SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

October 22, 2009

"The Art of SEO" Isn't a Paint-by-Numbers Kit

The Art of War by Sun Tzu isn't about Chinese pottery and The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin and Jessie Stricchiola isn't a paint-by-numbers kit.

The Art of SEO is a comprehensive guide to search engine optimization strategies and tactics written by four SEO experts:

-- Eric Enge, the President of SEO consulting firm, Stone Temple Consulting, who is widely recognized as an expert on the topic of SEO.

-- Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz.org, one of the web's most popular portals on the topic of search.

-- Stephan M. Spencer, the founder, President & CEO of the SEO firm Netconcepts.

-- Jessie Stricchiola, the founder of Alchemist Media, Inc., a San Francisco search engine marketing company.

The Art of SEO provides proven guidelines and cutting-edge techniques for planning and executing a comprehensive SEO strategy. The authors clearly explain SEO fundamentals, while correcting many common misconceptions. If you are new to SEO, you'll get a complete and thorough SEO education, as well as an array of effective tactics, from basic to advanced. Seasoned practitioners will find this book useful as a complete reference to SEO best practices.

The chapters on Keyword Research, Developing an SEO-Friendly Website, Creating Link-Worthy Content & Link Marketing, and Tracking Results and Measuring Success are must-reads for anyone interested in mastering search engine optimization.

I interviewed Fishkin on the future of SEO at SES London 2009. He said people are using more social elements and direct methods of getting information rather than using the traditional search engines. Programs such as Yelp, OpenTable for local search, and Kayak, Faircast Live for travel search are examples of this recent development.

Fishkin said people today who want to converse or learn more about social media don't use Google but use such applications as Facebook or Twitter. He also offered his take on the significance of links.

Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz, on the future of SEO in 2009

Fishkin and Enge will both be speaking at SES Chicago 2009. Fishkin will be speaking about "PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle" and "Black Hat, White Hat: Does it Really Matter Anymore?" Enge will be speaking about "Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues."

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 13, 2009

Are Search Engine Optimizers Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists?

First of all, a shout out to Joanna Hogan‏ (surfwrite), who asked for my thoughts on the post by Derek Powazek entitled, entitled, "Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists."

It must have been a no good, very bad Columbus Day for Powazek. He decided to call search engine optimizers, "goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen."

Strong stuff.

Now, Powazek was called one of the top 40 "Industry Influencers" in 2007 by Folio Magazine. He once worked at pioneering sites like HotWired, Blogger, and Technorati. He now splits his time between working as "Chief of Awesome" for HP's MagCloud and Creative Director of Collecta, advising a handful of startup companies on community design. And you've got to admire a guy who "lives in San Francisco with his wife, two nutty Chihuahuas, a grumpy cat, and a house full of plants named Fred."

So, I read his rant -- twice. And I think it requires a response.

(By the way, I'd provide the same kind of response if he'd called public relations people flacks and spin doctors. There are some groups that need defending.)

So, what proof does Powazek offer that search engine optimizers can't "dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you" the way they claim they can?

He claims, "the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn't work."

Well, if the good advice were obvious, then "SEO training" wouldn't be such a popular search term. Go to Google Insights for Search and compare search volume patterns for the terms "SEO training" and "SEM training." As you will see, SEO training is hot, but SEM training is not.

And the people conducting these searches aren't looking for a new breed of con man. They are are looking for good advice about search engine optimization that isn't obvious.

And reputable organizations like Search Engine Strategies, Market Motive, and the SEMPO Institute all offer SEO courses for SEO specialists.

And there are books on the topic from reputable authors like Rebecca Lieb's The Truth About Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin, and The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie Stricchiola.

None of these SEO courses or SEO books would be necessary if the good advice was obvious.

Powazek also claims, "SEO is poisoning the web."

Well, it did once, when AltaVista was king of the hill back in 2000. And SEO could poison the web again -- if Google wasn't doing a better job than AltaVista did in fighting the darkside SEO masters that Powazek remembers from the old days. Apparently, Powazek missed the 2005 post by Gord Hotchkiss, who retold the story of my dinner with a black hat SEO. In between the courses, a confession came out that stopped me in my tracks: "Black hat stuff is getting too hard. I'm actually thinking about turning legit."

And, apparently Powazek didn't read the 2007 post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog that Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. He thinks "Google bombing" still works.

Now, it turns out that I do agree with Powazek on "the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web." He says, "Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again."

Or, as Google says about link schemes, "The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it."

Now, apparently Powazek has decided that calling search engine optimizers "spammers, evildoers, and opportunists" can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. Saying something controversial to generate discussion is a classic linkbaiting technique.

As Matt Cutts said in a 2006 post entitled, "SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting," on his Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO blog, "On a meta-level, I think of 'linkbait' as something interesting enough to catch people's attention, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though)."

The only thing easier than picking on search engine optimizers is to call public relations people flacks and spin doctors. That's like shooting fish in a barrel.

But that's another topic for another day.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

September 4, 2009

How to Optimize for Bing

Over at the official Bing blog, Principal Group Program Manager Rajesh Srivastava is offering up some tips on how to conduct search engine optimization (SEO) for their engine.

Much of Srivastava's advice is your basic SEO tips that you would apply for Google or Yahoo! But for you beginners out there, drill these SEO principles into your head:

  • Develop great, original content (including well-implemented keywords) directed toward your intended audience
  • Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users' web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
  • Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links

Bing has a Webmaster Center, similar to Google's Webmaster Central. Use it to help Bing index your site and improve your results even further. Here are tips for using Bing's Webmaster Center:

  • Review the Bing official guidelines for successful indexing document for various recommendations on technical and content issues as well as known problems that can affect your site's rank
  • Visit the Webmaster Center blog to keep up with the latest information from the team (you can even subscribe to our blog's RSS feed to automate this process)
  • Register all of your websites with Bing Webmaster Center tools, where you can use our tools to see all sorts of data to your website pertinent to webmasters
  • Participate in our Webmaster Center user forums to ask questions and provide us with feedback

What do you think of Bing's SEO tips? Do you have any to add? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

September 2, 2009

Digg Goes Nofollow to Reduce Spam

Social bookmarking site Digg is incorporating the Nofollow tag to a bunch of links in order to reduce spam. Links on user profiles, comments and not-so-popular posts will get the nofollow tag, meaning it won't pass along link juice.

Many have submitted content to Digg just for the links. Of course, the more popular a link is, then there's the added value of a traffic bump.

In their blog post announcing the change, Digg was not specific on how popular a link would have to be in order to get the Nofollow tag removed.

Digg said it worked with leading experts in SEO to come up with the rule. But since Google bullied Twitter into integrating Nofollow, you have to wonder how much of a collaboration this was and who the experts were.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Google Cash Scam Artists vs. White Knight SEO Campaign

During SES San Jose 2009, I heard about plans to launch a White Knight SEO campaign to fight the legion of Google Cash Scam artists. If you want some background on the effort, read Jonah Stein's post "Using SEO for Good - Introducting White Knight SEO."

As Stein explains, the group aims to protect users from spam blogs (splogs), Made for AdSense (MFA) sites, and other Google Cash Scam artists by "dominating organic search results with consumer protection information. We hope that we can place advisory content to take over the top 10 results in Google for searches related to common scams and online fraud with a particular focus on areas which are using adwords & adsense to snare victims."

The White Knight SEO campaign's first target is "Google Cash" and related terms. And it has already started generating posts.

One of the earliest that I've found is "Alert - Google Cash Scam," which was posted August 19, 2009, by David Rodnitsky of PPC Associates. Rodnitsky says, "Move over flogs, now there's something meatier! Introducing, um, fnews - fake news! I got a full-screen pop up today from the 'Los Angeles Tribunes' with the headline 'Breaking: Google is Hiring at Home Workers. Pay $373 Dollars a Day (or more).'"

On August 21, Jonathan Hochman, the founder of Hochman Consultants, joined the White Knight SEO campaign when he posted, "Google Turns Blind Eye to Scam Ads." According to Hochman, "Unless you live under a rock, you've no doubt seen those 'Google Cash business opportunity' ads from entities like Google Money Tree and Google Treasure Chest. They seem to be everywhere."

And earlier today, Stein re-doubled his efforts by posting "Google's Cash Cow - Scam Advertising & Profits." Stein writes, "By now, you have gotten at least one email inviting you to make easy money by placing links on Google. These scams go by names like 'The Google Cash System' or 'Easy Google Cash'. The bottom line is pretty simple, these offers are scams and they are designed to take advantage of the most vulnerable people in our society, the unemployed, the opportunity seekers and the naive."

It's still early days, but it will be worth watching the White Knight SEO campaign against the Google Cash Scam artists. If you search for "Google cash" in Google, the #1 organic listing is the question in Google's Web Search Help, "Is Google Cash a legitimate service?"

But the eye goes to the #4 organic listing, which is a YouTube video entitled "Google Cash Scam." You can also watch the 4-minute, 12-second video by Sean Kells of the ReviewAroo.com blog below.

Who knows, maybe there are already enough warning signs around for even the most naive searcher. On the other hand, it never hurts to ensure that the warnings are even more explicit. Stay tuned. This story has legs.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

August 17, 2009

Learn SEO for PDFs at eSeminar Hosted by Acrobat User Community

The Adobe Acrobat User Community (AUC) is hosting an eSeminar on how to optimize PDFs for search. The eSeminar occurs this Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 10:00am PST and it's FREE! (I know you like free.)

Here's what the AUC says you will learn at the eSeminar:

  • Determine the best way to create a PDF for on-screen viewing and quick downloading
  • Create and share custom presets designed to balance file size with quality based on the type of file and use cases.
  • Optimize your PDF files for optimal indexing and search results display by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

To learn more and register, click here.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 2, 2009

Read "The Truth About Search Engine Optimization" by Rebecca Lieb

Read, don't skim, "The Truth About Search Engine Optimization" by Rebecca Lieb. It's has just been published by FT Press and this book reveals 51 proven search engine optimization techniques and bite-siz, easy-to-use advice that gets results.

Okay, I should disclose that I've know Rebecca Lieb for years. She was the The ClickZ Network's editor-in-chief for over seven years, which is about as long as I've been doing SEO PR. But she now oversees the U.S. operations of Econsultancy, the leading source of independent advice and insight on digital marketing and e-commerce. So, I have no conflict of interest in plugging her book.

Lieb spoke at SES New York last week and Jamie O'Donnell, the co-founder of SEO-PR, interviewed her about the target audience for her new book. As she says in her introduction, "It's not a book for geeks. It will not teach you how to write code, or get you up to your elbows in programming. But whether you're a small webmaster or a chief marketing officer overseeing a search optimization initiative, you will learn tactics, strategies, and best practices for wrapping your arms around this whole search thing."

Rebecca also discusses her favorite takeaways from her new book. Of course, my favorite is Truth 22: "Using SEO PR as a link strategy."

Check out the interview below:

Rebecca Lieb, eConsultancy, on her new book about search engine optimization

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 20, 2009

SEW Experts: The Better You Rank...the Better You Rank!

The more popular your Web site is, the better the likelihood that your Web site will rank. In today's organic search engine optimization column, "The Better You Rank...the Better You Rank!," Mark Jackson explains that you need to maintain momentum in your both SEO and general marketing efforts to keep a steady flow of traffic coming to your Web site.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 17, 2008

SEO Can Be A Bear

We often take the mainstream press to task for not understanding the value of search engine marketing and search engine optimization. So it's a welcome change when a national columnist gets it right.

Today Steven Strauss in TheStreet.com wrote a column titled, "Get on Google's Good Side with SEO." With Matt Cutts' recent endorsement of "white hat" SEO, it's great to see small business embrace search engine optimization.

Strauss writes, "One of the questions I hear most often these days goes something like, 'How the heck am I supposed to keep my small business going in this economy? I don't have a lot of money for advertising.'"

He states - or perhaps overstates:

The good news is that there is in fact a great way to market your business that is not expensive and is very effective. However, it is quite time-consuming.

It's called search engine optimization. SEO gets you noticed, is practically free marketing and increases sales. SEO is the magic bullet.

Anyone who's done SEO knows it's not a magic bullet. Calling SEO a magic bullet beats "snake oil" any day of the week.

Since he's writing for beginners, Strauss compares fear of SEO to an Alec Baldwin-Anthony Hopkins movie written by David Mamet, "The Edge."

I am reminded of the 1997 movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. In it, the two men are stranded in the Alaska Outback after their small plane crashes.

Soon they are being stalked by a bear. Eventually Hopkins' character convinces himself and Baldwin's character, Bob, that they can slay the bear.

"I'm going to kill the bear," Hopkins' character says, "Say it! Say I'm going to kill the bear!"

Bob says it, halfheartedly.

Charles (Hopkins) then yells at Bob: "Say it! Say I'm going to kill the bear!" Bob says it.

"Say it again," says Charles. Bob, starting to feel it, says it more loudly. "I'm going to kill the bear." "Again!" Charles bellows. Finally, Bob yells, convincingly, " I Am Going To Kill The Bear!"

Finally, they kill the bear.

You must believe in SEO and your ability to achieve online marketing goals to succeed.

Steven D. Strauss is a lawyer, author and USA TODAY columnist. His latest book is the Small Business Bible. He's spoken around the world about entrepreneurship, including at the UN, and has been seen on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, The O'Reilly Factor, and many other television and radio shows. He maintains a Web site at www.MrAllBiz.com.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 15, 2008

SEW Experts: Duplicate Content -- A True Story

Dealing with sites that steal your content is not fun. But it doesn't have to be difficult. In today's organic SEO column, "Duplicate Content -- A True Story," Mark Jackson outlines a few simple steps before and after you discover the offending scraper sites.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 14, 2008

Google Talks Ranking and Basic SEO Again, This Time on Adsense Blog

Recently, Google's Matt Cutts gave USA Today readers 5 SEO Tips, which many of our readers found quite basic (albeit good). Then, last week, Google gave an overview of its ranking system. Both come in the midst of Google's latest push to inform about its privacy policy. Now, Google has taken to the AdSense blog to inform publishers of basic SEO tips.

Here's what Ambroise Fensterbank, Search Quality Evaluator, recommends:

  • Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
  • Use tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
  • For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about.

Fensterbank also recommends updating your site with fresh content, which may help the Googlebot crawl your pages more regularly. Also, it may attract links.

And what would a good instructional post be without a video? Hit play below to learn more.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 3, 2008

Banned from Google? Get Back in the Game

The Official Google Webmaster Central blog has posted steps on how to get reincluded in the search results should you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of being exempted. Mariya Moeva, of the Search Quality Team, hosts an entertaining how-to vid explaining the steps you should take when your site is Google-less. For those who can't or don't want to view the video, look below for the steps in text.

1. Check your access. Log into your Webmaster Tools account and check the Overview page to see what happened when Googlebot visited your site last. Also, check your robots.txt file to make sure there aren't any pages blocked that you want seen by Google. 2. Check your messages. There could be a message in your Message Center inbox of your Webmaster Tools account regarding your site. 3. Read the Guidelines. Make sure you know what Google does and does not allow for sites it lists in its search results. 4. Help Group. When all else fails, join the webmasters help group where other webmasters and Googlers can help determine what's going on. 5. Fix your site! Once you know what's wrong, fix your site! 6. Submit a Reconsideration Request. After you've made the fixes, submit a request for Google to check your site again.

Have you ever submitted a reinclusion request? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

Related Reading: Google Updates SEO Recommendations Article

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

July 2, 2008

Google Updates SEO Recommendations Article

Google has updated its article entitled, "What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?" Included in the update are the benefits of SEO as well as guidelines when choosing an SEO company or consultant.

The benefits mentioned in the article are:

  • Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
  • Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
  • Content development
  • Managing online business development campaigns
  • Keyword research
  • SEO training

Google also offers up 6 questions to ask a potential SEO vendor, but back in March, our own Marty Weintraub posted 48 questions you should consider when signing up for search marketing services. And earlier today, Aaron Shear discussed upsells agencies use to keep clients on board.

When hiring an SEO agency, it's always important to know enough SEO to make sure your vendor is pursuing the best practices. Google's article is a good place to start and of course, stay tuned to Search Engine Watch for news and tips in the SEO industry.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 22, 2008

Get in on the Conversation about the Future of SEO

There has been much discussion about the future of SEO lately. A-list bloggers galore are writing SEO's obituary, much to the dismay of site owners and search engine marketers. Earlier this week, Mike Grehan delivered his thoughts on the matter over at ClickZ. He also started a thread in the Search Engine Watch forums to discuss his post.

Here are some main takeaway points from Mike's post:

  • SEO will give way to a new form of digital asset management and optimization. This new SEO will place a much larger emphasis on optimizing a range of file types, from PDFs to images to audio/visual.
  • More effort will be placed on feeds to search engines. Not just XML feeds into paid inclusion and shopping comparison, but also feeds with other types of information, such as local, financial, news, and other verticals.
  • Mobile will become much more popular, search will gradually become more of a personalized experience.
  • Personalization and digital asset optimization will end 1999-style ranking reports, as search engine results will be based on blended results from end-user specifics, such as geographic location, time of day, previous searching history, and peer group preference.
  • Online, monitoring the customer voice will become more important than pushing a brand message. Reputation management will become more important as marketing continues its reversal from a broadcast medium to a listening medium.
  • Marketing into networks will see huge growth, and social search will grow with it.

