Quibblo.com just came out with a new “Collaborative Polling” feature, whereby flash quizzes that you display on your site will generate trackbacks, and will also display all of the other places where the quiz or poll has been taken. The poll below is one good example.
There are, generally speaking, two philosophically different kinds of SEO. Honest SEO is a process applied to a site to obtain more organic search traffic from the target audience. Very often, this involves creating content that is tailored to the way that search engine users phrase their search queries. This is just smart, customer-centric marketing. The other kind of SEO — maybe we could call it spam SEO or black hat SEO — seeks to trick search engines into believing a page is about something that it’s not actually about. For example, this post is trying to capture Miley Cyrus related search traffic, while this post is trying to capture traffic where people search for (non-existent) photos or video of Zac Efron nude. These pages provide a poor experience to the users who land on them, because they patently do not offer what the user was looking for. They are just designed to attract traffic where traffic is available.
However, not everything that is a “trick” is a black hat technique, in the sense of deceiving the user. Misspellings are a prime example of that. Suppose someone searches google for “quizes”, when they probably meant “quizzes”. Someone has to rank #1 for “quizes”, and hopefully for the user’s sake it is a page that is all about quizzes. All to often, however, misspelled queries return results from whatever rinky-dink web pages happen to have also misspelled the same word. It provide a service to the user when marketers create targeted content around the misspelling, such as this page about “quizes“. This page offers users a chance to get the quiz content they wanted from a high-quality source. So yes, it’s an SEO trick, but not a dirty one.I actually just created the quizes page. I’m working on creating some more “quize-related” content for it. I’ll update this post with info on the progress of this page in terms of organic search rankings and traffic.
By the way, here’s an example of quizes-related content:
Racehorses, politicians, and adult film stars all have funny names. Can you tell who’s who when it comes to running hard, and beating out the competition?
Mass media can drive search traffic on the internet like nothing else. And if you’re a performance based search advertiser, you’ve gotta be on the lookout for 800 pound gorillas impinging on your keyword space. Take, for example, this poor fellow, who is just trying to sell jars of gourmet French foods in the UK, and cannot figure out why he gets such huge volumes of search traffic for the keyword ratatouille. Someone had to break it to him that this was not click fraud, but simply the fact that the biggest animated film of the past three years had the same title as his delicious eggplant ragout. So sad.
Just noticed this ad on YouTube, which I though warranted some public attention. A girl looks to be about 15 asks, invitingly “Wanna get me drunk?”
I found this ad to be a little bit ethically problematic. So what did I do? I clicked on it to see what lay on the other side. Alas, there’s some damn effective advertising…that is, as long as this ad isn’t CPC. Turns out, fubar is an virtual cantina with–gasp–no drinking age limit. That is to say, it is a cleverly skinned mainstream social networking site.
Usually, you can tell that an online ad is not running an a cost-per-click basis when its content is absurd salacious, or otherwise destined to attract a flurry of very speculative clicks. If your ad is CPM or CPA, there is no harm in eliciting impulsive clicks from anyone impulsive or curious enough to give it a click just because “eh, what the hell”. Consider the now-famous “Fart Button” ad.
Think of all the clicks this must get on a ‘tween gaming site (it was my 12-year-old cousin who first brought this glorious advertisement to my attention). After all, even if you’re not a fart fan, per se, the ad speaks to you: “you know you want to”. Who knows what lies behind the fart button, but who really cares? It’s a fart button. Click.
However, if you’re buying CPC ads, you should watch out with ads like this. You don’t want to get charged individually for all those fart-fancying clicks by people who probably don’t want whatever you’re selling. (Flatulence?) There is a common misconception that click-throughs are inherently beneficial to an ad campaign, and that click-through rate is a stat to be monitored. This is simply not the case for a PPC campaign. Still, I think these ads can be effective, because they engage people, and some fraction of those people will be in the target market. And, when you’re running CPM ads and hoping to get traffic, lewd, lascivious, and absurd may be just the way to go.
A fundamental question in cognitive science is the extent to which certain cognitive abilities are either inherent in humans’ genotype, or dependent on environmental factors and learning. Nativists are those who attribute the balance of our competence to “nature” or the genetic endowment. Empiricists are those who emphasize the role that experience or “nurture” plays in cognitive development. Given how foundational this complex and nuanced issue is to the field of cognitive science, it is absolutely ridiculous to distill it into the following simple question: “Nativism or Empiricism?” In the name of absurdity, please case your vote:
Take the Quibblo opinion survey about PPC arbitrage.
