I’m not too sure how many sites are seeing different values out there, but a number of client sites as well as some of my own have undergone PageRank updates at some point this weekend. The changes took place at some point between Friday night and Sunday morning — at least, that’s when I began noticing them.

There’s no rhyme or reason to what I’m seeing just yet. Initially I suspected that the domains I had been building and exchanging links for had been hit — but I’m not sure that’s the case. I really cannot be sure if this is an extension of other penalties or filters — or if I’m just a bit unlucky.

In 20 of my active domains, a small group has been hit by the update. Two sites I manage for small family businesses dropped to the lowly value of one. These sites had values of three or four on Friday.

I haven’t seen a lot of coverage on any possible updates, aside from the major update that took place a few weeks back. If you’re following it though, or looking for additional information — check these links out:

• PageRank Updates Continued
• PageRank Update – Jan 2007 (part 2)

If you can add any reports of your findings… Please do so here with the comments below.

The early days of pay per click advertising were much more simple than today. You could communicate more easily to clients, and establish more profitable advertising programs using PPC as a supplement for organic search marketing. Unfortunately, search engine giants continue to tinker with what works best– and we’re now operating in a marketplace that is unfair for those managing pay per click campaigns.

Back in July of last year, Google introduced their “Quality Score” to all AdWords advertisers. This scoring algorithm effectively monitored the landing pages of your ads while determining the overall price in which you should pay in order to obtain traffic on a per keyword basis.

While the move was made to help clean up Google’s programs, it also came on the heels of some important legal matters — most notably a $495 million settlement for click fraud. Understanding their position, I worked with my clients to inform them that this move was one made by Google to help protect advertisers and the entire playing field of AdWords advertising.

Today, I regret having done that.

While the move allowed smaller companies an opportunity to compete on content rather than cost — it has muddied the waters and caused issues for everyone involved. As a service provider, there’s a mysterious cloud that exists. I’m constantly knee deep in a battle to defeat the rising costs of the quality score for my clients. My clients are further frusturated because Google refuses to provide information on how to really improve their pages.

It’s not as though we don’t want to improve things, or, that we want to improve these pages dishonestly. I think I speak for many AdWords campaign managers when I say that we just want more specific information.

While that’s unlikely to happen — Yahoo! has a great opportunity to win back our hearts, as well as many of their former GoTo and Overture advertisers. That is of course possible only if their new system improves upon the flaws evident in Google’s system.

Two days ago, Frank Watson from Search Engine Watch posted that Yahoo will introduce a similar system to Google’s Quality Score to advertisers on February 5th as part of their new “Panama” program. While you can view the entire press release directly from Yahoo, I’ve pulled out some of the more important areas that we need to be concerned with:

“…excited to introduce our new, more quality-focused ranking model because it has the power to significantly enhance the experience we deliver to our users and unlock the full potential of Yahoo!’s search marketing network..”

“…search ads on Yahoo! and its distribution partner sites have been ranked solely by bid price – the higher the bid, the higher an ad appears within the search results. When the new ranking model goes into effect, both bid and the ad’s quality together will determine where an ad appears in the search results. The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed…”

“…Yahoo! is providing advertisers with industry-leading marketplace visibility and features that allow them to better understand their performance and make informed marketing decisions. Advertisers who have upgraded to the new system (code named “Panama”) can gauge the quality of their ads by viewing the prominently displayed quality index within the Panama application. Yahoo! also provides advertisers with an estimated average position and estimated forecast of clicks for their ad campaigns, based on budget allocation and ad quality…”

So what does all this mean?

For one, we can expect something similar to what Google has in place with their Quality Score system. The critical area though is one where feedback becomes important. Messages like “Improve Quality” or “Increase Bid to XX” do nothing for me. If the game is about performance where price is not a factor — why should advertisers have to pay more?

The bottom line is that improving landing page quality is highly subjective. More importantly, I’m concerned with one part of Yahoo’s press release. It’s the statement that “quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system”.

In other words, your pages’ performance can not be factored until part of the new Panama system. If you have a page that performs wonderfully for organic traffic, that performance is essentially irrelevant. Yahoo! then is basically telling us that performance cannot be factored when Panama launches, because 95% of the advertisers do not have access to the system. Translation: Yahoo! will then determine advertisement placement solely on price and what it sees as “its expected performance relative to other ads displayed”.

