The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

If your work or business depends on Search (which is almost everyone) then have a read of the above article. It just goes to show that there may be something in what he says and it backs up what I have been saying about Google for a while now. Google are not bad (no worse than any other company out there to make money) its just that they have too much of a hold on commerce on the internet. Microsoft did (and does) hold a monopoly on OS’s etc but we don’t actually need their software to conduct business (in the strictess sense). You can get other software that does the same job. Google though is the gateway of the internet for the majority of users and through their dominance of search and paid listings they basically have the power to do what they want and guide users in whichever way they see fit. They also have the power to punish those players that do not play by their rules – I am not saying that they do this but they are certainly in a position to be able to. Anyway, read it and see what you think.

I am sure that most of you have already noticed this but some of you are probably unaware or don’t really care. If you know anyone who isn’t really computer literate but still go on the internet for certain things (probably about 70% of people online) and have watched them on google you might have noticed that they click on the very first link that shows up in the results. This first link is usually an advert. I have watched my mum on many occasions look for something, click on the first link and then wonder why the content is not really what she was looking for. I have explained this to my mum but she is still getting used to navigating around to find what she wants and she forgets all the little bits such as sponsored ads etc. So how many companies are paying for clicks like this? I would take a good guess that most of the clicks on these very first sponsored links are done by people like this. Perhaps some advertising campaigns are setup for this but I can imagine that most are not.

The main crafty issue that I don’t like is when Google shows an ad for a company when they are the very first result in the rankings and they always place these ads in the top sponsored links section meaning that most people see what they were searching for so will click on it costing the company money for traffic they would have gotten anyway. I noticed this a while back but didn’t really give it much thought until I was creating a campaign for someone. The last search I completed was for iSale software on the mac. If it is still the same you will notice the first result is correct but the ad above is for the exact same link. Your telling me that Google could not automatically work this out? They could but won’t because I can imagine that a lot of their revenue is created by doing this. I don’t know if Google has something under the hood that will sort this out in the admin, but considering they are showing the ad in the first place I doubt it or else why show it?

I don’t know Google Adsense well enough yet to know if there is a way that you can create filters to get around this, but I would recommend companies to take a look into this so they can see how much money they might be paying for traffic they would have gotten for free. If you have analytics you may be able to see what the search result was in the same way normal referrals work but, any click from Adsense gets redirected through the google system (obviously) so perhaps they do not include the same meta information they normally would do. If this is the case you begin to get a better understanding why they are not doing this.

So what do I think Google should do?

Firstly – They should remove the first sponsored links that blend in so well with the search results. I think this ruins it to be honest. Its easy enough for me to ignore them but what about the majority of users who have no clue what they are and just click on them thinking that they are the results.. They get around this because they put on ’sponsored links’ and it removes them of responsibility but they know that in the majority of cases people will click on them not really understanding what they are.

Secondly – They should stop putting paid ads in the results when you appear in the first few results of a page and the user should be able to specify exactly how they want this. They might say show my ad when I am not in the first result or in the first 10 results. It’s their money so they should have control over this functionality.

I have started to create some content sites with the aim of providing decent content which is optimised to enable maximum return from ad placements. The purpose of this is not to make a huge sum of money (although it would be nice ) and it is probably impossible anyway. The purpose is to cover the costs of my hosting and domain fees. As any will know these add up. I spend a lot of time doing work on the internet and not getting paid so I thought I might as well spend some time getting and creating useful content with the aim of making some money to cover my costs.

Anyway my point is that I have been browsing the forums regarding Google adsense for some tips and have been amazed by some of the things that I read. It would appear that there are quite a few people who are out there just finding ways to con the system and then moaning when they find their accounts have been terminated – Doh!. It would appear that quite a few also have no clue about how intelligent the Google fraud detection system is and probably don’t intend to actually commit fraud, but don’t realise that they actually are.

There seems to be lots of questions about zero value clicks. Zero value clicks can happen for a multitude of reasons. None more likely than a click being determined to be invalid by Google’s fraud detection system. This is also the primary reason accounts get banned. This has a lot to do with what I was going on above. People also seem to forget that public service adverts will be displayed when you first open an account. This is just until the Google bot can get to your site to work out the best ads to serve. Just remember that you will not get paid for these and they tend to be charity ads. All this is very clear when signing up for an Adsense account as all the information is provided for you to read. Another thing that may not be that clear but you can find out by reading the forums is that some ads are charged for by CPM (Cost/Thousand) and these seem to be juggled by Google depending on your overall traffic and the success of your clicks I suppose.

The AdSense system is meant to and I am sure does show the most beneficial ads at the time they are actually shown. This makes not just them but you the most possible money so it is in both of your interests. The system works, but none the less, people still constantly question it. There are problems, Google is hopefully addressing them as they have the resources. Just because a single click gave you nothing, don’t freak out, if you are watching click by click, or even can watch click by click, either you have very little traffic, or a lot of time on your hands.

AdSense has over the last couple of days added a couple of good posts to their blog to help publisher diagnose low earnings, or earnings decreases by explaining how to read an analyze reports to help find out what is happening. Just remember that if you use it properly you will make money and if you don’t it can be because of many reasons, but most likely that your site is no good. Take all this information using any and all of the tools you can get your hands on (such as Google’s analytics funny enough) and find out what your visitors are doing, what content they seem to like, what they don’t like, how long they are staying and then optimise the hell out of it accordingly.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is part of it of course but it is all part of the long term success. You may need to think about spending some money on advertising to get some customers to your site in the first place. It might take a while to get your site in any of the search engine rankings where it will bring in enough traffic on its own. Also remember that there are free tools that you can use to your advantage such as twitter, facebook, myspace, wordpress and many others. If you leverage these tools right you may be able to get plenty of traffic without spending too much money at all.

Remember that a degree of success comes down to how much work you put in. How big a success it is depends on how good the idea is.