One of the first important articles I wrote for SEO Chat covered click fraud. A year and a half later, two search engines (Google and Yahoo) settled click fraud class action lawsuits, but the problem is still with us, and shows no sign of going away. That’s just a small part of what Outsell is telling us with the results of its survey.

As I mentioned, the company conducted the survey in May. More than 400 online advertisers responded, with yearly advertising budgets ranging from several thousand dollars to more than $10 million. Together, these advertisers control about $1 billion per year of online advertising money.

That might seem like a drop in the bucket for more conventional advertising, but for Internet advertising, it’s a very significant fraction of a growing field. According to research firm eMarketer, this market was worth $10 billion in 2005 and will be worth more than $15 billion in 2006. Google and Yahoo together will capture nearly half of that market. So Outsell’s study examines the online marketing experiences, monetarily speaking, of about ten percent of the customers. Outsell describes those who responded to the survey as a representative cross section.

So what did Outsell find in its survey? According to some figures, it found a $1.3 billion problem with click fraud. While there have been percentage estimates of the problem before, few actually put a dollar amount on it. And how did Outsell come up with that figure? Apparently, all it did was apply simple math to the results of its survey.

The reasons for that are three-fold. First, every single website is different. Second, we have no idea what we're dealing with just by glancing at a site. Lastly, and most importantly, we spend a large amount of time performing the analysis because it's such an important part of putting together a plan for a site's SEO project.

While this might appear at first to be not a particularly earth-shattering revelation, it surprises me how many so-called SEOs don't actually do an initial site analysis.  Another thing that gets me shaking my head is the standard single page of statistics that many SEO firms consider to be an analysis. In this article, I'm going to share with you a couple of secrets to finding out what may really be going on with your website that we always look at during the course of an SEO analysis.  But first, I want to show you a few so-called SEO analyses that quite frankly have me hopping mad.

I am a firm believer in looking at the entire SEO picture.  There is no magic formula to optimizing a website for search engines; no secret formula to that winning combination. There are, however, a few foundational aspects of good, basic SEO.  One of those is the analysis.

Now I don't want to sound like a suspicious, cynical individual who can find nothing better to do than to "spy" on my competition. I do, however, try to find out what other SEO firms are doing for my own benefit. So when a company offers a free analysis, I ask for one. I have several other websites that honestly have nothing to do with SEO. I have my own personal website with a blog, pictures of my kids, and my writing portfolio. I frankly don't have time to optimize it well. But I'm not really looking to gain a bunch of visitors to my site from the search engines; it's just my own outlet for personal stuff. So usually I ask for an analysis on this site. I also dabble in some web design, and occasionally, I'll want an analysis on that site, too. I usually reserve asking for the analysis on the last one for when I run across a particularly obtuse company who may not notice the many blurbs or links I have to my SEO site. 

In my own research and desire to streamline my own analysis efforts, I have compared my information over the span of a few months. These are just a few of my findings.

The company unveiled the new service at the O'Reilly Open Source Developers Conference. It's called Project Hosting, and like all Google betas, it's free to use, though you do need to have a Google account. The service is supposed to give open source software developers a web-based ability to track bugs and other issues with their software, collaborate, and otherwise handle the many details involved in working on and coordinating an open source project.

The search engine wars are fought with strategies, alliances, and robots. As Yahoo! primes itself to be the number one contender for market share after Google, websites that want to optimize for Yahoo must study how Yahoo ranks pages and how it indexes pages. The Yahoo web crawler SLURP should be studied; your site server logs should have recorded visits from various robots, including SLURP. If you do not have records of SLURP visiting your site, then this article will give tips on how to get SLURP to crawl (hopefully deep crawl) your site.

The Preamble

Yahoo SLURP evolved from Inktomi SLURP. The Yahoo SLURP robot is an upgrade from Inktomi’s SLURP. Yahoo used Inktomi’s search engine to replace Google, which used to take care of its search results. This officially triggered the second search engine wars (the first was won by Google without it declaring hostilities).

Yahoo has at least 130 million registered users on its network. Granted, Google is the definitive search engine, but Yahoo is large enough that it should not be ignored.

