Microsoft launched their new Bing ad on television last night.

My first impressions were that the ad is too negative. It doesn’t show what Bing can do for you. It’s at risk of associating Bing with information overload and distressed searchers. I’m also not convinced the phrase “decision engine” is a good one – too techie, too nebulous. Who’s making the decisions – me, or Bing?

Compare it with Google’s Superbowl ad:

This has its own potential problems – I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to use no voiceover whatsoever on a TV ad running in a £60,000 per second timeslot – but in general it’s a much more upbeat ad showing someone achieving something – lots of things – using Google Search.

In Microsoft’s position, I think I’d accept the fact that lots of people use Google and get good results lots of the time, and show that Bing is an alternative that often succeeds when Google fails. I’d challenge the notion that Google always delivers the right result, every time, and that if Google doesn’t deliver it it can’t be on the Web. I’d get people to try Bing – that’s all you can ask of the ad. An idea would be to use something based on the famous “Pepsi Challenge”, but bring it right up to date.

Having seen the interview with Ashley Highfield, I’m looking forward to more ads in the series. It would be great to see Bing achieve the double digit market share that he desires, but I think this was a bad start to the campaign.

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It appears that, some time ago, Google removed details of results prefetching from its Webmaster guidelines while continuing to implement results prefetching in its search results.

If you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, the Wayback Machine has the original Google Webmaster help on this topic, which I’ll paste here verbatim in order to make it searchable (Wayback Machine pages aren’t indexed by search engines):

Results Prefetching Questions

1. What is “results prefetching,” and how does it impact my site?

On some searches, Google uses a special <link> tag supported by Firefox and Mozilla to instruct the browser to download the top search result before the user clicks on the result. When the user clicks on the top result, the destination page will load faster than before. This tag is only inserted when it is likely that the user will click on the first link.

For example, when a Firefox user searches for [stanford], Google includes the following tag in the results HTML:

<link rel="prefetch" href="http://www.stanford.edu/">

The official Mozilla Link Prefetching FAQ describes the behavior of this tag in detail.

Prefetching may impact your site because the prefetch request will happen whether or not the user clicks on the result, so it may result in additional traffic to your web server. Google only inserts this tag when there is a high likelihood that the user will click on the top result, but clearly this heuristic is not right 100% of the time.

2. Can I distinguish prefetch requests from normal requests?

Yes, as described in the Mozilla Link Prefetching FAQ, prefetch requests include the additional HTTP header

X-moz: prefetch

3. I want to block/ignore prefetch requests. What should I do?

To block or ignore prefetch requests (from Google and other web sites), you should configure your web server to return a 404 HTTP response code for requests that contain the “X-moz: prefetch” header.

What else do you need to know about results prefetching?

If you run Google Analytics or another JavaScript-based analytics package, you won’t see these prefetched pages in your analytics. That’s because only the HTML is prefetched, not the images, JavaScript, etc. referenced by that HTML, which means that the Analytics JavaScript is never even fetched, let alone executed. You need to look at raw log files to see prefetched pages.

Google only issues the prefetch code when they are very confident that searchers will click on the #1 result (as in their example, a search for stanford). Most times, particularly for more “normal” sites (i.e. not Stanford), Google won’t issue the code. So you may never see this on your own site.

However, it’s worth being aware of this issue because if you do see a prefetch in your raw logs you’ll want to know why; and because, depending on how you calculate conversions, the fact that a page is prefetched but never viewed by a searcher may significantly affect your conversion tracking and monetisation on that page. I’m surprised that Google removed this info from their Webmaster help.

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The Google Adwords trademark policy is aimed at balancing the interests of trademark holders, advertisers and internet users. Does it always do this, or can it sometimes provide a method for trademark holders to restrict competition and potentially cause harm to advertisers, internet users and Google itself? That’s the billion dollar question.

Google Adwords is a paid search marketing program offered by Google that allows millions of organisations around the world to advertise their products and services in Google’s search results. That makes Adwords a big deal. Adwords accounts for the lions’ share of Google’s revenues, which totalled $16.5bn in 2007 alone.

Yahoo! and Microsoft offer similar programs to Adwords. However, Google is the market leader, with estimates of its paid search market share ranging from 58% upwards. Google clearly holds a dominant position within the paid search marketplace, so its policy decisions matter.

