Blind Five Year Old

In the past month I’ve left a number of comments on blogs only to find they were never published.

I’d like to believe that the blog owners simply didn’t see my comment. That it fell into their spam queue which they rarely, if ever, look at. Because the alternative is that they saw the post and decided to suppress it. Now, it’s their blog – their little corner of the Internet – but this type of censorship is troubling.

Comments Content

What about the content of my comments? To be fair, in some instances I was disagreeing with some or all of the content in that post. But I did so in a constructive manner, using links to my own thoughts on the topic or to other material to help round out my argument.

I regularly publish comments on this blog that are contrary to my own opinion. One only has to look at the comments on my Stop Writing For People post for examples. I’m free to respond and defend myself, but having the debate in the open is important. It builds trust, much like having bad reviews on a product is actually a good thing.

Comments are incredibly valuable because they provide additional information on the content. They make your content better through clarification, confirmation, addition and debate.

Comments = Content.

Comments are a rich source of meta information that deliver value to both readers and search engines. This extends to links as well! Relevant links in comments help create a web of information that users now and in the future will find useful.

Yet it is those links that may be at the root of the problem.

Comment Spam

It’s like the Internet version of a plague of locusts. One of the most popular ways to combat comment spam is to screen comments that have links. This is one of the default setting in Akismet.

It makes sense since many spammers will drop a link or links in comments. But links are not the problem. Spammers are the problem.

What’s wrong with contextual links to relevant content? This is not behavior that should be penalized. In fact, it should be encouraged. In many ways, the comment spam problem threatens the link graph.

Not only that but, anecdotally, it seems that comment spam sometimes pushes people to disable comments altogether. When the ratio of comment spam to real comments is too high, many simply give up. I understand the decision but it’s depressing that it gets to that point.

Outsourcing

Fed up with comment spam and general comment management, have we decided to outsource engagement to social networks? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are all happy to provide venues in which comments can flourish. Make no mistake, these venues understand the value of comments.

Is our obsession with amplification and generating social proof robbing us of the real value of comments and conversation? Certainly there is some hope that it’s like a rubber band. The content goes out, but then snaps back, drawing more comments to your content. It works to a certain extent, but by how much and at what cost is an interesting debate.

The Filter Bubble

Of course these bloggers may have seen my comment and simply decided not to publish it. Eli Pariser argues that personalization and ‘invisible algorithmic editing’ as a real danger but I think comment censorship (whether intentional or accidental) is the true menace.

I believe much of the hype around the filter bubble is FUD. Personalization is rather minimal in most cases though I do agree with Gabriel Weinberg’s view of how to deal with personalization.

Personalization is not a black and white feature. It doesn’t have to be on or off. It isn’t even one-dimensional. At a minimum users should know which factors are being used and at best they should be able to choose which factors are being used, to what degree and in what contexts.

Personalization deals with the fact that some content isn’t being made readily visible. Comment censorship excises content from the Internet altogether.

Identity

So what could help get us out of this morass? How can we ensure comments are once again a vital part of the content ecosystem? Identity.

The reason why many embraced Facebook comments was because comments are attached to an identity. Not only that, but an identity that people cared about. This obviates the need for aggressive moderation. You might run into a troll, but it’ll be a troll you can clearly identify and block.

Identity essentially stops comment spam because you can’t post as Best Miami Attorneys. Comment moderation is suddenly manageable again.

Censorship

A commenting system that uses identity removes most of the uncertainty around comment censorship. If my comment isn’t published, it’s likely because that blogger made an active decision to toss it into the HTML version of The Bermuda Triangle.

If the filter bubble can be managed through making personalization transparent, so too can comment censorship. A third-party, identity-backed comment system could track the number of comments censored on each blog. A grade or score could then be shown to let users know how much of the conversation was being censored. In some ways it would be like Charity Navigator but for blogs.

So perhaps the blogger who touts the benefits of community actually censors 32% of blog comments. That might be an interesting thing to know.

Could this get messy? Sure. But you can build a system of checks and balances.

