SEO Werkt!

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: August 3, 2012
  Honestly, a fairly slow week despite some significant SEO events. SEOmoz introduced MozCast…
• August 2012 Google Webmaster Report
  It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster report where we share all the latest Google SEO related topics of the past month and recap you on anything particularly new going on in the search results…
• Should You Let Google Build Your AdWords Campaigns?
  A WebmasterWorld thread has one AdWords advertiser sharing his experience going through the decision making process of allowing a Google employee to set up a new AdWords campaign for free and see how it goes.

  The outcome was that he decided to see what the AdWords representative can do…

• Did Negative SEO Beat SEOmoz?
  In August, a huge negative SEO debate sparked up and it resulted in Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz offering his site up as a sacrificial lamb to the negative SEOs out there to try to see if they can’t hurt SEOMoz’s rankings by implementing negative SEO techniques…
• Where Google Street View Cars Sleep
  Richard Hay from Google posted a nice picture of a garage full of Google Street View cars, a fleet of them. I guess this is where they sleep?

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Google Israel has a Tu B’Av Logo, Barry Schwartz – Google+
• AdSense team meeting: worth the time?, WebmasterWorld
• More Sales OR More Money?, WebmasterWorld
• Odd message in WMT, Google Webmaster Help
• Squibble is squashing discussion, Google Webmaster Help

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Author Stats Returns To Google Webmaster Tools
  After a three month hiatus, Google has brought back Author Stats to Google Webmaster Tools.
  I personally noticed it yesterday when I was playing around with my Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Google: Wouldn’t It Be Annoying If USPS Did Multiple Sites?
  One of the most common questions I get is, should I build a web site for each location I have a presence in?

  If I run a barber chain and I want to rank for barber in each city, should I just make a web site barber-cityname…

• Safely Give Others Access To Your Google AdSense Account
  Finally, after years and years of requests from Google AdSense publishers, Google announced you can now control user access to Google AdSense…
• Google+ “Share” Link Added To Google Search Results
  Now when you search in Google and you are logged in, you should see a “share” link when you mouse over Google search results. Here is a picture:
• Google 404s The Old Google Analytics
  Google Analytics announced they have finally completely sunsetted the old version of Google Analytics.

  You can now only use the new UI (user interface) for Google Analytics. This is a really long time coming…

• Bing Adds Foursquare Reviews To Social Bar
  Yesterday Bing announced they have added Foursquare data to the Bing social bar.

  It works pretty well.

  You search for something local, be it movie theaters, places to eat, barber shops and so on and if someone has something to say about it on Foursquare, Bing may show it…

• Yahoo Gets Marissa Mayer A Baby Gift
  Just one day on the job and Marissa Mayer already got a baby gift for her baby, which she is expecting in October. Marissa left Googler earlier this week to take on the task of being the CEO at Yahoo

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• YouTube Launches Face Blurring Tool, WebmasterWorld
• Bing Adds 215 TB of New Image Data To Birds Eye, WebmasterWorld
• Invision Power Board – Panda Trigger, WebmasterWorld
• More third party tools to help manage your Google+ page â¦, Eduardo Thuler – Google+
• New Google Tools input …, Stefan Keuchel – Google +
• Unbelievable – Site Got To Page 1 Of Google Within A Few Hours, HighRankings Forums
• Website Upgrade Gone Bad – Major Ranking Drop, WebmasterWorld

Finally, after years and years of requests from Google AdSense publishers, Google announced you can now control user access to Google AdSense…

Finally, after years and years of requests from Google AdSense publishers, Google announced you can now control user access to Google AdSense.

Meaning, if you want to give your partner, developer or a friend or family member access to login to your Google AdSense account to see reports or manage ads, you no longer have to give them your Google Account username and password.

Google said:

We currently support two types of users on an account: Administrator and Standard user. Both types of users have full access to the AdSense interface, but only Administrators can add or remove users. As a publisher with an approved account, your access level for your account has now been set to âAdministratorâ. You can invite other people to access your account, designate them as Administrators or Standard users, and later change these settings if needed.

To enable this sign in to your account, visit the Home tab, then Account settings in the left hand panel. Then under “Access & authorization,” in the “Users with sign-in access” section, enter the email address of the user you want to share your account with and click Invite. The user is added to the âUsers with sign-in accessâ table with the status âpending.â Once the user has accepted your email invitation by clicking the link in the email and associating their Google Account with the AdSense account listed in the invitation, their âpendingâ status will disappear from the âUsers with sign-in accessâ table.

