Legal Search Marketing Blog

Arkansas judge finalizes Google "click" settlement

TEXARKANA, Ark., July 27 (Reuters) - An Arkansas state judge on Wednesday granted final approval to a class-action settlement between Google Inc. and advertisers who alleged Google allowed third parties to drive up fees by fraudulent use of its Web search advertising system.

Judge Joe Griffin of the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas made no changes in approving the settlement, which calls for Google to pay up to $90 million in online credits to customers and legal fees, according to court documents.

The Google settlement hearing is part of a broader legal action by plaintiff Lane's Gifts and Collectibles originally filed in February 2005 against Internet advertising industry players over the issue of so-called "click fraud".

SOURCE : REUTERS NEWS

Chicago Estate Planning Legal Blog

The latest blog we have created is for the Chicago law offices of Donald Thompson. It is the Chicago Estate Planning Law Blog and focuses on Wills, Trusts & Estate Planning law in the Illinois area.

Report backs Google efforts to combat fraud

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An independent report filed on Friday in an Arkansas court sided with Google over disgruntled advertisers who had sued the search engine giant accusing it of trying to drive up fees through so-called click fraud.

The two sides agreed to commission the report as part of a settlement deal for the lawsuit, filed by advertising customer Lane's Gifts in a state court in Miller County, Arkansas.

Pay-per-click advertising, where advertisers only pay when people click on ads, is seen by critics as the Achilles' heel of Web search leader Google, which last quarter saw revenues grow 77 percent to $2.46 billion, virtually all from such ads.

The suit alleged Web advertisers allowed their pay-per-click ad systems to be abused in order to drive up fees paid by customers. It argued that companies such as Google have not taken reasonable steps to regulate the practice.

"Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google's efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable," Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at New York University, said in the report. Lane's Gifts commissioned Tuzhilin's report.

The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud.

This is probably true and Im sure Google does all it can to battle click fraud, but they cant prevent it totally.   I think Google adwords is the best pay per click program by far but I would be cautious of the Google content network and I never recommend it to clients when doing Adwords advertising. 

Google Adds Supports For NOODP Tag

Post from Search Engine Watch about Google now supporting the NOODP meta tag, which can help those sites that have been stuck with a bad DMOZ Title listing.

Google has granted our wish. If you have one of those pesky titles pulled from the ODP (dmoz.org) directory, don't fret it, just add the NOODP tag.

How do you do it? Just add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> to your page source. If you want to just exclude MSN use <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP"> if you just want to exclude Google use <META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP">.

Keep in mind, it takes time for Google to spider your pages and then determine if you do not want to use the ODP title. So if you add the tag today, it may take several weeks to have an impact.

Webmasters, this can have a huge affect on your organic traffic. If you have a poor ODP title and Google uses it in the results, by tweaking your title, your click-through rate from Google can potentially dramatically increase.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Judge Orders Google To Disclose Advertiser's Info

Out-Law reports that Google was ordered by Justice Rimer to hand over the information on an advertiser to Helen Grant for copyright infringement. Helen Grant "complained that a Google advert led to a service which she claimed violated her copyright in a forthcoming book."

A search brought up a site named Realityunlocked.com, "which offered a free download of an earlier draft of the book, and that the site violated the Trust's copyright." Google asked Grant to take the issue to court, this way Google does not have to worry about the privacy issues with handing over the information.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Keyword Research For Law Firms

KEYWORD RESEARCH - LAW FIRM MARKETING

Every law firm should do some kind of keyword research to determine which keywords to focus on. Keyword research is vital to a succesful search engine optimization campaign, both for organic and pay per click search marketing. Below is some example data from Keyword Research.com for a law firm in Portland, Orgeon.

Query	Searches	Occurrences	KEI	Predicted Daily
oregon lawyer	578,155	1,010,000	5.11	13,200
oregon criminal law	383,994	1,010,000	4.70	8,767
real estate law	301,432	256,000,000	0.18	6,882
property law real estate law	19,211	77,900,000	0.04	439
real estate and portland oregon	16,012	10,400,000	0.30	366
oregon+lawyer	12,902	991,000	1.56	295
real estate portland oregon	10,399	17,100,000	0.12	237
portland attorney	4,863	581,000	1.26	111
portland law firm	3,897	440,000	1.32	89
oregon bankruptcy law	3,843	n/a	n/a	88

These are the top 10 results sorted by the # of searches. Below is an explanation of what each column means.

Predicted Searches

Figures in this column provide a rough estimate of the total number of daily searches on the internet as a whole, for each given search term.

Predicted Daily count is just that, "PREDICTED". The searches column contains the total number of ACTUAL searches in OUR DATABASE that is supplied by close to 200 search engines.

Occurences

This column contains an estimate of the number of pages in which each search term appears.

The more pages there are, the more competition there is for the top position in the search results. This means that if there are a lot of pages, it will be more difficult for you to achieve good rankings.

KEI

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Indicator.

It is designed to measure the effectiveness, or the value of a given search term. This is done by correlating a number of factors such as the number times a keyword is searched for, with the number of pages on which it occurs, etc.

KEI is a log scale with values from 0 to 10.

The concept is very similar to the Richter Scale used to measure earthquakes and this is a good way to think about the numbers. Search terms with the largest values tend to be less competitive and thus have the most potential to "shake" things up.