Archive for September, 2008

• Spectacle Recycling, Content Match And MFA

  Part of what we do is SEO and conversion improvement, so I tend to take a close look at other sites that rank well in organic search, to see how they are constructed and whether they work only for the site owner, or work for the visitor too. That was thrown into highlight this week [...]

  September 28th, 2008

• SEOMoz article on IIS

  I blogged about some of the issues involving IIS and case folding over on SEOmoz. Some interesting suggestions.
  Best comment so far from “G-Force”, to embed some ASP code in each page that checks the file name, and 301’s to the “right” case variant. Heavy work - individual page edit for each unique page. Unless, hmm, [...]

  September 26th, 2008

• Automated Bidding on AdWords

  We have done a lot of our work on AdWords using the API and programs that we’ve written. We’ve done some work with fast paced advertising - advertisers with a large inventory of rapidly changing stock with different prices (think “travel”). I was reminded of this when I saw a comment on this blog by [...]

  September 22nd, 2008

• PPC Auction Optimisation - Budget Wrangling

  In the introductory article about paid search auctions, I dismissed the simple “bid ordered” auction as being less effective at revenue generation than the generalised second price auction. I also implied that an opaque auction - one in which it is not clear on what search queries you are actually bidding and where the competitor [...]

  September 21st, 2008

• Google UK HQ, SEO Failure

  Search for “belgrave house, london -hotel” and you get this:

  Note the missing description for the property? Yup. It is a flash site with no Open Directory Project listing. OK, so Google don’t own the building, but I find it slightly amusing that the UK HQ of the worlds biggest search engine is housed in a [...]

  September 16th, 2008

• AdWords Quality Score Changes To Correct A Design Defect?

  Earlier this year I observed several accounts where the impression volume had drastically decreased, badly damaging the clients’ business. Google insisted that they had changed nothing. To those damaged, it looked like an organised change of some sort. There have been other instances, such as around July 11th, when another step change was visible to [...]

  September 16th, 2008

• Spiders, IIS Caseless, Cookieless and Search Engine Indexes.

  Digging into IIS web server log files is quite interesting. I’ve developed a number of in-house tools over the years that help understanding why web spiders go where they do. I’ve been reworking them from an Apache dominated view to include some of the things that IIS does.
  You can see requests like “GET /(J(1)S(4dab…..))/” [...]

  September 15th, 2008

• Does AdWords Starter Edition Define Evil?

  Google has a pretty good reputation built on Organic Search results and a well known corporate rule “You Can Make Money Without Doing Evil“. However, Google’s behaviour towards advertisers appears to run from a different rule book, in which that rule is absent. This apparent reduction in ethics now seems to be coming back to [...]

  September 13th, 2008