Latest Articles
PPA you say, don’t you mean PPC?
May 31, 2007 By Webposition SEO Team
By Curtis Friedl
What is ppa, cpa, cpm, or ppc? Well we are not talking about the latest accounting jargon, and you don’t have to worry about a new executive acronym to be used during your next company meeting. These initials refer to some of the most frequently used paid online marketing program options.
CPM = Cost Per (thousand) impressions
PPC = Pay Per Click
CPC = Cost Per Click
PPA = Pay Per Action
CPA = Cost Per Action
All of these have been around for some time. CPM, PPC, and CPC have receive the most press in the last few years, and many people have used the programs like Adwords, Adsense, and Yahoo Search Marketing as a basis for their online marketing efforts. Much of the press surrounds some of the fraud activities that have been debated in the press. Last year Google announced a limited trial of a new addition, a PPA program. Recently they announced that they are expanding the membership of this group.
If you have never heard of PPA(Pay Per Action), or CPA(Cost Per Action) before, and don’t know what it is about, don’t worry. While there has been some activity in this type of a program through a search engine called http://www.snap.com/about/advertise.phpSnap little else has occurred. That is until Google entered the game. It will likely be only a short time until MSN and Yahoo may do the same. PPA or CPA, are simple ideas, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks the add link, and completes a particular action. These actions can be anything that the advertiser defines, and can be measured, and tracked by a computer such as signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase, etc.
This program like Google’s other ones permit you to adjust your daily spend for the program. Unlike with the Adsense, and Adwords programs you are responsible for activities/conversions that occur up to 30 days after the PPA visit.
Some people have indicated that this will eliminate the issues with click fraud others have suggested that this may instead lead to “Refund Fraud”. While this will be more difficult, and time consuming, it also may be more costly for the advertiser, with expenses up front, and at the refund.
If and when this program goes live to the general public one thing is sure that the landscape of advertising and ads on pages will no longer be the same. Google’s program currently permits you to run the standard adds we are familiar with, in addition to banners, and maybe most controversial inline text ads. The only way to tell that the link is sponsored will be to place your mouse over the top of the link and review its information, and they should be labeled as “Ads by Google”.
With this program still in beta there are sure to be additional changes to keep an eye open for. Only time will tell how beneficial this program will be to the internet using public, or if a new form of abuse will be learned that tarnishes this new program.
Apple.com telling Google “we don’t want to rank”?
May 17, 2007 By Webposition SEO Team
by Scott Goodyear
As I mentioned a while back, Google states that they are getting more aggressive in how they treat links. High rankings based entirely on links (i.e. the term does not appear on the page) are often called “Googlebombs”. For several years Apple.com has enjoyed a first page ranking for the terms MP3 Player, MP3 Players, and often top 10-20 rankings for related terms like MP3 device, digital music player, and others. Today they no longer rank in the top 100 for keywords that they should dominate like MP3 players and simply MP3. In the past, they were supported by benign Googlebombs.
The page that was normally well ranked for most MP3 related terms is: www.apple.com/itunes. However just about any of the sub pages from this section including www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html would potentially make good pages to attempt to rank for MP3 related terms.
When you look at the source code for their iTunes page or just check the cached text in Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. you find that they do not use the keywords “MP3″ or “player” any where on this page. Even thought they have used that term in the past.
On the other hand, Apple’s pages still rank well in Yahoo and MSN as these engines still place a high relevance rating on inbound links. But even in these engines, the textual content can make a difference. (Ask.com, appears to be taking a route more akin to Google.) Should this concern Apple? It should. According to a quick search of the Wordtracker.com service, Google has about 47% of all search engine traffic. I’ve seen other estimates that say Google is 60-80% of all search traffic.
I thought links were all we need for Google rankings?
If you still think that links alone can support your site in Google, consider the following Google rankings for the keyword phrase MP3 player:
680,000+ inbound links from non Apple.com pages is nothing to scoff at. Even if you think that perhaps Google might be devaluing some of the potentially paid or off topic links that point to the iTunes page, take out even 200,000 links and you still have a linking juggernaut. Discount all of those links and a single link from their main page to the iTunes page could push a lot of Page Rank weight to the iTunes page. But… again, for the keyword phrases related to “MP3″, Apple just doesn’t use the term and so, they are essentially telling Google through their optimization or specific lack of optimization, ‘we don’t sell MP3 Players and we don’t want to rank for them’.
There is a hole in your chart/theory! Or is there?
I know that some of you will say, “but Scott, look at number 8. Musicmatch.com doesn’t even use the keyword!”. That would be true, but Google considers “jukebox” to be a keyword that is similar to MP3. Really? Yep, that is semantic indexing at work. However the strength of this association is quite weak.
Here you see keywords in bold that have strong relationships to “jukebox” such as MP3 Player, MP3, and player.
Below you see keywords that have a strong relationship to “MP3“. But you will notice that the term jukebox is not highlighted by Google in bold. Thus indicating that the relationship between the two keywords is not all that strong.
And some of you will say “Why do I see MP3 in some of my Yahoo searches for this Apple page?”
It is because they use Yahoo’s paid Search Submit service. Essentially they have a bit more control over what text appears in the Yahoo search results, faster indexing and refreshes from Yahoo, and a few other perks. However it does not directly improve their rankings in Yahoo and does nothing for their rankings in Google.
Does Apple play MP3 files? Who cares. Should they use “MP3″ on their web pages?
