Issue No. 14

September 8, 2009

Behavioral Targeting Under Consideration by Feds

As the Federal Communications Commission considers a new national broadband plan, a fellow agency, the Federal Trade Commission, has urged it to consider restrictions to behavioral targeting.

In 17 pages of comments, which is the way in which one agency makes recommendations or raises concerns when another is considering new regulations, the FTC said consumers remain very concerned about the practice.

"A significant number of consumers appear to be particularly concerned about the tracking of their online activities for the purposes of, for example, delivering targeted advertisements," wrote the FTC. "It appears consumers generally maintain these concerns even where the data collected is not personally identifiable."

In particular, the commission is concerned about technologies that track a consumer's online activities to deliver targeted advertisements while also allowing providers to "advantage or disadvantage certain content or applications."

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Tracking Clicks on Facebook PPC Ads and Content Links

Tips and tricks for better keep track and evaluating traffic to your website from the growing social network

More and more of our clients ask for advice regarding how best to use Facebook as an effective means for driving more traffic to their websites.

This is increasingly important as recognized by comScore who recently reported that about one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook. While our Yield Web Marketing Suite doesn't include a Facebook module (yet!), we don't hesitate recommending its use as part of an overall Web marketing strategy.

Digg Implements a New "No Follow" Policy for Some Links

In his widely-read blog, Google's Matt Cutts announced that Digg, the popular site that enables crowd-sourced online content ratings, had implemented a new no-follow rule for links published on its site.

Digg said it would add "rel='nofollow' to any external link that we're not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity."

What this means is that links included in posts on Digg, which members can then add their endorsement to, could have a rel-nofollow attached to it if they believe the content to be scurrilous or not what it purports to be, preventing search engine crawlers from recognizing the link.

Major search engines count links to any given website as an indication of that site's popularity and authority, which helps them determine a site's rank in natural results. Links from certain very popular sites, including Digg, carry more weight than links from other, more pedestrian sites. Which is why, in part, content producers love it when a link to their site is included on Digg.

Cutts gave the move a thumbs-up because of what he views as another way to improve search results overall.

"Once a story looks real to them, I can imagine that they would lift the nofollow," he said. "So the new move by Digg is a positive change in my opinion, because Digg decreases the benefit for spammy stories but Digg still helps normal and high-quality stories in the search engines."