SEO Blog

Earlier today, Metamend Senior Analyst Mark Johnstone issued an advisory for our PPC clients on Google Automatic Matching. Here is a copy of Mark’s advisory:

This notice is to inform you of the recent changes at Google ADWords. Google has implemented a new feature called “Automatic Matching”.

This is the notice we received here at Metamend from Google:

Automatic matching has been enabled in your accounts.
Your ads will now show for additional relevant search queries based on the keywords, ad text, and landing pages in your ad group.

What is Automatic Matching?
For more information on this feature of AdWords please visit Google’s overview.

Metamend’s take on Automatic Matching
Metamend strongly recommends that we disable this feature on your campaign until we can assess the benefits of this addition to Google AdWords. We will also be contacting our Metamend PPC clients individually to discuss the potential benefits of employing the Automatic Matching in the near future.

This feature has been automatically implemented by Google on your current campaigns and we will be going through and turning this component off. Automatic Matching influences a campaign’s daily spend (can use up remaining funds not spent during a given day) and this is the sole reason for us to take a close look at the potential benefits.

About eighteen months ago, Google requested SEOs submit reports when they found their competitors violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines or otherwise using deceptive tactics to achieve stronger rankings. Since then there has been debate within the SEO community about Google’s request. A post today at the Search Engine Roundtable got me thinking about the topic.
Should SEOs report on their competitors? It’s a difficult question.

On one hand, if practitioners don’t police themselves, who will? Google obviously can’t do it on it’s own or they wouldn’t be asking for help. To this day there is an awful lot of underhanded techniques being used in the pursuit of (generally) short-term rankings. Spammy SEO pollutes the environment we work in and responsible SEO practitioners are often the only ones who can spot such spam quickly and efficiently. A good SEO knows how the “cheaters” got the rankings though he or she would not likely use such tactics themselves.

Think of the ‘web as a society. Being a practicing SEO makes you a major participant in the evolution of the web, a highly active Netizen if you will. All citizens have a responsibility to act in the best interests of their society. It’s called the social contract. Certainly preventing and cleaning pollution is in everyone’s best interests, isn’t it?

Recognition of one’s talents is pretty cool. Recognition of the talents of a team is even cooler. Over the coming weeks, the folks here at Metamend are going to be feeling pretty cool as we are sending speakers to two of the premier search marketing conferences, Search Marketing Expo (SMX Advanced) in Seattle and Search Engine Strategies Toronto.

Colin Cochrane is quite possibly one of the most talented technical SEOs in the business. On June 4 at 10:45am, Colin will be part of the SMX Advanced Developer Day session:

Platform Considerations for the Microsoft Stack and LAMP Stack - Practical tips, tricks and workarounds for search-friendly architecture.

• Microsoft Stack
  - Including IIS, ASP.Net, Silverlight, Microsoft SQL Server
• LAMP Stack
  - Including Apache, PHP, Ruby, Flash/Flex, mySQL
• CMS Considerations (such as .NET Blog Engine, AxCMS, Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla)

This is the stuff extremely technical SEOs think about. The conversation isn’t really that difficult to understand once one gets past the techno-jargon acronyms. The panel will be discussing the optimal ways to set up servers and unique applications, add-ons and enablers (e.g.: various blog platforms, online content management applications, server-side includes, etc…).

Nielsen Online released its estimation of the Top 10 US Search Providers in April 2008. Nielsen Online bases its numbers on the total number of search queries conducted at each search provider.

Looking beyond the dominance of Google over Yahoo! and Microsoft’s struggle to break the 10% market-share mark, the Nielsen list shows an interesting micro-glimpse of the search engine landscape and search-user habits.

Here’s Nielsen Online’s view of the Top10 with a few short notes (of my own) for each.
1/ Google Search - Google.com

• 5,109,444,000 search queries served
• 35.4% growth over April 2007
• 62.0% share of searches

2/ Yahoo! Search - Yahoo.com

• 1,446,410,000 search queries served
• -3.4% growth over April 2007
• 17.5% share of searches

3/ MSN/Windows Live Search - MSN.com and Live.com are two unique search addresses both delivering results from Live Search.

• 796,038,000 search queries served
• 30.0% growth over April 2007
• 9.7% share of searches

4/ AOL Search - AOL Search delivers organic results from Google’s index.

• 352,039,000 search queries served
• -5.1% growth over April 2007
• 4.3% share of searches

5/  Ask.com Search - Ask.com

• 171,545,000 search queries served