SEO by the Sea

On April 14^th, Matt Cutts wrote about hidden links on his blog, and he also discussed a best practice to disclose paid links towards the end of his post:

The other best practice I’d advise is to provide human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid. You could put a badge on your site to disclose that some links, posts, or reviews are paid, but including the disclosure on a per-post level would better. Even something as simple as “This is a paid review” fulfills the human-readable aspect of disclosing a paid article. Google’s quality guidelines are more concerned with the machine-readable aspect of disclosing paid links/posts, but the Federal Trade Commission has said that human-readable disclosure is important too:

The link Matt included in that paragraph points to a December 12, 2006, Washington Post article titled FTC Moves to Unmask Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Endorser Must Disclose Link to Seller.

The word “Link” in that title is a little misfortunate in that it isn’t talking about hyperlinks but rather relationships of one type or another. Unfortunately, the Washington Post article didn’t link to the FTC Opinion letter that they wrote about, but after searching around, I do believe that I was able to find a copy of the Commercial Alert FTC Staff Opinion Letter.

Continue reading Google, Paid Links, and the FTC Staff Letter On WOM

Is Google becoming less of a search company, and more of an advertising company? These two patent applications (discussed in part 1 and part 2) cover an advertising system that include ads on television, radio, podcasts, audio and video streams, and telephones, and while most involve determining relevancy, few concern serving search results.

The Goog 411 service does provide local search on the phone, and a video search example provided also allows for search possibly along the lines of what podzinger offered. Google TV Ads and radio ads focus upon ease of advertising, determinations of relevancy, and the serving of ads, but are a move away from Google’s search background.

The patent applications do move on to cover such additional topics such as determinations of ad spots, how filters might work for ads, and revenue sharing between Google and publishers. Will this advertising model be the one that emerges from Google in serving audio ads on televsion, radio, internet, and the phone?

Continue reading Targeted Audio Advertising with Google Part 3 – Conclusion

My last post was on examples from Google’s recent audio patent applications. Today, I’m going to take a closer look at the processes described in the patent filings. The two documents are:

• Using speech recognition to determine advertisements relevant to audio content and/or audio content relevant to advertisements
• Advertising with audio content

Assumptions behind Google’s advertising

Interactive advertising lets advertisers target ads to a receptive audience, and the relevancy of targeted ads makes it more likely that the ads will be useful to end users. Query-based keyword targeting has been effective in delivering relevant ads, and AdSense has been an effective way of serving ads that are relevant to the content found on Web pages.

Continue reading Targeted Audio Advertising with Google Part 2 – Relevancy

I ran up to New York last Tuesday for the Search Engine Strategies Conference, and had a chance to spend some time with a number of friends whom I hadn’t seen in a while. It wasn’t long enough, but it was great to do some catching up, and to meet some new folks. Thanks to everyone whom I had a chance to spend a little time with.

One of the conversations that I had involved Google’s new Goog 411 telephone voice search. I hadn’t tried it out, but it was interesting to see that the service provides paid search results as well as Web results.

We know that Google has been working on bringing advertising to radio, and they are doing some testing of Adwords with targeted audio ads.

Continue reading Targeted Audio Advertising with Google, Part 1 – Examples

Is the print advertising world ready for contextual ads in magazines and newspapers?

A new Yahoo! patent application explores a process which allows the matching of concepts in articles for print, and advertisements to show up beside them:

[0013] According to one embodiment of the invention, advertisements are automatically matched with to-be-published written materials, such as articles, based at least in part on the concepts to which the advertisements and the written materials pertain. As used herein, the word “concept” refers to topics, ideas, subjects, phrases, etc. The concepts to which the advertisements and the written materials pertain are automatically determined so that no human intervention is required.

The overview section of the patent application tells us that this determination happens without human intervention, but the more detailed description provides one version where the publisher is given a choice of advertisements to show that are contextually related to pages, and choses amongst them.

A publisher could also determine how much flexibility there might be in different parts of a publication for advertisements to match broadly or narrowly the concepts found upon articles in the publication.

Continue reading Yahoo! Contextual Advertisements in Print Publications

If you own a web site, Google wants your traffic details, or at least they want to be able to estimate your traffic and the behavior of visitors at your web site. It’s something that might help them uncover click fraud by discovering unusual amounts of traffic and unusual behavior by visitors to sites.

They’ve been handing out tools to let people measure their own traffic, such as Google Analytics.

They’ve also recently announced the release of Website Optimizer (beta), which is a program that lets Adwords users test different variations of their landing pages. It appears that between the two programs, and some reasonable guesses, Google might be able to use the information provided to help build traffic models that might be used to help them combat illegal clicks.

A new patent application from Google tells us: Continue reading Google at the Crime Scene: Profiling Websites, Estimating Traffic, and Combating Click Fraud

Last month, news leaked out that Google was buying Adscape Media, which specializes in providing advertising within games. It appears that Google was already working on how to show ads during gameplay, and how to collect information about the users playing those games.

A new patent application from Google looks at ways of determining user information for use in targeting ads, and determining and serving relevant ads in video games. They take into account a person’s interests and gaming behavior by monitoring and making inferences from their online gaming activities.

Continue reading Google Games Patent Filing on Targeted Advertisements

Google’s Inside Adwords blog announced a limited test of a new advertising system on Tuesday, which would allow advertisers determine the value of certain actions (pay-per-action, or ppc).

The AdWords Help Center has an even more extensively detailed explanation of what Pay-Per-Action is, and how it might work. in their Pay-Per-Action FAQ. In both, there’s discussion that under this kind of approach, the advertiser would determine what value a pay-per-action add might cost.

A new patent application from Google explores this concept of having advertisers define the value of a click, or impression, or action – such as a specifically defined conversion. This includes how much an advertiser might pay to appear on a specific site, or what they might be willing to pay for a certain number of impressions or clickthroughs for different keyword phrases. Pay-per-action is one part of this larger system, and the system could also include offline advertising options.

A long and detailed document, the patent application is worth a read if you engage in purchasing advertising through a search engine:

Continue reading Letting Advertisers Decide Upon Values of Ads: Impressions, Click-Throughs, and Pay-Per-Action