Author: David Szetela, Search Engine Watch, Feb 25, 2008

My column on Google AdWords placement-targeted campaigns exposed a mystery: rejected AdSense publisher sites. This week: mystery solved — possibly doubling the number of sites upon which you can advertise.

I’ve been getting some interesting feedback and questions regarding my columns on Google’s AdWords placement-targeted campaigns. Reader Jeremy Brown set me off to track down an important problem — and a simple solution.

A few readers told me they’d tried running placement-targeted campaigns, and found many sites displaying AdWords content ads (i.e. AdSense publisher sites) don’t seem to be available to display placement-targeted ads.

Google told me that some AdSense publishers had chosen not to display ads from placement-targeted campaigns. But Jeremy had reported to me that out of a list of 40 sites he’d identified as AdSense publishers, only five were accepted by the placement tool advertisers use to select sites where they want ads to appear. In our own tests at Clix Marketing, we saw similar results.

So we dug a little deeper, and here’s what we discovered. The suspicion I mentioned last week is correct: the AdWords placement tool is indeed inefficient. It frequently fails to find sites are AdSense publishers who are opted in for placement-targeted ads.

Apparently, Google is aware of the issue and working to improve the tool. But for now — are advertisers stuck with only the AdSense sites the tool identifies?

Fortunately, no. A simple solution might even present an additional opportunity for savvy advertisers like you.

Let’s break it down into steps:

1. Accumulate a list of sites you’ve identified as AdSense publishers you want to target with your ads. List them in an application like Excel. Don’t include the http://www part of the URL — just use the domain name, e.g. clixmarketing.com.
2. Highlight the list and copy it to the clipboard.
3. Go into the AdWords Web interface (this won’t work with the wonderful AdWords Editor). Go to your placement ad group.
4. Click on “Add Placements.” This will bring you to the placement tool.
5. Click on “List URLs.” Paste your list of URLs into the resultant field.
6. Click on “Get Available Placements.” On the right side of the screen you’ll see a list of sites the tool has identified as ready for your ads (under the green “Selected Placements” bar). You may also see a list in a pink box above, containing the names of domains the tool claims are “…not available for targeting.” Important: highlight and copy this list. For safety’s sake, paste it into an application like Word or Notepad.
7. Scan the list on the left under “Results related to:” — it will show you detail about the sites the tool has found acceptable. Some of them may indicate you can target ads to particular pages or even page sections within the site — choose these if you like. Finish by clicking “Add Selected Placements.”
8. Now here’s the tricky part: go back to viewing the ad group and click on “Edit Placements and Bids.” Scroll to the bottom of the resultant field, paste in the rejected URL list, and click on “Save Changes.”

If you’ve done your homework correctly and all the rejected sites are AdSense publishers — the entire list will be accepted.

Now here’s the odd part: there seems to be very little error checking on the domain names. I tried entering just the string “zzzz” and the domain google.com, and they were both rejected. But the domains aol.com and msn.com were accepted. Even though they’re not (trust me) AdSense publishers.

If you want to be really lazy and don’t care about targeting site or page subsections, just accumulate a list of domains you hope are AdSense publishers, skip steps 4-7 above, and paste the whole list into “Edit Placements.” Odds are good all will be accepted, and if any are not AdSense publishers, they simply won’t accumulate any impressions or clicks.

Hello Guys,

From last 16 months it has been noticed google taking very strict actions agains text link selling sites and automatic link exchange network, one way links and different link farms.

Previously we have seen google ban TLA for selling text links, widget bucks for keyword spam in there affiliate code distriubtion.

Now an Asian fun and mobile portal funmaza.com page rank drops from 5 to page rank 0 the reason behind this down fall after years of continous success they are selling text links.

So i strongly suggesst you to avoid such practices and follow my other link building and backlink building articles available on smartseotools.com.

 Thanks for your time, I’ll back to you with latest search engine news.

Buying text links. It’s all the rage.
Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it?
These are the questions on webmasters’ and search marketers’ minds. What follows is my take on buying text links.There’s nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is good. Advertising it on popular sites where your target market hangs out is even better. After all, the name of the game is to bring in targeted traffic. Your advertisements on other people’s sites are none of the search engines’ business and will not get your site banned or penalized. They will not hurt your site in any way. How you market your site is completely up to you, and you don’t need to worry about the search engines if you decide to purchase text link ads.

So what’s the big deal?

Here’s where it gets tricky. A good portion of ads that are bought on websites are not purchased for the targeted traffic they will bring, but as an attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of the site being advertised. No big news to you, I’m sure, and no big news to the search engines. Since having a popular site can often help with natural search engine rankings, people have been looking for cheap and efficient ways to boost their site’s popularity for years.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do — but so do search engines.

To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone found a site useful and wanted to tell others about it. This may very well have been true at one point in time many, many years ago. But today a link could mean something completely different. A link might be a simple trade between webmasters, or an ad, or even a vote *against* another site. With no way for a search engine to really know the intent of a link, things have really gotten complicated for them.