Speaking to some of my evangelical Mac friends, it is true that a Mac does not technically “play” MP3s. However they do convert MP3 based music files, CDs, etc. into a format called AAC that can be used on Mac’s iPod hardware players. I know from personal experience that their iTunes software player either converts or plays MP3s as well. However whether it is converting them or playing them directly, to me, doesn’t matter. I can play them. The average person is in a similar situation online. They are looking for an “MP3 player” in Google, not an “AAC player”.
There may be some technical or licensing considerations preventing Apple from using the ubiquitous “MP3″ term on their site. Maybe they are trying to subtly encourage new/non-techie iPod owners to only use the iTunes music store by remaining a bit silent on the word MP3 and the ability to convert MP3s to something usable by their players. On their iPod and iTunes promotional pages they always use more general terms like “music files”, “music library”, etc. rather than talking about song formats. Even their help pages don’t really help you to understand if your existing MP3 library works with iPod or iTunes. I doubt that they simply forgot to use the term.
Lets go back to Wordtracker for a second. The keywords MP3 player and MP3 players are estimated to have 900 to 1600 searches in a 24 hour period. While I think this value is a bit low, what is potentially at stake? Lets combine the keywords and figure that 900 people could hit Apple.com in one day from a combined “MP3 player” and “MP3 players” search. Over the course of a month, that could mean 27,900 visitors to their site or roughly 328,500 visitors a year. What if 1% of those visitors ended up buying the average iPod at $199? That is an additional $55,521 a month in revenue or more than $600,000 over the course of the year. While this is all “in theory”, remember that there are also various other MP3 related searches that they are missing out on as well.
Summary and Suggestions…
Apple.com probably should consider their rankings loss for MP3 player and similar terms. They have one of the most popular music players on the planet and it can use MP3 songs, convert them to AAC, or whatever needs to happen. As some one who thinks in terms of search engines though, their pages are -not- optimized for MP3 or MP3 related terms. And that side of me thinks that they have a great opportunity to re-gain their Google rankings. No, they don’t have to go out of their way and start talking about “MP3″ all over the place. It would be easy enough to just add a sentence or two at the bottom of their iTunes page where it reads:
“Cars available on iTunes in selected countries. © Disney and Pixar. No celebrity endorsement implied. iPod games will not play on Apple TV. All rights reserved. TM & Copyright © 2007 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.”
Perhaps just a quick sentence/phrase/slogan like “Your MP3 tunes work on iTunes and the iPod music player.” Or add a short paragraph that talks about Steve Job’s recent announcement on DRM free music. Do you have recording of his speech? Um, podcast anyone? Post a descriptive text link that points to a free AAC copy of the speech as well as an MP3 copy. This will provide another instance of “MP3″ for your page. Certainly there is a creative, yet valid and logical way to squeeze MP3 onto your page in order to regain the MP3 related Google rankings.
For the rest of us, it will take more than just a few mentions of MP3 and a few links to rank on this term or others. There are literally hundreds of search engine factors to consider when optimizing a site to rank well. But when you are strictly focusing on the linking side of things, dealing with hundreds of thousands of legitimate links, a trusted domain, etc. many of those other factors can fade into the back ground. However whether you are a behemoth computer industry site or a mom and pop trying to rank on a few terms, some of the more fundamental SEO considerations are considerations that every site should keep in the forefront of the web and content design decisions.
Teaching New Tricks to Old Robots, New Robots.txt Command for SEOs.
May 8, 2007 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
Sitemaps.org, a collaborative effort by Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, has announced a change in robots.txt usage. The new change should allow you to tell participating saerch engines where you keep the sitemap on you site. The usage is fairly simple and it is likely that most other engines will soon support this standard.
How To Use The Robots.txt Sitemap Tag
Normally you will want to use a robots.txt file to tell search engines to stay out of certain files or folders. Here is an example where Google’s own robots.txt file is excluding many folders from being indexed by their own robot, Googlebot, as well by other search engine robots by utilizing the user agent “*”:
| User-agent: * Allow: /searchhistory/ Disallow: /news?output=xhtml& Allow: /news?output=xhtml Disallow: /search Disallow: /groups Disallow: /images Disallow: /catalogs Disallow: /catalogues Disallow: /news Disallow: /nwshp |
But now you can also tell a search engine exactly where you keep your sitemap by including a bit of code in the robots.txt file. For example there is a “sitemap” link at the bottom of most of our MarketPosition pages but we could also tell search engine robots about our HTML sitemap or tell them about the text version of our site map by including the new sitemap command in our robots.txt file (you don’t have to have both an HTML and text version, we’re just testing to see which seems to work better) like this:
| User-agent: * Allow: Sitemap: http://www.marketposition.com/textsitemap.txt |
In the past, the robots.txt file was pretty one dimensional in purpose. It served only to exclude robots from certain areas of a page or site. If you wanted to exclude them from indexing your images directory, you used a disallow command. If you wanted them to slow down because they were hammering your site with page requests as they crawled, thus slowing your site down, some engines allow for a delay option in the robots.txt file. Below, I’ve added a command to slow Microsoft down when indexing:
| User-agent: * Allow: User-agent: msnbot Crawl-delay: 60 Sitemap: http://www.marketposition.com/textsitemap.txt |
Further Reading And Discussion
If you want to read more about robots.txt and site maps, consider the following resources:
Controlling Search Engine Robots With robots.txt and Other Methods.
How to Identify Legitimate Search Robots.
The Robotstxt.org and Sitemaps.org web sites.
For more discussion on these topics, consider:
HighRankings.com and WebmasterWorld.