Reputation

Joan Jett might not care about her bad reputation but you should. Whether it’s a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, number of Likes, sentiment analysis, length of comments, spelling and grammar or other metrics, a savvy comment system could begin to assign reputation to each user.

So the censorship percentage wouldn’t be flat in nature. If you blocked a known troll, no worries. If you censored someone who had a history of abusive comments full of foul language, no problem.

On the other hand, it would be disturbing if you censor someone who consistently adds value to conversations. The reputation of those you censor would matter.

Confidence

I’d like to be confident that I’m not missing good comments that wind up going into spam.

I’d like to be confident that if I take the time and effort to comment on a blog that it will be published and, hopefully, spark further comment and conversation.

I’d like to be confident that the comments I read are not biased and simply a form of self-curated cheerleading.

“Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.” – Vince Lombardi

The Internet desperately needs more confidence.

(IMPORTANT: Before I get to my story, if your Yahoo! email has been hacked I recommend that you immediately change your password, update your security questions and ensure your Yahoo! Mobile and Y! Messenger are both up-to-date. You should also visit Yahoo! Email Abuse Help and use this process if you are unable to login to your Yahoo! account. Also, make sure to read the comments on this post since there is a tremendous amount of good information there as well.)

(UPDATE 12/13/11: Yahoo has introduced second sign-in verification as an added security measure. It will require that you add a mobile phone number and verify it via a text message. Here’s the direct link to start using second sign-in verification.)

It happened just before we arrived at the San Francisco Zoo. We are at a red light on Sloat Boulevard when my phone started to vibrate.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Had the rapture come a day late? No. I was getting undeliverable messages. Lots of them. My Yahoo email had been hacked!

Here are the two important lessons I learned as a result.

I Have Good Friends

I didn’t want our day at the Zoo ruined, me staring into my phone resetting passwords and figuring out what happened. So I put the problem on the back burner and proceeded to have a fun family day.

But I did take time to quickly tap out a response to people who replied to the spam coming from my hijacked account. Why? Because they took the time and effort to give me a heads up that I had a problem. These were good people. Good friends.

The thing is, I’d gotten a number of these same emails lately from other hacked Yahoo accounts. I figured these people knew they’d been compromised and I didn’t need to respond. With the shoe on the other foot, I realized those emails were comforting even though I was well aware of the problem.

I’ll shoot off an email the next time I get a hacked email from someone.

Yahoo Email Security Failed

The odds are that I will get another one of those emails because I learned just how easy Yahoo makes it for hackers.

Upon getting home I went about securing my account. On a lark, I checked Yahoo’s ‘View your recent login activity’ link.

Sure enough at 10:03 AM my account was accessed from Romania. This obvious login anomaly didn’t set off any alarms? Shouldn’t my security questions have been presented in this scenario? I have never logged in from Romania before.

I’ve never logged in from outside the US. Yahoo knows this. In fact, Yahoo knows quite a bit about my location.

My locations puts me in three states: California, New York and Pennsylvania. I also have location history turned on, so it’s not just my own manually saved locations (some of which are ancient), but Yahoo’s automated location technology keeping track of me.

Do you see Romania in this list? I don’t.

Why is Yahoo making it this easy for spammers to hijack accounts? Make them work a little bit! At a minimum, make them spoof their location.

Yahoo should have noted this anomaly and used my security questions to validate identity. I still would have had to change my password (which wasn’t that bad) but I would have avoided those embarrassing emails.

A simple rule set could have been applied here where users are asked to validate identity if the login (even a successful one) is outside of a 500 mile radius of any prior location.

I’ve had a Yahoo account for over 10 years without a problem, even as I moved my business accounts over to Gmail.

Yesterday I thanked those friends who had my back. Unfortunately, Yahoo wasn’t one of them.

In February Aaron Bradley sent me an email to let me know that I had a duplicate content problem on this blog. He had just uncovered and rectified this issue on his own blog and was kind enough to give me a heads up.