I’m really, really worried about this.

I’ve seen this happen with Google AdWords campaigns, and what tends to happen is that the PPC providers alienate their customers. As a paying customer, you’re once again stuck behind a thick veil of smoke and mirrors, making changes and constantly resubmitting ads and groups in the effort to decrease your costs and improve your quality.

The only opportunity Yahoo! has here, is to be more up front with their advertisers. Is the page lacking content? Does it contain too much content, a lack of detail or questionable content? Are you promoting affiliate offers too strong, or perhaps showcasing another system’s contextual advertising? These are the things that Yahoo needs to tell their users early and often to help win back advertisers.

If they don’t, it’s entirely possible that MSN’s adCenter could improve their system (currently being tweaked for improvements) and instantly one-up both Google and Yahoo! without much effort at all. The result would also result in an increased number of LiveSearch users — therefore leveling the playing field even more.

One thing’s for sure in all of this though… It’s a dynamic industry and one where the major players need to be concerned with advertiser’s needs. Other folks have ideas too on how Yahoo can differentiate themselves. Check out Panama Could Provide Google Antidote for a quick read if interested.

Despite being the most widely used search engine available on the Internet, Google makes a number of mistakes on a regular basis. It’s when they compound those mistakes that they continue on the path they’re on… One where many involved in the Internet begin to look down upon them, similar to what Microsoft went through in the late 90′s.

For Google, things have changed very quickly in a couple short years. Since the dawn of their IPO, Google’s users have become more critical while what Google offers has become increasingly flawed.

So what’s the deal with Google? If you were to ask me, they need a bit of soul searching — because they’re telling us one thing and practicing another. And that’s why I’m sold on the fact that Google is one giant hypocrite.

Let me explain…

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” (source)

That worked so well back when Google was content being a search engine. Search engines have the ability to organize search for stocks, images, maps and news… But can someone please explain to me how that same company focused on organizing information gets involved with things like Google Checkout, Froogle, Google Pack and Google Talk?

I know that some people actually use these things — but how does it relate to search? They don’t. They just provide Google with a larger base to market their ads.

I’m okay with that so long as you come clean about it. The thing that floors me is that Google site back and tells us that:

It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
Google does search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service already considered the best on the web at making finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of users. Our dedication to improving search has also allowed us to apply what we’ve learned to new products, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Maps… (from: Corporate Information: Our Philosophy)

I don’t buy it. Aside from being incredibly hypocritical — Google has one of the most difficult times marketing their products to their users. Why would that be so difficult if you were providing useful tools? One theory of mine is that they’d be a lot more successful if they’d just change their image or do what they say and stick to what they’ve earned their reputation as — a search company.

As an example, Froogle has been around for more than two years now and still fails to organize information well enough to solve the simplest shopping adventures. Still, there have been no improvements visibly made to the tools and as a result it gets shuffled lower and lower on the PR list until we all forget about it.

Next, let’s look at Google Checkout. I know it’s new and I might be jumping the gun here — but just take this for what it’s worth.

This past holiday Google offered bonuses to merchants and buyers for using Google Checkout to purchase things online. While competing with systems such as PayPal is quite the challenge, what does it say about your marketing abilities when you have to resort to giving things away? Giving free things to people when you’re a mom and pop shop fighting for exposure is one thing… But when you have 380 million unique users per month, you couldn’t find a more effective way to advertise and recruit users?

I’m really just bitter though, mainly because I used Google back when they provided efficient search results that weren’t so easily influenced. In today’s version of Google’s search engine (remember, this is the one thing they know best), they over-value sources like Wikipedia despite the fact that it can be one of the most easily spammed sources for backlinks.

To make matters worse, Wikipedia has chosen to implement nofollows once again — a step in the right direction for cleaning up some Google SERPs. But why couldn’t Google have made an alteration?

The answer is simple — Google is no longer motivated to provide effective search results. Rather, they’re satisfied with a questionable image and increasing profit margins. Anyone in business would feel the same way though. That’s why I’m not faulting Google for focusing on those goals — I just wish they’d come to their senses and refocus themselves a bit before they go too far down the path to mediocrity.

