BusinessWeek published an article about small advertisers being priced out of AdWords. Given quality score adjustments that may boost ads for sites which have strong trust associated organic SEO, it is prohibitively expensive for many businesses to use AdWords unless they are already well trusted in organic search.

What Types of Sites Rank?

The sites which are already well represented in organic search typically fall into one or more of the following groups

• old

• has many signs of authority (new and old links, repeat visitors, brand related search queries)
• associated with a rich powerful offline entity
• unique & remarkable

News Sites as God

News sites tend to fit all 4 of those categories, plus get additional easy linkage data by writing about current events and being included in select indexes like Google News, and have many other advantages. The bias toward promoting large trusted sites which are already overrepresented in the organic results starts to look even uglier when news outfits are

• writing for Google (as noted in the NYT's This Boring Headline Is Written for Google)

• creating high ranking lead generation pages that leverage their domain authority (like this one http://www.bizjournals.com/resources/bad-credit-debt-consolidation-loan....)
• buying up keywords, as reported in the Wall Street Journal

From the WSJ:

Britain's famously competitive newspapers have a new battleground: Google. ... Newspapers are buying search words on Google Inc. so that links to their Web sites pop up first when people type in a search. ... Paying to put their stories in front of readers by buying Google ads -- a practice the papers say has intensified in recent months -- is different from past marketing efforts

In spite of Google claiming otherwise, there is a direct connection between buying AdWords and ranking in the organic search results. If a news article is read by a few more people and gets just a few more links off the start it will become the default article about that topic and acquire many self reinforcing links.

Why Would Google Trust News Sites so Much?

• Most news sites have some type of editorial controls and are typical hard for the average webmaster to significantly influence.

• Most people think what they are told to (and the media is who tells us what to think about). Thus if Google returns a rough reflection of what we should think they are seen as relevant and unbiased.
• Most news sites are associated with economic macro-parasites - not micro-parasites. Google is far more afraid of death by 1,000s of small cuts than by trusting any given domain too much.
• It is mainstream media which makes up a large foundation of Google's index and power. Google is killing off many of the inefficient monopoly based business models, and is thus trying to throw the media scraps to keep the media bought into Google's worldview.
• It is easier for Google to organize information if they allow their algorithms to cause their search results to parallel offline authority structures.

Crawl Delay Has Cost:

Danny Sullivan recently commented about how Digg outranked him for his own headline because his website is newer and less trusted than Digg.

Google has become less willing to regularly crawl and rank sites unless they are aged or have a significantly developed editorial link campaign associated with them. If your site gets indexed slower then your content needs to be much more remarkable to be linkworthy, thus if have not built up significant trust this is a penalty / cost you need to overcome.

Sure Google may say they do not offer paid inclusion, but requiring a huge authoritative link profile or years of aging is associated with costs. They may not have paid Google directly, but Google's algorithms do require that most people pay, in one way or another.

And if you can't get past that crawl delay problem, you can always buy AdWords.

SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

Answer: PPC ads go through redirects, so they do not count toward your link popularity, but there are other ways to tie together PPC ads and organic search placement. Search engines claim there is no direct linkage between buying ads and ranking, but they only talk in ideals because it helps reinforce their worldview and help them make more money.

Buying AdWords Ads

What They Won't Tell You:
Highly commercial keywords may have the associated editorial results go through more relevancy filters and/or be editorially reviewed for relevancy more frequently. Also, because they want people to click on the AdWords ads there is a heavy informational bias on the oranic search results.

I know some people who have large ad spends that get notifications of new ad system changes ahead of time, and others who get to give direct feedback to allow them to participate in cleaning up search results and minimizing unfair competing actions in the ad systems. So that is one type of cross-over / feedback that exists, but I think that tends to be more rare, and the more important cross over / feedback that exists is an indirect one.

Just by Being Real
You can't really explain why and how everyone does what they do. Some people who find your product and enjoy it enough to leave glowing testimonials will even tell you that they don't know how they found it.

In the same way that targeted ads can lead to purchases, they can also lead to an increase in mindshare, brand, reach, usage data, and linkage data. Just by being real and being seen you are going to pick up quality signals. If you try to factor all of those into your ad buys most markets are still under-priced.

Cross Over Due to Buying AdWords:
A well thought out pay per click campaign can feed into your SEO campaign more ways than I can count. Here are a few examples.

Integrating Offline & Online:
In a TV commercial Pontiac told people to search Google, and got a ton of press.

Big Controversial Ads:
Mazda quickly bid on Pontiac.

