Search Engine Marketing Spot

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As of this post, the overture keyword suggestion tool no longer shows results for any keyword you type in.  The last update to the database was done in January of 2007, so it was only a matter of time before the service would be stop working all together.  I know this tool was used by a lot of people in the SEM industry when it was being updated every month, I know I did.  Now that the tool no longer displays any results, I hope this is a true wake up call to those doing there keyword research.  Up until last week I continued to see posts of people telling others to use the overture keyword tool for there keyword research, why though?  The data was nine months old, to me that is far to long to use and consider accurate in most markets.  Now the sad day has come and the tool is dead, lets hope that Yahoo has something in the works for a new keyword tool, it was a blessing to any SEM to have in there bag of tools.

I cannot believe some of the clients I have worked with that have a large user database and they really do not utilize it at all.  Your data is a great income source if used the proper way and everyone should be trying to maximize the potential of it.  Now if your website does not keep track of its customer information, I high recommend you start doing that as soon as possible.  By keeping track of your customer data, that gives you the chance to contact them again in the future offering them online discounts, new product launch or even an entire new website launch from your company.  Sending out a monthly newsletter to these customers is also a great way to keep in contact with them and shows them you are still in business and growing. 

You have a new product or service you are launching in the coming weeks, how are you going to generate sales for this?  Maybe with a huge adsense campaign, Yahoo network, or just going to blanket the internet with this new product to try and generate the most sales.  If you have deep pockets then sure go ahead, but the smart thing to do that will not cost you any money out of your pocket and will probably generate a good amount of sales is to contact your user or customer database.  These are the people who are either interested in your website or who have purchased from you in the past.  This data is like a pre-qualified lead which is worth a great deal of money in the open market.  You know they are or even at one time interested in your website so why look them over?  You should never over look your data and that should be the first place you with your new marketing campaign.  The revenue you can generate from that could pay for the coming months advertising campaigns.  That is why it is so important to not only keep track of your users but to also use this data to your advantage.  It is one thing to say you are going to do it, or say you will send out an email to them.  You need to act on it though, by acting on using that data to its full potential can bring in more profits for your business.  That is the purpose of being in business, to make money for your business to grow and for yourself to live.

A recent thread over at Digital Point reveals Matt Cutts speaking openly about the Google pagerank bar and how he doesn’t expect to see it updated in the next few days or even the coming weeks. The industry was predicted a PR update in either late July or sometime in August. Here it is now in September and we have yet to see the little green bar update its “magic number”. My belief behind not seeing the update is due to the debate of paid links and what Google is trying to do to fight them. The thing about Pagerank is everyone uses the number as the standard when buying and trading links. If Google does away with the Pagerank bar, then that could put a damper in the link selling market since everyone would have to find another way to convey the quality of there website. As of now, going by the pagerank of a website was an easy way to determine if you wanted to purchase a link on that site. Google dug themselves into this hole and are struggling to get themselves back out of it. In the same article Matt talks about his take on paid directories.

I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:

- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of
the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
_
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

So from what I read here having paid directories are perfectly fine, you just have to not accept every website that submits and pays you for a “review”. So we can buy these directory “reviews” from directories that are reputable and does not accept every submission. Isn’t that not still buying a link though? Seriously thing about that for one minute, you can submit your site to say BOTW, have it reviewed for $80 and if approved you now have your site listed. Is that not a paid link now? They do not use no follow tags or javascript links, it currently passes the link juice onto your site. Will they be forced to change this now with the paid directories and have all the links no follow, use javascripts links or some other measure to ensure that the juice is not passed onto your website? If that is the case, who in there right mind will bother to buy these directory reviews? We all know that they are not searched as nearly often as the search engines, when was the last time you went to a directory to search for something? Yea that is what I thought….NEVER! Google’s plan back fired and now they are just trying to use duct tape and patch things up until they can find a definitive answer. I believe they will be eliminated the little green bar here in the near future to help combat its use with buying text links from other websites.

So we are starting to see Google removing pages of some directories in it’s index.  I figured it would only be a matter of time before Google would look at some directories and penalize them in some way or another.  At SES San Jose a big debate was that of paid links and what Google was trying to do to stop them.  These directories seem to be nothing more then a paid link farm.  There are no free listings, each listing is paid either for a regular listing or the directories featured listing.  In my opinion this is the big reason why these directories are starting to see penalties in the Google index.  Three or four years ago we saw the emergence of the “link farms” where sites were all inter linked with one another and you either got a free or paid listing.  Google then penalized these websites and the general public put a “spam site” label on a link farm site and or network.  Now that search engine marketing has changed since then, the need for links is still very important for any marketing campaign.  The Google algo loves websites that have a lot of other authority sites linking back to you, this is where your backlinks play an important role when trying to rank for your keywords.  The emergence of paid links has hit an all time high and Google is now trying to fix what they created.  If the page rank bar was not made public and Google putting to much emphasis on backlinks then I bet the paid links debate would not be as big as it is today.

Now this past weekend Google has penalized some directories from there index and removing a lot of there pages.  No reason has been made public yet as of this posting, if there has been please post here as I could not find anything.  I believe however that Google has penalized these directories because they seem to be nothing more then a paid link farm.  Take elegantdirectory.com for example, there are only two ways to get your website listed on this directory and yes you guessed it, both are paid options only.

1. Sponsor Listing (5 Free Deep Links): Guaranted 12-24 hours review, Pay $79.95 Yearly Fee and get sponsored link page listed. Your site will be listed above all other Paid listings. Individual pages of domain and sub-domains are accepted. Sponsored Listings on Top Level Categories are allowed.
2. Paid Listing: Guaranted 12-24 hours review, individual pages of domain and sub-domains are accepted. Pay one time fee of only $39.95

Look at that, 5 free deep links with a $80 per year fee and your site will be listed above all other “paid listings”.  Now we have heard that Google is starting to penalize websites that sell text link ads on there website by devaluing the link juice of that website.  Some ways that Google is determining if it is a possible paid text link or not is by seeing what other links are on that website.  If there are links to gardening, marketing, sports, gambling, adult, and other links they have no relevance on that page can raise the Google red flag.  Also if you list your text links under a category of “paid listings”, “sponsored links”, “paid links”, etc. that to will also raise the red flag.  Now that we see these directories are nothing more then “Paid Listings” why wouldn’t that raise the red flag to Google.

Paid links has been debated by many in the SEM community for the past four or five months and we are now starting to see Google try and put there foot down.  They have publicly stated they are against paid text links, they want webmasters to use the no follow tag on those paid text links (yea I wonder how many links would be sold then).  I just wonder what other directories will get hit with a penalty and which will not.