How does Real Time Analytics help
In the dynamics of the web environment, a lot of money is spent in PPC campaigns. Real time data analysis can help you discover the pattern of user behavior towards a particular advertisement. With this data you can alter your content in 5 clicks rather than making change after 500 clicks. Now imagine the amount of money you can save with this dynamic data. The live environment in real time analytics re-focuses your attention and can facilitate to optimize your SEO efforts.

Real time analysis can tell you about adding an image or changing content or adding a call to action button, etc. and observe changes as they occur. You can make changes in a sloppy layout or even change of certain key words in your content depending upon the real time data. It is definitely a more satisfying experience to observe the shift in results in response to your change of strategy. Thus real time analytics undeniably adds value and gives you an edge above your competitors.

As a customer you might just go through the remaining results, that catches your attention or try on with a new search phrase for a better set of results.

As a more technology savvy user, you might laugh at Google’s search algorithm and wonder what the “Pocket PC Services” has to do with “PPC Service” and carry on.

However, what if you are in the on-line business providing zone? Would you not rub your eyes and get blatantly surprised? You’ll wonder how it could be possible. You would go back and refresh the page, might be several times, and if still you see the Pocket PC Services as a result for PPC services, you certainly would lose faith in the business abilities of the unerring search magnum.

How can Google, the leader in PPC business not understand the impact of losing the search by one competitor, and in this case not even a competitor?
How can the ruler of SEM allow one’s quality score to get affected by such an outrageous activity?

How can the LSA fail like this? Anyone endowed with the technological reasoning would understand that the algorithm can never err. It would under no circumstances deviate like this.

So, is the crawler crawling wrong limbs or is it one more of Google’s evil designs???

Three European web sites alleged Google of anti-competitive behavior and said that, the Internet search giant was unfairly steering traffic away from them.  The three sites: Foundem, a British retail price comparison site; ejustice.fr, a French legal search engine; and Ciao from Bing, a Microsoft-owned shopping site that operates in Europe, alleges the search engine magnate, Google, of deceitful conduct.

The lines sound interesting and surely demand a pondering. Let us try to uncover the story, where lies the problem, why is the giant being probed?

Google AdWords, PPC, Bidding rates and Click Through activity…

All of us are aware of Google AdWords, it is the PPC Advertising service offered by Google, through which it displays click-able links from advertisers, in exchange for a charge per click.

PPC requires the advertiser to bid on key words in order to buy a top position in the search engine results for a particular keyword. Google determines the placement of the ad based on the bidding price and the ad’s click-through activity. The advertiser pays for each click made by a search engine user, through which advertisers’ web page gets a reckoning and is ranked accordingly.

Google AdWords is a powerful advertisement arena, by Google through which it is managing PPC sites. The problem is that, Google is being unfair by promoting its own products on every page it springs out. Google is indexing itself first amongst the PPC sites, whenever any keyword is searched for, here is the catch. Even if the keyword is not related to Google AdWords or Google Maps or some other Google product, Google is systematically favoring its own products, and indexing it foremost on most of the pages delivered by the search engine, irrespective of the keyword.

The service protocol of PPC, assures the advertisers, that their web sites will be delivered to the audience targeting the keywords, and the advertisers have to compete with their adversaries for the ranking through bidding and click through activity.

Let’s view this in affect:

If someone in US wishes to search for ‘SEO Service’, then the resulting page which Google shoots forward is like this:

We all know that “Google.com/AdWords”, is not a SEO Service provider…

What’s fraudulent here…?

No doubt, Google is unfairly steering away the traffic, by ranking the other sites lower to its own site, thus decreasing the click through activity and increasing the bidding rates. Moreover, it is violating its own protocol of delivering the clients’ link to a visitor, appropriate to the keyword being searched, by posing itself as a competitor to most client sites, irrespective of the keyword.

Let’s wait and watch the ramifications…

So now, when the titan is undergoing antitrust scrutiny by U.S. regulators, and is facing the music, let us see how it handles the ramifications of the allegations it has been alleged with.

You got it right, Yahoo has struck a twitter deal. These two have decided to face the Buzz challenge by coming together. Yahoo and Twitter have come to an agreement to share data between their properties. Hope this is no knee jerk reaction to the Google Buzz. This was hardly called for, as Bing is about to take the data aspect for Yahoo, and, which will very likely include the Twitter data as well. Moreover, Yahoo’s front end elements already include Twitter integration including Flickr. How far will it work? This is a million dollar question?