Comment Pagination

The problem comes in the way that WordPress handles comment pagination. The default setting essentially creates a duplicate comment page.

Here’s what it looks like in the wild. Two pages with the same exact content.

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/new-age-pyramids-enhance-population-data/comment-page-1/

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/new-age-pyramids-enhance-population-data

That’s not good. Not good at all.

Comment-Page-1 Problem

The comment-page-1 issue offends my own SEO sensibilities, but how big of a problem is it really?

There are 28 million inurl results for comment-page-1. 28 million!

Do the same inurl search for comment-page-2 and you get about 5 million results. This means that only 5 million of these posts attracted enough comments to create a second paginated comment page. Subtract one from the other and you wind up with 23 million duplicate pages.

The Internet is a huge place so this is probably not a large percentage of total pages but … it’s material in my opinion.

Change Your Discussion Settings

If you’re running a WordPress blog I implore you to do the following.

Go to your WordPress Dashboard and select Settings –> Discussions.

If you regularly get a lot of comments (more than 50 in this default scenario) you might want to investigate SEO friendly commenting systems like Disqus, IntenseDebate or LiveFyre.

Unchecking the ‘break comments into pages’ setting will ensure you’re not creating duplicate comment pages moving forward. Prior comment-page-1 URLs did redirect, but seemed to be doing so using a 302 (yuck). Not satisfied I sought out a more permanent solution.

Implement an .htaccess RewriteRule

It turns out that this has been a known issue for some time and there’s a nice solution to the comment-page-1 problem in the WordPress Forum courtesy of Douglas Karr. Simply add the following rewrite rule to your .htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^(.*)/comment-page-1/ $1/ [R=301,L]

This puts 301s in place for any comment-page-1 URL. You could probably use this and keep the ‘break comments into pages’ setting on, which would remove duplicate comment-page-1 URLs but preserve comment-page-2 and above.

Personally, I’d rather have the comments all on one page or move to a commenting platform. So I turned the ‘break comments into pages’ setting off and went a step further in my rewrite rule.

RewriteRule ^.*/comment-page-.* $1/ [R=301,L]

This puts 301s in place for any comment-page-#. Better safe than sorry.

Don’t Rely on rel=canonical

Many of the comment-page-1 URLs have a rel=canonical in place. However, sometimes it is set up improperly.

Here the rel=canonical actually reinforces the duplicate comment-page-1 URL. I’m not sure if this is a problem with the Meta SEO Pack or simple user error in using that plugin.

Many times the rel=canonical is set up just fine.

The All in One SEO Pack does have a Canonical URL option. I don’t use that option but I’m guessing it probably addresses this issue. The problem is that rel=canonical doesn’t stick nearly as well as a 301.

So even though this post from over three months ago has a rel=canonical, the comment-page-1 URL is still being returned. In fact, there are approximately 110 instances of this on this domain alone.

Stop Comment-Page-1 Spam

23 million pages and counting. Sure, it would be nice if WordPress would fix this issue, but short of that it’s up to us to stop this. Fix your own blog and tell a friend.

Friends don’t let friends publish duplicate content.

Yesterday Google rolled out an algorithm change “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Google’s share of the search market must have been suffering, right? Wrong. comScore puts Google at 63.0% in January 2009, 65.4% in January 2010 and 65.6% in January 2011. People were not defecting.

Not only that but Google is the leader in search engine customer satisfaction according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. So why the change?

Google Means Well

I believe Google thinks they’re making things better. I don’t see a Machiavellian scheme behind every Google action. I like these guys. Meet any of the people at Google and you realize they’ve drunk deep from the search quality kool-aid. They are true believers! On top of that, they’re usually amiable and generous with their time.

But … the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Google Got Bullied

What’s shocking is how Google got pressured into making this change. Vivek Wadhwa, Paul Kedrosky, Jeff Atwood, Michael Arrington, Rich Skrenta and others played Google. A bunch of upper-class, highly-educated technophiles convinced Google that search quality was in jeopardy. Was search quality really an issue or was this a matter of taste?

