Think Affiliate » google

This Site May Harm Your Computer [2]

admin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:22:41 +0000

Following on from the previous post, StopBadware.org have issued a statement saying that they do NOT provide the badware data to Google. The huge number of people who received ‘This Site May Harm Your Computer’ links to StopBadware.org for more information created a Denial of Service attack on the site and caused confused users to be shown an Internal Server Error message.

It appears that both Google and StopBadware.org have now agreed that the error lies with Google and that human error was to blame.

This Site May Harm Your Computer

admin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:12:41 +0000

I was very confused yesterday when every site returned for any Google search was saying ‘this site may harm your computer’. Thinking this must be the result of some kind of spyware/adware on my laptop I ran every test I could think of and checked out all of the processes running on my machine.

It turns out that the actual reason was Google’s fault. All domains were affected as the domain ‘/’ was added to the list of unsafe domains. Whilst mistakes do happen, I am very suprised that Google don’t have more safeguards in place to prevent a massive error like this getting through.

Pay Per Click Advertising

admin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:34:27 +0000

As with most things internet based, the idea of pay per click advertising is a very recent idea. First introduced by Goto.com in 1998, pay per click (PPC) advertising is now the standard advertising structure used by most search engines. In 2000, Google launched Adwords, using a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) structure instead of pay per click. However, they moved over to the PPC charging model in 2002 and since, they have had huge success.
Advertisers choose keywords they wish to target and decide how much they are willing to pay.

The amount of traffic provided to each advertiser depends on how prominently their adverts are shown. The sponsored results shown above the organic listings tend to have much higher amounts of traffic, making them the preferred advert location. Although not strictly proportional, the higher the adverts position on the page, the more people tend to click on the advert. As such, Adwords ranks the adverts with the most desirable at the top of the page, and the less desirable being near the bottom or not even on the first page of results.

The ranking of adverts is based on many factors with the most important being bid price and quality index where the quality index is made up of factors like the advert click through rate (CTR). There is a great skill in being able to reduce bid prices whilst ranking highly by boosting the quality score for an advert.

Google Adwords is not the only pay per click service, but it is by far the biggest with current estimates putting its market share at 85%-90%. The biggest competitors in the UK are Yahoo Search Marketing (the new name for Goto.com who were bought out by Overture) and Microsoft Adcenter.