Posted by randfish

This event is fast and furious so I've got to keep it in list format again:

• Apparently I was wrong about Todd Malicoat - he has a crush on me (pictures to prove this later) not Lisa Barone. On the female side of the aisle there is a girl that he's devoted to but she's not at the conference so we don't get to meet her :(
• In other news I interviewed Vanessa Fox for WebProNews a few hours ago and actually had a terrific chat about Sitemaps - format signals what to use it for and what they really pay attention to in the meta data you can provide (the interview should be live next week).
• Prior to Vanessa's chat with me I asked her to make an addition to the Google Webmaster Guidelines page noting how important it can be to deliver either a 404 or a 200 for a robots.txt request. Apparently Google might have big problems crawling sites that have server errors or timeouts when requesting the robots file.
• We visited the Art Institue of Chicago today and had a terrific time. I highly recommend going if you can make it to the city - their collection is fantastic (and yes they have that Seurat work that's featured in Ferris Buehler's Day Off)
• Matt Cutts' Pubcon callout of a gentleman who ran a lot of "spammy-looking" sites is getting a good bit of press and discussion - should Google be punishing sites because they're owned by operators of other unsavory properties?
• My post on TLA's transparency stirred up some anger with Patrick's crew - my apologies there. Luckily I have no such beef with ReviewMe which is an excellent service model in my opinion - more on that later.
• Loren Baker's got a fancy new design... ours is behind schedule as always but I promise it's good.
• Calcanis lost the respect of a lot of folks in the webmaster industry this morning; according to attendees hypocrisy & bad-mouthing the folks who hired you for a keynote don't go together as well as Jason might have thought.
• Google threw a closed-door party tonight that upset more folks. Quite a few big Google partners and spenders (who griped about it on the expo hall floor) were not invited. Now it's MSN's turn to snub would-be party-goers at the next conference :)
• The high today in Chicago was 26... low around -10. It's chilly to say the least.
• SEOmoz auctioned off a link last night at Alan Dick's Vintage Tub & Bath party. He'd prefer I use the anchor text - clawfoot tubs. Note to self - add sponsoring events and inviting bloggers to list of good link building tactics.
• Hatbait is hilarious - great photos and a great idea from Liana.

For those Chicago SES attendees who are reading - anything I missed that needs to be discussed?

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Posted by JaneCopland

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Posted by randfish

Just the facts ma'am... (or rather in this case pure speculation from a night of heavy drinking in cold weather):

• Heard the rumor several times that Google's search quality team has undercover link buyers working for them (I only find it hard to believe because it seems like they could put that manpower to better uses)
• David Temple - I finally got to meet him in person and he is amazing. Smart funny genuine personable... I'm thrilled to go to China with him next spring.
• Todd Malicoat has a big crush on Lisa Barone (who's as charming in person as she is on the blog). He's trying to hide it even from himself but it's tough going (oh man am I going to take heat for writing this tomorrow).
• I met someone who used to employ SEO Fangirl... Her identity should be revealed in the next couple days.
• Kim Krause and her husband Eric just celebrated their 2nd anniversary on the plane to Chicago - a toast to them both!
• Danny's going to be announcing something on SELand very soon that I'm extermely excited about... something that will include a party.
• Vanessa Fox is wicked fast - she made a mad dash to grab Rebecca's bag off our plane from Seattle to Chicago at the end of the flight. I commented to Rebecca - "wow she's not just good at sitemaps."
• DaveN needs to do a better job of optimizing his beer drinking... my right ear suffers the consequences :)
• Eveyone's worried about Microsoft - Vista is getting bashed Live is taking heat even Xbox is getting eclipsed by the two new consoles. Since they're in my backyard I feel a duty to stand up for them - I'm trying to get an interview with Eytan Seidman in the next few weeks.
• Yahoo! is hosting a party for everybody tomorrow to help make up for their closed invite Pubcon backlash - party thread from Joe Morin here.

More to come...

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Posted by Guillaume

A few months ago I was out of my office for an appointment with a client in downtown Montreal. Since I knew (well I thought I knew!) how Google Adwords IP geotargeting system worked I wanted to give him a demo with a concrete example. I used as my example my own firm's Adwords campaign which had the keyword “conception web” (translation: “web design”) geotargeting the Quebec province (Canda's only French-speaking region). Since I was in Quebec I presumed it would show up on nearly all Quebec computers no matter the ISP.

But when we tried from the client's office  we couldn’t get the ad to show! I called the office and they checked my bids and NVI was still on the first PPC spot in Quebec location on “conception web”.

I didn’t understand the problem at that time but it seemed that the only difference between the testing done at my client's office and the one made by my colleague at our office was the ISP. My client was connected to the Internet with Bell/Sympatico (on ADSL) one of the two leaders in Quebec and my office with Videotron (Cable) the other leading ISP company.