A reminder, you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

The Echo Chamber

A good marketer knows that they are not the target market. If you’re reading this, you are not the primary search user. You might be a power user, but you are in the minority my friend.

Perhaps there is more under the hood, but from where I sit Google chose qualitative feedback over quantitative feedback. The problem? That qualitative feedback was biased. The Silicon Valley echo chamber flexed its muscle and Google acquiesced.

Red Herring

What is disappointing is that Google decided to tackle the subjective (content quality) instead of the objective (link fraud). Do we truly think that JC Penney, Forbes and Overstock are outliers? The answer is an unquestionable no.

What’s a bigger threat to search quality? The blatant and rampant manipulation of trust and authority via link fraud or the creation of content (of varying quality) to meet query intent?

What Changed

A staggering 11.8% of queries were impacted by this algorithm change. I’m curious about how Google effected this change.

Did they re-weight current signals or create new signals? Google acknowledges that data from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension was not used. That doesn’t mean other new signals or data weren’t used. But even if Google did introduce other new signals, to impact 11.8% of the queries it seems reasonable to believe that current signals were also re-weighted.

That assumption and hours of SERP review lead me to the following conjecture.

• Trusted TLDs (org, gov, edu) were given more weight
• Exact Match Keyword Domains were given more weight
• Forums were given more weight
• On-Site text was given more weight

The last presents itself in an odd way. Sites that look like they were last touched in 2003 are ranking well. It’s as if Google sought a ‘no style’ version of the web. This also includes a number of long form blogs. Sadly, many of these same sites are bloated with AdSense. Now, AdSense is everywhere so … that’s to be expected. But the position of the ad units on many of these sites is completely against any UX standard.

This is a very simplistic and blunt analysis. I’m sure others will tease out other differences and we’ll never know for sure what changed. But what it tells me is that Google changed quantitative measures to meet a pre-determined qualitative goal.

The Real Story

Google passed judgment on the quality and value of sites in what seems like a very subjective manner. How exactly did these sites and specific pages rank so well in the past? What suddenly changed? Did the pogosticking rate creep up? Did internal satisfaction metrics of the ‘reasonable surfer’ change? I’m not hearing any of that. I’m hearing subjective terms like ‘quality’, ‘value’ and ‘useful’ being thrown around.

Google is setting their own perceived metric of value in conflict with other signals, metrics and feedback. The message? Google doesn’t trust us to know any better. It’s not about what we want. It’s about what Google thinks we should want.

The idea that Google altered current signals to effect a perceived content quality metric should terrify you.

It’s all very well and good when those changes don’t impact you. You guffaw at Mahalo’s demise. But what happens when they come for you? What happens when you’re suddenly the target? How will you feel when your content is called into question?

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Blekko Spam

Just prior to Farsight 2011, Blekko removed twenty sites from its search results.

“These sites are the worst spam publishers on the Web according to our users,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “They are literally responsible for millions of pages on the Web that our users say are just not helpful and they’d prefer they were banned permanently. So we’re going to do that for them.”

Blekko has some interesting functionality around spam so I can see why they’d want to highlight it based on the recent spam/content farm meme surrounding search. That’s understandable. But censorship is not the answer.

Blekko Users

There is precious little data as part of this announcement. How big is Blekko? Quantcast and Compete show that the monthly unique visitor count is anywhere between 16,000 and 143,000. However, to mark anything as spam you have to be a Blekko user.

The November 2010 public launch of Blekko provided some insight into numbers and usage.

Blekko has been testing its solution to search with roughly 8,000 beta testers who have created more than 3,000 different slashtags. Blekko tells us that 11% of its existing user base come back to the site on a weekly basis.

I was a beta tester. So were a number of my colleagues – innovators, technologists and SEOs. As a search marketer we were eager to try out a competing search engine. I’m not a Google apologist.

Without hard data the math gets fuzzy, but the total number of registered users seems relatively small and is likely still composed of innovators. Do these people represent everyone?