Over at the forums, Grehan is looking for feedback on the following:

  • Should search engine ranking algorithms continue to be based only on the data they have about people who happen to have web sites and therefore have text pages and can link to others. Or is the voice and opinion of the end user now being heard much more clearly?
  • Do I really think that a number one result at Google for the term – blue widgets – is a fair result if only people who have web sites can vote for its top ranking position? Or should the millions of people who use blue widgets and don't have a web site also be able to have some influence on that ranking?

Get in on the conversation about the future of SEO. Head over to the forums and share your thoughts.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 8, 2008

Could the Term "SEO" Become Trademarked?

If you read the headline and thought it was just a teaser to get you to read this post, think again. SEOs really do have a new trademark issue to worry about. According to a post by Sarah Bird on SEOmoz, a man named Jason Gambert has applied for a trademark of the term, "SEO." It would be my pleasure to write this next sentence saying that Trademark Office isn't complying with Gambert's wish, but that isn't the case.

On March 25, the Trademark Office notified Gambert of the following news:

"The mark of the application identified appears to be entitled to registration. The mark will, in accordance with Section 12(a) of the Trademark Act of 1946, as amended, be published in the Official Gazette on the date indicated above for the purpose of opposition by any person who believes he will be damaged by the registration of the mark. If no opposition is filed within the time specified by Section 13(a) of the Statute or by rules 2.101 or 2.102 of the Trademark Rules, the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks may issue a certificate of registration."

And let it be a lesson to those who quit easily, Gambert has actually been rejected several times during his application process. But he has persevered, and his persistence has paid off.

If you feel you would be harmed by the issuance of a trademark for the term SEO, it might be in your best interest to contact the Trademark Office and let them know.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:43 AM | Permalink

February 20, 2008

How to Drive More Organic Traffic by Understanding Search Engine Algorithms

This morning over at Seattle-based blog SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin asks "What is an Algorithm? How does it apply to the Search Results at Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live?" The post, How to Track the Evolution of Search Engine Algorithms & Why It's Important to Do So, amounts to a free clinic regarding the "whys" and "hows" for professionals seeking to garner more organic search traffic. "The vast majority of search marketers operating in the organic space at least lay claim to "following the latest algorithms" at the search engines, and in 90% of the client pitches I've ever heard (or made, for that matter), the subject comes up at least once. However, I think this is still a topic about which there's not a lot of true understanding and for those new to the field, it's probably the most daunting aspect of the work. So, to help ease some pain, I figured I'd address many of the most common questions about keeping up with the search engines' ever-changing mathematical formulas that rank search results." Rand Fishkin The article gets to the algorithmic red meat: inherent trust in link metrics, domain trust over the importance of individual pages, temporal analysis of link growth, sandboxing of new websites, fixing blog comment spam, and Google's recent crackdown on reciprocal tactics.

Posted by Marty Weintraub at 7:53 AM | Permalink

February 18, 2008

Does Pay Per Click Make SEOs Lazy?

SEOBOOK's Aaron Wall, in what will likely be a hot post around the social news and bookmarking universe, serves up candid and insightful thinking on the long term competitive advantage of classic search engine optimization vs. pay per click. His writing style is hungry and tone passionate. Aaron's got his Mojo on in this delightfully self-effacing comparison of SEO & PPC's long-term value. Wall writes, "This is why I like SEO so much more than PPC. Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships. We are afraid of failure, afraid of success, and afraid that we are investing too much in one place. But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can't just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul." Many A-list SEOs have weighed in to the dialog regarding the Tao of SEO and PPC in tandem and separately. For additional perspective read "PPC vs. Organic," David Naylor, Lee Odden's classic 2006 "The Lame PPC and SEO Debate," and sugerrae's recent rant, "The Lazy SEO vs. The Lazy Monetizer." In a street level video interview, Rand Fishkin discusses using PPC to test organic concepts, PPC vs. SEO in China, and other useful concepts.

Posted by Marty Weintraub at 7:13 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2007

Myth Busting: Affiliate Marketing

There is a persistent belief out there by many that affiliate marketing is bad. The truth is that it's all in the packaging, and whether or not your site adds any value.

During the early days of SEO, when it was easy to rank highly in search engines, about all you needed to know was how to spell SEO, it was almost trivial to make hordes of money with affiliate sites. The problem was that hordes of sites that were extremely thin on content came out.

As the search engines matured in their understanding of ranking issues, they recognized that these sites did not add any unique new value to the user. They began to try and detect these types of sites, and the sites became known as "thin affiliates" or "affiliate spam sites".

A classic thin affiliate site would be a directory of products from one affiliate partner, organized into a tree, with no other products on the site, and all the product descriptions are supplied by the affiliate partner. There is no added value here, because the affiliate partner's product appear all over the web, on sites using that same description.

Unchecked, this leads to a search engine index that may have most of its first ten results for related search queries coming from pages with the same content. Search engines don't like this. One big reason is that they work hard to provide variety to their users, because if the first 10 results are all essentially the same, and it's not the answer the user is looking for, the user will most likely leave without being satisfied. Not good.

Looking deeper into this, one of the big issues is the natural ambiguity in user search queries. It's a fact: Users do not accurately specify what they want. This goes beyond the obvious queries, such as "Jaguar", which can mean an animal, a car, a guitar, or even potentially a football team.

Even with a fairly straightforward query such as "diabetes", it is not clear what the user wants. Do they want diet information? Do they want to find a doctor? Do they want to read about novel new treatments? Are they a doctor looking for the latest research? These types of query problems are the rule, and not the exception.

The way the search engine deals with this is by providing variety in results. Thin affiliate sites do not provide variety.

It would be wrong, however, to say that affiliate marketing is bad. The problem with thin affiliates is in the sameness of the content. If you have a site loaded with content that you have uniquely developed, there is nothing wrong with monetizing that through affiliate programs. The key question is whether or not your site provides variety.

This very same issue is at the heart of successful link building as well. People don't link to your for the purpose of helping you make money. The sites you really want links from are the ones who link to great content, because they want users to find that content in the event that what the user wants is not on their site.

So even if you write a bunch of original articles, but they are more or less on the same topics with the same message that 100 other people have written about, you are not adding enough value to the conversation to get authoritative sites to link to your site. You really need to be adding something to the conversation.

From a strategic perspective, the search engines don't want this remixed content either. This may be a bit harder for them to detect directly, but if they see you have written a bunch of "original" articles, they may not be able to detect that you have said nothing new, but they will be able to see that you are not getting the high quality links that would be an indicator of high content quality.

Ultimately, it's about the content. If you are really adding value to the conversation, no one is going to worry about how you are monetizing it (of course, this assumes you are not flooding all your pages with ads and creating a bad user experience).

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2007

A look into the purpose of Google's "PageRank update"

A lot of blogs have been talking about a PageRank update in progress, but if you look under the covers, it really looks like a manually applied update to a set of sites that are being punished. While the majority of these look like they have been selling links, some of the affected sites do not appear to be selling links. You can see a listing of many sites that were affected here on SEOmoz.

There are reports from a couple of the affected sites, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable that their traffic has not been affected in any way. Bearing in mind that the PageRank display in the Google toolbar is always out of date, losses in ranking and traffic from Google rankings adjustments would normally occur before a visible toolbar update.

It may be that the purpose of these updates is to make it more difficult for link sellers and link buyers to place a value on a link purchase. The Google tool bar PageRank has been one of the most common ways of measuring a site's value in link sales situations. Perhaps the theory is that obscuring what the tool bar would normally show will affect the text link market.

If this is all that Google intends to do to these sites, I don't think it will meet their objectives. Links can get a value placed on them by a variety of other means. However, I would be very cautious about being complacent about this. Google has demonstrated in the past a willingness to send a warning shot across the bow before taking greater action. For example, many people have seen 30 day penalties (removal from the index) applied to their web site, only to bounce back.

When I discussed this with Matt Cutts, he made it clear that Google uses this approach to provide warnings to webmasters to repent their sins and repair the problems that Google detected. Perhaps this is more of the same. It may be that web sites who continue to leave their paid links up will then be subjected to a greater penalty, such as removal, or a rankings drop comparable to the PageRank drop. Only time will tell us how this will unfold.

As a final note on this update, I have looked over a large number of pages that should have some visiable PageRank when Google next does a general update. For example, this interview with Rajat Mukherjee is listed in the webmaster tools account for the Stone Temple web site as having the highest PageRank for the site for the month of August.

Yet it still shows no PageRank. I have done similar checks on dozens of other pages across various sites that should have had some PageRank changes if this was a general update. No change was visible on these pages. As a result, I believe we are looking at an update that was applied on a manual basis to a set of web sites, and most likely, this was just a warning to those sites.

Posted by at 10:17 AM | Permalink

October 16, 2007

Reservation Road: A Study in how NOT to launch a movie on the 'net

By Carrie Hill, SEW Expert, Little Biz

Our Editor at SearchEngineWatch, Kevin Heisler, threw down the gauntlet – he wants the blog contributors and SEW Experts to collaborate on a project. The goal? We need to "get the word out" about Reservation Road, a new feature film from FocusFeatures.com and director Terry George starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo.

After poking around and seeing what's already existing around the 'net? We found the studio to be lacking a few basic "musts" for setting their film up for success in the online market and blogosphere.

Homepage

First of all, there is no site dedicated solely to the movie and the news surrounding the movie. When you visit the site "ReservationRoad.net" you're redirected to the FocusFeatures.com homepage that talks about a variety of movies they're producing. If you select the link for "Reservation Road," you're taken to a page with a note saying "website coming soon" and a pic of the movie poster – oops.

MySpace

The film didn't have a MySpace page – something I think is probably a must for any movie that wants to attract a large audience. If you look at the homepage of MySpace today, you'll see a huge layout and ad for the new National Treasure movie starring Nicholas Cage – score one for Disney.

I set up a MySpace page for Reservation Road and threw some movie trailer clips on and a few photos. That seems to be another issue, as there aren't that many great photos out about the movie for people to share and talk about. I found a few here and there, and there is a photo gallery at FocusFeatures.com – but the photos aren't really promotional, just movie stills and somewhat dull.

Search

Because there are so many varied critical opinions associated with movies, I think it's important to have good search engine saturation from the get-go. To be honest, Reservation Road doesn't deliver. I just did a Google query (see below) for "Reservation Road" and a new news item is showing in the #1 position Рbasically a review saying it's clich̩ and to skip it from MSNBC Рoops again.

You can also see Focus Features is buying PPC ads (again, see below). This is great but the ad isn't really saying what the movie is about and who is starring. For a movie with little to no buzz, my opinion is they should really be talking about who is starring, what it's about and some other text about the Oscar buzz I've been hearing about but can't seem to find online.

So – what are the lessons here?

1. Be prepared and have a site ready to go and live at least a week before your film premieres – I'd probably even have a site as soon as you have a title and put updates on filming, timeline and some blog posts from the stars of the film to age the domain and the "power" it can create.

2. You're going to get some bad reviews, that's the nature of show business – so be ready and have your film saturated across the web with news items, press releases, Web site mentions, and social media blitzes (MySpace et. al.)

3. A new movie is like a new brand – you need to get it out there, use paid search to your advantage and keep in mind that you have limited real estate available to get your point across.

We'll keep you updated on our progress and if (and when) you've seen the movie, let us know what you thought about it at the Reservation Road MySpace page.

Posted by at 5:22 PM | Permalink

The Reservation Road Challenge

Last week, our esteemed SEW editors threw out a challenge. There's a new film getting released this Friday, called Reservation Road. It's based on a best seller from a decade ago. It's got a great director and cast. How could we grow traffic as quickly as possible? How could we share the fine art of search marketing, too?

Here are a few tactics to get started:

1. Point all the traffic home. Even though the book and movie may be found in many places online, we want Reservation Road to lead somewhere. Our only bet seems to be the .net domain which re-directs to the Focus Features studio site. When you get there, you land on a page about several films including this release. There are some interesting previews and clips when you click on the movie. So it's a start.

2. Act like a movie fan. We wanted to join the fans who already are linking Reservation Road to their sites about Joaquin Phoenix and others in the film. As part of priming this pump, we spent less than a day creating these pedestrian fan sites (and it shows). Note they all have different takes on the upcoming entertainment:

> Video Clips site – acts as a billboard, with simple reviews and links to clips (Reservation Road) > General blog – links to movie premieres, books (Reservation Road) > Actors blog – waxes enthusiastically about the movie and its actors (Reservation Road) > Movie Reviews blog – links to all reviews, nothing edited (Reservation Road) > Photos site – shows selected pix of the lead actors, from red carpets (Reservation Road) > Book blog – links to original book reviews and more (Reservation Road Book)

3. Ask for your help! Please go online and learn more about Reservation Road. Feel free to click on these fan sites above, contribute to the blogs (at least the more modern ones), link to them, or tag whatever interests you about the movie or book. Or dispense with these lovely sites entirely, and just share anything about Reservation Road.

The SEW bloggers and writers are trying to push for *only* a few days, as a model for what happens over longer timeframes. We'll report back on what succeeds and fails here.

Posted by at 12:53 AM | Permalink

October 8, 2007

Matt Cutts Interview

During my recent visit to the Googleplex, I sat down and interviewed Matt Cutts. One of the things I wanted to get a handle on was how Google handles links encoded in Javascript, or that go through redirects.

A lot of time people implement click throughs so they can analyze the outbound link traffic. Matt told me that there is a recent proposal someone made to add a ping attribute to links, which would allow for that type of tracking without having to send the link through a redirect. Interesting idea.

More importantly, the bottom line is that Google does try to track these links, and still pass PageRank appropriately. This is good news for SEOs who groan when they get a great link from a .gov or .edu site that goes through a redirect. Google will still try to pass PageRank for that link. However, as always, the best practice is to try and get the link as a direct link.

Posted by at 8:25 AM | Permalink

September 18, 2007

SEW Experts: Google Dance in Aeon Flux

In today's au Natural column, "Google Dance in Aeon Flux," Mark Jackson explores the "Google Dance." Some SEO experts say the Google don't dance. Others claim the Google Dance never ends. What does it mean for SEM, ranking reports, and site analytics?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2007

NoFollow as an SEO Optimization Tool

Rand at SEOmoz published some great information based on questions he asked Matt Cutts. There were several interesting questions answered, but I think the biggest nugget was the suggestion that you can freely use NoFollow within your own site to control PageRank flow, including on your own internal links, without fear of it being seen as a poor quality signal by Google. The quote from Matt was as follows:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

This opens up some really interesting advanced SEO techniques. For example, do you really want to have PageRank flowing to that "Contact Us" page? Or that "About Us" page? Or a page that simply lists your clients? Now you can keep the page there for users, but tell Google that you don't want to spend any PageRank on them.

For that matter, you can do some research on your site using web analytics, and find out what pages are not providing any traffic any way, or which pages are not providing any conversions. Then you can take these pages and cut back on the PageRank flow to them, and increase the PageRank flow to the pages that matter the most.

If you have a large and complex site, this opens up some great dynamics. I suspect that this statement by Matt launched a few thousand experiments in understanding how to leverage this aspect of NoFollow.

Posted by at 11:45 AM | Permalink

August 28, 2007

SEW Experts: Tools of the Trade

In today's au Natural column, "Tools of the Trade," Mark Jackson recommends several useful tools for running an effective search engine optimization campaign.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2007

SEW Experts: Public Relations Train Wrecks

In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Public Relations Train Wrecks," Kevin Ryan reports in from SES on the press and search optimization controversy.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 31, 2007

Training a New SEO

One of the interesting challenges in managing an SEO company is training new people to be top notch SEOs. I find that this is the easiest way to expand the size of the business. After all, SEOs are in scarce supply, and many of the best have their own SEO companies already. Here are 8 aspects of training an SEO generalist to consider when taking on this training task:

  1. A good SEO has both business / marketing skills and technical skills. SEO inherently involves an understanding of the technical details of a site's implementation, but it's also a marketing activity. Quality SEOs know that they are only a component of the marketing picture for a web site, and they understand that there are compromises that will be made from time to time due to other aspects of the client's needs.
  2. Make sure your SEO in training has an entrepreneurial personality. SEOs are always going to be ask to deal with a wide variety of different problems, and need to be flexible and adaptable.
  3. Pick an initial area of focus. There are hundreds of things to learn in the SEO field. Don't bury the person at the start. Let them focus on and master a specific area.
  4. Start slow. Don't give them 5 clients to work on at once. Get them going on a single client, and help them to be successful with that client.
  5. Realize that your workload on that first client will go up. Training people is hard work, and you still need to make sure that the work gets done correctly for the client (first priority!). So in addition to doing almost the same amount of work, you will also be spending time educating your SEO in training. It might be the 3rd client or so before you get a net gain.
  6. Have all their work on the first 2 or 3 clients go through you. The client comes first. This will also give you the most visibility into what they have learned so far, and that they haven't
  7. Be patient. It's easy to under-appreciate the complexity of SEO. No single aspect of SEO is hard. What makes it hard is that the search engines keep their algorithms secret so knowledge is experience based, there are so many different details to learn, and the nature of search is constantly evolving.
  8. Lastly, in contrast to the title of this post, don't think about creating SEOs, think about creating web marketers. The mission is to increase site traffic for your client, and there is more than one way to do that these days (consider social media for example).

