Helpdesk: weekly eCommerce tips and tricks

Got a question ?  Get in touch !

Whether it's technical question, or you're just not sure how you might use eCommerce in your business, why not get in touch ?  Each week we'll publish the best questions and their corresponding answers courtesy of one of our eCommerce experts.  You can email us at expert@opportunitywales.co.uk - please note that we can't reply individually to every question although we will notify you when the answer to your question is published.

Here are this weeks questions:  You can browse previous questions and answers in our archive.

Someone has put together a Web site that says bad things about my company which ranks just below us in the search engines.  How can we get this removed ?

If someone has posted content about you that it completely untrue then you could talk to your solictior to see what action can be taken against them in order to remove the offending material from their Web site.  However, if their Web site is hosted outside of your legal jurisdication then this may be difficult to do.  Appealing to their Web host may be an option as well.

An alternative approach would be to ensure that they don't rank so well in the search engines.  It's not possible to ask a search engine to remove a competing site so you'll need to outrank them for the keywords that you're interested in.  To do this effectively you'll need to talk to a professional search engine marketer.  Any changes that are made will take some time to filter through the system so you ought to be prepared for this.

If you want to do this yourself you're going to come up against a problem and that in the search engine results each Web site domain can only have two results per page.  This is the main result and an indented result.  To get around this you'll need to set up a series of sub-domains (such as directory.opportunitywales.co.uk) and get these to rank for the same phrase.

If you want to push them off of the front page you may need to create up to four subdomains and then get these to rank well.  It's not an easy task and really should be left to a Search Engine Marketer.

I'm currently running a series of Pay-per-click marketing campaigns using Google Adwords.  I'm concerned that my competitors are clicking on my adverts in order to use up my advertising budget.  Is there anything I can do to prevent this ?

So called click-fraud where your competitors click on your adverts in order to use up your advertising budget is relatively uncommon although there are certain very competitive markets where it can happen.

Google (and the other providers of similar Pay-per-click systems) all take click-fraud very seriously and have systems in place to identify it.  The problem is that fraudulent clicks do get through and you'll be charged for these whilst Google investigates.  In order to minimise the amount that you'll get charged there are some basics steps that you can take.

Firstly, unless you're trying to attract customers from overseas ensure that your campaign is only displayed to UK-based users of Google.  This will prevent so-called 'click-shops' in India and the Far East from being employed to click on your adverts.

Secondly, when you set up a campaign you have the option to display your ads on the main Google search results, other search partners as well as what is known as the Content Network.  The later are where Web site publishers place Google ads on their own sites.  These are particularly prone to click-fraud.

The third step that you can take is to elect to add tracking information to the clicks that come to your website in the Google account management panel.  This allows your dynamic visitor tracking system (you do have one, don't you) that logs visitors to your site in real time, allowing to track visitors from your adverts.

By looking for clicks from the same IP (Internet Protocol) address using the same Web browser you can spot potentially fraudulent clicks which you can then report to Google.  It goes without saying that these clicks need to be visitors that simply come to your site and leave and don't necessarily browse around as real visitors would.

When you come to report your suspicisons to Google give them as much information as possible, including any visitor log files that they may need.  If they do find your suspicisons are correct they will usually refund the money that you've been charged quite quickly and will normally block clicks from those IP addresses.

I've heard a lot about 'link bombing' lately now that Google have removed the two most famous ones.  Will this effect my search matketing efforts as I rank for some of the same phrases as my competitors ?

Link bombing is the art of making a page rank in the search engines for a phrase that doesn't actually appear on the page.  There are two famous examples of this, although there are many more, are were a search on Google for 'miserable failure' used to bring up the Whitehouse biography page of George W. Bush and were a search for 'liar' brought up Tony Blairs page.

Google claim to have fixed these results which they viewed as unreliable by introducing a new filter in the algorithm that ranks pages.  However, many people are unconvinced because whilst the two most notable examples are no longer returned in the results, many of the lesser link bombs still do appear.

This suggests that the filter that they've applied either isn't working or that the results have been manually adjusted.  What evidence is there for this ?  Well a search on Google for the words 'click here' (Google link here) shows Adobe as the number one result even though those words do not appear anywhere on the page.

This result comes about from the thousands of Web sites that offer Adobe Acrobat documents for download and which have the words similar to 'Haven't got Adobe Acrobat ?  To download it click here'.

So will this effect your search results ?  Probably not, although it's worth making sure that the words that your have in inbound links appear on the page(s) that they link to - just in case !

Got a question for us ?  Email it to expert@opportunitywales.co.uk and we'll answer the best ones each week.