Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings.

Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index.

Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help to define a site’s reputation. The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.

To search for pages linking to a specific page, simply enter the URL on Google or Yahoo! this way:

link:http://yourdomainname/pagename.html

Here are some strategies that are generally considered to be important to increase link popularity:

• There should be links from the home page to all subpages so that a search engine can transfer some link popularity to the subpages.
• Appropriate anchor text with relevant keywords should be used in the text links that are pointing to pages within a site (technically, this helps link context, not link popularity).
• Getting links from other web sites, particularly sites with high PageRank, can be one of the most powerful site promotion tools. Therefore, the webmaster should try to get links from other important sites offering information or products compatible or synergistic to his/her own site or from sites that cater to the same audience the webmaster does. The webmaster should explain the advantages to the potential link partner and the advantages his/her site has to their visitors.
• One way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• The webmaster should list his/her site in one or more of the major directories such as Yahoo! or the Open Directory Project.
• The webmaster should only link to sites that he/she can trust, i.e. sites that do not use “spammy techniques”.
• The webmaster should not participate in link exchange programs or link farms, as search engines will ban sites that participate in such programs.

To increase link popularity, many webmasters interlink multiple domains that they own, but often search engines will filter out these links, as such links are not independent votes for a page and are only created to trick the search engines. In this context, closed circles are often used, but these should be avoided, as they hoard PageRank.

Links

• HIOX Link Popularity Checker
• Measuring Link Popularity
• Link Popularity Web Directory
• Increase link popularity – Why and How to Increase Your Link Popularity (free article)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

AdWords is Google’s branded text-based pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service.

Google’s advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine on www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored link” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results. The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers’ bids (thus the system is classified as P4P) and the historical click-through rates of all ads shown for a given search.

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google’s partner networks. The “search network” includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.

The “content network” shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. Google automatically determines the subject of the pages and displays ads for which the advertiser has specified an interest in that subject. The ads show in boxes resembling banner ads, with the designation “Ads By Gooooooooooogle.” These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model.

AdWords is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. The biggest competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and MSN’s soon-to-be-launched adCenter.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from AdWords.

Legal context

The service has generated lawsuits in the area of trademark law and click fraud. [1]

Interacting with Adwords

The ads are displayed on the right hand side of the natural search results. The ads are pure text, and thus difficult to block. However, on external sites, they are hosted within an IFRAME (an HTML element), making them easy to remove with advertisement blockers.

Technology

The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use a commercial database (Oracle) instead. As is typical of applications simultaneously written and tuned for one database, and ported to another, the system became much slower, so eventually it was returned to MySQL ([2])

Links

• Official Website
• Program Details and FAQ
• Adwords Lawsuits
• Google AdWords API
• Google Advertising Professionals aka GAP’s
• WhoisaGAP Helps you find out who is a Google Advertising Professional

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing).

History

Link farms were developed by search engine optimizers in 1999 to take advantage of the Inktomi search engine’s dependence upon link popularity. Although link popularity is used by some search engines to help establish a ranking order for search results, the Inktomi engine at the time maintained two indexes. Search results were produced from the primary index which was limited to approximately 100,000,000 listings. Pages with few inbound links continually fell out of the Inktomi index on a monthly basis.

Inktomi was targeted for manipulation through link farms because it was then used by several independent but popular search engines, such as HotBot. Yahoo!, then the most popular search service, also used Inktomi results to supplement its directory search feature. The link farms helped stabilize listings for (normally) online business Web sites that had few natural links from larger more stable sites in the Inktomi index.

Link farm exchanges were at first handled on an informal basis, but several service companies were founded to provide automated registration, categorization, and link page updates to member Web sites.

When the Google search engine became popular, search engine optimizers learned that Google’s ranking algorithm depended in part on a link weighting scheme called PageRank. Rather than simply count all inbound links equally, the PageRank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight than others. Link farming was adapted to help increase the PageRank of member pages.

However, even the link farms became susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous Webmasters who joined the services, received inbound linkage, and then found ways to hide their outbound links or to avoid posting any links on their sites at all. Link farm managers had to implement quality controls and monitor member compliance with their rules to ensure fairness.

Alternative link farm products emerged, particularly link-finding software that identified potential reciprocal link partners, sent them template-based emails offering to exchange links, and create directory-like link pages for Web sites hoping to build their link popularity and PageRank.

Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains were removed from the search engine indexes in order to prevent them from influencing search results.

Justification

The justification for link farm-influenced crawling diminished proportionately as the search engines expanded their capacities to index more sites. Once the 500,000,000 listing threshold was crossed, link farms became unnecessary for helping sites stay in primary indexes. Inktomi’s technology, now a part of Yahoo!, now indexes billions of Web pages and uses them to offer its search results.

Where link weighting is still believed by some Webmasters to influence search engine results with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask (among others), link farms remain a popular tool for increasing PageRank or perceived equivalent values. PageRank-like measurements apply only to the individual pages being linked to (typically the reciprocal linking pages on member sites), so these pages must in turn link out to other pages (such as the main index pages of the member sites) in order for the link weighting to help.

The expression “link farm” is now considered to be pejorative and derogatory. Many reciprocal link management service operators tout the value of their resource management and direct networking relationship building. The reciprocal link management services promote their industry as an alternative to search engines for finding and attracting visitors to Web sites. Their acceptance is by no means universal but the link management services seem to have established a stable customer base.

Guidelines

Google indicates in its Webmaster Guidelines that more than 100 factors are used to determine search results rankings. There is considerable debate in the search engine optimization community regarding the continued value of PageRank. Mike Grehan, a well-known search engine optimization columnist, has publicly quoted engineers from Yahoo! and Ask who say Google never fully implemented their PageRank algorithm.

Search engines such as Google recommend that webmasters request relevant links to their sites (conduct a link campaign), but avoid participating in link farms. According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.

Search engines try to identify specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filter those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains are removed from the search engine indexes in order to prevent them from influencing search results.

Links

• Google Information for Webmasters, accessed 2005-09-03.
• Yahoo!’s Search Content Quality Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Litigation

Disputes over the issue have resulted in a number of lawsuits. In one case, Google (acting as both an advertiser and advertising network) won a lawsuit against a Texas company called Auction Experts (acting as a publisher), which Google accused of paying people to click on ads that appeared on Auction Experts’ site, costing advertisers $50,000[1]. Despite networks’ efforts to stop it, publishers are suspicious of the motives of the advertising networks, because the advertising network receives money for each click, even if it is fraudulent.

Solutions

Proving click fraud can be very difficult, since it is hard to know who is behind a computer and what their intentions are. Often, the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent, and not charge the account of the advertiser. Ever more sophisticated means of detection are used, but none are foolproof.

The pay-per-click industry is lobbying for tighter laws on the issue. Many hope to have laws that will cover those not bound by contracts.

A number of companies are developing viable solutions for click fraud identification and are developing intermediary relationships with advertising networks. Such solutions fall into two categories:

a) Forensic analysis of advertisers’ web server log files

This analysis of the advertiser’s web server data requires an in-depth look at the source and behavior of the traffic. As industry standard log files are used for the analysis, the data is verifiable by advertising networks.

b) Third-party corroboration

Third parties offer web-based solutions that might involve placement of single-pixel images or Javascript on the advertiser’s web pages and suitable tagging of the ads. The visitor may be presented with a cookie. Visitor information is then collected in a third-party data store and made available for download. The better offerings make it easy to highlight suspicious clicks and they show the reasons for such a conclusion. Since an advertiser’s log files can be tampered with, their accompaniment with corroborating data from a third party forms a more convincing body of evidence to present to the advertising network.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Yahoo! results and its forecast for current-quarter sales pleased the investors; Yahoo’s shares boost almost 6% in extended trading after the market close. “It was a clean ‘beat’ quarter, you see signs of stabilization, which is very positive.” says Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at financial services firm Collins Stewart.

As Business Week says, Yahoo, in the midst of a sweeping reorganization and rebranding campaign under CEO Carol Bartz since she joined in January, emphasized that the online advertising market is stabilizing.

In the third quarter, Yahoo earned $186.1 million in net profit, or 13¢ a share. That’s up from 4¢ a year ago. Gross revenue of $1.58 billion was down 12% from a year ago. Net revenue after commissions to advertising partners, a more closely watched metric, was $1.13 billion.

About 5¢ of the profit came from the sale of Yahoo’s stake in China’s Alibaba, but remaining results were still ahead of forecasts. The company was expected to earn 7¢ a share on gross revenues of $1.52 billion, or $1.12 billion after payments to advertising partners.