Posted by at 2:41 PM | Permalink

March 20, 2007

No More Video Island for About.com

Vertical publishers like About.com have clearly evolved in the last year alone. They used to think about video as a separate island, shown in a pop-up window. Now they want all media integrated within their sites, as a traffic performance boost. About provides information on 650 separate topics. Expert guides write their own content and 1.6 million pieces have been created overall. According to Jessica Luterman, just 60 “how-to” videos were created through last year. These videos weren't easy enough to find or use, and it was impossible to tie ad revenues to them.

About recently began integrating videos within their updated content pages. See the full transcripts, related videos, text and articles surrounding videos, in this Knife Safety example.

Video inventory has increased ten-fold, to 650 videos this year. Some 1,500 original videos are expected by next year. The process for creating videos has been vastly simplified, and it's possible to scale quickly.

The main video topics include autos, gadgets, food, health, home, parenting and style. About is focused on producing video content where there's current ad demand, a genuine benefit to showing information in video format and core non-video content strength.

About attracts over 32 million uniques monthly to their domain. Their content is highly searchable from the organic search engines already. By integrating video-related content, especially the transcripts, they continue building on their SEO strength. As video content grows, they may be able to push time-spent metrics as well.

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink

February 20, 2007

Becoming a Successful Web Entrepreneur

Michael Gray put up a nice post yesterday about Finding Your Inner Jerry McGuire. Not a goal I aspire to personally, but the point of the post is that you need to take chances to get to the top of your profession, whatever it may be.

It means that you have to create an image of your own, one that pushes and promotes ideas that you are personally passionate about. While Michael is specifically addressing SEOs, his post applies to any entrepreneurial business. If you are a webmaster, know that creating a distinct site, with unique content that differentiates you from the pack is a requirement for success.

The web world is very competitive, and winning attention (and in bound links) requires that you bring something new to the table. People don't give you links for the purpose of making you money. They give you links because you offer unique and new content (or tools) that no one that they have seen has, and because they think that your site will be valuable to their users.

Don't be afraid to occupy a niche spot either. In many businesses, the niche spots can do quite well. Develop a passionate core audience and build out from there.

And be opportunistic. The best opportunity to distinguish your business may not yet have made itself known to you. But keep your eyes open, and when the right situation comes up, be ready to jump on it. Land on it with both feet, and go after it heart and soul. And if that first one does not work out, get ready to do it again when the next opportunity comes up.

Posted by at 8:32 AM | Permalink

February 19, 2007

The 301 Redirect Headache

Moving Web pages that have been indexed by search engines to a new URL via a 301 permanent redirect can cause serious dips in traffic once the search engines discover that the old page has moved. This is a headache that must be planned for whenever anyone considers changing the addresses of their Web pages, for whatever reason.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable last week highlighted a discussion at Google Groups in which Google's Adam Lasnik claimed that it only takes them a "couple of weeks for things to smooth out."

Unfortunately, although Google seems to be able to index pages within a few weeks, the past rankings for those pages are not updated in any time close to that, especially for competitive terms, without some additional effort. The primary method to speed this process seems to be gaining links from authority sites to the new URL, in a rapid fashion. Funny because that also seems to be the way out of what some call the fictional Google Sandbox.

The "trick" often used in order to try to lessen the severity of the old pages' loss of rankings is to employ a 302 redirect instead. This causes Google to keep the listing of the previous page within its index, and often in the same position within the rankings.

Some SEO's recommend using this tactic while "building up value" of the new pages through the form of new links that lead to the new URL. Although I have personally seen this work, I would recommend using 301s right away for all pages. It is nice to do this "off-season" if you are a seasonal kind of business, but unfortunately that isn't the case for every one.

I have always hoped to find a larger sample of case studies which show that Google can perform faster than what people consistently forecast as 3 months before original rankings are regained, if ever. Unfortunately, according to our engineers, the clients we have worked with have rarely seen this rapidity in bounce-back-ability. I asked Barry who agreed that 3 months was much closer to the norm.

So will Google allow users of the Webmaster Central portal to maybe jump line when it comes to regaining lost rankings due to URL rewrite or move? Will its algorithm ever speed this process out or will it stay like this to help avoid accidentally ranking pages which have considerable content changes.

Either way, moving to new URLs is something that will cause headaches no matter what, it seems. Everyone involved with the Web site should know that before the redirects are implemented, and other means of driving traffic to the pages should be considered as a top gap. These means include, but are not limited to the use of Paid Search, traditional marketing, as well as banner placement on well-trafficked sites.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 12:14 PM | Permalink

February 7, 2007

Want to Succeed in SEO? Think Like a Search Engineer

Understanding the way search engineers think can help you decide whether or not a new idea is worth trying. Knowing when you are taking risks, or making the decision to avoid them, can help scale your search engine marketing strategy to new heights. Eric Enge assumes the role of search engineer in today's SearchDay.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:00 PM | Permalink

January 17, 2007

What Are SEO Best Practices?

Best practices for search engine optimization are constantly evolving, and are starting to look more like conventional business plans. Following best practices can greatly contribute to the success or failure of your SEO efforts.

Today's best practices fall into four main categories:

  1. Subject-Matter Expertise
  2. Information Architecture
  3. Technical Implementation
  4. Marketing

Check out today's SearchDay to get the details on today's SEO best practices from Eric Enge, president of Stone Temple Consulting.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:13 AM | Permalink

January 16, 2007

Improve Your WordPress Search Results

Getting a WordPress blog up and running is easy. However, getting the best search results from your WordPress blog has typically required more than a little creativity.

Thanks to Ross McKillop at downloadsquad.com, this task has been simplified for experienced as well as new users. In his helpful article, WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist, Ross provides 23 clearly illustrated tips for WordPress users. For those interested in better search results, he shows where it makes sense to bypass the default (examples: changing the permalinks structure and title formats) and make more search-friendly choices.

Ross provides his readers detailed guidance in each tip. The links he has chosen to include are also helpful, particularly those addressing SEO issues. For WordPress users, this is a recommended read.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 10:13 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2006

The Link Building Conundrum - Eric Ward's View

Over the past year, there has been much talk about link building, in most cases specifically related to buying links. As Barry discussed and I commented on last week, the most recent hotly discussed topic has been around the subject of reciprocal linking. According to some interpretations of the Google Blog post from last week, reciprocal linking is now an "official no-no" when it comes to Google's ranking algorithm.

Last night, Webmasterrardio.fm's show "The Pulse" included a guest speaker who is very well acquainted with linking: Eric Ward. Eric gave some great insight into his opinions on the subject of reciprocal linking and link building best practices.

Eric was welcomed to the show by Co-Hosts Barry Schwartz, Ben Pfeiffer, and me. He introduced himself and his history (find out more about his link building history), and discussed his approach to building links which he feels is a bit different from the “norm” these days. He understands the fear of reciprocal linking that is being raised by some of Google's recent statements. Yet he feels that is there is concern, then maybe the worried party should question why they built the reciprocal links to begin with.

The trouble, Eric feels, is when people enter into a reciprocal link engagement with the initial intent to fool or game the Google algorithm in order to improve the rank of the site. He feels that this was never the original intent of reciprocal linking, when the practice started before Google even existed. The key point, however, is that it is difficult for the search engines to determine intent in a reciprocal relationship without looking further.

Eric surmises that the algorithms need more than just the presence of a few reciprocal (A>B>A) links in order to determine intent. He gave some examples of ways that search engines may be able to look for what he calls “signals of intent,” such as looking for further links and finding the presence of link farms or other sites that have been flagged in the past. If they do, then they should possibly return to look more closely at other relationships.

Eric also briefly introduced what he calls the “Matt Cutts rule,” asking webmasters to consider if they would try to get a particular link with Matt Cutts sitting on their shoulder. When asked if there is a difference between penalization and devaluation (remembered that word today), Eric felt that it would be “foolish and reckless” of Google to penalize a site without some “pretty heavy analysis.” He notes that he has seen sites drop in rankings due to what he believes is a temporary devaluation of some links that had helped the site in the past, while Google investigates those sites further.

The last question asked was how he would pick a high quality link. He brought up an example of getting links from .edu top level domains. He suggested putting oneself in the search engine's position: can they trust the link even if from an .edu site? If the page has links to YouTube, MySpace, and Napster, for example, it is pretty likely that it is a student page, which may be cause for concern if a commercial link appears along side. However, if the page is obviously a part of a Veterinarian School, for example, the “algorithmic footprint” left by the page's other outbound links may indicate that it is more trustworthy. Great stuff.

Eric summarized by saying that people should understand that any tactic used for link building could lead to potential repercussions. There are places that sites should have links anyway, he recommends, regardless if the engine will give credit for them or not.

Added: I just noticed Rand's excellent post on this subject, which also led to Danny's equally detailed opinion.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:26 AM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

Keyword Research Best Practices

Barry pointed out a great response to thread at Search Engine Watch forums by Paid Search Guru Ian McAnerin. A member had asked Forum visitors which industries they "would not touch with a 10 foot SEO pole?"

Ian answers led to some additional excellent discussion at SEW and a couple of gems in the SER comments.

Keyword research is a topic that is considered to be very basic by many in the SEO and Paid Search fields. This is likely due to the fact that it has been one of the few constants since the early days of SEO, when tools began to appear that were geared towards finding the right keywords. Since, many writing about the subject have indicated the same core needs: relevancy and popularity, including Danny from way back when, Kevin Lee, Shari Thurow, and most recently Christine Churchill.

Ian's post at Search Engine Watch makes three main points: First that some industries may be too difficult to venture into without specialized experience; secondly, you may not want to venture into some industries due to business concerns (he cites Realtors as being especially “difficult” when it comes to payment or buying in to the value); and lastly that your personal belief set may be in conflict with the particular industry, such as Hate or Porn sites, for example.

Ian comment raised some good follow up questions, and he defends his opinion that one should “cut their teeth” by targeting more localized terms. The whole topic leads well to a discussion of the core competency of keyword research. When venturing into a new space, it is likely that many SEO's are at a slight disadvantage due to being unfamiliar with terms. When deciding on whether to accept a project, it actually takes a fair amount of diligence on the part of any SEO; otherwise they may be simply saying “sure we'll get you ranked.” This could be an alarm signal.

Using geo-modified keywords as the target can also prove to be difficult if not properly done. In some cases, there may be a majority of searchers using the city or town before the more general term (i.e.: Timbuktu hotel) while in others, people may use it more often after the term. The fact is that without excellent and trusted keyword research, only trial and error will lead to the required log files that report the actual activity. This trial and error period can be greatly eased by having an unlimited paid search budget to run all keywords on broad match across all engines for at least 2 or three months. Unfortunately not everyone has the budget to do that. However, running these types of campaigns on a local basis may be somewhat helpful.

One comment that was very insightful at the SER blog was that “generally the most competitive websites have the highest cost in PPC advertising. Find the biggest spenders and you have the stiffest competition.” Although this is a generalization, it holds fairly true. When making a decision as to whether to venture into an industry for SEO, a quick check of the results pages for Paid Search listings can save a good amount of time for small SEO/SEM shops.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 9:09 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2006

Yahoo! Organic Rankings Update Confirmed

Yahoo! has been updating its organic search results database since Sunday night and states they will complete the process by the end of today, December 13, 2006. Initial feedback is naturally louder on the negative side, but the topic is being discussed in various areas, including the Yahoo! Search Blog announcement from Tim Mayer.

Tim had actually commented on the story earlier at the WebmasterWorld Forums, under his sneaky alias of "Tim" in this thread about the latest Yahoo! update. WebmasterWorld appears to have been the first source indicating there was a shift happening.

The topic has raised some questions in regards to the timing, reminding some of the much maligned and often misunderstood Florida update that cost Google plenty in public relations costs. Barry Lloyd has a good recap of that at the Search Engine Journal.

The bottom line, however, seems to be that the majority of well-designed and deserving sites will likely remain roughly in the same position in the rankings, with a few good ones possibly slipping through. The majority of the noise around most of these updates comes from those that have lost position, and rarely do the good luck stories make headlines. A few of those from past updates can be found within the comments threads at MattCutts Blog .

One question to ask, is will this update affect YPN publishers in a way that Bourbon did to AdSense publishers as discussed in this thread at WMW?

Further discussion also at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 9:35 AM | Permalink

October 27, 2006

Competitive Intelligence & Link Searches

Rand over at SEOMoz has a great write up on Long List of Link Searches where he goes through a sample client and how he would approach the competitive intelligence aspect of the SEO research. This is a must read for any SEO because he goes through "the obvious," some "advanced operators," "alternative search sources," "directory search terms," "blog & forum searches," and "submit type searches." The best part is that this is a practical example that gives you actionable items to run through in your own SEO practices. Gotta love Rand for doing this, most would not.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

October 16, 2006

How Can Search Engines Rank Results? Let Bill Count The Ways

20 Ways Search Engines May Rerank Search Results from Bill Slawski at SEO By The Sea looks at the many ways search engines can or could rank search results after an initial ranking has been determined. Duplicates might be dropped; personal data could influence results; country-specific targeting might happen among other things. Like that? Then you probably want to check out Search Engine Ranking Factors from SEOmoz. Written last year, it covers over 100 factors that search engines might consider to do initial ranking. The main takeaway from me is that all these factors -- pre- and post-ranking -- simply underscore how we are moving further into that world I've written about before, where not everyone will see the same search results for the same query.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:27 AM | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Keywords In URL May Help Rankings, Google's Matt Cutts Says

The hotly debated SEO topic of, does having keywords in your file names help with your rankings, will probably start all over again. Matt Cutts of Google wrote at his blog, and I quote;

Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.

Did Matt just say, that keywords repeated from the post title in the URL, can help "search engines judge the quality of a page." Honestly, I have been listening to Matt talk in person, on radio, on video and on forums for a long, long time now and I have never seen him come out and say this. So what does that mean? Why would he come out and say this? I personally always felt the keywords in the URL help a bit, but how much was always my question. So I always tried to code client sites with the keywords from the title in the URL. But for Matt to point that out specifically, does that mean that it is more important than I, or you, originally thought?

Up for debate, and where else do debates work best than a discussion forum? Discuss it at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:33 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2006

Matt Cutts & Vanessa Fox On WebmasterRadio.FM Thursday AT 1PM (PST)

Vanessa Fox just posted at the Google Webmaster Central Blog that she and Matt Cutts of Google will be live on WebmasterRadio's GoodKarma show with GoodROI (Greg Niland). You'll be able to tune in tomorrow, Thursday at 1pm (PST) to hear Matt and Vanessa talk shop. Tune instructions at WebmasterRadio.FM.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:19 AM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

103 Links About SES San Jose 2006 (AKA The Big Recap)

Couldn't make it to last week's monster Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose? Well, maybe next time! In the meantime, I've compiled a list of coverage from across the web, even somewhat organized into topic areas.

Our San Jose show is always tough for me, as I arrive a week earlier to visit with the various major search engines out there. That means two weeks of news and email to dig out from, since you can never get it all done on the road. All that digging out means I know I don't have everything listed below. But you'll find plenty to keep you entertained.

General Recaps

Eric Schmidt Appearance

Eric Schmidt & Search Privacy

Click Fraud Panel & Related Coverage

Yahoo's Panama Ad Platform Preview

Social Search & Related Topics

Organic Listings Sessions

Search Advertising Sessions

Issues Sessions

News, Blogs & Public Relations

Big Sites/Budget Sessions

Small Sites/Budget Sessions

Conversion & Metrics

Other Sessions

Google Dance & Parties & Pictures

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:50 PM | Permalink

August 8, 2006

Yahoo Releases Updates To Site Explorer

During the Bot Obedience Course session at SES San Jose just a few minutes ago, Rajat at Yahoo announced a new upgrade to the Site Explorer tool they initially launched last year. The additions at Site Explorer include:

- More information about sites you own., including -- Last Crawled Date and Language for your Site URLs -- Subdomains of your site - Feed submissions are much smoother. You can submit RSS, Atom and URL lists, and manage all of them from one place. For authenticated sites, you can also track when they were submitted and processed. - UpdateNotification Web Service to notify us of feed or site updates, part of the suite of Site Explorer APIs you already know and love. Since these return the same data as the tool, we recommend using them for automated applications.

The tool really reminds me of Google Sitemaps, now Google Webmaster Central.

I hope to take a deeper look after the SES conference.

