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The Penguin Update - Whiteboard Friday

SEOmoz and I don't always see eye to eye on industry issues, but I still have a lot of respect for the company. In fact SEOmoz is still the website that I send people to, when they want to learn about SEO or get into our industry. Rand kindly invited me to the SEOmoz office when I was in Seattle this week, for a chat and the opportunity to present a Whiteboard Friday.

This week's Whiteboard Friday covers the recent Penguin Update, including what to do and what not to do. I certainly wouldn't say that it's a comprehensive guide, but it does discuss the issues and causes that I have witnessed. Fortunately Ayima's campaigns have been unaffected (other than increases) by the update, but we do monitor our client's competitors and their agencies to a very granular level using in-house technology. Off-Page SEO has been changing dramatically for a while now, and it's important that agencies and in-house teams don't get left behind. Always ask questions and never just assume that Google whacked you by mistake, even if you are "White Hat".

Video Transcription

Hello, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Rob Kerry. I'm co-founder of an SEO agency called Ayima. Today we're going to be talking about the Penguin Update. There's been a lot of talk in a lot of communities out there, a lot of SEO communities, about the Penguin Update. A lot of false information being chucked around out there as well. Hopefully, this video clears up quite a few things.

The first issue is that a lot of people still use the term white hat, grey hat, black hat. Now, this terminology was taken from the hacking world and adopted for SEO reasons. It's actually in Google's best interest for us to use this terminology because it makes SEO sound like a risky, dangerous, almost illegal thing to be doing. Whereas if you actually use the hacking terminology and adapt it to SEO, the only thing that is black hat SEO is hacking someone's website and embedding links into there for SEO reasons. Everything else is basically white hat, because you're either getting permission from another webmaster to have a link on their site, or you're making adaptations to your own website, all of which would be classed as white hat.

Rather than looking at whether you use a white hat SEO provider or a black hat SEO provider, actually have a look to see what techniques are being used. Even if you're not buying links, you can still get affected by the Penguin Update. This isn't an update about whether you are buying links or not buying links. This an update about how you're trying to manipulate Google.

If your white hat SEO provider is currently just putting links into your site for commercial terms or even only putting 50% of the links in using commercial terms, let's say we're trying to rank for the term "penguin," if half your links or more are saying penguin in them, then you're going to get tripped up in this kind of filter because you're seen as manipulating Google, even if those links were acquired through directories or through asking for links or through viral campaigns.

So, rather than looking at that, we need to look at the footprints that are going into your site. Quite a good case study for that is we have a client who works with a lot of seasonal campaigns. We were about to run one at the beginning of this year for an event, which they sell products for. A competitor SEO agency in the UK works with one of their big competitors, one of the big competitors of our client. We were basically monitoring to see what that other SEO agency was doing. Three months before the seasonal campaign needed to launch, they started building links into their client's website using the commercial anchor text, so people putting links in saying penguin, penguin, penguin, going into those client pages. Whereas, we went with a different tactic.

We actually changed the way that we do SEO in terms of off-page SEO about a year ago, predicting that this kind of update would get rolled out. With our clients now, as long as the on-page is optimized properly and there are a few links going in using commercial terms, then we basically just build up the authority and the trust of our client website.

It sounds like kind of a lame idea, and it goes against traditional ideas of SEO, but it does actually work ever since this update rolled out. So, whilst we were starting to go up and up and up in the rankings, eventually hitting number one place for the biggest term for this seasonal campaign, we noticed our competitor going down and down and down.

There are even complaining on Twitter that Google might be broken, there's an algorithm issue, just because they didn't understand why putting loads of anchor text with commercial terms going into the client's site wasn't working. It's basically because Google has been working towards this kind of thing for quite a long time.

So, have a look at your anchor text ratios. Go to Open Site Explorer, type in your website, click on the anchor text link, and that will order it by, I think, group linking domains. You can actually see what links are most used on each URL of your website. If your commercial terms are quite near the top, let's say in the top 10, then you need to really work at getting better links going into your site and maybe even taking down some of the links, which are overly optimized. This is basically their step towards an over-optimization penalty.

There's another thing, which is content providers, who as soon as the Penguin Update rolled out, we got a barrage of emails from all of these people saying, "We can fix Penguin by building lots and lots of more pages of content for your site." These would actually negatively affect you, because one of the things that Penguin's trying to do is further penalize the production of crap content.

Rather than paying thousands and thousands a month to have 200-words news articles put onto your website, get rid of those if they're not actually bringing any traffic in. Look at actually creating a good quality resource of information on your website to become the authority in your industry. A few pages of great content is a lot better than just hammering Google with loads of news articles.

The big thing is there's no quick fix. If you get an email from a company saying that, "We can fix all your Penguin issues," it's likely not to be the case, especially if it's like a $35 fix. You just basically need to build a better campaign for your website. Look at taking down content which might not be unique or useful information. Get rid of some of that from your website if it's not driving any traffic directly to it.

Also, look at just making your website look as natural as possible. Build authority into the pages that you want to rank, but don't start over- optimizing on the anchor text. If you start doing that, not only will it fix Penguin issues, but it will also help you to rise up in the rankings. Thank you very much, and that's about it.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Publ.Date : 2012-05-10T21:59:53+01:00

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 3): Avoiding Mobile Mis-Indexing

Posted by Suzzicks

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is the third and final installment in this mobile SEO blog post series, covering the impact of the new Google smartphone bot and how you can use it to make the most of your mobile content. The first article in the series discussed how the new smartphone bot works and which sites will be most affected. The post from last week discussed how to author redirects correctly to ensure that your mobile content will be properly indexed by the smartphone bot. This final post will review common search engine indexing problems that mobile sites and mobile platforms have, and how you can prevent them.

Some SEOs insist that we must believe what Google tells us about how and why they index things the way they do; that indexing is consistent, predictable and flawless. Unfortunately, that is not the case, especially in mobile where there are more pages and more potential for things to go wrong. Believing that indexing will always happen correctly, and that you need not mitigate risk factors for mis-indexing will not create the ideal SEO scenario. It will leave your sites (mobile/desktop/tablet) exposed when there are changes to the algorithm, or when new crawlers are evaluating your site for the first time.

If you are trying to ‘dot all your ‘i’s’ and cross all your ‘t’s’ in the world of mobile search engine indexing, here is what you need to know to prevent mis-indexing:

Avoid Duplicate Content

Google has never and will never like duplicate content. Google’s new smartphone bot, and their decision to index and cache mobile redirects may be a way for Google to avoid or minimize the need to index entire mobile pages (possibly), but it is still hard to tell how it all works. Adding mobile pages into a mix will always presents the RISK that something will be misunderstood as ‘duplicate’ and cause problems.

To keep Google happy, in the mobile world it is especially important to avoid the sneakier kinds of duplicate content that some webmasters forget about, otherwise known as DUST. The acronym stands for Duplicate Url Same Text [Acronym shared with my by the awesome Lindsay Perkin-Wassle, of Keyphrasiology]. DUST happens any time more than one version of a URL will resolve in the address bar but the browser shows the same page. The easiest example to understand is a page rendering with or without inclusion of the ‘www’ in the URL (the canonical v. non-canonical discussion usually stops here), but DUST can also be seen when there are multiple versions of a home page or category level page, as in the examples below:

Desktop	http://www.yoursite.com/ http://yoursite.com/ http://www.yoursite.com/index.asp http://yoursite.com/index.asp	It is quite common for sites to allow all four of these URLs to be linked to or typed into the address bar so that the home page will be served. (This can happen at category level pages too, like www.yoursite.com/cindy and www.yoursite.com/cindy/index.asp)
Mobile	http://m.yoursite.com/ http://m.yoursite.com/index.asp	Adding mobile pages to the mix makes this even more confusing and cumbersome for Google.

In the mobile SEO world, it is quite common for mobilization platforms to control the servers and databases that generate the mobile content, and they are infamous (maybe only in my mind) for generating lots of DUST. Even the best mobilization platforms typically have minimal understanding of SEO; they try to set their servers to be very flexible with what page requests they can correctly render, and render as many different variations of a URL as possible. Instead of doing this, the platforms should be setting up the servers to 301 redirect any version of the URL that is not the canonical ‘chosen’ to redirect to the ‘chosen’ version of the URL. This is also how you can set up your own servers to prevent DUST.

Avoid 404 Errors and Misdirects

There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. This means that it will probably also have a heightened the sensitivity to errors that are present on a site or in a redirect.

In general having lots of errors on your site can hinder crawling and indexing and cast your mobile site (and possibly desktop site too) in a bad light. Be sure that you check the content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, especially if you are generating dynamic mobile pages or using a hosted mobile solution to generate your mobile pages. To make finding and fixing 404s easy, you should set your mobile content up in a separate Webmaster Tools account. This way, you can see just the errors and information related to the mobile content, and not have to subtract out desktop figures to generate meaningful information.

