Rob Hammond

A post on SearchEngineWatch yesterday asked the question “Are PPC Ads Now Counting in Google Organic Backlinks?” A question I was tempted to reject out of hand as tosh (this would be incredibly damaging for Google if this was really true), but after reading through the post I couldn’t discount it entirely without some research of my own.

This issue is more interesting than I initially thought. Basically what is being said in the article is that for one of the author’s client websites, a number of backlinks were appearing in Webmaster Tools that appeared to show links coming from an AdWords/YSM campaign. Not only this, but the website ranks #1 in Google for a phrase only used in the PPC campaign, and which is not in the content of the page that ranks for the phrase:

So after a bit  digging in Yahoo (search for ["ga nc tn & tx land sale" bluegreen] in Yahoo, and see screengrab below), I can see what appears to be happening, is that these particular ads have been syndicated across a bunch of the spammy pseudo search engines you see so many of these days.

In this low-quality syndication network, the JavaScript code they’re using in these sponsored links is shown below:

<a href="[[adurl]]" ONMOUSEOVER="window.status='http://www.BluegreenCommunities.com';return true;">anchor text</a>

I counted only 2 302 redirects on the ad URL redirection chain before the spider hits a robots.txt block. This means Google may have either given up following these redirects before it reaches the robots.txt file, hit the robots file and decided to try another route, or was treating the JavaScript element as a different link entirely.

Now the clue that Google is following the JavaScript code element in this case is that it is the domain, and not the ad destination URL that gets the anchor text credit, accounting for the homepage ranking #1 for the query in question, and not the advertising URL.

This is rather odd, because “window.status” is not a JavaScript link function, and implies Google’s JavaScript crawling isn’t as advanced as they want us to think. Looks to me like they’re just running a regex for anything that looks like a URL inside a onmouseover/onclick/etc command – this requires testing, but if that’s it, surely that’s pretty primitive?

I think it’s fairly clear this is a screw up in Google’s JavaScript crawl implementation, so will likely be fixed in (very) short order. In the meantime, I’m thinking of setting up an AdWords campaign or two…

It’s well accepted amongst SEOs that alt text in images doesn’t carry as much weight as plain text. However if a website’s CMS automatically uses images as headings to preserve a design, is there any ROI in SEO for the associated costs of implementing sIFR or image replacement techniques?

I ran a quick test in order to test this, and an inference taken from page 16 of Google’s SEO Starter Guide:

“the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link”

The inference here is that alt text in images does not carry as much ranking weight as plain textual content. As mentioned above, this is a generally accepted principle, but I wanted to know if this applied equally to heading tags as everything else.

I linked to 2 almost identical pages, with the heading code differing as follows:

• Text version (8lks5c3z.htm): <h1>7i1bn504</h1>
• Image version (04x7oszi.htm): <h1><img src=”04x7oszi.jpg” alt=”7i1bn504″ /></h1>

The page with the image-based H1 tag was linked to above text-based H1 to adjust for any bias in HTML order.

As expected, the results showed a clear bias towards the textual version. Google indexed both pages and putting the image-based version in the supplemental results. Yahoo, Ask and Lycos only indexed the textual version (and Bing did not index either version). The images below outline the results:

First result in Google is text version

Both results appear with duplicate filter off

Yahoo only indexes textual version

Ask only indexes textual version

Lycos... ah well, who cares