The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Two illustrious Internet audiences, the Web’s leading authorities on online security and the leading practitioners of advanced search engine marketing, descended on Seattle last week. What the two groups had in common was a bright line between White Hat “best practices” and stealthy Black Hat maneuvers, although which tactics were being censured and which advocated was sometimes in question.

The AOTA Summit 2008 attracted the chief security advocates for Microsoft, Avenue A | Razorfish, eBay, PayPal,. the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the FBI and the White House, along with Wash.-state attorney general Rob McKenna and Craig’sList founder Craig Newmark. The theme, “”Reaching the Tipping Point: The Future of Online Trust” was based on instilling consumer confidence.

Craig Spiezle, director of the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance which organized the event explained that spam is a tactic of choice for many criminals working online.

“There’s a big proportion of mail today that is spam,” he said. “Just by opening up a mail, there’s a potential your unprotected user or unprotected PC could have malware loaded on their machine.”

“There’s another whole area of corrupting and comprising ad servers today …You see an ad, you click on a link and you actually are taken to site that tries to get malware on you,” he said.

That illicit tactic overlaps with a concept analyzed at SMX Advanced and known in the search engine world as “cloaking,” where a link you clicked on to reach a particular goal did not lead to the destination you had in mind. In the search example, the content of the destination site was withheld or misdirected by the search engine spider. Advanced search marketers are conflicted about the relative degree of risk that a search engine like Google will allow or find acceptable. Some to try and eke out an extra advantage for their Website’s visbility.

In a lively discussion post about the relative value of “dark side” tactics at a search conference, organizer Danny Sullivan was apologetic, “The conference had content that was far more blackhat that I would have liked to have seen. It had content I was embarrassed to see presented, because it is not about the type of SEO I’d like people to learn or know about.”

Having said that, many conference goers appreciated learning more about the black arts of search. They learned what to look out for from competitors, while being amused by the pure entertainment value of the aggressive, and sometimes brutally effective, “overnight sensation” power of the black hat tactics being discussed.

SEO pundit Michael Gray was outspoken, “If Google were Hostess Twinkies, they would take up 90% of the shelf space in your local super market. Sure you could always stop by the bakery and pick up yestedays day old Yahoo bagels or the produce department and pick up that crazy [MSN] fruit that they keep changing the name of, but you’d still be tripping over pop up displays of Twinkies in every aisle.

“Corporations shouldn’t make the rules in any industry, but in our world they do, and it’s even worse that it’s not even multiple companies but just one. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about Google’s way or everything else. “

Google’s stock will top $900 next year. Online voting won’t happen in our lifetime. And Microsoft Corp. will make a big push into virtualization, possibly buying Citrix.

Those were among the forecasts Tuesday night at the WSA annual predictions dinner as five panelists from the Pacific Northwest technology industry — Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group; Kelly Smith of Curious Office Partners; Jonathan Sposato of Picnik; Enrique Godreau of Voyager Capital; and Steve Lidberg of Pacific Crest Securities — fielded a variety of questions about the future of the industry.

Moderator and P-I columnist, John Cook, has the story.

Does Amazon know for sure that I’m a search marketer who might be interested in buying ads for clients on Amazon product pages, or is it just the fact that I’ve purchased The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords in the past, or more recently, Shane Atchison and Jason Burby’s Actionable Web Analytics?

In either case, instead of  being cross-sold a robust espresso maker to help me manage those complex PPC campaigns long into the night, Amazon is inviting me to go down to the River.  ClickRiver to be precise.

Dear Larry,

As an Amazon.com customer who purchased Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, we think you’ll be interested in a new program that lets you extend your pay-per-click marketing efforts to the tens of millions of customers per month that have made Amazon.com the leading online marketplace.

Clickriver Ads, offered by A9.com, works just like the sponsored link programs of the major search engines. You bid on the keywords you want, and pay only for actual clicks to your own web site. Your sponsored links appear both on Amazon.com’s search results pages and product detail pages.

What differentiates the Clickriver program is the audience. Customers who visit Amazon.com aren’t in search mode. They’re in shopping mode - the best time to introduce them to your product or service. That’s why we think Clickriver is the perfect way to extend your marketing reach.

Visit Clickriver.com to sign up now; you can have your sponsored link up and working for you in minutes. Registration is free, so it’s a zero risk proposition, and we think you’ll be very pleased with the results.

Next, they’ll be suggesting that those Who Purchased ClickRiver Search Advertising were also interested in Yahoo! Sponsored Search or perhaps Google AdWords. Hey, interested in a good used Google Advertising campaign?

Attending the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose this week along with the annual Google Dance event, it’s easy to see the ascendancy of Search across so many categories.

