In previous blog post about Google AdWords landing page experiments, I have made it clear that moving a landing page from a low content domain to an existing domain which had a lot of content did work. However, this is just a workaround instead of solution to the real problem.

Unless you can make the landing page part of the site, you are still attaching an independent and low-quality landing page to a site that work. I don’t say this landing page will stop working in the future but there is always a possibility.

Without further ado, here are some points worth noting when building sites:

• The site must have relevant and substantial content — relative but measurable. An advertiser reported to have 15 pages which only 3 of them are in the Google index. Still, she got a well lower bid price than other of her campaigns before the content.
• Provide value in terms of information and content to your visitors. It is wise to position yourself as a visitor to your site. What are you looking for and how fast do you find what you want. Get others to assess your site.
• For affiliates: presell still works. Many advertisers start thinking that Google wanted to boot affiliates from advertising in AdWords. It’s not true. If you can get good information during the pre selling process, you can still leave the conversion part for your merchant. Let merchant close the deal, they are good at that.
• It is not required but it is considered ethical to distinguish affiliate links from the rest. In search engines, they are clearly labelling commercial links as “sponsored links” or “advertiserments”. The intention is to let users know what are they clicking on.
• Stickiness is still one of the top strategies. Give readers what they want and capture them so they come back again. The real value of your traffic is in those who come back, those who you build relationship with and become your customers in the long run.

After all the storm, at last we come to the conclusion: building a real site is what really matters. Surprise huh?

The thing is that taking shortcuts, even when all you want is to advertise on Google AdWords is now highly discouraged.

Webmaster World is now running a discussion thread about what exactly are supplemental pages and some of the ways to avoid and remove them.

As the name implies, supplemental results are just that, supplemental. Google will return them only if not enough regular search results are available. In very rare chances are these results will appear on normal search query unless the keywords are very specific.

We usually know if our pages are marked as supplemental by doing a quick [site:] command.

In the following post, I am going to summarize and add my own view of why it happens, with a few suggestions on how to get out of the problem — if it is indeed an issue you can get rid of.

Why Supplemental Results Happen

What are the main causes of a page being marked as supplemental result?

• For expired domains, Google keeps a copy of the latest version of the page it crawled and display it as a Supplemental Result in the index as necessary. Usually, they are dropped after one year but may be longer.
• For a page that used to show content but now is 404, Google also keeps the lateset version of the page as it saw and display it as a Supplemental Result in the index. They also might be dropped after one year but possibly longer.
• For search that matches only on the old version, then you will see that old pages returned and marked as supplemental. Even the keywords or keyphrases are not in the cache or in live page, the returned page will highlight the search terms in the title and snippet of old version as usual.
• For duplicate content, some of the pages or URLs will appear as normal results while others will appear as Supplemental Results. This could happen because there are different links leading to multiple URLs that are duplicate ontent.
• New site which has very low inbound links or PageRank will have some of its pages in the supplemental results until the site grows up both in link popularity and age.
• Site that are hosted on unreliable hosts. When Google tries to crawl the site, the host was down.

For publishers and webmasters, this is not a good thing as pages which are supplemental obviously can not rank normally in the main index. Google explicitly marks such pages as having no or very low weight so in order for them to rank, they must get out to the main index.

Possible Solutions

Being website publishers, we could only do our best to make our sites as appealing as possible by making sure that they work flawlessly and fixing the errors if they exist.

Some of the causes of supplemental results can not be “fixed”. Still we have control over our own sites so if we are willing to work and improve the situation, their pages will eventually get into the main index.

Here are a few suggestions on how to improve affected sites:

1. Make sure that every page has only one URL that can access it. Avoid unnecessary characters after the URL. Either return 404 for other version or 301 redirect it to the only version you want to keep.
2. Decide if you want a www or non-www version of your site. Use mod_rewrite to redirect the entire domain. Google Sitemaps also has an option to choose between www or non-www to avoid duplicate content.
3. Follow best practices for a good website. Well structured pages, links, well-defined tags, etc.
4. Work on building inbound links. Get more inbound links and then more. You can never get enough of them. This will tell Google that your site and pages are important enough and get the pages our of supplemental.

Some Questions and Answers

Q: Does Google omit supplemental results in the result pages during keyword search?
A: No, but the chance of it to be included in normal search engine result pages are very slim, unless the query returns very little main results or use obscure keywords.

Q: Do supplemental URLs get re-spidered?
A: Yes, but on a less frequent schedule than URLS that are in the regular index.

Q: Are changes to supplemental URLs re-cached?
A: Because supplemental pages are also in the cache, they are also get updated.

From my personal experiments during the last few months, also feedbacks I got and read in forums and other places, we now come to a conclusion that the quality of the entire site matters in determining if a landing page is acceptable or otherwise.

Note that we can’t be 100 percent sure about what Google really wants because none of us has actually dissect the source code or document behind landing page quality.

But through a lot of data from various sources and industries, we could draw acceptable guidelines to create better landing page.

Landing Page Experiments and Reports

1. A forum user moved his landing page from a low content domain to an existing domain which had a lot of content. He immediately got his low priced keywords back.

2. I found that squeeze page is okay as long as the page has links to other pages of content in the same domain. The domain in which the landing page resides can not contain only one page. It is required that the landing page also connects to other pages on the domain.

