Google Mapspam Coming to a City Near You

Greg Sterling and a few others note of a new Interwebz spammer called biglocal.com on a Search Engine Land post.

Many have noticed local (map) results on Google when doing a local search query. If you do a common one such as “pizza in Minneapolis” you’ll see something like this.

The above results are pretty slick and very relevant, appear above the natural results, and the algorithm is separate from the natural results as well.

Now you can do a search for “internet consulting in Minneapolis” and you find a bunch of fake ones from biglocal.com.

Clever indeed, although it’s obviously search engine manipulation and will be deleted once Google finds out what’s going on. Some notes…

1) They’re not local to Minneapolis which is considered essential for Google in these results.

2) Everytime you call their number, you suddenly get a “Due to the high volume of calls, we cannot answer. Please try again later”. On a Saturday? Right. This is noted by others as well.

3) The domain is registered by proxy, which basically means you can’t find out who they are. Domains by proxy are primarily used by those who don’t want themselves to be known.

4) Their “about us” page leads you to a broken page and they don’t show a physical address on their contact page, or anywhere else on the site.

5) The listing addresses they use for themselves are fake. Not just in Minneapolis, but in Seattle, Los Angeles, and pretty much any city across the country.

Although it appears they want to be anonymous, they do have a SuperPages profile and a Yahoo Local listing complete with a five-star “review” and matching physical addresses and Salt Lake City local phone numbers.

It does seem strange that the phrase they’re targeting is “Internet consulting + YourCity”. So many more people search for terms such as “Internet marketing”, “Web marketing”, “Internet advertising”, or “search engine marketing”. The free WordTracker tool isn’t perfect, but see for yourself.

The person or people submitting their listings are pretty clever though, and apparently pretty horny as well. The first Minneapolis listing shows an address of 307 3rd St S. This is about a block from what Google considers the city center and is also arguably one of the main factors Google considers in their local (maps) algorithm.

If you do a “street view” map search, there is no such address, but 308 and 316 3rd St S. shows you none other than this.

That’s right folks. Rick’s Cabaret, a well-known gentleman’s club. Maybe this photo was taken in the morning and these two gentleman shown are waiting outside for the club to open?

In addition to Greg from Search Engine Land, others have written about this too including Mike from the Blumenthals blog, Stephen from I’mNotADoctor (I believe he was the first to find this), and Greg’s article was even Sphunn on Sphinn.

How to Use Negative Keywords to Help Your PPC Campaigns

Negative keyword options have been around for years, but not many advertisers use them to help ensure targeted traffic. This post is to help identify negative keywords, how to easily place them in both Google and Yahoo campaigns, and how to find new ones in your analytics program.

For anyone unfamiliar with negative keywords, these are the keywords that you do not want to show up in your PPC ads once users perform a search query. A few common starting ones are:

• free
• download
• cheap
• ebay

Basically, if you sell red staplers your ad can be blocked by users searching for “free red staplers”.

Finding additional negative keywords can be as easy as tracking your analytics. Whatever analytics you use, find what keywords that you’re getting traffic for that does not provide quality traffic and include them as negative keywords. The amount of these words you find can be amazing and they’re very easy to find. This can be updated on a weekly or monthly basis in as little as a few minutes.

While finding negative keywords is easy, implementing them can be a bit tricker depending if you’re advertising on Google or Yahoo.

In Google, it’s pretty straightforward. You can go into your campaign, click on the “tools” tab and you’ll see the option that says “edit campaign negative keywords”.

Here is some more information on negative keywords, straight from Google.

Yahoo is a little more tricky. Once you log into your account and select a campaign, you can then click on an ad group. On the right site, you can see a blue box that says “ad group settings”. In the drop down, select “tactic settings”.

From there, you’ll see a box to show “excluded keywords” (negative keywords) and you can now implement them. Keep in mind this is done at the ad group level. Here is some newer information on excluded keywords, straight from Yahoo.

Big Google AdWords Change

It looks like your AdWords destination URLs must match your display URLs sometime in April (image is barely readible do to resizing, but it makes the point). The key words in the image are “without exception”.

Some may see this as a proactive opportunity and some might think this:

AdWords professionals and advertisers will definitely be busy starting… now, including myself. I’m guessing there is a grandfather clause in this.

I can see large e-commerce advertisers scrambling at this as well as larger corporations with set processes. At the same time, I can see consultants viewing this as more reasons to recommend unique landing pages and not just pointing ads to whichever page on the site seems most relevant.

I kind of like it, but definitely empathize with those who will be in living hell the next few weeks.

Any thoughts or input?

Client Communications and Why Google AdWords Landing Pages are Important

The source for this is from a bunch of places, so I’ll point to the Search Engine Land post that links to many of them.

The points describe that Google AdWords landing pages that load slower can have a negative impact in your positioning. It does make sense that this would be included in Google’s Quality Score.

There are other reasons to create unique landing pages, but this could be a great client-communication opportunity for search marketers to suggest targeted, yet fast-loading landing pages.

It’s no secret that clients would just rather you point the ads to the most relevant pages on their site. It makes it easier on them. It’s also no secret that many of these pages may take longer to load.

If the client or business is smaller, it might be an easier sell. The communication lines are smaller and it won’t take as many hours for them to create these landing pages.

If the client is larger and your contact is a marketing director or something similar, it can be more difficult. They love your idea, but they also have their own processes. Their lines of communications are larger, and the number of hours it will take for them to develop these landing pages can be enormous.

