Thursday, July 17, 2008

High Paying Adsense Keywords List?

Here is a list of "so called" high paying AdSense keywords. These "high paying AdSense" lists are all over the net. Some of the sites are simply MFA sites. In other words, "Made for AdSense" websites. So here is what I find interesting...

Highest paying search terms and cost per click (with my comments):
$69.1 mesothelioma treatment options
$66.46 mesothelioma risk
$60.96 treatment of mesothelioma
$57.93 epithelioid mesothelioma
$59.04 mesothelioma article
$58.44 new york mesothelioma
$57.54 mesothelioma facts
$57.13 mesothelioma resource
$56.57 mesothelioma doctor
$56.24 mesothelioma
$55.67 mesothelioma lung
$55.61 mesothelioma texas
$55.57 mesothelioma attorneys
$55.36 mesothelioma compensation
$55.28 mesothelioma incidence
$55.26 malignant mesothelioma
$54.54 benign mesothelioma
$53.94 pleural mesothelioma
$53.37 pericardial mesothelioma
$52.27 malignant pleural mesothelioma
$51.87 mesothelioma stage
$51.86 mesothelioma smoking
$51.82 mesothelioma treatment option
$50.82 mesothelioma survival
$50.78 mesothelioma attorney
$50.76 mesothelioma lawyer
$50.73 mesothelioma prognosis
$48.78 mesothelioma diagnosis
$48.64 abdominal mesothelioma
$48.55 mesothelioma lawsuits
$48.51 mesothelioma treatment
$48.42 treatment for mesothelioma
$47.88 mesothelioma statistics
$50.4 mesothelioma chemotherapy
$50.39 mesothelioma treatments
$47.42 mesothelioma cause
$46.83 mesothelioma radiation
And the list goes on and on...there are too many to bother listing.

I was surprised to see "mesothelioma" listed so often. I even has to search Google for the term to see what it was, and here is what I found:
Mesothelioma is a form of cancer that is almost always caused by previous exposure to asbestos. In this disease, malignant cells develop in the mesothelium, a protective lining that covers most of the body's internal organs.

It their an epidemic? Is asbestos exposure rampid? And why are companies willing to pay as much as $69 a click to "help". I didn't realize this was so competitive.

Next are the "lawyer" keywords. The should team up with those paying for the keywords above and save time and money.

$51.47 austin dwi
$50.4 accident attorney michigan
$50.35 michigan auto accident attorney
$49.29 los angeles personal injury attorney
$49.25 accident helpline
$47.74 automobile accident lawyers
$47.49 dui defense attorneys
$46.91 philadelphia personal injury lawyers
$46.77 las vegas car accident attorney
$46.52 pennsylvania personal injury lawyers
$46.34 arizona dui
$46.34 arizona dui
$59.39 arizona dui lawyer
$53.17 personal injury lawyers los angeles
$44.84 accident attorney los angeles
$44.83 personal injury lawyers nyc
$40.7 dui defense lawyers
$40.66 san diego dui
$40.63 dwi attorney
$40.63 dwi attorney
And there were plenty more.

What does NOT surprise me is the amount of "lawyer" keywords listed and what they are willing to pay. I guess when you make thousands of dallors an hour, what's $40 a click? I also didn't realize that there were so many "aviation accidents".
NOTE: I lumped the "lawyer" keywords with the "DUI" and "DWI" terms assuming they go "hand and hand".

Next up is the "insurance" terms, mostly car.

$59.44 online car insurance quotes
$57.87 michigan car accident attorney
$56.59 free auto insurance quote
$52.31 free online auto insurance quote
$52.02 free online car insurance quote
$51.73 free car insurance quotes
$45.8 business liability insurance quote
$45.42 insurance quotes com
$44.83 mesothelioma symptom
$44.52 truck accident lawyers
$44.03 online auto insurance quotes
$43.84 select quote insurance
Etc., etc., etc...

And of course. I'm not shocked that "insurance" companies pay out a bundle as well. I guess with all of the drunk driving accidents, people need to switch their car insurance carriers due to the large increase in their premiums.

Now for "loans".

$43.86 loan consilidation
$42.98 student loan consolidation
$40.1 home equity line of credit
$39.32 loan federal consolidation
$39.23 refinancing
$38.72 equity line of credit
$37 2nd mortgage
$35.4 loan consolidating
$35.15 home equity loans
$34.9 automobile accident attorney
$34.86 auto accident attorneys
$34.82 mesothelioma cancers
$34.81 instant auto insurance quotes
$34.8 home equity loan rates
$34.79 home owners insurance quotes
$34.71 home equity line

And of course, what I thought was the most common, due to the bad market (in the US at least), is "loans".
They'll give you money that you need now, and you'll pay them back double tomorrow.


So in conclusion...I have my doubts as to the legitimacy of these lists as a whole, yet so many MFA sites are popping up every day...If there was any way to contact the webmasters, I would ask them...but for some reason, the don't list any contact information.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Google Indexes Text and Links on Flash Files

We've received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we've greatly improved our ability to index Flash.


Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file?
We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

Flash site in search results before improvements
Flash site in old Google search results

Flash site after improved indexing, querying [nasa deep impact animation]
Flash site in new Google search results

Source: Google

Saturday, July 12, 2008

New Insight to Google Ranking

In May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group, the group responsible for the ranking of search results. He introduced various teams within "Quality" (as we like to call the group) including Core Ranking, International Search, User Interfaces, Evaluation, Webspam, and other teams. In this post, I want to tell you more about one of these: the Core Ranking team.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google. I've worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years, having been introduced to search in 1990 as a graduate student in computer science. In the academic world, the field of search is known as Information Retrieval (or IR). After spending a decade as an IR researcher, I came to Google in 2000, and have worked on Google ranking ever since.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.

The most common question I get asked about Google's ranking is "how do you do it?" Of course, there is a lot that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours, and I will delve deeper into the technology behind it in a later post. Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.
The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results. We often call this the "no query left behind" principle. Whenever we return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country - and we do (search is by no means a solved problem) - we use that as an inspiration for future improvements.

The second principle seems obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? Well, as search systems go, given the wide variety of user queries we have to respond to in multiple languages, it is easy to go down the path where more and more complexity creeps into the system to serve the next incremental fraction of the queries. We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The "keep it simple" philosophy has served us well.

No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

Stay tuned for my followup post, where I will discuss in detail the technologies behind our ranking and show examples of several state-of-the-art ranking techniques in action. Let me just conclude this post by saying, our passion for search is stronger than ever - and as a search researcher, I have the best job in the world :-).

Source: GoogleBlog