jeffreyrusso

This leaked data from June 2010 gives some interesting insight into the distribution of AdWords account sizes... http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-advertisers-...

I work on accounts of varying sizes, approaching $1M/month. At that level, we have access to a handful of dedicated reps who quickly fix issues like this when they arise (in addition to weekly support meetings and a handful of other nice-to-haves.) The smaller accounts I work on barely get any attention, so I can sympathize.

That being said, the established accounts I've seen don't have these types of issues. (Even some of the smaller accounts I work on don't run into holdups often at all.) I suspect it has less to do with budget and more to do with some sort of trust built up over time and the frequency with which you make changes to your account (if you make frequent changes without causing problems, you are given more leeway, maybe?) Casual observations on my part, but something I've noticed.

This is a viable concern, but it applies to pretty much any activity a startup can engage in. There are a lot of paths to revenue you can choose to take, and maybe over-optimizing is an easy one to be led down, but I don't think that this is a danger that is unique to SEO. Ignoring SEO and your analytics data is probably equally dangerous and just as common.

Link building and social media optimization aren't necessarily spam activities (but I can see why you might correlate the two; there are a lot of shady link building operators out there and a lot of social media charlatans, for lack of a better word.)

While there are a lot of technical pieces to SEO (that go beyond mod_rewrite hackery, as you put it), most legitimate SEOs spend as much time on the marketing side of the equation. There are a few legitimate link building "tricks" out there, but most SEOs doing a good job at link building & social activities are focused on creating worthy content that ranks well in search and gets attention on social media sites.

BTW, nofollowing links to "sculpt" the way PageRank flows through your site doesn't work anymore - nofollow now "evaporates" the PageRank rather than forcing more of it through the other links on your page :)

I've seen view through do some pretty amazing things first hand. It depends very heavily on the advertiser and the vertical, but in some cases it's astonishing what a few million dirt cheap impressions can do to drive sales through other channels.

Google purports to do something similar on its display ad network - they call it "smart pricing". If it's a low quality placement that is "unlikely to produce an actionable business result" (their words), the CPC an advertiser pays is lowered below the natural auction price. The whole system is pretty opaque, but as you mentioned, it likely allows Google to keep millions of poorly performing pages in its display network without harming the overall network (too much.)

I agree that it's important to distinguish between the different types of content everyone is registering grievances against...

Scraped content and empty directory pages (that washing machine reviews page that has nothing more than an H1 and some crummy auto-generated sentences) vs... Mediocre human written content from sites like e-How and other Demand media properties.

The first kind of content is pretty clearly spam, and doesn't deserve a place in the index. Everyone can agree on that, and I'm perplexed as to why Google hasn't taken more action against these types of sites. I have a hard time believing they can't do it algorithmically.

The second type isn't as clear cut. Most of the readers here and on the cited tech/search blogs know what this content is and where it comes from, and are probably a bit more critical of it than the average user for that very reason. I agree that these article directory pages are usually painfully mediocre, but I wonder if they aren't "good enough" from the point of view of someone who doesn't know better. After all, I havent seen much of an outcry about search quality coming from the mainstream; it seems limited to HN and other tech circles.

The last official comment on anything related to this was a vague mention that resources had been taken away from the search quality team to work on other projects, but that they would be refocusing on search quality in the near future. Not sure if there has been much else in the way of official comment since then, but I can't imagine that they would let the cries (warranted or not) go unanswered for much longer.

Good question. There are a handful of employer review sites out there that have real review content, but on the ones I've seen it is often hard to discern the angry rants from the legitimate grievances.

I honestly sympathize. It's a horrible thing to be blindsided by something like this when it's a main source of income. The approach Google took was cold and heartless, that goes without saying. All that being said, I can understand why things like this happen, and I don't necessarily fault Google. When a particular placement generates a lot of traffic that doesn't convert, Google has an obligation to take action on behalf of their paying advertisers.

Very important point. Driving increases in CTR is a million times easier than driving increases in actual conversion rate. While the author mentioned that they saw "similarly impressive" increases in conversion, that isn't the norm. In a lot of cases, the extra traffic drawn in by jumping through hoops to increase CTR converts at a proportionately poorer rate - it's fickle, poor quality traffic.

Glen Greenwald's salon.com piece on this is also a worthy read; it discusses the irreversible physical harm to the brain these conditions have probably already caused Manning. They also have him on a steady dose of antidepressants... All this makes me sick to hear about.

Wow. I'm a total search geek and I missed this one. Radian6 has a similar feature, but that's the only place I've ever seen something similar.

This was an artful response. Google took what was essentially a piece of negative press from the New York Times and used it as an argument against the call for transparency in the algorithm that so many major media sources are pushing for lately.

I have a hard time believing that image search is any kind of a bellwether on the state of Google.

Nick Fox (Google's AdWords Product Manager) broached the topic of a keywordless ad system in late 2009, and there is word that some larger advertisers have been invited to private alphas. I think Google is acutely aware that a keyword based system is only scalable to a certain point. AdWords is already so complicated that it's really difficult for beginning and occasional users to get a lot out of it (as was the case with this author.) That being said, AdWords is where the volume and intent is; and it will always come out ahead of contextual/demographic ads like Facebook when used properly.

Google isn't some "great equalizer" that ranks content purely on its merit. There is an entire economy working behind the scenes that determines which pages end up at the top of the search results. On top of that, there are a huge number of complex technical issues that regularly get in the way of worthy content being ranked. Understanding how this process works and how to best present your content is not manipulative at all. If anything, SEO is only going to grow as competition for rankings becomes more fierce and search becomes more complicated.

I also think the author chose the wrong article to pick on. There are so many poorly written and poorly researched pieces of advice on SEO out there - the article they chose isn't one of them.