Unlike most fraudulent clicks that will often cause a spike in your CPA as they do not result in conversions, what made this spike unique is that conversions also spiked over this same period.

Below is the graph of Clicks vs. Conversions:

Not much had changed in the account and there was no noteworthy press to speak of to explain this spike. My gut told me that the over 200% spike in clicks and the nearly 400% spike in conversions was unfortunately too good to be true.

I turned to Google Analytics to investigate my suspicion and evaluated the following:

• Were they from the same IP address?
• Were they from the same network?
• Were they from the same location?

The answer to all these questions was no.

Still not satisfied that these leads were legitimate, I reached out to my client to see if the leads looked real in their database. On the surface they actually did. The email addresses were different and the forms were filled out. It is important to note that the conversion in this case is a completed form. For this client the lead to sale turnaround time is about 2 weeks, so I told my client to let me know what the final lead to sale conversion rate was and how it compared to the website’s rate on average.

Despite the leads looking legitimate on the surface, I still felt this spike was unrealistic and I did not want to wait two weeks before we found out that all these leads were not legitimate sales prospects. I turned to Yahoo new placement tool, which was released in September 2009, to see if it was a particular search partner that was responsible for the spike.

I found my culprit, the domain, http://www.trafficz.com/. This one placement month over month increased over 2000% (that final 0 is not a typo), not two hundred, but two thousand percent!

Moreover, all the conversions were attributed to one keyword on standard match. I immediately excluded this placement from my account, as this one word in that one placement caused the entire spike.

Two weeks have gone by and it turns out my suspicions about the leads driven by Traffickz were confirmed. Not one of the leads actually resulted in a final sale. The typical conversion rate for this site in a 2 week period is MUCH GREATER than 0%. (I am not providing the actual conversion rate here to protect the confidentiality of my client)

I believe the forms were filled out were by a computer program with fake people’s information. What makes this type of fraud so hard to detect is that program made the leads look like they were coming from different IP addresses and geographic locations. This was not your ever day click spammer. These guys were sophisticated and I can see why Yahoo’s click fraud protection system did not catch these spammers automatically.

I have reported this click fraud to Yahoo and am still waiting for an answer. I am going to push hard for a credit on this one, as we are talking thousands of dollars of SPAMMY traffic. I am confident that the people at Yahoo will see this traffic for what it is, aka fraud, and provide the account with a credit.

This experience will not force me to abandon Yahoo all together, and I am not suggesting you do either. Yahoo comprises about 17% of all traffic and is a very important supplement to Google Traffic. Yet, for clients with limited budgets I may look to Bing before Yahoo when expanding. I would tell the people at Yahoo that they should choose their search partners more wisely for their long term success.

Though you should not completely write off Yahoo, I suggest the following to protect your accounts against this new form of click fraud keep the following in mind:

• Make sure you or your agency monitors weekly if not daily for any unusual spikes in traffic for each engine
• Click spammers are getting smarter making click fraud harder to detect using the usual measures such as IP address, location, bounce rate or conversion rate.
• Click Fraud does not only hurt your numbers at times by causing spikes in your CPA, but can also deceivingly help your numbers by increasing conversions.
• If something seems way too good to be true, it probably is.
• Fight for credits back to your account for fraudulent traffic.
• Make Yahoo’s Ad Delivery Report part of your optimization process and look for suspicious search partners to exclude

How much might the usability of a web page matter to a search engine? If that search engine were to look at an approximation of the layout of a web page, it could try to understand how good of a user experience visiting that page might be, and evaluate the page based upon certain characteristics that it finds upon the page.

This is interesting, and while it is not implemented and could be years away from implementation, it brings an interesting, new, and fresh angle to look at what the search engines may be up to.  For those people trying to stay just one step ahead of the search engines (which is not smart, duh).  You should look at this as an idea for where the search engines may someday use to determine your spammy, low value, link heavy site isn’t so great.  Google might look at bounce rates for those who install Google analytics someday.

