| LED Digest 2330: PPC Bidding on Trademarks |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. January 22, 2007 Issue no. 2330 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== --== Competitors Bidding on Trademarks ==-- ~ Sandy Keller "He is now doing PPC bidding on my domain and my business name, both on Google and Yahoo!" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Incoming Links from Virtual Domains ==-- ~ Eric Ward "This is a great example of the 'signals of intent' I scream about." ~ Jill Whalen "There are so many natural reasons why sites owned by the same company are linked together." --== The Revisit-After Meta Tag ==-- ~ Derek Andrews "Think of Google as a black box..." ~ Michael Martinez "Google is recrawling that portion of the Web which is eligible for the Main Index more frequently." --== Image Spam the Future? ==-- ~ Mark Whitman "If you get the spam early on enough, as you've seen - a quick profit can be made." ~ Steven Birk "At least the mainstream media is picking up on this..." --== Update on Yahoo! Slurp ==-- ~ Will Bontrager "Maybe after Slurp is done slurping, Yahoo! will do us the honor the other SEs have." ========== NEW =================================== From: Sandy Keller Subject: Competitors Doing PPC Bidding on Trademarks Hello! I have a competitor who first came to my attention when he violated copyrighted designs of one of my vendors, who responded by threatening him with a lawsuit. He changed his product just enough to avoid further threats of litigation. He is now doing PPC bidding on my domain and my business name, both on Google and Yahoo!. Now that YSM has changed its PPC interface, I will no longer be able to send them the copyright violation proof they request in a formal complaint, nor will I know which search engine is serving up the ads I am seeing. Google doesn't appear to care to take any action at all. Yahoo! has been slow to respond, and the ads have re-appeared twice shortly after being removed, although Yahoo! states that they don't accept ads which fail to meet their relevant content requirements. There is no content on this person's site relevant to my trademarks, yet the ads are once again approved and served. Have any of you litigated in response to similar trademark violation? What was the result? Were there any co-defendants? Sandy Keller Advantage Bridal http://www.advantagebridal.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Eric Ward Subject: Incoming links > I have had up to 33 websites... all with a link back to my > main website. All the sites share the same IP address > and have for 9 years. My website has been at #1 thru #5 > on all the search engines for 8 of those 9 years... - Karl L. Baldwin, LED Digest 2329 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1717/55/ This is a great example of the "signals of intent" I scream about. All links have the potential to send a signal of intent. In your case your site's age is a significant mitigating factor. Put more simply, your sites have been up since way before any engines paid attention to links, and thus are in Bobby DeNiro's famous "circle of trust". Your linking intent couldn't have been to fool engines, because your sites were around before algorithmic link analysis existed. This is easy for the engines to smell. Now, try this with brand new sites all on the same IP block and I promise you'll never get those rankings, because the signals of intent are far more likely to be for chasing link juice and rank now. Eric Ward http://www.ericward.com/ Content Publicity & Link Building Strategies since 1994 -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Jill Whalen Subject: Incoming links > Nothing may happen right away, but "soon" Google's > algorithm will get to it, and the site will end up getting > banned, or may even just fall big time in the rankings, > and/or lose it's current PageRank as well. - Ravi Jayagopal, LED Digest 2328 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1716/55/ Sorry, but that's just not true. It takes a lot to get banned, and the fact that your sites happen to link to each other (and are on the same IP) isn't going to do that. There are so many natural reasons why sites owned by the same company are linked together. To ban them would simply be insane, in my opinion. Google may be a lot of things, but they're not insane. Jill Whalen High Rankings Helping Sites to Be the Best They Can Be! www.highrankings.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Derek Andrews Subject: Meta revisit > So maybe these [meta revisit-after] tags have more > value than we currently assign them. I did not get 1st > ranking because of that tag alone, but I lost 1st page > ranking because I changed it to 1 day, and got it back > by changing to 7 days. - John Smart, LED Digest 2329 I think you are jumping to false conclusions. First off, you shouldn't infer too much from one little test like this. To make an analogy, let's imagine you wanted to do a poll to see who will win the next election. Would you go out and ask just one person? No, you would take a much larger sample, and then there would still only be a certain probability that you are correct. Think of Google as a black box. It takes information in from very many sources, processes it in many ways, and outputs certain results based somehow on the inputs and internal processes. There are two major complications with trying to figure out what is going on inside the black box. One is the time delays. Not all the processes that Google performs run at the same time. Indexing happens fairly frequently. Link analysis probably runs less often, and long-term ranking is going to take some time to settle down. The other problem with trying to over-think how Google works is that it is always being tweaked to try and make it better. What works today, may not work next week. Unless you like puzzles and have a lot of time to do extensive testing, I think you are wasting your time. Here is my take on the revisit tag. This is how I might use it if I were designing a search engine. I would test over a period of time to see how accurate an indicator it is. If it says revisit every day, yet when I do I find no change to the page, I would downgrade that page's trust factor. That would mean that I would be even more careful about the value of other meta tags and maybe even on-page content. It might even be a flag that I should run tests to see what other rank gaming scams the site might be employing. I certainly wouldn't use it to promote the rank of the page. If on the other hand I found that the page did change regularly, and the site is otherwise found to be very authoritative (i.e. the home page of BBC News), I would check it very often, and for a short period of time I would rank the indexed content quite highly, and more so on news and blog searches. Derek Andrews, woodturner http://www.seafoamwoodturning.