The Internet Marketer» Opinion

A legal precedent restricting keyword advertising?

Pete — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:54:35 +0000

Landmark legal decision about using Google Adwords ?

The Federal Court has handed down a decision presumably setting a legal precedent that may impact “competitor campaign” strategies.

A competitor campaign uses your competitor’s name or product as a ‘keyword’ to trigger the display of your Google ads in your campaign that present your busines sor products

eg If your compeditor is XYZ then your online advertising displays your business or products should there be a search for XYZ

The Court held that “ had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct through the use of the Google Adwords to create a sponsored link…” …because the use of keywords in this manner (ie the ads) implied there was an association between the businesses.

This was therefore considered to be a breach of the Trade Practices Act

Caused by Keyword Insertion ?

Where this becomes interesting/challenging is if your Adwords campaign uses keyword insertion to insert the searchers terms into your ads.

In these cases as the advertiser you have no control over whether a competitors name or brand is part of the original search (which is then automatically inserted into the ads) -

From my interpretation of reports in various legal blogs it may be that keyword insertion was in fact used in the Adwords campaign and that the advertiser is probably innocent from blatant misleading and deceptive conduct and simply naive about Adwords keyword insertion facility.

I wonder if this was raised in court (or even understood by the parties involved) and if this was the case would there have been an impact on the outcome…?

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VOIP Numbers dont work in Adwords ad extensions

Pete — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 07:50:26 +0000

Got a VOIP phone number?
Forget about using it in your AdWords telephone ad extensions or in Google Places, because as I discovered today neither of these Google services will allow you to register the services using a VOIP telephone number.

I thought I had a configuration or input error but the Google AdWords Helpdesk confirmed that VOIP numbers are not to be used in AdWords

As I had the same issue with Google Places, I can only assume that is also the case

This is a significant online marketing disadvantage for these folks

I’d be interested hear if folks in other countries are having the same issue

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Buying the rights to a domain

Pete — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:43:12 +0000

Having both the dot com (.com) and the dot com dot au (.com.au) domain for your business can be important, especially if you have future plans for marketing into the US or internationally in general.

Unfortunately many/most of the viable dot com domains have been snapped up, often by ’domain sitters’ who speculate on exactly this situation. When you approach them to see if you can purchase the rights to the domain, the asking prices can seem to be astronomical, even when the Aussie dollar is on par with the US one

If you are unlucky enough to be seeking a domain that has already been claimed, and you would still like to buy the rights to it then the following might save you some angst and maybe even some cash.

Domains sitters do this for a living
They are unlikely to be persuaded by anything but money and they’ll try to get as much as possible.
So dont give them any reason to think that you are desperate to get the domain in question or the price will skyrocket

Don’t use your business email address
If you email the seller using your business email address then you’re giving them information that might impact your ability to negotiate the domain price:

It helps them find out more about your business.
If your business is linked to the domain, either directly via your website or through online tools that reveal who owns a domain
then the seller can find out more about you, the business and if they perceives the business is an established (i.e. cashed up) their domain pricing expectations might increase.

Are you already committed to the domain?
If your email is sent via an email address that uses the Australian version of the domain you’re trying to buy, then the buyer will see that you are committed to that specific domain. This will also change their perception of what you are prepared to pay.

Try creating an impression that you are considering several domain options, not just the one they have, and that you would consider purchasing their domain more seriously if the price was right.

Who ‘owns’ the domain?
You should be aware that no one ‘owns’ a domain, but you ‘lease’ the rights to use the domain until you don’t renew the lease anymore, or you transfer rights to someone else. Domains details including the current registered parties are stored in the domain details which are then managed/administrated and renewals invoiced by domain registrars.

The Australian Domain Name Administrator (AUDA) is the self-regulated body that provides policy etc for Australian Domains. The AUDA website provides a list of Accredited Domain Registrars who are authorised by auDA to provide services to people who want to register a new domain name, renew their existing domain name, or make changes to their domain name record.

WhoIS
If you want to find the current registered owner of a domain you can use a Whois facility like the one at http://whois.domaintools.com

How much should you pay for a domain?
I have been involved in negotiating domain purchases for several thousand dollars, and while asking prices in the tens of thousands of dollars is not uncommon none of the succesful negotisations have cost quite this much.

Sedo also have a domain valuation service where for a small fee they valuate the domain you might be seeking while might be helpful input into your negotiation, although ultimately the purchase price must be struck between you and the seller.

How do you buy a domain?
I would strongly recommend you don’t deal directly with the seller for the actual financial/domain transfer transaction, but use a broker.
Sedo provides this along with an escrow facility to ensure both parties get the outcome they seek and the costs are very modest indeed.

Ultimately if you want a particular domain the seller can dictate the price so as they say buyer beware…

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Update: Renew your domain or face instant ranking outage

Pete — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:28:47 +0000

Further to the recent item where an overdue domain renewal cost a client ranking for their target terms, their site has now fortunately returned to its original ranking.

So they have been in the ranking doldrums for 21 days! Thats a harsh commercial penalty indeed.

The moral of the story is to make sure you renew your domain otherwise risk loosing ranking for at least three weeks.

