Caydel’s SEO Blog

I just came across this over at Jason Bartholme’s blog - he built his own clickbot out of a Lego Mindstorms kit.

It gave me a good laugh, anyways…

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Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but Michael Gray (Graywolf) 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!

Just in case you haven’t read it yet, I would urge you to check out Andy Beal’s recent post .

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?

update - This is a case of Shoemoney getting massively misquoted in the press. Please see his response at http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/12/07/forbes-article/. I apologize for any defamation or damage to the branding this article may have had!

Shoemoney is going to get his account taken away. Here’s why.

If you have been paying attention to the Search blogs lately, you will have heard about the in which both Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ Schoemaker and Michael ‘Graywolf’ Gray are both quoted. Now, I haven’t read the article itself yet, but I just came across this extract which :

Schoemaker insists he and others have in fact found a way to circumvent the crackdown. He says he uses techniques like “cloaking” to fool Google’s algorithm. Arbitrageurs know the search engine’s IP addresses, the fingerprints that reveal the source of any Web page visitor. So Schoemaker says he sets his web pages to automatically display legitimate content to the Google spider, while giving other users the ad-filled arbitrage page. Schoemaker says that makes him virtually immune to Google’s quality-regulation measures.

… Since then, he says he’s made more than $2 million by arbitraging search terms related to cell phone ringtones, teeth whitening and mortgages. “I love Google,” Schoemaker says. “They changed my life.”

So here Shoemoney is, admitting on a national-level that he utilizes cloaking to bypass Google’s crackdown on PPC arbitrage. This is in violation of the where it says:

Do not employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

If Google is really serious about cracking down on PPC arbitrageurs, they will have to ban Shoemoney. For him to announce to the world that he has, does, and will continue to effectively cheat the Adsense program by violating their TOS is a major blow to Google’s reliability. After all, $2 million is a lot to take out of advertiser’s pockets.

What do you think?

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I just came across a post on Eches Blog where he espouses the idea of filtering all the MFA (Made For Adsense) sites from your Adsense ads by using the Adsense competitive ad filter. He also mentions that by doing this you may cause your adsense earnings to increase. Additionally, the post also links to AdsBlackList.com, a site which lists a variety of MFA and low-paying sites with the idea that you use the competitive ad filter to remove these low-paying ads. From AdsBlackList.com:

Why would I use AdsBlackList?

There are three main reasons.

1) Increase your adsense revenue up to 50%
2) Increase the reputation of your website by NOT linking to Made for Adsense sites
3) Save the quality of contextual advertising in global

In other words, subscribing to ABL and submitting MFA sites that you’ve discovered, you will be helping yourself to make more money and helping your customers to find quality information when they click on your adsense ad

I am not sure I understand how this could lead to higher adsense revenues. Adsense works on a priority system where cost and relevancy are balanced in order to bring you the best blend of relevancy and price available to you. By blocking certain ads, the ads you do get are likely to be priced lower than the original ads. So, how can they justify the theory that creating a blacklist a mile long and blocking ads which Google would normally show as the best paying ads for that block can increase your revenue at all, let alone by as much as 50%?

Somebody, enlighten me, please!

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Well, as you all may remember, there was a class action suit launched against Google a few months ago with regards to click fraud. I joined into the suit, and recieved my settlement just a few moments ago. 5 minutes ago, I just recieved the following email:

Dear Google AdWords advertiser:

We are writing to notify you that we have processed your claim for
Account Number *removed* under the Lane’s Gifts v. Google class-
action settlement. We are issuing credits to the AdWords account
identified in your claim.

To view your credit award, log in to your account and open your
Billing Summary page. Your credit award will appear under the label
‘Adjustment - Click Quality’ between the dates 10/27 and 10/28. In
some cases, it may take a few days for an award to be reflected on
this page, so if you don’t see it at first, please check back soon.

You don’t need to do anything to redeem your credit. Google will
automatically apply it to future invoices for your credited AdWords
account. The credits are valid for one year from their date of
issuance and may be canceled at any time after that.

Credits are awarded on a pro rata basis, taking into account these
factors:
- The amount you paid Google for advertising
- Google’s revenues from online advertising since January 1, 2002,
and your claim percentage
- The total amount of credits available in the settlement, which is
US$60M.

If you have any questions, please contact us at
.

Thank you for your continued support of Google.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

Being somewhat excited by this, I quickly logged into my Adwords account to see how much I recieved back. And, *drumroll* I got $0.48.

Yes, you heard correctly. $0.48 bloody sense. This is a touch rediculous. now, I am not a large scale advertiser. But when I filed my claim, I claimed $198.42 on my account, at an estimated 30% click fraud rate, in line with the numbers resulting from a variety of studies which had been reported around the time that I had filed.

Just to emphasize how rediculous this compensation is, I was compensated for 0.24% of my advertising costs. ie, Google is compensating me for an estimated 0.24% click fraud rate. Now, I didn’t expect to get the full 30% I claimed back. I would have been happy to get 5% back.

We all *know* that there is a higher click fraud rate than that. If this has proven anything, it has proven that the only people who actually are making good on this suit were the lawyers arguing it.

At any rate, I will relish my 2 free advertising clicks. With any luck, at least one of them will convert. If anyone else has recieved their settlement, let me know. I want to know if what I recieved is in line with the settlements other people have recieved.

My wife was checking her e-mail earlier, and was reading an e-mail from a friend concerning an upcoming wedding for her cousin who will be getting married next summer. This ad was on the sidebar of her Gmail account:

Honor this Special Time
Puberty can be a tough time for
parents too. Chinaberry can help
http://www.chinaberry.com

This struck me as somewhat funny, since it seemed to be accusing the Bride and Groom of only just hitting puberty themselves…

The wording struck me as a little strange as well. since in my Dutch background, puberty was something that either was not talked about, or was teased mercilessly; hardly, an ‘honored time’. I guess it may apply to Jewish or other backgrounds where puberty *is* an honored time. Either way, doesn’t really fit with the whole wedding thing in general.

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