Winning Results with Google AdWords Second Edition_4 docx

Much advertiser dissatisfaction has been directed at the content targeting option in AdWords called AdSense when viewed from the publisher’s perspective—that is, from the perspective of

expanded to cover “semantic variations” and did not work very well at first Google is constantly tuning the workings of Expanded Broad Matching, and at times it appears that broad matches, especially when bid high, lead to erratic performance as ads are displayed unpredictably on

“semantically related” search phrases

Much advertiser dissatisfaction has been directed at the content targeting option in AdWords (called AdSense when viewed from the publisher’s perspective—that is, from the perspective of website owners displaying ads paid for by AdWords advertisers) Google was uncharacteristically quick in ramping up this program, likely due to their perceived need to race against competitors like Yahoo and DoubleClick for control over online advertising inventory In the past couple of years, Google has steadily improved the feature set, transparency, and accountability of this ad program Most of these changes have come in response to a steady stream of advertiser input, and

no small degree of advertiser frustration

In other instances I tend to disagree with analyses that peg any change to the AdWords platform as “just another Google cash grab.” The current Quality-Based Bidding formula is certainly doing no harm to Google’s long-term revenue prospects, but the reasons for releasing and refining this formula are complex, and not all tied to pure revenue maximization The user experience, in my judgment, does remain paramount in the AdWords program This search engine user satisfaction, in turn, keeps Google in business, and highly profitable

How Google’s DNA Influences the AdWords Game

Let’s turn to an overview of idiosyncratic policies and attitudes that will become familiar to you

as you play the AdWords game Many of them stem directly from the values of the founders and their immediate circle On the whole, though, a certain kind of attitude permeates the company

If I had to boil it down, it might be “never forget the user experience,” which in the case of a search engine company means “don’t intrude, just help people find what they’re looking for.”

A generalized wisdom also prevails: “don’t forget why we’re here and AltaVista isn’t—don’t be dot-com road kill.”

Editorial Rules and Banned Items

Google spent a lot of time in the early going debating advertising policies Today, not only is there less to debate, but the policies themselves may be less transparent than they once were But you may find yourself running afoul of certain policies That shouldn’t be inherently surprising

Any publisher (online or off) is going to have guidelines for the types of products that they accept advertising for Google is no different They must ensure, of course, that ads comply with applicable laws But they also go beyond the law in areas they worry could become controversial and alienate the general public

Google has sometimes reminded advertisers that it does not censor search results Whereas

an ad may be banned for something like hard liquor or a certain type of knife that might commonly be used as a weapon, this does not preclude pages about these items from showing up

in the regular search results

If you’re curious, https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html offers a list of basic content policies It wasn’t published until November 2004 It does not give much detail, and

many gray areas are still left up to editorial discretion In my experience, the list of prohibited

industries and ad subjects provided on this page is nonexhaustive You may run into other

problem areas that have yet to officially make it onto the list

Pop-Ups and Other Poor User Experiences

Pop-up ads, and Google’s policy prohibiting sending visitors from your ad to any page containing

such ads, is really now just an example of a larger-scale, systematic program Google has

implemented to police what it calls “landing page and site quality.” In essence, Google once

took strong stances against a few things that it believed led to a negative user experience Now,

that iconoclastic approach has been tempered and extended through the collection of years’

worth of user feedback A few of the old policies no doubt remain alongside a richer list of

ill-advised practices, such as customer data collection without adequate disclosure of your business

credentials

Since both Yahoo and Google reserve the editorial right to ban any ad just for pointing to a page they deem irrelevant to the ad, it’s not surprising that Google has also taken the initiative in

banning ads that point to pages that they deem to provide a poor user experience Want to show

your ad on Google? You will pay a premium to point it to a page that serves users an annoying

pop-up ad; if your ad shows up at all, that is

At this point, such specific guidelines shouldn’t be taken too literally, in the sense that you can also run afoul of Google’s landing page and site quality guidelines by doing other things that

smack of deceptive or irrelevant advertising As mentioned, I’ll cover the gamut of ad quality

issues in an upcoming chapter

Ironically, this very policy led some entrepreneurs to come up with pop-up-like technologies that were different enough from pop-ups that they passed editorial muster with Google for a time But “working around” Google’s rules is more difficult now because Google looks for a variety of signals of negative user feedback So much like the Mom who doesn’t give her child a pass for saying “Oh, Fudge” (the intent was there!), calling something a pop-in, a pop-around, a pop-a-rooni, or a pop-a-doodle- doo is now unlikely to “fool” a Google policy specialist if it displeases users.

