SEM Wired

Companies prefer to spend/waste their money on banners, Adwords and affiliates campaign rather than producing some silly tv clip. It was pretty predictable.

Especially if we realize the current economic downturn. I guess it means that advertiser prefer to spend money where they can get some more valuable feedback information, with a more precise and extensive targeting and value for money.

Sounds right to me…but are we really sure that sticking banners and Google Adwords actually works?

Let’s get some hints from the same Guardian article’s comments:

Record £1.75bn online spend… and you still can’t make a profit with your website.

Indeed. Everybody knows or has been working on a company or project which injected a awaful amount on money on internet advertising without getting any profit back, not even in the long term.

This one it’s even better:

I don’t think they actually wasted all that money but expectations on conversions and sales, yeah, those might be quite high if spending get’s up to those digits. And guess what, while only getting away from the last economic downturn, so they guy here could be pretty right.

Anyway, the following comment might settling this down:

I disagree with many of these posts. Web advertising is much more accountable than TV, radio and print advertising – which is why it works. It doesn’t matter if some of you ignore them. Enough web users see them, and, more importantly, click on them.

That’s pretty much my opinion on the problem. And also the way things actually work out in a real enviroment, if you happen to work in marketing or advertisement.

The perception people has got of online ads it’s quite biased though: those who do not click on ads think they do not work:

…but according to these figures (1.75bn quids is not a few pennies) there’s actually some people who click on those ads and purchase products.

In the end, better a few more ads on a page (and adblock activated) rather than more tv crap (who does watch tv anymore… ).

The original article here.

It’s quite of a surprise but it seems that Google has just added a tiny line of text into his homepage in order to launch a new HTC mobile with Google Android.

Until now, the ad is displayed only in the italian and spanish mirrors:

This is Google.it homepage:

This is Google.es:

The links goes to a Google Landing page which describes the HTC Mobile features. On this page there’s a another link which goes straight to the vendor’s ecommerce page.

What is the Canonical Link Tag?

A few months ago Google introduced the Canonical Link Tag.

This tag is supposed to solve the duplicate content issue on different URL, which can negatively affect those page’s ranking. It just tells search engine the preferred version of the content, in order to be ranked better by the engines themselves.

The Canonical Link Tag should reside in the HEAD section of the page, and the href attribute should point to the URL of the chosen page. That should be enough.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourURL.com/">

Canonical Link Tag vs. Redirect

Upsides
It is way better than a 301 redireccion: it’s search engine to be redirected, not the users hence not affecting the user experience though making sure rankings wouldn’t be affected.

A 301 redireccion would actually affects search engine who have to update their rankings according to the quality of the content of those pages

Downsides
However, while the 301 redirects visitors and search engines from different domains, the Canonical link tag can be used only into a single domai, its folders and subdomains. That’s the only downside. Still it’s a pretty tool.

Possible application of the Canonical Link Tag

Usually PHP pages create dynamic content with random urls, lacking of informative content related in any way to the content. They usually have the visitor’s session ID and merge content from different sources. The Canonical Link Tag can preserve rankings of the original page which featured the content.

To learn more about the Canonical Link Tag, check out this post from Matt Cutts or take a look into the Google Webmaster Center.

Search the original Google algorithm and show side-by-side comparisons to Caffeine.

Last week Google announced a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search, called Caffeine.

They also kidnly asked users to contribute in the effort of benchmarking the new technology providing some feedback on their searches through this URL:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Anyway, a few days ago a new service has been released which compares in real time results from both Google and Google Caffeine: GoogleCompare.

I’m not going to explain any more about the service since it’s pretty straightforward: the whole thing has a funny retro-style, kind of coffe adverts from the ’50s. It’s quite funny. Then you just type your keyword and click on brew and you get a quick comparison eventually showing how SERPs have changed due to the new algorithm.

So how did your ranking changed due to the update? I’ve have not experienced any major change in my rankings. However search speed has increased a lot… I guess that was the main effort behind the development of Caffeine.

I’ll keep an eye on Caffeine for the next few days if anything changes…

Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.

according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.

In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.

However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.

Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:

Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds

These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.