When I tried this, I received an error that read, “currently being used by an existing AdSense account.” Others are also receiving this error but they are not sure why.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This week the BBC tested out Facebook advertising by running a campaign for the Facebook page of a fictitious small business called VirtualBagel. The investigation was headlined “Facebook ‘likes’ and adverts’ value doubted”. During the week over 3,000 people Liked the ads even though the company doesn’t exist and simply shows you a picture of a bagel. The ‘investigation’ is partly a reminder that Facebook still has issues with fake profiles and astro-turfing, but is also a simple re-stating of the fact that you get what you pay for and if you put up a dumb ad targeted too widely you’ll waste your money.

The BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones spent a whole $10 on Facebook ads to promote the page, adding a little light targeting to reach a potential audience of “112 million customers” and garnered 1,600 Likes within within 24 hours. VirtualBagel turned out to be popular in Egypt, Indonesia and the Philippines, but not in the UK or US where bagels are more typical fare. However, most of the people who liked the page appeared to have fake profiles which had also Liked a bunch of other random pages.

Finding he got a lot of Likes from places that probably would’t be interested or even able to do business with his Uk-based Bagel business, Cellan-Jones ends up pondering the efficacy of Facebook ads when there were so many fake profiles on the system.

Facebook has responded saying – naturally enough – the experiment is “worthless” because the ads were not targeted enough, and yes, there are fake profiles in Facebook but they act to discourage the practice, and fake profiles are not allowed under their T&Cs. This is not exactly news.

But, asked the BBC, can Facebook’s $100bn valuation be justified when there are so many fake profiles? Well, how can we put this Rory, did you do the same campaign for $10 on Google AdSense and find a lot of bad clicks?

Because there’s a truism here – yes there are scammers and spammers and astro-turfers on the Internet. But at least on Facebook, you can generally see where they are coming from and get a sense of whether they are fake customers or not, which is the significant difference with something like Google Adsense, and of course why Google+ is crucial for Google’s future going forward in terms of ad targeting.

Facebook has responded, with their response summed up with the statement: “We’ve not seen evidence of a significant problem. Neither has it been raised by the many advertisers who are enjoying positive results from using Facebook…. Looking at the test case you flagged – the person has, for some reason, taken a scatter-gun approach to distributing their ads, sending them to multiple countries with little or no demographic targeting.”

Now, the Beeb was put up to this idea by a social media consultant Michael Tinmouth who’d found his small business clients were clicking false clicks on their ads. Here’s a little information on Tinmouth.

He describes himself as a “Journalist, investor and communications strategist tweeting about social media, entrepreneurship, small business and occasionally my travels and cats!”. Tinmouth is a former editor of Entrepreneur Country, which is run by Ariadne Capital. Ariadne is generally regarded in the tech sector as a high-priced agency, run by high profile business woman Julie Meyer, which makes most of its money by charging introduction fees between startups and Angel investors.

Until April this year Tinmouth had about 10,000 Twitter followers, but then on 15 April his follower count jumped dramatically to nearly 30,000.

There is no suggestion than Mr Tinmouth “gamed” his followers by using one of the many services out there to buy Twitter followers.

And it would be cruel of us to point out that there may potentially be some fake Twitter profiles following Mr Tinmouth, so we won’t do that.

A WebmasterWorld thread referencing a Google AdSense Help thread where a Googler said they have made adjustments to the AdSense invalid click filter to better block clicks from a specific third party crawler.

A couple weeks ago, Andrew from the Google AdSense team said:

This is Andrew from the Ad Traffic Quality Team at Google. We’re aware of a problem with a third-party crawler in the network that is generating invalid activity across a number of different publishers. We’ve recently made some changes to our filtering so that this invalid activity will be excluded more quickly from your earnings reports and the discrepancy between estimated and actual earnings will be smaller. Robotvsbadger, I’ll reach out to you separately via e-mail to check in on the problem.

Two main points here:

(1) Google is aware of a network that is generating nice amounts of invalid clicks on AdSense ads and they are going to or already have stopped it.

(2) Google will remove invalid clicks from estimated earnings reports more quickly so the difference between the estimated and actual will be smaller.

So you may have noticed earnings changed recently do to this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google AdSense Help.

Four years after Google introduced the arrows to scroll Google AdSense ads across most ad format, Google has just removed them.

I am not sure exactly when it happened but it was sometime over the weekend.

I am also not sure if this is a bug or a change to how Google AdSense ads behave.

Here is the before and after shots.

