Foreign Perspectives

Archive for March, 2008

Reading the original research presentation of google highlights a number of points where the weakness of the algorithm can still be exploited and those cracks are starting to become very obvious.

One thing that they never allowed for was that once money came into the equation then people would pay to manipulate how their site was ranked in terms of pagerank. As we’ve seen late last year that has now become a significant problem for google and so they have begun to crackdown on the payment for links beginning with sponsored posts. How effective that will be given that there are now over 600,000 (yes, six hundred thousand) directories offering links is hard to say but sales of links are sure to remain with us in one form or another.

Then there’s the assumption that people would use large letters and bold fonts to highlight what was important on the page. As is plain, this is easily manipulated and is on quite a widespread basis in some quarters.

They even neglected to consider that some people would simply click on their own pages because clicks are a factor in pagerank (they know if you’ve installed the google toolbar). That’s quite noticeable if you “legitimately” do it when developing a website and one assumes that many more people are doing it for less innocent reasons.

That they’re having problems is obvious: they shouldn’t need to crackdown on the blogs and yet they appear to need to do that.

James’ nursery school is in the throes of producing a film based on the Arabian nights tales.

Well, we think it’s on that as James is less than forthcoming about his role in the production beyond mentioning the other day that he had to hand a lamp to two of the other children in his class. We’ve also seen various shapes of swords laid outside for the paint to dry and there was a photo of the little girls in Arabian nights type costumes in the newsletter last week.

Anyway, we’ll know soon as opening night (probably day I expect) is in a few weeks time.

Post offices in many countries around the world offer a range of banking services these days, but are they really up to it?

Typically a small post office will have one counter to do everything. That works well when “everything” is mainly posting letters and parcels which take a few minutes to process.

Add on banking services and you’re into a whole different league in terms of the time that it takes to process a transaction though. For one thing, opening an account takes ages and delays everything. OK, it’s not something that happens every day but it happens fairly frequently: I spent getting on for an hour in a queue in a post office today which ended up snaking right round the available space and out the door because two people were opening accounts.

The problem really stems from the practice of governments to consider post offices in country villages to be a “good thing” and therefore worthy of support. That in turn leads to them being considered a job creation scheme so, of course, you wouldn’t want to add too much automation into them as then you wouldn’t create so many jobs. What automation that there is often is counter-productive: posting my three letters took nearly five minutes because the stamps had to be scanned in and destinations entered into the computer.

So, no, I don’t know that it’s really true to say that many post offices could be considered banks.

Now and again I try out adwords, mainly to advertise the listings sites or rather to advertise for owners to list on them.

It’s been ages since I spruced up the campaigns so I thought I’d have a shot at it again today.

One thing to remember is that you only want relevant clicks on your ads. How many times have we all come across an adsense ad that was on a site that seemed totally inappropriate to the content? That’s because the person placing that advert hadn’t thought enough about exactly what keywords they should be aiming to use and probably thinks that it’s great that they’re getting loads of page impressions but they’re getting very few clicks.

In fact, the best approach is to have very tightly defined keywords, get very few page impressions but get very high click through because your advert is displayed where it should be. Not an easy task for sure, but one way to tackle the problem is to consider all the factors that go into placing your advert and why someone would click it.

Consider an example: a self-catering property in Brittany, France.

1. The language. If your ad is in English then you need to select that as an adwords option.

2. What country? OK, our property is in France, and the advert is in English but there are a lot of English readers out there so we could list the UK, Ireland, France as a first cut but it’s probably also worthwhile adding in all the countries bordering France. In practice the use of English will exclude non-English speakers but you could add the rest of the richer European countries on the basis that English speakers in them might want to go on holiday in France.

3. What keywords? This is where many people fall down. Yes, your property is in France but you don’t want people clicking on your ad if they’re looking for a place in Provence so you need to include Brittany as one of the keywords. This isn’t quite so easy though as it means that you need to add phrases like “gite brittany france”, “france brittany gite”, and so on. It’s best to include the keywords in quotes as this will limit the irrelevant page impressions and clicks but note that you need to put in all possible variations.

4. What about the ad? This needs to say what you’re offering. Now, that might sound silly but many ads don’t or rather attract irrelevant clicks because they aren’t clear about what they’re offering. Remember that the people seeing your ad won’t know what keywords triggered it so you’ll need to say something like “Brittany gite with pool”. The ad needs to be readable too which often isn’t easy as there isn’t much room for the text.

5. Where should it go? Whilst you could just go to your homepage, it’s best to run up a special adwords page that follows through with the sale information. Not only will a more direct sales page be more effective but you’ll also see more clearly in your stats which clicks came via adwords.

6. What about the budget? This is a difficult one. For example, there are a lot of gites advertising using adwords so the more general phrases have high bids. Remember too that you generally need 100 clicks to make a sale so if you’re charging $1000 a week then paying $1 a click means that 10% of your income will go in adwords costs. Also, no matter how careful you’ve been, you may get heaps of irrelevant clicks through some oversight so you should always test a new ad with a low budget.

Finally, don’t forget that the longer the phrase you use, the lower you need to bid. Long phrases mean low numbers of page impressions but higher click-through from them and lower costs for you. What you don’t want is lots of irrelevant clicks as that just costs you money.

I came across an interesting site a few days ago which has set me thinking about my own listings sites.

What this site does is build mini websites for accommodation properties and then enters those properties in a property listing. It’s interesting because my own sites operate from the other end so to speak. They’re listing sites that build mini websites for the properties that list on them.

That different starting point has created numerous differences in emphasis between my site and theirs but I suspect that if you were to compare both in a few years time there’d be little to distinguish between them. I’m currently beavering away to soup up the mini websites that I create for the properties and no doubt they’re beavering away to soup up the performance of their listing service.

If nothing else, they’ve provided me with enough ideas to keep me busy for the rest of the year!