Update: More details just posted at the Yahoo Search Blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 5:39 PM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

The Concept Of A "Perfectly Optimized Page"

Aaron Wall at SEO Book has an excellent and thought provoking write up named The Myth of a Perfectly Optimized Page. He discusses how he gets request from folks for him to review a page or two and to let the person know how "perfectly optimized" that page is. Aaron then explains how optimization is not just about keyword density or links, but that each page has a goal. Based on that goal, optimization tactics and strategies will change.

At this point, when writing this summary, I think Aaron make be discussing "optimization" as a whole, and not just search engine optimization. But when you think of it, I understood his post to apply to the 'new wave' of search engine optimization. Optimization of the page, as a whole, applies today to your search engine optimization strategy. What type of content should I write? What types of links should I get? How hard will it be for me to get natural links? You see, all these things come into play for usability, conversion testing and search engine optimization.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:06 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

Google's Matt Cutts Answers Questions On Google Video

Matt Cutts has released six video sessions so far, over the past two days at his blog. They all answers questions sent to him on the topic of search engine optimization. Most of the videos are about five minutes long, you don't have to necessarily watch Matt talk, you can just listen (there is not much going on in the background). Here is a break down of the video SEO sessions:

Session 1: Quality of a Good Site, 5 minutes and 40 seconds. "Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Does Sitemaps depend on pageviews? - What are the top things to do in SEO? - Should I use bold or strong tags?"

Session 2: Myths, Large Site Launches, and Google Images, 4 minutes 10 seconds. "Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Myths: 1) sites on the same server, 2) IP, or 2) including off-domain JavaScript - Launching sites with millions of pages: how should I do it best? - Google images: updates on the horizon, and current Google Images technology."

Session 3: Optimize for Search Engines or Users?, 4 minutes and 25 seconds. "Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Which is more important: search engine optimization (SEO) or end user optimization? - What spam detection tools would you recommend? - Does cleanliness of code (W3C) help at all?"

Session 4: Static vs. Dynamic urls, 4 minutes and 30 seconds. "Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Static vs. Dynamic urls: does PageRank flow the same to both? What pitfalls should I avoid with dynamic urls? - Can Sitemaps alert webmasters when their site has been hacked? - Can I do geotargetting within Google's Quality Guidelines?"

Session 5: How to structure a site?, 4 minutes and 46 seconds. "Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Merging acquired domains with 301s? - How to create a site architecture with themes and keywords? - My urls have too many parameters--can I serve up static HTML to Googlebot instead? - How to do split A/B testing?"

Session 6: Supplemental Results, 4 minutes and 12 seconds. "Matt Cutts answers Google questions: - Supplemental Results - Should I worry about results estimates for 1) supplemental results 2) using the site: operator 3) with negated terms and 4) special syntax such as intitle: ? Answer: No. That's pretty far off the beaten path. - Why do 301s take so long to be reflected in supplemental results? It's been months. - I started appearing in the supplemental results in May--should I be worried?"

Great job Matt, really appreciated by the SEOs and SEMs here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

July 13, 2006

Counting Links At The Search Engines

Rand has an excellent post on how to get your hands dirty by manually checking your links at the various search engines. He reviews Google's link command and how bad it is. He also reviews MSN's link command and explains how you can add modifiers to the link or linkdomain commands (i.e. exclude site A from the command). Rand then reviews the Yahoo link command, and explains that although Yahoo has Site Explorer, the "most accurate" result set still comes from search.yahoo.com. He recommends you use search.yahoo.com and then append &b=999 to the end of the URL manually. Like MSN, you can add modifiers to the Yahoo link commands. This is a great post for those who want a refresher on the link commands available to you, plus learn a few new tips on them.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2006

MSN's Hand Crafted Results (Fake? - Shame On Me!)

"MSN Hiring People to Hand Code SERPS" at SEO Blackhat is a nice catch from the MSN Search jobs page talking about needing people to help hand-craft results. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reacts with "Oh my." I react with "Hallelujah."

Note: As Threadwatch spots in comments, this page looks like a joke that MSN is hosting. Shame on me for not reading more closely -- type 150 words per minute! The page IS on the real MSN Search domain, but it's not linked from the real jobs area [OK, Pip at Google Blogoscoped found it connected from the jobs page]. Anyway, I'll drop a note and get confirmation. And the points below -- still valid :)

Let's look at the job post first:

When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user. Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user?s query in less than 3.8 seconds. This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well. We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks. If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method ? come join us and delight users real-time!

I agree. Search engine algorithms are not perfect. I'm tired of seeing bad listings make it into the top results that any human reviewer would nix. The Google mantra has always been that they prefer to tailor their computer algorithms to figure out how a human would see and rate things and then get the algorithm to do the right thing. We've had that mantra for years. And yes, generally the algorithms do the right things. Still stuff gets through. So kill off the bad stuff with a human and sure, insert a good quality page you know you are missing.

As a reminder, MSN used to have human editors, as I've written before. That was actually one reason why years ago, they compared pretty well when we would do relevancy tests on popular queries. They had a very sophisticated editing suite that allowed a team of editors to constantly review -- AND FIX -- bad results.

Now I can buy into the "Oh My" idea if MSN is returning to hand crafted results because their automated technology is so bad they've got to fall back on humans. No, that's not good. But if it's to complement and better tune what the automation does? Bring it on. If you want more on the how and why this can help, see my past post, More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog.

I also have the "Oh My" reaction if hand handcrafting involves payment. This year, I've had one serious allegation that MSN has rigged one set of its results to favor a top advertiser. I just had another serious allegation like that levied against Yahoo. In the MSN case, the difficulty in pursuing the allegation is deciding whether they are true or an attempt to knock out a competitor that might be ranking well. In the Yahoo case, I'm awaiting that tipster to send me more information beyond the quick eye opening stuff I was shown at our recent London conference.

Yahoo, of course, does hand manipulate already, to my belief (I'm not saying for payment -- only that for whatever reason, they seem to hand craft some results). I wrote about this in 2004 but never got an answer about it from Yahoo, nor did I get an answer when I followed up at least one other time. It also came up on our forums last year and at here at Search Engine Roundtable.

Google has long denied "hand jobs," as wizened search marketers call them. Setting aside censorship cases, I believe that. I've never seen any solid evidence of results being hand selected by Google (and the quality raters we're written about before have not been shown to be manipulating results).

In fact, Google used to trumpet that it had no hand manipulation. That was true in crafting results, but it wasn't true in terms of removing them. As I wrote in 2004:

Of course, Google does indeed intervene manually in search results. It removes material because it may be deemed illegal, as was the case in the infamous chester guide search. The company also removes material in response to DMCA complaints and also because for spamming reasons, as this article explains further.

Such interventions make some marketers confused (or even livid) when they read Google's oft-repeated claims of no hand manipulation of search results. To them, such removals as I've described above are hand manipulation. You can get a flavor of such confusion in this recent WebmasterWorld forum thread.

These interventions are not specifically rank related. When they happen, Google doesn't try to reorder the ranking of how a page appears. Instead, it simply pulls the page from the index entirely. And if you aren't in the index, you naturally no longer rank number one. But to save confusion, it might be better for Google to be clearer in saying that they don't chose by hand which sites rank well.

By the way, I asked Google previously about the reference in a Wired article about wanting to "attach" better sites to queries to ensure it had good information available. I remember being disturbed by this, just as some in the aforementioned thread were, as it indeed suggested that Google was doing hand-ranking in some cases.

I was told by Google that this was a misinterpretation on the part of Wired. The Google engineer apparently meant that the Google search algorithm would be tweaked to produce better results, not that the results would be reordered by hand.

Overall, I'm fine with hand-crafting, hand manipulation, hand jobs or whatever you want to call it as long as:

  • It improves search quality
  • It's not done to favor an advertiser by rigging the editorial results

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:16 AM | Permalink

SEO for All the News That's Fit to Search

The New York Times has one of the most popular news web sites, but until this year that was largely because of the strength of its brand. After its acquisition of About.com, the Times embarked on an aggressive campaign to make its web site more search friendly, a complex process that's paid off with notable traffic gains for the company. Today's SearchDay article, Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly, takes a look behind the scenes at how the Times and its vice president of enterprise search, Marshall Simmonds, pulled it off.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:48 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2006

Tips On Across The Engines Ranking From SEO Book

People are beginning to remember again that there are search engines beyond Google. This reawakening is one reason why I added the Can You Please Them All? session to our upcoming Search Engine Strategies San Jose show next August. Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has also clearly seen the renewed interest in pleasure more than Google. Out today is his excellent Google vs Yahoo! vs MSN Search: Defining Search Engine Relevancy piece today.

It's great and deserves a better title, something that better explains the main focus, tips on what each of the major search engines seems to like in ranking web pages. You can skim the short tips on top or enjoy the long detailed tips down below.

Of course, one of the biggest challenges when you try to please different search recipes is that it's easy to get caught up in the perfect page trap, a lot of work trying to match what you think each search engine likes but without getting the result you expect.

We went through this before back in 1999-2000 or so. I did a long piece on it in 2000, In Pursuit Of The Perfect Page for Search Engine Watch members, plenty of the main points which still hold up today:

Occasionally, I get questions about what "numbers" or "rules" should be followed to construct the perfect page for each crawler-based search engine. In other words, how many times should a term appear on a page for it to rank in the top results? How often should a term be repeated in a meta tag to attain success? How often can a term be repeated before a spam penalty ensues?

No one has these numbers, honest. Those that say they do are merely making educated guesses at reverse engineering the crawler-based search engines. You will always see exceptions to their perfect page formulas. Additionally, the twin rise of a greater reliance on "off-the-page" ranking criteria and human-compiled listings makes focusing on perfect page construction much less an activity than in the past (see additional articles about this at the end of this story). Those who are looking forward in the world of search engines are not worrying about "keyword densities." Instead, they are building content, building links and doing other activities that will benefit them in the future....

Enlarge your site to have real content on the terms you want to be found for. If you sell shoes, have articles about how to select different types of shoes. If you offer package holidays, provide some tourist information about your destinations. Build this "real" content and optimize it for your target terms. Then go out and link build. Find sites that are non-competitive with yours but on related topics and offer to swap links. These two activities are akin to building a house, while concentrating on doorways is similar to renting. Renting is easy and offers a lot of advantages, but at the end of the day, you don't own anything. Concentrate on building your house, and you should see traffic from search engines and other publicity venues over the long term.

I generally advised most people back then not to pursue a perfect page strategy, and I've stuck to that when the topic came up on our Search Engine Watch Forums recently:

I can remember (there he goes again) when Webposition rolled out the page analyzer tool to help those who wanted to build to target Infoseek, AltaVista, etc. I can't say I miss the days where it was easy to tell what someone was doing because the URLs would all end in initials of the search engines a page was targeted at (page-is.html, page-av.htlm, page-ex.html). I always got a kick when a page clearly targeted by someone at Excite would rank well for AltaVista and so on. To me, it underscored how these tools trying to get you to do the "perfect" page often wouldn't deliver -- plus the differences recommended often were so slight as not to matter. Still, I can see that coming back. In fact, the SES San Jose agenda just went up, and the beginning of the second day is a session called "Can You Please Them All?" Session descriptions haven't yet posted, but we're going to revisit the issue. People are again wanting that top ranking across the board without losing out on wherever they are at. I think building three different sites and robot.txt banning out all the untargeted search engines is a massive pain for most people and instead tend to recommend the be happy with ranking with one of them approach. But that's not for everyone, I know.

Again, for most people, trying to get the perfect page for each search engine for all your terms is probably going to be too much work. But some will want to make the effort, and especially so in a more selective manner, for their most important terms. This is even more so when you see specific tips continuing to work over a long period of time, such as MSN still seeming to love keyword-rich URLs and domain names, as Aaron notes.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:05 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

Unique Content VS. Plagiarism In The Eyes Of An Algorithm

Chris Boggs over at the Search Engine Roundtable wrote an item named Which Came First: the Content or the Plagiarism? which discusses the challenge search engines face when it comes to determining the original source of a particular piece of content.

For example, the content I am writing right now may be picked up within a matter of seconds by another site that wants to "borrow" or steal the content. So now we have two (probably a lot more than two) sources with identical content. A search engine can say, hey, I found source A before I found source B with this particular content, so source A must be the original source. But if you think about that, since spiders don't work in real time, a search engine may visit the source that "borrowed" the content prior to visiting the original source of that content.

Chris offers two suggestions. The first is to watch your crawl cycles in Google and wait just before to post the content. Now that is not really feasible, as Chris knows, because there is no way to exactly know when Google will crawl your site and news information must be posted as soon as possible, so waiting is normally not an option. Chris uses this example to make a point, I believe. The other option Chris suggests is to use Google Sitemaps, so Google can see you as a trusted source and be feed the information, sooner than later.

But what do you think is the algorithmic solution? I personally do not know. There are people discussing the fundamental challenge at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:29 AM | Permalink

June 6, 2006

Google Indexing Fewer Pages: Signs Of The Google Crawling Sandbox?

Aaron Wall over at SEOBook.com has an excellent write up on the recent indexing phenomenon at Google. Google has been indexing fewer and fewer pages and webmasters are trying to figure out how to get more of their pages indexed and found by searchers. Aaron posted a blog entry he named The Google Crawling Sandbox.

The title of the post comes from the concept of Google slowing down its crawl process, like it would when ranking new sites (the whole Google Sandbox concept). Aaron explores the rumors of these theories but when push comes to shove, he nails it down to unique content. The more "legitimate useful content" the more likely people will want to read it, the more likely Google will crawl it, the more likely Google will index and then rank it.

Postscript From Danny: One of those commenting on Aaron's blog highlight a key quote from him, one that well deserves that attention:

The less your site needs to rely on Google the more Google will be willing to rely on your site.

This goes right back to the "don't do things only for search engines" or don't be totally dependent on search engines messages that many have said over the past years and is worth repeating. No, you don't want to ignore them -- but if you've done everything to revolve around them, that's a good sign you aren't running a "natural" site of the site search engines are trying to reward.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:49 AM | Permalink

May 25, 2006

Google Rankings Depend On Data Center, Geographic Location & Personalization

Aaron Wall has a nice write up on the different ways one searcher can see one set up results, compared to a different search seeing a different set up results, all for the same search query. Aaron explains that three primary things may determine the results sets you see for any particular query. They include the search engine data center you hit, the location of your computer and if you have personalization preference turned on.

Data Centers: Depending on the search engine, especially Google, you may hit a data center that has a different set of indexed pages or a slightly different algorithm. Both have an effect on the search results you see. Google has multiple data centers in order to help return you a quicker response and because it enables them to roll out different indexes and algorithms slowly and to select users. As you can imagine, it will affect the result sets you see.

Geographic Location: Some times, Google tailors the results to your location. So if you are in London, Google may show you results that are more relevant to a person in London. How? They may show more results from .co.uk domains, or from servers hosted in the area or sites that have the language.

Personalization: With most search engines now, you can now sign in, and enable personalization. That means the search engines look at your search history and other preferences and tailor the results specifically for you. As you can imagine, this will have an impact on the results you see for a particular query.

I did not really read Aaron's post, but I suspect it says the same thing I said above. If not, you can blast me in our forums. Read Aaron's post here, it is a nice topic.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:32 AM | Permalink

May 22, 2006

Searcher Behavior: An SEOs Perspective

Shari Thurow has a new ClickZ article live named Analyzing Search Behavior for SEO, which looks at searcher behavior from the SEO's perspective. She defines the different modes of search behavior that include; Berrypicking, Querying, Refining, Expanding, Browsing/surfing, Pogo-sticking, Foraging, Scanning (eye-tracking) and Reading. Shari goes deep into a paper written by Marcia J. Bates in 1989 named Berrypicking, for the inspiration of Analyzing Search Behavior for SEO.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

April 7, 2006

MSN, Yahoo Seek SEO People To Help Them Rank Better

There's still the occasional person who I encounter who thinks that SEO overall is somehow wrong to do or something the search engines frown upon. Yahoo!, MSN & Ebay recruiting - SEO hits the big time is an example of why this isn't so. It covers how Yahoo, MSN and eBay in the UK are all recruiting internal SEO people to help promote their own sites.

Such hirings aren't new. We've long had search companies themselves trying to rank well in other search engines, to the point of hiring people internally or externally to make it happen. But it's a nice reminder for everyone to keep in mind.

