AdMoolah News and Views

There is going to be yet another pay-to-blog service – SponsoredReviews.com. There are several existing services such as ReviewMe, PayPerPost and LoudLaunch that are very similar.

They mention a few differences that make them sound like they may be interesting:

• Lower Transaction Fees – that’s always good for the advertisers and bloggers.
• Manual Pricing – This could be good for advertisers finding good deals from bloggers who are willing to lower their prices

They should be launching in a few weeks.

Here is a list of things you can do if you want to annoy people, get blacklisted, or even arrested for your online marketing efforts. Webmasters often use these techniques thinking they are harmless, but there is a cost – these technique do cost people real time and money.

Imagine if you developed a robot that would go into a Starbucks every day and steal 4 packets of sugar. No big deal right? Who would miss, or even complain, about 4 packets of sugar? But now let’s pretend you had a thousand of these robots and sent them each into a Starbucks every hour. That’s 96,000 sugar packets a day or 35,040,000 packets of sugar a year. Starbucks is going to have something to say about that.

It’s the same with automated spamming techniques, a single piece of spam may not seem like a big deal – it’s just a little bandwidth, or CPU usage or disk space that’s used, but add it all up and you are doing some real damage. Even more damaging is the amount of time that people spend deleting and fighting spam.

Here are some of the common spam techniques, along with the reasons they work and how it causes damage.

1. Email Spam

This is the original spamming technique. Marketers send out mass, unsolicited emails.

Why it works

It’s a number game. If you send out 100 million emails, even if you get a .0001% response rate, you get ten thousand responses.

Why is this bad?

People spend countless hours deleting spam and setting up and configuring spam blocking systems. Spam counts for a huge percentage of all email and clutters mailboxes and wastes huge amount of disk space. I can’t even imagine all the CPU time consumed trying to filter all this junk.

2. Guest Book Spam

This is one of the original spammy SEO techniques. In the dark ages of the web, people would set up guest books where visitors could say “hi” and leave a little message. Spammers quickly found out that they could set up bots that create messages with links back to their own site.

Why it Works

Search engines use the number of backlinks to a site as one of the indicators of a good site. This technique abuses that indicator.

Why Is This Bad?

People spend a lot of time trying to clean up guest books. Disk space and bandwidth is also wasted with these spam messages.

3. Referrer Spam

These spammers send there bots to as many sites as they can, and set the referrer URL to the website address the spammer is trying to advertise. Some sites have publicly accessible web statistics, so these URLs end up on web pages.

Why it Works

Search engines that find these links from the publicly accessible web statistic pages may count them as a vote for the site being pointed at.

Why Is This Bad?

Bandwidth is wasted when the bots visit the site. A lot of time is spent by Webmasters trying to figure out who that particular link ended up in his referrer list.

4. Web Spam

Unscrupulous Webmasters create web sites that full of bogus content that attract search engine spiders, but are of no use to real use to real users.

Why it Works

Using automation, Webmasters can create thousands or millions of pages of content. This content gets displayed in search engine results for “long tail” key phrases where users are looking for very specific queries. Again it’s a numbers game, get enough of the long tail hits and you can get some good traffic. Contextual ads, such as AdSense, are put on the pages to monetize them.

Why Is This Bad?

Search engines indexes become polluted with content that is useless to users, making the entire web experience poorer for all users.

5. Splogs

Short for spam blogs, these are blogs full of automated junk are created.

Why it Works

Much like Web Spam, long tail keywords are a rich source of traffic, but blogs have the added benefit of being indexed quickly in many blog search engine as well as standard Web search engines.

Why Is This Bad?

Many splogs are created on free blog hosting services such as Blogger.com. This wastes the resources of the blog host. It also pollutes blog and regular search engines with lousy content, degrading the overall user experience on the web.

6. Blog Comment Spam

Automated comments are posted to blogs containing a link back to the spammers web site.

Why it Works

Since search engines count links as a vote for a site, this boosts the site’s rankings. Lately the “nofollow” tag has been added to links, but this seems to have done little to stop the flow of comment spam.