Blekko Searches

The other missing piece of data is the searches related to these spam complaints. We don’t know the types of searches that were performed, nor the result set that was presented to users. Are the spam complaints a measure of the sites or a measure of the quality of results returned by Blekko?

Are spam complaints produced on general search queries or long tail queries? Is the incidence of spam complaints for specific sites different based on query type? (Information vs Transaction vs Navigation.)

The spam interface also leads to another question. How many of the spam complaints were made without visiting the site in question?

Blekko Censorship

Aaron Bradley took the words out of my mouth in his Blekko, Can I Please Have My Spam Back? post.

At the end of the day, I have no respect for a search engine that censors my results based on notions of quality, rather than relevancy.  It ceases to be comprehensive, it smacks of elitist righteousness and – most of all – decisions about the validity of content are being made on my behalf by people I don’t know.

Quality and taste are subjective. The fact that Blekko has chosen to use the feedback from a biased minority to censor results for the majority is unfortunate. Is the message that mainstream users don’t know enough to make their own decisions, the right decisions? If I search for ‘food’, should unhealthy foods be removed from search results?

In all seriousness, would Blekko remove specific books that users had marked as spam? According to the American Library Association, this would mean Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple would vanish from the landscape.

Use spam feedback to reorder results, but let me make up my own mind. I don’t need a nanny search engine.

Disclosure: While I consult for Buzzillions, this post is my personal opinion and does not reflect those of Buzzillions.

Does Google truly understand SEO? One would hope so but in the last few weeks Google took one step forward and two steps back.

What Google Says

Matt Cutts gave SEO a sort of backhanded compliment in a recent post about search neutrality.

I don’t believe all search engine optimization (SEO) is spam. Plenty of SEOs do a great job making their clients’ websites more accessible, relevant, useful, and fast.

I like Matt and I think he does understand and may even appreciate SEO.

And a recent Google Webmaster Help video titled Using Webmaster Tools Like an SEO was also a positive sign. The content is very basic and Maile seems to be talking like Mr. Rogers, but that’s probably to ensure the video helps beginners and those where English is a second language. So, they talk the talk.

What Google Does

Does Google walk the walk? The new Google Engage program recently launched and I’m seeing ads on Google promoting it.

The keyword targeting seems focused around any term containing SEO. I got this one to fire when I searched for ‘seo services’.

A different version popped up during my morning Google Reader review.

What’s the problem? Google Engage has pretty much NOTHING to do with SEO. Here’s the landing page.

The highlighting is my own, but is there to underscore the fact that they’re equating search engine optimization with AdWords services. I find this disturbing.

I would give most people outside of the industry a pass on distinguishing between SEO, SEM and PPC. Google is no outsider. I think it’s pretty clear that SEO is about optimizing a site and pages for natural search. SEO is not about paid search.

Yet here they are advertising against SEO keywords, using an SEO focused display URL to encourage AdWords business. I’m left to believe that those behind Google Engage don’t understand what SEO really is or that they know what SEO is and seek to convince people to spend on paid search traffic instead of optimizing for free search traffic.

Bait and Switch

So which is it? When I search for ‘sem services’ I get a different ad.

That ad takes me to an interesting page.

Huh. Looks like Google’s got the definitions down pat. So I’m left to assume Google Engage is purposefully muddying the waters.

Am I blowing this out of proportion or are you disturbed by this bait and switch technique?

When was the last time you counted your friends … in real life.

You Don’t Count Friends

My guess is that you have never actually sat down and counted your friends. Maybe when you were 6 you counted your best friends on one hand but you didn’t wake up every morning and recount. Yet online we’re constantly reminded of and trained to tally our friends.

The Prisoner

We’ve become prisoners to social numbers. The numbers on Facebook and Twitter; on Feedburner and Quora. Not only are we held hostage by those numbers, we become them too. We’re number 212 on someone’s list, number 83 on another.

I am not a number! I am a free man!