After listening to an archived show of NetIncome, Jeremy’s show on WebmasterRadio, I started thinking about black hat optimization and the reputation that it has received in the industry. In the particular episode I’m referencing, Jeremy spoke with legendary “black hat” Quadzilla from SEO Blackhat. Together, they did something that has been needed in the industry for a long time… they provided us with clear examples as to why black hat optimization is truly just effective optimization.

Both Jeremy and Quadzilla commented early in the program that traditional white hat SEO is filled with the same tips and strategies, regurgitated from one source to the next. They hit the nail on the head too, indicating that most of what’s available in terms of articles and tips is repetitive, boring and ineffective to a large degree. In battling for improved rankings on the SERPs, there’s really only so much you can gain from optimized titles, meta tags and link building.

Quadzilla offered a wealth of information on the show, and I’d like to go through some of his comments (as well as Jeremy’s) because they really indicate that there is indeed a gray area between black and white SEO. Those that actively practice the advanced optimization in these gray areas should not be frowned upon. On the contrary, we’re talking about very seasoned individuals that develop advanced techniques that require dedication, research and credentials to be effective.

More importantly, it’s very difficult to practice pure black hat optimization. I know that there’s a strong market of black hat pay per click groups out there — but there are very few in the true SEO landscape. While folks bend the rules and limitations, true black hats are usually exposed before they close up shop and move onto a new niche or vertical. While they continue to exploit holes in the system — those in the gray area are the ones capitalizing on their success.

See, to me the beauty of advanced optimization techniques, aside from the fact that they’re highly effective — is that they’re well guarded. Unfortunately, many SEOs conjure up the image of these advanced SEMs as a “black hat”, putting in minimal time to exploit the weaknesses of search algorithms.

That’s not at all the truth.

In this blog post, I hope to clear up a bit of that confusion, using comments from both Jeremy and Quadzilla, experienced players in the advanced SEM game to help us along. Hopefully, I’ll get it right.
There was a question in particular that stood out to me — and it was posed from Matt Cutts of all people: If you were a search engine, what would you tackle next to reduce web spam? Quadzilla responded with:

Everything that Google’s doing now is reactionary…. They’ll take a list of results and apply a new filter to it… ..They won’t hand code the results, but they’ll say: If we apply this filter or that filter to the algorithm which gives us the best general results? So, they’re being very reactive in terms of what’s being done to improve the algorithm.

This is a very telling quote and one worth basing your efforts around. For years now, the battles that take place for specific SERPs are incredible. Yet, with a few tweaks — Google can (and in many cases has) altered the playing field to weed out what they deem to be the spam or over-optimized players. Unfortunately, this is also what has ruined the once mastered practice of search optimization. In short, Google’s reactionary stance towards cleaning up their engine has caused (what is seen as) white hat SEO to much less effective.

Too often, beginning SEOs literally expect for traditional white hat SEO to be effective. As Quadzilla points out in the interview though, what these people see as white hat SEO can really be learned in as little as four hours.

Moving on, let’s analyze another quote…

The bottom line for what I do anyway, is I look at what works, and what works for me. I think that’s what everyone should be looking at is, you know, what works for you,… What’s working for someone else? How can I copy what they’re doing right in my own business? — And, not worry so much about if it’s technically falling on this side of white hat, or black hat… Just, do what works and at the end of the day if you have a good check coming to you, you’ve probably done something right.

To me, this quote from Quad really reminds me of what the industry was like before SEO became as popular as it is today. In those days, no one ever referenced Google’s Webmaster Guidelines when discussing their practices. Today, 95% of the players in the game market themselves as white hat players who adhere to those guidelines.

Optimizing title tags and cleaning up your code is all well and good — but as more people practice these techniques, the less effective they become. More importantly, if every new site has this built in from the ground up, there’s only so much to be gained from optimization.

To me, the name of the game is in advanced optimization techniques — the gray area beyond those plainly formatted webmaster guidelines. It’s in the things you won’t read about regularly, but practice often. For example, according to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines — you should:

• “avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings”
• “feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you’
• and ask yourself… “Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

I don’t know about you — but I’ve got more important things to do than create effective title tags, collect effective keywords and write compelling meta descriptions. Still, I do these things because I know they’ll improve my rankings. I know that the sites I’m competing with do the same — and we all do it because search engines exist.

Does that make me a black hat? Of course not — it makes me smart enough to realize that there’s an element of politics and some smoke and mirrors involved in Google’s operations.

