Nick Garner - UK SEO / Online Marketeer

SMX advanced give it up session (recap here)

So you know , this is where a selected panel ‘out’ themselves on the best seo tricks they can come up with that they dare to give away. Interestingly there is a blogging blackout for 1 month. Then we can go ahead and talk about it all. The weird thing is that the blackout is done on an honor basis and once again this year, everyone has kept their promise.

Since i was privileged enough to be there, i thought I’d add a couple of comments to the excellent coverage on this give it up session…

My main overview comment was that there was a lot of blackhat stuff, which is great for getting laughs and applause, but realistically how would you actually use most of this stuff without getting busted by the big G?

key points for me:

Google does obfuscation in a BIG way� - (and yes they are getting more evil by the day) So a good example is their PPC quality score where they have been outed for completely misleading us on what they really look for when determining price per click and what were told.

the google guidelines:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas, the core components remain more or less the same. Below you’ll find a breakdown of each type of Quality Score.

For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid:

• The keyword’s historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Other relevance factors

the bit about landing page quality is most important here - so much so, it has a whole page to itself. Big points are Relevant and Original Content and Transparency.

Of course its all obfuscation in spadefulls since its got nothing to do with ‘being a good guy and doing it the google way’ - you pay relative to the authority of the site your ad points to.

Michel Grey and the truth:

Michael Gray was next at bat. Luckily his presentation was a lot more white hat.

Michael asks Google to stop trying to be our moral compass. Be truthful and honest and stop sidestepping the question. Amen.

Michael’s presentation is about how to beat the AdWords Quality Score.

Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it’s going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.

Everyone applauds and I giggle.

So what’s the difference?

• All campaigns were created in one account
• Ad copy identical
• Landing page identical

The only difference was the domain age. The domain that was created in 2006 had its ad jacked up to $10.00. The domain from 2008 was just $.75. It’s not just the domain age. They’re looking at the number of trusted links you get over a period of time. You need a certain number of links but you have to do it over a certain period of time.

Quality Score Gets Adjusted Just Like The Sandbox

Landing Page Quality Score has nothing to do with the actual landing page. To prove this, Michael creates a third ad going to the whitehouse.gov site. Any landing page algorithm that gives whitehouse.gov a good quality score for ringtones is really not looking at the landing page.

What is the Landing Page Quality Score really looking at? The main factor Google looks at is your site’s organic trust score. Trusted sites equal good low pricing. Non-trusted sites get bad pricing.

How do you beat the Landing Page Quality Score? Every few months Google updates their Landing Page score. If your Web site moves into a non-trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all your keywords over.

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data that you give them is going into their borg and being used in their algorithm. Every piece of data can and will be used against you. Think twice before you give it to them.