Privacy Policies

It will be interesting to see just how far Google The Advertising Company is willing to go to

collect demographic data on users as competitors attempt to do the same Google, for now,

has relatively strict privacy policies and does not know much about the individual surfer using

the Google Search tool, although it does look at the user’s geographic location (IP address)

Google’s history might suggest that it will go slow on offering advertisers advanced demographic

targeting, while its competitors forge ahead with more intrusive schemes

Currently, Google does report limited demographic targeting information to its advertisers, under the auspices of partnerships with (for example) social networking sites such as MySpace

Google does not want to be portrayed as a privacy threat, so its approach is to test the waters

gently and to lull competitors into making the first invasive moves (so a competitor, not Google,

can take the rap for moving the goalposts)

Because Google The Global Information Powerhouse has now built so many integrated services around its core search offerings, the topic of privacy and Google now seems to exceed the scope of this book! What are we to make of Google Health, a would-be centralized repository for patient medical records? Or Google’s steady rollout of a variety of telecommunications services? The apparent mapping and archiving of pretty much everything, as Google’s stated corporate mission? When we look at specific policies with regard to searcher privacy, Google looks relatively innocuous But Google’s role in the global information economy could well make it the single greatest potential threat to your privacy But that’s another book.

Are Policies Consistently Enforced?

When it comes to the ongoing quest for top rankings in organic search rankings, many business owners have been torn between so-called “black hat” and “white hat” strategies A broad consensus has emerged in the industry: you have to be at least “gray hat” to do well The unwillingness of many businesses to strictly follow Google’s webmaster guidelines often comes from observation of competitors bending the rules for years running, apparently benefiting from the deception “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” seems to be a constant temptation in the world of search marketing It takes a strong will to resist temptation For the record, it’s usually best to resist, in my opinion, because that competitor might not be doing as well as you think, and may eventually be subject to catastrophic penalties as Google adjusts their search ranking algorithm or makes manual adjustments to catch certain forms of unreasonable “gaming” of their algorithm

It was inevitable that a certain degree of this gamesmanship might gravitate towards the paid search program, too Google combines automated methods with human discretion to weed out and punish advertisers who don’t play fair

The problem with some of Google’s policies in the past is that they weren’t grounded in any solid principles Some have been nearly unenforceable; in other cases, Google has chosen not to enforce them—in essence, “looking the other way” on minor violations given the complexity of enforcing the rules to the fullest extent

One quagmire is the quiet but rarely enforced prohibition on “double serving.” If you think about it, an unscrupulous advertiser could open two (or ten) separate AdWords accounts and blanket the page with ads for the same product or service, crowding out competitors Google prohibits such behavior, but it’s not uncommon for exceptions to slip through There are too many gray areas where it actually makes sense to have two ads showing on the same page from the same company on the same keywords A large company like IBM might have separate divisions that are both likely to benefit from rather different ads on keywords that sometimes overlap

More to the point, perhaps, this is yet another policy matter that has now been subsumed under the all-encompassing enforcement mechanism of Quality Score, which is opaque and largely automated The extent to which human inputs (real policy specialists twiddling the knobs, as it were) affect Quality Scores is not precisely known Again, I’ll be delving deeply into this shortly

By moving policy enforcement into a “no-tell” zone (into a numerical score that takes myriad factors into account), “bad guys” don’t necessarily find out what they’ve done wrong

Google is under no obligation to tell them, either

That’s led to further uncertainty among conscientious advertisers, wondering if they’re being wrongly judged Where Quality Scores are low, they want to know what factors are causing the

low rating Thus Google is now swinging back towards more transparency They’re studying

ways of giving advertisers some clue as to which policies they’ve violated, or what factors led to

their keywords being given low “quality” ratings

Despite the imperfections that have cropped up along the way, Google is moving in an interesting direction when it comes to policy enforcement The degree of automation they are

attempting to achieve would seem to codify their policies and remove excessive discretion from

the hands of editors The analogy would be with making good laws: judges are needed, but legal

interpretations in specific cases should not vary wildly depending on which judge you deal with