Between August 2008 & May 2012 Google AdSense Ads Had Arrows To Scroll Ads:

After May 21, 2012, Arrows Go Missing:

In fact, Google started testing scrolling AdSense ads back in December 2007 and has stuck with it since mid-2008. So to drop it four years later seems interesting.

AdSense publishers are not sure what to make of the arrows not being there. I do wonder how many users actually clicked on the arrows, I bet it is something like 0.000001% of users.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Hit By Penguin? Google Query Hack To Confirm?
  Here is one more crazy thing for the Penguin Igloo – a search hack that may show you if you were hit by the Penguin update…
• Google Knowledge Graph: Google Labels Me An SEO Expert
  Yesterday, Google announced what they are calling the knowledge graph.

  In short, it provides answers directly in the search results sourced from third parties such as Wikipedia but driven from their acquisition of Metaweb in 2010 and the FreeBase database…

• Google Uses Text Of Code It Doesn’t Understand
  There are new technologies coming out on the web all the time and Google isn’t always up to date in understanding the markup used on those web pages.

  So what does Google do when it doesn’t understand the markup…

• Google AdSense API Referral Bounty
  A thread in the Google AdSense Help forums has a question on a new term being used by Google AdSense named the “API Referral Bounty.”

  It is the left over residue income generated from the Google API Referrals program which expired or sunsetted a few days ago…

• A Sea Of Google Bikes
  Gabor Cselle posted a picture of a tremendous number of Google bikes all lines up next to each other – like a sea of Google bikes. Yes, these may be the ugliest bikes out there but there are many of

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Developers site indexed instead of ours, Google Webmaster Help
• Google and 100K page size limit?, WebmasterWorld
• Sudden Refferal Traffic Via Unknown Sources, HighRankings Forums

Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren’t going to cut it. If Facebook wants to live up to a $104 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams. An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads, and payments for physical goods are a few ways it could boost its average revenue per user far beyond the puny $4.34 a year it earns today.

Facebook has a tough decision to make now that’s going public. It will have to strike a new balance between the good of its users, advertisers, app developers, and investors. If it refuses to explore new business models, its share price could sink. But if it strays too far in favor of making money, Facebook could lose its addictiveness and the faith of its users. Here’s the four aces Mark Zuckerberg could have up his sleeve.

The AdSense Killer

Most ads suck because most advertisers don’t know much about who you are. But Facebook does. What if any website could use everything Facebook knows about you to show you ads you’d want to click? Well, those sites would pay Facebook a lot of money. They also might use Facebook to replace Google AdSense, the current leader amongst ad networks, which analyzes a site and automatically displays relevant ads.

Facebook’s ad network essentially turn ad real estate on any website into places to serve the campaigns that advertisers buy for display on Facebook.com. Anyone currently logged into Facebook who visits one of these sites would be shown ads targeted by their Facebook information, such as age, gender, location, work and education history, interests, app usage, and friends. Facebook and the site hosting an ad would then split the money made on clicks or impressions.

Facebook has denied this product is in the works whenever it’s been asked, but last week it revised its privacy policy to expand its ability to serve ads to its user while they’re outside of Facebook.com. There’d be little reason to do this if something wasn’t in the works. The march across the web of its other social plugins such as the Like button have also paved the way for an ad network plugin. It might need to develop or acquire a company with expertise in analyzing site content so it could serve somewhat relevant ads to site visitors who aren’t logged in to Facebook.

The biggest obstacle, and likely the reason Facebook hasn’t already launched an offsite ad network, is that the world might not be ready. People are already skittish about Facebook using all their personal data to target them with ads when they’re on its site. Even though Facebook wouldn’t technically be “tracking” user web browsing history to power ad targeting, seeing offsite ads targeted from their onsite data might cause some people to have an all-out privacy meltdown. But if it worked, the ad network could double or triple Facebook’s ad revenue.

PayBook

Facebook has its own virtual currency called Credits that’s typically used to let gamers make in-game purchases like powerups, clothing for their characters, and of course, cows for their farms. Users buy the Credits for $0.10 each, and when they spend them Facebook gives 70% to the game’s developer and keeps the other 30%. These in-game payments are a healthy business for Facebook, and they’ve made game developers like Zynga rich because creating and selling virtual goods is cheap.

The problem is that the 30% tax is too high to for people to sell physical goods for Credits. And while Apple also charges 30% to sell music, games, and in-app purchases through iTunes and its App Store, it has a tight grip on the digital media market. Facebook allows media sales with Credits, but only a few developers and content producers are experimenting with it as the tax is prohibitive.