Many companies also have strong ties between the legal and marketing departments. If buying or selling an ad gets you sued and gets you in the news the value of the news coverage can far exceed the cost of the ads and legal fees.

Small Controversial Ads:
When I was newer to the field one friend called me the original link spammer. He meant it as a compliment, and I still take it as one. In much the same way I was an aggressive link builder, I was also quite aggressive at ad buying.

I caused controversy by buying names of other people in the industry as AdWords ads. I was prettymuch a total unknown when I did that, but some of the top names in the industry elevated my status by placing my name in heated discussion about what was fair and reasonable or not.

You can always consider placing controversial / risky ideas or ads against your brand or competing brands as a way to generate discussion (but of course consider legal ahead of time).

Drafting Off New Words & Industry News:
When the nigritude ultramarine SEO contest started I bid on AdWords. Some people discussing the contest mentioned that I bid on that word. If an event bubbles up to gain mainstream coverage and you make it easy to identify your name as being associated with it then you might pick up some press coverage.

Industry buzz words that are discussed often have significant mindshare, get searched for frequently, and larger / bureaucratic competitors are going to struggle to be as plugged into the market as you are or react as quickly to the changing language.

Snagging a Market Position Early:
When a friend recommended I read the TrustRank research paper in February of last year I knew it was going to become an important idea (especially because that same friend is brilliant, helped me more ways and times than I can count, and was the guy who came up with the idea of naming the Google Dances).

I read it and posted a TrustRank synopsis. In addition to trying to build a bit of linkage for that idea I also ensured that I bought that keyword on AdWords. Today I rank #1 in Google for TrustRank, and I still think I am the only person buying that keyword, which I find fascinating given how many people use that word and how saturated this market is.

Buying AdSense Ads

Buying Ads Creates Content:
If your ads are seen on forums people may ask about your product or brands. I know I have seen a number of threads on SEO forums that were started with something like I saw this SEO Book ad and I was wondering what everyone thought of it. Some people who start talking about you might not even click your ads.

Each month my brand gets millions and millions of ad impressions at an exceptionally reasonable price, especially when you factor in the indirect values.

Appealing to an Important Individual:
I have seen many people advertise on AdSense targeting one site at a time, placing the webmaster's name in the ad copy. It may seem a bit curt for some, but it is probably more likely to get the attention of and a response from a person than if you request a link from them.

Ads are another type / means of communication.

Appealing to a Group of People:
I get a ton of email relating to blogs and blogging. And in Gmail I keep seeing Pew Internet ads over and over and over again. Their ads range from Portrait of a Blogger to Who are Bloggers?

Going forward they will have added mindshare, link equity, and a report branded with that group of people. When people report on blogging or do research about blogging in the future the Pew report is likely to be referenced many times.

Selling AdSense Ads

Don't Sell Yourself Short:
Given the self reinforcing nature of links (see Filthy Linking Rich) anything that undermines your authority will cause you to get less free exposure going forward. So you really have to be careful with monetization. If you do it for maximal clickthough rate that will end up costing you a lot of trust and link equity.

There are other ways to improve your AdSense CTR and earnings without costing your credibility and authority.

More tips:

• AdSense Tips and Linkworthy Content

• Tracking AdSense Ad Clicks by Page and Keyword
• Track Google AdSense Clicks via Google Analytics

Don't Monetize Too Early:
Given the lack of monetization ability of a new site with few visitors and the importance of repeat visits in building trust and mindshare you don't want to monetize a new site too aggressively unless it is an ecommerce type site. It is hard to build authority if people view your site as just enough content to wrap around the AdSense.

Spam, Footprints, & Smart Pricing:
In the past search engines may have discounted pages that had poison words on them. Search is all about math / communication / patterns.

If your site fits the footprints of many spammy sites then your site might be flagged for review or reduced in authority. MSN did research on detecting spam via footprints, and link spam detection based on mass estimation shows how power laws could make it easy to detect such footprints.

Graywolf recently noted that landing page slippage may be an input into landing page and site quality scores for AdWords ad buyers. Google could also use AdSense account earnings or AdSense CTR data to flag sites for editorial reviews, organic search demotion, ad payout reduction, or smart pricing.

This is old news, but a while ago on TW I posted that UPI, a 100 year old company, was overtly selling PageRank, even mentioning PageRank on their advertisement pages. Search works so well because they measure relevancy using things that are hard to manipulate or things that people wouldn't generally think to manipulate. Thus, if a 100 year old slow moving company is doing something you know that the method of relevancy they aim to manipulate is generally likely already dead.