Many 404’s in mobilization platforms are caused by improperly expired mobile content, but you should also watch for 404 errors caused by a lack of capitalization normalization and trailing slash rules set up on the server. See the example below, where one version of a URL is working fine, but the same URL with a capital letter is understood as missing, and being redirected to the mobile home page. (This is also DUST – your server can automatically normalize URLs to remove capitals.)

Capital letters in the URL cause a 404 or redirect to the mobile home page:

Actual URL:
URL with a Capital ‘C’:

http://m.yoursite.com/cindy/
http://m.yoursite.com/Cindy/

Successful
404 Error or Redirect to Home Page

The presence or absence of trailing slashes can also cause problems, as shown below:

Actual URL:
URL with a Trailing Slash:

http://m.yoursite.com/cindy
http://m.yoursite.com/cindy/

Successful
404 Error or Redirect to Home Page

Whether the page is 404 or just redirecting to the home page, this is a problem. Stuff like this REALLY happens all the time, especially when the mobilization platforms are in charge of the server, so if you are working with an external mobilization vendor, go check this stuff out when you are done reading the article. Error-based redirect to the home page could be somehow mis-indexed as the mobile redirect.

Mobilization platforms will usually not archive mobilized pages for long periods of time, especially for sites that generate new content on a daily basis, but they also generally don’t have a proper mechanism to expire the content in a way that is good for SEO so a very similar scenario could happen with a 404 error on a page that has expired.. Mobilization platforms will generally just remove the content and leave a 404 error, which makes the mobile site look bad, because as you are constantly generating new content, you are also constantly generating new 404 errors at the same rate.

What if Google took the 404 errors on the mobile pages seriously? What if Google somehow associated the errors on the mobile pages with the corresponding desktop pages even though they were still live and fine? Hopefully Google would not let the 404 on the mobile page drag down the credibility and rankings of the desktop page that was redirecting to it, but it is not worth the risk! If you are worried about it, there is a Mobile SEO Tool to help you check indexing of one domain across the desktop and WAP index.

When you are optimizing your mobile content, the best bet is to always play it safe, and keep your content and your server settings as neat and tidy as possible. Avoid the risk of mis-indexing by checking your URLs and watching for errors. When you add more pages and more redirects, and potentially even more servers and different companies to the mix to achieve a good mobile user experience, you increase the risk of mis-indexing.

Thanks for tuning in to this mobile SEO series about optimizing for Google’s new smartphone bot! If you missed the previous articles, they cover important information like how the new bot works, which sites will be affected and how to generate the right kinds of redirects to ensure that your content is correctly indexed by the new bot. Good luck with all of your SEO efforts and stay mobile!

Publ.Date : 2012-05-09T23:11:19+01:00

Project Management for SEO (2012 Edition!)

Posted by Tom Critchlow

So here's the truth - I used to suck at project management. But over the years I've determinedly turned myself into a half-decent project manager. Why? What was the driving force?

Project Management Is A Tool For Effecting Change

At the end of the day, I never have and still don't care that much for project management. But what I do care deeply about is effecting change. Driving action and results instead of talk and documentation. You can see my drive for getting things done in this whiteboard friday:

(Note, if you have thoughts about this video you'd do well to read my follow-up comment about the difference between reports and reportings.)

Although there are many ways of affecting change, project management is a crucial part of it. Below I'm going to outline a bunch of tools, tips, and tricks that we've discovered and implemented over the years at Distilled to get better at project management:

Project Collaboration - Trello

Personally I'm not a fan of clutter, either physical or virtual, and so I love technology that gets out of the way while you get on with getting shit done. I've tried lots of different project management solutions, and Trello is the first one I've fallen in love with. For those that saw the whiteboard friday I did with Jamie about a year ago it models the real life post-it note system very well:

I'm going to let Will explain why he likes it so much:

And I'm going to let Paddy break down the details in his blog post Using Trello to Manage SEO Projects.

Project Collaboration - Google Docs

A lot of you will already be familiar with Google Docs. Of course. But only recently have I come to realize the extreme power behind the collaboration elements. I've always hated track changes in Word and finally Google Docs has something better to offer. This video, although cutsey, actually demonstrates the power of real time collaboration:

In particular, two features that are really making me excited are in-line comments (with easy replies and notifications) and revision history (which allows you to see when, how, and who edited a document).

We use Google Docs extensively within Distilled to craft and send around documents even if ultimately we deliver the final report as a .PDF or some other format. After all, some large corporations still like the smell of .PDFs in the morning....

Inbox Zero Methodology

(image credit)

I can't explain how much of a life changing experience the inbox zero methodology is. For the modern day information worker, inbox zero is fundamental to happiness and productivity. If you're not using the inbox zero system then please trust me when I say it'll change your life. Here's Merlin Mann talking about the original system at Google:

When new employees start at Distilled, we coach them in the ancient ways of Inbox Zero. Although it's a personal revelation for many (myself included), the real power comes when you have an entire organization that is GOOD WITH EMAIL. Having seen a peek inside companies that are not so efficient with email the difference is night and day.

Our Consultants Work On-site Where Possible

Life is organized chaos. Sometimes not so organized either. Project management is similar in that it's often more chaos than management. There's only so much you can really and truly work to get things done without being in the thick of it.

So, where possible, our consultants aim to spend some time on-site with our clients. The increase in results is striking. Not only are we better able to communicate our ideas, but we are also better placed to understand how the client's business works - not just the business model and mechanics, but communication, project management, hopes, and fears.

The best substitute for this if you're not able to get face-to-face with the client is to at least communicate often with many different points of contact within the client's organization. This improves the chances that you'll understand the real needs of the client as well as ensure that as many people as possible like you which is important for getting things done!

Communication Solves All Problems

We have various memes within Distilled; you can read more about them in a post I wrote for Dharmesh a little while back called Startup Culture Memes - Do You Have A Duck Of Awesomeness. One of the ones I'm most proud of is the mantra "communication solves all problems". I'm constantly amazed at the ability to solve problems by communicating effectively. Either talking to other members of the team or talking directly with the client - just having some real interaction (face to face or on the phone ideally) and explaining the situation clearly solves 99.9% of all problems.

This mantra has infiltrated all parts of Distilled, but I see two key ways that this affects project management on every project.

At the start of any project, we have a kick-off meeting which has two clear outcomes; the first is a top to bottom understanding of the client's business, and the second is a detailed understanding of what the project is going to look like. Mark wrote up our project kick-off process in a little bit more detail here: How To Kick Start SEO Projects.

Secondly, I drill into people here that it's okay to miss deadlines. Really. It is. Do people really care if you deliver something on Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon? The answer is that yes, they care very much if you don't let them know. If you let them know that you will deliver it Monday instead of Friday, then in 99% of cases, they could care less. Why is this so powerful? Because a single missed deadline without communication tarnishes your perception in the client's eyes. So long as the communication is strong, the actual dates rarely matter.

PPT Pitches

PPT? As a project management tool? Well yes. Let me explain - there are broadly speaking three types of work that you do when you're consulting and there are three different tools you use for these tasks as follows:

Activity	Tool
Research and analysis	Excel
Deliverables and specifications	Word
Pitching ideas and strategy	PowerPoint

Although this seems like a no-brainer, it's actually a very powerful mental model. Want to take a guess where setting the project vision and goals comes in? Yep - PPT. Although you won't keep track of a project in PowerPoint, you should be crafting and creating the vision and goals for the project in PPT. Without strong vision and goals, projects will fail.

So persuading a consultant to put together PPTs at the start of projects is a powerful tool to ensure we have a clear idea of where we're going, and importantly, the client is on board.

Monthly Industry Updates

As part of our monthly reporting communication, we provide a letter from Will to our clients. This is a value add that allows our clients to keep abreast of industry news and changes. I've included a sample of the letter (and supporting links) for April here:

Why is this important? Well not all of our clients are SEO junkies like us. And they like to be kept abreast of the latest happenings in the industry.

How is this a project management tool? You might think it's tenuous, but actually it's crucially important. Running SEO projects on the shifting sands of Google's algorithms means we have to keep on our toes and be prepared to potentially shift our strategy at a moment's notice. So communicating these changes to our clients allows us to be on the same page when we start talking about pandas and penguins....

What Works For You?

It's important to note that what works for us may not work for you. Hopefully this has been helpful for you to take a peek at how we manage projects and communication. I'd love to hear what you guys have to offer in the comments!

MONTH ONE – PLANNING AND QUICK HITS

This month in the Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide you are setting up your online presence and the tools to measure it. Simultaneously, you should be planning out your link building campaign.

PLANNING

Oli’s guide talks about launching an editorial calendar at Month Two, but I suggest you start thinking about when you’re rolling your content out before you start anything. You should of course be thinking about what’s hitting the blog when, but content takes time and careful planning to create and then launch.