Google’s dominance has created a significant demand within Adwords from third party advertisers who would like to market products and services against the results of popular trademarks which they do not own. As a result, there have been several instances where Google has faced legal action by trademark holders trying to restrict third parties bidding on those search terms relating to their trademarks. Trademark holders in the US, such as Geico and American Airlines, have previously filed suit . In Europe, Google has been sued by the likes of Louis Vuitton in France .

These legal actions led to the introduction of the Google Adwords Trademark Policy. There are in fact two policies, one or other of which is in force in any location around the world. These policies allow the trademark holder to exert significant influence over the use of their marks within the Adwords program.

Whilst it may seem a reasonable response on the part of Google to seek to recognise and protect the rights of trademark owners, especially in response to suggestions Google may be facilitating passing off and/or infringement of registered trademarks, the problem is that the Google Adwords Trademark Policy may in fact give far more power to trademark holders than they need to protect their goodwill and prevent passing off. Google’s trademark policies may fail to recognise the legitimate right of third parties to use registered trademarks which they do not own to legally sell products and services which they have a right to sell and facilitate Trademark holder to restrict free trade in goods and services.

For example, in the motor market, many private individuals, non-franchise and franchise dealers have a legitimate right to use manufacturer and model trademarks in order to describe a car or range of cars they wish to advertise.

An example would be if you wished to sell your Peugeot 308. Do you really want to have to call it a mid size French 1.9 litre diesel hatchback? Somehow the sale is much more likely to happen if you just call it by its make and model rather than a bland description.

Clearly in this example there is no passing off and no loss of goodwill. It is completely understood by all parties that the advertiser of the car is not necessarily the trademark holder. Yet Google’s trademark policies mean that advertisers can be prevented from using trademarked terms even so. Has this policy really balanced the interests of trademark holders, advertisers and internet users, as Google purports to do? Commenting, Kevin McGuinness of London-based commercial law specialists Sabretooth Law stated

In restricting the use of trademarks Google may have diminished the ability of non-owners of trademarks to legitimately use such trademarks in the course of carrying on their trade. Given the size of the market in which Google operates and the importance of the advertising market to automobile resale sector this is likely to be an area where both English and European competition authorities may take an interest in arrangements which potentially restrict competition to the detriment of the general public.

Antitrust or anti-competition issues have been one area where both the UK and European competition authorities have consistently demonstrated a keen interest in protecting the European consumer and Google’s dominant position in the paid search marketing sector would suggest it needs to ensure its policies are legal, not only in the US but also in Europe.

In the UK, an organisation can be fined 10% of its worldwide annual revenues for engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. As noted earlier, these amounted to $16.5bn for Google in 2007 alone, so 10% would be $1.65bn. That is a large number!

Is it Google’s responsibility, though, or is it the responsibility of the respective trademark holders? Or is it both?

It seems harsh to hold Google solely responsible, when Google has been simply trying to respect trademarks holders’ legitimate rights; especially in light of the fact that Google has been sued by several trademark holders and to some extent its trademark policy is a result of that. In addition, by restricting competition on some trademarked terms, Google may have impacted its own revenues. Kevin McGuinness again:

As Google is the participant in the on-line market place, which is itself restricting the availability for use of other persons’ trademarks, it could be that Google, not the trademark holders, may be found to be at fault. This hardly seems fair given Google’s long standing commitment to ethical good business practice.

Clearly Google does not exercise its trademark policy in isolation. Only when a trademark holder files a trademark complaint in the appropriate jurisdiction does Google exercise its policy. This is why you can see Google Adwords for lots of trademarked terms, but not all.

Evidence of how trademark holders are working with search engines came in a recent interview with New Media Age magazine (subscription required) when Steve Bowler, Marketing Manager of Land Rover, stated:

One of the areas that wasn’t looked at properly before was search. Previously it was recognised as being somewhat important yet ancillary to TV, press and outdoor. Now, though, we take search very seriously, working with the search engines on how to deal with issues like trademarking.

As a result, Kevin McGuinness states:

Competition authorities could conclude that Google and trademark holders are each using Google Adwords to prevent competition.

