The bids on AdWords are soaring to new heights everyday. Some advertisers are even shelling out up to $10 per click. So, naturally the question arises - Is this complete madness or is there any logic behind such aggressive advertising?

To me, it does make some sense to bid aggressively if you have the right strategy in place. These are two scenarios you can consider:

1) Every client you acquire, on an average spends $12000 with you in a year. In this case, you do not mind spending 10% of the revenue as customer acquisition cost. Therefore you can comfortably bid $10 per click (provided you have a site which can convert 1 out of 120 visitors). Thus, looking at a lifetime value of a customer makes it a good investment.

2) If you have mastered the art of persuasion (or have hired a master of persuasion), and have come up with a website with converts well (visitor > customer conversion), every visitor you are driving to your website is equivalent to revenue . So go ahead, rock the boat and bid out all your competitors. You will get more customers and will also have lower customer acquisition cost. What more do you want?

So, expensive keywords bidding do work, if they are backed with high lifetime customer value and/or higher conversion on the website. And yes, those Internet marketing experts are not insane! In fact most of them are very smart.

So bid smartly!

I just made a blog post - Buying and selling websites.

Within minutes, I got a trackback. I was a bit puzzled at the lightening speed. I thought - how can someone read my entire article and blogged about it in less than a minute! I followed the link and found a new kind of spam, which is spreading rapidly on Internet, making life difficult for Internet users, Google and Adwords advertisers.

Here is the site which automatically picked up the post (courtsey - aggregators), modified the author to some ‘Wesley Warren’ and snapped up few lines from the post to link it to my blog for further reading. A smart blackhat SEO tactic for sure. This is a new technique to create keyword dense pages to attract better rankings and make "free money" by inserting Adwords everywhere as the only exit route from the page. These spam sites are bound to get high click-through rates because we all are lazy to type in a seperate web address in the browser address bar.

Google has to get rid of this new spam to throw up quality results, as these spam sites does not provide any valuable (or unique) content, but still escape the duplicate content filter of Google. I think it should not be very complicated for the Google experts since this time the duplicate content is in "organized data" i.e. blogs instead of "unorganized data".

I hope this nuisance is sorted out ASAP!

Yahoo announced that they are opening up their search results for third party data integration. This will allow third party to contribute to Yahoo search experience and make it more useful for their users. It will be interesting to see how other webmasters use this open search platform to gain popularity by sharing data with Yahoo, while still retaining their competitive edge, by virtue of their database, in their respective area. We can expect to experience a long-tail of innovation in days to come. This will help webmasters, visitors and Yahoo! A perfect win-win-win situation.

On the other hand, Google already have a open platform called Google Co-op, where anyone can create custom search engine. As per Google Co-op,

"Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website."

Google also offer Google Subscribed Links which in their own language they define as:

"Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more"

The challenge

However, both the services that Google offers, has a great deal of focus on promoting Google, Google Search & Google Subscribed Links. Again, they are not directly making any change in the Google Search (at least it has not be publicly explained how it will effect user experience of a normal search).

Therefore, Google Search or Yahoo Search cannot be termed as true "user contributed" or "Web2.0" as described by Tom O’Reilly. People won’t contribute unless they see that their contribution is making a positive impact in the search pattern and it is visible. In the current state both Subscribed Link and Yahoo Open Search will only help if a user wants to use the enhanced engine. Most Internet users will never switch these engines. Even if they are told the benefit of the plug-ins, how are they supposed to select the ones which will help them from a collection of thousands of user contributed plug-in channels? And what happens when new plug-ins come out?

Suggested solution

If search engines want to go the Web2.0 way with user contribution enhancing the overall experience and defining the way search engines display results, they need to bring user contributions to the mainstream. I feel that themed searches are the way to go. Google / Yahoo shall classify a particular user contributed plug-in into a theme. When a visitor wants to search for a business, he may choose a "Finding a business" theme. On a contrary when a visitor wants to learn about the subject he may chose the "Tutorial" theme.