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Are website defects affecting your ranking?

Pete — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:01:35 +0000

Google talks about websites that provide a ‘good user experience’, and its increasingly apparent that this includes the absence of defects…

Defects! What defects?
Well some website defects may not be obvious but its apparent that simple issues like broken links are having a negative impact on a website’s organic ranking in Google.

The challenge is finding these and any other issues but thankfully there’s a couple of useful tools to do just that:

WebMasters Tools

Google WebMasters Tools includes a range of diagnostic facilities that allow you to examine things that the Google crawler GoogleBot may have had an issue within your site.
Check out the Diagnostics menu and you will find information on crawl errors (ie broken links and more) and even suggestions on how to improve your website
Here’s a great video from Google introducing WebMasters Tools

For more info on WebMasters Tools checkout: www.google.com/webmasters

W3C Validation Tool
The Wold Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a standards body that manages technical standards in internet technologies.
There is controversy about W3C standards applicability, especially by Web Devs who have suffered because of display inconsistency across various browsers.

There is a good chance that a W3C non-compliant website wont be considered to be a “good user experience” either.

Its easy to check if your website complies with various standards by using the W3C validation tool.
Resolving W3C issues can be complex however and may require technical assistance.

Website Crawler
Website crawlers traverse your site discovering all about it, in a very similar way that search engine crawlers or ‘spiders’ do.

A good crawler like the GSiteCrawler (download for free here) will discover and report broken links.
Fix them and re-crawl the site!
A Web Dev’s technical help might be required here too.

The bottom line is to focus on the ‘good user experience’ which includes a defect free website for an optimal Google ranking…
…but don’t forget about the other 199+ factors that influence ranking as well

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The long domain name dilemma

Pete — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:17:17 +0000

Increasing interest in maximising online exposure has lead to detailed scrutiny of domain names as they do certainly have an influence on what terms a website correlates with your site.

There is no doubt that a carefully selected domain name can help propel your site up the rankings

There are some though that are including several keywords into the domain name in an attempts to attract searches for each of the individual terms.

In my experience these don’t work, and here is why:

Ranking = Keyword focus

Domain names are certainly a key factor in communicating keyword focus to search engines. A quick scan of typical search results will reveal high ranking sites that if not for a keyword targeted domain would certainly not rank as well.

The ideal domain name aligns exactly with the target term.

For example if my target term was “target term” then the domain “targetterm.com.au” would be ideal

I have noted however that in practice a domain with just one character deviation (eg targetterms.com.au ) is much less effective; especially in competitive search situations

Where there are multiple target terms also included in the domain name this becomes very problematic because the relevance to each individual term reduces significantly and is likely to rank as well for any of the terms.

If we introduce a second target term eg “the other” then a domain which includes both (eg targetermtheother.com.au) has little impact on the keyword focus & hence ranking.

Introduce a third term and the issue degrades even further

I have seen examples of this fail in the field repeated and I strongly recommend that the domain you select concentrates on just one target keyword/phrase

Domain length

These multiple keyword domains tend to be very long which introduces its own set of issues not the least of which is trying to fit it on a business card, or spell it out to a prospect over the phone

A domain name structure as quoted in Wikipedia is:

The definitive descriptions of the rules for forming domain names appear in RFC 1035, RFC 1123, and RFC 2181. A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels, that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example.com.

The right-most label conveys the top-level domain; for example, the domain name www.example.com belongs to the top-level domain com.
The hierarchy of domains descends from right to left; each label to the left specifies a subdivision, or subdomain of the domain to the right. For example: the label example specifies a subdomain of the com domain, and www is a sub domain of example.com. This tree of subdivisions may consist of 127 levels.
Each label may contain up to 63 characters. The full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters.^[9]In practice, some domain registries may have shorter limits.
DNS names may technically consist of any character representable in an octet. However, the allowed formulation of domain names in the DNS root zone, and most other sub domains, uses a preferred format and character set. The characters allowed in a label are a subset of the ASCII character set, and includes the characters a through z, A through Z, digits 0 through 9, and the hyphen. This rule is known as the LDH rule (letters, digits, hyphen). Domain names are interpreted in case-independent manner. Labels may not start or end with a hyphen.^[10]
A hostname is a domain name that has at least one IP address associated. For example, the domain names www.example.com and example.com are also hostnames, whereas the comdomain is not.

Refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

AdWords Implications

If you are thinking of promoting your new elongated domain name site in AdWords, consider the following carefully as AdWords has strict limitations on URL lengths:

Display URL 35 characters

Note that this 35 character budget includes:

www (dot) – 4 chars
Not actually required but can make your domain look more natural
Subdirectory
Variable but usually 5 chars or more plus the backslash character
Not actually required but can help reinforce keywords for improved AdWords Quality Score so reducing click price
Landing page filename
Optional and not normally used in display URL
Top level domain (TLD)
three characters plus a dot eg .com
Country code
two characters plus a dot eg .au

So this looks like: (www) ( dot) (dot)(dot)

For example to include the www and .com.au in your display URL you only have 24 characters for the elongated domain name.

