Twitter SSL Certificate: Something Wrong?

Just got this security warning pop-up a couple of times in the last few minutes:

Seems that there maybe some issue with Twitters security certificate or it's implementation. Twitterfox seems very unhappy about the whole thing! Anyone know what is going on?

Spam reporting your SEO competition an ethical decision?

In a recent post by Rand Fish of SEOmoz about 5 common pieces of SEO advice he disagrees with, I was surprised to see him reluctantly defending the process of reporting sites to Google that had seemingly bought links (or similar). Surprised not because I am against the practice of reporting those who contravene Google's terms of service but because it was the first I had ever heard about this industry code of silence on the subject. Perhaps this is the point where I should "fess up"?

My name is tootricky and I happily report competitor spam/link buying to Google.

Search Engine Knight or Spawn of Search Satan?

Is "doing the dirty" on a SEO competitor an act of noble morality or is it industrial sabotage? Are we who perform this seemingly unpopular practice, Knights of Search Engine ethics or kin of the google-devil?

I see myself as neither actually but let me explain why.

The two reasons given in Rand's article for not reporting bought links and spam are:

You may inadvertently hurt your site's rankings if you've engaged in (or unknowingly benefited from) particular types of spam.

Reporting spam may hurt your fellow SEOs and is thus unethical

There are two fundamental ripostes one can make to these very valid points:

1. Most SEO is some form of managed risk, therefore, if I am happy to stand by my work I expect others to be reasonable and do the same.
   
2. One can no more seriously apply ethics or morality to practices that are against the Google TOS than one can apply it to strawberry trifle.

Moralising managed risk is illogical

Link buyers and spammers, perform both practices because they are generally:

• Effective
• Cost Efficient
• Offer a measurable ROI

Therefore managing the risk of these types of marketing strategies is the main draw back not the fact that someone somewhere will think their work to be "ethical" or not. The risk to them is that their bought links may possibly be reported by a competitor or spotted by Google and may possibly be acted on (to their detriment).

Their decision to increase their liability is no more an ethical choice as mine is an unethical practice to report them.

So report them I will :)

Changing a batch of under performing keywords in Adwords

There are several frustrating issues with the Adwords interface, that can make optimising campaigns a real chore. One that continues to frustrate is the lack of a feature that allows you to apply changes to a group of keywords at once, based on their status.

Now before somebody points out that Adwords Editor allows you to filter keywords by their status flags (Enabled, Paused) this is not the "status" I mean. In the new adwords interface you can filter keywords based on their status which are currently:

• Not triggering ads: requires action
• Eligible: limited
• Not active
• Eligible
  

This filtering can be very useful when used with the "Eligible: limited" flag to find keywords with poor search volume and impressions (sometimes referred to as low share of voice) so you can tweak and improve their performance.

One thing I like to do when fiddling with campaigns is change the match type for keywords from phrase or exact match to broad match, to see if this improves impressions. The only way to change a batch of keywords through the new adwords interface is to do each manually by selecting the relevant drop down menu; there is no "copy to all rows" button like there is is for other attributes like position preference or Max CPC (see piccy below)

 

 

My workaround to batch edit keywords using Adwords and Adwords Editor

There is a dirty workaround to this annoying problem but it involves using other attributes in the keyword edit dialogue to temporarily group keywords. By using a mix of the following attributes you can create a unique "fingerprint" for the keywords that you can then match in Adwords Editor later:

• Status
• Max CPC
• Destination URL

For example if I wanted to change a bunch of keywords that had low search volume from phrase match to broad match, I would:

• Filter the keywords in the Adwords web interface using "Eligible: limited" to get the list of under performing (low share of voice) keywords.
• Set the mentioned attributes and "copy to all rows" to create a unique "fingerprint" for that group of keywords:
• Change Status to Paused
• Set Destination url to http://www.somedomain.com (obviously this will only works if you don't use individual urls for your keywords)
  and/or
  
• Set Max CPC to something unique and exact like £11.11 (only really works if your CPCs are currently all the same)
  

Once these attributes have been applied to the keywords, go into Adwords Editor and download the current campaign. Use advanced search to look for keywords that have the status paused and a destination url containing "somedomain" (or whatever you chose to use) and/or where the CPC is £11.11.

Once you have your keywords list filtered in Adwords Editor, select all, edit the match type of all of the keywords to "broad", remove the destination url on all keywords, correct the CPCs (if necessary) and switch all keywords to enabled and upload.

Obviously all of this kind of stuff would be much easier if Google improved the filtering and informational content available through Adwords Editor, but until that becomes a reality, we have to find other ways!