Ok, I’ve got a hypothetical situation that I need some additional thoughts on. Let’s say that I (hypothetically) worked for a company that decided in its infinite hypothetical wisdom that buying links would be a good way to achieve rankings for certain key terms. So, this link-buying company hypothetically signs a hypothetical contract with another company for something in the order of 1,500 links from blogs over a period of a few months.

So, a month or two passes, and my hypothetical link-buying company notices that not only has its rankings not improved, but they appear to have slid quite a bit. Also hypothetically distressing is the fact that most of the blog links are extremely worthless from a word of mouth perspective (but I suppose that’s what you get for hypothetically buying links).

Present day. Company (or at least hypothetical members of the company) have decided buying links from a blog spam farm was a bad idea (and some of them may have known from the beginning). They fear that Google has penalized them for such low quality links, but at the very least, they want the links that are already out there scrubbed clean from Google’s index. The hypothetical link seller company is suddenly and inexplicably not returning phone calls *gasp*, and I can’t contact each blog individually since it’s a very long list and they probably wouldn’t care. As was so eloquently put on News Radio, getting something off of the internet is like getting pee out of a pool.

So what does the company I hypothetically work for do?

One notion I was hypothetically batting around with some of my fellow colleagues was to contact Google through the Webmaster Tools’ contact form. We could tell Google that we bought a bunch of links, realized it was a dumb idea, but now we can’t undo it. We could ask Google if they will remove any of those links from affecting our site if we send them a full and complete list of the links we purchased. The benefit for Google is that they have some evidence of blogs which are simply spam.

Would this work or should my hypothetical company try something else? Hypothetically, of course.

Obviously a developer should have an eye for SEO so he knows how to code. I’ve also lumped content writing into development because that’s where it belongs historically. This person should also be aware of how search engines work so he can write accordingly.

The social media side is really just the kind of marketing that draws traffic to your sites and generates quality links. Essentially, the SEO part of social media is link bait.

I’m pretty sure that these positions, coder, writer, and social marketer, combine to form the heart of SEO. Sort of like Captain Planet. Thoughts?

Does this mean sponsored image ads are going to be infiltrating image search in the future? Or maybe just a beta test?

Update: Looks like this is fairly old news. Here’s the story at CNet.

That’s all well and good, and many website owners use that method with great success, but what happens when you rank (or want to rank) for a variety of terms that are hard to fit together in the short amount of space you have for your page title and description?

Hello makes-sense, my name’s counterintuitive, and I’m here to kill you. Secret weapon of the webmaster? Get rid of your meta description.

Think I’m crazy? Think about this. When Google, Yahoo!, or Live Search (hereafter referred to as Goohoolive, and yes goohoolive.com is taken) doesn’t find a meta description, what do they do? They scan the rest of your page for relevant content and will often times display the portion of it that contains the terms being searched for. So if you’ve got a decent amount of content on your homepage (and you should) relating to all of those terms you want to rank for, then you should have enough info for Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, et al to find and display.

Okay, I know it sounds risky, so I’ll try some assurance. First, you don’t have to get rid of your description altogether. I found one very large retail site that shortened it enough to achieve the same effect. Since large retail = big money and therefore (hopefully) less crazy, I’ll use them to back up my point.

Crucial.com is by far the largest internet retailer of computer memory there is. That probably has something to do with the fact that they’re owned by Micron, one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers, but I digress. If you go to their homepage and view their source code, here’s what you’ll see for their meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Memory upgrades from Crucial.com" />

Pretty short, right? That should be absolutely killing them on the SERPs, but it’s not. Below are screenshots of the search engine results page from Google for the top three terms in their industry: memory, computer memory, and ram.

As you can see, each of the descriptions vary somewhat, according to the keyword. Now, while I don’t think the content on their homepage is ideal, it gets the point across. For each of these three searches, they have bolded terms in a description that might otherwise be without.

Now, I haven’t tried this yet with any of the sites I manage, but I am thinking about it. What I’d like to know is if anyone else out there will admit to trying it and let me know what the results were/are.

1. Is Sphinn aware of this?
2. Are they gonna fix it?
3. Does anyone know about Web Position 4?

One thing I’ve always loved about Google is their support team. My questions aren’t always satisfied, and I don’t necessarily always get my way, but at the very least they listen. For a while now I’ve been sending them my feature requests and I always receive a personal response from a real person who actually read my suggestion and forwarded it on. As a user, this encourages me. As an advertiser, it comforts me.
 
