$earch!!

The BMW keywords scam opens up the cracks in Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
advertising

The meta tag and the 'keyword' are still alive and
well. For well over four years, Google has reclaimed it from the clutches of an
early death; by commercializing it to the point of it becoming the search
giant's primary revenue stream. Many of those 'toy' companies out there
loved it when searches on 'playmate' drew parallel matching links pointing
right at them. The spammers cheered too. And, many of them are Google fans,
including German carmaker BMW.

When Google moved to blacklist BMW's worldwide corporate
website www.bmw.de  for what it called BMW's 'blackhat SEO' (Search Engine
Optimization) practices, it was a case of the devil taking the most famous
first. The practice has been around for as long as the Internet existed. But the
business of fudging searches by using hidden keywords was a tactic which gained
ground after Google started its Pay-Per-Click (PPC) business-offering
'sponsored links' to companies, which paid Google to serve up links to their
websites whenever relevant topics were searched out by Google users.

Fudging search results through misleading or hidden
keywords is as old as the Internet itself. But as far as PPC was concerned, it
spawned a keyword software industry. The keyword software business, which has
been built since 2000, around the revenue model of subverting Google's PPC,
has gathered pace in the last two years and now fetches an estimated $60 mn in
revenues.

Many Google AdWord customers have been looking at more than
just PPC as a 'search' option for their multi-level marketing needs. They
were clearly thinking out of the box, if one goes by the demand for well known
PPC 'accessories', which generate keyword phrases and help customers to add
hidden keywords inside their Web pages. Adwares such as Keywords Finder,
Wordtracker Killer, The Permutator, CleverStat, AdWord Clever Wizard, to name a
few, have been around for as long as PPC brought in the bulk of Google's
revenues.

So, where do we stand on the much lamented death of the
meta tag and the 'keyword' inserted between the and
of the HTML code on every Web page? The meta tag, which was
introduced into the Web coder's lingo by Alta Vistas, Go.com and Hotbot's
Inktomi search engine of the mid-1990s. Towards the year 2000, many coders felt
that the pain and time involved in crafting a meta tag out of some pretty
demanding HTML syntax was just not worth it. A more efficient way of doing it
was to concentrate on the title tags or 'headers'. Besides, many search
engines stopped supporting meta tag searches at the dawn of the Y2K era.

Just that Google's business plans placed the
'keyword' right back on the Web designer's jargon page. After a long time,
the meta tag is right at the center of controversy, and that's the way it
should be. With Google taking BMW's worldwide corporate website to task for
duplicating meta tag content and playing foul with Javascript on the pages of
www.bmw.de, the concept of page rankings is now raised to the equivalent of what
TRP ratings are in the broadcasting world.

Building on Google's search ranking methodology of
featuring the most visited Web page on top of its sponsored search results, many
Google customers have picked up the gauntlet of making it to the top of the
search results page on every conceivable angle of their business lines. A cement
manufacturer, for instance, would be keen to make it to the Top five search
results even on the strength of a keyword like 'set' (which figures in the
Guinness Book of World Records for having over 120 different usage contexts).

The last few years of the Google era have seen a
no-keywords-barred push to grab the Googler's eyeball by hook, crook,
Javascript or non-relevant keyword. Ironically, in the BMW case, its portal
happened to be more visited than the rest, not least because of Google. All the
more reason why it would be difficult for the uninitiated to notice anything
amiss during the first few visits to the bmw.de 'doorway' pages.

Hidden keywords also point at something, which is part of
our everyday online lives-spam. The outright manipulations of PPC by keyword
marketers and their cohorts have grown all the more recondite by the day.
Google's 'results' pages now clasp devious spamming possibilities, and all
the more, when sponsored links lead to multiple 'doorway' pages embedded
with hidden keywords, as the BMW case highlighted.

Google's excellent filters make it less vulnerable to
spam than Yahoo! and AOL. Though Gmail is still in the beta stage, a paid
Webmail model will emerge sooner than later as Google introduces more services
right within its Gmail accounts-such as integrating GoogleTalk with email chat
for instance. On February 7, Google announced plans to raise GoogleTalk's
visibility among the Gmail user community. Google announced that Gmail users
would be able to chat with their contacts from inside Gmail, without loading a
separate 'messenger'-their chats would also be searchable inside the 2.6
GB of storage per email account. The key possibility of this value upgradation
is: it will help the archiving of chat sessions and

herald the rise of personalized community archives among Gmail account holders.

Lured by Google's reputation as the most priced online
property, venture capitalists continue to arrive in droves to invest in the
company's latest ventures. It's planned user-run network of Wi-Fi hotspots
with Skype and Madrid based Fon, is being funded by Index Ventures and Sequoia
Capital to the tune of $21.7 mn. The band of 'Foneros' is expected to become
the world biggest independent Wi-Fi network by the end of the year. Yet, Google
is at the crossroads. As it moves into the rarefied arena of Wi-Fi hotspots and
personal chat archives, a clear road for PPC will have to be 'searched' out.

Ravi Menon

ravim@cybermedia.co.in