Of course for most people who just build quality sites with users in mind you wont’ have to worry about this very much, that’s of course the right way to go.  However if these experiments ever become main parts of ranking algorithms, it will be good to know that these kinds of metrics could be used as areas to troubleshoot…someday.  I say someday because we could be years away from these tactics being used by search engines to determine rankings.

Interesting to consider thought, right?

I mean, let’s be honest, how many brands accurately reflect who they SAY they are?

So in the early phases, they truly were fanatical & we liked working with them, then BOOM a major outage. After this recent outage at Rackspace, I saw a link to this page that explained a the incident that caused outages. It is still linked from their homepage and outlined what was happening, what they were doing to fix it, and what steps they were putting in place to keep it from happening again.
That prompted this blog post…

These guys put “fanatical support” on everything with their name, and you know what? They lived up to it. While no service business can ever say that they will never have a problem, it is how they REACT to those problems that separates one company that says…”hey we’re great” from their competitor who also says ….guess what… “we’re great too.”

I only hope that this transparency leads to MORE customers for rackspace, not less. Because at least they don’t hide their wounds, they not doing some spin, they took the mistakes on the chin and are looking to improve.
Problems and friction between customer and client are where the rubber meets the road. I come across this every day in our industry. Picking an SEO company is difficult, why? Because we all sound the same, well not all…but most. It is a hard business to differentiate yourself with bullet points and powerpoint slides.

It got me thinking further…about the Jetblue fiasco and how David Needleman reacted sure, there may have been a PR person whispering in his ear a bit, but the company is one of openness in its culture so this response doesn’t surprise me.

So what does all this have to do with SEER? At the end of the day, I want SEER to always be a company that:

• treats each other, our clients, vendors, partners, and friends well
• values and recognizes the contributions everyone makes to our clients successes
• is “fanatical” about ensuring that the budgets invested in us make solid returns for our clients
• does everything we can to help our clients achieve their goals
• has an impact on our community
• attracts great talented people who want to kick ass and make a difference

To steal a line from Rackspace:

Fanatical Support can’t be captured with bullet points or summed up with a simple graphic.
For every customer, it’s an experience that impacts their work and lives in very different and powerful ways.
So we’ll let them speak for themselves and for Fanatical Support.

For those of you who are selecting SEO companies, stop looking for the bullet points!! We SEO types all have access to the same information, we all read the same blogs, yet what makes ones better than the other?? I’ll be discussing that topic in my next post, stay tuned.

BTW – check out how yahoo has responded to an outage on Cyber Monday for its Yahoo! stores, leaving many merchants unable to transact on the busiest day of the online shopping year. how does it compare to Rackspace? As of today 24 hours later, they are not responding on their own blog…does that sound fanatical to you?

On the horizon, Compete is going to be launching Search Analytics on September 12th with a Pay-as-You-Go pricing model. This service will provide a new level of competitive research accessible for all sizes and types of companies. Compete Search Analytics will provide companies with access to keyword and site referral data so one can compare a site to its competitors and uncover ways to improve a search marketing strategy.

The second development I want to share is a widget. Yes, it seems everyone is widget-crazy these days, but this widget doesn’t apply to the masses — Due Maternity has found a great way to use a widget to connect to their niche. The first of our friends just had their first baby three weeks ago. I’m married to a second-year associate at a law firm and, as I mentioned, I’m about to start back at school for my MBA, so starting our family is a ways off (much to my in-laws disappointment). But my friend’s pregnancy was — and new baby Matthew is — really exciting for us (now, if they didn’t live in Ohio…). If only I had discovered Due Maternity’s desktop widget earlier, I could have shared it with the mommy-to-be. I love it, not only because it’s cute, but because it’s a brilliant marketing idea; Due Maternity has found an alternative marketing avenue to stay in touch with their target audience, and it has a measurable ROI!

“During the first 45 days after launch, the application was downloaded around 10,000 times—customers were enticed with a 10% discount on select purchases—and sales directly attributable to click-throughs from the application to the e-commerce site hit $7,500. The cost? $600.” -Internet Retailer, August 20, 2007

Often companies want to develop a widget just for the sake of having a widget (or because “everyone else is doing it”). The Due Maternity widget really emphasizes thinking about your target audience, the format of your widget, and widget tie-ins that will entice the downloader to return to your site.

