Bill was getting frustrated and desperate. He’d being trying to promote his website for months with little or no success.

Adwords didn’t seem to be working. He’d devised the most fiendish ads he could think of and set them up on Google only to find that nobody clicked on them.

He had written several articles and, using an automatic article submitter, had placed them on hundreds of Article Barns across the web. There had been an increase in his Alexa Ratings, but that was it. Maybe there was a slight flurry of hits when he first placed the article, then nothing.

He’d set up a blog, made a press release announcement, and done everything except don a Shaman costume and dance around his computer.

He’d purchased ebooks on increasing his traffic, and tried every idea he ran across. His budget was beginning to show the effects, and he had the chilling realization that if he didn’t come across something that worked, he was simply going to run out of money and go bankrupt.

In other words, he was about to become one of the 90 per cent of the Info Marketers on the web who fail.

That was when he ran across a site that guaranteed traffic. Little did Bill know he was about to become a victim of click fraud.

Click Fraud and Big Business
Click fraud has been discussed in a recent issue of Newsweek (Oct 6, 2006) as one of the most serious issues that faces online advertising. It has cast doubt on at least some of the efficacy of services such as Google Adwords to bring actual paying customers to a business website.

It began with the monitoring of clicks that appeared to be coming from outlying countries such as Botswana and Syria, and grew into the discovery of a scourge that threatens to undo the very concept of paying for clicks as a way of obtaining legitimate customers.

Whole cultures were discovered that sustained themselves by clicking on ads - “paid to read” rings consisting of hundreds of thousands of people who do nothing but click on sites.

Newsweek reports that Yahoo and Google claim they “filter out” clicks of dubious origin, but the credibility of pay for click advertising is beginning to be undermined. It’s estimated that 10% to 15% of all clicks are fake. 300 to 500 million dollars of advertising revenue are being funneled into the click fraud industry.

The “visitors” COME FLOWING in
Bill was seriously considering paying for “guaranteed targeted visitors”. For as little as $100 he could get this kind of traffic directed to his site, and after months of frustration in building his customer base he pulled out his credit card.

And the clicks began. They started slowly and then gradually mounted. By the time they reached a thousand, Bill knew there was something wrong.

He was getting a lot of clicks, all right, but he was getting no sales. Bill knew from his experiments with Adwords that his site had a 1% “conversion rate”. That is, for every 100 clicks he sold one ebook.

If he were truly getting paying customers he should be selling books, and he wasn’t.

What to LOOK FOR in a “guaranteed click” service
So the question is, are all “guaranteed click” services fraudulent?

If you’re down to the point of paying for a service that will send you customers, you should take a hard look at a few things:
1. How do they get their customers? They should have some reasonable explanation for how they entice 10,000 or so customers to click on your ad.

2. Do they allow sites with pop ups? If not, why not? Could it be their automatic click machine doesn’t work on sites that have pop-ups?

3. Do you have the software necessary to monitor your site to determine if the clicks are coming from unique visitors? If you don’t, you have no way of knowing whether or not you have 10,000 unique potential customers or 1 machine clicking your site 10,000 times.

4. Do you know what the historical conversion rate of your site is? If sales aren’t tracking that conversion rate, why not?

5. Are there any complaints listed with the Better Business Bureau? (Or, if you want a report for consumers by consumers, check the Rip Off Report).

6. Finally, if you suspect fraud or feel you have been badly treated, email the company in question and demand your money back. If you don’t get it, post to the BBB, or better yet, the Rip Off Report. Sites like this one will put some of these guys out of business.

THE MORE DESPERATE You Get…
As your business progresses and you are discovering that you aren’t getting the traffic you need to truly “make a go of it”, you become more likely to search out quickie solutions such as “paid for traffic.”

Thoroughly consider the credibility of claims and offers. Sleep on it before you jump in with your credit card.

Recognize that you need an overall “system” for developing site traffic, not a “band aid” approach. Band aid approaches usually don’t work.

Visit marketing forums and talk with people about what works and what doesn’t. Get recommendations from reliable sources.

Remember, every recommendation on a sales page is ecstatic, and the entire page is psychologically designed to sell you a product, whether it works or not.
In short, as time progresses and you aren’t experiencing success, you become more vulnerable to fraud. You must take stock of yourself and what you are willing to consider.

And be a lot more careful.

By John Young

Google’s Goal of Quality Search
In their paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ it is very evident that Google’s goal has always been to be one of the best search engines there is in terms of the quality of the results it gives. Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, however knew that in order to do this, Google needed to be able to store information efficiently and cost effectively and to have excellent crawling, indexing, and sorting methods or techniques. Google not only aimed to give quality results but to produce the results as fast as possible.