When planning your link building you should do what it takes to differentiate yourself and your content because you are competing with the whole web. Making your content stand out will make building links substantially easier.

With that in mind you will be launching the following content:

Egobait (Month Two) – This is content that includes and flatters your key influencers to in turn encourage them to participate by linking to or sharing your digital assets.
Data Visualization (Month Three) – Everyone’s go-to version of this is an infographic, but consider other ways of visualizing the data such as a book (Storybird), a timeline (dipity) or a videographic if possible. In month three you will be launching your own.
E-Book and Guest Post (Month Four) – By the time the fourth month rolls around, the key influencers in your space should know about you or your client and what you bring to the table. At this point an e-book is great way to solidify you or your client’s thought leadership. Much like this guide and Oli’s, you will be coupling that e-book with a blog post on an influential site in your space to be sure that it is seen.

The content should have a centralized theme that links back to your business goals, but you want it to be different enough so that your growing audience will want to share all of it.
Audience/Influencer Personas – Understand who your target audience is by creating personas. Personas are general representations of your audience. Typically you should create four personas for the whole site campaign and while you can make as you like, four are more easily managed.

These personas don’t have to be particularly in-depth (for example we don’t need to determine their need states) nor validated through measurement, they just have to help you create a mental model for content ideation, prospecting and outreach. While a more in-depth form of this falls under the Opportunity Discovery model, for the purposes of link building a basic understanding of who is potentially out there is all that is required. This will make it easier to associate concepts and keywords with one segment of the audience rather than another and then ultimately allow you to tailor outreach specifically to that segment in order to scale the messages.
- Social Listening – Use tools like Topsy, Social Mention, Amplicate and Google Discussion Search to identify user segments based on keyword searches and usage. Starting from basic keyword searches that you have identified in the Adwords Keyword Tool identify who is contributing to that conversation. In cases where the conversation is particularly spammy, download the tweets and clean them up using Google Refine.
- Facebook Ad Creator – The Facebook Ad Creator is to audience research what the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is to Keyword Research. It is an invaluable tool to understand the inventory of people that fit a very precise demographic. This tool will be the validation required for the personas you are building. If you hypothesize from social listening that there is a user segment out there between 30 and 40 and is interested in search engine optimization, you can then take that to the Facebook Ad Creator and see how valid that is. The only limitation is that you can’t examine the interests together using “AND.” You can only use examine the inventory using “OR.”

Prospecting – Finding people who will be interested in your content has never been easier. Now that you have identified the type of people that you want links from and split them into targets and influencers you have a fairly precise idea of what they are into. Break these into defining keywords and run searches in:
- FollowerWonk
- Zerply
- About.Me

You can also prospect specifically for sites within Google by using a variety of search queries. Additionally, there are prospecting tools such as Citation Labs and Ontolo, but these require paid subscriptions.

Keep track of these users by persona type so you can later segment your outreach and create more directly tailored form letters — if that is your thing. If you’re prospecting specifically by site you can also keep track of those sites by the segment that those sites target.

Original Content Ideation – Even with an incredible Creative team amazing content is not scalable. Even Don Draper’s team had far more misses than makes, but what Sterling Cooper didn’t have is Social Media.
- GoFish – This is a tool that I built to perform real-time keyword research in order to help identify co-relevant ideas that are already occurring on Twitter and gives you a list of users that have tweeted those keywords. I gave an example in my “Targeting Humans” talk where I put in the keyword “Michael Jackson” and it identified the keywords “Jackson trial” and “south park” as occurring together very often. A content idea with a built-in audience would be “The Michael Jackson Doctor Trial” played out with South Park characters. More information on how this tool works can be found in my “Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand” post.
- Facebook Ad Creator – You might be surprised to see this tool twice. In addition to being great for segment inventory it’s also great for inferring content ideas that will resonate with those people. For example if we found that target segment of XXX is interested in [A].[B],[C] can we can infer that they would be interested in a __________________. This is the same idea as with GoFish, but it allows for more evergreen concepts.
Pre-Contacting – At this point you have your ideas and a strong list of prospects. Strike up a conversation and tell them about the content you’re working on. Ask them for feedback due to their expertise or interest in the subject matter. Update them regularly along the way to make sure they are still onboard so when the content launches you will have a warm rapport with these people. Keep track of who was interested in your spreadsheet.

QUICK HITS

The following quick hits can be done at any point in any month. Many of them are one-offs, others will benefit from continued engagement. They are placed here so that you can get wins and show movement to the powers that be in order to get continued buy-in for your link building campaigns.

Get Indexed Fast with Google+

Ask for Links in Mailing List Signups – Encourage users to link to your website when sending out the confirmation email for your mailing asking them or including embed code.
Profile Links – Many Web 2.0 profiles allow you to implement a “DoFollow” link or links that pass link equity. When claiming your brand on social networks be sure to include links from your profile.
- Facebook Fan Page
- Twitter
- YouTube
- Google+ Profile
Directory Submission – Directory submissions are generally considered the lowest form of link building and generally won’t help you move the needle. That said you can easily identify directories with keyword searches plus directory type e.g. “3d tv rss directory.” Again, you can show numbers with these, but they are generally not worth your time.
- RSS Directories
- Niche Directories
- Paid Directories
- Article Directories
- Blog Directories
- Design Galleries
Better Business Bureau – The BBB has a site with an incredibly high domain authority, it’s a widely trusted site in both the eyes of the search engines and the consumer. Getting linked from this site is fairly easy and very valuable.
Chamber of Commerce – Similar to the BBB, the local chamber of commerce provides the same type of value and ease for obtaining links.
Join the Conversation – Typically this is called “link dropping,” but that is only in cases where people place links without joining in the conversation contextually. If you are adding to the conversation (as seen on SEOmoz posts) this is a viable tactic for link building.
- Message Boards/Blogs – Find these with keyword searches in Google’s discussion search and Social Mention.
- Quora
- LinkedIn
- Yahoo Answers

MONTH TWO – EGOBAIT

This month in the Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide you are building your social media followings and soon you will be expected to seed users. That’s much easier said than done, but one of the best ways to do that is by getting your influencers to put your content in front of their users. The best way to accomplish this is by launching egobait which is content made to flatter, include or get the attention of specific users while also providing utility to your audience,

Crowd Sourced Posts – Reach out to influencers and ask them what they think about current events. This makes them feel important and allows them to voice their opinion on topics without having to write a full post themselves and truthfully allows you to create content with little effort.
Best of Lists – Curate a list of the greatest content, writers, things in your space and give props to your target influencers. Another way to quickly make content that will make the rounds and their audience will start to engage with you.
Interviews – Have a Q&A session with a popular thought leader over the phone using Google Voice and you will quickly have a transcript of your interview and your influencer will have piece of content they are proud to share and link to.
Awards/Badges – Gillian Muessig said it best “no one gave us the authority to launch the Web 2.0 awards, but we did and people still try to enter them to this day.” Launch your own awards in your space and send the people you want to link to you badges that they can use to link back to you. You can take this even further by launching an unbranded microsite and then tricking you competitors into linking to you.

X-Factor – There’s an infinite amount of ways to flatter people. Without picking up a copy of the Art of Seduction I’m sure you can creatively figure out how to get influencers to come out to play. Here’s an example from a Credit Card Finder site in Australia where they created a comic book series starring the top financial bloggers in their space.

This is a great opportunity to revitalize a dormant content idea that never quite took off. Do you have creative content that fell to the wayside because the characters never took a life of their own? Take your influencers and breathe new life into an old idea by making them the stars.

Month 3: Data Visualization

MONTH THREE – LAUNCHING DATA VISUALIZATION

What Happens Online When You Die?

The infographic is largely misunderstood as a piece of automatically viral content. The reality is that the infographic has been done to death so unless you have an active built-in community yours requires a substantial launch plan and push. The Noob Guide to Online Marketing Guide places the launch of an infographic at Month Six, but to get the most mileage out of it as a noob, I’m placing data visualization at Month Three. Feel free to launch an additional infographic at Month Six.

In 2012, data visualization should be presented as a Maximum Viable Product. A great example of such is an Australian site in the life insurance space called Life Insurance Finder who launched a very impressive and successful piece of link bait called “What Happens Online When You Die.”

Don’t just build the infographic, build a data visualization experience that exhausts the available digital assets. Create a video counterpart to that infographic, and highlight the source data to build a higher barrier to entry for those that will look to steal your success. Even right now you’re thinking that’s a lot of work; well think of how competitors will feel once that work is finished. Zappos has over 30,000 videos for its products; it is very difficult to compete with Zappos in video search because they got there first. Be the Zappos of the topic you visualize.

