Clicksharp Marketing

We work hard to use the right keywords that will attract the qualified visitors to our websites. We should also be using them to keep unqualified visitors at bay.

You’re just a humble advertiser — who knew spammers could cause your business to lose money? (Photo by hegarty_david)

Spam means many things to many people. We tend to most closely associate it with email, because that’s an annoyance experienced by virtually everyone online, and regularly at that. What characterizes spam, in this in other cases, is the exploitation of digital communications technologies to broadcast a highly irrelevant message. Said in other terms: “It costs me nothing to blast out to 100,000 email addresses… so why would I bother trying to weed out just the targeted recipients?”

Search engine spam, depending on how you look at it, is an even bigger problem — because relevance is an even more critical component of the value proposition. Email dialogues happen between individuals, and we ourselves apply our own logic to decide what to read and what not. In search engines, we count on the technologies of Google et al. to do it for us.

The SEO industry sometimes takes a few bruises for the so-called “black hats” who favor spam-ridden tactics to achieve their ends. A few of these include duplicating content, cloaking to hide content from viewers, overstuffing keywords in website copy, and bombarding industry partners and competitors with link requests.

This last one, the link requests — that’s where you come in.

Most search engine marketers have some sort of link building methodology as part of their array of services, and if their client happens to be in your industry or category, it won’t be long before they come across you and your site. They’ll be looking for phrases within your content such as “add URL” or “link partnerships” or “suggest a site.”

There’s no harm if they find these terms on your site through the organic results, but the problem lies on the sponsored side. If you’re deal in sports memorabilia, and an SEO has a client in this same category, they’ll use a query such as “add URL baseball cards.” If you’re running any PPC campaigns with a broad-matched keyword of “baseball cards” (what is broad match?) — your ad may very well show.

The result? You’re appearing in front of a very poorly-qualified prospect, and you rack up an additional impression. That lowers your click-through rate for the “baseball cards” keyword, which lowers your Quality Score, indirectly raising the bid amount that will be required for your ad to show at the top of the page.

Or worse… the person might actually click the ad. Now you’ve actually paid for them to soil your campaign.

This may seem like a lot of excitement over a relatively small threat. Well, it’s true that the proportion of people on the Internet engaged in this kind of behavior is pretty slim. But relatively speaking, this group of individuals is faster, more efficient, and more prolific in their work than the average Internet user. In other words, their actions include a built-in multiplier effect. So what that in mind, consider adding the following to your negative keyword list:

• add site
• add url
• add website
• benefactor(s)
• bookmarks
• comment(s)
• discussion boards
• donate
• donation(s)
• donor(s)
• favorite links
• favorite site(s)
• forum(s)
• link(s)
• list of sites
• list of websites
• related site(s)
• related URL(s)
• resources
• similar site(s)
• similar URL(s)
• site(s)
• sponsor charit(ies)
• sponsor(s)
• sponsorship(s)
• submit site
• submit url
• submit website
• suggest site
• suggest url
• suggest website

That’ll do it for our 5-part series on Bad Clicks. This thread could go on and on; with some finer attention to specific industry verticals, there’s virtually an infinite range of situations in which people outside of your target might be dragging down the quality of your PPC campaigns.

The bottom line — we spend a lot of time thinking about how to use keywords to attract the right visitors to our site. We should also use them to keep the wrong visitors at bay.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

To access the earlier posts in this series:

1. Part 1: Introduction
2. Part 2: Comparison Shoppers
3. Part 3: Researchers
4. Part 4: Job Seekers

Many thanks to Ann Smarty for her link building query list. Also be sure to check out PPC Hero’s Super Duper list of negative keywords.

Related Posts:

Don’t pay for bad clicks! - Part 1: Introduction A variety of scenarios can drive bad clicks to your site. With a little attention to detail, you can nip these in the bud before they chew up your pay-per-click...

Don’t pay for bad clicks! - Part 3: Researchers There are a lot of people out there looking to research your business, market or industry. It's a fact of life, but don't let them empty your bank account in...

Don’t pay for bad clicks! - Part 4: Job Seekers Job seekers, or anyone seeking employment opportunities, are very active in search engines. With a little care, you can ensure they don't use up part of your advertising budget....

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 @ 6:13 pm on the category Pay-per-click advertising, SEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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