Now – Google determines what adverts go where by indexing the content of the website in question, so that if your website is about dogs, you’ll see adverts relating to dogs. You might see ads for dog baskets, dog insurance and other related dog products, but what you shouldn’t see is ads for mountain bikes from Halfords.

That’s what I saw recently on a website that had nothing to do with mountain bikes. The odd placement of ads was dismissed as simply Google placing random adverts until it had enough time to index the website in question in order to place relevant ads, yet something seemed odd as I was actually thinking of buying a mountain bike at the time. Was it chance, or did Google know?

Have we entered some Minority Report situation where Google now knows what you’re thinking of buying, and offers you relevant adverts in order to complete the sale?

Suspicions were confirmed when reading about the semi finals for Britain’s Got Talent on the metro.co.uk website where, once again, the same mountain bike adverts from Halfords appeared.

No coincidence, and nothing to do with the content of the website. No, Google has managed to index the most recent bookmarks within Firefox and has realised that one of them is for a mountain bike on Halfords’ website. Obviously believing that a sale could be forthcoming, Google has decided to bombard me with ads for mountain bikes – which could well work too, but it does raise more pertinent questions.

Have you noticed any adverts on websites lately that were a little bit too accurate for your liking? Do you feel that your privacy may have been infringed upon in some small way?

Has Google gone too far?

The survey was conducted in April this year, showing an overwhelming usage of SEO within businesses online. 3.1% of those who responded didn’t know whether SEO was important, and one solitary respondent stated that SEO was not important at all – wouldn’t like to be working for them!

82.8% of those who responded said that they have had SEO on their website and that it was optimised for search engines. 11% of the respondents said their website had not been optimised, and 6.3% didn’t know either way. The respondents who supported SEO used words such as ‘imperative’ and ‘essential’ to describe it, but the figures showed a discrepancy between the number of people who stated that search engine optimisation was important, and the number of people who actually understood it.

Perhaps some people know that SEO is important without really understanding it?

40.6% of those surveyed purported to fully understand the nature of SEO. 54.7% of those surveyed said however that they sort of understand it, whereas 4.7% claimed they didn’t understand SEO in the slightest.

The importance of SEO has grown significantly over the last decade, with figures from a survey conducted by Internet Retailer showing that 51% of retail websites stated that at least 25% of their traffic came from organic search, and just 28% stated that most of their traffic came from PPC.

Followers of UK politics are well used to the major parties undertaking ‘dirty tricks campaigns’ in the run up to general elections, but Labour MP John Prescott has gone a stage further in the run up to this year’s election.

Prescott has urged followers of his Twitter to go to Google and to type in terms related to the election so that the Tory party’s Adwords Ads appear, and then to click on them to waste the Conservatives’ Adwords budget.

Clicks on Adwords cost the advertiser every time a click is a made, and once the daily budget is exceeded, the ads will stop appearing. However, clicking on Adwords Ads deliberately to stop a competitor’s ads appearing is click fraud, and Google takes this very seriously. Also, there are measures in place to detect when multiple clicks are coming from the same source, or patterns of clicks are emerging just to use up an advertiser’s budget. It is therefore likely that Labour’s efforts wouldn’t have dented David Cameron’s Adwords budget too much.

According to the Financial Times, the Tories were bidding on parliamentary search terms, such as ‘budget’ and ‘hung parliament’. The FT also stated that the Tory party was bidding on specific geo terms for local constituencies, which would work out much cheaper as geo targeting your ads is a better way to get results. For example, searching for ‘General Election Cheshire’ or ‘General Election Wirral’ would produce far fewer results, and as such would be less competitive and cheaper on Adwords, than appearing for ‘General Election’.

Labour meanwhile has a smaller advertising budget than the Tory party, so has reportedly been spending its money on SEO and an effort to become a Google News Publisher. Hopefully Labour started its SEO campaign some time ago, as in an area as competitive as politics it can take a long time to garner natural search rankings.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has achieved more traffic than Google either, as it hit the top spot on January 1st 2010, Christmas Day 2009 and New Year’s Eve 2009 – with its users wishing their friends family season’s greetings.

Since the same period last year, Facebook’s share of web traffic has increased by a staggering 185%. Google meanwhile has only enjoyed a paltry increase of 9%.

Does this mean Google’s crown is slipping and Facebook is the new king of the Internet? Does this mean that advertisers should shut down their Google Adwords accounts and start using Facebook’s PPC system? Does it mean Bing will creep up on the blindside and pass Google, as the once great behemoth’s tyres are flat?

No, of course not. It means that people use Facebook…a lot. It means that people check Facebook several times each day, and many of Facebook’s 400 million plus users can’t go a day without seeing who poked them and what’s happening on their fun wall.