Not only Google but each individual trademark holder could be investigated and potentially fined up to 10% of global revenues. Trademark holders who have restricted their trademarks include Alfa Romeo, Peugeot and Land Rover.

Do the same issues also affect Yahoo! and Microsoft? No. Both of these search companies have much more targeted trademark policies. For example, Yahoo!’s policy is:

As applied to nominative uses of another’s trademark, Yahoo! Search Marketing requires advertisers to meet one of the following two conditions: … Reseller [... or ...] Information Site, Not Competitive

And Microsoft’s policy, though targeted, is elegantly simple:

Affiliates and resellers may bid on trademarked terms relevant to the goods, services, or sites that they promote.

Why does Google not have such a simple policy? Perhaps because, though simply stated, the Yahoo! and Microsoft policies require more editorial intervention than the Google policy, or perhaps because Google’s current policy arises from being sued by trademark holders, rather than being pursued by competition authorities. Google’s official response is posted on their Inside Adwords Blog:

We will not allow the use of a trademark term according to the parameters of the trademark complaint filed by the trademark owner. Therefore, unless the trademark owner specifically grants you permission to use their trademarked term by contacting our Trademark team, we are not able to approve the use of the trademark in your AdWords ads.

There is no explanation there, nor has one ever been offered on the many occasions Google has been given to comment on this issue, but one can only assume that Google believes it is on solid legal ground in operating this policy. The question is: are they correct?

Though a vast improvement on Google’s trademark policy, Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s policies both restrict comparative advertising (advertising which “explicitly or by implication, identifies a competitor or goods or services offered by a competitor”). A recent European court case showed that such restrictions may be unlawful . However that is a different, and far less contentious, issue than the anti-competition issues raised by the Google Adwords Trademark Policy alone.

So, the question remains. Has Google and/or its advertisers been in contravention of UK or EU competition laws in exercising its trademark policy to date? Microsoft’s European court experience should provide ample evidence that American software giants need to be very careful within the European Union. Once the EU competition authorities decide to bite, they rarely let go of their prey quickly. Given the enmity between the two, will Microsoft be at the head of the line to point out the ongoing competition issues in Google’s trademark policies?

Google has, since its inception, been a beacon of best business practice, but it may be on the wrong side of this legal issue by trying to do the right thing by trademark holders who continue to abuse its policies in order to restrict fair competition. With fines of up to 10% of global turnover possible, it’s a high stakes issue.

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OK, sorry for the slightly misleading headline (although if you read on you’ll find it’s not that misleading). No apologies, though, for giving my opinion on what is now old news, which is that Google has dropped Best Practice Funding for agencies from 2009 onwards. Don’t ever expect this blog to be first with the news … there are others in the industry who are devoted to that. What you can expect here is considered, truthful opinion and, hopefully, an insight that you won’t find anywhere else.

There’s plenty of comment around about the fact that BPF was not a subsidy, was not a commission and was not, in fact, related to any individual advertiser but rather to the net billings of the whole agency. Personally, I think it’s great the playing field is levelled, but I’m still not looking forward to having to renegotiate rates with clients. Any agency that doesn’t have to renegotiate was either not receiving BPF or was charging too much in the first place, and SilverDisc does not fit either of those two categories, I’m happy to say.

What’s missing is comment on what BPF actually is, and what its withdrawal therefore signifies.

Probably the best document that describes what Best Practice Funding is, if you’re prepared to read between the lines, is the 2007 – Best Practice Funding Terms And Conditions. This lists several conditions that an agency must meet in order to fully qualify for BPF. Those conditions include:

1. the fact that the agency, rather than the agency’s customer, must communicate with Google
2. the fact that the agency is responsible for Google being paid its invoices on time

I can’t help feeling that Google is massively undervaluing the role of agencies in providing these services. Their support role, in both account management and invoicing, will grow enormously in 2009. I hope that Google uses the time between now and then to grow its infrastructure accordingly.

Another requirement on agencies to qualify for BPF is that they employ at least two GAP-qualified staff. This is where my slightly misleading headline actually has a ring of truth. The GAP exam has been the best tool for building and maintaining an understanding of Adwords. I’ve passed it myself and, before Christmas, I’m due to renew my qualification. All my PPC management staff and PPC programming staff (we write PPC API apps to manage our clients’ spends) have passed the GAP exam too and, again, are due to renew before Christmas.

