looking at link structure and keyword determination.

Sean Ammirati from Read/WriteWeb
was at the event and gives a good rundown of what Google’s VP of
Engineering had to say. According to a post at the Read/WriteWeb blog,
Manber explained a range of issues that keep his staff working late at
night.

First of all, imagine dealing scalability and compatibility issues with something as large as Google’s networks.

As a network of sites, indexes, services, directories, advertisers
and users, Google is absurdly enormous. Chances are, very few, if any,
know exactly how big it really is. Imagine trying to match information
from literally billions of sources written in thousands of human and
machine languages together through an increasingly narrowing funnel
until you boil them into a coherent set of search results on a user’s
monitor. Now try doing it with uniformity and style.

The next point mentioned is the fact that “Expectations and needs will continue to grow”.

Google doesn’t get much sympathy there, especially considering they
push themselves fairly hard to increase user expectations. The same
should be said about the Toronto Maple Leafs. Unlike the Leafs, Google
tends to deliver.

The third point Manber raised is absolutely astounding but if true
shows huge promise for Long Tail keyword SEO technique. Apparently, 20
– 25% of all queries that pass through Google are ones Google has NEVER
SEEN BEFORE.

The post continues to offer a far better understanding of how Google
looks at different documents in its numerous indexes, makes logical
assumptions about user intent and location, and compensates for
language issues.

Check out the piece at Read/WriteWeb.
It gives a few good clues to the ongoing puzzle that is Google.
(Somehow, find out Google engineers that find their own engine puzzling
brings a small but certain sense of relief)