If you cant display your domain your campaign wont run

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Renew your domain or face instant ranking outage

Pete — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:12:58 +0000

A client who failed to renew their domain registration has lost all Google ranking.

The renewal notice email from their domain registrar was apparently lost in the continual deluge of inbox spam; the Domain registrar decommissioned the domain when they had not received a renewal payment and the website simply disappeared off Google’s ‘radar’

This is not an uncommon issue as I described back in early 2008 in Website calamities – Where has my website gone?

The client first noticed they couldn’t receive emails, then with the help of their web dev realised their website had also disappeared, then horror of horror they had also lost their much loved #1 Google ranking for their target term.

Before Google Caffeine this probably would not have been so commercially severe. I recall several cases over the years where ranking had at worst a minor glitch after a website disappeared for a few days (always due to domain renewal oversights ), but it seems now that the additional speed Caffeine has injected into Google that not only are website found faster so is removal removal from search results.

For those interested in operational details:

Google WebMasters Tools didn’t alert me although crawl errors do show “domain not found” on the fatal day. I was really disappointed by this as WMT has previously alerted me to more trivial activities; but this is critical and I would have valued an alert on this!

The site still appears in the site: search so its still in Google’s index. Rank Tracker shows the site as sitting consistently at Google #1 since late July then plummeting out of the first 100 within two days of the domain de-registration.

We are now 7 days past the domain outage and although the site is operational it is still not ranking at all…

Understandably the client is not happy as this ranking outage a significant commercial impact.

Fortunately their forward thinking Internet Marketer has more than one site ranking for their target terms :) So it appears that having more than one appearance in target search results is not only a great way to increase traffic, but is also a great contingency in ranking outages too!

Cheers

Pete

PS See this update to find out how long the site was out of ranking….

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SEO service provider shame file

Pete — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:31:56 +0000

I stumbled over an extraordinary example of poor SEO ethics recently that I’m ashamed to admit was undertaken by a well known Aussie SEO house.

No this is not about using some black hat SEO technique, this is blatant abuse of a client’s site by the SEO service provider for their own purposes.

This well known Melbourne based internet marketing business had covertly planted a link farm in their client’s site which was feeding keyword aligned links back to other clients

If you’ve been involved in internet marketing for more than a minute, you know how important links are and just how hard they can be to secure. Incoming links that it is, not outgoing ones like this.

So in summary the situation is this:

• The SEO provider has created a hidden page that linked out to seven of their other clients sites.
• Net benefit for the client in question is nil
• Net gain for the SEO provider – Some free links that aid their other clients

BTW when I enquired, the client was unaware of this page and certainly had not approved it.

Before you mentally interject to suggest that this client probably benefited from seven similar links back in, there is no evidence of this. The link farm file date placed its last update at 2008, so it wasn’t a revenge attack linked to their recent loss of this clients business.

Where’s the return on investment for your now ex-client!?
Shame. Shame. Shame.

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Gawler Bookkeeper proves Online marketing really works

Pete — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:41:02 +0000

I was really pleased to see this story by Dean Allen from MYbookkeeping Services

Dean took some advise I provided in recent internet marketing presentation at the Gawler BEC & turned it into some international business by bringing together two of his customers, Living with Wildlife and Compliance & Competency Management

Now that’s really providing value to your clients! Well done Dean!

Google Profiles now in SERPs | Goodbye Linked In ?

Pete — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 08:01:47 +0000

Profile sites like Linked In that have emerged recently as business-relevant social media (should that be business media ?)

These sites will start to feel pressure from the omnipresent Google with their recent announcement that Google Profiles will now be featured in SERPs. ie if you create & fill in your Google Profile you’ll appear in search results.

The Google Profile screen sets the expectations right up front: ”Adding more information will help you improve your profile’s rank.”

The simplistic Groups ( Co-worker & regularly contacted etc) already provide scope for an embryonic business network capability.

I for one will be watching this space closely…

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The Internet Marketer» Opinion

A legal precedent restricting keyword advertising?

VOIP Numbers dont work in Adwords ad extensions

Buying the rights to a domain

Update: Renew your domain or face instant ranking outage

Are website defects affecting your ranking?

WebMasters Tools

W3C Validation Tool The Wold Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a standards body that manages technical standards in internet technologies. There is controversy about W3C standards applicability, especially by Web Devs who have suffered because of display inconsistency across various browsers.

Website Crawler Website crawlers traverse your site discovering all about it, in a very similar way that search engine crawlers or ‘spiders’ do.

The long domain name dilemma

Ranking = Keyword focus

Domain length

AdWords Implications

Renew your domain or face instant ranking outage

SEO service provider shame file

Gawler Bookkeeper proves Online marketing really works

Google Profiles now in SERPs | Goodbye Linked In ?

W3C Validation Tool
The Wold Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a standards body that manages technical standards in internet technologies.
There is controversy about W3C standards applicability, especially by Web Devs who have suffered because of display inconsistency across various browsers.

Website Crawler
Website crawlers traverse your site discovering all about it, in a very similar way that search engine crawlers or ‘spiders’ do.