I love numbers and could literally lose myself in an Excel spreadsheet for a day. But the numbers attached to friends and followers simply seem unnatural and don’t map to any offline behavior.

People are generally not alerted when someone ‘unfriends’ them in real life. What does that even mean? It probably means you grew apart and just don’t talk anymore. No biggie.

But online the drop in friend count is right there in your face. Suddenly you have to explain and account for it. WTF!

Lose The Social Numbers

What it we lost the numbers. Maybe you still need some sort of tally? But could we come up with a word to describe a range of numbers? Something that would be more real?

• A Handful
• Several
• Some
• Many
• A Lot
• Tons

I know, I know, people will probably still want to get from Several to Some or from A Lot to Tons. But maybe it helps a little? Or maybe we just remove the numbers all together. Poof.

Is there an app for that? Like an ad blocker but for social media numbers? Contact me if you want to help build one.

There is a rising tide of advice lately extolling the virtues of creating a valuable site focused on the user and that the rest … will simply come.

If you build it they will come

If you think this happens online (or anywhere outside of the movies), you’ll be waiting a long time for Ray Liotta to saunter out of that digital cornfield. And you won’t have traffic beating a path to your door like the closing shot of Field of Dreams.

The story sounds great, doesn’t it? Write scintillating content and you’ll get search traffic. Build a useful, interesting site and the Google gods will smile upon you. Maybe this is how it works in some magical Utopian world where it rains marshmallows.

Field of Dreams

It would be great if the sites that were most useful were always ranked appropriately. But spend any time doing SEO (the kind where you’re in the trenches) and you know this is patently not true, nor (sadly) does it seem to be getting much better.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t build a great site focused on users that delivers tremendous value. That just isn’t enough. You still need SEO to ensure the great site you’ve built gets in front of the right people.

Trash and Treasure

Here’s the hard truth, you may not be appealing to as many people as you think. Your definition of value might not be the definition others use, particularly not the definition Google uses. This is why I find the pollyanna around Field of Dreams SEO to be so dangerous. Because there is a nugget of truth to the notion.

Writing great content and building a valuable site is a critical part of SEO. But this means different things to different people. Put another way, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure and vice versa. As an example, I may find William Faulkner unreadable, but others may adore his novels.

Waterworld

SEO winds up being director, editor and agent – helping to shape your content and site so it is appealing to the major studios. Sure, maybe you can go the ‘Indie’ route, bucking the establishment and releasing it in small art house movie theaters. But how many times does that really work?

Ignore SEO and you’ll wind up with Waterworld instead of Field of Dreams.

Infographics can be a great way to generate backlinks. But the prevalence of infographic spam threatens this link building technique.

Infographic Spam

You’ve undoubtedly seen infographic spam. The hallmarks of infographic spam are a mediocre graphic from multiple data sources with a link back to a tenuously related website.

This TSA infographic is linked to a criminal justice degree site. Related? Barely. Of note, nice going keeping the utm parameters in your source link.

Here’s one about the sexual revolution that’s linked by to a site offering online counseling degrees. Related? No.

Pay per Infographic

Oh, did I mention that they pay sites to post infographics? Earlier this year Aaron Wall wrote about link buyers outing themselves. Well here’s a similar example.

This is an actual post where the site owner admits to posting infographics for money and asking if readers mind. The verdict? Readers are fine with it. But I’m not, and neither should you.

The sites that generate this garbage are usually making a lot of money – most often coming from the lucrative education vertical. But what about this guy? What about the individual site owner? He’s making just $130. I don’t blame the guy really. He’s just trying to break even on this site and maybe make a little bit in the bargain.

Paid Links vs Paid Infographics

In my mind, there is a big difference between paid links and paid infographics. Paid links are essentially static. You’re renting the trust and authority of that site and probably getting a bit of traffic as well. There’s no expectation of amplification. Said another way, paid links aren’t viral.

Paid infographics are problematic because they are engineered to create additional installations through social distribution and embeds.

The sole purpose of infographic spam is to drive keyword specific anchor text from multiple domains. Domain diversity anyone?