People use Facebook for communicating with friends, which naturally means they’ll come back to it as their friends reply. Google however is used to find stuff out – and as you find stuff out on Google very quickly, you don’t really need to revisit it again and again.

If Google were only interested in achieving page impressions, so its advertisers could achieve ad impressions, it wouldn’t be quite so effective at matching results with users’ queries. It would draw the whole process out a bit, like Bing does. Then Google’s share of web traffic might go up… temporarily until people started to use a more effective search engine.

Perhaps they’re looking for someone highly skilled in SEO, who has experience of heading up SEO campaigns, introducing new SEO practices and who also follows the industry, keeping abreast of new developments. This last requirement is what a recent job spec we saw advertising for an SEO genius seemed to be looking for.

They appeared to want someone who knew the industry inside out, someone who not only knew SEO, but knew what was coming. The advert asked for someone understood tomorrow’s SEO technologies, not just today’s.

The advert went on to ask for someone who had experienced big wins in very competitive markets and who knew how to use social media to its fullest.

We thought this sounded interesting. Perhaps the company advertising for this ‘SEO genius’ also understands what it means to be a true SEO.

However, the advert turned sour when they also asked that this ‘SEO genius’ had commercial PPC experience… and possibly some experience with developing iPhone applications.

Maybe a degree in French and some chef’s qualifications would be good as well? We jest, but the point is a solid one. SEO is SEO, PPC is PPC. While yes, you will find people with experience in both industries, if you wish to advertise for an ‘SEO genius’, someone who knows the industry backwards and will be able to lead you forward into a new age of search engine optimisation, don’t ask for someone who also knows PPC… and how to develop applications for a phone!

You’ll end up with the usual jack of all trades, master of none. SEO knowledge and PPC knowledge are very different, with different sets of rules (although the rules for both often change). To utilise both SEO and PPC, you need experts at both disciplines – not someone who can ‘have a go’ at both.

This sounds wonderful doesn’t it?

However, as with most things that sound too good to be true, it is. Whenever the word ‘guarantee’ is used in relation to SEO services you should stay well away. Search engine rankings can never be guaranteed, and no ethical SEO company would ever offer guaranteed search engine rankings.

So are they lying when they offer guaranteed rankings?

Often when rankings are guaranteed, they relate to one of two things. Neither of which is any use to you. Here are the two usual cons with ‘guaranteed search engine rankings’.

Long search strings
One of the ways companies can get around their promise of guaranteed first place rankings in Google is to optimise your website for the occasional very longtail search string. This is a phrase that is made of several words, words that nobody else will search for, so that they can attain a first page ranking in Google for you.

The ranking is useless, it’s not for a keyword that you want to rank for and it will not win you any traffic – but it IS a first place ranking in Google.

PPC
This is the most common way of conning (because that’s what it is) people into paying for guaranteed SEO results. PPC stands for pay-per-click, and its most common use is through Google Adwords. Google Adwords are Google’s sponsored results that you see on the right hand side of Google results, and sometimes at the top.

Companies pay to appear there as every click on a PPC link costs them. This is akin to paying for an advert in a magazine or newspaper, and because many business owners don’t know the difference between SEO and PPC, some unethical agencies can get away with offering PPC as SEO, and performing miracles such as attaining rankings in under 24 hours.

So if any SEO company has offered guaranteed results to you, stay away from them, they are not to be trusted.

The BBC paid Google so that people looking up details of the Mercury Prize, for instance, would be directed to a BBC website.

This sounds very sinister, but of course the newspaper has got the wrong end of the stick entirely and clearly doesn’t understand Adwords. You cannot pay for natural Google listings, no matter who you are and how much money you have. The tone of the article suggested that this is what had happened. Instead, the BBC has cleverly used some of its online marketing budget for Google’s Adwords, a sponsored listings product, to promote time sensitive events.

The Mail on Sunday quoted the BBC as saying:

Promoting content like the Mercury Prize online is an effective way to inform the licence fee payers who will want to watch it or read about it. The BBC has an annual budget for marketing and value for money is at the heart of how decisions are made about spending it.

This sort of reporting is either irresponsible in that it’s intentionally trying to make believe the BBC is ‘paying’ for Google listings, or it’s badly researched. Anyone in the Internet Marketing industry would know that the BBC is simply using Adwords, just as millions of other Google customers do to promote their products and services.

The news was reported responsibly however by PC Pro, who stated:

The Corporation is using part of its £100m annual marketing budget to pay for sponsored links…

Just to reiterate, in case anyone isn’t clear on the matter, the BBC has not paid Google to increase its search rankings. The BBC has been using Adwords, which demonstrates some Internet Marketing acumen on the part of the BBC, something they should be applauded for.

As for those who don’t know the difference between PPC and SEO, you’d best read up on the subject!