I always thought that the Google’s encouragement of agency staff being GAP-qualified was of great benefit to Google, the agencies, and the industry as a whole. In dropping BPF, I think Google are sending a poor message – in, literally, stopping funding best practices, they are stopping supporting best practices.

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Rarely does Google give such a public ringing endorsement for a third party as this, on the official Google Analytics blog:

Your next coffee table e-book

Can I look forward to a link drop to SilverDisc here or here?

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If a page has a NOINDEX tag on it, how much PageRank does it have? The intuitive answer would be “None”. How can a page that is not indexed have PageRank? Wouldn’t it be treated like a dangling link and disregarded during PageRank calculations?

Apparently not. Matt Cutts states on seomoz:

Does a link from a page with meta robots=”noindex, follow” carry less weight? no weight?

For Google, I believe such links would carry the same weight as normal links on regular pages.

Hmmm. Does he mean that the unindexed page actually has a PageRank? Or does he mean that the zero Pagerank that the unindexed page has would be divided out among the links on the page, giving nothing to each? I wonder …

One thing’s for sure … if “NOINDEX, FOLLOW” works as implied, it’s a great way to inject spammy content and links.

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Thanks to Dan Thies for drawing my attention to the latest “mayhem” surrounding Google, rel=nofollow and the FTC. This is an area close to my heart, as my article from 2005, Search Marketing & The Law, made clear:

It would be foolish to expect to be operating in a multi-billion dollar global marketing industry and not expect to comply with marketing laws and regulations in the countries in which you are marketing.

The current confusion stems from Matt Cutts’ blog post on paid links back in April, which called for both human readable and machine readable disclosure of paid links – machine readable first:

If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute.

The problem here is that there is no machine-readable disclosure for paid links. Matt suggests that there a “ton” of ways, but none of these ways mean “this link is paid”, let alone the means, method and motive for payment. This is where the confusion starts.

Matt then goes on to discuss human-readable disclosure:

The other best practice I’d advise is to provide human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid.

Here I fully agree with Matt – it’s important not to mislead your visitors. No confusion here.

The real confusion seems to come from the next thing Matt says:

Google’s quality guidelines are more concerned with the machine-readable aspect of disclosing paid links/posts, but the Federal Trade Commission has said that human-readable disclosure is important too:

The petition to us did raise a question about compliance with the FTC act,” said Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear . . . if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

To make sure that you’re in good shape, go with both human-readable disclosure and machine-readable disclosure, using any of the methods I mentioned above.

Some people have inferred that Matt is saying that paid links that aren’t labelled in a machine-readable way are contravening the FTC guidelines. He isn’t saying this at all. Read carefully. The FTC is concerned with human-readable disclosure, not machine-readable disclosure. There is no machine-readable disclosure for paid links.

It is possible to place deceptive advertising in search results using various means. But failing to label a link as paid in a machine-readable way is not one of them. There is no machine-readable disclosure for paid links.

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I see that Google have added to their Quality Guidelines, including a new, helpful(?) definition of cloaking:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.

That’s fairly clear then.

My own definition of cloaking is

My rule of thumb is that you should not need to know that a search engine is making the request in order to deliver a response to that request. The obvious exception to this rule of thumb is Paid Inclusion. Paid Inclusion isn’t cloaking.

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I see Matt Cutts has updated his “How to report paid links” post. I missed this one the first time around as he posted it on my 40th birthday.

Matt is head of Google’s Webspam team. We talked together quite a lot in 2001 when Matt was working on the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Matt had seen my talk on spam and cloaking at the 2001 Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Francisco, and had read my White Paper on The Classification of Search Engine Spam. He was particularly keen on my ideas of “Doing it for humans”. These ideas eventually found their way into Google’s Quality Guidelines as

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Since 2001, Matt and I have communicated regularly and have always seen eye-to-eye on issues of spam. That is, until now. I can’t help but feel that Matt’s stance on paid links and the application of the rel=nofollow attribute is the start of a slippery slope for Google.