Ads used to have tracking links so that webmasters could measure their return on investment; however, today’s text linkers often prefer to keep the tracking codes off because their web analytics software no longer needs them. And besides, if you’re going to buy an ad, you might as well get the possible link popularity credit that comes with it. That’s more likely to happen with a plain old, stripped-down href link.

Unfortunately, this is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. On the one hand, they know it’s not their place to tell people whether they should or should not advertise on other sites — especially since most of the engines are advertising companies in their own right. On the other hand, without any way to figure out which links are truly a vote for a site, and which are simply a paid ad, the relevancy of the search results for any given keyword phrase can be skewed towards those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

The good news for search engines (and I guess the bad news for link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them tend to leave noticeable “footprints” behind in the code. It would be no trouble at all for a search engine to do a little digging into what the latest footprints are, seek out all pages that have them, and simply not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty, mind you. It would just be a way for the search engines to count only votes and not ads. Your ads would still be worthwhile for the exposure and direct traffic they bring, but not for providing you with link popularity. So although your site wouldn’t technically be penalized, its rankings could drop if it was dependent upon the link popularity of paid links.

For those of you who don’t believe the search engines can or would do this, you obviously haven’t been paying attention over the years. What do you think every major update at Google has been about? They haven’t been specifically about purchased link ads, but they have been about finding a subset of pages that all have similar characteristics and no longer allowing them to count the way they used to count towards rankings. Which means every page using the technique in question suddenly finds their rankings have dropped like a rock.

It’s not a matter of *if* this will happen with paid text link ads, but *when*. It could be next week, next month, or next year. Regardless of when the engines decide to lower the boom, you can bet we’re going to hear a lot of crying in the forums about it! For now, if you’re buying text link ads, or have been thinking about it, I wouldn’t really worry about it. Just make a mental note to yourself that whatever boost to your rankings they may provide now could vanish at any time. It’s no big deal if you’re getting real traffic from your ads, or if you’re simply using them to jumpstart your SEO campaign. It’s going to be a problem only if your livelihood depends on buying or selling text link ads to boost link popularity.

Starting a Web Directory is still a good money maker even if many webmaster think that the directory business is not profitable anymore. Basically they think this way because they created a directory and did not succeed in making it unique and popular. At the beginning, running a directory could be frustrating because you won’t sell any links even if you spend a lot of money in it’s promotion. On the other hand, once your directory is popular, it could become the big earner in your website portfolio.

Let’s skip to the main question of this article (the earnings of a web directory, will be discussed in another post): how much money do I need to invest to create a quality web directory?

Many people create a directory network instead of creating one single web directory. The benefit of a directory network is that you can create a lot of directories that look the same, and offer a submission to all these for a cheap price. Also in this case, you will need to promote only one of them and than link all your directories from the promoted one. A directory network can bring quite good money, but it will never beat the earnings of one single professional quality directory.

In my opinion it’s always better to focus on one single directory and try to make it as unique and popular as possible. Here is a list of what I’ve spent to create the Linkrain Web Directory:

• 10$ for a domain name at Godaddy
• 75$ for a directory script ( PHP Link Directory) with full rights
• 100$ for a Deeplink Mod (a modification which allows users to submit also inner pages of their site and not only the main page). This mod can also be installed on your own if you are a good PHP coder or if you have already some experience with the “php link directory” script.
• 400$ for a custom template (which is not online yet) and a logo. Also this can be done by yourself if you already have some experience with “php link directory” templates and if you are good in designing with Photoshop.
• 1.000$ in promotion. I don’t really know how much I’ve spend in promotion yet, but with 1.000$ you can get some really good results. At the beginning you should not spend them in Adwords but only in permanent links, blog posts and some cheap monthly links. Once you have an established directory, you could also start to sponsor Wordpress themes (or other kind of templates) and to spend some money in a Pay Per Click advertising service such as Google Adwords.

TOTAL: 1.585$

Keyword Use in Title Tag

Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header

EGOL

Gets bolded in the SERPS and is a heavy hitter in optimization.

Andy Hagans

This title tag has consistently been the most important on-page SEO factor for the past few years.

Russ Jones

Most important for CTR in SERPS, but generally the most powerful HTML tag you have at your disposal. I chose moderately weighted because of the duplicate content issues. A good title tag can help a little, a bad title tag can ruin a page.

Christine Churchill

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titiles.

Elisabeth Osmeloski

Not only is it one of your strongest chances to impact rankings, it is undoubtedly your BEST chance to convert a searcher to a visitor within the SERPS. Get the click, get the conversion.

Chris Boggs

We have seen great and rapid results modifying the keyword use in the title, especially for large branded sites that already have thousands of IBLs. Again, with everything, this is also dependent on the word’s usage within content and IBLs. Additionaly, the “prominence” of the keyword (closer to the begining) seems to help incrementally, espcially with sites that agree to place their brand name after the kw.

Keyword Use in Body Text

Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page

Scottie Claiborne

It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense. As engines get more sophisticated, it’s not just the targeted keyword phrase that counts, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.

Aaron Wall

If it is overdone it can suppress rankings. I think they are moving more toward topic analysis to learn what is relevant though.

