Caydel’s SEO Blog

The other day, I posted a bookmark.html file containing all the links Rand Fishkin mentioned as being in his bookmark list. I put a comment in Rand’s post, and he ended up linking to me in the main body of the post.

Now, I don’t get tons of traffic through this blog, so the effects of the SEOmoz link love were quite noticeable. I got nearly 120 visitors through the SEOmoz link in the last 48 hours, resulting in approximately 325 extra pageviews. Additionally, my Feedburner Subscriber bar is showing 72 subscribers today over 34 subscribers yesterday. Of course, I take this with a grain of salt - the Feedburner number varies by as much as 10 subscribers on a regular basis, depending on how many new posts and traffic my blog gets in a day.

At any rate, thanks for the link love Rand - it’s been like a shot of Viagra for my blog. Hmmm… I wonder what that will do for my Adsense ads…

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While every webmaster works hard to get traffic, it appears that one of our community members took it a little too literally…

Abhishek Tripathi, owner of The SEO Hut, good friend and a regular in the WebmasterRadio.fm Chat seemed to drop off the face of the planet last week. After a number of days of silence, Abhishek has come back online. It turns out he was hit by a car:

(21:52:26) Abhishek: I was just standing near the Uni entrance gate man with my friends … about to head home ….
(21:52:49) Abhishek: when this corolla fellow rammed into the gate …
(21:58:22) Abhishek: he first hit the wall …then turned left and hit me and my friends directly ….
(21:59:24) bvuyk: oh my goodness - was anyone else hurt?
(22:00:36) Abhishek: yep me and another guy … one girl and the the security guard ….

While he is now the proud owner of a fractured leg, fortunately Abhishek walked (or crawled or something) away with his life. Best wishes during your recovery, Abhishek!

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Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz posted his Firefox sidebar list, containing links to the 60-70 sites he visits on a daily or weekly basis. Although he doesn’t give away any trade secrets within his list, it makes for a great comprehensive who’s who in the Search/SEO worlds, and is sure to turn up at least a few valuable sites you’ve never read.

In order to make Rand’s list a little easier to place in your own browser, I have created an exported bookmarks file. Just save the bookmarks.html file below to your system, and import it into your browser.

Rand’s Sidebar Links

P.S. I used my all-powerful-editor’s privilege to correct a glaring ommision under his ‘Blogs’ list.
P.P.S. You know you’ve hit it big in the blog world when you can post about reorganizing your bookmarks and still get tons of backlinks from it…

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Grr… if there is one shortcoming with Google’s PPC advertising system, it’s that whenever you mention it by name, and ads by the aforementioned advertising system running on my homepage all jump over to spammy tutorials, ebooks etc. on how to get rich by using it.

The net is so flooded with these ads, such as ‘How to get rich using ‘ or similar, that I bet these ads don’t even get a decent clickthrough at any rate. Perhaps it’s irrational, but I want to try to avoid them. Therefore, I am seeing how long I can go without speaking ‘the name I will not say’.

In the meantime, does anyone know of any way to set negative keyword for your adsense? If that feature is available, I do not know about it. If it is not available, perhaps Google’s PPC system team might consider implementing it…

P.S. yes, I know… I filed it under ‘that’ category…..

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Yesterday, I read an interesting post by Jeremey Zawodny in which he calls out Google for blatantly stealing Yahoo’s template for the IE7 download page and using it for their own, after changing a few branding marks.

Late last night/early this morning Matt Cutts posted an (un)official response to Jeremy’s accusation, apologizing to the Yahoo UI designer whose template was stolen:

I can only speak for me personally on this. If Jeremy looked into it and says that it wasn’t a template from Microsoft, I believe him. That would mean that the Yahoo! page was used as a template for Google’s IE7 promo page. I can’t say why someone at Google would decide to do that, but to the Yahoo! UI designer whose page was copied: my apologies. In my personal opinion, it sucks when someone else copies a page layout without attribution.

Matt quickly followed this up with a few comments and pictures pointing out how he imagines Google can sympathize with the designer seeing as how every move Google has made with regards to the design and formatting of their PPC ads was quickly copied by Yahoo (in addition to other PPC companies, I’m sure).

At the very end of his post, Matt offered this challenge:

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

This puts Yahoo in an interesting position - step up and admit that many of the ‘innovations’ they have applied to their PPC system were merely take from Google, or else sit down, pretend they didn’t see it, and drop the whole copying issue.

Good stuff - I love seeing point/counterpoint happen like that.

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Just in case you haven’t read it yet, I would urge you to check out Andy Beal’s recent post Exclusive: Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%.

Andy describes a sit down he had with Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder, in which Ghosemajumder shows him an internal presentation describing Google’s click fraud practice.If what Google says is true, than the only fraud going on may be on the part of the ‘click fraud companies’ that have popped up since the Lane’s Gifts vs. Google class action suit this year. If nothing else, even if the rate is higher than the 2% that Google claims it is, I have no doubt it still has to be *very* well below the 20-30% claimed by self-titled ‘click fraud analysts’.

On the other hand, these numbers are directly from Google; this may just be spin to try to reassure their advertisers. What I would really like to see is Google hiring on a responsible third-party company or individual to audit the Google click fraud monitoring procedures. That may be the only way we can see the real numbers.

What do you think?

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A lot of webmasters talk about split-testing their ad layouts, trying to determine which layout or block position gives a higher CTR. Well, perhaps you should take it a step further.

I had a page on one of my older sites which targetted a fairly well-paying aspect of the site’s niche. I was making on average about $0.20 per click on this page, which wasn’t bad; most of the pages on the site have consistently been paying in the range of $0.05-$0.10 per click.

This week, I had a writer rewrite the page. The new version was slightly longer, but had a different feel and phrasing than the original. I updated the page with the new content late last night. This evening, roughly 24 hours after posting the new version, the page was delivering me an average $1.35 per click, nearly 7x the average I was previously getting.

It may be to early to completely rule out the possibility of today just being a fluke, but I suspect that the slightly different phrasing used when the page was re-written triggered different ads than the previous version. Perhaps a word was used in the new version that was not in the previous version. Perhaps a certain phrase came together which never appeared previously. I don’t know.

No matter what you pay per article, I would suggest that it is definately worth writing two versions of an article or page, and split test the content to determine which version gives you the best CPC. Even if you pay $25 per article, the difference will eventually be made up.

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