Tight Control of Information Flow

Despite its democratic, fun image, Google is a serious business entity that holds its cards close

to the vest It employs a degree of secrecy that many consider excessive Some recent political

reading that equated undue government secrecy with a deficit in democracy made me sit up

and think hard about just what was going on over there at the Googleplex Google staffers have

always told me as much as they possibly can to help me understand AdWords features But the

company’s secrecy often precludes them from telling the whole story

The pressure on Google seems to have abated some now that the nail biting over their IPO

is done (The first trade of Google shares under the ticker symbol GOOG went through at 11:56

A.M ET, on August 19, 2004, for $100.01, well above the offer price of $85.) In the pre-IPO

quiet period, most everyone in the company was terrified of giving away material information

or being perceived to promote the stock, since even the suggestion that Google might be a good

investment would have violated SEC regulations and led to delays in the IPO Delayed IPOs, as

AltaVista found following 1999, are not good karma for search engine companies

All Search Engine Companies Are Secretive about Algorithms Much of the secrecy employed at

Google is absolutely necessary Search engine companies cannot share much about the “secret

sauce” of their methodologies on a month-to-month basis, since millions of website owners are

jockeying for high rankings in the free results In this regard, Google is not alone Its cryptic

commentaries about its search engine ranking methodologies are in keeping with the demands of

its ongoing battle with index spammers

Concealing Details of How AdWords Functions, for Competitive Reasons An unusual quirk of

AdWords is that many features are a lot more complicated than similar features offered by

competitors Add to this the engineer-speak combined with public relations spin and you’ve got

some features that are downright befuddling

Google has opened up their public relations outreach in the past four years, however

Spokespersons such as Nick Fox, a key manager of the “ads quality” team, tirelessly explain new

features of the ad ranking formula Nick has directly answered many of my pointed questions,

and has been forthcoming in public conference sessions as well For example, on the question

of whether total advertiser spend or length of account history (in terms of time) affect wide Quality Scores and performance, Nick was clear in stating that Google “does not believe in perverse incentives, so it doesn’t include time or spend in the Quality Score.”21 I believe him.

account-Google also has more products in the marketplace today than they did two or three years ago This has evidently led to a more systematic outlook on how to communicate with the public

Google Analytics (a website analytics service) and Google Website Optimizer (a landing page testing tool) are key examples of products used by paid search marketers The outreach effort has evolved towards a mature dialogue with affected businesses and interested commentators and journalists, with heads of the product development teams making their insights widely available

Google’s recent move towards glasnost has been refreshing It appears that they have counseled

their key public faces to give direct, clear answers to questions about how products work, while maintaining confidentiality only where absolutely necessary

In fact, it’s the substance of their complex, automated systems that leads to most of the apparent obfuscation No amount of spokesperson explication or number of oversimplified PowerPoint presentations can make up for the fact that the AdWords program has always been complex, and has shifted from generation to generation quite rapidly, with nearly no external actor being competent enough to distinguish between a small feature change or a major new release

For example, in the early days of AdWords, Google invented a sliding scale to measure the exact minimum threshold of clickthrough rate (a relevancy requirement) that advertisers were required to meet to keep keywords enabled Officially, the cutoff was 0.5% But Google emphasized that this was actually “0.5% normalized for ad position.” This means that the relevancy policy, as measured by clicks on your ads, is relaxed as your ad moves down the page

to a less visible position (The 0.5% is no longer part of the formula, but the threshold for what counts as a “good” CTR is still normalized for ad position.) Many advertisers wanted to know exact numbers for CTR cutoffs in different ad positions, but Google never disclosed this In part, this was because this CTR cutoff would vary by keyword (industry norms) Therefore, disclosing all the figures would have disclosed proprietary search behavior information Google is unlikely

to disclose this level of detail on such matters, at least for the time being While literal-minded advertisers often found this coyness frustrating, pretty much everyone’s gotten used to it by now

