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Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

I came across this commentary (or rather report) on SearchEngineWatch about search arbitrage or as I call it traffic arbitrage. This was from a discussion at  the recent SearchEngineStrategies in San Jose (I did not attend, by the way). The question is whether search arbitrage is good or bad. It depends. At first glance, arbitrage is good for the arbitrager who is making a profit through the price differential between buying ad clicks and selling ad clicks. On the other hand, we’ve all clicked on a PPC ad and ended up on a page with little or no content except a whole bunch of other PPC ads.From the point of the arbitrager, we’ve got to remember who our customer is. Big company advertisers are our customers as much as search engine users who are looking for information. The guiding principle I’ve always followed is to provide value to both - advertisers as well as search engine users.

Therefore, I don’t advocate the typical “MFA� sites where there is little content. If you land on one of these, you’ll recognize it immediately. Some of these sites pretend to return search results which are in fact more PPC ads. Others are more blatant and just paste the PPC ads all over the page without other relevant content. If you’re doing this, my advice is simple - STOP.

In the long run, the search engines will crack down on such sites. The July Google AdWords update was one such move to discourage pure MFA sites.

So the question comes down to where we’re providing value in the path of clicks. The user clicks on a PPC ad on a search engine and lands on our page. We should provide information relevant to what they’re searching for. Then the PPC ads displayed will be closely targeted and the user will see something of interest and click on it. We’re acting as the middleman. But we’re also providing a value-added service.

How? By making sure that we have content-rich pages that have information of use to the searcher. Sites built this way will stand the test of time and I don’t see why Google or any other search engine would frown upon them.

So the point comes down to getting content for your site. My favorite source is private label content.

You can read more reactions to the article:

Shoemoney bashes Catherine Seda in “Catherine Seda Clearly Does Not Get It.”

Mike Jones from PepperJam responds. So does Kris Jones from PepperJam which is an SEM company that also runs a shopping comparison site.

Technorati Tags: traffic arbitrage, search arbitrage

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