Let us see an example.

We search for a very competitive keyword - "web design". This is the result we get.

If you see, there are three different intents that the search result satisfies. A person might be searching "web design" because he:

• Want to find a web design company (blue marker)
• Want to learn web design (red marker)
• Get web design resources (green marker)

All three intents are very different. Most people do not type-in their intent in the search box to make it a specific search, because they are not specialists in using search engines. Therefore, a search engine should suggest a possible intent and display results only related to the given theme. The theme model can best work when they are formed based on a collection of user generated plug-ins. Thus user generated content can find its way to the end user in an organized way.

It goes without saying that pulling in the user generated content directly into the main search result has its challenge of weeding out spam. But this seems to be the most logical way as of now. 

I recently came across a post by Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal about Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam.

It is shocking to see that Google has not been able to tackle such crude level of spam. We hear about site ageing, search engine saturation, quality one way link and latent semantic indexing as key factors that Google is using to improve search results. However what Loren has investigated in this case is absolutely shocking.

It shows how a million dollar keyword (i.e. payday loans made it to #1 in Google by using under-the-belt techniques like transparent links bundled in hit-counters offered by "free hit-counter website" in less than one year of existence and less than a dozen indexed pages with not-so-good quality content. It is really confusing.

We all presume that Google is very smart and to do well on this search engine, we have to be very smart. I just hope we do not need to be spam-smart

Read the complete research here - Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam

Abhishek

I recently read Ed Kohler’s comment where he has ranked the importance of various "Google Apps" programs in the following order:

1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet

However, I beg to differ.

In my personal experience I have found spreadsheet to be most used online collaborative tool of the entire office suite.

An online spreadsheet can be used in hundreds of ways for different purpose and help you collaborate much better for several reasons:

1. Spreadsheets keep data in a more organized way which can be further imported / exported as a comma delimited file and also imported / exported from a third party database

2. Some common usage can be sales tracking, basic level project tracking, bug management, issue tracking, any collaborative data gathering, managing petty accounts, etc. The list is endless. You cannot do all this using word processor or presentation tools online.

3. Every spreadsheet has several sheets, which enables various versions of inputs to be gathered from different sources, all put together in one place with a very easy-to-shuffle mechanism.

May be my opinion is based on the way I use Google Apps!
What is your opinion?

Abhishek

I am a big fan of Gmail because of its speed and simplicity. However Gmail makes life hell lot of difficult in some cases -

1. The Threading Bug
While threading, Gmail creates threads based on the “Subject” of the email. It should be “Subject” & “Sender/Reciepient”. It is very cumbersome to sort out and read mails in reference when you are dealing with two or more people with the same subject.

It all gets jumbled up.

2.  Keyboard shortcuts
Some of the keyboard shortcuts are so “short” that they get pressed accidentally. This results in a terrible anxiety.

3. Stupid web clips
It is very common to see stupid web clips like “Spam potato salad”. They do not make any sense and causes unwanted distraction.

I look forward to see these corrected very soon

Abhishek

I recently came across Google Answers (answers.google.com/answers/) and found that they are no longer accepting questions.

So Google closes down its Google Answers service. Though I did not sense this coming, but once I saw it, I felt this is a logical step Google has taken. I anticipate the following reasons:

1. Google does not want to concentrate its energy in “people intensive” business models as they are not very scalable. They are “technology focused” and backed with solid processing infrastructure.  They will like machines to do the work!

2. Google Answers is a pay-and-use model. This makes it “less popular” compared to free services available. Again the money Google makes out of it is so small that it does not make good business sense to continue with this.

Yahoo on the other hand has a free service which has gained much more popularity than Google Answers, putting up a tough competition.

3. I saw few answers which were very well researched and were done for only $10-$20. I doubt that they were done with an intention to make money. The fees was kind of a reward or a way to say “thank you”. It was not purely business driven.