In fall 2003, Google claimed to be raising that cutoff to 1.0% on some keywords in some situations, but the explanation for that was so confusing that virtually no one understood it The 1.0% cutoff formula, whatever it was, was quietly dropped

Google policy gets a lot more complicated than that Many features have not been amenable

to straightforward description because they’re based on proprietary algorithms and predictive formulas Pricing on content targeting, for example, is subject to a so-called Smart Pricing formula, where Google’s software determines the cost of a click (subject to your stated maximum bid) based on a predictive or actuarial formula that looks at which kinds of pages online are more likely to return a higher conversion rate to sales

Three motivations have underpinned these elaborate feature designs First, the brilliant Google engineering team always wants to take a stab at solving a problem through software Second, Google wanted to design AdWords as an elaborate, proprietary system to muddy the waters in its drawn-out patent dispute with Overture Finally, the more difficult Google made AdWords to copy, the less likely competitors would be to ape it Certainly, Overture and FindWhat moved

quickly to duplicate some of the most compelling features of AdWords—particularly matching

options But it takes considerable experimentation and development time to copy the more arcane

features Is feature even the right word for a formula based on complex interrelationships among

a host of variables? Google AdWords is not only multifeatured, it’s multiformulaed

Not Disclosing Details of AdSense Program Content targeting has been an ongoing source of

concern for advertisers Like Overture, Google is content to boast of major publishers and certain

“poster child” publishers who have participated in its AdSense program But there is poor disclosure

of not only the full list of participating publishers, but many other details of the AdSense program,

such as how pricing is determined, what the revenue share is, and more Advertisers see click costs,

and publishers see basic reports and receive checks in the mail, but a lot of detail is missing

Failure to Break Down Reporting of Ad Spend by Country of Origin One thing I always found

curious was that Google will let you choose which countries you show your ads in, but the

reporting interface doesn’t break down your click costs by country I’m sure that’s one feature

Google has on its to-do list, but it does stand out as an example of an area of nondisclosure that

was left to linger too long There have been numerous others

Google’s Service Revolution, or “First We Take Chelsea”

Relative to the program’s popularity, AdWords was administered by a skeleton staff of customer

support and editorial staff in the period 2002–2004 Since that time, Google’s headcount has

exploded The new staff complement runs the gamut from engineering talent, to advertising sales

execs, to customer support reps Their Manhattan office space in the trendy Chelsea area, still

a novelty to many longtime observers of the Mountain View, CA–based juggernaut, seemed to

me considerably more labyrinthine and bewildering in March 2007 when I visited it than it had been

only a year previously.22 As always, the food is tasty (organic or vegan if you want), and a fun-looking

selection of confections and beverages is always on hand Mountain View meets Manhattan, in

style Google appears to believe that if you’ve made it into the Village Voice, you’ve really made it.

Google added nearly 7,000 employees in the period between May 2007 and the same time

in 2008, when quarterly financial reports are published for Q1 This brought the company’s total

headcount to over 19,000 Prior to that, headcount grew at least 80% in each of the previous

four years That’s a breakneck pace While there may be some slowing of that pace due to the

consolidation of acquired DoubleClick employees, as Google expands into completely new

fields, its ravenous appetite for talent may well continue unabated for some time It’s likely that

this trend will eventually put a damper on profits, in spite of the notes of caution formally offered

by company management It’s also worth noting that much of this growth is international

At the end of 2002, the year AdWords’ pay-per-click version was launched, the company had only 682 employees None were stationed in a chic Manhattan neighborhood

As a result of the buildup, advertisers have noticed significantly increased service resources

Many of us who run agencies with multiple clients have permanent “agency reps” who assist

in expediting troubleshooting and answering difficult questions Sometimes, however, this

has spilled over into meddlesome behavior Accustomed to “self-serve,” some advertisers find

Google’s growing customer service staff “salesy” just by virtue of their very presence Achieving

a consistency of tone and behavior across the board becomes a challenge with such rapid growth

In light of all this, the company’s early technical orientation—automate where you can—is actually a strength, buffering advertisers from the most pesky effects of salespeople with too much time on their hands At the root level of AdWords is a “product” that works consistently (if

in complex fashion) Fundamental decisions about the advertising auction are driven by product managers incorporating feedback from advertisers and users, with only minimal input from this

“growing headcount.”