3. Grouping focused keywords into groups become more important. You can not expect to dump thousands of keywords into one ad group and expect it to work. It become even more necessary to optimize every part of the campaign.

4. Google AdSense is not the culprit. If the landing page contains Google AdSense ads and other rich content pages, the AdWords campaign was not affected at all. Again, if the site contain only thin content which sole purpose was to drive traffic and then to monetize again through Google AdSense, that site was definitely penalized.

Hypotheses

Through repeat reports from many advertisers, we could now say with 90 percent certainty that in order to get low keyword bid price, advertisers need a real website.

No longer that we could quickly create a landing page to test a market by getting them to answer to a question — for product ideas, for example.

Well, that method would possibly still valid if we could host that landing page on a related domain and make it look like as if the landing page is actually part of the domain.

Now, it becomes obvious why generic ads with very general targeting still run while your ads had to pay in the range of $1 - $10. Targeting is not the problem, content is — at least in this update. Although the ad had a bad targeting, it turns out that the site has lots of solid content.

AdWords adds weekly report view

Google AdWords team announced the arrival of a new feature — weekly reports. The new report view aggregates your report data on a weekly basis, making it easy for advertisers to see how their account, campaigns, Ad Groups, ad, keywords, or URLs performed each week.

AdCenter advertisers like returns, want more

ClickZ reports that Microsoft adCenter is becoming a favorite among search engine marketers. In a roundtable discussion in Mirosoft’s New York headquarters this week, a group of advertisers said they were happy with the results they’ve seen from adCenter so far but all agreed they’d like to get more traffic, as long as the returns do not go down.

With the demographic, geogrpahic and psychographic targeting in adCenter, advertisers get more sophistication they could tak eadvantage of.

Re-evaluating click fraud

Alan Chapell gives a view of click fruad from an entirely different perspective. While everyone in the industry believes that clickfraud is a problem — which accounts for 15 percent of total clicks — still the real problem is not very obvious.

For instance, reports from click analytics company may reveal the real percentage of click fraud, but no number that could show how many did advertisers pay for.

IAB is now involving search engines, advertisers and auditing firms to look into the definition of a legitimate click. Until then, search engines may or may not have done enough to protect their advertisers from this issue.

Ask upgrades sponsored listings

Ask.com has upgraded its Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) program, improving management tools and increasing premium inventory available to paid search advertisers.

A new dashboard interface, bulk management tools, and an available application programming interface (API) simplify management of ASL for advertisers and agencies managing multiple campaigns.

In addition, ASL now offers advertisers daily budgeting tools, instead of the previous monthly budgeting, along with hourly performance data for reports. Self-service advertisers paying by credit card can also set the amount and frequency of credit card charges, improving monthly budgeting.

Frequently asked questions on PageRank

Matt Cutts has posted answers to frequently asked questions about PageRank. It is just on time that Google is updating the PageRank on the toolbar.

A month ago, SEO Black Hat had an experiment about the effect of on-site intra-linking to SEO. Particularly the experiment is about click distance and how it could bring more or less traffic from search engines.

What is Click Distance?

First of all, click distance is the number of clicks it takes to reach to a web page from the homepage of the site.

If a site was structured or organized like directories, then access to example.com/page1.html should be one click away, while example.org/category/subcategory/subsubcategory/page2.html is 4 clicks away from the homepage.

Search engines value a page with less Click Distance score better than one with higher score. In some search engines, the deep of the page and directory structure also matters.

What Was the Experiment

The experiment is about both SEO and usability. First, he deleted all the Category links from the sidebar and put a link to every post ever written, using the title of the posts as the anchor texts.

The site had gone supplemental after 182 results prior to the experiment.

Finally, he also got rid of the Google Sitemaps file — both sitemap.xml and sitemap.txt from the server and deleted the sitemap from Google Webmaster Tools.

The Result

For the month of September 2006, SEO Black Hat had these search referral numbers:
Google 24889
Yahoo 1047
MSN 503
Ask Jeeves 91
Google Images 82

In August, 2006 with search referrals of
14258 - Google
1603 - MSN
1266- Yahoo
41 - Ask Jeeves
19 - Google Images

and these numbers in July
11995 - Google
1145 - MSN
828 - Yahoo
514 - Google Images
34 - Ask Jeeves

There was a 74% climb in the number of Google search referrals. MSN switched to Live, Yahoo! was down slightly and Ask Jeeves up slightly.

For supplemental pages, now the blog does not go supplemental until 554 results.

Current Hypotheses

What caused the raise in search engine referrals? We can be sure that during the months the site also gained backlinks from other blogs and sites. The site also got a bunch of referrals from Internet trends search like “Fortuny” and “lonelygirl15″.

But those aside, there are two factors that he thought had contributed to the traffic:

1. Stickiness and number of visits — due to the private SEO Black hat forums.
2. Click distance

Take Away Lessons

If there is only one thing I could learn from the experiment, it is to structure the blog so that you always display the most recent posts on the homepage, and perhaps also related posts on all blog pages.

Internal linking is not only important but also could immediately increase readership. Link to your old posts so visitors are more likely to find them.

Make your flagship posts easy to access; as few clicks from the homepage as possible.

Last but not least, create a community where people will continually come back for more and stay longer.

[SEO Black Hat]