Click Quality & Click Fraud

So you spend a lot of money on CPC (cost per click using AdWords, Miva, Yahoo Search Marketing, Bidvertiser, etc) and wondered - or perhaps need to understand - 'Am I getting the best out of CPC adevertising?' or 'Am I losing money on fraudulent clicks?'

Check out some of these articles:

• Clicking Content Ads in Exchange for A Quality Post: Here is an ethical dilemma in the click fraud arena, please leave your point of view in the comment field below. Joe Bloggs is a tech savvy individual who reads many online blogs. Whilst searching for a technical answer, he is directed to a particular site via ...
• Click Fraud and The Presedential Race: I am seeing a lot of chatter on the net about how click fraud may be used as a tool in the upcoming presedential campaign. Internet marketing techniques will play a big part in the upcoming campaign, and the ability to deplete a candidate’s ad budget ...
• Survey Results In: I recently ran a survey on this site to see what type of articles you would like me to write. The overwhelming result was that you would like to read how-to articles. With this in mind I have decided to create a lot more detailed ...
• Entrecard Bans ClickBots/DropBots: A number of months ago, I wrote an article about gaming Entrecard and asked if it was a type of click fraud.
  The crux of this post was that people were creating click bots or drop bots to drop a virtual business card on other ...

Best Back Links

You may have already discovered that the more your back link is in context, the better it is for getting visitors and search engine optimization/results. Also, we're talking about Google and Google PageRank right?

So, generally, the following links strategies might be considered as 'beneficial', and listed in the order below:

• Best Back Link?: A link from another website's home page
• Better Back Link: Content Linking - a page on another site dedicated to your product or service with link(s) pointing back to your site
• Medium Back Link: Link on a ‘non-links’ page (i.e. a link at the bottom of a page NOT dedicated to links)
• Medium Back Link: Links Pages - your link amongst others on a page of RELEVANT links
• Worst Back Link?: Automated Linking Strategies - sometimes you don't have control over how/where your link is displayed.

You may adopt the following attitude and spend effort accordingly: The more difficult a back link is to obtain, the more it is likely to be worth.

What ever you decide, good luck with your back linking, because I'll tell you for nothing: it's not easy to get good back links! I'm not telling you anything new right? You should also keep in mind that Google PageRank does not directly relate to where you appear in the organic results.

Just carry out good back linking for real visitors and the search engines will fall into line!

Rebranding - if its good enough for Google...

You may have noticed recently that Google has done some rebranding.

However, not fully as you can see.


The website's favicon.ico (a small icon that shows up next to the URL in a browser's address bar) shows that Google have opted for a lower case 'g' without an enclosing box. But their toolbar still shows the old logo.

On its own, its not a big deal. But when was the last time that you reviewed and/or revised any of your branding? I'm talking about logos, colours or fonts? As a matter of fact, anything that you use consistently for marketing - does it need an update? Is it more than a few years old? Does your printed material branding match your online branding?

If you have not done so, then take a bit of time out to at least review your branding. Depending on the results, make the appropriate chnages - I mean, you don't wear the same outfits for years on end do you?