Michael Gray

It is possible to rank pages without the text being on the page, but it requires a lot more effort from domain trust/authority, internal and external anchor text if it’s not.

Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)

Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords

Eric Ward

Strongly weighted once overall site is trusted.

Aaron Wall

Using semantically related terms allows you to help associate your page with other topical pages and helps your page rank for many long tail keywords.

Wil Reynolds

This should also coincide with the theme of the links pointing to the site.

Marcus Tandler

I think this will become more important in the future

Chris Boggs

Seems as if the engines are enjoying more variations of the keyword and semantic equivalents, as recently tested.

Keyword Use in H1 Tag

Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase

Eric Ward

Depends on the topic of the site and the word in the tag. Having a site about industrial washers with a <H1>Britney Spears</H1> tag is not going to help.

Aaron Wall

May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title and anchor text. If templating issues cause too much duplication in a large section of a website it may also lead to reduced crawling.

Ben Pfeiffer

Not as important as it once was as a ranking factor, but still necessary on a well optimized page and very useful for organizing page content.

Jill Whalen

Keywords H tags in and of themselves don’t seem to really matter as my tests have shown that positions don’t seem to change whether the headline is wrapped in an H tag or not.

Keyword Use in Domain Name

Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com

Jonah Stein

If your nicesly aged, non-hyphenated domain name contains your primary keyword, your 25% of the way to the top…10.

Scottie Claiborne

Using a keyword in the domain name is only helpful if you separate the words with hyphens. General speculation is that too many hyphens might trigger a trust issue with the domain, so more than one or two hyphens is not recommended. A good brand name is always better than a keyword-filled domain.

Aaron Wall

If the domain name is an exact match I believe it is strongly weighted because it might be a sign of a navigational query. Plus having an exact match domain means their were either early to their topic (and thus perhaps a topical leader), or they may have paid a domainer nosebleed prices for the domain.

Mike McDonald

I don’t see how having a domain consisting of (or containing) one of your primary keywords could be a bad thing. One of the precious few consensus opinions in SEO is the importance of link text. That said, I don’t think there is much (if any) value if the keyword is one of 50 hyphenated keywords stuck in front of a .net.

Keyword Use in Page URL

Including target terms in the webpage URL, i.e. seomoz.org/keyword-phrase

Barry Schwartz

Having them bolded in the search results are worth a lot in my opinion.

Aaron Wall

Not weighted anywhere near as much as an exact match domain name, but helps improve CTR (and thus relevancy if CTR factors into relevancy scores) and some people will link to pages using the URL as anchor text.

Ben Pfeiffer

Works very well in Yahoo. Great for user navigation and still worth while to do as a basic SEO methodology. Use hyphens.

Keyword Use in H2, H3, H(x) Tags

Placing targeted terms in the H2, H3 headline HTML tags

Aaron Wall

May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title and anchor text. If templating issues cause too much duplication in a large section of a website it may also lead to reduced crawling.

Thomas Bindl

2nd most important on-page criteria (weight changes every now and then and it can happen that h2/h3 have the same/higher importance than h1

Mike McDonald

Similar to H1 tags. Font styles and emphasis would ideally be an objective judgment on the importance of a word or phrase. Search engines aren’t stupid though. They know about css and I would be surprised if the abuse of these types of tags didn’t set off flags of some sort.

Keyword Use in Alt Tags and Image Titles

Using target keywords inside alt HTML tags and img title tags

Andy Hagans

This is very important for Image search, but not as important for Web search.

Scottie Claiborne

When an image is used in place of anchor text, the alt acts as anchor text. Alt attributes for linked images do have some importance when it comes to SEO. Alt attributes on regular images are important for usability (think mobile devices and screen readers) but not for SEO.

Natasha Robinson

In Google Local listings, I’ve actually found some sites ranking for words that only appear in ALT tags and Image titles of that site.

Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags

Positioning keyword in HTML text with strong/bold attributes

Scottie Claiborne

Setting words apart from the rest of the text indicates that you think they are important- it makes sense that those words would get a little more attention in the analysis of the page.

Ben Pfeiffer

Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much. Effective usage might lie in what type of tag you use, but its still undetermined. Bolds are for markup, strong is for emphasis. I generally use strong tags and highlight 3-5 keyphrases on a page in slight variations.

Jill Whalen

I haven’t seen real evidence to show this as being a factor.

Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag

Utilizing keywords in the meta description tag in a webpage’s HTML header

Scottie Claiborne

A good description can help influence users to click on a listing. The meta description is still used as the site description for many smaller directories and engines.

Danny Sullivan

And yet, so important for display purposes.

Ben Pfeiffer

Descriptions are important. Need to be unique for each page and contain target keywords to encourage search engines to pull snippets from it. Make it interesting!

Keyword Use in Meta Keywords Tag

Utilizing keywords in the meta keywords tag in a webpage’s HTML header

Barry Schwartz

Only Yahoo and I doubt they use it much.

Natasha Robinson

Works for mispellings in Yahoo (Ha, I spelled “mispellings” wrong) - And this is about Google.