Google started as a high quality search engine and continues to be the best search engine today. It has managed to stay true to its original intent to be a search engine that not only crawls and indexes the web efficiently but also a search engine that produces more satisfying results in comparison to other existing search engines. To stay true to the goal of providing the best search results, Google knew right from the start that it had to be designed so that the search engine could catch up with the web’s growth. According to Brin and Page “In designing Google we have considered both the rate of growth of the Web and technological changes. Google is designed to scale well to extremely large data sets. It makes efficient use of storage space to store the index”. They knew that they needed much space to store an ever growing index.

Google’s index size, which started out as 24 million web pages, was large for its time and has grown to around 25 billion web pages, still keeping Google ahead of its competitors. However, Google is a company that doesn’t settle for just beating the competitors. They truly aim to give their users the best service there is and that means as a search engine they want to give users access to all or at least most of the quality information that is available on the web.

Google’s New System for Indexing More Pages
As mentioned earlier, Google aims to give access to even more information and has been devoting time and much effort to realize this goal. It seems that the new patent entitled ‘Multiple Index Based Information Retrieval System’ filed by Google employee Anna Patterson might be the answer to the problem. The patent published just this May of 2006 and filed way back in January of 2005 shows that Google might actually be aiming to expand their index size to as much as a 100 billion web pages or even more.

According to the patent, conventional information retrieval systems, more commonly known as search engines, are able to index only a small part of the documents available on the Internet. According to estimates, the existing number of web pages on the Internet as of last year was around 200 billion; however, Patterson claimed that even the best search engine (that is Google) was able to index only up to 6 to 8 billion web pages.

The disparity between the number of indexed pages and existing pages clearly signaled a need for a new breed of information retrieval system. Conventional information retrieval systems just weren’t capable of doing the job and just wouldn’t be able to index enough web pages to give users access to a large enough percentage of the present existing information available on the web.

The Multiple Index Based Information Retrieval System, however, is up to the challenge and is Google’s answer to the problem. Two characteristics of the new system makes it stand out compared to the conventional systems. One is that it has the “capability to index an extremely large number of documents, on the order of a hundred billion or more”. And the other is its capability to “index multiple versions or instances of documents for archiving…enabling a user to search for documents within a specific range of dates, and allowing date or version related relevance information to be used in evaluating documents in response to a search query and in organizing search results.”

With the new system developed by Patterson, Google now has the ability to expand its index size to unbelievable proportions as well as improve document analysis and processing, document annotation, and even the process of ranking according to contained and anchor phrases.

History of Google’s Index Size
Google started out with an index size of around 24 million web pages in 1996. By August of 2000, Google had managed to quadruple their index size to approximately one billion web pages. In September of 2003, Google’s front-page boasted an index of 3.3 billion web pages. Microdoc, however, revealed that the actual number of web pages Google had indexed during that time was already more than five billion web pages. In their article ‘Google Understates the Size of Its Database’, they emphasized that Google not only specialized in simplicity but also in understating their power and complexity. Google was still managing to stay ahead of its competitors and continued to surprise everyone with what they had up their sleeves.

As Google’s index continued to grow the number in their front page grew impressively large as well before it plateaued at eight billion web pages. This was around the time that Patterson filed the new patent. Then in 2005, with controversies in index size growing, Google decided to stop counting in front of the public and simply claimed that their index size was three times larger than the nearest competitor’s index size. Google also maintained that it was not just the size of indexed pages that was important but how relevant the results they returned were.

Then in September of 2005, as part of Google’s 7th anniversary, Anna Patterson, the same software engineer who filed the patent on the Multiple Based Index Information Retrieval System posted an entry on Google’s official blog claiming that the index size was now 1,000 times larger than the original index. This pegged their index size at around 24 billion web pages, about a fourth of Google’s goal of indexing a 100 billion web pages. It seems then that Google must have started using the new system in mid 2005. With the new system in place, we can only wait and see how fast Google will reach the goal of a 100 billion web pages in its index. It’s most likely though that when Google has reached that goal it will set an even higher goal to provide continuous quality service.

By Danny Wirken

When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site’s profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it’s usually better to focus on one or the other. But which is best for you?

Organic Search Engine Optimization
Organic search engine optimization campaigns offer several distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising campaigns, as many recent studies have shown. What follows is a brief listing of some of the findings.

Propensity to Click
Study after study indicates people are less likely to click on paid search ads rather than on results from organic search engine optimization. For example, one study found that search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results than they are to choose any of the paid results [1], while an eye tracking study [2] showed that 50 percent of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results. Other studies have shown that only 30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, leaving an overwhelming 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings. [3] And a 2003 study found that 85 percent of searchers report clicking on paid links in less than 40 percent of all of their searches, and 78 percent of all respondents claim that they found the information they were searching for through sponsored links just 40 percent of the time.[4]

Trust
Studies are beginning to indicate that the trust level for organic results is much higher than that of paid results, and that paid results are looked upon as a nuisance by some searchers. One study found that only 14 percent of searchers trust paid listings, and 29 percent report being “annoyed” by them. [5] Another study found that 66 percent of customers distrust paid ads. [6] Clearly, it’s not generally a good idea to upset potential customers before they even click on your link.