Even if this is all the rest against Google, it would in no way be an easy proposition. Buzz, although is new, has a very strong backing of Gmail, which just cannot be ignored. With a solid Gmail presence on the internet, it is unlikely that no matter how you set the table, Buzz will only get to be a very strong word.

What are paid links?

On a web page, link that links your click to buying or selling a product or service is a paid link. These links take you to altogether different site or page. So the paid links are like advertisements that we often come across in a publication. It is up to you to follow or ignore them.

Then, what’s the problem?

Paid links on web pages has always been the bone of contention between website owners and search engine optimizers. More links to your page or site was looked upon as a mark of reputation and believability.

However, recently, paid links pertaining to buying and selling are making their entry through some search engine operators. It is believed that search engines are unable to differentiate between general links and paid links; thereby raising serious questions about link based ranking of sites. Surprisingly, these links are passing PageRank by Google. They confirm that all paid links do not violate guidelines set by webmaster. These links generally do not have malicious intentions and help only to spread the business.

What’s the solution?

Solution is still nowhere in sight. Search engines fail to differentiate between general and paid links. Google, the best of them is studying the link architecture and trying to device software that automatically detects paid links. Presently, Google is actively asking its users to report paid links.

Reporting paid links on Google

Google has guidelines for reporting Paid Links. It says:

• Sign in to Goggle’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form
• Then include the word “paid link” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.
  • If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will      carry more weight.
  • Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paid link” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Are paid links worth?  Thousands of dollars are being pumped in to put one paid link at the site or page where it matters. It is expected to generate enormous traffic for the destination site. All it comes down to is link’s conversion rate that could give return on investment. Search engine optimizers are looking for methods to track pages and build links from the websites or pages that don’t cost you heavens.

Users must understand that buying/selling links is a high risk activity. There are ways to reduce it but the risk cannot vanish altogether. Most of the standard and reputed websites no longer display paid links to their clients. Other than ethical or moral grounds, the risk involved discourages them to do so. The reputation of the site is at stake in doing so and it will rank lower in search result pages.

What about Caffeine? Why more of it? Well, it seems Google had enough of the Bingoo stuff and decided to launch a Search engine platform of its own. The beta phase caffeine is set to roll out very soon – and we can be sure of some excellent timing by the Google guys – No Google dance this time..

By some leaked noises from Google – Caffeine will vouch for a greater indexing speed, more accurate results (better spam filtering), more exhaustive results and some undisclosed features (very much expected).

So what was the need for another Caffeine Bing?

Ben Parr at Mashable has covered some known corners of the new Caffeine while trying to test it – and it seems that the new Google has scored over the old master on almost all of the accounts..

[A] Speed –> Caffeine is twice as fast as the old Classic for the most popular of keywords

[B] Accuracy –> Caffeine scored over the Old Google in terms of accuracy, although it does seem to be deprived of universal search features at this point. So, don’t be disappointed if you don’t find your favorite conference pics…It might be just on its way

[C] News results and current events have a much faster arrival in Caffeine as compared to the Old one. Bing is there but can be counted as ‘Also ran…’ for the time being.

[D] In terms Indexing size , Caffeine is miles ahead of anybody else in the playing field including its younger sibling…

xRank will let you search for your favorite icon and will even ..

• Tell you their popularity movement chart (how they fared in the last 6 months)
• Give you a snapshot of a celebrity’s videos, images, movies, albums, and more
• Tell you the most recent associations (patch-up / break-up) of these cultural icons. Thumbnail photos at the bottom of xRank show you the associates, friends, enemies, and romances, of the person you’re interested in.
• xRank even shows the upward / downward slide in the search popularity of these people through an arrow graphs

While the work on xRank is still in the beta phase (just Like the Google Labs product Google Trends), we can expect a much larger scope in the coming days…

So, xRank is a great tool for celebrity trackers and paparazzi s..

I had the faintest of idea what i got…

While using the site operator – site:www.yahoo.com –> Here is what is Got: 239 pages

While surprised by the result, i tried the same thing for www.cnn.com, thousand times smaller than Yahoo

While using the site operator – site:www.cnn.com –> The number of indexed pages in Google : 264,000 pages

So, is it that – Google ignored Yahoo pages or

Yahoo cares a s..t about Google….Either way, it was a good discovery for me.