Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

Search Clinic knows that running your own pay per click campaign is hard enough, especially if there is a lot of competition in your industry.

With all the stress of setting up and managing your own campaign, there are some basic errors that many website owners make.

One of the most common (and funniest), mistakes a search marketer can make is bidding on the term ‘Keyword’. This is all too common across both Google and Yahoo! advertising platforms, so let’s look at an example of what I mean:


Google Sponsored Links for the term ‘Keyword

As you can see, 3 out of the 8 sponsored links on the right hand side of the page have absolutely nothing to do with the term ‘Keyword’. Granted there are many legitimate Ads from keyword research companies etc, but what do hotels and alarm clocks have to do with the term ‘Keyword’?

Let me explain how this mistake occurs. When setting up their campaigns, many companies use a spreadsheet program to draft a list of keywords they would like to bid on. The spreadsheet has a heading for each column and the heading for the column of keywords is… you guessed it: ‘Keyword’.

When uploading these keyword lists into Google, it’s easy to just copy the whole column, forgetting to remove the ‘Keyword’ heading from the list.

This simple mistake could end up costing you hundreds of Pounds every month, so make sure to check your keyword lists thoroughly before uploading! Or you can ask the Search Clinic do the checking and hard work for you.

Google blogger Matt Cutts recently confirmed Google’s stance on internal linking, stating that pages should generally have less than 100 links.

Matt points to Google’s design and content guidelines, which states the following:

* If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
* Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

The original reason that Google provided this recommendation was that Google used to only index around 100kb of a page. If the page exceeded 100 links, it usually exceeded 100kb and the remaining links would be ignored or truncated.

These days, there are a couple of other reasons Google still maintains this policy.

Firstly, if you’re showing users over 100 links on any page, there is a good chance they might become overwhelmed, not find what they’re looking for and leave. Google calls this a ‘bad user experience’.

Of course, there are some instances (such as providing a large resource library) where you might have a completely valid reason for having over 100 links. Because of this, Google won’t automatically consider these pages spam, but they might choose to nofollow or not index some of these links.

The second reason you may want to consider limiting your links is based on SEO. The more links you have on a page, the less PageRank each link will pass because you’ll be dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links.