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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

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SES Chicago – Day 2 – Yahoo! Search Marketing Lunchtime Panel

John Slade speaks to an overflow crowd…

Says “Thank You!” to existing customers

Thanks people who have been early adopters

Web Publishers – everyone is a publisher in some way, even if they don’t think they are.

Consumer Context – Keep it in perspective

The Four Questions:
– How do I reach my desired audience?
– How can I effectively engage them?
– What mix of tactics should I use?
– How do I know its working?

Today’s offer model is a linear model, moves to multiple ad targets & calls to actions

Tip: Always get your keywords in your titles and descriptions.

Build calls to action: It’s a framework to continue

New Tools:
– Dynamic Account Structure
– Ad Testing
– Fast Ad Activation – building more automation and integrity checks into the process.
– Enhanced Geo-targeting
– Alerts – proactive keyword alerts to start shortly
– Share of Clicks and Forecasting
– Quality Index

Rank is determined by its bid and expected performance. Relevance is critical to preventing “ad blindness”

Five Reasons Marketers Should Be Exited:
– Improved user experience: intuitive, speed
– Faster impact and rewards for advertisers that optimize
– Focus efforts on what matters most to the marketer’s business
– Gives marketers the power create, test, and analyze campaigns like never before
– Leverage creative (missed the rest of the slide)

John stressed that one needs to be cognizant of thinking in new ways to get full advantage of the features of the new system.

Graham Harris…gives demonstration. Shows the automated keyword generator. This shows a huge change in magnitude that allows effective campaigns to be created by almost anyone.
Patrizio Spagnoletto speaks…

Upgrading Approach and Schedule:
– U.S. advertiser upgrades have begun
– Advertisers may chooser to upgrade post holidays
– Invitations will continue in stages to U.S. advertisers over the next several months

What to Expect
– Frequent Update
– Cheat sheet

Please look at the tutorials, customer solutions 1-866-YAHOO-98
It’s important to Yahoo! to make this house your home. We are successful when you are successful.

Question/Answer: Minimum bid for the US market is still $.10.

Question/Answer: Bulk submit is available.

International markets will occur sometime in 2007. John Slade said customer feedback was being sought on the best way to roll out.

How do you calculate relevance in a new ad? Dozens of factors drive us to a relevance to an ad, many of these come from Yahoo! search technologists. As data is available, this is factored in as well.

All in all, Yahoo! is demonstrating some positive attributes during this large conversion of platforms. These include a customer focus and taking the time to make a professional and transparent system migration that I believe will serve as a model in how to make a professional and non-disruptive migration. Stock analysts should look at the long term of what is occurring here.

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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

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New Yahoo! Maps Release

I *loved* the old Yahoo! Maps product. Late last week it was replaced with a very “Google looking” map that has a small fraction of the restaurant listings that the old maps product did.

Stated simply, I prefer the old release much, much better. The new release was rolled back once before in favor of the old one and I still find the other one to meet my needs better and I would prefer to use that one.

Fellow blog readers what do you use for maps and why do use that particular one?

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Jennifer Slegg Interviews Yahoo! SVP Steve Mitgang

Jennifer doesn’t put up daily interviews, but when she does, they are interviews that make you take notice.

The interview of Yahoo! SVP Steve Mitgang focuses on the release of Panama. New metrics like assists and number of interesting and many other new items are discussed. The interview lasts about 60 minutes.

Good job Jen!!!

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Forrester Consumer Conference – Mobile Marketing’s Play In The Channel Strategy

Charles S. Golvin, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Where do you fit in? Discussed Crest toothpaste mobile campaign example

What tools are available, what is the reach, what are the learnings?

Tools available today:
– Messaging
 – Voting
 – Promotions
 – Search
– Mobile Browser
 – Banners
 – Interstitial
 – Search-based
– Applications and content
 – Free / discounted services

New mechanisms are emerging
 – Physical proximity
 – Coupons and loyalty (Cellfire)
 – Using location (opt-in) to improve targeting

Where does mobile fit?
Eyeballs>>Awareness>>Consideration>>Preference>>Personal>>Loyalty

What is the reach of these tools?
1 in 4 receive text messages regularly

Youth see their mobile phone differently

Think Europe is so far ahead? Think again…
 – Internet penetration is higher in USA than Europe

What does the data mean?
 – Mobile campaigns need to target data adopters

It’s still early
 – Most US consumers still use voice
 – Mobile formats are small and generally difficult to use
 – Ad Standards need to be developed
 – Mobile is a unique channel

Compared with the fixed Web, consumers’ mobile experiences are:
 – Abbreviated
 – Transactional
 – More tied to the physical world
 – Successful campaigns embrace these differences

Best practices
 – Target mobile early adopters
 – Immediacy factor
 – Tailor content to mobile screen and user’s process
 – Use promotions to boost response rate
 – Employ creative or ad formats that match product or service
 – Time campaigns for maximum business ROI
 – Tie mobile to offline marketing

Tomorrow’s mobile marketing next practices
 – Integrated marketing campaigns
 – Performance-based metrics
 – Smart use of innovative functionality
 – Location sensitivity

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Danny Sullivan to Continue with SES (Official)

Incisive Media and Danny Sullivan today announced that both parties have signed an agreement to continue to work together to produce the market-leading Search Engine Strategies series of conferences and exhibitions.

This past August, Danny Sullivan, who has always been an independent contractor, announced his intention to step away from active involvement with SES at the end of 2006. Since then, both parties have remained in contact and have reached an accord to extend their relationship through 2007.