4. Google in itself is a “Answering machine” and therefore it does not need Google Answers! (as suggested by my colleague, Mukul)

Overall, I feel that Google Answers was not fitting into the long term strategy of Google and a stiff competition in the same market by Yahoo (which is a very successful in leading people backed systems dating back from its famous directory) made them retract from this business.

Links to few discussions:

www.webmasterworld.com/forum35/3728.htm
www.webmasterworld.com/goog/3171877.htm

Hi Folks,

Gmail is fast.
Gmail is easy to use.
Gmail is virus and spam free.
Gmail is web based and universally accessible.

But, for most internet users, the biggest turn off is the fact that you cannot use your own domain name with Gmail. In fact no free webmail service is known to me which provides this facility as on today.

However there is a workaround! You can use the “cool and fast” interface of Gmail and send/receive mails using your “professional” email ID using your own domain name.

• Grab a domain name. Register it from any leading registrar
• Host the domain on a reliable server
• Create an Email account. Say you created yourname@yourdomainname.com
• Open a Gmail account say yourname@gmail.com
• Now you can set a forwarder in your server to forward all mails coming to yourname@yourdomainname.com to yourname@gmail.com. Thus you are keeping a copy of all incoming emails on your server and sending a copy to your Gmail account so that you can access it from there.
• Now log into your Gmail account. Go to Settings => Accounts. Click on Add another email address. Enter yourname@yourdomainname.com email address there and confirm.
• Now Google will send you a verification email. Since it will be sent to yourname@yourdomainname.com, it will be forwarded to yourname@gmail.com. So you can instantly check that and enter the validation code.
• Once validated, you can again go to Settings => Account and mark this account as your default account.
• Now, whenever you will send an email, it will go from yourname@yourdomainname.com even when you are sending it from your Gmail account. And of course all replies will come to your gmail interface as yourname@yourdomainname.com emails are forwarded there.

Enjoy the productivity enhancement Gmail offers to you without losing on your brand image.

Regards

Abhishek

Hi Folks,

Google is doing everything in their capacity to weed out spam and return meaningful results for search queries. However it seems that they missed on an important aspect!

Concept

A good quality website will definitely have proper (if not accurate) spelling and grammar. Using advanced spelling and grammer checking routines, it is very much possible to weed out spam and provide higher rank to high quality websites.

Benefits

This approach has many advantages:

1. Quality will get preference over quantity

2. Sites which are ranked lower due to poor quality spelling and grammar have a chance of imporving ranks by correcting spelling and gramatical errors. This will initiate a rush to improve user experience and we will be able to see better quality sites all over.

3. Sites which use more “generic terms” and less “proper nouns” will get higher rank as they are simple to understand and are written with a generic audience in mind.

4. Spam sites which simply puts in pages generated from search results will get totally eliminated as they will have broken sentences.

5. Links farms, FFA, Generic directories can be identified and ignored unless specifically requested by the user.

Implementation

The implementation can be further enhanced by setting up a baseline and quality benchmarks, just the way Google did for link popularity (Page Rank).

Sites can be evaluated on a regular basis based on the following parameters:

• Total number of words in the page
• Spelling errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Gramatical errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Another parameter which can be useful is how the page validates. Is the page full of HTML errors? Is it XHTML validated? Is the CSS validated?
• How often the page have been updated?
• How often the site has been down?

This data can be collected over a period of time and can be be used to determine how the site has improved or declined in quality.

Can it be implemented?

Now the question is - “How difficult is the implementation?”

I have recently been watching some of the changes introduced by Google in order to refine their ranking algorithm:

a) Penalty being imposed for duplicate content
b) Reciprocal links getting lesser weightage than one-way links
c) Usage of Latent semantic analysis (LSA) to find relevant related results

If we consider the total processing power required for each of these refinements, we can safely assume that they have enough processing power to implement spelling and grammar check.

I will not be surprised if Google is already working on this. Therefore it is advised that try to improve the above mentioned parameters before the magical google update strikes you!
I hope to see “quality based ranking” in action soon.
Abhishek