Posted on Leave a comment

Switching Search Engines is Easy…

“Google’s monopoly power is less threatening than Microsoft’s because changing operating systems is hard, while changing search engines is easy…” – Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox in his post Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose.

Interesting read.

(Update – 7/21 /2009 – updated to Internet Archive – http://www.blakeross.com/2006/12/25/google-tips/ no longer is live.)

Posted on Leave a comment

Google Changing Monetization Strategy?

Robert Scoble had an interesting post on this issue. I’ve got to ask one question though Robert! In Naked Conversations, Robert talks about how you should point to your competitors and even talking positively about them.  How is a likely non-relevant ad on a map on your web site more of a threat than you saying “company x does well with blah-blah”? I don’t get the logic here, am I missing something?

Posted on 1 Comment

AI Gateway Accepted to Major University Technology Incubator

AI Gateway, a development stage search portal and ad network with a truly unique value added technology, was accepted into a major university incubator today. Founder Joe Holcomb put significant work into this effort and gave me a shout to let me know that this goal has been reached. 

AI Gateway is currently seeking angel funding and or an aggressive venture capital participant willing to fund a predevelopment concept based on a unique business plan that starts to generate revenue quickly upon completion of a beta product.  

Posted on

Chicago SES – Day 2 – Duplicate Site Issues

I came to this session to hear abouts splog and what Google and others were going to do about splog prevention (apparently nothing yet). I was also inerested how feeds affected organic listings as I’ve personally experienced some problems. What I got instead was a bunch of people developing business sites that needed redesign and/or clean up, certainly necessary, but not as interesting to me.

Jon Glick, Become.com

What is duplicate content a problem?

Google, Yahoo, Open Directory Project…

Confusing the Bot: Dynamic URLs

Confusing the Bot: 2 URLs

Don’t confuse the spider – chose one canonical domain and link all internal pages

301 redirects, your hero…

Yahoo! has transparency on whether your site is banned, check it out.
Shari Thurow, Grandtastic Designs

What is duplicate content?

The definition is unclear.

Search Engines do not want duplicate or near-duplicate content in their indices.

Duplicate content filters:
– content properties
– linkage properties
– content evolution
– host name resolution
– shingle comparison

siteexplorer.yahoo.com

example: 3 web pages, 3 unique URLs – robots.txt excludes the duplicate content or meta tag can do the same thing

Duplicate content is often copyright infringement.
copyscape.com

Posted on 1 Comment

SES Chicago 2006 – Day 1 – Ads in a Quality Score World

How do you do better in a quality score world?

Joshua Stylman, Reprise Media

– Quality score is determined by a number of factors
– Google Adwords =  CPC x CTR (more relevant copy)
– Why make these changes – control over #1 position
– 2005 – Black Box – CPC, CTR, Landing Page, Ad Copy, others that aren’t transparent
– CTR not a good proxy for relevance, irrelevant landing pages, etc.
– Example of dramatic lowering of CPC once ad had a quality score
– Unintended impacts – artificial CPC inflation, Engine define “quality”, changes affect quality score
– Death of bid management, not really.
– How do you solve for an equation that you don’t understand

Andrew Goodman, Zero Page Media

– Two quality scores – one affects minimum bid, the other affects ad rank
– “Other relevancy factors” – tightness of relationship keyword – ad – landing page
– Relevant ads, ad keyword are critical
– How it works – see the public guidelines, human codes used to train algorithm
– Principles for ad quality raters are derived from user feedback on a large scale
– Adbots crawls landing pages looking for ”markers” a formula will determine score
– QS  Ad Rank – CTR still key
– You can fix some of these issues – Advertiser (A sports training facility) using separate page to test response on different domain
– Don’t be foolish
– Cheesy Landing Pages + Deceptive Offers – “There is No Sanctuary”
– Try country variance

Jonathan Mendez, Otto Digital

– Strategic services arm of Offermatica
– What is relevance? Contextual relevance.
– Segmentation + Targeting = Relevance
– Engagment
– Ad needs to be relevant to the keyword and the landing page
– Geotargeting – important to news growth

Brian Boland, Microsoft

– Was there for the question and answer session – Google was invited to the panel but declined to participate

SESChicago2006