According to the Rubicon Project, CPM ad rates significantly dropped from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009. This drop was expected because seasonal pressures, post-holiday budget adjustments generally result in a 20-30% drop in CPM ad rates. Additionally, the global economic crisis has had a clear impact on the advertising industry. CPM ad rates alone can not determine the health of the advertising industry though, one must compare overall revenue and traffic performance as well. When same site and all site comparisons were examined for this quarter , it was found that there was significant growth in traffic and overall revenue amidst the lower CPM ad rates. As CPM ad rates have continued to drop, the online advertising industry has been remodeling and expanding. At the beginning of 2008, there were approximately 300 networks in existence, and now there are over 400 advertising networks. Also, these ad networks have been attempting to improve their efficiency and performance in order to bet out the competition. There has been a shift to a more performance oriented focus. By improving their efficiency, these ad networks have been able to better optimize ads, so that they are more likely to reach the target audience, which result in better performance for the advertisers and the publishers. Although, CPM ad rates have continued their decline, advertising revenue has increased for publishers and there are more opportunities for advertisers.
Nofollow is dead
•June 24, 2009 • 1 CommentAccording to Matt Cutts, PageRank sculpting is now dead and has been for some time; people simply didn’t notice the change in Pagerank designation that Google secretly made sometime ago in 2008.
At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t.
Classic PageRank (ignoring the decay flow factor of 10-15%) was seen like this: a site with “10 PageRank points” and 10 outgoing links (5 of which are nofollow) will give each link without nofollow 2 PageRank points. However, now a site with the same structure will only give each of the links without nofollow 1 PageRank point. Links with the nofollow attribute are designated their respectful PageRank, but when the times comes to assign it, this PageRank simply disappears.
What does this mean for webmasters? Matt Cutts suggests that you let PageRank flow freely throughout your website; I agree with him to an extent, but I think that people will still try to PageRank sculpt in a new way. This new PageRank sculpting will encourage webmasters to reduce the number of links on a webpage or hide these links away from getting PageRank by using iframes or other techniques to ensure that the other links on this webpage get the maximum flow of PageRank. Some webmasters might even consider removing comments on their blogs because all of the links from comments is destroying their PageRank flow throughout their websites.
PageRank is clearly a much more complex topic than this. For instance, link placement on a webpage affects the authority it is rewarded; a navigational sidebar link is going to be designated less PageRank that an in context link. Time will tell if people start this new PageRank sculpting, but I doubt it will be beneficial for the time it takes to implement and its implementation will likely make a website awkward. If it does become a new practice to optimize websites, one thing I believe is that Google will pickup on this and change their algorithms accordingly.
Hyphenated .com vs. Non-hyphenated .net
•June 22, 2009 • 2 CommentsIdeally, you would like to have the (non-hyphenated) .com, but sometimes that is not an option as the .com is already a preexisting website or it is out of your budget. Many webmasters are now needing to decide between the hyphenated .com vs. the non-hyphenated .net for their websites because the .com has already been taken. Keyword1-keyword2.com and keyword1keyword2.net are the same from a seo point of view; however, these domains are different from a user standpoint. The hyphenated .com and the .net will both give the non-hyphenated .com type in, direct, traffic because users generally forget the existence of hyphens in domains and default to the .com extension. Instead of choosing between these two domains, I would recommend buying both of them and 301 redirecting the undeveloped domain to the developed website. Remember that the .net and the hyphenated .com are viewed the same by search engines, so you should develop the domain that sounds, flows better, or is more memorable. After you have chosen which domain to develop, emphasize the hyphen or the .net in the banners or other images that include the domain, so that less traffic is funneled off to the .com. .nets and hyphenated .coms are becoming popular because the non-hyphenated .coms are all taken; instead of choosing between the two alternatives to the .com, get both and develop the more brandable domain.
Bing Continues to Grow
•June 18, 2009 • Leave a CommentIt is still quite early, but Microsoft’s Bing has had a second good week according to ComScore:
Bing has gained 3% of the search engine market share for Microsoft compared to where they were at pre-Bing, regarding number of searchers and total number of queries. “It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, ComScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.” Bing has held strong for 2 weeks, but the true question is will this gain in market share stick or will is fade away.
Danger of Auto Formatting Text
•May 20, 2009 • Leave a CommentMicrosoft Word and other word processing platforms auto format punctuation. Oddly, punctuation that has been formatted through these word processing platforms is not converted in the same way as the programs running search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc. For instance, word processing programs will turn:
- straight apostrophes, commas, and quotation marks are turned into curved versions
- fractions written as 1/2 become ½
- a short hyphen – is turned into a longer hyphen –
- ordinals such as 1st are turned into 1st
The solution to fix this issue is to strip all of the auto formatting from the context prior to copying and publishing it on your website. To do this in Microsoft Word, one simply clicks on Tools and selects the AutoCorrect Options. Then, click on the Autoformat tab and uncheck the boxes besides:
- “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”
- Ordinals (1st) with superscript
- Fraction 1/2 with fraction characters ½
- Hyphen – with dash –