Google AdWords Not Provided Still Hypocritical

As you know, Google is now not passing referrer data to Ad Words advertisers log files, web servers and analytic packages. Hence, Ad Words went Not Provided. But, there are easier ways for Ad Words advertisers to get that data than organic users, which leaves open the purpose behind not provided in question.

Google says this is done for the "security of our users" but if that was the case, why does Value Track still work, and the ability to use dynamic keyword insertion where you can set custom landing pages with it?

This can be a confusing topic, so again, I'll step back and explain.

Not Provided with Ad Words means that the referrer data passed when a searcher clicks from the search results ad to your site is removed. So that keyword data is removed from the referrer data so it would protect the searcher from anyone knowing about their specific search, except Google.

But if the advertiser can pass the search keyword via Value Track and keyword insertion, even if the search keyword doesn't exactly match the query (although chances are it will match 100%) exactly, that is still a security issue to the searcher.

If they are afraid of the NSA or random sniffers, then only pass referrer data from Google SSL to SSL enabled sites. If not, then turn off the Value Track and/or the ability to pass a hint of the keyword to a destination URL.

If they are concerned about someone stealing data from the advertiser, then again, don't pass it even with SSL enabled, like they do on organic.

The API and AdWords reports are fine to keep with this logic but not Value Track and custom keyword based destination URLs.

Am I making sense? Is this implementation of not provided within Google Ad Words hypocritical still? Yes, it matches the organic side but the organic side did not have the ability to implement ValueTrack and custom keyword based destination URLs.

Google's Matt Cutts On What Is A Paid Link

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a detailed video trying to define how Google's manual spam fighters determines what is a paid link versus what is not.

Now, 99% of the time, Matt Cutts said it is clear if a link is paid or not. It is a clear transaction that the link on a site was paid $X for. But sometimes it is not clear. Matt summarized it on Google+ these are the other criteria Google uses to determine if a link is considered paid or not. Google asks these questions when looking at a suspicious link:


What is the value of the gift, product, or service?
How close is the gift, product, or service to actual money?
Is it an outright gift or a loan?
Who is the intended audience?
Is the intent of the gift to get links?
Would the gift be a surprise to third party?

Here is the video:

I strongly recommend you listen to it once today and once again shortly after.

Now, of course, folks at Webmaster World ask:

I never got this, how will they know if someone is giving another money for a link. I know Google is big brother but I don't think the spam team as access to that happy!

I guess it depends on how clear it is. Like if the link is from a paid link network or from a site known to sell links.

Matt said they reserve the right to change or adapt the "criteria" they use for determining what is a paid link. But he also suggests you review the FTC guidelines as well.

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a detailed videotrying to define how Google's manual spam fighters determines what is a paid link versus what is not.

Now, 99% of the time, Matt Cutts said it is clear if a link is paid or not. It is a clear transaction that the link on a site was paid $X for. But sometimes it is not clear. Matt summarized it on Google+ these are the other criteria Google uses to determine if a link is considered paid or not. Google asks these questions when looking at a suspicious link:


What is the value of the gift, product, or service?
How close is the gift, product, or service to actual money?
Is it an outright gift or a loan?
Who is the intended audience?
Is the intent of the gift to get links?
Would the gift be a surprise to third party?



Here is the video:

Got A Google Penalty? Should You Start A New Site?

As more and more Google penalties become more transparent, recovering from them seems to get harder. Even when you do recover, the rankings don't always return.

In a recent column by Eric Ward named When The Best SEO Move Is To Kill The Site where he concluded that "in almost two-thirds of the cases I advised that the best move was to kill the site." This is when it comes to unnatural link penalties or Penguin related issues.

The question is, is that true? Is it often easier to kill off the site?

Matt Cutts has said time and time again that digging yourself out of a spam hole is often harder then starting fresh.

Also, now that we know penalties may follow you to your new domain, if you don't start a fresh new web site, then making the decision to kill off a site is even more costly and timely.

If it was as simple as copying your site to a new domain name, switching might make sense more of the time. But if you need to rewrite your content, redo your CMS and design, then it can take a long long time.

Google's John Mueller posted on Google+ a comment about Eric Ward's article saying:


It's never a decision to make lightly, but there can be situations where a website has built up so many problems, that it may appear easier or faster to start over with a fresh & new website, rather than to try to fix all of those problems individually. This isn't an easy way to get past problems that have been built up over the years, it's a lot of work to create a new website, even if you already know the business area.



