St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Click Forensics has released their latest report on Click Fraud. Click Fraud effects people and businesses who buy “pay per click” advertisements on web sites and search engines like google. It becomes fraud when:

• It’s not a human doing the clicking
• It’s human who is doing the clicking but his or her only intend is to cause the advertiser to be charged for the click, not because they are interested in the content advertised

The two most common sources of click fraud are competitors who want to see your budget eaten up without any legitimate customers going to your site. They also get the added benefit of being able to bid on those keyphrases for much less money once your budget is blown. This is by far the most common type of click fraud.
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Domain tasting exploits a loophole in the domain name registration procedure where people can “return” a domain name for a full refund. I’m betting your domain name registrar didn’t tell you that was even possible). Read the Wikipedia entry on domain tasting for more info.

Over the next few weeks, Google will start looking for names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within a five-day grace period for full refunds.

Google’s AdSense program would exclude those names so no one can generate advertising revenue from claiming them temporarily.

Since Google profits greatly from this and other unscrupulous internet marketing practices, we’ll see if they implement something that actually does what it sounds like it’ll do or whether they do something that still allows them to profit from this but say they are trying to help the internet.

read quoted news story

Link building campaign is a pretty straightforward term. Basically it just means trying to get web-sites to publish search engine readable links to your site.

Why?

Well Search Engines think the more links there are to a web site, the more important and relevent that site must be. It almost sounds good on the surface, but actually it’s quite the moronic idea.

Here’s some things you can do to increase the effectiveness of your link building campaign:

• Get links from sites that are related to the keywords you which to market.
• Use your chosen key phrases / words in the text of the link that others place on their sites. The text of the link matters a bunch.
• If your going to pay for links, make sure they’re NOT “Jump links”. Jump links are coded in such a way as to be not readable to search engines.
• Make sure the links that point to your site don’t use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. that asks a search engine not to follow (therefore count) the link in question.
• Get links from sites w/ as high of a PageRank as possible. Search Engines mistaken believe this has something to do w/ site quality too.

Sooooo Embarassed!Story Update:
I’m so embarassed, I was hoaxed! Turns out the whole thing was a hoax perpertrated by Matthews Cutts hisself as an April Fools Day prank! The site is back and working fine. Here’s the story I mistakenly wrote about the event:

Google’s Matt Cutts Blog gets hacked!Matthew Cutts, the engineer who works for google and runs the official blog for communications from Google to SEO experts and novices alike has had his site hacke yesterday. Some say it may have been an april fools joke, but today’s April 2nd and it’s still hacked!

In case Google has regained control over thier web site by the time you read this I’ve provided a screenshot of what it looks like when your web site gets hacked.