Personally, I got a chuckle out of the breakdown Threadwatch did of the MSN UK recruitment ad. Wanted: Spammer-in-chief for MSN over there highlights some of these key success metrics for MSN UK's SEO person:

  • Achieve x% of traffic from Search engines within our top channels and homepage
  • Achieve x% of pages cached/listed within Google and Yahoo
  • Achieve first page ranking in Google/Yahoo for major channel entry points and other important MSN content areas
  • Beat Yahoo! on listing results in Google on major events
  • Demonstrate clear traffic improvement as a result of implementation of SEO techniques
  • Ensure all new pages are SEO compliant

As for Yahoo, I found these points interesting:

  • All title / meta data tagging of UK products
  • URL specifications of UK products
  • URL redirect mappings
  • Producing SEO recommendations and documentation for UK products
  • Fostering development of effective SEO tools / reporting process
  • Maintaining existing Yahoo! UK product?s search engine rankings
  • Identifying and flagging potential spam violations on UK products
  • Identifying and flagging inappropriate Y! content that is accessible via search
  • Weekly / monthly SEO reporting & statistics for UK products
  • Keyword / log analysis reports for UK products
  • Keeping web development, engineering and production up-to-date with developments in the SEO field

Note the part I bolded. Nice to see that Yahoo UK wants to ensure no one suddenly accuses it of spamming itself or another search engine. Nah, such things never happen. Wait a minute: Google Admits To Cloaking; Bans Itself. That was from last year, but to be fair, it was pretty much an accidental thing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:30 AM | Permalink

March 9, 2006

Music's Payola Compared with Web's Link Buying

Techdirt compares buying links to payola, "the illegal practice of record companies paying money for the broadcast of records on music radio." Joe at Techdirt explains that both payola and link buying are ultimately where "the seller pays for this by auctioning of its credibility, or whatever it is that made it popular."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:45 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2006

Google Sitemaps Stats On Most Common Words In Your Anchor Text & Site Content

Along with the cool new robots.txt checker, Google Sitemaps has also released stats showing the most common words used on pages within your web site and the most common words anchor text pointing at your site.

The common words in site content stats will be good fodder for those who believe Google somehow tries to figure out a word "theme" for your entire site. Google's never claimed to do this before -- and seeing sites like Amazon or Wikipedia rank for anything when they are about nothing in particular should demonstrate that you don't need to target all your pages around a particular term or theme.

Still, if Google's generating stats like this for a site, it'll probably tip some people back to worry more about this. I wouldn't - but do as you deem best.

The anchor text analysis is far more intriguing. Again, Google has generally said that each page is measured by the links pointing at that particular page. So if someone points at a deep page in your site, that helps that particular deep page, not the site as a whole. And if someone points at your home page, that helps the home page, not the entire site (Yahoo, in contrast, has said it does some sitewide link crediting).

Now Google's reporting anchor text terms for an entire site -- which suggests that any link to any page in your site might have an impact on other pages. Or not!

Questions, questions. I'll drop a word over to Google blogmeister Matt Cutts to see about getting some answers. I'll postscript here, but I'd also say to watch his blog as well.

Finally, while these stats are promised, I don't see them live for all of my sites my sitemaps yet. If you don't as well, there's probably a delay in getting them rolled out and live.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:24 PM | Permalink

January 17, 2006

Designers Should Love SEO, Plus Making Flash Friendly To Search Engines

Can't We All Just Get Along? - The Battle Between SEOs and Web Designers has David Wallace at Search Engine Guide inspired by the Do Designers Hate SEO? discussion at our Search Engine Watch Forums. In that thread, many feel designers should embrace lots of what SEO has to offer, especially since it is NOT all about blog spamming nor necessarily dumbing down design. David touches on this and dives deeper into issues with Flash and how Flash designers, with some thought, can have Flash and search engine friendliness combined. Our Revisting How Search Engines Deal With Flash thread at the SEW Forums goes into even more depth here, with lots of great advice for those of you grappling with the Flash "problem" for search engines.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:27 AM | Permalink

December 28, 2005

The Googleshank Redemption Reloaded

Remember me writing about the Googleshank Redemption? If not, it was the story of site owner Allan Dick feeling powerless to get help from Google. Proving the power of the blog, Allan found that chronicling his experience finally got action. Google's Matt Cutts got in touch, and Allan says things are looking up.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:54 AM | Permalink

December 22, 2005

What's A Scraper Site

It's easy to assume that everyone knows what a scraper site is. Everyone doesn't -- or at least, they know what a scraper site is, they just don't know what they are commonly called. Scraper Sites and SE Ambiguity: What is Your Site’s Reading Level? from Stuntdubl gives you a nice rundown on how scrapers grab search results to make "content" that's typically host to Google AdSense ads -- and asks the same question on the minds of many, why does Google fund this junk?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:04 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2005

Have You Been Googleshanked?

I had dinner with Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath last week at SES Chicago. Allan's a great guy, an attendee who turned into a moderator and creator of some interesting unique sessions we do at the show. He's also a great storyteller, and he recounted how he felt with Google over the past year or so like the character seemingly without hope from The Shawshank Redemption. The Googleshank Redemption on his blog tells his tale of being Googleshanked and regaining hope afterward.

Googleshanked? Despite his efforts, feeling he was in the right, a sense of being wronged, he ultimately was powerless to correct his Google troubles. No appeal, no shorter prison term. Googleshanked.

Despite his Googleshankyness, Allan found his redemption, learning to move past his despair and accept that which could not be changed.

After reading the post, be sure to move on to lighter subjects on his blog. Is that all-in-one sink/toilet cool or what?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:01 PM | Permalink

December 5, 2005

Reports from Search Engine Strategies Chicago: Day One

Well, it's cold in Chicago but Barry (RustyBrick) Schwartz and Phoenix are keeping warm (especially their fingers) by blogging detailed session summaries from various SES sessions they're attending. Here are links to what's available. Check back for more later.

+ Search Advertising 101 + ClickZ Forum: Ads Beyond Search + Book Search + Podcast Search + Reputation Monitoring & Management + Earning from Search & Contextual Ads + Video Search + Introduction to Search Marketing + Search Behavior Research Update

Posted by Gary Price at 2:12 PM | Permalink

November 30, 2005

On SEO Myths & Getting The Balance Right

There's been a variety of articles out recently that look at search engine optimization advice that people hear, believe and perhaps act on in the wrong ways. Below, a look at some of these resources covering myths, mistakes and getting things into perspective.

The SEO Myths Thread from Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable summarizes an interesting Cre8asite thread about top SEO myths, such as oldies like meta tags being super important and others such as worries over duplicate content penalties. Of course, "SEO Worries" might be a better name for the thread, since not everyone will agree that all the items listed are myths.

Search Engine Forums & Conferences - Are they Really Helpful? from Search Engine Guide is on a related topic and a good read. It covers how tips people pick up at forums and search conferences sometimes aren't weighed properly.

It's excellent advice. SEO in particular has always been a slippery area for anyone to know exactly what's "right." What's correct for one person can often come down to the particular situation their involved in. Pushing Viagra on the web? What works for you might be completely different than what's helpful to a site that sells children's toys.

That's a chief reason why at our own SES conferences, it's extremely rare that we have a panel with only one person on it. I'm always trying to have a range of viewpoints and hoping that people will take it all in and make up their own minds on on how to proceed.

Speaking of which, SEO Overkill is a session at our upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago next week that addresses some of the myths and "what to believe" problem. Sometimes, it's not that the advice is wrong. It's that people simply don't do things in moderation. That panel will look at some examples of going to extremes and why that is bad.

That leads me to Common Sense Algorithm Chasing, out today from Search Engine Guide. It talks briefly about trying to get that balance right, understanding what a search engine wants, but not going to the extreme of being an algo chaser nor the opposite of simply assuming that "common sense" alone is enough for success.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:35 AM | Permalink

November 28, 2005

WebmasterWorld's Brett Tabke Speaks On Rogue Spidering Woes, Plus The Need For Expanded Feeds

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld dropped me a note about a new thread where he's answering many questions about WebmasterWorld banning all spiders, while Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable also has an interview with him. In both places, you'll learn of spiders being an increasing burden to the site, though I still am very, very wary that others should follow the route that Brett's taken.

Attack of the Robots, Spiders, Crawlers.etc at WebmasterWorld picks up from the Lets try this for a month or three thread where Brett announced last week that WebmasterWorld was banning all spiders by excluding them via robots.txt and through other measures such as required logins.

WebmasterWorld Bans Spiders From Crawling and WebmasterWorld Out Of Google & MSN from the SEW Blog covers more about the move fallout with WebmasterWorld no longer being visible in two major search engines.

In his latest posts, Brett explains:

  • The flat file nature of WebmasterWorld makes it apparently more vulnerable to spiders.  
  • Spider fighting has been taking a considerable and increasing amount of time.  
  • A ton of efforts have been done to stop spiders but cookie-based login still seen as necessary  
  • Major search engines other than Google (Ask Jeeves, MSN and Yahoo) were all banned for more than 60 days before this latest move.

Brett Tabke Interviewed on Bot Banning from Search Engine Roundtable takes the interview approach, where it is much easier to see what Brett's thinking and reacting to than wandering through the forum posts. Beyond the points above, he addresses not wanting to make use of non-standard extensions to robots.txt that Google, MSN and some other search engines have added precisely because they aren't standard.

Overall, I can appreciate much of what Brett's going through, but there still have to be better ways for this to be addressed. His solution is simply not one that the vast majority of sites will want to try, because it will simply wipe out the valuable search traffic they gain.

To be clear, I'm NOT saying that any site should be entirely dependent on search traffic. But neither do you cut yourself off from them, either. It's a matter of balance and moderation. To quote from what I posted in our forum thread on the WebmasterWorld situation:

People would often ask how much of their traffic they get from search engines. There is no right answer, but I'd often said that if you were looking at 60, 70, 80 percent or higher, you might have a search engine dependency problem. You want to have a variety of sources sending you traffic, so no one single thing wipes you out.

But to suggest that a site is so successful that it doesn't need search traffic at all? That's foolishness. I have absolutely no doubt that WMW will survive. It's a healthy community with plenty of alternative traffic. But people seeking answers to things it has answers to give are no longer going to be finding it.

Hmm, we'll maybe those people aren't good members, just generate to noise and so on. Yeah, maybe. But that also assumes that every single quality person must be there already. That's just not so. You always have good new people coming onto the web.

Search engines are a way you build up loyal users. People often discover you for the first time through search, then they keep coming back. It's not a dependency to have a small amount of your traffic bringing in new people this way. But it is, in my view, a marketing screw-up to cut yourself off from that potential audience.

Geez, it's like the basic rule of SEO/SEM. Ensure your site is accessible to search engines. If they can't get in, you stand no chance of getting traffic at all from them. And when people are paying by the click for search traffic, why don't you want that free publicity. Why wouldn't you seek other ways of retaining it but also restricting the bad bandwidth you don't want?

Overall, WMW obviously can and will do what it wants, and perhaps there's some magical master plan that down the line will make us all say "Genius!" Maybe. But this is a very, very bad model for any site to be considering, if they're having the same spidering problems that are the stated reason for why WMW is doing this. It's like saying you're getting too many phone calls to your business, so you're going to pull out the phone entirely!

So what is a site owner to do, if they are suffering from rough spiders? I'll share a bit from our own experience, plus point at what maybe the search engines should be doing.

We've encountered rogue spiders. It was one reason why our own Search Engine Watch Forums were down briefly last month, coincidentally the same time WebmasterWorld and Threadwatch went offline for different reasons. Rogue spiders aren't just something unique to Brett's set-up. They can and do indeed cause problems even for less "flat file" sites and URL structures. In fact, want to have some fun. Check this out. That shows you all the people on our SEW Forums at the moment you click on the link, up to 200 visitors. Scan the IP Address column, and you'll see how Yahoo's Slurp spider is in many, many different threads all at once. That's a burden on our server, though since we're getting well indexed as a result, it's a burden we live with.

Our own solution has been for our developers to throttle or ban spiders at the IP level that seem to be hitting us hard, in particular spiders that aren't identifying themselves as to their purpose. Good spiders often leave behind a URL string in your logs so you know they are from Google, Yahoo or whatever. For example, Yahoo points you here. Google points you here. No good identification? Then we don't worry that banning you is going to harm us seriously in some way.

What about improving the robots.txt system? Unfortunately, that's not a solution for rogue spiders. Brett's right when he points out the real story is moving to required logins. Rogue spiders aren't paying attention to robots.txt. Put in a ban against them, and they'll ignore it. Robots.txt only works with "polite" spiders.

Because robots.txt isn't a solution, it also means that wishing that the major search engines would come together to endorse new improved "standards" for the protocol also isn't a solution. Since rogue spiders are ignoring robots.txt, it doesn't then matter for there to be some type of universal agreement to have a "crawl delay" feature or more wildcard support, for example.

Still, while improving robots.txt isn't a solution to rogue spiders, there are things it could do if improved, and I'm right with Brett in wishing that the major search engines wouldn't unilaterally make their own improvements, as I've written before (and here).

So if we can't depend on robots.txt, what is the solution? If more and more sites face heavy spidering, we'll likely have to see a shift toward feeding content to search engines.

Feeding content isn't a new idea. Yahoo's paid inclusion program is pretty well known as a way for site owners to feed not URLs into the search engine but actual page content. Yahoo also has partnerships with some sites to take in content on a non-paid basis. Google also takes in feeds of content through things like Google Scholar or Google's Froogle shopping feeds program.

To be absolutely clear, these types of program aren't situations where you feed URLs, as with Google Sitemaps or Yahoo's bulk submit. These are programs where you feed actual page content. The spider doesn't come to you and hunt and guess at what you've got. You tell the spider what you've got.

Expanding feed programs to everyone would be a much more efficient way of gathering content, with one exception. You can expect that some sites will abuse feeds to send misleading content. Heck, it's bad enough how ping servers are already abused being wide open this way, as I wrote about on Matt Mullenweg's blog last month, when the future of ping servers was raised:

Whether we have an "independent" ping service almost seems beyond the point when both Dave and Matt are talking about the ping spam problem they have experienced. I'm actually surprised any the open ping servers are surviving. If they are open to anyone to ping, a small number of people will abusively ping for marketing gains

We?ve had 10 years of history knowing this with web search. Web search engines could long ago have had instant add facilities. Indeed, Infoseek and AltaVista even did for a short period of time. They found that without barriers, a small number of people would flood them with garbage. That?s why they don?t take content in rapidly. It?s not that they aren?t smart enough to take pings or let website owners flow content in. Instead, it is that they?ve learned you can?t leave a wide door open like that without being abused.

There?s absolutely no reason for anyone to have assumed that RSS/blog/feed search services were going to be immune to the same problem. If the ping outlook is bleak, it?s not because Verisign or Yahoo has purchased some service. It?s because you simply can?t leave doors open on the web like this for search, not for any search that?s going to attract significant traffic. Blog search is gaining that traffic, and you can expect the spam problem will simply get worse and worse until some barriers are put into place. You also cannot expect that you?ll simply come up with some algorithmic way to stop ping spam. Again, 10 years of web search engines diligently trying to stop spam has simply found it?s a never ending arms race.

I don?t know what the solution is. I suspect that for the major search players, the Googles & Yahoos, they?ll eventually move to a combination of rapid crawling, trusted pings and open pings as a backup. Remember, they get news content very fast. If they have a set of trusted sites, they can spider and hammer those hard. They?ll know to keep checking Boing Boing, Scripting and maybe 1,000 other major blogs that really, really matter ? and that when you check them, you quickly discover other links from blogs you may want to fetch quickly.

So throwing feeds wide open to everyone without vetting isn't the solution. But certainly we're overdue for feeds to be available to more people without requiring payment, through some type of trusted mechanism.

WebmasterWorld is a perfect poster child for this. People want the content there, and the search engines should want the content to be found via their sites as well. Allowing the site to feed its content gets around the barriers erected to stop rogue spiders very nicely.

But WebmasterWorld isn't the only candidate in this class. Many others, including myself, want the ability to feed actual content to the search engines. Let's see them move ahead with a way to make this more a reality, to establish real "trusted feeds" that aren't based on payment or whether your site falls within an area that the business development teams think need more support. Google Base may become Google's means of doing this, but at the moment, that's not feeding into web search.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forum thread, WebmasterWorld Off Of Google & Others Due To Banning Spiders.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:16 PM | Permalink

November 23, 2005

Getting Search Engine Love From Affiliate Links

A long time issue with those who ponder using affiliates is whether paying for affiliate links will rob them of link juice with the search engines. If the affiliate links make use of tracking codes or redirection, will search engines count these as much as "real" links?

SEO Friendly Affiliate Systems from Greg Boser is a great tutorial on how affiliate links work in various flavors and how to get the ones that will help you with search engines (short answer, use 301 redirection), assuming your affiliates buy into the idea. As Greg explains, giving you the link juice means they might be less likely to show up themselves.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forum thread, Affiliate URLs - 301s vs 302s.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:08 AM | Permalink

November 11, 2005

Moving To Trusted Links & Change The Link Election Model

Thank you, Aaron. That's for taking the research paper (PDF file) about detecting link spam that Gary wrote about earlier and breaking it down in non technical language (and Jim Boykin summarizes Aaron further here). Aaron finds things like the paper says having .edu and .gov links are a good thing, don't worry about having a few spammy links and the more trusted links you have, the better.

I was thinking last night about the way to describe some of the changes or generational evolution we've seeing with counting links, and I thought it might be helpful to break it down this way:

Counting Links / Referendum: Before Google, other search engines made use of links to determine which sites might be important. But this was mainly a counting exercise. The more links the better, regardless of the quality of those links.

  • In simple terms, each link counted the same.  
  • In election terms, it was like a referendum. Every voter had an equal say.