Usually, there is not much to say about interesting things that Yahoo! is doing that Google has not done already. But I think Yahoo! is trying to catch up to Google Universal, so they have done a couple interesting things in the past few months. First, if you’re searching Yahoo! for information on a specific location, look at what you might find:

Looks like Yahoo! has done a great job of using their own property (travel.yahoo.com) to provide a “One Box” Travel Destination Shortcut with a picture slideshow, as well as helpful hotel, flight, restaurant, and map quick links and top things to do. Similarly, if you’re trying to compare Donovan McNabb’s most recent statistics to Carson Palmer’s, you might find a result like this:

Again, Yahoo! has done a great job of leveraging a property they own, as well as maximizing an area in which they know they excel – Fantasy Football. They have all the stats in their database, so it’s easy enough to throw them in a One Box result, plus the added benefits of the Yahoo! Fantasy Rank. Who Dey!

Of course, I still love Google, so I have to give them some love in my blog post. I also love to cook (and I’m not half bad), so I’m always on the searching for new recipes. If you do a simple Google search for “chicken recipe,” this is what you’ll get back:

You can then use the two boxes and search for recipes or click “Find results for chicken recipe in Recipes search” and use the abundance of drilldown types to find exactly what you’re in the mood for:

It’s great that the recipes come from all different sources. (Interested in listing your company in the recipe results? Use Google Base. What is more, you can use Google Base to list all sorts of things – hotels, jobs, real estate, products, etc. and it’s FREE!)

Well, that’s my wrap up of recent favorite things in the spirit of reminiscing. Is there anything you have seen recently that is worth sharing? I think discovering new things is fun, but sharing them with others is even better!

Then, a few weeks later, Yahoo! let their new Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) loose. As Yahoo! noted in their own Search blog, “You may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.” After implementation of the new Yahoo! Slurp, search results did not improve.

In their most recent Weather Report regarding their Search Index Update, Yahoo! directed visitors to their Site Explorer for more communication and interaction with Yahoo! Additionally, webmasters were asked to authenticate their sites. Whether or not site authentication helps improve search results on Yahoo! is still subject to debate. If you find that you’re not ranking well in Yahoo! and you’re abiding by the rules of SEO, it’s probably worth a shot.

Here’s an example of some of the bad results Yahoo! has been returning for search. On September 27th, I did a search for “Philadelphia Liposuction Doctor.” Let’s review the results:

1) A Plastic Surgery Savings site. Not truly Philadelphia-specific. I can’t even contact a doctor here – only put in my name & email for someone to contact me. Not a very good result.
2) Another Plastic Surgery Savings site. Comparing paragraphs on this page to #1, you start noticing that the content duplication is remarkable. Additionally, if Yahoo! is going to rank two pages from the same site in back-to-back positions, couldn’t they be grouped together like Google does?
3) A blog page that simply mentions searching for “Philadelphia Liposuction Doctor” in the context of free speech in the U.S. Bad result.
4) A directory page from e-comoutlet.com. Bad result.
5) A “Philadelphia Guide” page from criany.org – pretty much a scraper site. Bad result.
6) Actual plastic surgeon in Philadelphia area. YAHOO! Good result.
7) Philadelphia page from Looking Your Best. Looking Your Best is a portal site operated by an internet marketing company for plastic surgeons. Good result.
Plastic surgeon in Philadelphia area’s website. Good result.
9) Scraper site. Bad result.
10) Philly plastic surgeon’s site. Good result.

Overall, not very good results from this Yahoo! search. Try the same search in Google and see what comes back. Looks much better to me. For now, I think I’ll stick to Google for my searches – a lot less hunting to find quality results.

So what does this mean for your search results? Yahoo! still seems to be working on their search. It might take some time to see where things settle out. In the meantime, it’s hard to sacrifice good rankings on Google on MSN while trying to figure out the new Yahoo! algorithm. Search is sometimes a game of wait and see.