newmediaMike

Keyword Oddity

The buzz around the blogosphere about Google labeling all sorts of sites as malware today reminded me of something that happened earlier this week.

I was doing some keyword research for my day job at Direct Energy . I was optimizing a page on our Flexible Electricity plans. In Google Analytics when I did a drill down I found that last year, the second most used keyword phrase that brought visitors to the site was Canada furnace repair hourly rate.

I found this to be quite peculiar, so I used that phrase a search term.  There we were #9 for that phrase. But it was how Google gathered these keywords that I found peculiar. They gathered those words from the text on the page, which is normal.

But the odd part is the words aren’t even in the same paragraph or together. They are not in the URL, the page title  or as H1 tags. Basically the phrase doesn’t conform to my standard SEO  practice.

If you look at the image above you see a lot of trailing dots  …  Google is cherry  picking through the page to find this phrase.  Furnace Repair is on the sidebar and the Canada is at the bottom of the page.

Has anyone else ever experienced something like this?

Canada leading country after US for click fraud

I came across this post today about click fraud. Surprisingly the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada.

Click Forensics has released click fraud data for the fourth quarter of 2008. The click fraud rate grew slightly year-over-year. Here are the primary findings:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1 percent for Q4 2008. That’s up from 16.0 percent in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6 percent rate reported for Q4 2007.
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2 percent. That’s up from the 27.1 percent rate reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from the 28.3 percent rate reported for Q4 2007.
• Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That’s up from the 27.6 percent rate reported for Q3 2008 and the 22.0 percent rate reported for Q4 2007.
• In Q4 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada (7.4 percent), Germany (3.0 percent) and China (2.3 percent).

“Based on the data we tracked in Q4 2008, it seems that the online advertising industry is not immune to the growing tide of cybercrime during this recessionary period,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “Both the overall click fraud rate and the rate of click fraud originating from botnets were the highest ever in Q4 2008. In addition, we’ve started to see old schemes like click farms reemerge. Advertisers should pay close attention to these types of threats in their online campaigns throughout the year.”

The three biggest red flags that point to the economy having an impact on the growth of click fraud are:

• The Q4 click fraud rate jumped a percentage point when it was steady most of the year.
• We saw a higher than usual jump in the botnet rate (14 percent this quarter) and the botnet rate rose to its highest level ever at over 30 percent.
• We noticed a re-emergence of click farms when they had all but disappeared.

In over four years of reporting the Click Fraud Index, the overall industry click fraud average is at its highest threat yet.  With click farms and botnets on the rise, advertising campaigns are taking the hit.  It seems that the online advertising industry is feeling the pressure of the inconsistent economy in more ways than one.