But if Facebook wanted to get serious about making money on payments, it could reduce its 30% tax for digital media and physical goods. In fact, its S-1 filing to IPO noted that “In the future, if we extend Payments outside of games, the percentage fee we receive from developers may vary.” That could turn Facebook into a competitor to Amazon for the huge market of physical goods, and pit it against Apple, Google, and Amazon for selling music, films, and more.

The real power of Facebook Payments comes in its tie in with Facebook Connect. Together they could one day let you make a purchase and fill in your shipping info anywhere on the web with just a click or two. Before privacy fear-mongers in the media and congress made Facebook retreat, the social network briefly allowed apps to ask for your home address, aka your shipping address. Eventually Facebook will bring this back. Then this frictionless purchase system could increase conversion rates for ecommerce stores enough that they’d gladly implement Facebook Payments and Connet…

Charging For Apps For Your Identity

There were over 550,000 apps and integrated websites on the Facebook platform as of a few years ago. Many rely on Facebook’s identity system to replace or provide an easier alternative to signing up for an app-specific account complete with another password to remember and profile to fill out. This service saves app developers from having to build their own identity system, and primes users for social sharing that can drive crucial referral traffic to apps.

Could Facebook convince some of the developers to pay either a subscription or per-user fee? Yes, but the price would have to be steep to make it a serious revenue stream. If it got 300,000 apps paying $100 a month each it’d still only be make $360 million a year. $100 a month could be a bargain for popular apps, but it might discourage smaller developers from signing on. Meanwhile a per user fee would disincentivize growth, and force apps that suddenly get popular to abandon Facebook’s identity platform.

Charging for identity has potential, but it could also backfire and send developers fleeing to Twitter and Google’s free identity systems. That’s a huge problem because Facebook relies on third-party apps to contribute content to its news feed which Facebook monetizes with ads. So instead I think Facebook’s best bet to boost revenue in the short-term is…

Big, Glossy News Feed Ads

Advertisers don’t want to have their message crammed into the little sidebar ad boxes. And while they’re happy to have their ads made social as Sponsored Stories and injected into the news feed everyone reads, they also want less subtle marketing options. Facebook is trying to be flexible with the launch of Reach Generator and the big logout page ad unit, but advertisers want a louder marketing channel within the core Facebook experience. But beyond advertisers and investors looking to make a quick buck, nobody wants to see more ads on Facebook.

So the trick is for Facebook to make ads seem like content instead. Content we actually want to consume. Tiny boxes don’t do that, but large, high-impact full screen or near-full screen ads could. Flipboard and some other mobile apps have been experimenting with these big, glossy ad formats in their mobile apps.

Imagine scrolling down your news feed on the web or mobile and when you got to where there’d be a “More” button or fold (if Facebook didn’t have infinite scrolling), you’d see a large or full-screen ad. You could scroll right over it, or Facebook could make it snap into place for a second before you were free to move on.

These ads could be clicked to open an advertiser’s presence on Facebook such as their Page or App, or to open the buyer’s website. Facebook could even require the ads to be social, essentially creating a glossy Sponsored Story format that could only reach you if you Liked the advertiser’s Page or your friends had interacted with or Liked the brand.

As Facebook’s user base is quickly shifting to mobile where it only shows a few Sponsored Stories ads a day rather than multiple ads per page on the web, glossy ads could let Facebook make more money on mobile without having to show ads too frequently. Users might complain at first, and it could make people slightly less likely to visit the news feed. Still, Facebook could watch the data and manage rate limits to show these glossy ads only occasionally, and less often to users who immediately leave the site or app when they see them.

The fact is that Facebook is responsible to its outside shareholders, even if they don’t have enough voting rights to forcibly change the company’s course. If investors are smart, they won’t grumble if Facebook doesn’t immediately flood the site and the rest of the web with ads, payments, and subscription fees. Facebook got us all to connect. Now its biggest challenge is to remain cool while making more money. If Facebook expands its revenue streams slow and steady, it will have an ocean of users to draw from for years to come.

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More Big Facebook News

Facebook Will Have The Biggest Tech IPO Ever, Raising $16 Billion With $38 Share Price

Here’s What Could Kill Facebook

Zuckerberg Will Ring In Facebook IPO From Menlo Park HQ On Friday

A thread in the Google AdSense Help forums has a question on a new term being used by Google AdSense named the “API Referral Bounty.”

It is the left over residue income generated from the Google API Referrals program which expired or sunsetted a few days ago…