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Thanks for such a full response, EGOL.

To put this in perspective, that means 90% of around $42 billion spent on AdWords in 2012 was wasted.

That's the GDP of Kenya.

The recent article from eBay about the performance of their PPC campaigns got me thinking more generally about AdWords and whether maybe the whole thing (especially in the case of eCommerce) might be a complete waste of money.

Obviously, considering Google sucked several billion dollars out of the world last year using just AdWords, I hope not, but hear me out...

There are two reasons why I think AdWords (in the case of online sale of products in a competitive market) are a waste of money:

1. In a competitive market place, the bidding system necessarily means that the cost of an ad is as high as it can be for any given keyword.

What does this mean? It means that, given all bidding parties are intelligent agents (spoiler: they're not), the price of a sale will naturally approach the profit made on that sale and no-one (except for Google) will make any profit.

e.g.
Alex bids $2 to make a $5 return ($3 profit!), so Ben bids $3 to make the same return ($2 profit!), so Carla bids  $4 ($1 profit!), until no-one is making a return at all, or at least the return is so minimal as to not be worth the effort.

This is presuming Alex, Ben and Carla are intelligent agents. If they're not, it's highly likely that they'll bid more than their return (e.g. a bid of $6 for a $5 return leading to a loss of $1). In a real world situation where you can multiply these 3 agents by 100s, there is enough stupidity and general noise in the bidding that this is bound to happen.

Result? For your bid to succeed, you have to bid so much that it's not worth bidding.

So: don't bid on AdWords and spend your marketing money on something else.

2. If it did work, we'd all be rich

Let's say I'm wrong about the above. I can find a way to guarantee a positive return on investment (Google themselves constantly go on about how you can easily track and predict your ROI).
If this were the case, surely I could go to any bank or investor and show them my proof, borrow $100tn, and make both me and them trillionaires.
Why are there so few trillionaires??

I might be missing something big here (I'm sure I am) but I just can't convince myself that the system could ever work for anyone other than Google, who are effectively hoovering up the profits of every business in the world.

Please tell me I'm wrong!

Thanks Cyrus - very helpful. I still get the feeling that getting a link from a PageRank e.g. 7 site (however relevant it is) is going to be a lot more valuable than a load of PageRank 3 sites, though maybe not as valuable as an extremely relevant PageRank 6 site...

I'm planning a link-building campaign, and I've realised it'd be good to know the relative values of different PageRanks.

e.g. does a PageRank 5 site have 10 times as much effect as a PageRank 4 site? Or 100 times? Or 2 times?

I'm thinking, rather than spending ages getting 10,000 PageRank 3 links, I should just spend a bit less time trying to get a few PageRank 7+ links!

I'm even considering offering incentives to staff for getting links - to do so it would be good to be able to value each PageRank accordingly.

Any suggestions / knowledge / experience / stats gratefully received!

Alex

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for the response. However, the "Last Index Update" on Open Site Explorer is still showing 8/14/12?

Alex

OK - thanks Keri. Not a problem, just getting excited!

Alex

I've been keeping an eye on the Linkscape update calendar and am a bit confused! There was meant to be an update yesterday, but Open Site Explorer is still showing "Last index update: 8/14/12". When will the new data reach OSE? Been doing lots of link building and want to know if my efforts have been worth it!

Any info greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Alex

Until recently all of our product pages (we run an eCommerce site) had product descriptions copied directly off the manufacturer's sites. Obviously this isn't good from an SEO perspective, so we were planning to write our own original copy.

My question is: should we keep the manufacturer's copy too? This is often good, useful content from a customer's perspective, but obviously it's not original.

Any help appreciated!

Alex

We're working hard on improving our website right now, and would love to get the community's examples of the best eCommerce sites out there, from an SEO and a general customer-centric design perspective...

Very interesting - thanks! And makes sense. However, I can't quite get my head round how this would work in practice. Have you got any real world examples? Alex

Hi all,

We run an eCommerce website at www.oursite.com plus a blog (including news / articles / reviews / how-to guides etc.) at blog.oursite.com (those aren't really our site URLs, BTW ;-).

For SEO reasons previously discussed on here, and for ease of use for our customers / browsers, we now want to integrate the two more closely.

This will mean:

1. Our blog will move to www.oursite.com/blog
2. We will try to feature the blog content in places where it is relevant to customers (so e.g. news and blog posts about shoes would appear on our shoes category page, a review of some Adidas XL1000 shoes would appear on the Adidas XL1000 shoes product page)
3. The blog is currently run on a wordpress.com site, so we'll need a new CMS (or wordpress.org) to get more control of the data.

My issues are that, although it's good from a users point of view, having blog articles appear in lots of different places on the site might cause issues with duplicate content from a search engine's point of view.

Has anyone got any pointers on how to integrate the two in a way that will make most use of the good original content coming out of our blog, while not "watering it down" by spreading it around too much?

Can anyone point to examples of shops that do this well?

Is there any software (other than Wordpress) that people would recommend using?

As always, any help greatly appreciated!

Alex

Hi all,

We sell musical equipment, and we have been debating about how to structure our website in terms of products and categories.

These are our two options:

1. Each category page lists sub-categories _and _all of the products contained within each of these sub-categories, so e.g. the "Guitars" category page would contain links to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" as well as a big list of electric and acoustic guitars.
2. Each category page lists only its sub-categories, unless it is a "leaf" node, in which case it lists all the products, so e.g. category "Guitars" just has two links - to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" - and no products.

Option 2 means customers don't see products until they've decided which category they want, which doesn't seem ideal to me, but SEO-wise, which is best?

Thanks!

Alex

The "Domain Authority" of my site on the "Link Analysis" section of SEOmoz Pro (34) is different to what it is on Open Site Explorer (36) - how can this be? All I can think is that one hasn't been updated yet (I'm hoping the lower one!).

Elucidation gratefully received!

Alex

Has anyone got experience of optimising Google Products (Google Base) feeds?

I've noticed that, although my site doesn't often appear on page one in the standard results, we occasionally appear right at the top because of the "universal" shopping results.

My question is: how can we make this happen more often? There seems to be a lot less competition (presumably because our competitors haven't worked out how to provide the feed to Google yet!), so I imagine it should be easier and quicker to reach the top this way than any other way.

Thanks!

Alex

If I have a blog at (for example) blog.mywebsite.co.uk (hosted on Wordpress), does this confer rankings to the top level domain (e.g. www.mywebsite.co.uk which we host ourselves)? Contained within the blog are many links to the main website (which is an eCommerce website) for all our key phrases, but it seemed like a good idea to keep the blog and the store separate.

Alternatively, would it be better to use something like www.mywebsite.co.uk/news?

Thanks!

Alex