Why Is This Bad?

Blog owners spend a lot of time deleting this unwanted junk. People also spend a lot of time trying to set up systems to thwart the spam. Lots of disk space CPU time are wasted on this spam.

7. Forum Spam

Automated programs register as users with forums and then create posts with links back to the spammers web page.

Why it Works

Since search engines count links as a vote for a site, this boosts the site’s rankings.

Why Is This Bad?

Forum owners spend a lot of time deleting this unwanted junk. People also spend a lot of time trying to set up systems to stop the spam. Lots of disk space CPU time are wasted on this spam.

| | Vote for this on SEOyak.com

ShoeMoney had a post about who would hire Matt Cutts if he were looking for a job. The post itself was interesting, but there was one little nugget of information buried in the post that I thought was very interesting:

I mainly build content or service oriented sites for users not for search engines so the whole SEO value really is not that important to me.

That’s something to keep in mind every time you think: “How am I going to get traffic to my site?”

The Performancing/PayPerPost deal I blogged about a few days ago is being canceled. I’m not sure of the details, but Nick Wilson of Performancing said the deal “proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community”.

Update: The PayPerPost blog is reporting that “We listened to our Posties and other Metrics users, dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.”

Now is you chance to win a link on the home page of AdMoolah.com.

I am pleased to announce a contest on SEOYak.com that will let one lucky member get a free link for a month. The more you participate at SEOYak.com, the better you chances of winning, so register at SEOYak.com today and start voting, commenting and submitting new stories!

In case you missed my earlier post, SEOYak.com is a social news site focused on the SEO community. It is much like Digg.com, except the stories are primarily about the world of SEO.

Here is some good news for publishers who have been having problems getting correctly targeted ads on their sites – Google is testing the ability for publishers to specify negative keywords for ads.

One publisher who was given the chance to test this new feature had this to say:

I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads.

Of course, as with all new testing at Google, there is no word on when this feature will be available to all publishers, or even if it will ever be available.

I think this is a good step forward for AdSense. I know I initially had problems targeting ads on this blog, because all the ads were about “blogs”. Having a negative keyword filter would have helped out a lot.

Originally found via ProBlogger.

Performancing, who runs an advertising network I personally use, and who I’ve mentioned before, is being aquired by PayPerPost, the blog advertising network who I have also mentioned. TechCrunch broke the news today.

Performancing has 28,000 users, most of who are bloggers. This fits in perfectly with PayPerPost’s business model. PayPerPost has been getting some competition from ReviewMe lately, and this should help give them a boost.

I have started a new SEO social news website – SEOyak. Users can submit and vote for stories that are of interest to the SEO community. This is in response to a few recent reports (from TopRankBlog and Search Engine Land) that Digg has been banning SEO websites.

This site is brand new and is a little rough around the edges, but have a look at it and contribute if you can. Feel free to email me at [tlainevool at seoyak dot com] with any comments.

Two services which allow bloggers to be paid by advertisers for posting about products, PayPerPost and LoudLaunch, both announced recently that bloggers will be required to have full disclosure for paid posts. This follows an opinion issues by the FTC last week that they will look into deceptive word of mouth marketing campaigns on a case by case basis.

LoudLaunch also announced recently that they are beginning to accept applications from both bloggers and advertisers and the service will be launched on December 26.

A third get-paid-to-blog service, ReviewMe launched last month and has required full disclosure from the beginning.

One source of constant confusion and debate in the AdSense community has been the placement of images next to ads. Many people discovered that putting images right next to ads caused an increase in the CTR of ads. Google, however has come back to publishers and told them that they are not allowed to do this, and ads that appear physically related to the ads are not allowed.

Google has now posted a blog entry that clarifies AdSense’s image policy.

Here is what I believe is the main thrust of the policy:

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Many publisher have tried to put a thin line between the images and the ads, but according to Google, that is not good enough:

If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

So, the basic rule is, don’t try to fool your visitors. This is still a subjective judgment, but try to view your site as if you were a Google engineer, and ask if it seems acceptable or not.