Caydel’s SEO Blog

A bunch of bloggers have been commenting today on the ‘misspelling’ in Google’s Valentine’s day logo this morning, which seems to say ‘Googe’ rather than ‘Google’.

The Puget News decided to do a quick bit of research into ‘Googe’ to determine whether this was a mistake or not, and they discovered the following:

1. ‘Googe’ may refer to the 16th century poet Barnabe Goorge who is mostly famous for the line, ‘I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die’ which is obviously in the romantic, Valentine’s spirit
2. ‘Googe’ could be a reference to bassist Debbie Googe of My Bloody Valentine, an Irish-British rock band from the early 1990’s.
3. Lastly, it could be referring to the word ‘Googe’ as used in the Urban Dictionary. Warning: possibly NSFW, and just nasty anways…

So, hopefully that sheds some light onto the mystery. Once again, hat tip to The Puget News!

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Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but Michael Gray (Graywolf) made a post about ‘MFA’-style pages he found while clicking around in his GMail.

I checked in my own account, found the pages in question, and found that there was more to this than Graywolf mentioned. At the top of the page, they have a 4X3 or 3X4 ‘Sponsored Links’ section containing Adsense ads, fairly well targetted to the subject you clicked on.

Below the Adsense-type ads, they have a list of 4-7 ‘Related Pages’ which point to news articles relating to the topic you clicked on. The ad copy is the headline of a news story, with the text containing the first sentence or so of the story itself.

Of course, these ‘Related Pages’ are also ads. For instance:

Layton hopes to mobilize Cdns against ATM fees; says banks don’t …
Canada.com - 8 hours ago
TORONTO (CP) - New Democrat leader Jack Layton is launching a ..

has a URL pointing to: (broken into 3 lines to solve formatting issues)

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/pageclick?client=ca-gmail&type=1&
redir_url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html
%3Fid%3Dd7e600a2-5817-48cf-a902-015cb247c737%26k%3D49477

What program do these news companies use to get these ads? Is this a custom offering by Google where news sources can automatically attach keywords to their stories to trigger links in the ‘Related Pages Section’? How are these paid? Or has this been in existence for a long time already, and I just don’t know about it?

I wouldn’t mind learning more about this. For regularily updated news-type sites, this could be a great way to get relevant, interested readers, better than even ‘normal’ Adwords advertising. Please, comment if you have seen these before!

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Andy Beal and Barry Schwartz are reporting today that there is yet another Toolbar PR update.

When the Jan. 9 update hit, it only appeared to affect older, established sites. Most of my sites 18 months or older had some changes last time around, but none of my newer pages had any changes. This blog, for instance, which is nearly a year old remained at a solid PR0.

This latest update appears to affecting more sites. *All* of my older, established sites dropped PR by a point while new pages, such as this blog, finally got their first Toolbar PR value.

The fact that the PR dropped on the older pages, which have only been growing over time, leads me to wonder if perhaps the displayed PR values have been normalized differently this time around. For example, does a new PR3 signify a higher ranking than a PR5 may have a year ago?

Many of my pages which were previously PR5 are now PR3-PR4, despite major increases in relevant links from a variety of *trusted* sources. I find it hard to believe that these pages could have *lost* value over time in the eyes of Google. I am not so confident to believe that it is totally impossible that my pages could ahve gone down in quality over time, yet the fact that this trend appears across *all* my pages seems to indicate that something has changed.

Have you noticed anything different? What kinds of gains / losses have you seen this time around.

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LinkedIn has been generating a signifigant amount of buzz in the last few weeks. First, a lot of noise was made over the launch of the new LinkedIn Answers section, then Guy Kawasaki’s great ‘10 Ways to Use LinkedIn‘ post.

Where is the value of LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a network of over nine million professionals, with full profiles on them including their education, their industry, and their work histories. In short, LinkedIn has control over a staggering amount of data. This information is a goldmine for data mining purposes, market research, or any one of a thousand different uses.

But that is only the smallest part of the value of LinkedIn. The real value becomes apparent when you go to Account Settings > Advertising in your profile and read the following text:

LinkedIn is developing or has developed a method to serve ads based upon the content in your LinkedIn profile. Any time you are logged into LinkedIn, the ad code they are developing will likely read a cookie in your browser to gain the stored profile ID, then delve into your profile to pull out the information to serve ads.

Think of the value in this - they know your industry and your work experience. They could tune advertisements exactly to what you as a professional want and need to see. This technology could be worth potentially millions to the Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing programs. For all we know, LinkedIn is already licensing out this data to other companies for marketing purposes.

Before too long, we will likely see LinkedIn purchased by either Google or Yahoo! in order to get control of this data. It could potentially form a large part of the algorithm of either company when determining which ad to display on a site to a given end user.

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About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post ‘Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword‘. In it, I made the suggestion based upon an article posted by EGOL at SEOmoz that in order to prevent certain types of ads from showing, Google should allow us to set negative keywords for the Adsense ads on a site.

In the comments, Joost de Valk informed us that Google is indeed beta-testing such a program, and that he is actually part of the limited beta-test.

I know for a fact that Google is testing with negative keywords like that, since I have been testing it myself

I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads. And no, no release date…

That is extremely encouraging - I can’t wait for this feature to be released to the general public. There are some categories of ads that I would *really* like to see banished from my site (such as the $0.07 CPM ads Google is running advertising Adwords and Adsense). I think that this toold could really help Google - I think the publishers know what is on their site better than Google does. It seems every day I see ads which are close to a good match, yet still manage to miss the point of the page entirely, and thus result in unsatisfactory, off-topic ads which probably don’t get the CTR they should.

Plus, this would be great for people who have definitions of ‘family friendly’ that are perhaps more stringent than those of Google. I don’t really want to see seduction tips and other crocks advertised on my site, regardless of what one or two keywords I may have that might trigger those ads.

What do you think?

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EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.

EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.

Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.

What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.

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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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