Link Building Pro Tip: Maximum Viable Products

Simply put, some people want infographics, some people want a page and some people want a video and the performance of the “What Happens When You Die Online” campaign is very indicative of that. Here are the numbers:

Page – 258 Links, 86 Root Domains, 172 Facebook Shares, 145 Tweets, 51 +1s
Video – 81,072 views, 2071 Facebook Shares, 69 links, 10 Root Domains, 2601 Tweets, 61 +1s
Infographic – 86 Links, 28 Root Domains, 31 Facebook Shares, 99 Tweets, 16 +1s

Make it easy to link to you, give the people what they want.

TACTICS

Seed to Your Influencers – You have pre-contacted influencers for this very reason. Spell out their involvement in your content so they are compelled to link to it, share it and otherwise endorse it.
Reach out to your Targets – The list of prospects you’ve created have been waiting for this moment. Ideally, you will reach out to them first in social media and then escalate to email.
Contact Those Already Linking to You – Pull your existing links using a link index tool and then inform all of the relevant people that already link to you that you have launched a new piece of incredible content.
Leverage Your Mailing List – At this point your mailing list should be full of people that want to find out about your content. Inform them of your new content and include the relevant embed code to make it easy for users to link to you.
Add to the Conversation – Head back to the forums, blogs, message boards and Q&A sites and contextually add to the on-going conversation and when it makes sense add a link to your content.

Month 4 - Release An Ebook

MONTH FOUR – RELEASE AN EBOOK AND GUEST POST

By now you and/or your team have written the most incredible e-book your niche has ever seen with the best graphic design and interesting if not new insights on your subject. Luckily, you’ve saved some room for your new influential buddies to get a piece of the action and enough tangential or cutting room floor content to spread it around and get the most mileage out of it.

TACTICS

Exclusive Release – Align with an influential site in your space that gets a lot of traffic and offer your E-Book as an exclusive download.
Guest Post – A good guest posting opportunity typically serves two purposes. First, you are writing content for a third-party website wherein you can drop as many exact match anchor text links as you like. Secondly, you have an opportunity to leverage the eyeballs of users that frequent the site.
Foreword – Invite a key influencer to write the foreword of the book so their name can be attached to your promotions in social media and on other influential websites.
Quotes – Reach out to thought leaders in the space for quotes, similar to the pre-contacting done in the first month asking thought leaders for quotes keeps them aware of the process that you are making a book and once the book arrives you can easily reach out to those influencers and request a link or promotional support.
Reviews – Reach out to bloggers that specifically write book reviews in your space. Simply search for “[keyword] book review.” For example, if I were to write an SEO e-book I would certainly reach out to this gentleman, Ian Lurie, since he has reviewed an book about SEO in the past.

(I just egobaited Ian here. Now when I tweet about it I can put "featuring @portenint" in the tweet)

Month 5: Host a Blog Contest

MONTH FIVE – HOST A BLOG CONTEST

In Month Six Oli suggests holding a contest in social media. I’m going to move that up one month in order to couple it with the event you will be throwing in Month Six. I’m also going to take another page out of Oli’s book and suggest this be a blogging contest.

The concept is quite simple:

Reach out to influencers in your space that are awesome writers
Convince them to write their best work
Offer awesome prizes
Decide the winners based on social metrics

You may be few thousand dollars lighter from the prizes you pay out, but you also have a ton of great content from thought leaders in your space which then turns into more linkable assets. You also have a ton of social shares that put your content in front of those influencers’ followers in social media.

Does it work? Well Unbounce ran the same contest and here’s the leaderboard:

Conversionfest 2011 Leaderboard

The posts led to a combined 20,000 unique visitors during the respective two week scoring periods of each post and twenty one posts that continue to drive substantial traffic and links for Unbounce.

TACTICS

At this point the content on your site will be robust enough to make linking to you easy and worthwhile. The following tactics will allow you to continually identify contextual prospects and grease the wheels for any ongoing outreach link building:

Set up Google Alerts – Use your brand name, the names of people involved in the business and target keywords as the queries that you are targeting in Google Alerts. If someone has mentioned you and not linked to you, quickly ask them for a link.
Ifttt– Set up automatic alerts using If That Then This for when the brand, keywords or guest post URLs are mentioned in social media. Reach out to those people and encourage them to link to you.
LinkStant – Find out when someone is linking to you as they are writing their post and ask for updated anchor text.
Image Search – Google’s image search allows you to search for sites that have embedded your infographic and request that they cite their source by linking to you.
Video Search – Sometimes people re-upload videos to YouTube and that causes the views to be split between them. Search for those videos on YouTube and then search for the URL in Google to find sites that have embedded your video and request that they switch videos and link to you.

Once the competition is over, revisit your badge strategy by sending all entrants a badge and encouraging them to link back to their post.

Month 6: Throw an Event

MONTH SIX – THROW AN EVENT

You may have heard that the best way to get someone to link to you is to buy them a beer; throwing an event is the scaled version of that. Throwing a successful event naturally generates a lot of fanfare, promotion and chatter that will also lead to links.

First, you must decide what type of event you want to put on:

Meetup
Conference
Party
Dinner

TACTICS

Ask People You Know To Link To You – The people that you specifically invite to your event should be the type of people that you want to link to you. Show them a good time and encourage them to write about your event after the fact.

Press Releases - These have been abused by SEOs on PRWeb and Businesswire for content launches and link building but they are most effective in the case of launching an event.
Reach Out Directly to Journalists – Find journalists with the keyword searches “columnist for [publication]” and “writes for [publication].”Invite these people out and show them a great time.
Handwritten Notes – Follow up after the event is over with handwritten notes so potential linkers remember you and your hospitality.

FINAL QUICK HITS

The SEER Method - For your grand sendoff use the SEER Interactive method; pull your full list of followers using SimplyMeasured and pull your complete backlink profile with MajesticSEO, expand any shortened URLs and do VLOOKUPs to determine what users are following you, but not linking to you and reach out to them.
Find Who Shared Your Stuff – Similarly, using Topsy, pull the profiles for all the people that shared your URLs and perform a VLOOKUP to see what users shared your content but didn’t link to you and reach out to them.

CONGRATS!

Presumably, you’ve made it through not one, but two guides on how to successfully launch a new web property and ultimately get visibility not just in the SERPs but amongst key influencers in your vertical. I hope now that link building doesn’t seem quite as daunting as it once did and I wish you great success!

Remember there are two solid ways to build links: Make News or Make Friends.

Which one are you prepared to do?

Publ.Date : 2012-05-08T22:38:38+01:00

Colossal Day of Craziness!

Posted by MozCTO

Hello, I am Anthony Skinner, the CTO of MozLand!

Many of you were affected by several SEOmoz tool issues that happened last week, unfortunately all colliding into one colossal day of craziness on May 3rd. We want to first apologize for any inconveniences or problems that these issues caused you.

The good news is that our awesome engineers fixed these problems quickly, but we want to share an update of what happened, how we fixed it, and what we’re doing to prevent "colossal days of craziness" from ever happening again. So, here’s the inside scoop (y’all know we like that whole transparency thing 'n stuff ;-)).

So, down to the nitty gritty of what happened last week and where we are now....

Status	Issue
Fixed	Rankings – Rankings were delayed by a couple of days for all customers due to some intermittent outages in our database. This delay caused custom reports without rankings data. Fix: After trying it the hard way, we had a eureka moment (in the shower, no less) and promoted our back-up disks to primary, resolving the problem almost immediately. Why it won’t happen again: We had planned for SSD failures, but did not expect to see a full cluster failure at one time. Going forward, we’ll be looking at making sure we’re using SSDs appropriately, and, when we do use SSDs, having more robust failover plans in place. We’re also changing the way custom reports are built to speed up the process, and enhancing custom reports to wait on dependencies.
Fixed	Slow Open Site Explorer CSV Reports, and Mozscape API calls were failing – The Mozscape API was running noticeably slower and reports weren’t finishing. We found two export jobs that were continually requeuing themselves, severely backing up the CSV reports queue. Fix: We fixed the condition causing the queueing and made some adjustments to the load balancing on the servers. Why it won’t happen again: To prevent the queues backing up in the future, we’ve added a hook to prevent failed jobs from re-queuing. Monitoring and alarms have also been added to notify our ops team if these queues start backing up.
Fixed	Campaign Setup and Custom Crawl – Users were running into an error message when trying to create new campaigns, and some users were seeing a dramatic reduction in the number of pages crawled. Fix: With some creative ops magic, our engineers were able to configure the proper permissions and get campaign creation working again. Truncated crawls were caused by a race condition. We also made the transition between finalizing the crawling of a campaign and scheduling the next crawl smoother, which resolved this race condition. Affected campaigns were re-crawled so users could receive a full weekly crawl. Why it won’t happen again: We’re working to do better testing at scale and to create more defined unit tests to catch these types of race conditions that don't appear in small scale testing. We’re also working on better monitoring around the campaign crawl service and decoupling campaign creation from the custom crawl service so back end crawler problems will not have such a dramatic affect on the usability of the rest of the SEOmoz PRO app.
Fixed	Delay in SEOmoz PRO Web App picking up the new index - Our latest index update wasn’t reflected in the SEOmoz PRO web app right away. Fix: We redeployed an old endpoint in our API that we had been using for campaigns to pick up the new index metrics. We also updated the PRO software to use the new endpoints that Mozscape API now supports. Why it won’t happen again: We updated our release procedures, and also updated the PRO app to use a new Mozscape API endpoint that publicizes the index launch date. This improvement will mean much smoother updates to Mozscape API campaign metrics in the future.
Fixed	Social – PRO users trying to connect their Facebook accounts were receiving an error message. We were getting odd data back from the Facebook API indicating users' authentication data expired - like 25 years ago :). Fix: We’ve updated the Facebook connection to return the correct time format. Why it won’t happen again: To be honest, we’re not sure it won’t... We’ll try to stay on top of changes in Facebook and update our app before the changes affect our users.