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Meta-revisit Re: Evidence of the Revisit-After Meta Tag Helping? Highly unlikely. Here is what Google had to say about "revisit-after" around a year ago: -------------------- "With progressively less usage are four more name values: robots, to control whether spiders should index the page or follow any of its links; generator, used to indicate what tool was used to generate the page; author, used to give the name of the author; and revisit-after, supposedly used to tell search engines how often to recrawl the page. To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used -- at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless <.meta name="revisit-after"> than use the <.em> element!" Source: http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html -------------------- Google has implemented a "daily data refresh" since at least the end of November / beginning of December. It's possible they started it sooner, as the last officially acknowledged period of "rolling out an update" ended around mid-October, according to Matt Cutts. Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/ What neither Matt nor any Googler has discussed (in any public venue of which I am aware) is a new link filtering process that Matt actually warned people several times throughout last year was coming down the line. I believe Google turned on the filtering around the Thanksgiving holiday. Perhaps they turned it on sooner and it simply took several weeks for people to start noticing it. The apparent behavior so far has been that as Google recrawls the Web it re-evaluates each page. Many pages that were formerly placed in the Main Index have now been placed in the Supplemental Index. As pages remaining in the Main Index lose "Main Index linkage", their crawl frequency changes. Pages that lose too many links drop out of the index and "go Supplemental". In the meantime, Google is recrawling that portion of the Web which is eligible for the Main Index MORE FREQUENTLY. So many people are now seeing their pages drop out of the index mysteriously for a few days, or lose rankings for no apparent reason, and then they come back (again for no apparent reason). Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, and Vanessa Fox have all told people to get more "quality links" -- which I believe means "more links that we trust". I've spent years removing "revisit-after" from my pages. Every time I have to restore from a backup, some pages sneak back on to my server with that tag. I may have finally gotten rid of most occurrences. My rankings are not hurting. My important pages are pretty solid in the Main Index. Some of my pages have gone Supplemental. I see absolutely no indication that "revisit-after" should be helping anyone. Most likely, I just have enough inbound trusted links to maintain my stability. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Mark Whitman Subject: Image spam - Pump-and-dump Schemes > I don't know how it all works but I would be willing > to bet that the person or persons who perpetrated > this particular email spam profited nicely from it... - Steve Birk, LED Digest 2329 You're experiencing the "pump and dump" scheme a gang of Russians have been operating for a while now. These guys have high end programming talent working for them, which is why your Outlook settings are useless at blocking this spam. They do in fact have some enormous number of computers worldwide acting surreptitiously as spam bots and there's nothing that can be done to stop them. This type of scheme has been operated for many years by various people in the US (till they get busted), in fact I was recruited in 2000 by a guy who wanted to do the exact same thing. When the Russian mafia got on board they took it to a new high (low). They invest in a stock, promote (pump) it, and when people start acting on the "tip" (lots of people really do it) the price spikes. The spammers dump their shares quickly and make a fortune. If you get the spam early on enough, as you've seen - a quick profit can be made. M.Whitman -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Steve Birk Subject: Image spam At least the mainstream media is picking up on this. MSNBC had this headline front and center on their website on Friday, "Spam Onslaught, Why unwanted e-mail is worse than ever". The headline linked to this story on MSNBC http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/01/spam_is_back_an.html , which dealt mainly with the growing problem of image spam. And don't miss the pretty interesting viewer comments worth reading at the end of the article... Regards, Steven Birk http://medcenternews.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Will Bontrager Subject: Yahoo Slurp > Let me know if you would like me to crawl your site to > see if there are internal links to these pages. - Derrick Wheeler, LED Digest 2322 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1703/55/ Mr. Wheeler sent his 'bot to willmaster.com and it processed 1661 URLs in 10 minutes and 29 seconds. That's a lot of page fetching and scanning in those few minutes. I didn't know 'bots came with steroids. Maybe he's developed proprietary algorithms. My earlier comment about feeding the 'bot before sending it out seems silly in retrospect. Some over a thousand forum posts were not scanned because (1) I have a copy on my hard drive and could scan them myself and (2) the posts are generated on-the-fly, which could strain the server if gobbled at the rate the static pages were. No links were found of the /directory/?S=E type that Yahoo! Slurp has been attempting to retrieve. Slurp is still crawling willmaster.com. It's kind of Slurp to respect server resources by only crawling a few pages at a time. Watching its activity, it seems a link to a file in a directory alerts Slurp to obtain either a directory index page or directory list. On a related note, according to one of Derrick Wheeler's tools (see http://acxiomdigital.com/resources/ -- which you gotta bookmark, the tools are that good, and link to if your visitor demographic includes web site owners), Yahoo! does not have willmaster.com in the first 3 pages of its search results for one of our keywords. (I verified it correct.) Yet, willmaster.com is on the first page for that key word at AOL, Google, Lycos Pro, MSN, and Netscape. Maybe after Slurp is done slurping, Yahoo! will do us the honor the other SEs have. Mr. Wheeler, thank you. Will Bontrager ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "There are more fools in the world than there are people." - Heinrich Heine |
