The Alchemy of Search

Google, please stop giving Valentine’s Day love to parasitic marketers!

Here are some examples of people who are ranking their SPAM by posting it on crowd sourcing sites like NowPublic.com or free classifieds in Topix. Try a search for Valentine Lingerie and you will find the #4 position taken by A Splog Post on NowPublic.com and the #8 and #9 spots taken by two free classified listings from 2 different domains with essentially identical content on Topix.

It is really hard to make a coherent argument why these pages deserve to rank for Valentine Lingerie more than another costume & lingerie site. Topix and NowPublic have no incentive to fight this garbage unless the engines make them suffer for all of their content, because they get paid on the impressions.

For the “marketer” whose Splog post is on NowPublic, the 699 visits on the page to date might be worth the effort, but it definitely doesn’t mean they deserve the eye balls. NowPublic also doesn’t NoFollow links, even ones that seem to clearly be less than editorially controlled, so there may be (NOT) some PR flowing to the Spammer as well.

I am not sure if MSNBC and Foxnews deserve the love their getting from Valentine’s Lingerie more than NowPublic, but at least these articles aren’t spam, they are “news stories about fashion”.

Google, please stop ranking the SPAM. It encourages blackhats and causes blight in the index!

Two studies tracking this race conclude that search marketing is lapping the alternatives.

Despite all the hype about display advertising and the block buster ad network deals of 2007, search continues to be the high performance engine that is driving online marketing spend. According to GroupM, search will make up 65-70% of the measured online advertising in 2008, up from 50% in 2005. For the mathematically challenged, that means search has gone from about even to 2 times the display spend. It also means most of the revenue growth has been from search. Nothing But Net, a new study by JPMorgan, meanwhile, puts the global search spend in 2008 at $30.5 billion.*

GroupM goes on to note that online advertising in Sweden is expected to exceed spending on any other channel, with the UK and Denmark likely to follow suit by 2009. Given that search is only getting about 10% of the dollars going to television in the U.S., we have a long way to go to catch up with our friends in Europe (and perhaps European companies need to wake up to the superior ROI of investing in SEO instead of relying on paid search)

Another interesting note from the study is that the 2008 U.S. election cycle is expected to contribute $2 Billion in local and national television advertising. No data is available at the moment, but it seems unlikely that search is getting 10% of that pie and it is clear at the moment that few of the campaigns are spending anything for SEO.

*We rarely call out a company’s SEO issues by name, but JPMorgan needs a lot of help. We wanted to link directly to the report, since we believe in citing source material whenever possible. Despite the fact that this study has been widely quoted, it is impossible to find any links to the study on JPMorgan.com. In fact, searching for study by name, JPMorgan + Nothing But Net, “JPMorgan “Nothing But Net” failed to find a press release, abstract or the study in the top 10. We went on to search for “site:jpmorgan.com nothing but net” and still couldn’t find the source.

JPMorgan Executives, if you’re listening, call us.