Google Underestimated Need for Customer Service At first, by using software to facilitate

editorial review, Google assumed that it was onto something big: a business model that could reap revenues even greater than Overture’s, while spending far less on human support As the program grew, it became difficult to ignore the huge gulf in service Google became aware that advertisers need a lot of hand-holding, and the pace of hiring accelerated Today’s attitude towards service appears to be nearly a 180-degree reversal from the early “don’t call us, we’ll call you” approach Because Google can attract good people and is so stringent in its hiring process, their new commitment to service could make it tough on the competition That being said, new concerns are now being raised about Google’s overhiring cutting into profitability

What about Rewards for Good Customers? There doesn’t seem to be a conclusive policy on how

to provide dedicated support for agencies and advertisers who spend more The overall level of service and attention is now so high that pinpointing exactly what criteria are used becomes less important, but for some literal-minded folk, the process may be murkier than they’d like It’s important to recognize, in any case, that few advertisers spending any decent amount are denied time and support, because Google has such vast resources So make use of it, no matter how big

or small you are

Certainly the “sales potential” of an agency or large advertiser (how much can Google expect them to spend in the future) appears to be a large part of their internal criteria for how much extra dedicated support to provide

Uncertain Relationships with Advertising and Marketing Agencies Third parties often advise

clients on how to use AdWords, or directly manage complex campaigns (That’s what my firm does, for example.) Observing Google’s progress in dealing with the environment of marketing and advertising agencies, they have never fully given up on the idea that advertisers really should

be coming directly to them for advice However, this situation appears to be improving

A Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program, launched in November 2004, was an interesting initiative that was supposed to sort out qualified from unqualified individual AdWords campaign management practitioners A company wide (agency) version of this is also available

This is more of a training and indoctrination program than anything else, however The reward to the qualified professionals and agencies is minimal at best, though ostensibly it helps advertisers avoid working with “hacks.”

Agencies certainly get much less out of Google in terms of financial rewards (such as a commission) than they have in any relationship in the history of advertising On a variety of fronts, including the Google-agency relationship, observers have asked the question: is Google sucking the proverbial oxygen out of the room? While consultative relationships have improved

and become more formalized—a key improvement, to be sure—many of the leading AdWords

consultants and evangelists must make their living from service fees alone, putting them too

close to break-even for comfort, while Google’s extreme profit margins continue to fuel the

company’s growth There are practical hurdles to be addressed before such traditional advertising

industry practices can be adopted, particularly in the “geek culture” which has served Google so

well However, the goodwill and indeed survival of the search marketing agency community, in

particular, may hinge on a recalibration of their financial relationship with Google

In its formative years, having the right (geeky, iconoclastic, world-beating) attitude at the right time was a big part of what made Google into a global powerhouse Some critics

predict that this same attitude could be its undoing Experts believe that the degree of Google’s

cooperation with the developer community (and I would add, the marketing ecosystem) will

determine whether the company has the staying power of a Microsoft.23

Coexisting with “Resellers” and the Ecosystem in General

Through the back door, Google may be studying ways of responding to the above analysis

Beyond AdWords, the company has new, highly technical products, like Google Analytics and

Google Website Optimizer It has initiated partner and reseller programs for these products By

instituting criteria for membership, working closely with that community on product development,

and figuring out ways of steering valuable consulting business to such resellers and partners,

Google can study the ins and outs of forming such productive relationships Such relationships

seem to be founded on classic models common in the software industry, especially in high-ticket

enterprise software What makes this unorthodox (as usual) is that Google’s products are often

free, and many of the customers for them are small to midsized businesses What will it mean for

my consulting firm to “resell” Google’s free product to a small customer, I wonder? Like many

others, including Google themselves, I can’t wait to unravel that puzzle

Google’s survival may well require it to balance its secretiveness (against increasingly feisty competitors like eBay and Microsoft) with a new openness in its dealings with certain partners

