The State of Search - Pay-Per-Click
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On the Pay Per Click side of the search engines, there are still fact-based rumblings within many areas regarding click-through fraud that occurs, as well as a growing insanity in the bidding for keyword terms, which (researchers are discovering) does not need to happen as only twenty percent (20%) of the keyword terms available are over $1.00 The other eighty percent (80%) can be had on average for under twenty cents (US$0.20).
A personal observation I would like to make: I have found Google still returning shopping results pulled from Yahoo!'s Directory, yet it does not appear that Yahoo! is reciprocating the favor. Which search engine is trying to be more relevant and which one the mad cash cow?
Over in the Yahoo! search world, the search engine is having a flashback in time to the old tried and abused Meta keyword tag. Now, before everyone rushes out to toss fifty keywords into the Meta keyword tag, Yahoo! is using it to match against the content of your body. Since they are using it to match, it has been surmised that having keywords there that do not match body content will earn a demerit of sorts in Yahoo!’s relevancy factoring.
Another interesting development that was discovered is Yahoo! now seems to be banning cross linked websites from its natural results listings. A simple example of cross linking is building a website selling widgets using all static html pages on your hosting server, then building another web site on the same server with a different domain name selling those same widgets but using a PHP- or ASP-based website, and then linking the sites to each other.
Next: Enter AOL and Amazon >>
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