Rather than get off on that tangent though, lets look at one final quote from Quad as he responds to Jeremy’s question of — in closing, what’s the advice you’d give to someone looking to get started?

In Google’s current algorithm, the trust of the domain is supremely important. So if you’re going to do white hat or black hat or whatever for a site, you don’t want to start it, in my opinion, on a fresh domain…

Again, Quad’s giving us some sound advice as to how to be effective. New sites are incredibly difficult to get off the ground. While you could spend months creating a domain and building backlinks — it’s much easier to just purchase a domain that has the platform you need to succeed. Depending upon your techniques, that platform or base could be a particular level of backlinks, history in a specific vertical or niche, a numbers of years of actively indexed content, etc.

So, before you go reporting every questionable SERP you see — investigate it. Take notes, record information and see what they’re doing right. Then, ask yourself if you’re taking the easy way out by filing a SPAM complaint — or if you’re absolutely sure that what the site is doing is creating an unfair playing field.

I’m willing to bet that in most cases, you’re simply selling yourself short on what you could accomplish if you took the time to learn and practice the same advanced optimization techniques.

I had the rare chance to sit down with a former colleague last week for the sake of comparing notes and discussing strategy in the ever evolving SEM landscape. Over coffee, he told me that there was no way to successfully market a web site without committing money to it for directory inclusion, PPC efforts and link building.

I felt badly because I knew exactly why he also complained to me that his sites were not generating any revenue for him. The bottom line is that he was guilty of sitting back and expecting things to happen for him.

It’s simply not 2002 anymore. Google is not updating every month… You can’t use forms to submit links to actively indexed pages and get a full crawl overnight. There’s no quick and easy way for inclusion that you will be told about. It’s a cutthroat industry and like most SEMs out there, I’m going to hold any tricks I know of close to the vest.

But you don’t need tricks or gimmicks to be successful. You just need a solid commitment and desire to succeed.

Case in Point, My New Blog
When I started my career I was writing articles weekly for Search Engine Guide, SEO Today and ISEDB. After taking a few years off from writing, I decided earlier this week to get back into it. I registered this domain on January 15th. In five days’ time, the site is averaging 166 unique visitors and 285 page views. This of course excludes my own traffic because I can parse my logs (more on this later). While that’s not a gold mine of traffic, it has been targeted — and often times, just one targeted visitor is all you need to be successful.

If you dedicate yourself to providing quality information — the traffic will come. The SEM industry is such that you no longer need to rely on Google as your primary source of traffic. It can and will help you — but there’s a lot more out there if you just take the time to get it’s attention.

Use Social Networking to Your Advantage
Social networking is no longer built just for bloggers and high-schoolers. There are a number of resources that professionals can use to market their content, including profiles on MySpace, MyBlogLog, and LinkedIn.

Using these sites you can find thousands of people interested in your industry. Once you have made your introduction and befriended them — don’t be shy — drop your URL in front of them and ask them to check it out.
I’ve been particularly impressed with how well you can use MyBlogLog to your advantage here. Just by clicking through I’ve come across some great sites and blogs that I never would have known about. Suddenly, my Google Reader has a bunch more feeds to parse and I’ve got a lot more to read up on… but that’s a great thing for me… which is why social networking is so important in the first place — it provides you with information you can’t find easily on the search engines.

I don’t look at other SEM bloggers as my competition — I see them as connections that I need to be successful. You need to do the same thing with others in your competitive space because they will force you to see something in a different way. Armed with a new point of view, force yourself to write another page of content. If you do this, you’re guaranteeing yourself more visitors.

(Side note… There are other sources too, from Digg to Technorati and beyond — but I’m trying to restrict this to site marketing — not blog marketing.)

Review the Sites Who Have What You Want
I know that there are SEM factors that you cannot counter as a new site. The most important of which is probably going to be the age of your domain. Unless you’ve bought and quickly re-hosted your site on an older domain — winning the battle of the SERPs can be a tremendous challenge.

Using tools like Wordtracker, get to know more about what your targeted audience is after. Then, start checking the top engines for the primary sites who are being successful where you want to be. Start an Excel spreadsheet up, and begin tracking things like:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Ranking
• Indexed Backlinks
• Keyword Density
• Age of Domain
• Homepage Cache Dates
• Number of Pages Indexed

Aside from Alexa rankings and Google PR, keep track of the data across at least the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN). Doing this on a weekly basis for even a dozen sites will show you where these sites are growing, where they are lacking, and how they’ve become successful.