I have yet to see any of my ideas come to fruition in the Adwords platform, but I’ve only been submitting them for less than a year. I thought I might post them up here (and hopefully get some readers) so that those who agree can also forward these requests to Google. If enough of us suggest this, perhaps they’ll implement some of them! So here’s my list of improvements to Google Adwords. All other platforms who might be listening (I’m looking at you, Yahoo!) can feel free to implement these items first and try to steal away my business. :)

Note: Keywords have been changed to be generic examples.

Expanded Phrase Match

For some time now, I’ve been wishing for a match type somewhere between broad and phrase match. I’m not sure how helpful this would be, but when I create a campaign that has a bunch of broad match keywords with three, four, or more words in them, I would like to be able to specify how many of those words would trigger the ad.
 
So a keyword like “Canon Powershot A400″ which is in a group of keywords all for Powershots, I would like to specify that the keywords are broad, but have to contain “Powershot” in order to trigger the ad.
That way if Adwords for some reason decides the quality score on these ads is higher than my “Canon” broad match terms, someone searching for “Canon Cameras” would still receive the general ad, not the targeted ad.

Quick Bidder

On certain days of the year, I notice conversion rates drop considerably across the board. On other days, I enjoy a drastically increased conversion rate. On days like the latter, I tend to spend the first ten minutes of the day adjusting bids to take advantage (or cut the losses) of that day’s dynamics. However, I am forced to use the Google Adwords dayparting tool to do this since I have such a large keyword base.
 
What would be great is if there was a way to adjust bid percentages by campaign or even account. That way on Christmas day, a day when I typically see poor conversion rates, I can bid down to 20% or 30% of our normal bids while on days like today or tomorrow, days when I typically see better conversions, increase my bids to 120% or 130%.

You could even make it a cool and pretty GUI with an ajaxy slider or some such.

Ad Group History

What about a history tab in each ad group (and possibly each campaign) that would keep a log of all changes (creation date, bid changes, URL changes, keyword pause/delete, etc.) for that specific ad group. It would help a great deal in keeping track of changes and such and would improve greatly upon the current “My History” option in the tools section.
 

Ad Scheduling By Location

I was looking at some reports and realized that we convert visitors from certain time zones or states better at certain times of the day than others. What about a feature similar to ad scheduling, where I would schedule bid increases/decreases based on time of day AND location? It would be one more way to help target the right people (the ones who are looking to buy).
 

“My History” tool and Reverting

Currently, the “My History” tool downloads into a .csv format. While this is normally fine (and works fine for all the regular reports), it more or less breaks with the history report. This is because individual keywords have their match type shown with the appropriate symbol (i.e. brackets, quotes, or nothing) instead of having a separate column with a text entry (i.e. exact, phrase, or broad). Because this file type uses quotes to surround each field, Excel cannot import this file correctly if there are phrase match keywords within it. So I’d like to suggest that the same reporting protocol used in the reporting module be used in the change history tool to avoid this.
 
Secondly, having all the keywords in the same row as the ad group works okay for looking at the interface on the website, but it also interferes with downloading the file and using it in Excel. In my opinion, it’d be better to have each change as its own row, with the respective campaign and ad group listed.
 
As sort of an aside, another useful feature would be a “Revert to Date” feature where I could change all bids back to the way they were at a certain point in time.

Conversion Assist Tracking

Frequently, I believe that I have high volume but low converting keywords that act as loss-leaders into the site. For instance, a searcher might enter “science fiction books” and click on an ad, determine what book they want and then later search for something like “Dune Series”. Since they clicked through my first ad and liked my site, they might click on this second search as well, recognizing my website name. If they then order, Adwords registers the conversion to the second, more specific keyword since it was more recent. I’m unable to see that they clicked through a general keyword first.
 
I, like many advertisers out there base my bidding decisions on the ROI… and if I can’t see that an expensive keyword is generating revenue, then I’m likely to bid it down. However, if there was evidence to suggest that some keywords act as entry points and helping other keywords to convert, then I would be more likely to maintain these bids or even raise them. This change not only makes sense for advertisers, but also for Google since it prevents advertisers from lowering bids.

Timeline Reporting

How about reporting that didn’t just show metric trends over time, but also showed when big changes occurred during those trends. For instance, if I was looking at how the transaction rate has fluctuated over 6 months, the report would have little icons for when many bidding changes occurred or when new landing pages were set up. Talk about helpful data. Basically, this is simply combining the reporting with the history tool and would look something like Google Trends.

Labels

One thing I like to do is separate well performing keywords into a separate campaign. However, it makes more sense to leave them in their current topical structure. I’d love for the functionality that is in gmail to be added somehow to Adwords. So I could leave all my high performing keywords in their proper campaigns and ad groups, but label them “high performing” or “high cost/low conversion” and so on. It would allow easier reporting while still keeping a logical structure.