We’re also going to be putting some of the new funding (read the memenouncement here) towards making sure things like this do not happen again. We’re investing in infrastructure improvements (blog post to come) to both help keep things running smoothly, and bring you new features and improve stability all around. We’re also hiring... if you’re a brilliant, motivated SEO-lover, apply here.

Again, many apologies for the inconvenience this caused all of you. We’ve learned a lot in this process and will keep doing our darnedest to keep things running smoothly.

Publ.Date : 2012-05-12T09:38:08+01:00

Response Codes Explained with Pictures

Posted by Lindsay

Man thinking of a water gun. Friends and I were recently debating the finer points of serving a 410 versus a 404 response code when a brick and mortar retail analogy was born. I hope you'll have half as much fun reading through these amateur comics as I've had putting them together. You might also come away with an extra line of lingo when explaining HTTP Response Codes to clients or colleagues.

What are Response Codes?

When a search engine or website visitor makes a request to a web server, a three digit HTTP Response Status Code is returned. This code indicates what is about to happen. A response code of 200 means "OK, here is the content you were asking for." A 301 says, "Gotcha. That page has moved, so I'll send you there now." And so on.

Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough." It is in this spirit that I present to you my brick-and-mortar retail store analogy.

A man walks into a store looking for a particular model water gun. In each scenario, he is greeted by a different Sales Associate (our response codes).

200 OK

A 200 is the most common type of response code, and the one we experience most of the time when browsing the web. We asked to see a web page, and it was presented to us without any trouble.

301 Moved Permanently

We were expecting to find a web page in a particular location, but it has been moved. No worries though, the web server has sent us to the new location. Most users won't notice that this has happened unless they watch the URL change.

302 Found (Moved Temporarily)

You're in the right place, but the page has moved temporarily to a new location. Just like a 301 the user doesn't usually notice anything because the web server seemlessly moves them to the new URL.

Important SEO Implication: A 302 isn't a permanent move. Any SEO strength that the original page had won't be granted to the new URL.

401 Unauthorized

We've requested a page, but a username and password are required to access it. We're presented with a way to login.

Important SEO Implication: Search engines won't submit a username and password for entry. If you have content hidden behind a login, it won't show up in the search results.

403 Forbidden

We've requested a page that we don't have permission to access at all. This page isn't for us.

404 Not Found

We've requested a page, but the web server doesn't recognize our request. The page can't be shown because the server doesn't know what it is.

Important SEO Implication: Most default 404 pages are a dead end for users and search engines. Look at using a custom 404 for these cases.

410 Gone

We've requested a page and the web server knows what we're asking for, but the page is gone.

Important SEO Implication: There is some debate in the SEO world as to the advantage (if any) of using a 410 over a 404 in certain cases. This post by Barry Schwartz is a good place to start your own research.

I prefer to use a 410 when removing unfavorable (perhaps penalized) content from a website. Perhaps the website has some bad links pointing to a bad neighborhood within an otherwise quality site. I'd use a 410 to say, "We know what you're asking for, but we've deliberately removed it from the site, permanently."

500 Internal Server Error

We've requested a page, and in return, we get a generic error message. No information is given. It is like looking a sales associate in the eye, asking a question, and recieving a blank stare in return.

503 Service Unavailable

We asked for a page, but are told that it is temporarily unavailable. Something is wrong. Perhaps the website is down for maintenance.

Status Code Readers & Additional Reading

If you're like me, you came to SEO out of an interest and background in Marketing, rather than approaching it from a start on the Techology side. I understood the meaning of the basic response codes for SEO (301, 302, 404) long before I understood what was technically happening. I needed to see it before I really got it. If you're feeling the same way, you can use a browser plugin to watch the communication between the your browser and a website behind the scenes as you browse the web.

Try these:

Chrome: HTTP Headers
Firefox: HttpFox
Explorer: HTTP Analyzer ($)

There are a number of excellent resources available to help you better understand HTTP Status Codes and determine when to use them to your best advantage for user experience and SEO.

Here at SEOmoz there is a nice summary and infographic that breaks down the impact on users and search engines in each scenario.
Ian Lurie placed a solid post on SearchEngineLand that covers .NET and IIS solutions nicely.
Another way to look at the information is SEOgadget's infographic parralell with London's Tube. Just click the link. You'll see. :)

Happy optimizing!

Publ.Date : 2012-05-14T22:11:20+01:00

17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid

Posted by Carson Ward

If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam.

It's become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the "danger zone" in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus.

I was only partially correct, as the majority of cases appear to be devalued links rather than penalties. Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they're doing doesn't look like a type of link spam. Google's response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone.

1. Cleansing Domains

While not technically a form of link building, 301 "cleansing" domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers just cut the trouble redirected domains loose like anchors, and float on into the night with whatever treasure they've gathered.

A cleansing domain for NFL jersies

When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight.

Link building through redirects should be easy to catch, as new links to a domain that is currently redirecting is hardly natural behavior. To anyone watching, it's like shooting up a flare that says, "I'm probably manipulating links." The fact that search engines aren't watching closely right now is no guarantee of future success, so I'd avoid this and similar behavior if future success is a goal.

2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

I've already covered the potential risks of blog networks in depth here. Google hates blog networks - fake blogs that members pay or contribute content to in order to get links back to their or their clients' sites. Guest blogging and other forms of contributing content to legitimate sites is a much whiter tactic, but consider that a strategy that relies heavily on low-quality guest blogging looks a lot like blog network spam.

With blog networks, each blog has content with a constant ratio of words to links. It posts externally to a random sites multiple times, and with a lot of "inorganic" anchor text for commercially valuable terms. Almost all backlinks to blog networks are also spam.

I cringe when I see low-quality blogs with questionable backlinks accepting guest blog posts that meet rigid word length and external link guidelines. Quality blogs tend not to care if the post is 400-500 words with two links in the bio, and quality writers tend not to ruin the post with excessive linking. Most of us see guest blogging as a white-hat tactic, but a backlink profile filled with low-quality guest posts looks remarkably similar to the profile of a site using automated blog networks.

I'd obviously steer clear of blog networks, but I'd be just as wary of low-quality inorganic guest blogs that look unnatural. Guest blog on sites with high quality standards and legitimate backlink profiles of their own.

3. Article Marketing Spam

Article link addiction is still a real thing for new SEOs. You get one or two links with anchor text of your choice, and your rankings rise. You're not on the first page, but you do it again and get closer. The articles are easy and cheap, and they take no creativity or mental effort. You realize that you're reaching diminishing returns on the articles, but your solution isn't to stop - you just need to do more articles. Before you know it, you're searching for lists of the top article sites that give followed links and looking for automated solutions to build low-quality links to your low-quality links.

Most articles are made for the sole purpose of getting a link, and essentially all followed links are self-generated rather than endorsements. Google has accordingly made article links count for very little, and has hammered article sites for their low-quality content.

Ezine Articles SEO visibility

Maybe you're wondering how to get a piece of that awesome trend, but hopefully you'll join me in accepting that article directories aren't coming back. Because they can theoretically be legitimate, article links are generally devalued rather than penalized. As with all link spam, your risk of receiving more harsh punishment rises proportionate to the percentage of similar links in your profile.

4. Single-Post Blogs

Ironically named "Web 2.0 Blogs" by some spam peddlers, these two-page blogs on Tumblr and Wordpress sub-domains never see the light of day. After setting up the free content hub with an article or two, the site is then "infused" with link juice, generally from social bookmarking links (discussed below).

Despite their prevalence, these sites don't do much for rankings. Links with no weight come in, and links with no impact go out. They persist because with a decent free template, clients can be shown a link on a page that doesn't look bad. Google doesn't need to do much to weed these out, because they're already doing nothing.