Weighted Links / Electing A Congress: Google's PageRank system helped usher in a change to weighting links, that not all are as important as others. The system worked to figure out what were the most important links and give sites getting those links more credit -- the authority pages, to use a popular term for this.

  • In simple terms, not all links are credited equal. Some links are worth more than others.  
  • In election terms, it was as if Google looked at all the links across the web, determined who seemed to get the most, then let those authorities serve in a "congress" of sort in making the big decisions about what's good on the web through the link votes they cast.

Trusted Links / Qualifying Representatives

This is what we've been moving to. When PageRank knew a link was "important," that wasn't the same as trustworthy despite the authority misnomer. It only meant knowing that some particular link should count for more because the page the link was on had a lot of people "voting" for it. You can scam that type of voting.

  • In simple terms, some links are worth more than others after using some checks-and-balances to eliminate the scamming.  
  • In election terms, it's as if after a congress is elected, you go back and check the campaign contributions. If you find something iffy, then some particular congressperson's vote might not count for as much as others. Or perhaps you watch their voting record, to see if they know what they're talking about. Being popular as everyone knows doesn't necessarily mean you're an authority!

That's a rough idea, and I'm playing at refining it more, but I thought I'd share it now. Remember, it's also not just about how much a link counts for but the text that's in and surrounding the link, along with a lot of other factors. Also see Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge on how search engines hope to tap into trust in ways beyond link analysis to improve results.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:25 AM | Permalink

Black Hats Going White?

A reporter asked me recently if the black hat and white hat branches of SEO are getting further apart these days. I replied I thought things were coming more together.

More white hats seem to feel things they might have deemed wrong in the past to be more acceptable, while some black hats are deciding some aggressive tactics might not be worth continuing with. Meanwhile, "bad" techniques like cloaking suddenly don't seem so black hat when Google itself fully cooperates with some sites to allow it. The world of SEO just getting more gray, to me.

A Whiter Shade of Black from Gord Hotchkiss over at MediaPost is a good piece on this, looking both at how white hats can enjoy the "guilty pleasure" to talking with "these dark magicians" but how his dark hat dinner companion conversely found things getting harder and wanting to go "legit."

One point of dispute. While Gord feels the Nov. 2003 Google Florida Update was the biggest blow to spam and dark hats, I have the exact opposite view. In the wake of Florida, many, many people I talked with and read commenting on forums felt like they had been trying to go the good content route.

When Florida hit and Google stayed quiet about the mystery "signals" in place, I felt like that made it an open season for some people to feel like "anything goes" with Google, not less. Just my take.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, Is SEO Getting More Gray?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:57 AM | Permalink

October 14, 2005

Top Ten SEO Starting Tips

New and Improved 10 Tips to the Top at Search Engine Guide has Jill Whalen of HighRankings taking a fresh look at top SEO things to consider. She's got the details over there, but here's the summary:

  1. Stick with an established domain, if you can
  2. Optimize for your audience, not search engines
  3. Research target terms extensively
  4. Design your site with target terms in mind
  5. Build a search engine friendly site
  6. Use descriptive links
  7. Create compelling copy keeping target terms in mind
  8. Incorporate target terms into your title tags (YES! Each page should have a unique title)
  9. Ensure your site is link-worthy
  10. Don't fixate on ranking for one particular term

Plenty of good starting places advice. Need more? Top Ten List Of Search Ranking Factors talks about a list that Rand Fishkin helped get compiled last week.

FYI, Jill was also featured in an About.com interview this week, if you want to learn more about her and her SEO philosophy. Jill's also got an SEO seminar coming up next month in Philadelphia. More details on that here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:28 AM | Permalink

October 7, 2005

Top Ten List Of Search Ranking Factors

Earlier I posted about Rand Fiskin's list of search ranking factors and how I wished they could be rated in order of importance. As I later wrote, Rand invited some people to take a stab at doing that. Today, he's posted the revised list, as he explains more here. Below is the top ten list and average scores (5.0 would be the highest you could get, meaning it was deemed super important).

  1. Title Tag - 4.57
  2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
  3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
  4. Accessibility of Document - 4.31
  5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
  6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
  7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
  8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
  9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
  10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

Overall, I had a few problems with some of the things even included on the list and how they were defined. There were some factors I didn't think were well explained or unclear on how to vote. But the good news is that what emerged is an excellent starting list of factors for anyone to consider.

Using this view, you can go through and see the factors with contributor comments. For Search Engine Watch members, continue to the longer version of this post for a further rundown on my comments about the most important factors.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Top Ten SEO Factors.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:13 AM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

SEO Big With Small & Medium Sized Businesses

No Guesswork Here: Web Sites Work For SMBs at InternetNews.com has a few search stat tidbits worth noting. A survey has found that among ways small and medium-sized business promote their sites, SEO is ranked second, 54 percent, just after email at 60 percent. That's SEO as in non-paid search. Paid search (or PPC) was ranked fourth at 20 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

BodyBuilding.com Builds $48 Million In Sales Off Natural Search

Via Gary Stein, How BodyBuilding.com pumps up sales by word of mouth marketing from Internet Retailer looks at how BodyBuilding.com expects to make web sales of $48 million this year largely off of traffic driven by free search listings. Rather than spend on search ads, the company has tons of articles that serve as fodder to attract natural search engine traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:19 AM | Permalink

October 3, 2005

Update On Search Ranking Factors List

Earlier I posted how Rand Fishkin had created a list of nearly 100 factors that search engines might consider in ranking web pages. I also wished there was a way for everyone to contribute and rate the factors. Now he's working to let a small number of people vote and contribute to refine the list, then he's going to do a revision. He explains more here. Postscript: Previously I had a link to the voting page that Rand's using for his small focus group. I pulled it down, because he didn't intend for everyone to get to use it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:41 PM | Permalink

Being Indexed Versus Being Ranked

SEO Practices: Indexing and Ranking from Mike Grehan at ClickZ is a good reminder that being indexed by a search engine isn't the same as ranking well. It's only when a page ranks that you'll gain traffic, and getting the page to rank comes down to great content attracting good links, in his book.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:44 AM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

SEO Still A Low Priority for Many Marketers When Compared with Paid Search

A brief Media Daily article titled: Marketers Slow To Embrace Optimization, Say Search Experts, reports on a panel of heavy hitters that took place at the OMMA East conference yesterday in New York. The audience was told that they need to both opitimize their web sites for web crawlers and also run cost-per-click campaigns.

Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro told the audience that still SEO remains a low priority as compared to paid search for many marketers.

Quotes "Search marketing can be done as a stand-alone strategy," said Hotchkiss, referring to paid campaigns. "But we don't recommend that." - Gord Hotchkiss

"A lot of people still see SEO as sort of 'black magic." - Alan Boughen, mOne Often marketing departments and the IT departments are not coordinating to get the job done. "Sometimes you'll get brought in by the marketing folks and they won't even consult the IT department," he said. "It comes down to organizational commitment." - Rob Murray, iProspect

Also on the panel were Chris Copeland, Outrider and Jeremy Cornfeldt, Carat Fusion.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:00 AM | Permalink

And Debunking Urban SEO Myths!

Speaking of debunking urban myths, how about those of the SEO world? I just posted about a list of things that may (or may not) influence how a page will rank in search engines. But what convinces people of the truth behind a particular factor? Cause and Effect - Not Always Easy to Determine from Scottie Claiborne over at Search Engine Guide looks at how you can end up assuming something is working a certain way for all the wrong reasons, plus gives some basic tips on how to test correctly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:46 AM | Permalink

Rundown On Search Ranking Factors

Search rankings aren't all about PageRank. Even Google will tell you they have many, many "signals" that are measured to rank a page. The same is true for other search engines -- and has been a fact of SEO life for years and years. But what are all these signals and factors? Some are known, some are speculated on, and some change all the time. Search Engine Ranking Factors now up from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz is a diligent rundown on factors that could influence how well a page does.

Rand stresses that exactly what is used and how important is impossible to know. That's crucial to remember. I skimmed his list, and some of the stuff makes a lot of sense that I'd agree with. Have good title tags, absolutely. Have good use of the terms you want to be found for in the body copy.

Other things, I'm not so much in agreement with. I don't think external links are crucial for a page to do well, but that's my view and experience. Keyword use in the URL is a extremely minor factor to me -- I'd give it half a box or even less, if that was an option. He also stresses too much to me the idea about links coming in to your TLD or your root domain.

Search engines by and large still say they are (and seem to be) operating under the notion of looking at pages individually. They don't really seem to try and understand what your entire site is "about," though Yahoo did say about a year ago that having many links at your root domain could help boost your internal pages.

It would be fun to see all the factors listed so that a community of SEOs could rate how important they are deemed to be. Overall, it's fun to look down and certainly will give you plenty to think about. But you'll also realize how difficult it will be to get exactly every piece "right."

In fact, you won't. You'll get many things wrong. So how do you win? I still fall back on making sure you have some of the best content you can offer, built in search engine friendly manner. Build it -- and don't put up search engine barriers -- and for many people the traffic will indeed flow.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:27 AM | Permalink

September 12, 2005

New Katrina Missing Persons Meta Search Site & Spidering Issues With Red Cross Site

Katrina Search is another new service designed to let you meta search from a variety of web sites that have information about people missing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Search Katrina Missing Persons Sites from Lycos and Katrina: Search for Missing People from Yahoo are two others we mentioned going up last week.

Meanwhile, Sites not yet in sync on searches looks at how Yahoo cofounder David Filo got personally involved to create the Yahoo service. It also illustrates how what sounds to me to be dynamic URLs from a Microsoft server platform meant a new site from the Red Cross became unspiderable by Yahoo and other services.

That's apparently been fixed or will be shortly. The story calls the site "Family First" but I believe it is actually this one: Family Links Registry.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:23 AM | Permalink

September 9, 2005

How To Get "Unsafe" Results At Google & Yahoo

Google UnSafeSearch and Yahoo UnSafeSearch are ways billed to find content that both search engines DO NOT consider safe for family-friendly viewing. They work by doing a search with filtering options at both search engines switched on and off. It then compares the results and shows you whatever was being filtered out. The result is to give you only stuff deemed "unsafe." Unsafe Search Results is a similar service.

Why might you use these other than to find unsafe content? I came across them via Tara over at ResearchBuzz, who notes in Unsafe Searching on Google that this can be a way to see if the filters are slipping, censoring content that might not really be unsafe.

She suggests trying a site search for your own site, to see all your pages that might be accidentally filtered, such as some of these pages in a check on Amnesty International. The only problem is, you won't be shown all your pages. You'll only be shown all the pages from the first 100 results that are checked. You could have more pages being filtered, if you were able to drill deeper.

Need to know more about enabling such filters if you want them, bearing in mind that they aren't perfect? Our Kids Search Engines page has tips and information.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:01 PM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

Travel Search Engines Bump Hotels From Top Search Listings

A study out from SEM technology firm SEMphonic finds that travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Hotels.com push out actual hotel sites such as Marriott and Radisson from top results of "247 hotel-related keywords." Travel aggregators or travel search engines get 39 percent of the top 50 spots in paid listings, while hotels get 17 percent of the listings. Hotels do better in organic listings, getting 48 percent of the top 50 spots.

The firm hasn't released the study to any one but DMNews yet, so it's hard to poke at it more. You can read more in their article, Travel Sites Push Hotels Out of Searches.

Top of my head -- I tend not to like studies that dig deeper than the first page of results. What's happening in the top 10 spots? That's what matters. There's a side remark in the DMNews story noting that when you look at the top 10 organic listings, Marriott, Radisson and Starwood hotel sites do well there.

I guess the takeaway point is this. If you run a travel site, make sure you're doing everything possible to ensure that your official site is showing up well, if that's important to you. As someone sick of always running into your affiliates rather than the official site, I know it's important to me.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:30 AM | Permalink

September 1, 2005

New SEM/SEO Quiz To Test Your Knowledge

I had a lot of fun taking an SEO quiz that SEOmoz hosted back in May. Now there's a new one. Intro is covered here. You can take the test here, all 44 questions of it. Haven't taken it yet, but I'll do so shortly!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:20 AM | Permalink

July 6, 2005

Q&As, Q&As, Q&As On Search

It's Q&A madness out there. Below links to Q&As with a black hat on SEO, a recovering PR meister on search and public relations, an information research professional on search marketing, Bloglines, PriceGrabber, Digital Point and MSN Search to come.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:02 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge

Yesterday, Chris wrote about the new Yahoo My Web social search network. I expect many will be excited over the tagging component, but I remain dubious for many reasons which I cover in another article I posted today. But whether tagging works is beside the main point. What deserves the most attention, the real key development, are the trust networks for knowledge Yahoo hopes to create.

I got a tour of the new system while it was in development, when I was visiting at Yahoo last month. After seeing what was planned, I remarked to Yahoo senior vice president of search Jeff Weiner sitting next to me that they were building "an eBay for knowledge." Jeff was already literally bouncing at times with excitement in showing the new system, and the remark made him smile even more broadly.

He smiled because that's exactly the Yahoo goal. My Web is Yahoo's community rating system for information. Just as you buy things on eBay depending on ratings to know if you'll trust a seller, My Web is what Yahoo hopes will help you choose more wisely the information you receive, whether you actively check reviews, contribute or remain an ordinary searcher who completely ignores the tagging and social search components.

In short, Yahoo's not banking on tagging -- the categorization of material -- as a way to help people find things better. It's banking that the mere act of saving things at all, even without tags, will give them a clue about what are trusted pages across the web. By looking at patterns of saving, Yahoo will have trust networks to tap into.

Searching Everyone's Pages, Trust Networks & Public Experts

Chris's Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with My Web 2.0 article explains how searchers can seek information posted into the My Web system. My new A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 article posted today for Search Engine Watch members drills down in depth about what exactly you can and cannot locate in the system and how various components work.

The big missing component is that there's no way currently to search against the "Everyone's Web" content, pages saved by everyone using the My Web 2.0 system. In other words, despite there being around 20,000 pages now saved by everyone in the community (and growing fast), you can only keyword search against content saved by those specifically within your "community" of contacts.

That's going to change in the future, once Yahoo's ready. Trust networks are the missing piece to make that happen.

"Eventually, we'll have 'search everyone' enabled," said Eckart Walther vice president of product management at Yahoo. "In the future, you will be able to see what others share. You can choose to add others to your trust network."

By adding others, Walther means that you can choose to add other people's choices to your own My Web collection of documents, even if they don't wish to network formally with you. It's an important point, because it leads into the public experts system that Yahoo wants to see evolve in the system.

Right now, the only people impacting what you search for are those who have agreed to be in your community -- your friends and friends of friends. But what if you see that there is someone you really respect on a particular topic participating? Consider:

  • If Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, is tagging content relating to the web, you might want to have him added as an expert to influence what you see.  
  • Like Oprah Winfrey? Then you might want her to have an influence on your results, if she's tagging and saving pages in all her spare time.  
  • Into business with a rebel attitude? If Virgin's Sir Richard Branson were in the system, he might be attractive as an expert for you to add.  
  • Interested in internet and technology law and like what Lawrence Lessig has to say? Then you'd probably like him to help influence your results.

In the current system -- assuming such celebrities were taking part -- you couldn't tap into them unless you knew them directly or were connected by a friend or friend of a friend.

That will change in the future. Not only will you be able to add anyone to your network, but Yahoo wants to evolve the system to help you better spot and use people they'll consider "public experts" you can tap into. Chances are, they won't be giant celebrities. But there will be a range of people regarded as knowledgeable in their areas that you'll likely be able to trust.

In addition, the company will be able to watch how networks begin to expand and rate content. It expects that there will be all sorts of data that can be mined to help rank results better, for when people are doing searches against "Everyone's Web" saved pages.

"We can figure out what all these people have in their trust network. We expect to have several thousand networks emerge immediately. We can then overlay those," Walther said.

Trust Networks As The New Link Analysis

Trust won't just be used against My Web content. Yahoo is going to use trust networks to refine all of its web search results -- in other words, searches on "regular" Yahoo.

In October, I explained to Search Engine Watch members that My Web data was something Yahoo was "considering" using. It isn't considering any longer. The company says My Web data will definitely be used to refine results for everyone in the future.

Why? Yahoo knows that despite all the saving that will go on, people will never save all the billions of pages on the web that it already indexes. Instead, what Yahoo accumulate a lot of information on what various trust networks within My Web seem to like. That can be applied to improve the rankings of all pages it indexes, not just those within the My Web area.

We've had a generation of search engines that depended on on-the-page factors such as word location and frequency. We've had a current second generation that tapped into link analysis, looking at how people are linking and what they say in links.

Personal search is that third generational jump, and Yahoo's flavor of personal search is a social network one that it hopes will improve relevancy in web wide results in the way that link analysis helped drive back spam and improve relevancy years ago.

"We're creating personal anchor text for pages, but by having a trust network, we can actually pretty much eliminate spamming," Walther said.

Will Trust Get Spammed?