In addition, when buying links you’re usually looking for links from sites that are similar in topic. You’re seeking to build your profile in a certain neighborhood.

As an aside, this is exactly what you’re doing if you buy a directory listing. You’re buying the trust and authority from a relevant section of that directory. I’m still not sure why one is verboten and the other is okay, but that’s a topic for another post. While I don’t actually recommend buying links, I don’t find the transaction to be that disturbing.

Nevertheless, there’s no such targeting involved in paid infographics. It’s the Sherman’s March of link building.

Algorithm Blues

It doesn’t seem like the algorithm is currently capable of finding infographic spam. I can completely understand why it might be difficult.

The link graph may not be that different for paid and non-paid infographics. Because once an infographic gets out in the wild, the viral component takes over. Users don’t care about the little bit of HTML at the bottom of the infographic, they just think it’s interesting. As the poll above showed, even when told, users aren’t running to Google to file a spam report.

You can’t use anchor text bombing as a signal since any good SEO is going to use proper anchor text in an infographic.

Now, perhaps you could work to determine whether the source sites (where it first appeared) between infographics differed. Yet, the example I provided mentions that ‘many’ of the infographics posted of late were paid. So, he might be mixing in ones found and enjoyed with ones where he’s getting paid. So is his site a poison source site or not?

In the end, maybe we need a little human intervention and outreach. A couple of emails, a bit of sleuthing and some Law & Order type of immunity deals and I think you’d locate the sites and intermediaries who were polluting the infographic space. I’m not advocating going after the posting sites or contract designers but instead the sponsors of this content.

Am I entirely comfortable with Google using their nuclear option (the dreaded penalty) in this type of subjective manner? No. But lately I’m seeing way too much getting through the algorithm (both infographic and otherwise) and relying on users to report spam doesn’t seem like enough.

Do you care about infographic spam? If so, what would you do to stop it?

I recently fired up a new AdWords campaign for a client that was perfect for Dynamic Keyword Insertion. But it didn’t seem to be working, so I emailed AdWords support and got this answer.

Dynamic Keyword Quality Score

First off, my name isn’t John. This isn’t the first time I’ve been addressed like this though. Since I go by AJ many customer service folks seem to transpose the J onto my last name (Kohn) and come up with John. Now, at one point in my youth I told my parents I wanted to be called Tom after the cat in Tom and Jerry, but I’ve never used John as a pseudonym.

What was more surprising was the fact that Dynamic Keyword Insertion as a feature is gated by Quality Score. Was I supposed to know this? Nowhere does it mention that you must achieve a certain Quality Score to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. But more to the point, does it make any real sense?

AdWords (il)Logic

The advice they have is to create static text ads (for the nearly 10,000 keywords I have) until such time as they grant me the ability to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. You tell me to make it more relevant. I can do that … by using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. But I can’t use that until I make the ads relevant. It’s a Catch-22.

I wrote back explaining that it seemed like an onerous amount of work. You really want me to create static ads until the Quality Score increases to a point where you turn on Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

Yeah, still not John. But here’s the kicker. This is a new campaign! Yet users are not finding my ad very relevant to click on? So – how did you figure that out before it was launched? (Okay, I actually know they’re probably using an account or domain Quality Score. But tell me if that’s the case.)

And lets talk about relevancy. While I can’t divulge the exact keyword set, it is very specific. This ad is relevant if you’re searching for any of these keywords.

Making Relevance Difficult to Achieve

I’m still trying to figure out why Google would decide to gate this feature. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a fairly advanced strategy. You’re not going to get a lot of small businesses using it, particularly if you’re playing these types of games.

Using the keyword in the ad is a pretty good way to make the ad more relevant. That seems to be one of Google’s goals. The advice is essentially to make a static ad that would be the same as the dynamic ad. So … Google wants the ad to look that way and include that keyword, they just don’t want me to use the feature that makes that easy to do.

It makes about as much sense as a smiling Spock.

Can anyone give me a good reason for this policy?