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

Site-wide footer links used to be all the rage. Google crippled their link-juice-passing power because most footer links pointing to external sites are either Google Bombs or paid links. Where else would you put a site-wide link that you don't want your users to click?

To my point of avoiding the appearance of spam, Penguin slammed a number of sites with a high proportion of site-wide (footer) links that many would not have considered manipulative. Almost every free Wordpress theme that I've seen links back to the creator's page with choice anchor text, and now a lot of Wordpress themes are desperately pushing updates to alter or remove the link. Penguin didn't care if you got crazy with a plugin link, designed a web site, or hacked a template; the over-use of anchor text hit everyone. This goes to show that widespread industry practices aren't inherently safe.

6. Paid Links in Content

There will never be a foolproof way to detect every paid link. That said it's easier than you think to leave a footprint when you do it in bulk. You have to trust your sellers not to make it obvious, and the other buyers to keep unwanted attention off their own sites. If one buyer that you have no relationship to buys links recklessly, the scrutiny can trickle down through the sites they're buying from and eventually back to you.

If you do buy links, knowing what you're doing isn't enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they're doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

Speaking of footprints, I believe it's possible to build a machine learning model to start with a profile of known links violating guidelines, which you can acquire from paid link sites and link wheel middlemen with nothing more than an email address. You can then assess a probability of a site being linked to in that manner, corroborating potential buyers and sellers with a link graph of similar profiles. I have no idea what kind of computing/programming power this would take, but the footprint is anomalous enough that it should be possible.

Exchanging links through link schemes requires a lot more faith in a bunch of strangers than I can muster. In a link wheel, you're only as strong and subtle as your "weakest links." My opinion is that if you're smart enough to avoid getting caught, you're probably smart enough to build or write something awesome that will have superior results and lower risk than link wheels.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

High-quality syndication and wire services possess a few unattractive attributes for spammers: there are editorial guidelines, costs, and even fact checking. Low-quality syndication services will send almost anything through to any site that will take it. You'll end up with a bunch of links, but not many that get indexed, and even fewer that get counted.

My experience has been that press releases have rapidly diminishing returns on syndication only, and the only way to see ROI is to generate actual, real coverage. I still see link-packed press releases all over the web that don't have a chance of getting coverage - really, your site redesign is not news-worthy. I'm not sure whether to attribute this to bad PR, bad SEO, or both.

9. Linkbait and Switch

In this context, we're talking about creating a real piece of linkbait for credible links, and later replacing the content with something more financially beneficial. Tricking people into linking to content is clearly not something Google would be ok with. I don't see linkbait and switch done very often, but I die a little every time I see it. If you're able to create and spread viral content, there's no need to risk upsetting link partners and search engines. Instead, make the best of it with smart links on the viral URL, repeat success, and become a known source for great content.

10. Directories

Directories have been discussed to death. The summary is that Google wants to devalue links from directories with no true standards. Here's a Matt Cutts video and blog post on the topic. Directory links often suffer from a high out/in linking ratio, but those worth getting are those that are actually used for local businesses (think Yelp) and any trafficked industry directories.

Would I pay money for a listing here?
Are the majority of current listings quality sites?
Do listings link with the business or site name?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, don't bother with a link. This immediately excludes all but a handful of RSS or blog feed directories, which are mostly used to report higher quantities of links. When I was trained as an SEO, I was taught that directories would never hurt, but they might help a tiny bit, so I should go get thousands of them in the cheapest way possible. Recent experience has taught us that poor directory links can be a liability.

Even as I was in the process of writing this post, it appears that Google began deindexing low-quality directories. The effect seems small so far - perhaps testifying to their minimal impact on improving rankings in the first place - but we'll have to wait and see.

11. Link Farms and Networks

I honestly can't speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.

"I'm telling you right now, the engines are very very smart about this kind of thing, and they've seen link farming over and over and over again in every different permutation. Granted, you might find the one permutation - the one system - that works for you today, but guess what? It's not going to work tomorrow; it's not going to work in the long run." - Rand in 2009

My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites

Links from the majority of social bookmarking sites carry no value. Pointing a dozen of them at a page might not even be enough to get the page crawled. Any quality links that go in have their equity immediately torn a million different directions if links are followed. The prevalence of spam-filled and abandoned social bookmarking sites tells me that site builders seriously over-estimated how much we would care about other people's bookmarks.

Sites focusing on user-generated links and content have their own ways of handling trash. Active sites with good spam control and user involvement will filter spam on their own while placing the best content prominently. If you'd like to test this, just submit a commercial link to any front-page sub-Reddit and time how long it takes to get the link banned. Social sites with low spam control stop getting visitors and incoming links while being overrun by low quality external links. Just ask Digg.

13. Forum Spam

Forum spam may never die, though it is already dead. About a year ago, we faced a question about a forum signature link that was in literally thousands of posts on a popular online forum. When we removed the signature links, the change was similar to effect of most forum links: zero. It doesn't even matter if you nofollow all links. Much like social sites, forums that can't manage the spam quickly turn into a cesspool of garbled phrases and anchor text links. Bing's webmaster forums are a depressing example.

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

From time to time you'll hear of a new way someone found to get a link on an authoritative site. Examples I have seen include links in bios, "workout journals" that the site let users keep, wish lists, and uploaded files. Sometimes these exploits (for lack of a better term) go viral, and everyone can't wait to fill out their bio on a DA 90+ site.

In rare instances, this kind of link spam works - until the hole is plugged. I can't help but shake my head when I see someone talking about how you can upload a random file or fill out a bio somewhere. This isn't the sort of thing to base your SEO strategy around. It's not long-term, and it's not high-impact.

15. Profile Spam

While similar to unintended followed links on authority domains, profile spam deserves its own discussion due to their abundance. It would be difficult for Google to take any harsh action on profiles, as there is a legitimate reason for reserving massive numbers of profiles to prevent squatters and imitators from using a brand name.

What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn't match your site or brand name.

"The name's Insurance. Car Insurance"

When profile links are followed and indexed, Google usually interprets the page as a user page and values it accordingly. Obviously Google's system for devaluing profile links is not perfect right now. I know it's sometimes satisfying just to get an easy link somewhere, but profile link spam is a great example of running without moving.

16. Comment Spam

If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments. I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.

I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn't. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:

Followed blog comments

Let's pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you? Maybe I'm missing something here, because I can't imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let's just hope you didn't build anchor text into those comments.

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

Buying domains for their link juice is an old classic, but I don't think I have anything to add beyond what Danny Sullivan wrote on the matter. I'm also a fan of Rand's suggestion to buy blogs and run them rather than pulling out the fangs and sucking every ounce of life out of a once-thriving blog.

Domain buying still works disgustingly well in the (rare) cases where done correctly. I would imagine that dozens of redirected domains will eventually bring some unwelcome traffic to your site directly from Mountain View, but fighting spam has historically been much easier in my imagination than in reality.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble.

Spam Links: Not Worth It

I have very deliberately written about what spam links "look like." If you do believe that black hat SEO is wrong, immoral, or in any way unsavory that's fine - just make sure your white hat links don't look like black hat links. If you think that white hat SEOs are sheep, or pawns of Google, the same still applies: your links shouldn't look manipulative.

I'm advising against the tactics above because the potential benefits don't outweigh the risks. If your questionable link building does fall apart and your links are devalued, there's a significant cost of time wasted building links that don't count. There's also the opportunity cost - what could you have been doing instead? Finally, clearing up a manual penalty can take insane amounts of effort and remove Google's revenue stream in the meantime.

Publ.Date : 2012-05-15T22:02:50+01:00

9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions

Posted by Dr. Pete

I spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in Q&A is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

6. Check Your Headers

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

7. Use Basic Tools Well

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

8. Learn When to Be Patient

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

DO THE FUCKING WORK.

The most frequent excuse I hear in Q&A is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

Publ.Date : 2012-05-16T20:08:19+01:00

Consumer Ad Awareness in Search Results

For the following study, we asked "Does this search result have ads on it? " to 1,000 searchers, per search results. Due to these surveys requiring a smaller image (to fit the ad unit size) we chose search results that generally had more ads on them (typically 3 or 4) so that the background had a significant portion of real estate devoted to ads, in spite of its small size. The one exception here was DuckDuckGo, as it only displays one ad at most even on highly commercial keywords like credit cards.

Other than resizing the search result to fit, the only modifications we generally made were removing the graphic picture from the Wikipedia page near the top of the DuckDuckGo SERP (since a prior study showed that users presumed there was a correlation between graphics and the perception of ads) and that in most cases we removed the right sidebar. We did include the sidebar ads on 3 different Bing, Google, & Yahoo! search results so that we could compare the impact of sidebar ads vs not having a sidebar.