And as it enters adulthood, it might need to shed its laid-back attitude and become more strategic

in forcing users and advertisers (and welcoming reseller partners and application developers)

into proprietary, but widely shared, information technology architectures These architectures

may allow new uses of Google’s products, but when the goals of third-party applications conflict

with Google’s, Google can always block access or raise prices on certain types of usage An

example might be the recent acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft, making it the owner of

Atlas, a popular third-party bid management tool Microsoft owning a tool that can gather a

huge amount of search behavior and economic data about how real businesses are faring on the

AdWords platform may have caused some initial alarm at Google, but it doesn’t seem to have

helped Microsoft gain market share Regardless, through their ownership of Google Analytics

and now DoubleClick, Google has trumped competitors in the race for dominion over business

data pertaining to advertising performance across wide swaths of the online world, regardless of

whether that advertising is going through Google AdWords

Another model Google could pursue to ingratiate itself to the developer and business ecosystem is to release more thoroughly open-source products, as it has recently done with its

new browser, Google Chrome Such initiatives can be advantageous to the community and even competitors, while solidifying loyalty to Google as a source of innovation.

With specific regard to paid search, the introduction of the AdWords Application Program Interface (API), is promising insofar as it signals a heightened commitment to cooperate with third-party developers and agencies But it’s clear that Google does not view all third parties

as cooperative with its own goals and its customers’/users’ needs When it comes to third-party

“layers” such as bid management technologies, Google can price API tokens (the price for any automated access of the AdWords interface) and set the API terms of service in such a way that

it is costly to build certain kinds of software overlays Such overlays may be seen as superfluous annoyances, given that Google is also developing new features to help advertisers directly within the AdWords platform

Google will likely need to create more formal partnerships in the future, and invite more developers and agency types into ongoing dialogues about features and business relationships

They have already begun to formalize this process, putting together new “blue-ribbon” panel groups to assist in ongoing feedback about their products (including the AdWords interface) that will coexist with older means of gathering feedback from forums, users, and webmasters chosen for limited beta tests

In the past, the dialogue with the “affected community” often appeared to be limited to select groups of beta testers and informal chatter mediated by the likes of anonymous Google employees posting on forums, such as GoogleGuy These means of communication did little to forge long-term adult relationships with Google’s agency advocates, resellers, and technology partners Google has now begun to reach out to these latter players, which augurs well for Google’s long-term survival because it is more aligned with the lion’s share of online advertising dollars Geek-speak will never

be out of vogue in this medium, but it will now be tempered by business focus

Google’s unique culture was shaped first and foremost by its founders, moderated by technology veteran CEO Eric Schmidt The company’s ability to focus depends heavily on the ongoing involvement of top management in steering what has become an increasingly diversified enterprise To paraphrase the “risk factors” sections of the company’s SEC filings:

If Google should lose the services of Larry, Sergey, or Eric, it could be in big trouble Time will tell, but there is no reason to believe that Google’s top people have anything in mind other than overseeing its continued breakneck pace of growth and change By building a sound and consistent means of interacting with partners, Google will also build allies for the long term, allies who bring more resources and perspective to the table than the first wave of geeky foot soldiers who helped Google cross the chasm to global search supremacy in the first place

Endnotes

1 Josh McHugh, “Google vs Evil,” Wired (January 2003), archived at www.wired.com/

wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html

2 A useful primer on such matters, covering the whole range of contemporary administrative

theories, is Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, 3rd ed

(McGraw-Hill, 1986) Chronicles of dot-com startup desperation, greed, and excess such as

Po Bronson’s, The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley

(Broadway, 2000), don’t seem appropriate to grokking the Google work culture, which has always seemed relatively settled and self-confident as opposed to chaotic As nerdy and unconcerned as Google employees may appear to be about the traditional goals and structures of large corporations, keen observers (see David Vise, “Following a Rich

Tradition: Under the Avant-Garde Veneer, an Old-Guard Startup Strategy,” Washington

Post, June 24, 2004, E01) have argued that this powerhouse is very much a traditional Silicon Valley “insider” company Key early investors and advisers—including Jeff Bezos, John Doerr, and Michael Moritz—were all seasoned members of the Silicon Valley elite, and the hiring of Eric Schmidt as CEO introduced a degree of settledness

to a group that was already arguably mature beyond its years Of course, some sensationalistic press reports have suggested otherwise

3 For example, Danny Sullivan, “Where Are They Now? Search Engines We’ve Known &

Loved,” Search Engine Report, March 4, 2003, archived at searchenginewatch.com.

