Google PR via Overture
by Sharen
What we don't know however, is that running a PPC (pay per click) campaign with Overture
can increase a web site's Google link popularity. I wish I could see the raising eyebrows
of some of you now. In the next few paragraphs I'm going to tell you how this method works
and like everything in life its pros and cons.
So, running an Overture campaign (regardless of how successful the campaign is) will put
your advertisement on thousands of web sites (refer to Overture Impressions). It's pretty
simple; there are thousands of 'content' web sites that use Overture ads as their main
income stream. Similar to Google ads, web sites are publishing Overture ads and once a
user clicks on the ads, Overture pays a small amount to the 'content' web site (for
example see http://www.brazil.com , right click on any link on this web site then
properties, you'll see that this links back to overture). Once your ad appears on many web
sites it's ready to be indexed by Google. Google, using its famous crawler - GoogleBot,
visits many web sites each day and there is a high chance that it will find, index and
include the page that displays your ad in its natural results.
Sounds a bit farfetched? Let's have a look at this example, open a browser, go to Google
and type http://www.orangejewelry.com/ -site:http://www.orangejewelry.com/ into the Google
search box. What you will find is around 200+ links to this web site. These are Google's
natural results; however, 90% of the links in this results set are 'content' pages that
run Overture advertisement campaigns!!! http://www.orangejewelry.com is a new web site on
the web that runs PPC campaign with Overture, what they found out is that they get an
additional value from the campaign in the form of 'loose links' in Google, which increases
link popularity. Again, it's pretty straightforward; http://www.orangejewelry.com pays
Overture to be visible on the internet. Overture pays small 'content' web sites to display
http://www.orangejewelry.com ads. Google crawl these web sites, index them and include
them in its natural results.
As I mention above, these links are 'loose', which means these are not real links to your
web site. The reason is that the Overture ads are changing all the time and by the time
that Google picks up the page, index it and put it in its natural results the real ad or
link to your web site is not there, it's changing dynamically by Overture.
To prove this, do the exercise we did above, or click on the following link to Google.
What you will find is that by clicking on the Google results, and going into one of the
web pages in the results set, there is no mention to http://www.orangejewelry.com (for
example: Brazil.com) ; however, if you click on the results cached page (for example:
Cached) you can clearly see when the page was indexed by Google and that your web site
Overture advertisement is there!!! Amazing ha?
The pros and cons are quite self-explanatory at this stage (I think) on the one hand you
get link popularity boost from Google by running an Overture campaign (go figure, why
Google do this as Overture is its main competition). This is by far the single most
important factor to determine what sites are indexed by Google (see Google PageRank
Information). On the other hand these links are not 'real' rather 'loose' as once the user
clicks on them heshe doesn't get to your web site but to where your web site was
advertised awhile ago.
My conclusion is pretty simple, if you have a new web site OR use Overture a lot to
increase traffic to your web site, try to use this method smartly (for example, you can
participate in categories in Overture that have many impression but low click rate, this
will result in your web site ads are visible on the net for GoogleBot but you won't have
to pay much for Overture clicks). Whatever you do, keep in mind that once you stop your
Overture campaign, these 'loose' links in Google will stay there for only few weeks. What
I'm still puzzled about is why Google indexes pages with links to Overture and not pages
with Google ads, which they can have financial gain from (not very ethical though).
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Copyright © Sharen
About the Author:
Sharen is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Link Popularity Experts (http://www.linkpopularityexperts.com/), a
Link Popularity services company serving small and medium businesses. He has specialized
in search engine optimization since 2001, including three years as the Search Engine
Specialist for Nudget Publications, a technical book publishing company.
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