Executive Summary

The 3 big takeaways are:

For most search engines, people are generally unaware of ads vs organic results if there are no ads in the right column ... most of these yes/no questions came down to about a 50/50 vote, even though all of them had ads on them. It is every bit as true today as it was in 2003.
If there is a right column, the percent of people who voted that there are ads on the page jumps significantly. Thus it is pretty safe to say that people think ads are in the right column & that the right column is ads.
- In part perhaps due to placement and a lack of user knowledge between ads vs content, paid ads do significantly cannibalize organic traffic.
- SERP heat maps have shown heavy focus on the left column. This is perhaps why Google feels comfortable putting brand oriented Google+ promotions in the right column, while they put further ads at the bottom of the organic search results - people tend to view the left rail as organic search results and the right rail as ads.
- In the past Google also stated that graphic product ads in the right column got about double the CTR of text ads in the same location, thus if Google ever offers search-branding graphical campaigns I would expect those to primarily appear in the right column.
Interestingly, among major search engines, Yahoo! (without sidebar) got more "yes, it has ads" votes than other search engines. In fact, Yahoo! without sidebar ads scored within 1% of Bing with sidebar ads.
- Years ago they decided to get out of search in part because they under-monetized competitors (in part due to paying arbitrages to destroy their click value by pumping their network full of fraudulent clicks). Advertisers didn't even have a mechanism to opt out of such scammy ad syndication until AFTER Yahoo! signed the search deal with Bing.
- Yahoo! still under-monetizes search (& complains about it publicly, blaming Bing) in part because Bing cut out a lot of the arbitrage, in part due to ad matching issues on longtail queries, and in part because Yahoo!'s ad background color is more noticeable to users, where other portals and search companies like Google & Bing blend it in so well that many users simply can not see it, particularly on laptops and older computers. Ask is the most aggressive ad blender of all search engines. If you click through to their results from a Google ad it plants a cookie to remove the background color on the Ask search result ads on all subsequent searches until you clear that cookie.

Combined Survey Results

For the question Does this search results have ads on it?

search engine	yes	no
AOL	53.1%�(+3.9 / -3.9)	46.9%�(+3.9 / -3.9)
Ask	52.0%�(+4.0 / -4.1)	48.0%�(+4.1 / -4.0)
Ask Arbitrage	51.6%�(+3.9 / -3.9)	48.4%�(+3.9 / -3.9)
Bing	50.2%�(+3.8 / -3.8)	49.8%�(+3.8 / -3.8)
Bing w Sidebar	57.7%�(+3.7 / -3.8)	42.3%�(+3.8 / -3.7)
Dogpile	44.7%�(+4.1 / -4.0)	55.3%�(+4.0 / -4.1)
Duck Duck Go	52.3%�(+3.9 / -3.9)	47.7%�(+3.9 / -3.9)
Google	54.5%�(+4.0 / -4.0)	45.5%�(+4.0 / -4.0)
Google w Sidebar	62.9%�(+3.6 / -3.8)	37.1%�(+3.8 / -3.6)
Yahoo!	56.8%�(+3.9 / -4.0)	43.2%�(+4.0 / -3.9)
Yahoo! w Sidebar	59.8%�(+3.9 / -4.1)	40.2%�(+4.1 / -3.9)

User Voting Images

Here are the images users saw when they voted:

AOL SERP

Ask SERP

Ask Arbitrage SERP

Bing SERP

Bing With Sidebar SERP

Dogpile SERP

DuckDuckGo SERP

Google SERP

Google With Sidebar SERP

Yahoo! SERP

Yahoo! With Sidebar SERP

Which SERP Has an Ad? (Maps vs AdWords Ads)

Prior to doing the above study, we asked users to please click on the search result which has an ad in it, listing search results side by side. Any bias presented in this (outside of both having smaller than actual sizes) impacts both images. At first we did a regular Google SERP where we included the branding & then we followed up with one that is more zoomed in on the actual search results but does not include branding. On the one that was less zoomed in people thought the map was an ad more often, but upon further zooming they thought it was roughly 50/50.

SERP	All�(1172)�
�Left	53.7%�(+3.3 / -3.4)
�Right	46.3%�(+3.4 / -3.3)

SERP	All�(1198)�
�Left	49.6%�(+3.4 / -3.4)
�Right	50.4%�(+3.4 / -3.4)

Comparing Google+ to Ads

Does this search result have ads on it?

layout	yes	no
Google+ without ads	56.3% (+3.1 / -3.1)	43.7% (+3.1 / -3.1)
Google+ with ads	56.9% (+3.2 / -3.2)	43.1% (+3.2 / -3.2)
large top ads w/o Google+	53.6% (+3.2 / -3.2)	46.4% (+3.2 / -3.2)

Searchers tend to think that Google+ integration in the right rail is an ad unit. More people voted that Google+ without ads had ads in the search results than a SERP with 4 AdWords ad units and no Google+ integration.

Search Engine Ad Background Color

After seeing that users generally guessed no better than a coin toss at best in most cases, we decided to ask What background color do Google search results use to denote top left search advertisements? The same question was asked of Yahoo! & Bing search results.

Google

Google	All�(1147)�
none, they are white	49.7%�(+3.2 / -3.2)
blue	25.5%�(+3.0 / -2.8)
yellow	10.6%�(+2.3 / -2.0)
pink	7.0%�(+2.1 / -1.6)
purple	7.2%�(+2.2 / -1.7)

Yahoo!

Yahoo!	All�(1080)�
none, they are white	44.6%�(+3.4 / -3.4)
blue	20.9%�(+3.0 / -2.7)
yellow	15.6%�(+2.7 / -2.4)
magenta	11.2%�(+2.5 / -2.1)
orange	7.7%�(+2.3 / -1.8)

Bing

Bing	All�(1063)�
none, they are white	49.0%�(+3.6 / -3.6)
blue	23.5%�(+3.2 / -3.0)
yellow	13.0%�(+2.8 / -2.4)
purple	7.5%�(+2.4 / -1.9)
pink	7.1%�(+2.4 / -1.8)

Summary

Bing scored highest, however blue also scored as the 2nd highest color for all 3 search engines. Nearly half of searchers believe that top ads have a white background, which highlights a general widespread lack of awareness of search ads.

Search Engine	% Who Answered Correctly
Bing (blue)	23.5%
Yahoo! (magenta)	11.2%
Google (yellow)	10.6%

Ad Location on the SERP

Given how little awareness users have of ad background color, I decided to ask: Where might ads appear on search results at top search engines like Bing & Google?

Vote	All�(1144)�
right column	34.2%�(+3.4 / -3.3)
all 3 locations	29.6%�(+3.2 / -3.0)
search results do not carry ads	19.4%�(+3.0 / -2.7)
top of the left column	9.2%�(+2.5 / -2.0)
bottom of the left column	7.6%�(+2.4 / -1.9)

Less than 3 in 10 answered the question correctly & nearly 20% of people do not think search results carry any ads, which explains how an algorithmic penalty can create a bad quarter, why Google was sued in Australia for misleading ads & why the Rosetta Stone vs Google case was overturned. Next time you hear a search engineer talk about clearly labeling paid links, ask them why they do such a poor job of it themselves!

User Trust in Ad Versus Organic Results

Ever since search engines have weeded out some of the more exploitative reverse billing fraud ads, trust in online ads has been growing. Based on the above, we wanted to see how users perceive ads vs organic search results, so I asked: Search engines include both algorithmic search results and ads in them. Which do you trust more?

Answer	All�(1168)�
I trust both equally	45.8%�(+3.3 / -3.2)
Algorithmic search results	40.9%�(+3.2 / -3.1)
Ads that appear in search results	13.3%�(+2.5 / -2.2)

The above result surprised me given how people disliked money influencing search results. It is a strong compliment to the ads that only 40% of people trust the editorial more than the ads. However this number might be thrown off by the fact that many people are unaware of where the ads actually appear in the search results & what results are ads. (As noted above, most people voted that they thought that either search ads were only in the right column or that there weren't ads in the SERPs.)

Making Up for the Small Image Problem

One of the bigger issues with Google's current survey solution is that you are limited to rather small sized images. Such limitations do not harm asking a question like "what color does Google use for x" but they do make the search result a bit harder to see. To compensate for that problem we ran a separate survey on AYTM, where users were able to view a search result in full screen mode for 10 seconds & then they were asked 3 questions.

The purpose of the first question was to put a few seconds in between them seeing the image and them answering the second question. One other improvement that was made here (in addition to allowing users to see a larger sized search result image) was that we added an "I am not sure" answer to the questions. Below are the responses in table + graphic form, followed by the AYTM widget.

Where May Ads Appear on Google's Search Results Page?

Location	Vote
in the right column	28.70%
top of the left column	6.20%
bottom of the left column	1.90%
middle of the left column	2.30%
search results do not have ads in them	6.80%
I am not sure	18.90%
right column & the top + bottom of the left column	35.20%

Did the Viewed Search Result Have Any Ads On It?