Value of Visitors
Organic search engine results tend to be seen as non-biased, and they therefore are able to provide visitors that are more valuable. The overall conversion rate, or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site, is 17 percent higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%). [7] Trends also have shown that more of the sales that result from search engines originated in organic search listings. [8]

Visitors Becoming More Aware of Pay-Per-Click as Advertising
As more and more people turn to the Internet for research and information, more searchers are becoming aware of paid results as a marketing tool. One study showed that not only are 38 percent of searchers aware of the distinction between paid and unpaid results, 54 percent are aware of the distinction on Google, which is widely recognized as the most popular search engine. [9]

Pay-Per-Click Costs Rising
Meanwhile, pay-per-click costs are rising steadily. Between October 2004 and December 2005, average keyword prices rose from around $25 to just under $55.10 And the cost of keywords can increase by as much as 100 percent during the holiday season. [11] These costs aren’t going unnoticed either; one study of problems experienced by U.S. companies found that 57 percent of respondents felt that their desired keywords were “too expensive,” while 51 percent expressed concern that they are overpaying for certain keywords. [12] On the other hand, when you outsource to an organic search engine optimization firm, your costs will likely remain more stable than the prices for pay-per-click advertising.

Long Term Results
While a pay-per-click campaign may produce results more quickly than an organic search engine optimization campaign, organic search engine optimization campaigns can give you results that last. When the budget runs out for a pay-per-click campaign, or when your company decides that the pay-per-click campaign should be terminated, the results end as well. With organic search engine optimization, the optimized site content and other changes made to your site can have an impact on your search results until the next change in a search engine’s algorithm, or possibly even beyond.

Relevance
Users also have rated organic search engine results as more relevant than paid results. On Google, 72.3 percent felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent rated paid results as more relevant. Yahoo offered similar results, with 60.8 calling organic results relevant compared to only 39.2 percent for paid. [13]

Pay-Per-Click
While the above statistics may make organic search engine optimization seem the clear choice in all cases, in certain situations it actually can make more sense to do pay-per-click advertising. For those looking for fast results on a small budget, a pay-per-click campaign may be the answer.

Results
As previously stated, the results from pay-per-click advertising are immediate. On the other hand, an organic search engine optimization campaign may take up to three months or more for results to be apparent. In this case, pay-per-click is advantageous for those who are looking to promote an initiative that will go live in a short amount of time, or whose business is seasonal in nature and who only do promotion during certain months of the year.

Budget
Small businesses with extremely tight budgets may find that pay-per-click is a better investment than organic search engine optimization because a pay-per-click campaign will almost always cost less - good search engine optimization companies simply do not work for $100 per month. By limiting a campaign’s keyphrases to highly specific terms relevant to a company’s business, there will not be a large amount of traffic generated, but the traffic that is generated will be specific to the desired result. Plus, choosing such specific phrases can make them less expensive on a per click basis. Moreover, in niche markets with a high average dollar sale, where there’s not a great amount of search activity because the prospect pool is limited, it may not make sense to engage a quality organic search engine optimization firm at several thousand dollars per month when you can instead buy varying niche-specific keyphrases and generate traffic in that way.

Easier to Handle In-House
Non-complicated pay-per-click campaigns can be handled much more easily in-house than an organic search engine optimization campaign. Such campaigns generally involve business to business and high-end, service oriented companies, not those geared toward a large consumer base. Since organic search engine optimization requires a steep learning curve and since there are so many questionable tactics that can put a site at risk of penalization (the tactics that neophytes to search engine optimization are likely to use), it may make more sense to run a pay-per-click campaign. Since you are dealing directly with the engine, i.e., Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords, you don’t need to pay a middleman, and these sites offer helpful tutorials on how to use pay-per-click marketing. Perhaps most importantly, the concept of pay-per-click is much easier to grasp and understand at the outset.

No Contracts
Most organic search engine optimization campaigns require a contract of a certain length because SEO companies know that meaningful results will rarely happen overnight. When dealing with an in-house pay-per-click campaign, obviously a contract is not an issue. But in general, even when you are dealing with an agency, you will not tend to need to sign a contract because the agency instead makes money on a percentage of the spend, although there may be a setup fee. Without a contract, you are free to reallocate marketing dollars elsewhere if you discover that the pay-per-click campaign is not providing the desired results.

Conclusion
Clearly, organic search engine optimization has some distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising. However, there are undoubtedly certain situations and scenarios where pay-per-click advertising makes more sense fiscally and strategically. With a high enough budget, you would be able to have an effective organic search engine optimization campaign running in tandem with an effective pay-per-click campaign. But if you have to choose one, look into your unique situation before you decide.

By Scott Buresh