| LED Digest 2108: Click Fraud Reporting |
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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 adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 2, 2006 Issue #2108 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== Click Fraud Reporting Services ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "Is anyone using a third party service to combat click fraud? Do they work?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Drop-Down Menus & Search Engines ==-- ~ Steven Rothberg "I also vote against drop-downs." ~ Rick Gortatowsky "...it's always a good idea to support both folks who have scripting enabled or disabled." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Fighting Spam: An Update ==-- ~ Tom Anson --== The LED Archives ==-- ~ Mike Banks Valentine ~ Michael Martinez ========== NEW =================================== From: John Barendrecht Subject: Click fraud I noticed on my site that there were a lot of visits from odd user agents (browsers), I know some are suspicious bots. Contacting the website or the advertiser why you are getting PPC clicks from a bot usually results in a vague answer. Then I read this article: Internet ad-traffic scams could be ripping off as much as $1 billion annually. Are Web companies like Google doing enough to foil them? http://snipurl.com/n32q [businessweek.com] It seems like some advertisers are trying to combat click fraud, as I see these entries in my log file: The reason you have seen this user agent in your web logs is because you are advertising on a PPC search engine that is using ValidClick's real-time click fraud detection technology to ensure clicks to your website are from actual users and not generated by bots, scripts, or other forms of automated clicks. Is anyone using a third party service to combat click fraud? Do they work? Best regards, John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc. http://www.centralhome.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Steven Rothberg Subject: Drop downs I also vote against drop-downs. Our developer told me that they were not search engine friendly and recommended that we replace them with tabs, each of which would be linked to a page that listed and included short descriptions of the main interior sections of our entry level career site. As an added bonus, those descriptions would be keyword rich and therefore search engine friendly. We re-launched a week ago. According to Alexa and our internal traffic analysis, our traffic is soaring. Even more importantly, so are our candidate registrations. Steven Rothberg CollegeRecruiter.com career site The highest traffic career site used by students and recent graduates http://www.collegerecruiter.com ------- new post - same topic ------ From: Rick Gortatowsky Subject: Drop-downs Been reading this drop down menu thread a little. Several folks have stated that search bots will not crawl drop down menus. I would assume some may but the issue with these is of course the interactive nature of spidering them. I would presume that alot depends on the coding thereof. However, as a programmer myself there is a very simple work-wround for this Miss Sandy! Make your menus, all the menus you want! But instead of your Menu's transitioning direct to the landing pages use the Document object and transition the browser through static links also exisiting on the page, perhaps on the bottom of the page. This gives you not only the menu advantage but also allows someone who has scripting disabled to transition pages. Spiders will also be able to traverse those "static links". Now these days depending on site traffic its always a good idea to support both folks who have scripting enabled or disabled. There are numerous examples in source code on the web to do this. Of course you want focus on what your web is built around. Some use Javascript (loath it myself), Java or JSP, there is VBScript, Perl on and on all the way to Active Server Pages. The nice thing about server pages be it JSP or ASP is that pages generate on the server so no party can see your actual code and of course there are just myriads of controls and then some you can use on your web or code your own in many a language from VB to Visual C++ on and on. With ASP its not all too difficult to make seperate pages supporting browsers where scripting is on or off. All these forms of scripts use the Document Object Model. Basically speaking this object affords full browser control. For example tools such as automated form fill in softwares etc. all use the Document Object. This object has stored in it everything pertinent to a web page, links, properties, content on and on. Its all there. I would suggest something along the lines of testing if scripting is enabled on the users browser and using an iFrame setup. If scripting is enabled then your pages top iFrame uses menus, if not, static links. Then use another iFrame at the bottom with just static links. The menu's code will take the link data off the Links arrary within the Document Object. Thus your menus will transition pages but search bots will instead traverse the static links. While I have never had the need to code up such a beastie I cannot imagine it'd be all too torturous. Rick Gortatowsky ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Anson Subject: Fighting spam I think it's great that Tom Aman has found the unsubscribe approach to work so well. His results are really impressive. However, it simply wouldn't work for me. I only get around 60 SPAM emails a day (I'm not sure why I'm so unpopular...), and after checking, I find that NONE of them have an unsubscribe option. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials www.therapeutic-grade.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: LED archives The LED archives are indexed and the links to your site from your posts in the archives do *contribute* to both link popularity and PageRank for the linked site - and will lead to your site being crawled by search engine spiders due to those LED archive links. Links from the archives show up in Google queries differently, it just depends on how you search for them. I did a little test to check those links. Forgive me, as this may get a bit arcane, but I think a few like-minded LED-ophiles may find it interesting just the same. Using Google query: "site:audettemedia.com Mike Banks Valentine", I got 98 results, but in reviewing that list, saw that my posts to other Audettemedia.com lists, I-Helpdesk and I-Winsoft discussion lists from 2002 contributed to that total, so I searched "site:audettemedia.com LED archives Mike Banks Valentine", and narrowed it down to 73 results from 2003 forward. (The archive must not include posts I made to LED in 1998-2002 - For grins visit: http://snipurl.com/n1zn [web.archive.org] (LED Home in 1998 as shown in the web archive WayBack Machine) When I search for each of 5 domain names I routinely use (depending on topic of posts), I found from 0 to 22 results for each of 5 domain names. Interestingly, when I visit most archived pages from that first result list of 73, I still found the domains linked from those posts. One thing that apparently keeps them from showing up in Google searches is that many were linked to specific pages and filenames. In some cases the search returns different results if you include the http:// in the Google search! I thought that Google parsed out text within longer words or in this case within URL's. But apparently this introduces some odd variables within the LED archives, even though in most cases, the entire string exists in each instance. A search for "site:audettemedia.com WebSite101" returns 17 results in a Google search A search for "site:audettemedia.com WebSite101.com" returns 14 results A search for "site:audettemedia.com http://WebSite101.com" returns 8 results Try your searches with these or other variables, like your name, or the topic of your posts. I believe you'll find them indexed and linked to your site in most cases. (I believe Adam does hyperlinks properly if you neglect to include http://) All of that to say, that one way or another, the links are there and they will very likely lead to search engine spiders visiting the archives (because they are often updated and re-crawled regularly). Spiders will then end up following links from your posts in the LED archives to your site, thus negating the need to submit your site to the search engines - which was the point I was originally attempting to make from my first post in this thread. ;-) Mike Banks Valentine http://www.realityseo.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: LED archives > ... I suspect that even though Google (alone) had > managed to index these not-normal URLs it can't > spider the outbound links on the pages. - Steve Pronger, LED 2107 Google can parse URLs out of just about anything you can imagine. Whether they spider non-hypertext URLs is anyone's guess. But you can easily find pages where Google has identified non-linking URLs. The real question with Google, but probably also with Yahoo! and MSN, is how to determine if a link counts. Google has openly acknowledged that they devalue outbound links for a variety of reasons. I would be inclined to guess that the LED-archive links are more valuable than many other highly sought after links if only because the LED-archive pages are so under the SEO radar no one has given any thought to them. That is, people generally assume that all high PR pages give good linkage. That is wrong. Many high PR pages no longer confer reputation or PageRank for Google. It's a total roll of the dice. Google has done this to combat link manipulation at all levels. And I mean ALL LEVELS. I will be offline for a few days and cannot continue this discussion until next week. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." - TS Eliot |