Back in 2001, when we agreed on “Doing it for humans”, the principle behind this was that as a Web publisher you shouldn’t need to do anything specifically for search engines in order for them to crawl, index or rank your content. If you found yourself doing something specifically for search engines, that was the time to ask yourself whether you were spamming.

Fast forward to 2005 and Google introduced the rel=nofollow attribute; a contributor to that post was Matt Cutts himself. The best places to use this tag, according to the post, are

the actual links that other people can create [...] for instance, only the links within comments and the link immediately after “Posted by:” would get the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

This seemed like a great idea at the time. With hindsight, it marked the introduction of a tag that was specifically designed to affect search engine ranking algorithms:

At the heart of our [Google's] technology is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages … [that] relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.

By asking publishers to label links with rel=nofollow, Google was giving those publishers the power to affect PageRank. Nothing more and nothing less.

Search engines offer tags and other techniques to prevent crawling or indexing of Web pages – notably robots.txt files and the robots meta tag. But not since the ill-conceived and now much deprecated meta keywords tag has a search engine offered the ability to control rankings, in the way that the rel=nofollow attribute does.

So, the problem with rel=nofollow is that it’s “Doing it for search engines”, not the “Doing it for humans” that Matt Cutts and I agreed on back in 2001. Matt covered this in his post:

That same philosophy would mean that you wouldn’t create a robots.txt file (users don’t check those), never make any meta tags (users don’t see meta tags), never create an XML sitemap file (users wouldn’t know about them), and wouldn’t create web pages that validate (users wouldn’t notice). Yet these are all great practices to do.

However, there are two big differences between rel=nofollow and these examples quoted by Matt:

1. rel=nofollow is not designed to affect crawling, or indexing, which are naturally of interest to Webmasters (as it’s their site and their content); but ranking, which is the preserve of the search engine (as it’s their algorithm).


2. Failure to know about or deploy robots.txt, meta tags or sitemaps is not search engine spam. However, Matt is saying that failing to use rel=nofollow could be treated as spam; so a Webmaster who is buying links needs to know of the existence of rel=nofollow in order to avoid spamming.

I can see why rel=nofollow was felt necessary, and I agree it’s a good idea in certain circumstances (particularly when built into software such as Wordpress, rather than expecting individual publishers to know about it and apply it). What I can’t understand is why Google is now asking publishers to label paid links with rel=nofollow. The labelling of paid links was never mentioned as an application when rel=nofollow was introduced. There are some big problems with this approach:

1. Even when rel=nofollow was introduced the Web was over 10 years old. What about all the old links, that were made before rel=nofollow existed? Are publishers supposed to go back and change them? All of them?


2. Since rel=nofollow was introduced, it has become relatively well known in the dedicated search marketing and blogging community. But what efforts have been made to make it known to everyday Web designers and publishers?


3. What exactly constitutes a paid link? A link to a parent company? A link to a partner company who has supplied you work in the past? What about a link to somebody who bought you a beer at a conference once? Or is it only a link for which money specifically was exchanged? In some commercial areas of the Web, depending on your point of view, all links could be considered paid. Although I don’t work in the pills/porn/casino industries, even categories such as financial services are so highly commercialised that almost all links could be considered as paid. Within such a category, if all links were labelled with rel=nofollow (as Google appears to want), what actual use would rel=nofollow be?

Given the above problems, I can’t quite work out whether Google is being humble or arrogant in asking publishers to label their links…

• Humble: It’s like Google is admitting that it can no longer detect and properly compensate for paid links algorithmically. The heart of their ranking technology is links, and link spam is hurting so badly that they are asking for help.


• Arrogant: It’s like Google is starting to lay down how the Web will be built. Rather than reacting to how people build Web sites, they are telling people how to build Web sites.

I am not enamoured with either of these possibilities.

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What a dreadful, poorly researched article in Forbes magazine. There’s so much wrong with it, I can’t find a single good thing to say – so I’ll say nothing more about it.

In brief, the way to Google Heaven is:

1. Create good quality, unique content
2. Ensure the content can be crawled and indexed by Google
3. Take steps to ensure that the content is seen once only, at the best URL for it
4. Build good quality links to the content from your own sites and those of relevant third parties

It’s a shame the sites featured in the Forbes article failed to follow this simple formula.

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