The Google Dance, Google’s open house and social mixer held on the Google campus in Mountain View features Google product demonstrations, an “Ask the Engineers” breakout session,  and a carnival like atmosphere under the California moonlight that is festooned with multicolored lights and Google T-shirts, plus everything from karaoke contests, billards and beach volleball to stations where you can build your own root beer float.

The date of this year’s Google Dance coincided with Google looking skyward in a stellar direction.  The company announced the debut of Google Sky to allow searchers to peer into the cosmos and study astronomical photos, Google Sky being a supernatural extension of Google Earth.

Meanwhile, on the shores of Lake Washington, Google is breaking ground on a new Googleplex which will surely be the site of a future northwest edition of The Google Dance.  The LakeView Plaza campus is a  three-building, 195,000-square-foot development currently under construction in Kirkland.  You’ll soon be able to spot it on Google Maps, and Google Earth of course, even from millions of miles away in space!

Google lifted one of the many veils that obscures the inner workings of its paid advertising program last week by unmasking its Content Network distribution sites to advertisers. These are the sites that keyword-targeted Adwords ads appear on when you opt-in to Google’s Content Network on a PPC basis.For the first time ever, the launch of the new Google Placement Performance Report affords AdWords advertisers who are running keyword-targeted campaigns a bird’s eye view of their networked media buy. The purpose of the report is to check ad position in AdWords page units on the various Websites where they are running. What is far more revealing to this search marketer, however, is the eye opening (and jaw-dropping) view of the actual sites where content ads appear, especially the realization that the quality of those Content network sites can be very poor. (In contrast, Google “site-targeted” campaigns place ads on Websites that are selectable in advance and on a CPM-basis).

A look at the sites being offered up for a mainstream B2C advertising campaign (by mainstream, I mean a campaign of fairly general terms and devoid of highly specialized keywords), reveals a substantial number (more than 15%) of proxy sites and anonymous surfing sites (neither of which are auditable), sites that were wholly irrelevant to the subject matter, such as s Song Lyrics sites or phonebooth finders, and sites using alphabets other than the language specified (which in this case was English). I’ll eat my hat if click fraud is not in play at these sites, which rang up clickthroughs at an alarming rate while yielding less than one conversion on a $3,000 run with over 14,000 keywords.

Seeing is disbelieving. When choosing Google Content’s Network for keyword-targeted advertising, the implication (at first impression) is all too clear. Use ONLY highly specialized terms that are completely unambiguous in terms of Content Network placement, OR be prepared to spend days or weeks adding negative keywords and site exclusions to your campaigns based on the feedback. One can only hope that Google will take seriously the concerns of advertisers who seek credit for erroneous or unauditable ad placements, and that is anything but clear.

Internet search giant adding R&D center in Seattle

Add Google to the Greater Seattle community of Fremont’s northwest mystique, along with the famous troll, the annual Summer Solstice parade and the presence of such high tech firms as Getty Images and Adobe.
A new Googleplex will be hatched in 60,000 square feet sub-leased from Getty Images for a new R&D center, adding to the Puget Sound center it already operates in Kirkland, home of Google Webmaster Cntral.
“We are interested in giving people the option to work near where they live, and some people want to be close to downtown,” Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger said. She declined to say how many people Google plans to hire in Fremont, but she said it will fill the center with new jobs, not just transfers from Kirkland.

Google’s expansion in Fremont comes as Microsoft makes a bigger push into Seattle with Friday’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive. In an interview with the Seattle P-I, Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson said that the company may consider shifting some employees from Redmond to Seattle.

A new Google Webmaster Central tool has been introduced this week that lets site owners view a much larger sample of inbound links to pages on their site. Unlike the Google “link: operator,” this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and even downloaded.

All you need to do is verify site ownership via the Google Webmaster Central system to see this information.

While Google does limit the total amount of data available for each type of link, the increase in data is substantial. As an example, Danny Sullivan notes that with the old tool, Google reports ~3,000 links into his new Website whereas the new tool reports 57,000. Thatís quite a leap!

<http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/>

In a move of inter-galactic proportions, the planet’s leading search engine has announced a partnership with the University of Washington, among others in academia, to create the world’s largest database — a moving picture of the entire universe.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, is planned to begin operation in 2013 on a mountaintop in Chile, The telescope will take moving digital images — rather than the typical static snapshots — of all space, the entire visible sky. “It will be the greatest movie of all time,” said UW astronomer Craig Hogan, one of the leading scientists working on the project. “It will transform how we do science.”

The Google announcement was timed to precede the Seattle conference frequently dubbed the “Super Bowl of Astronomy,” the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Some 2,500 professional stargazers gathered at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center for four days starting yesterday to discuss such exotica as supernovae, quasars, astrobiology and the mysteries of dark matter and gravitational waves.

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