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GOOGLE LATEST:All about Google's new PPA advertising product - View Article
Google is testing a new advertising system that allows businesses to advertise on a cost per action basis. You can find Google's own announcement here.
How does Google's new product work?
Until now, Google has primarily sold pay-per-click (PPC) ads, so-called AdWords ads: advertisers pay when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad.
Google AdWords has one big advantage and one big disadvantage: You only pay for clicks of potential customers, but you risk paying a lot of money for nothing because of click fraud.
There has been a lot of debate around click fraud because Google has a short term financial incentive to promote it. Google's new advertising product is "pay per action" (PPA). You don't pay per click anymore but you pay when a customer takes further action, such as requesting a catalog, signing up for a newsletter or buying a product.
PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud.
How can Google track the action?
If you use Google's PPA advertising product, then you must use Google's conversion tracking code in the HTML code of your web pages.
Of course, the advertiser has an incentive not to confirm the action, but cheating does not make sense. Like PPC ads, PPA ads will likely be ranked by profitability to Google.
What are the consequences for the market?
Google will be able to better maximize revenues on its advertising network, and it also should allay the concerns over click fraud.
Google's new PPA program is in direct competition to affiliate marketing networks such as Commission Junction and LinkShare. Publishers could leave those affiliate marketing networks and concentrate on Google's PPA program.
Yahoo und Microsoft will certainly offer similar PPA programs in the future. The current players on the PPA market Snap and Turn now face heavy competition.
What are the consequences for you?
If you already track the return on investment (ROI) on your PPC ads, then you won't be affected much. If you don't track the ROI yet, take a look at ROI tracking tools such as AxROI which can save you a lot of advertising money.
If you are a smaller advertiser, then PPA advertising could mean that you will pay less for better results in the future, and that you will never worry about click fraud again.
Note that Google's pay per action program is currently in beta test. This means that there are some limitations:
- participation is by invitation only, you must fill out a web form to request participating in the program
- the PPA program is currently only available to US customers
- ads are limited to Google's content network of partner sites (Google AdSense)
The importance of robots.txt
Although the robots.txt file is a very important file if you want to have a good ranking on search engines, many Web sites don't offer this file.
If your Web site doesn't have a robots.txt file yet, read on to learn how to create one. If you already have a robots.txt file, read our tips to make sure that it doesn't contain errors.
What is robots.txt?
When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it will look for a special file on your site. That file is called robots.txt and it tells the search engine spider, which Web pages of your site should be indexed and which Web pages should be ignored.
The robots.txt file is a simple text file (no HTML), that must be placed in your root directory, for example:
http://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
How do I create a robots.txt file?
As mentioned above, the robots.txt file is a simple text file. Open a simple text editor to create it. The content of a robots.txt file consists of so-called "records".
A record contains the information for a special search engine. Each record consists of two fields: the user agent line and one or more Disallow lines. Here's an example:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
This robots.txt file would allow the "googlebot", which is the search engine spider of Google, to retrieve every page from your site except for files from the "cgi-bin" directory. All files in the "cgi-bin" directory will be
ignored by googlebot.
The Disallow command works like a wildcard. If you enter
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /support
both "/support-desk/index.html" and "/support/index.html" as well as all other files in the "support" directory would not be indexed by search engines.
If you leave the Disallow line blank, you're telling the search engine that all files may be indexed. In any case, you must enter a Disallow line for every User-agent record.
If you want to give all search engine spiders the same rights, use the following robots.txt content:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Where can I find user agent names?
You can find user agent names in your log files by checking for requests to robots.txt. Most often, all search engine spiders should be given the same rights. in that case, use "User-agent: *" as mentioned above.
Things you should avoid
If you don't format your robots.txt file properly, some or all files of your Web site might not get indexed by search engines. To avoid this, do the following:
- Don't use comments in the robots.txt file
Although comments are allowed in a robots.txt file, they might confuse some search engine spiders.
"Disallow: support # Don't index the support directory" might be misinterepreted as "Disallow: support#Don't index the support directory". - Don't use white space at the beginning of a line. For example, don't write
placeholder User-agent: *
place Disallow: /support
but
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support - Don't change the order of the commands. If your robots.txt file should work, don't mix it up. Don't write
Disallow: /support
User-agent: *
but
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support - Don't use more than one directory in a Disallow line. Do not use the following
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support /cgi-bin/ /images/
Search engine spiders cannot understand that format. The correct syntax for this is
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/ - Be sure to use the right case. The file names on your server are case sensitve. If the name of your directory is "Support", don't write "support" in the robots.txt file.
- Don't list all files. If you want a search engine spider to ignore all files in a special directory, you don't have to list all files. For example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support/orders.html
Disallow: /support/technical.html
Disallow: /support/helpdesk.html
Disallow: /support/index.html
You can replace this with
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support - There is no "Allow" command
Don't use an "Allow" command in your robots.txt file. Only mention files and directories that you don't want to be indexed. All other files will be indexed automatically if they are linked on your site.
Tips and tricks:
1. How to allow all search engine spiders to index all files
Use the following content for your robots.txt file if you want to allow all search engine spiders to index all files of your Web site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
2. How to disallow all spiders to index any file
If you don't want search engines to index any file of your Web site, use the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
3. Where to find more complex examples.
If you want to see more complex examples, of robots.txt files, view the robots.txt files of big Web sites:
Your Web site should have a proper robots.txt file if you want to have good rankings on search engines. Only if search engines know what to do with your pages, they can give you a good ranking.
Source:Importance Of robots.txt
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