Yesterday there was some talks in the forums about how sites that load slowly and are using google adwords to promote them, can see their quality score lowered. Google uses a number of factors in determining quality score but this appears to be a new one. This is from the Google AdWords FAQ:

Beginning in February 2008, you’ll be able to see a grade for your website’s load time in your AdWords account. ‘Load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.

Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if it’s received a low score.

Google offers a few tips in terms of bettering your load times

- Using fewer redirects
- Using smaller, more highly-compressed images
- Limiting use of iframes

Other factors like use of external stylesheets and javascript calls (limiting javascript as much as possible), global headers & footers, and fewer http requests also can help.

Google Adwords is testing a feature called “Automatic Matching.” In essense it will automatically spend your budget for you by extending your reach to keywords that you aren’t already bidding on if Google deems it appropriate.

This makes me incredibly nervous. As one of my colleagues said ‘It’s bad enough they have your health information now their spending your money too’.

When I build out campaigns here I spend a solid amount of time on keyword research as well as various combinations of keywords and phrases so I feel confident that I’m hitting all the valuable searches. With an implementation of something like this, whats the point of taking the time to do broad, phrase and exact match. Doesn’t this sound like an iteration of broad match which is beyond our control?

Here’s the example from Google:

I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic Matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.

Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.

Shoes vs. Slippers? Yikes!

How am I applying that principle personally? Well we have a real estate site which currently doesn’t offer rentals, only real estate for sale. Basically is Google saying because my keyword list doesn’t offer rentals that they will bid on that for me? Houses for Sale and Houses for Rent may be similar but certainly those two keywords are not targeting the same searcher. It sounds kind of like Google’s keyword tool that searches for synonyms and suggests adding those to your keyword lists only done in an automatic fashion now.

I like Google, their products, and the people that we work with there, but I really don’t see the value in this.

I just hope that Google is careful when testing this, or the perceived value of PPC ads and the amount of people clicking on them might decline faster than the amount of people who are still buying cd’s.

Looking at my people count on compete it’s pretty clear that I haven’t posted anything in a while. I’ve been really busy with work during Q1 working on the search engine marketing aspect of a new site that we launched here. The website is called frontdoor.com and it’s a real estate website. The real estate industry is seeing some pretty tough times right now, but I really think our site has legs since it offers much more than just listings. Check it out and let me know what you think.

HGTV FrontDoor Real Estate - Powered by HGTV with homes for sale, buying and selling tips and more

Update: After writing this article it has come to my attention from Nick James a fellow SEO, that E&P has removed the reference to the ‘500 times’. You can see the original article below. I’m glad to see they have cleaned this up for individuals who may have thought that the comment below was the right approach to SEO.

When I got in the office this morning I started going through emails and my RSS feeds. I saw an article on Editor & Publisher entitled Building Web Traffic Through ‘Search Engine Optimization’. I’m glad to see that Newspaper publishers are starting to see the value in SEO but I was horrified to see a particular quote in the article showing how there is still a lot of bad information floating around out there. Here’s the quote (with the wrong information being in the 2nd paragraph).

Manipulating meta tags also can affect search results. These tags of data (which readers don’t see) are computer code, a digital map of sorts, for what can be found on a particular Web page. “Meta tags will tell the search engines all kinds of information about what’s on the site,” says Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates in Williamsburg, Va.

He illustrates how meta tags work with this example: “Let’s say someone wants to index high with the term ‘pizza delivery.’ A programmer can type ‘pizza delivery’ 500 times in the meta tag. It’s basically a technical task where people who know the algorithms that Google and Yahoo use will work real hard to fool around with the tags to get you listed higher and higher.”

Are you serious?!?! You obviously don’t know the “algorithms” if you think that spamming up a meta tag with the same keywords over and over are going to have any positive results. I always thought of Editor & Publisher as very respectable so I’m surprised that nobody caught that quote before publishing this article. It’s a shame that there will be ones who read the above article and then ask their online teams to start taking this approach. I guess its articles like this, that keep real SEO’s in business.

Today I received a beta invite from Barry Schwartz for the site NotchUp.com. NotchUp is a job site which makes companies pay to interview you. The goal of this site looks to lure talented professionals to companies while they might not actively be seeking new employment. It’s a way for HR folks and Hiring Managers to locate those passive job seekers that typically they are unable to reach. Right now it shows Google, Facebook and some other corporate beta testers using their services.

So how does it work?

The site first lets you set an interview price and includes a little calculator which allows you to put in some criteria and then spits out a suggested interview price. This is a slick feature and seems to be pretty on par with real value even though it came in a little below what I thought I was worth ;).

Setting up your profile is a piece of cake. Most people on this site are probably using LinkedIn already so they have a feature which will let you import all your information from that service which worked like a charm for me. It also allows you to block certain email addresses from seeing your information if you are seeking a job and you don’t want your employer to know about it.

Another really cool feature is a 10% referral fee. When you refer a friend to the site and they get interviewed you earn a 10 percent referral fee (which if know of people actively seeking a job then you better invite them before I do! ) The cool thing is that even if you don’t get the job your left with more than a generic letter from an HR department, you get $$$$.

If your interested and would like an invite just contact me.