The problem remains the search engine market, Yahoo! continuing to loose ground to Google. Yahoo said it expects gross revenues of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter. Operating income before depreciation, amortization, and stock-option costs is expected to be between $400 million and $450 million. Both of those are somewhat higher than Wall Street forecasts.

Link Exchange (“Reciprocal Link Exchange”) is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody. You place their link on your site, usually on a links page and the other site in return will place a link back to you.

Link exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the WWW. In the last few years (after year 2000), this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google

However according to experts, search engines no longer place a heavy emphasis on reciprocal links. Instead the popularity or credibility of your site is now gauged by one way incoming links to your site. How than do you go about building one way back links to your site? There are a number of proven techniques you can follow:

1. First and foremost your aim should be to link to sites with a similar theme as your site. For example if you site is about “dogs” than it makes sense that back link from another dog or animal related site would be given a heavier weighting that a link from a casino site. You should start by conducting a search with you keywords on the major search engines (MSN, Yahoo, and Google) to come up with a list of sites which appear for that keyword. Next determine the contact info, ideally an e-mail address. Once you have this information, you can simply contact the webmaster (politely) and ask them if they would be willing to link to your site.

2. Another effective way of increasing your link popularity is to write and submit your articles to sites such as articlecity.com. The importance of this is that when you submit your material there is usually a resource box where you can enter the link information to your site. Every time someone publishes your article, you will have a one way link from their site to yours.

3. Submit to directories under the appropriate category. Many directories and human edited and therefore a link from a directory can instantly add credibility to your site. A major directory is Dmoz. Since site submissions are human reviewed, expect at least 6-8 weeks for any kind of response.

4. Submit your URL to link exchange directories where web users such as your self are actively looking to find new relevant link partners. If you search for google.com, ask.com or msn.com for terms: link exchange or link trade you will be able to find some good ones. Here are few that I have found: linkmarket.net, linkexchagned.com and linkpartners.com.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud whether they like it or not.

Use of a computer to commit this type of fraud is a felony in many jurisdictions, for example as covered by Penal code 502 in California and the Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom. There have been arrests relating to click fraud with regard to malicious clicking in order to deplete a competitor’s advertising budget.

In 2004, a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers defraud Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program.

Links

• “Web start-ups vie to detect ‘click fraud’.” Wall Street Journal Online. Retrieved June 10, 2005.
• “Vendors release click-fraud detection tools.” eWeek. Retrieved March 4, 2005.
• “Click fraud roils search advertisers.” C|Net News.com. Retrieved March 4, 2005.
• “Mice Attack: Internet scammers steal money with ‘click fraud’.” Newsweek. Retrieved January 18, 2005.
• “Google CFO: Fraud a Big Threat.” CNN Money. Retrieved December 2, 2004.
• “Click fraud threatens web.” Wired News. Retrieved October 13, 2004.
• “How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet.” Wired Magazine, issue 14.01 (January 2006). Retrieved December 29, 2005.
• “Click fraud fears growing for online advertisers.” Times Online. Retrieved February 2006

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

In the simplest case, relevance can be calculated by examining how many times a query term appears in a document (term frequency), possibly combined with how discriminative that query term is across the searched collection (often called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency).

Since search engines and other businesses rely upon the accuracy of their results, many additional, more complex algorithms have been developed to estimate result relevance. Many of these algorithms, particularly those used by search engines, are hidden to the public, as a user that knows the details of a search algorithm can artificially boost his own content’s ranking.

Relevance calculation is often misinterpreted by the press. For example, it has often been said that when Google burst onto the scene it was miles ahead of its competitors because it, unlike anyone else, ranked web pages by relevance. This is not true since everyone ranks by relevance. It is just that Google had come up with a fairly new way of estimating relevance, namely PageRank. But even search engines that only use TFIDF rank by relevance.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google’s targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

It currently uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (Note that the Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google’s search index.)

Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:

1. They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
2. They build valuable content on their sites; content which attracts AdSense ads and which pay out the most when they get clicked.
3. They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on Ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like “Click on my AdSense ads” to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements”.

The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.

Links

• Google AdSense
• Google wants to dominate Madison avenue, too (The New York Times, 2005)
• AdSense patent application