If you feel you're in this situation, make sure to get advice from friends & other people that you trust (including webmaster communities where you trust their opinions) before doing anything drastic!



In a Google Webmaster Help thread, John Mueller gave advice to someone in a hole that if he will go the new site route, he should start fresh. John wrote:


If you're creating a new website, and don't want to be associated with the old one, I'd strongly recommend really making a *new* website and not just moving the content to a different domain. You don't need to wait for anything in a case like this -- it's fine to remove (or block) the old website, and to create a really new one elsewhere at the same time.



So making the decision to start new is not easy. If it was me, I'd go in this order:

(1) Try removing the bad links (2) Submit a reconsideration request (3) Repeat this a few times until it is successful (4) Wait two months for traffic to change (5) If no traffic change then start a new site

Of course, it is not always this black and white and the specific situation might change the solution. Like if you put a ton of money into your brand name and you can't go elsewhere. Or if there are investors you need to worry about. Or if you simply can't make a new site.

It is a shame to have to deal with this stuff.

Google: You Don't Have To Disavow Off Topic Links

A Google Webmaster Help

 thread has Google's John Mueller responding to webmaster concern over off topic links.

Off topic links are when sites that are unrelated to you are linking to your site. In the link craze these days, Webmasters are afraid of getting link penalties and thus, they are concerned with off topic links.

Google's John Mueller went on record saying:

Just to be completely clear on this: you do not need to disavow links that are from sites on other topics. This tool is really only meant for situations where there are problematic, unnatural, PageRank-passing links that you can't have removed.

So not all off-topic links are problematic or unnatural.

Doing it right vs. doing it over

Cap Watkins in Just Ship*:

We work in a world now where fast isn’t good enough. Where quantity is fairly regularly getting edged out by quality. You shipped twelve just-good-enough things this year? You’re about to get smoked by folks who shipped three of those things thoughtfully and holistically. Where you cut corners on twelve projects to get them out the door, someone else crafted three focused experiences and left themselves little-to-no design or technical debt.

This also describes why arbitrary release dates are poison to good quality products. It forces teams to cut corners to hit a date, which puts them in a more vulnerable position than if they just took the time to do things right.

WorldFloat, India Home Grown Social Network Grown Faster

Worldfloat, India's home grown social networking site with over 45 million users, has introduced a new feature called "viralx" that provide realtime access to videos mostly shared on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

"Worldfloat viralx are like trending news of Twitter except in a video news version only and not like Twitter which is mostly text based or video links based. We play videos directly upfront on the viralx page," said Worldfloat founder Pushkar Mahatta.

He said viralx offers access to latest real-time video news from all over the world and internet. "These viral videos are the ones which are getting mostly shared on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels of internet and TV channels like BBC, CNN and Fox News."

Drawing a comparision between Worldfloat's new feature with those of leading social networking sites, Mahatta said: "Twitter's main focus is to broadcast public views of trending celebrities and their conversations via text and video and photo links and the main focus of Worldfloat viralx is to broadcast upfront trending video news of celebrities directly via videos, not via links of videos or text."

In Worldfloat viralx you can not only watch the videos of trending topics from around the world but also type in a celebrity name and see their latest viral videos and their life happenings and events and movies and music.

Viralx is a direct video broadcast of viral celebrities and their trending life and events.

We see many celebrity news channels publish text news and photos of celebrities along with videos of celebrities but latest viral videos only of all celebrities and their lives are a special feature of Worldfloat viralx.

"From top to bottom in celebrities viralx we show videos from the latest videos to the older videos based on time events of the celebrities and their life and happening. We are featuring in viralx all kinds of celebrities like movie celebrities, political celebrities, music and cricket celebrities," Mahatta said.

Viralx videos get updated every hour and shows only the latest one. It shows high trending videos from various topics like latest music videos, latest funny videos, latest technology videos, latest movie trailers, Bollywood and Hollywood news.

Mahatta said viralx is the first viral video news broadcast channel for the online internet world in India.

"We imagine viralx to be like the TV for the Internet showing latest news from mixed channels and extreme high trends of the social networking worlds of the internet. Worldfloat viralx is a new feature from Worldfloat among its other features like free online movies, news and social networking," he said.