Behavioral marketing has actually been around for a few years. In its crudest form, pre-Internet, it may have consisted of special mailings to repeat customers. Today, behavioral marketing involves serving up ads to a particular individual based on his or her previous online behavior. It is not to be confused with contextual advertising, which serves up ads that are related to the content of the web page on which they're appearing.

This means that two people seeing the same web page could see completely different ads. For example, let's take two surfers, one an outdoorsman who likes to visit hiking-related websites, another a big theater buff. They're both planning a visit to South Florida. Maybe they both end up on the same site with general information about the area, but the outdoorsman sees ads for the local parks or hiking groups, while the theater enthusiast sees ads for tickets to upcoming theater performances.

You can probably see why many online advertisers are very excited about behavioral marketing's potential. It promises the ability to reach an even tighter audience with more relevant ads than contextual marketing can achieve. In theory, this means advertisers can show (and pay for) fewer impressions of their ads, while enjoying a higher click-through rate - and more importantly, a higher conversion rate.

With this kind of potential, you would expect to see a lot of advertisers eager to try out this new form of online marketing. The truth is a little more mixed. According to figures quoted by Search Engine Watch, only eight percent of all online advertising is behaviorally targeted. That number seems a little low, but there are reasons for this, as I'll go into shortly. Some of them will become obvious when I explain more about how behavioral targeting actually works.

And if you do have hits, how long will your traffic grow? How far can you expand? How big can you become? What is the difference between a small, profitable operation like www.internetmarketingsecrets.com, or www.freewebmasterhelp.com, and a large household name like www.devshed.com. I mean, they all offer great content, they all optimize their sites for the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) but only one of them is a household name, relatively speaking, on the Internet.

The Bad News

In the real (as opposed to virtual) world of traditional marketing, it is the biggest brands that have the largest market share. In fact, market share is not determined by quality of service or excellence of product. It is a question of branding. Does Daimler Chrysler make the best cars? Or does Nokia really make the best phones? If they do, will they still make such great products tomorrow? I answer, who cares? I have my mind made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!

On the Internet, Google has branded itself as the search engine. The terms "google" and "googling" even made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently to signify using the Google search engine to search online. Despite the distinction of using a lower case letter and the fact that it specifically refers to just the Google search engine, Google risks its name becoming like Levis, which I found in the Oxford Advanced Learners dictionary defined as "jeans." Amazon has branded itself for books, and eBay for auctions; devshed has branded itself through its network of sites for content -- specifically, for information about open source software.

A brand will beat a better product or service ALL the time, not once, not nine out of ten times, but all the time. In traditional marketing, if the customer wants to choose any other product apart from the brand, he will easily find an alternative (a second brand that competes in that space, like Coke and Pepsi). In the online world, however, there usually is no second. Second in a category can spell death (read as "dependence on SERPs").

As a historian by training, I try to look at things in chronological order. So I’ll start with what happened first chronologically, even though it wasn’t the first point to come to light. In July 2004, a young software engineer named David Braginsky wrote in his blog that he “became a techlead of project Platypus at Google,” among many other things happening in his life. Sadly, his next update wasn't for another year, and only mentioned that he “really wants to focus on work.” There are no entries newer than August 2005 and no hints as to what project Platypus actually is.

In September 2005, Garett Rogers posted some speculation in his blog about a new project of Google’s called GDrive. After revealing that Google owns the gbrowser.com domain, he suggests that it could stand for “file browser.” Then he figures that “if google was smart, they would provide some sort of online storage medium that can be accessed from anywhere… a similar 3rd party application had been developed called ‘GDrive’ which utilized GMail as it's storage. This application has suspiciously been discontinued.” After doing a little digging, Rogers discovered that the gdrive.com domain is owned by the same parties who own the gbrowser.com domain, which leads back to Google. He saw that as convincing evidence that Google is working on a GDrive.

In December 2005, Google bought Writely.com, an online word processor that lets you store your documents securely online. It was by no means the first service that Google made available to its users that allowed them to store content online, nor would it be the last; Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheet, Blogger, Google Base, and Picasa, just to name a few, allow users to store and share different kinds of content in a variety of ways. But there’s nothing to tie it all together into one drive, or at least not yet.