Internet Marketing | Web Design | Web Development

In today’s In The Trenches article on Search Engine Land, Josh Dreller noted that the Google Conversion Tracking tool now allows advertisers to track up to 30 unique conversion events, up from a mere 5 events. We’re pretty excited about that much needed improvement, as well as this one: Google AdWords now allows advertisers to test their conversion tracking without clicking on their own ads!

Google has always had the irritating habit of charging advertisers to test conversion tracking, and I assume that the reason they continued this practice for so long is because it’s accounted for an extra bit of pocket change. Google’s previous suggestion on conversion verification was [Read more →]

Two months ago Matt McGee wrote an article title, “Are Yahoo and Yelp Dating?” in which he noted that Yahoo had given a nice bit of exposure to Yelp by using one of its listings as the primary example in their Open Search announcement. At the time he had speculated that Yelp had been chosen because of a perceived relationship between the two sites, which included a keyword rich link to Yahoo Local at the bottom of every business profile page on Yelp (see below). These links had been sighted as early as December 2007 and perhaps were related to Yelp’s participation in Open Search.

Frankly, I didn’t give the relationship much thought until the other week when SEOmoz posted an article about Yahoo’s relationship with Great Schools in which a large number of the Great Schools pages linked to Yahoo Real Estate, once again, with keyword rich anchor text. [Read more →]

Yahoo Local

A few weeks ago, we reported that Yahoo Local was being filled with affiliate spam. This story was immediately picked up and expanded upon (most notably by Search Engine Land and Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search).

Shortly after, Small Business SEM had an interview with Brian Gil, Director of Product Management for Yahoo! Local who basically said that the “hotel thing” was really insignificant and most likely put in place by the hotel owners as a tracking mechanism. [Read more →]

Today Matt McGee published portions of an interview he had with Yahoo’s Director of Product Management, Brian Gil, in which Brian responds to our report and others of affiliate spam in Yahoo Local:

We haven’t seen what I would categorize as significant abuse issues. I’m not going to speak specifically to the hotel thing. That one is a unique case. We have been looking into it…. We’ll take the appropriate action, but my gut is telling me that it’s not nearly as suspect as what was written up.

Matt also adds, "Brian did explain that there are times when businesses want to use a unique URL in their business listing for tracking purposes, but this didn’t appear to be one of those cases."

First off, if we’re somehow mistaken as to the relationship of these links to the hotels then we’ll apologize immediately and profusely. There are circumstances in which a business would implement a unique URL for tracking, but I doubt this is the case.
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Last week we wrote how Yahoo Local was full of affiliate spam (additional information can be found on Search Engine Land and Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search. Until recently, they were the only Local of the big three to allow any user to edit listing information without verification.

This morning, I stumbled across two articles by Techdirt and TechCrunch praising the move by Google to open up wiki style editing to the maps. While I generally agree that this is a cool feature, there are some hard lessons to be learned from Yahoo. Some of the comments on these stories talk about the opportunities for "vandals" to mess with the listings, but they miss the real problem. Local affiliate spam involves editing links to include an affiliate code, so even though the link still lands users on the same page, all actions taken by those visitors are credited to the affiliate.Affiliate spammers aren’t one-off angry people or kids goofing off, they have a direct financial interest in changing as many listings as possible, they will keep coming back again and again, and they usually send the traffic to the correct end result, so most users don’t even notice the difference.

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We were planning on saving this post for the launch of our new site and blog in April, but Greg Sterling’s article on Search Engine Land yesterday has prompted us to change our schedule. Google recently announced that they will allow anyone to edit the local listings in Google Maps, so long as that listing has not been claimed by a business owner. Greg touched on the possible negative implications of increased community involvement and included this statement:

Hanke acknowledged that there were some risks in doing this — Yahoo has had a similar system in place for some time without incident — but he stressed the value of getting the community involved in cleaning up and improving the database.

“Yahoo has had a similar system in place for some time without incident”…although it’s not clear whether this point was made by the author or Google Director of Maps & Earth, John Hanke, (it was Greg - thanks for the clarification) it would seem unwise to use Yahoo as proof of concept. Due to Yahoo’s open edit policy, Yahoo Local appears to be systematically sprinkled with affiliate spam.  We first noticed this behavior doing research for a downtown Chicago hotel.

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