I couldn’t believe that most of Bell/Sympatico’s Quebec customers (at least 40-50% of Quebec total ISP residential / commercial market) connections were not taken into account. So we did a real test to understand and explain this phenomenon. Here’s the test:

IP: 70.49.203.251 (one of the 10 IP’s we’ve tested)

Location : Montreal

Test we’ve done: For one of our customers we’ve selected Quebec as the geographical target for a keyword and tried to have it show up on Google.ca with several Bell/Sympatico ISP clients. We’ve also done the same test with the keyword “conception web” and we couldn’t get our ad to show up for those Bell/Sympatico users. This probably means that we have selected “Quebec” in your geographical target for your existing French Adwords campaign. The main problem is that most of the Bell/Sympatico IPs are pointing to servers located in Ottawa and Toronto which are in Ontario province despite the fact the clients are located in Quebec province.

Problem: Ads not showing in Google-sponsored links because the IP is resolved in Ontario. This is caused because many Bell/Sympatico ISP servers delivering the Internet connection to Quebec residents are located in Ottawa and Toronto and Google thinks the customers are located in Ontario and therefore won’t show the ads to them.

The Big Issue: I don’t think Google is aware of it so most of the Google campaigns you will run for French & English keywords will not show up in Quebec province for most/all of Bell/Sympatico Internet users if you have selected “Quebec” as your geographical target. 

This basically means that you are not targeting half of the already small French market! Way to go!

Google advertising reach a lot less French consumers in Quebec and Google loses a lot of money through its pay-per-click system in Quebec because it doesn’t serve Bell/Sympatico ISP clients.

How to overcome this obstacle?

The best solution we found is to create a copy of your existing French PPC campaign but by targeting Ontario as a geographical target you can dramatically boost your PPC impressions and clicks for Quebec province without hurting too much your quality since most of Ontario residents won't search for terms in French. On the other hand to reach Anglophones in Quebec you have to target Anglophones in Ontario as well which is not a viable solution for advertising campaign targeted only for Quebec.

What is Google's position on this issue?

In March we sent a brief note through the Google Help Center. Google answered that it can't do anything since Bell/Sympatico has chosen to implement its servers outside Quebec. That surprised me a lot since I was giving Google an insight that is worth at least several hundreds thousands of advertising dollars… for FREE. Maybe it didn't get to the right person!

p.s. from Rand - If any SEOmozzers think they can slip the AdWords folks a note during study hall I'm sure they'd appreciate the several million extra dollars in ad revenue?

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Posted by randfish

It's roundup time! Let's get this party started:

• It's Danny's last day at SEW... Get ready for SE Land (fingers crossed that we see more personality and more opinions mixed in with the news).
• This contest from Barry sounds awesome - great idea. I don't think we can win or I'd give it a go... although maybe in Chicago I could put Rebecca on it. Hmm...
• I should just run Todd's feed on the frickin' sidebar the guy's so linkworthy. From new names for SEOs to his marketing manifesto (that I already linked at once) to his Digg guide (my word is he active on Digg lately) you'd think someone lit a link fire under his rear :)
• Speaking of Digg Michael Gray is all over the value of one Digg and the small price one pays for being buried.
• Mr. Zawodny wrote about a couple of his favorite corporate blogs and I have to agree - love the personality and the varied story subjects. Another good one is Farecast's (full disclosure - we work with 'em but I read their blog before then so it shouldn't count).
• David Wallace's guess the SEO game is pretty cool but I could've sworn that #8 was Danny...
• As per one of Danny's final requests and my friend Joe's suggestion - will you?
• Andy Hagans writes about domain jujitsu and using your ninja skills to hide from Google. I read something like that and think - man I'm glad I'm not a black hat.
• Andrew Goodman asks Nick Fox (Google's head of advertising quality) some tough questions. Man - we just started testing the waters for some Adwords campaign testing and lost $700 foolishly. I'm gonna make sure I'm at that session next week.
• BTW - Mike I love your travels-around-the-world posts. Don't ever change buddy.
• Fangirl needs some help getting female SEO regulars to shoot her an email and get in touch about lunch in Chicago. Risa & Lisa that means you!
• Dude... Greg... Fricking write something new already! Same goes for you Xan. Ralph.. well let's just say I'm not holding out much hope (if he goes two years he wins a prize).
• Boy Paul Graham makes it very tough to argue that some people aren't worth 100X as much as others - a fascinating read.
• There's still people who don't know about this? Really?
• Rae's redesign looks good - glad to see you kept the personal posts on there too :)
• Auren Hoffman says that big high-tech firms are losing out on attracting big talent... I'd probably disagree and say that there are too many exceptions to this "rule" to make it a real trend - I'd just say that talent can be had by both big and small firms if they know how to recruit.
• Wait now we're not allowed to link to other people's pages that might contain copyrighted material?
• James Kim of C|Net and his family (incl. 2 daughters) are missing - if you're in central Oregon or northern California keep an eye out.

I know I missed at least a few...

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