Using that newfound knowledge to your advantage, be prepared to compete with those stats — not with the sites. Trying to bury a specific site in the SERPs leaves you with a clouded vision of success. This game isn’t about ranking for a specific term — it’s about growing your site out and marketing in such a way that you achieve maximum profitability… and fun.

As you can tell from my last blog post, I was upset with Google’s changes to their AdSense policy. My reaction to the update was obviously a passionate one — but one that I may now not be so upset with thanks to some direct clarification on the matter.

The primary issue I had with Google was that the new policy terms forbid users to have AdSense ad units on the same pages and sites as units from competing contextual ad services. I reached this understanding after having read comments like…

“…I was actually pretty surprised at the change in policy, most significantly the part about it being site-wide, even on pages that do not even have AdSense on them.” (Source: Jenstar)

Seeing that on an expert’s site, I based my opinion and became very upset. My understanding of how that was written was that AdSense ad units could not be shown on the same site as any YPN or competing ad units, regardless of how they were formatted. I know I wasn’t alone in that understanding too — so I went on to discuss that on other blogs and in popular forums like WebmasterWorld.

That was a critical mistake of mine, albeit a simple one. I took someone else’s word before checking with the source. I wrote a short email to Google in an effort to get a clear response. My message was simply…

It is rumored that AdSense publishers are no longer allowed to display competing ads (from services such as YPN) on the same SITE as AdSense. Is this true?

It would be great to get some clarification on this matter.

With thanks to Ben, part of the Google AdSense Team, I was given a very detailed and thorough response. I’ve been given permission to share this response from Google — and I’d like to do that now because it’s important that we get direct information from them rather than take an interpretation of it off of someone else’s blog or site:

Hi Eric,

I’ve read your email and your blog post, and I understand you’d like some clarification on our competing ads policy. Let me try to clarify first and then offer some additional background on the update.

AdSense publishers may display third party advertisements on sites and pages showing Google ads as long as the formatting or color scheme of these ads is sufficiently different from the layout of the Google ads.

In other words, if you choose to place non-Google ads on the same site or page as Google ads, it should be clear to the user that the ads are served by different advertising networks and that the non-Google ads have no association with Google.

As I’m sure you know, certain text ad networks use formats and implementations that look nothing like the available Google ads format. These ads can be displayed on the same site or even on the same page as Google ads.

If the formats are naturally similar, we’d ask that you use different color schemes for the competing ads.

From your post, I gather that you’re not very happy with this update. I won’t try to change your opinion on this, but I do want to point out that our update isn’t all a shift in one direction – it involves some give and take.

On the one hand, contextual ad networks that were previously prohibited from being placed on the same pages are now allowed, even on the same page if they couldn’t easily be confused for Google ads.

At the same time, we are asking that publishers not place ads (from other networks or house ads) on their sites, if they could easily be confused with the Google ads being served. If users click links that appear to be Google ads and find a site which spawns a series of pop-ups or attempts to install software on a user’s machine without permission, it can reflect poorly on our brand, even if Google did not serve the ads. As such, we’re hoping that this update will make it less likely that users click links thinking they’ve been reviewed and served by Google when that’s not the case.

Thanks again for writing, and feel free to follow up if you have additional questions.

Sincerely,

Ben
The Google AdSense Team

That, in a nutshell, is entirely different than what I was led to believe. While I’d still like to be able to test my ad units from one program or another in the same spot through a rotation — I’m okay with that. Despite my initial reaction, I’m having a change of heart on this one… Google’s not pushing their weight around as much as they are protecting themselves. I can and will respect that.

Earlier I read a great post on Paul O’Flaherty’s blog that further discussed the matter of competing ads. I feel badly because I think that I’m certainly to blame in providing some erroneous information to Paul. The same holds true for readers of the referenced WebmasterWorld thread.

So finally, let’s clarify here… If you’re going to display AdSense ad units on a page, you can display units from any other competing ad source, provided that there is a clear and distinct design difference between the two. This clearly differs from my initial post and reaction to the matter — so for the confusion — I apologize.