This isn’t a good or bad thing. It’s just “what it is” and should be understood within communication.

Google AdWords - How Local do You Want to Go?

If you advertise local products and services, Google AdWords has provided regional and local targeting for a few years, but how local do you want to go?

It really depends on what you provide. It could be a home for sale, legal services, Web design, car rental, or local chinese food.

Google’s AdWords platform lets you customize your location(s), but it can be tricky. By default, you can easily show your ads in the Twin Cities area.

These are the areas your Minneapolis-St. Paul (metro) ads will be shown.

This is great, but the above image is broad and shows Bemidji, MN as somewhere in the Twin Cities metro. It’s a pretty cool place, but it’s a long 220 mile drive. You might not want to use this option if you’re looking for impulse in-store traffic.

To put it in perspective, a drive from Pensacola, Florida to New Orleans is shorter by almost 20 miles.

If you’re specifically looking for Minneapolis customers, you can set it up this way…

Your ads will be shown here.

If you want to specify a radius from a city…

Here’s what you see.

More to come on all of this in the near future…

Google Contest for Local College Students

Google just put out an online marketing contest for college students and their profs. Pick a local business, get $200.00 in local AdWords advertising, and work with a local business to create an effective online and offline marketing strategy. It’s pretty slick and worth looking at if any Minnesota readers here are applicable.

In addition, Google has enhanced their pay-per-click advertising platform for local targeting. If you’re a regional chain business, it allows you to easily showcase ads to consumers in your area, and to not showcase ads to consumers who are not in your area.

This option has always been there in a way, but excluding areas streamline the process. The above example is to exclude ads within Minnesota geographical areas, although the same is applied nationwide. If you sell products and ship only to states west of the Mississippi River, you can easily disallow ads that would also be shown east of the river.

Go (MN) College!

Thoughts on Video Optimization

It kinda’ mirrors my thoughts on standard search engine optimization. It’s great to be seen, but does the traffic convert?

There’s a good ClickZ article labeled Taking the Video Wheels Off.

Talk is cheap. It’s easy to discuss video and how it works online, but what about producing it?

That’s the first sentence in the article and the rest of it explains that statement nicely. Digital point-n-shoots have provided some pretty cool viral videos, but would branded businesses benefit from something like this?

Just as important, are businesses doing this for the right reasons? Once Google’s Universal Search came out, Joolie from Between Stations gave a good prediction of video mania that in many cases came true (But we neeeeeed video! They’ll show up on “the Google!”).

I’ve seen quite a few videos within Google search results that are basically commercials of a guy or girl staring into a camera talking about how good their company is. This doesn’t provide me a bit of trust and I’d love to see more creative and viral ideas in these videos.

In many cases, it would be a good idea to outsource this type of service to professionals that have the creative know-how and resources to produce quality online videos. To businesses that don’t have the budget, Ed Kohler and Filo have some good and humorous beginning tips.

Ed Learns Video 101 - Episode 1
Ed Learns Video 101 - Episode 2

Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations…

This post is part kudos, part comment, part question. So here goes.

Kudos to Ed Kohler from Technology Evangelist for the information in their Google Docs post. It includes a YouTube video on how Google Docs can simplify emails with constantly updated attachments. I’ll include the video here as well.

I fall into the camp of creating documents and by the time it’s proofed, there are four different email attachment updates. It can definitely be confusing to immediately find the finished document or spreadsheet (good thing I’m not a project manager because I would suck at it).

I haven’t used these Google applications but have a question for you all. Do you use Google Docs/Spreadsheets and/or the new Presentations? I know that Google’s spreadsheet option might not fare too well for the Excel geniuses out there (ahem, Telli). And do they integrate with Basecamp?

Favorite Posts of the Week

Both Matt and Mike address that Google’s local business referral program will either fail or just not be worth the effort, and I agree.

That’s a lot of work for not a lot in return. But hey, all the best for anyone who does it. It can only help the results.

Barry Schwartz writes on Google’s top ad position and how an updated algorithm may change which ad shows up on top. Looks like it has to do with how much the advertiser is willing to pay (not actually how much they will actually pay).

I can see explaining this to clients of the corporate type. Some might really want one particular phrase to appear up top, and it may happen, but they should probably understand that it’s possible that daily budgets could have an adverse effect on other phrases during short-term bidding wars.

Finally, it’s recently been said that Google reads underscores the same as they do dashes. It looks like that may happen, but Matt Cutts puts it into perspective (about half way through the post). Some of the normal 4200 comments are kinda’ funny.

Currently on iTunes: Nothing. In Hayward WI in a run-down Super8 (but they do have free WiFi), and praying for no rain.

YouTube “Related” Videos - Sex is Doing Some Selling

Sometimes I like to post YouTube videos in blog posts, partly for relevancy and partly for humor.

In a recent post regarding print Yellow Pages, I included a YouTube video based on a Monty Python skit. At the end of it, you now see this.

It basically points you to this video (it’s pretty harmless PG-13, but you might not want to play it at work).

For this blog, it’s harmless and I suppose sex sells. What about a corporate blog that utilizes YouTube? Would a related video like this help or hurt?

Since the YouTube video was a Monty Python skit, a video like this is probably more likely to appear. Another related video does show the “PC vs Mac” commercial, which is pretty funny in itself.