Hmm. Link analysis has degraded over the years as people learned how to manipulate links. Aren't there going to be plenty of spammers and people trying to mislead the trust networks? Aren't there going to be a lot of well-meaning people who will nonetheless save horrible pages that they love for all the wrong reasons and categorize them terribly?

Sure. Yahoo admits all of this readily. But Yahoo is confident that these types of extremes will be lost among the overall quality it expects to dominate.

"Even if some there are some false positives in an extended trust network, the odds are much better that you won't get spammed compared to the wide web," Walther said.

Social Search Faces More Trust Vulnerabilities

The trust idea makes a lot of sense. Having a set of trusted pages that a search engine can depend on is at the core of the TrustRank system described in a paper written by both Google and Yahoo employees. If you know which pages you can trust, then you can boost them plus let them boost other pages by weighting what they link to more heavily. But to know those trusted pages, you ultimately need human beings to give you a collection.

MSN's new Neural Net / RankNet system which emerged this week seems to tap into a small set of humans doing trust training. Trust there is hard to influence -- hard to spam -- given you don't even know who is creating the core trusted documents.

The new Google Personalized Search service taps into trust by just looking at what you personally select in your searching activities. Influencing or all-out spamming trust there is even harder than with MSN, in that every individual is creating their own set of core trusted documents.

Advice to marketers looking to do better in both systems above? Very little. Have good content and hope for the best. Be trustworthy. There aren't entry points for you to directly influence the systems.

Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 system is ambitious. By virtual of being a social search network, it has various places where trust can be influenced or potentially spammed. In fact, I've been shaking my head a bit over all the time it's taken to closely examine the Yahoo system to figure out where and how things might go wrong.

Advice to marketers looking to do better in the Yahoo system? Lots and lots, as A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 covers.

Different Paths, Same Goal -- Better Relevancy Through Personalization

All of search marketing lives with a poor reputation that isn't completely deserved. SEO -- and SEM by extension -- took another slam today from Matthew Haughey of Metafilter, who puts us on par with cockroaches.

But search marketers have long influenced search engines in good ways to help them locate quality pages that might otherwise not get found, as I covered recently in Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO. In fact, search engines themselves refer people to companies that do SEO, and some have even hired firms to help them. It's not something that would happen if influencing results was always bad.

So, too, influencing trust isn't necessarily bad. Yahoo's system is vulnerable in being ambitious, but it's also strong in being able to tap into things the other systems can't.

Google depends solely on what you like, but that means your more hip and knowledgeable friend that you trust in other aspects of your life can't have an impact on you when it comes to search. Moreover, want to enlist a trusted expert in a field, as described above? You need an ambitious system like Yahoo's that allows that.

It's also noteworthy that Google isn't ruling out social search. On Tuesday -- before Yahoo rolled out its new service [which I have no doubt Google knew was coming] -- I asked Marissa Mayer, director of consumer products for Google, if its new personalized service might evolve into a social search model down the line.

Marissa talked about having worked on a web recommendation tool project in her pre-Google days and was pretty positive about the upside to such systems, I felt. But her experience also taught there are a lot of nuances that need to be taken into account, she said.

"I think there's a lot of potential there, but there's a lot of infrastructure that need to get built there and built well," she said.

Yahoo certainly feels it has the infrastructure. Vulnerabilities? Yahoo says it has this covered. Defenses, plans, self-correcting systems are all supposedly ready to go. Yahoo says it's not being naive about the attacks both overt and unexpected that its system will face.

As Chris wrote yesterday, "We'll see." That's not a cynical statement, either. It's just a fact -- we'll see if it works, and I hope it does.

As Chris also wrote, Google and Yahoo are on "very different paths" in tapping into trust for personalization. So's MSN, and we'll no doubt see Ask Jeeves bring trust into its personalized system as well.

Everyone's heading for that same goal, unique results that give you the best relevancy. Whatever path they take, let's hope they all get there.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:13 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2005

WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference Recap: Day 3

The third and last day of the WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference 2005 in New Orleans happened yesterday. Below is the roundup of live coverage from Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable and Aaron Wall from SEO Book relating to search:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:03 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2005

WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference Recap: Day 2

The second day of the WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference 2005 in New Orleans happened yesterday. Below is the roundup of live coverage from Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable relating to search:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:13 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2005

Tips On Improving Landing Pages

11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages at Digital Web looks at simple things to consider to ensure that when people land at your web site, they don't take off immediately for somewhere else.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:29 PM | Permalink

June 10, 2005

AOL Moves TV Spend To Search; Rodney Dangerfield Of Online Advertising No More!

AOL Wooing Users to Portal, With a Little Help From Its Foes from the New York Times looks at how AOL is ironically turning to search ads on rivals Google and Yahoo to attract people to its new public portal offering. The story notes how $50 million intended for television ads is instead going to search because AOL realized search was already the biggest driver of traffic to its free music site. Here's a quote to warm the hearts of search marketers over the years who've had to scrape, lobby, beg and plead for more spending on search:

"We started seeing the results and said, 'Oh, my God, what if we took this money and put it into search engine marketing,' " Mr. Miller said. Now more than half of AOL's marketing budget for the portal will be used to pay for ads on search engines and formatting Web pages so they appear in the free search results.

So there you have it. Search, which I called the Rodney Dangerfield of no respect in terms of online advertising in 2001, gets an endorsement from Time Warner. If you're still dealing with some marketing department that remains dubious about search -- despite the continued rise in spend -- despite the fact that for a tiny, tiny amount of traditional spend they could discover the power of search themselves -- point them at this quote.

And hey, point the Penn State to it, as well. Gary noted recent research from Penn State yesterday, on how consumers are found to head primarily to organic listings. Yes, search marketers have known that for years. But to say about ads:

According to recent reports, businesses spent an estimated $8 billion to sell their products and services via sponsored links in 2004, despite little evidence that such advertising successfully directs traffic to Web sites. More likely to hook consumers are the organic results or those results returned automatically by the algorithmic operations of the search engine, Jansen said.

I bolded the key part. Little evidence advertising successfully directs traffic to web site? Please. Search is one of the most heavily measured advertising venues. Advertisers are spending because they know they are getting traffic to their web sites, and traffic that converts. The rising spend is direct evidence that it successfully drives traffic to sites. Spend wouldn't be rising otherwise.

Organic, of course, remains important. If anything, organic search is the new Rodney Dangerfield of search. Despite bringing in more traffic than paid search, advertiser spend on paid search dwarfs organic, as SEMPO stats showed last year.

But maybe organic will get more valuable. At the very least, note that AOL didn't say it would spend only on paid search. "Free" search results were deemed important, as well.

Postscript: Paid Search a Footnote in AOL.com Push from ClickZ is a brief story that organic listings will be the big push in AOL's campaign.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:52 PM | Permalink

June 1, 2005

New Article Looks at SEO "Gone Bad"

Companies subvert search results to squelch criticism from the Online Journalism Review looks how companies are trying to squash bad public relations in search engines.

From the article:

It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones down.

and

"I don't have any problem with search engine optimization, and businesses have every right to do it. But my complaint is that this is something that you don't want everybody to know about, because you know that it's deceitful, and it's not about providing value for people. It's not about providing a great information resource that will be the #1 site on the Web. It's about flooding the Web with crap, and in that sewage, [they're] going to bury everyone else. That's my main concern. The implications go across to other businesses like Scientology." -- Eric Janssen, proprietor of Quixtar Blog and online creative manager for the Memphis Commercial Appeal's site

Posted by Gary Price at 8:25 PM | Permalink

May 25, 2005

Take The SEO Quiz

Rand Fiskin has created the SEO Quiz. It's fun -- give it a whirl. Then check out whether you're at the top of the leaderboard. I'm hoping Rand will make it into a monthly or weekly quiz on news. And Barry notes it's already had some texas holdem spam. Want to comment on how the quiz might change? Visit our forum thread, The SEO Quiz From SEOmoz.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:53 PM | Permalink

May 12, 2005

Online Poker Searches Not Driving Wikipedia Popularity

Recent news from competitive intelligence and analytics firm Hitwise that the community-created Wikipedia encyclopedia saw a rise in popularity over the past month got me thinking. Did this have more to do with a link bombing campaign by some bloggers to push Wikipedia into the top results for "online poker" at Google? After some checking, Hitwise says that's not the case.

The story now posted for Search Engine Watch members goes into depth about why bloggers want Wikipedia to do well for online poker and how stats show the campaign isn't behind Wikipedia's rise in general popularity. Plus, a look at who is doing tops for searches on online poker and the surprising top search term that's sending Wikipedia traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:17 PM | Permalink

Dogpile Gets New Look, Overlap Comparison Tool & Study

Dogpile has released a significant upgrade to its meta search engine, allowing easy comparison of search results across the major search engines. Dogpile has also introduced a new comparison tool that visually illustrates search engine overlap (or lack thereof) in the top results for Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo.

In today's SearchDay article, Dogpile Enhances Meta Search, Offers Comparison Tools, I take an in-depth look at these new services, and also comment on some new research that quantifies search engine overlap and why it's important for both searchers and search marketers alike.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:39 PM | Permalink

April 28, 2005

Mom, I'm an SEO, Not a Scumbag... Really

Anyone who's spent time in the world of search marketing knows there's a wide spectrum of experience, knowledge and, frankly, ability to effectively influence search results, whether paid or organic. Unfortunately, several high-profile incidents involving unscrupulous search engine optimization "firms" have cast an unsavory light on the industry. To make matters worse, a number of marketing, design and usability experts have weighed in with wrong-headed (or simply wrong) commentary disparaging search engine marketing with an overly wide brush.

That needs to stop, writes Danny Sullivan in today's SearchDay article, Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO. Danny offers a great recounting of how the search marketing industry ended up cast in such a negative light, and makes a number of useful suggestions for anyone involved in online marketing to both understand and use search marketing techniques that have been proven effective, ethical and ultimately, the right thing to do for the end user.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:57 AM | Permalink

April 25, 2005

Knowing The SEO Experts

How expert is your search expert? Search expert Shari Thurow aims to help you figure that out in Identifying SEO Experts, Part 1: Beginners at ClickZ, the first of a three part series. What's a beginner -- or perhaps better, someone with the foundations of being an expert? Try her mom test. If they can write a good essay that integrates 10 key terms, they've got the makings of being an expert.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:39 PM | Permalink

April 8, 2005

Research Papers: Rankings, Link Farms, Personalization, and PageRank Collusion

Yesterday's post about the revised research paper that will be presented at the WWW2005 Conference next month reminded me that I need to begin compiling links to some of the search papers that will be delivered conference. I plan to do get it done in several installments. So, consider this installment number one. Here we go. More coming soon.

+ An Analysis of Factors Used in Search Engine Ranking (AIRWeb Workshop) by Albert Bifet, Carlos Castillo, Paul-Alexandru Chirita and Ingmar Weber.

+ Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust(AIRWeb Workshop) by Panagiotis T. Metaxas and Joseph DeStefano. UPDATE: A slide presentation is now available.

+ Identifying Link Farm Spam Pages by Baoning Wu and Brian D. Davison. Note: A new tech report from Stanford's Zoltan Gyongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina: Link Spam Alliances, will not be presented at the WWW2005 conference but might be of interest.

+ A Personalized Search Engine based on Web-snippet Hierarchical Clustering by Antonio Gulli. Note: You can check out the engine described in the paper here. A new personalized version is also available. Antonio Gulli is the Director, Advanced Products at Ask Jeeves. His personal homepage is home to lots of interesting reading and demos including this one for ComeToMyHead, a news search tool (more than 2000 sources) that also offers images, personalization, and classification. In other words, what I'll be checking out this weekend. (-:

+ Pagerank Increase under Different Collusion Topologies (AIRWeb Workshop) by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Carlos Castillo and Vincente Lopez.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:06 PM | Permalink

April 6, 2005

Google SEO Support Given To Advertisers

Google & SEO Support For Advertisers now posted for Search Engine Watch members looks at how increased editorial listings support being given to large advertisers is raising concerns with search marketers and threatening the "church and state" division between ads and editorial results that Google has long sought to maintain.

In the story, I look at how Google will provide large advertisers with guidance on getting listed in its editorial results, upon request. The company has also provided this guidance to potential advertisers it seeks to gain.

Google acknowledges both points but stresses that only basic information is provided, similar to what someone might read on its web site or hear at a conference. Marketers I talked with for the story agree that no "insider" information to produce top rankings is being provided. However, the story does look anew at how some may get the go-ahead to do things that Google's public guidelines don't allow.

I also do a review of the situation with other search engines, in terms of what they say they do -- or do not -- provide in terms of express support. The story touches on how Ask Jeeves may finally come up with a free Add URL system of some type, while Yahoo hints at some type of new support system.

Overall, that's what I urge in the story -- a new, guaranteed paid support system that isn't tied to cost-per-click paid inclusion fees that all the major search engines should provide.

Be sure to also see For Whom the Search Bell Tolls out yesterday from Kevin Ryan at iMediaConnection. Kevin's heard the same stories that I've been told recently and touches on them in his piece that focuses on whether support provided by the search engines in part threatens the survival of SEM firms.

Meanwhile, see this post over in our forums that talks about how being a certified AdWords Professional wasn't enough for one search marketing company to be deemed big enough by Google to handle a large client.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:43 PM | Permalink

March 24, 2005

Content Sense

Sooner or later, virtually everyone who practices search engine optimization learns the most important "secret" to creating high ranking web pages. Often, after spending hours struggling with the arcana of tuning meta tags, balancing keyword density or spending hours in futile attempts at securing reciprocal links, most people finally see the light. The "secret" to high ranking web pages is almost frustratingly simple: Create good content.

How can this be? How can something so basic make such a difference in search engine rankings when all of the SEO techniques du jour seem to have little or no effect?

In today's SearchDay article, Why Quality Content is Key For Search Engines, guest writer Fredrick Marckini writes about a recent Search Engine Strategies panel that answered these questions. The speakers on the panel also offered lots of great tips for creating and maintaining a content-rich, search engine friendly web site.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:32 AM | Permalink

March 23, 2005

Writing Search Friendly Web Content

Last week I wrote about eye tracking studies that emphasized the importance of creating content that users respond to favorably after finding pages using search engines. One way to get people reading and interested is to write for your audience—your users— rather than simply trying to tweak your words to rank well. As obvious as this sounds, effective copywriting gets surprisingly little attention in the search optimization community, despite being one of the key elements of overall web site success.

Today's SearchDay article, Writing for Search Engines, reviews a comprehensive eBook that's focused solely on the art and craft of creating copy that's both search friendly and grabs attention, compelling web users to action. It's an excellent book, and deserves a place on every serious search pratitioner's bookshelf.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:14 AM | Permalink

March 16, 2005

Poking At Search Marketing Myths

Popular Search Marketing Myths Debunked from Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide takes a nice look at some of the popular search marketing wisdom you may hear out there and explains that it ain't necessarily so.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:33 AM | Permalink

March 14, 2005

Big Brands Need To Do SEO, Too

Big brand? "Get over yourself," says Shari Thurow, when it comes to SEO. In her Big Brands Equal Big SEO Opportunities column on ClickZ today, she looks at how being a big brand can give you opportunities in search engine optimization but doesn't mean guarantees if you aren't willing to accommodate search engines. That's especially so give there are smaller, nimble companies who will.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:18 PM | Permalink

March 9, 2005

SEO Big For About.com

What's the value of organic search engine optimization? It apparently contributed quite a bit to the $410 million that the New York Times paid for About.com. Note the heavy discussion of how SEO has helped About in driving traffic in this Online Journalism Review article, About.com CEO explains why NYT spent $410 million to buy site.

Quoted about About's SEO efforts is CEO Peter Horan. Behind the scenes, it's SEO veteran Marshall Simmonds, one of our regular SES speakers, who orchestrates the optimization and in-house training of all those guides to help their content naturally do better.

Want some tips on what he does for the big site of About.com? See these past SearchDay articles and SES forum coverage: Big Sites + Big Brands = Big Search Engine Marketing Challenges, Home-Grown Search Engine Optimization, Big Sites / Big Brands

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:50 AM | Permalink

February 10, 2005

Big Four Confirmed For Indexing Summit

The Indexing Summit is on!

The what? Earlier this year, I said it would be great to have some type of indexing summit, where search engines could hear and discuss ideas on what web site owners would like in terms how their content gets indexed.

I went forward with scheduling one for our upcoming SES New York show and just got a last confirmation for the panel. All four major crawlers, Yahoo, MSN Search, Google and Ask Jeeves, will be taking part -- and much thanks to all of them for stepping forward to participate.

Don't expect anything immediate to come out of the panel. It's unlikely that any new ideas will be suddenly embraced by all four then and there. But it is an opportunity to raise ideas for them to consider and hear some preliminary thoughts about why something might or might not be workable.

What type of ideas? Well...

  • Wish you could control exactly what a search engine spiders, such as tagging content that should or should not be indexed, such as page navigational elements?  
  • Wish there was a way you could explain to a search engine that although you have five different domain name names that resolve to the same site, THIS domain name is the one you want used?  
  • Wish all the search engines agreed on what they will and will not index in terms of Flash, JavaScript, CSS and so on?  
  • Wish there was a paid support system where you could get express answers on indexing questions?

