Category: Google

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The Truth on Affiliates for AdWords and Organic Placement

I was asked this question recently:

“Writing for healthcare websites is one of my specialties. An owner of a start-up company in the field wants me to work for him part-time. The company is an affiliate site and makes money from a third party whenever somebody fills out a form at his website. Is it worth my time and effort? Will this site make money?”

That’s an interesting question. Google has long had a “hate” relationship with affiliate sites both organically and on Google AdWords. In fact Google will only show one site, either the parent site or one of the many affiliate sites on a search query for Google AdWords. The key penatly appears to be a duplicate content both in the organic and paid search arena.

The truth is that it is very hard for a website to place when it is an affiliate site both organically and in AdWords. The only way an affiliate site will rank is if the look and feel of the site is very different from the parent site AND the content is different from the parent site. Unfortunately, this is typically not the case. So, do I recommend investing time and money in affiliate websites and investing in promoting them with Google AdWords? No I don’t.

If you are thinking of investing in an affiliate online business. Be very cautious, you may spend a lot of money and find out that Google is simply filtering out your site from the results both organically and in paid searches.

 

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Google is Now Indexing Facebook Comments

Don’t get too scared yet as Facebook probably will not allow this for long, but all the Facebook comments from your wall and from websites using the Facebook comment widget can cause your comments to appear in the Google index.

“This is not something that Facebook have actively introduced, but rather is a change brought about by Google and the way in which they index comments. Now when you comment both within Facebook and on a third party site, that comment is now crawlable by Google, leading to it being indexed on the search engine.”

This change to how comments are used and appear in Facebook has been done this past year to allow a more viral exchange or information within Facebook and Google has recently grabbed the content. To read more information, I suggest you read these two articles: Two important changes coming to Facebook Comments and Facebook adds ‘subscribe’ feature to comments. Both give more information about this important change and one that may be able to be leveraged for now for search placement.

Of important note is also the change on Facebook, clearly driven by Google+ to allow others to subscribe to your news feed if you have allowed this setting even if they are not your friends. This is particularly concerning for parents and those that really do not want to share their status updates with the world.

“Facebook is also letting people subscribe to news feeds of users they’re not friends with. Upon doing so, they will see the public updates the person has shared on their profile. And like with friends, users will be able to determine how many of those updates they will see in their news feed.” Read the full article.

With some of these important changes that Facebook has made in the recent months, it is now more important than ever to review your own account privacy settings and that of your children to assure that you are clear on what is being shared with the public and what is not to be shared. On my own personal profile, which I had locked down to friends only, the default button is Public meaning that by not changing the button for each status update or at the minimum making sure it is set to Friends, I unknowingly had been publishing my personal status updates publicly. Make sure you check as well. There are some things I just really don’t want to share with Google or the wider world on Facebook.

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AdWords Broad Match Modifier Explained

I am loving the Google AdWords broad match modifier! If you aren’t using it yet in your AdWords account this blog post will help you to know why you should and get you going fast.

First, this is what Google AdWords says about broad match modifiers:

“The broad match modifier is an AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match, and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.”

Here’s a link to the full information in the AdWords help center on broad match modifiers to help you understand them better.

For accounts that are getting too many impressions and a low click through rate use of broad match modifiers will better target your AdWords program and get a better result as well as improve your CTR. For accounts that have low impressions, as you are only using phrase match and exact match keywords, broad match modifiers will open up a whole new set of possibilities that can really generate some sales action for your account and increase targeted impressions.

Here’s how you use them. Suppose your keywords are built around booking vacations to Hawaii. In your AdWords account you may have a list of keywords like this:

Hawaii vacations
“Hawaii vacations”
Hawaii travel agent
“Hawaii travel agent”
hotels in Hawaii

With the broad match keywords you may be getting lots of “looky-lous” and clicks on even keywords like rentals or hostels in Hawaii. Or you may not be getting enough action or having to pay too high a price per click.

Here’s what a few broad match modifiers may look like for these keywords:

Hawaii +travel +agent
Hawaii +hotel +reserve
vacation +Hawaii +reservation
hotels +Hawaii +book

For me, I take the most important word in the phrase and put that first then I put a space and then a + (without a space) in front of the keywords that I am requiring for Google to have in the users search query to see my ad. With this approach you can get a lot more traffic that is targeted to keywords you consider important.

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Even Google Itself Says Turn Off AdSense for Mobile

I have been working with the agency team at Google.com in the AdWords division. It seems that we got recognized not for being a Google AdWords Certified Partner, or for being a Google Engage for Agencies Member, but for managing so many accounts with a big ad spend. Yeah, maybe Google will send me a “token” Christmas present again this year.

Really kidding aside, I did want to share one very important point that Suzanne L. at the Google AdWords Agency shared with me.

“We recommend turning off AdSense for mobile in your content campaign. Our customers have found that the conversion rate is very low.”

Interesting! We don’t have too many clients advertising in content, but we do have a few. Of one that she and I looked at together a full one half of the clicks was being delivered in the mobile network. So, take it from the mouth of Google, turn off AdSense for Mobile if you are in the content network; save yourself some cash.