4 For the whole story and a detailed how-to guide to the new Yahoo Search Marketing

platform, see Mona Elesseily, Mastering Panama (Page Zero Media, 2007).

5 Search Engine Positioning (Webware Publishing, 2001) An earlier iteration, Achieving

Top 10 Rankings in Search Engines: Insider Trade Secrets from Positioning Pros, a spiral-bound self-published effort, was released in 1999 Marckini has explained to me that a book distribution partnership with rank-checking software provider WebPosition Gold fueled rapid growth in his business

6 See Danny Sullivan, “Death of a Meta Tag,” Search Engine Report, October 1, 2002

This is not to say that metadata are unimportant, just that webmasters were still worrying too much about keyword tags in particular, when Google likely ignores them

Description meta tags are still visible in many search results and are therefore worth using A proper discussion about the future of metadata would fill a book

7 Claire Woffenden, “AltaVista MD Resigns Over Unmetered Fiasco,” vnunet.com, August

30, 2000 The credibility of AltaVista’s claims had been challenged by a technology

“critique” site, The Register See Kelly Black, “AltaVista’s Unmetered Access Hoax,”

InternetNews.com, August 22, 2000

8 “Why the Open Directory Isn’t Open,” Traffick.com, March 30, 2000

9 Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Stanford University Department of Computer Science, 2000 Jon Kleinberg, widely considered to be the leading contributor to this generation of search technology,

has published many important papers on search, including “Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment,” 1998.

10 For those interested in such issues, Danny Sullivan, “The Bumpy Road to Maximum

Monetization,” Search Engine Report, May 6, 2002, archived at searchenginewatch.com,

is a must-read

11 Nick Wingfield, “Engine Sells Results, Draws Fire,” CNET News, June 21, 1996, archived at news.com

12 Jim Hu, “AltaVista to Auction Premier Ad Placement,” CNET News, April 15, 1999

13 Steve Harmon, “GoTo.com IPO Set to Go This Week,” InternetNews.com, June 16, 1999

14 “Paid Search Is Here to Stay,” Traffick.com, March 27, 2000

15 eMarketer offers a convincing summary of relevant online ad market share stats that serves to re-emphasize points made in the first two chapters here See eMarketer,

“Portals Dominate Online Ad Take,” April 24, 2007, archived at www.emarketer.com/

Article.aspx?id=1004838 Stats include Google and Yahoo now accounting for 91.9% of U.S paid search spending and the same two companies accounting for over half of all online ad spending

16 Robert Scoble, “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook Are Going to Kick Google’s

Butt in Four Years,” Scobleizer, Aug 26, 2007 Rejoinders include Dave Winer, “Google

and Search,” Scripting.com, Aug 27, 2007; Rand Fishkin, “I Used to Respect Robert Scoble’s Opinion,” SEOmoz, Aug 26, 2007 Archive locations: http://scobleizer

in-four-years/; www.scripting.com/stories/2007/08/27/googleAndSearch.html; and www.seomoz.org/blog/i-used-to-respect-robert-scobles-opinion, respectively

17 Indeed, the formats were similar enough that Overture contended that Google violated key Overture patents Following Yahoo’s acquisition of Overture, the two companies settled the ongoing dispute out of court In August 2004, on the eve of its IPO, Google awarded Yahoo 2.7 million shares of Class A Google stock as a lifetime license payment covering any relevant patents for the pay-per-click auction model

18 Figures from comScore qSearch, as told by James Lamberti in a presentation at SES San Jose in the panel on “The Search Landscape,” Aug 20, 2007

19 See Kevin Ryan, “SearchTHIS! Paid Listings Under Fire,” iMedia Connection, June 7,

2005

20 Mike Grehan, “Optimizing for Google Universal,” ClickZ, July 9, 2007.

21 Andrew Goodman, “Holiday Time, Quality Time: Two-and-a-Half Questions About

Quality Score for Nick Fox, Google,” Traffick, November 30, 2006, archived at

How to Play the AdWords Game