Those are just some of the ideas that might be put to the panel. Your help is needed to provide some other things you'd like. Please come over to this forum thread: Ideas For The Indexing Summit. There, I'll be mining the ideas that come out for good things to raise to the panel.

For those looking for more background, see:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:44 PM | Permalink

February 3, 2005

How Much Are Top Rankings Worth?

How much is being in the top results of a search engine worth? Wired tries but doesn't really get an monetary answer to the question in Googling the Bottom Line. Yep, we know that top rankings can generate traffic. A Oneupweb study of 30 clients done for Wired found that getting on the second or third page of the results increases traffic five times in the first month, nine times in the second. Move to page one, and it's even better -- I think.

The study says traffic will triple in the first month, then increase six times in the second. So my traffic goes up five times if I'm on the second or third page but only three times for being on the first page. Yes, that's exactly right, according to the study. Here are the figures:

Traffic Increase 1st Page 2nd/3rd Page First Month 337% 517% Second Month 627% 942%

So when the report concludes:

Oneupweb performed this study hypothesizing that being in the top 10 results is better than being in the top 30?and being below the top 30 is like being invisible. Clearly, the study establishes that trend.

The figures seemingly say the opposite. Want more traffic? Get on the second or third page of results!

That flies completely against what every search marketer knows from seeing their own stats. Fall from the top ten, and your traffic falls off as surely as gravity pulls things to earth. So I called Oneupweb to try and better understand what is going on. Here are the caveats.

First, traffic is based solely off of natural search generated referrals. They looked at how much traffic a site got from non-paid Google search results one month, then compared to the next month.

Sites coming into the second and third page of results started out with less traffic. So when they arrived, the increase was more dramatic. That's the reason Oneupweb says the 2nd/3rd page results are higher.

Specifically:

  • Sites entering the 2nd/3rd page started at 7 visitors per keyword on average, then rose to 36 visitors per keyword.
  • Sites entering the 1st page started at 14 visitors per keyword on average, then rose to 46 visitors.
  • Since the 1st page sites already started with more traffic, the gain on a percentage basis was less dramatic.

But here's another confusing aspect. The report also says:

When Oneupweb reviewed the list of sites achieving a top-10 position for a particular search term, we noted that more than 75 percent debuted there, without previous listings on Google pages 2 or 3.

and:

In keeping with the industry?s rule of thumb, Oneupweb confirmed that websites falling below page three don't sell. In our research, not one sale was recorded for a site below Google page three for the time period.

So...

  • More than three-quarters of the sites that hit the first page of results "debuted" there...
  • Which means they were originally buried below the first three pages of results where no traffic is generated...
  • So how did that group of sites end up having more natural search traffic to begin with than the 2nd/3rd page group?

One more thing to complicate matters. Say you were a site that debuted on the 2nd or 3rd page of results. The next month, you move to the first page (as anecdotally can often be the case). The gain you get is still recorded as part of being in the 2nd or 3rd page of results -- even though you really were on the first page.

Given that, it seems no wonder you have a nine time increase in the second months. A number of sites making the jump onto the first page of results probably fueled this.

One more excerpt from the study I had to pull out:

Oneupweb's study demonstrates a clear benefit to being listed on the first three pages of Google results and may even prompt online retailers to target Google?s first page.

I don't know anyone period, retailer or not, who doesn't already want to be on the first page of Google's results. They don't need a study to prompt them :)

Back to the Wired article. Can this traffic a make-or-break an online business? Depends on the business. If you've built your business around getting only free search traffic, yes, it can be make or break, as many found during the big Google Florida Update in late 2003. If you do a mix of paid and unpaid listings, the unpaid listings save you money -- but they probably won't break you if they go away.

For another look at page position and visibility, see the iProspect study from last year. It found:

  • 22.6 percent of search engine users end their search after viewing the first few results returned
  • an additional 18.6 percent stop after reading the entire first page of results (41.2% cumulative)
  • 25.8 percent more abandon their search after the first two pages
  • 14.7 percent (81.7% cumulative) wait until they view three pages

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:55 PM | Permalink

January 31, 2005

Scoble On Anti-NoFollow & Blogs As Not Search Kryptonite

Robert Scoble takes a stab at what he calls a "anti-nofollow religion" that has sprung up in The "no nofollow" religion. To be fair, there's also a "pro-nofollow religion" as well.

As with most debates, the truth is at neither extreme. Nofollow isn't a perfect solution to blogging comment spam, but neither is it a waste of time. It's nice that web authors (not just bloggers, everyone!) have more choices over what will get indexed.

Interestingly, the NoNoFollow site that Scoble is reacting to was apparently started by some well known German bloggers in part worried that nofollow tags might work against bloggers, such as by robbing them of links they see as helpful with search engines.

As I've written before, such arguments bring the bloggers making them much closer to the comment spammers they despise. So this comment from Robert's post echoes with me:

Discriminates against legitimate users as spammers? Huh? Since when did writing a comment mean that you deserve the full search engine juice of getting linked to by someone else?

Robert also touches on the whole "blogs are superpowerful with search engines" topic that I disagree with:

Could be used to further discriminate weblogs. Um, weblogs are actually showing up too high for their real-world relevance. Here, why am I the #3 "Robert? [on Google]"

Why? Not because you're a blogger, Robert. It's because you're a person that lots of people link to with the word "Robert" in your name. Look at the other things coming up tops for "Robert." Most of them are not bloggers.

Heck, here's a new page just up with tips for those using the Blogger system that continues this type of myth of blogs as some type of search kryptonite, able to bring the mighty search engines to their knees:

Blogs rank well in the search engines by their very nature. They are regularly updated with keyword rich content. Most blog writers stick to a main theme for their blogs making relevance easy. Because of the blog?s versatility, the blogger can add more themes to the blog and tie them together, enabling a blog to maintain several strong themes.

Actually, many blog writers are all over the place in what they write about in publishing on their home pages. That dilutes what the home page is about and can cause what its relevancy is for to a search engine to constantly change.

As for "themes," the search engines have consistently said that keyword relevance is done on a page-by-page basis. So have all the pages on a particular topics you want -- that doesn't somehow make the entire site more relevant for a particular term. If having a site be all about a particular topic were crucial, then Amazon would never rank well for anything. Instead, you constantly stumble upon it for a variety of keywords in search results.

Blogs can certainly quickly attract links that search engines depend on, and that can help them more than other sites that don't have the ability to easily generate new links. As more and more content is published through blogs, it's also natural we'll see more of them in search results. But content just being on a blog is not a guaranteed rocket to success.

A search on Google for "cars" doesn't give me any blogs about cars in the top results, despite the fact we've got car blogs out there. A search for "movies?" The same thing.

For more on blogs and search engines, see my older article, Loving Each Other More: Search Engines & Blogs. For more on the nofollow debate and how nofollow goes beyond blogs, see my recent post More On Link Condom & Blogger Worries Over Nofollow.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:22 AM | Permalink

January 7, 2005

FyberSearch Gains Ignore Tag To Help With Blog Spam

Nathan Enns of FyberSearch dropped me an email to say he saw my proposal for search engines to consider an ignore tag and implemented it for his own FyberSearch search engine. More details and instructions in the press release at his site. OK, so FyberSearch is a tiny search engine, and the command is specific to it. This action isn't going to stop the problems bloggers and other publishers have. But it's a nice start!

For more background on the call for search engines to consider new tools for publishers, see my Comment Spam? How About An Ignore Tag? How About An Indexing Summit! post. Discussion is also on-going in this forum thread: Time For An Indexing Summit? I share within it that I'll likely set-up a summit-like panel for our next SES show in New York.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:56 AM | Permalink

January 5, 2005

Comment Spam? How About An Ignore Tag? How About An Indexing Summit!

Bloggers seem increasingly upset at the comment spam they have to deal with, something driven primarily by those who seek higher search rankings by posting links to their sites into comment areas.

To me, the solution seems simple. Why not give designers a tag telling search engines to ignore portions of a web page? Or better yet, how about a coordinated summit among search engines and webmasters to advance the state of site indexing overall?

The solution would help more than bloggers. That's good, because more than bloggers need it. The problem bloggers face has already been an issue for those who run forums, guest books or any other type of venue allowing public contributions. All are -- and have been -- targets of those who want to promote web sites.

For a non-blogger perspective at the problem, check out Mike Grehan's Google PageRank Lunacy article we ran last year in SearchDay. It discusses how guest book spam spoiled a memorial site for a good friend of his. Just like bloggers, people with guest books need help too.

I take my inspiration for an ignore tag primarily from Bruce Clay, who proposed a somewhat similar idea for <ad> tags to Google informally earlier last year. Bruce's concern was that if he or others want to purchase links, they don't want those links to harm them somehow in search engines.

Believe it or not, there are some people who buy links because of the traffic the links themselves may drive. Bruce's thought was that if publishers such as Search Engine Watch's own JupiterMedia could surround paid links they sell with an ad tag, then search engines could discount those links for ranking purposes.

Interesting idea. I also like the idea for another reason. Since we've operated our Search Engine Watch Forums, we've been liberal about allowing people to link out to resources as relevant. But this can and has been abused. Not much, fortunately, but we occasionally have to police out the irrelevant link or the link hidden in a period or comma.

One solution would be an <ignore> tag. Using this, we could surround any posted links with the tag to prevent them from being indexed. If that became commonplace on forums, it might reduce the attraction for link spam to them.

That leads to another inspiration. Six Apart/Movable Type's Brad Choate wished for some type of page-based ignore feature last July in his Restricting Google on my terms post (something he originally asked for back in Feb. 2002). His solution, which he didn't realize when doing it (check out the comments of that post) was to cloak his pages using user agent detection.

Google, of course, doesn't like cloaking. But since Brad's intent isn't too deceive Google, chances are he's not going to get busted. But even more to the point, as he says, he wouldn't have to do such a thing if Google gave him some alternative.

More broadly, lots of people beyond bloggers in lots of situations wouldn't have to do such things if search engines gave us more options. It's not a Google thing. It's not blogger thing. It's a search indexing thing.

I mentioned the ignore idea to Yahoo at our SES Chicago show and got some interest, so maybe there's hope. It poses problems, of course. An ignore tag could be abused. An ignore tag also means that some good content that's marked as "ignore" might not get indexed. But perhaps we might also have levels. How about a <content> tag authors can use to denote the key body content, a <nav> tag to highlight navigation search engines might not want to index or weight as heavily or a <public> tag to denote publicly-contributed content that might deserve less weighting?

There are lots of possibilities. What I know is that the last time the search engines came together to help provide coordinated assistance to web site owners on indexing was May 1996, when we got agreement on the meta description and meta robots tags, along with some additional talk on new support for the robots.txt convention.

Since then, we've had unilateral advances such as AltaVista (new image indexing tags), Google (robots.txt expansion, no archiving tags) or others have added but nothing coordinated to involve web site owners or the search industry as a whole. After nearly 10 years, surely the time is ripe for that type of cooperation now.

At the very least, it might help get some bloggers off Google's back who blame it for the problem. A sampling of blame and other looks at the problem and solutions:

  • Why hasn't Google stopped comment spam? which suggests a way for a link to be shown as giving or not giving credit to be passed on.  
  • Comment Spam - Google's Role? is another call that Google should somehow do something.  
  • Comment Spammers Have Blogs of Their Own from Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny is another call for some smarter way of deciding what links to credit.  
  • BTW, this is Google's problem from Dave Winer, a short note on trying to deal with referer spam, which he feels ultimately is a result of Google's reliance on links. In reality, it's a problem caused by all major search engines relying on links, but it's still a problem they can all contribute to help with.  
  • The Solution To Blog Spamming from Nick at Threadwatch looking at various proposals, including search engine ignoring links, and finding problems with them all. He pushes primarily for better defenses that the bloggers can employ.

So what do you think? Time for an indexing summit? Are there indexing changes you'd like to see? Comments of any type? Come discuss in our forum thread: Time For An Indexing Summit?

Postscript: Support has now been officially announced for an ignore-like nofollow attribute. See the Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links post for more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:58 AM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

Preparing For The Other Bradys Of Search

Back in 2002, I wrote my Google: Can The Marcia Brady Of Search Stay Sweet? article. I talked about how, similar to Jan's fear that everything was "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" in the Brady Bunch, search marketers and others were thinking "Google, Google, Google" in the search world.

Well, the other Bradys are getting more attention these days. Google is still the dominant search service, of course, with many webmasters still reporting it's the main source of their search traffic. But Yahoo has its own results, and Microsoft has long had a sizable share as well.

Despite this, are search marketers still focused too much on Google? Our forum thread SEO Thoughts on Google has a good discussion on this, including a long post from me if you care to read more about why I think it's the vertical search areas that marketers really need to plan for.

Another of our forum threads, Confessions of a White Hat Content Spammer: What I've Learned by Ignoring Google, also makes for some thoughtful reading as well on this topic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:03 AM | Permalink

November 16, 2004

Keeping SEO Secrets

Nick from Threadwatch has an interesting post today about how the real "secrets" of SEO never make it onto search forums. I agree, but it's not a reason for most to panic.

Nick puts himself out there by discussing how when he saw an effective but generally unknown technique, he got the person posting to remove their post.

This leads into his discussion that the "good stuff" doesn't generally make it into forums -- or more important, if it does, it doesn't last long given that search representatives monitor forums closely.

The statement is both true and false. Absolutely, there are secrets and tips passed among friends that never see the light of day on forums. That might make some people feel panicked. Don't.

I've never been a big proponent on trying to have people follow "secret" techniques. For one thing, if I did write about a particular technique, the exposure wouldn't let it last long.

Much more important is the fact that such loopholes generally aren't long-lasting. Those who've built SEO work around such techniques also understand this. They'll move on to the next technique and ride it for as long as it lasts.

In contrast, if you haven't used such secrets, you might actually have a better foundation for longer-lasting success. Remember, even the most closely held secrets eventually get detected. And when a big algorithm change rolls along that wipes out a number of secrets, you may be largely immune to this.

It's also important to remember there plenty of "good stuff" out there that's not so secret, helpful tips that you can employ that will bring about improvements. It's still the case today that simple title tag changes bring people better rankings.

In the end, I think it helps to understand what style of SEO you follow. I've got a bicycle race metaphor I like to roll out to explain this more.

Those who go after really specific SEO techniques, "secret" style efforts, can be like sprinters. Those focusing on content, tried and true things like good page titles -- they're riding along at a standard pace.

The steady rider may watch a sprinter overtake them and may think, "Well, I ought to do the same." But at some point, the sprinter can't keep up the pace. They fall back, and the steady rider pulls ahead. Then the sprinter catches their breath, digs deep and sprints ahead again -- only to fall back, letting the cycle repeat.

OK, maybe it's just the tortoise and the hare on bikes! But the difference is that I'm not saying there's a particular "winner" in the story. Rather, the emphasis is more on the style of racer you want to be.

If you want to go to SEO secrets route, you've got to understand that your life will involve a lot of flux. If you go the steady riding route, you've got to understand that yes, sometimes people may shoot ahead of you or that you may never crack a particular term. However, the time you put in overall may be much less, and the consistency of your traffic might be more assured.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:30 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2004

Using Paid Listings To Help Sell Free/Organic

Want to get clients or your bosses to put more money into work to improve "organic" or "free" listings? Tapping into your data about paid listing perfomance may be key. Tips on this from Kevin Lee in How Paid SEM Helps Organic Search Optimization from ClickZ.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2004

Search Engine Watch Forum's 101 Threads

Last week, one of our most energetic forum moderators Nacho Hernandez started a thread called Search Engine Marketing 101. In it, he leads off with a variety of resources useful for those getting started with search engine marketing. Comments and further contributions follow.

Nacho also kicked off a theme. Orion, one of our newest moderators, followed up with Block Analysis 101. That looks at the concept of search engines breaking up a page into "blocks," to better understand which particular content or links within that content should be given greater or less weight.

Member Nick W's now dived in to look at the often controversial issue of cloaking: Cloaking 101 - Questions and Answers. Some previous good threads and debate on this topic include The Great Doorway Debate, How Do I Spot Cloaked Sites?. You might also look over an article I did last year, Ending The Debate Over Cloaking.

Returning back to Nacho, he's compiled a great list of Google Sandbox 101-style resources in Sandbox - IN or OUT? The sandbox concept relates to the idea that new pages, new links or new sites might not be allowed to do well in Google until a certain period of time has passed. The Filthy Linking Rich thread touches on this, as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 1, 2004

Fighting Copyright Theft Via Search Engines

Someone using your web page without permission? Some succinct steps you can take to at least get them out of search engines: How to Handle Copyright Infringement Found by the Search Engines.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 31, 2004

Survey Says: SEM Could Be Better

Search engine marketing firm OneUpWeb found only 10 percent of Fortune 100 web sites to be considered well optimized. Write-up here from Internet Retailer: Less than 10% of Fortune 100 use search engine optimization effectively

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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