| LED Digest 2053: Tuning AdWords, also Linking |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. December 13, 2005 Issue #2053 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== NEW ======================= <Moderator Comment> --== Article Directories & Linking ==-- ~ Thom Reece "...search engines are at risk of 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'..." --== Tuning AdWords ==-- ~ Jim Gatton "...while the generalities are grasped pretty quickly the ambiguities are crushing." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Reciprocal Linking Thread ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "Google doesn't pay as much attention to links as people...claim it does." ~ Mike Banks Valentine "I'm afraid that I'm among those who agree that reciprocal linking is dead as a useful tool." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== LEDer Feedback ==-- ~ Lee Berkowitz ~ Noah Masterson ~ Bob Cavanagh ~ Michael Linehan ======== NEW ===================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, Any question about the LED's usefulness has been answered for me. Thanks to everyone who took the time to let me know how you feel about the list. I'm still weighing and considering several different options. I'll keep you posted. For now, consider things "business as usual" -- I have no immediate plans to do anything other than maybe change the schedule again. On that note (and thanks to feedback from an LEDer), let's find out how that schedule's doing. Do you like it 3 days a week, or would you prefer the 5 day format instead? Let me know. I'm leaning towards bringing back the 5 day schedule... Thanks again for your support! Please see the Billboard for a selection of your comments. Best wishes, Adam --------------------- From: Thom Reece Subject: Article Databases & Linking Joel Lesser, in LED 2052, posted an interesting piece on linking in response to an earlier post by Michael Martinez. Both author's make some great points. My question to both is how you see these issues affecting article directories? As the developer of www.marketingarticlelibrary.com it occurred to me that, since an article directory like ours can add hundreds (if not thousands) of back links in a weeks time... how are the major search engines going to view us in comparison to link farms? The growth in the number of article directories has increased quickly, as a result of some new php based directory scripts being released, and I can see where Google and others might begin to view article directory links as suspect. Article writing, distribution, and marketing are a very effective traffic generation and back-link acquisition tools Directories are at the front-line of providing that essential content to web visitors and publishers. It seems to me that the search engines are at risk of "throwing the baby out with the bath water", if they do not account for the very real benefit of the archived high quality content that directories provide. Thom Reece www.e-comprofits.com ------- new post - new topic ------ From: Jim Gatton Subject: LED Stop the LED Digest? Never! Never! Never. (well, ok, never say never. How about, "Not for a really, really long time?" Need a new topic? Now about Adwords and how to use it profitably. I've spent lots of time reading Google's guidelines and searching for information on the internet. I guess I know the basics pretty well but the real life application of same? A money losing proposition because while the generalities are grasped pretty quickly the ambiguities are crushing. For instance, in my advertising why should I use: widget keeper Baltimore widget keeper blue widget keeper sale, .. etc. for hundreds of examples, as opposed to... widget keeper broadmatched which is supposed to show up when any of the more specific widget keeper phrases are typed in by the user. And, fair warning: if you know the answer to this question I have a dozen more ready. Jim Gatton http://www.mpdprogram.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Michael Martinez Subject: Linking > I'm tired of reading misinformation about reciprocal > linking and so this post hopefully will dispel some > of the myths currently circulating on the Internet. - Joel Lesser, LED 2052 A great deal of the confusion comes from improper citation and attribution. For example, you write: > In Michael Martinez's last post, he quoted from this article: > > In "The Truth About Reciprocal Link Networks" > http://snipurl.com/kb9g [webguerrilla.com] he wrote: > > ------------------- > "But we all already new that, right? Anyone who wasn't asleep for > the last month knows that Google's last update was all about > penalizing sites for reciprocal linking". > ------------------- > > With all due respect to Mr. Martinez, how does the author of this > article he quoted know that sites who reciprocal link are being > penalized? Does the author work for Google? I specially followed up my citation of Mr. Bozer's comment with the following point of view: "As I stated last week, I think the October 2005 Google Update took on broader issues. In fact, I know some people who claim that some of their reciprocal link campaigns are still ranking well. So I still favor the link-variety-is-good hypothesis over the reciprocal-links-are-dead hypothesis. I did stop my own reciprocal linking years ago because of abuses from Webmasters, but that is neither here nor there." Clearly, I was not expressing anything like agreement or support for Mr. Bozer's position. I was, however, recapping what was then a popular statement regarding the impact of the October 2005 Google Update process. Also, you write: > If you want to know what Google thinks of linking, > go to the source. All you have to do is read the recently > published Google patent and Google's webmaster guidelines. The Google patents don't reveal which technologies have been implemented. And most people of us hate to read those things. And, interestingly, in your technical paper on the patent: http://linksmanager.com/googlepatent.html. Your staff write: "Not to beat this to death, but we don't even know whether Google is using search engine 125. We only know that they applied for a patent on it. " Be careful what you say, because someone will quote it back to you. The reciprocal link management service operators on this list usually feel very defensive about any link-related comments I make. I'm not targeting you guys. I am a former advocate of managed linking, but my reasons for leaving the fold are due to the abuses of the Webmasters who try to use these services as silver bullets. Google doesn't even pay nearly as much attention to links as people in the SEO community claim it does. The service was NEVER providing search results on the basis of