Google will likely filter out overt link buys like this

especially when they are marketed this aggressively on Google's own ad network

If a link buy is so overt that people would talk about it, then an engineer or algorithm has probably caught it already. But that sort of example can be seen as a proxy for the market as a whole, and Google have also significantly lowered the weighting on raw PageRank scores over the past few years, because too many people know about it and manipulate it. Just looking at PageRank is nearly as useless as a meta keywords tag.

Yahoo! tends to be a bit more cautious than Google when it comes to allowing trademark related ads. That significantly suppresses their earnings because brand related search queries are often some of the most targeted, most commercial, highest converting, and most expensive keywords. Here is a snapshot of the current search results for SEO Book. Notice that the top 8 organic results link to SEO Book.com. By loosening up on subdomains (displaying them more frequently) and providing a mini site map (called Sitelinks) in the SERPs it makes it much harder for affiliates or merchants reselling a brand to get exposure through the organic search results for the core brand name.

There are two pieces to that, as well.

1. If the top 5 or 6 search results point at the official site searchers have to scroll down quite a bit to find commercial search results outside of the core brand. Rather than scrolling they may be more likely to click an ad.

2. If the search results look highly informational in nature (by being harder to manipulate via commercial bias, and Google over-representing the official site) then merchants are more likely to buy ads.

The brutal part with buying the ads is that sometimes Google shows 0, 1, 2, or 3 AdWords ads above the organic search results. If the organic search results are somewhat irrelevant to the commercial intent of a searcher, those few ads at the top of the search results are going to get a high clickthrough rate. If you are a merchant who is not featured at the top of the results the right rail ads will bring you relatively little exposure. Thus a bidding war occurs for those top couple ad spots, and Google can control how many ads to show above the results to maximize earnings.

If you sell an ebook like I do, it is no big deal if one day your sales are high and the next day they are garbage, but if you run a business with fixed costs, a fixed marketing budget, and many employees then you may be stuck paying whatever it takes to be at the top of the results for brands you carry. The more dependant your business is on search the more they can bleed you dry!

While I used my brand as an example in this post, this brand factor recently played a big roll for a client, who even outranks his manufacturer for their official name in some major search engines, but is forced to pay much higher AdWords rates to get any exposure on Google. If he falls out of the top couple ad slots the right rail sends us like 10% the traffic that the top ad positions do. And I am probably going to have to bid bleed about $5 a click for a while to work that client back into the rotation of the ads at the top of the search results. And then if we knock a competing site out of position that may spur on a budget bleeding bidding war. Companies with a fixed marketing budget (my client has a variable budget based on market conditions) will suffer even worse by having to overpay for traffic until they kill their budget, and then not show up the rest of the time.

If the core brand term is priced out of reach it is important to

• Build enough link equity that your deeper pages rank at or near the top of the search results for long tail brand related queries. This may require investing into placing cheesy linkbait on your site to better integrate your site into the web and boost your overall authority.

• Use enough modifiers and alternate part numbers in your page content to be relevant for a wide array of queries.

My client dominates the long tail, but for that particular brand he carries, most of the queries are for the official brand name. As a Google share owner and owner of a strong brand, I think they are brilliant. As a marketer who has a client getting screwed by their setup, I think a bit less of them. ;)

Also worth noting that Yahoo!'s search results are moving toward a more authority based algorithm, and they are starting to double list many brand sites, so this issue will likely rise again soon enough.

Why are the Gmail spam filters so pathetic?

For example... I hate the letter I: Some asshat (who can be described using no other word), has sent me about 1,300 spam emails in the last week. Every email has the subject line of I and the from name of I. After labeling over 1,000 of these in the past week as spam how is it possible that Gmail has not picked up that footprint? How many real messages have 1 letter in both the sender name and the subject line?

Same Spam Name: Another asshat (or maybe the same one) is doing a spammer phrase dictionary attack. Surely they know the person named Buy Viagra Online Discreetly who uses the same thing as the subject line is a spammer? Yet I get about a hundred of these random spammer keyword emails in my inbox each day as well.

Many of my blog comments are not spam: Gmail is now sending many of my blog comments to the spam bin, in spite of me not labeling them as such. I even set up a custom filter for them to label it as important.

Good job starring the messages and spending them straight to the spam bin. I am sure you realized that is what I wanted when I set up a filter requesting the messages be starred as important. What is even dumber is that after I report dozens of these as not spam they still star new ones and send them to the spam bin. Why isn't there a filter to prevent something from being labeled as spam?

If Gmail doesn't improve I am probably going to have to try something new pretty soon.