linkage or PageRank. PageRank has only directly impacted Google's directory listings. Google clearly points out (going all the way back to the Stanford paper which first explained the search engine's premise) that on-page content is taken into consideration. On-page content outranks link-popular sites in many searches every day. Yes, there are people who use brute-force linkage to drive their sites to the top. That's doing it the hard way, folks. And that's also inviting closer scrutiny from Google. Way too much misinformation and bad advice on Google ranking strategies has been shared in the various SEO tutorials and forums. It will take years for all that nonsense to clear out of the system (and some of it will still be around in 10 years -- I occasionally see people talk about things that only worked 8-10 years ago). Since the LED Digest was last published, I've been able to read some more of Matt Cutts' comments, both on his blog and as reported on other Web sites. It appears to me that one of the areas Google focused on over the past year was devaluing what they deemed to be paid links. But what constitutes a paid link? Matt outed a television site that was carrying paid links (he claims it had already been outed), but by the time I got around to looking at the site, I couldn't find the links being discussed. I don't buy links. I don't sell advertising links. I do write feature articles for myself and other sites, and I get paid for many of those articles, and those articles usually contain links. Are those paid links? I have no idea. Nonetheless, it's almost guaranteed that someone will quote 1-2 sentences out of what I've just written and respond in such a way as to make it seem like I said or implied something I didn't. There is no innuendo in my posts on LED. If I don't explicitly say it, I don't mean it, I don't imply it, and you'll only see it when someone else has injected it into my mouth after the fact. The bottom line here is that we don't collectively know what Google changed. But we do have access to reputable, authoritative sites which document, directly or indirectly, losses of rankings, undervalued linkages, and other items of interest that -- taken together -- reinforce the fact that what Google wants is for everyone to stop trying to game the system and go back to producing good, clean content. And, no, I don't expect that to happen any time soon. There are way too many people out there reading way too much bad advice telling them to go out and get as many links as they possibly can. Eventually, a lot of those people show up in SEO forums with a variation of the following complaint: "I've been building links for year, doing nothing wrong, and I cannot seem to get my site to rank well on Google. Does anyone know why?" 'Nuff said. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------ From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: Linking I'm afraid that I'm among those who agree that reciprocal linking is dead as a useful tool. I agree that you should link only to sites that benefit your own visitors and have done so at all my own sites for years without regard to reciprocal relationships. For the past 18 months or so, I've sent a boilerplate letter to every person requesting links from my sites. I'll quote it here if allowed: (If not, it is online at http://www.website101.com/NO-reciprocal-linking.html ) My linking policy is to link only to those who provide content for my site. If you would like to contribute an article, case study or relevant text content for Website101, I'd be happy to use it and link to you through a resource box at the end of it. Likewise, I'd prefer that you use one of my articles at your site and link back to me through my resource box, rather than a simple link swap. You can find a wide selection of articles to use at my article archive for a list of over 175 available articles at: http://publish101.com/authors/Mike-Banks-Valentine/ If you would like to know more about my linking policy, please read the following article. http://snipurl.com/kqg6 [realityseo.com] Regards, Mike Banks Valentine http://WebSite101.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Lee Berkowitz Hi Adam, I have been a list subscriber since bCentral days and always get many helpful gems from the discussion that have helped with the sites I manage and design. One of which is consistently #1 or 2 on Google and almost always #1 on MSN, Yahoo, AOL. Without the ideas expressed on LED, this wouldn't be possible. I appreciate the amount of time necessary to maintain the digest and keep it relevant. However the future shakes out, I just want you to know how helpful a tool LED has been and is currently. Thanks again for all your past efforts and hopefully on into the future. Lee ------- next post ------- From: Noah Masterson Hi Adam, I've subscribed to LED digest for less than a year, when the webmaster at my former company recommended it, and in that time I've found many valuable nuggets of information. It's been a big help in the launch of my site, www.dc-baby.com. I've gotten tips on ebooks, payment systems, SEO, pay-per-click, and much more. Given the amount of info I've gathered in a relatively short time period, I really don't think the Digest has outlived its usefulness. I hope you can find a way to keep it going and make it a rewarding enterprise for yourself. Thanks, Noah Masterson, Publisher www.dc-baby.com ------- next post ------- From: Bob Cavanagh Subject: LED Adam, The LED Digest has been, and continues to be a very valuable resource to me and my organization. I certainly appreciate the time and effort you put into the Digest. I certainly hope it survives into the future. I suspect that the reciprocal linking debate has cost the digest some readership. Quite frankly, it is hard to sort out the real from the imaginary with so many "experts". But sanity will prevail as it appears to have done in today's issue. Hopefully this marks a return to more broadly based issues facing web developers, the types of issues that my team have faced over the years and where LED Digest has assisted us in so many ways. Thanks again for all your efforts. Bob Cavanagh, Director of Technology Queen's School of Business ------- next post ------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: LED usefulness I'd say it's still useful! Over the years, I have subscribed to many ezines around web marketing and related topics. Most have received an 'unsubscribe' at some point. LED is special and irreplaceable. Many others are on "topics". LED contains very precise advice on innumerable precise problems and questions. There's nothing like it. Michael Linehan www.marketing-alchemy.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence." - Ann Landers |