Answer	Vote
I'm not sure	41.00%
no	12.40%
yes	46.60%

What Background Color Does Google Use to Denote Ads At the Top Left of Their Search Results?

Answer	Vote
none, they are white	28.10%
blue	20.80%
purple	1%
I'm not sure	22.60%
pink	6.80%
yellow	20.70%

Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it!

Users confusing the yellow background as white shortly after seeing it is anything but an accident:

In a RGB color space, hex #fef7e6 is composed of 99.6% red, 96.9% green and 90.2% blue. Whereas in a CMYK color space, it is composed of 0% cyan, 2.8% magenta, 9.4% yellow and 0.4% black. It has a hue angle of 42.5 degrees, a saturation of 92.3% and a lightness of 94.9%. #fef7e6 color hex could be obtained by blending #ffffff with #fdefcd. .

If you have an older monitor or a laptop which you are viewing at an angle these colors are nearly impossible to see.

Embed The AYTM Graph in Your Website

Here is the AYTM widget of the above 1,000 person survey, which you can embed in your website.

Ask Your Target Market via SEO Book

Embed Code:

Categories:

internet

Publ.Date : Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:08:37 +0000

Setting Up Actionable SEO Dashboards in the New Google Analytics

There have been many mixed reviews about the latest Google Analytics UI. Putting the frustration of having to learn a new UI aside (here's a great guide to navigating the new Google Analytics interface), the new Google Analytics actually brings to the table great customization options. One of my favorites being custom dashboards.

Both the old and new interfaces offer a standard dashboard that acts as an overview of your analytics profile. But where the new UI has its advantage is with your ability to create your own dashboard - in fact, you can create up to 20 of them for each profile.

Creating Dashboards

The first thing we'll want to do is click the "+ New Dashboard" link on the left navigation of your profile's Home tab. Google will then ask you to name the dashboard and to choose either a "Blank Canvas" or a "Starter Dashboard." The Starter Dashboard is just like the default dashboard you already have in Google Analytics, so let's choose "Blank Canvas." Now it's time to populate your dashboard with widgets.

There are two ways you can customize your new dashboard:

Use the "Add Widget" feature on your dashboard
Navigate to the view you want in Google Analytics and click the "Add to Dashboard" link.

When you use the "Add Widget" feature, there are four types of widgets you can choose from:

Metric - This will show you a single metric as well as a "sparkline" for that metric (which is basically a tiny line graph)
Pie - Displays a breakdown of various metrics in pie chart form
Timeline - A graph (only) of any metric (or compare two metrics) over any period of time
Table - Your traditional Google Analytics table, but it can be customized to only display what you've setup (including filters)

You build each widget the same way you would segment/filter data in Google Analytics normally. The key here is saving the view to your dashboard so you can quickly login and review performance without having to set everything up again.

As you add more widgets to your custom dashboard, you can easily drag, drop and rearrange your widgets into one of the three dashboard columns.

Now that we know how to setup dashboards, let's take a look at some useful SEO dashboards you should consider creating.

SEO Monitoring Dashboard

The purpose of this dashboard is simple: a quick look into the health of your SEO campaign.

Widget #1: Total Organic Non-Branded Keyword Traffic (Metric/Timeline)

With this metric/timeline widget, we're simply wanting to look at our total number of organic, non-branded search traffic. Remember, with the metric widget, you can only look at a single metric. If you only want to see the total number of visits, add a metric widget. However, if you'd like to see the total visit count broken out over the selected date range, you'll want to add it as a timeline widget.

For this widget, we'll add a Metric/Timeline with the following dimensions:

Nonbranded Organic Traffic

Widget #2: Total Organic Non-Branded Keyword Conversions (Metric/Timeline)

In this widget we're looking to get a snapshot of just how many total conversions (or transactions) that have been generated by our non-branded organic keyword referrals.

For this widget, we'll add a Metric/Timeline with the following dimensions:

Non-Branded Organic Conversions

Just like before, if you'd prefer to see this over time you can change this widget to be a timeline instead of a metric widget.

Widget #3: Total Organic Non-Branded Keyword Traffic (Table)

This widget filters out your branded search keyword referrals so you can get right to the keywords you're most interested in. You may also consider adding an additional filter to remove (not provided) if it takes up a significant number of the results.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Non-Branded Organic Keywords

You'll notice that I didn't choose any goals for the secondary metric. We'll cover that in the next widget. For now, we want to get a good understanding of what keywords are driving

Widget #4: Total Organic Non-Branded Keyword Conversions/Transactions (Table)

In this widget we're looking to get a quick look at our top converting/transaction keywords. Once again, I recommend filtering out your branded search terms. Depending on how many important conversion points you want to keep track of, you may need to add more than one widget of this type because you can only view two metrics in each Table widget.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Non-Branded Organic Keyword Conversions

Widget #5: Top Social Action Content (Table)

You'll find it easier to navigate to this report in the Standard Reporting section of Google Analytics (Audience > Social > Pages) and adding the widget using the top navigation bar in Google Analytics. The goal of this particular widget is to quickly see which content on your site is getting shared the most in social media. That way you'll know what content topics have the best chance of going viral.

By default Google will show you information for only Google+, in a future post I'll walk you through how to get other sites like Twitter and Facebook setup on here, too.

If your blog content lives under a /blog/ subfolder, you may want to consider filtering the report to only look at that content.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

After I added the widget to our SEO Monitoring dashboard, I went back and edited it to also include total visits as well.

Widget #6: Top Content Traffic & Conversions (Table)

In addition to knowing what content is getting shared the most, I like to keep an eye on what blog content is getting the most traffic and conversions.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Top Organic Landing Pages

Don't forget to filter in just your blog content if that is the area you want to focus on.

Widget #7: Organic Search Engine Referrals (Pie)

I like to keep an eye on which search engines are sending me traffic and how it changes over time. The best way to get a snapshot of this is to add a pie chart widget.

For this widget, we'll add a Pie with the following dimensions:

I chose to only look at the top three organic search engine referrals, but you can select up to six for your pie chart.

Widget #8: Page Load Speed (Table)

We also need to keep an eye on any pages that are loading slow. We can actually setup the widget to only look at organic traffic page load speeds, although it would be in your best interest to look at all your content, not just that just with organic visits.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Page Load Speed

The above table shows you your top ten slowest loading landing pages, and also includes how many visits that pages receives. You can sort by either, but it's probably best to tackle the pages with the slowest load time first.

Widget #9: Site Search Keywords (Table)

The final piece to our monitoring puzzle: a list of keywords being searched for the most on our internal site search. This is a great way to generate new keyword ideas and to find new usability ideas (more on that later).

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

I also like to add conversions as a dimension to this widget so I can not only keep an eye on which terms are getting searched for the most, but also which lead to the most conversions.

Website Redesign Dashboard - SEO Focus

So it's time for the dreaded redesign process. You have a pretty good idea of what's ahead: long nights, lots of frustration and hopefully, a great looking website not too far down the line. With this dashboard you can quickly gain insight into what changes you should be making in the upcoming redesign to help out your SEO campaign.

You might also consider renaming this dashboard to be a Usability dashboard so you can frequently check-in on how well your site is performing for your visitors.

We'll be borrowing a few of the widgets in our SEO Monitoring dashboard, but also adding a few. Let's first look at which widgets we should be re-adding to this new dashboard:

Widget #1: Top Converting Keywords (SEO Monitoring Widget #2)

A website redesign offers a great opportunity for keyword inclusion throughout our site's architecture (navigation, URLs, etc.) With this widget we can keep an eye on which keywords we should be focusing these optimization efforts on.

Widget #2: Top Social Action Content (SEO Monitoring Widget #5)

Which social networks are engaging the most with your content? What pages are getting the most engagements? Answering these questions will help you create a user experience that is not only tailored to your top social network traffic drivers, but that also encourages social sharing.

You'll also want to look closely at what makes the content in this report so shareable. Is it because of the way they are laid out? The images they use? These insights can really help you carry that experience throughout your new site.

Widget #3: Top Converting Content (SEO Monitoring Widget #6)

Just like with the top social action content, you want to keep an eye on the content that is working best (and worst). This will allow you to duplicate your successes and (hopefully) eliminate your failures.

Widget #4: Page Load Speed (SEO Monitoring Widget #8)

The redesign is the perfect time to address page load speed problems. Take a look at the slowest rendering pages in this table and determine what the common problems are that are slowing the load speed down.

Widget #5: Site Search Keywords (SEO Monitoring Widget #9)

Site search is great for finding new keywords, it's also a great way to figure out what problems people are having navigating your site. With this widget you can quickly see the types of content people are expecting to find on your site - but aren't able to.

On to our new widgets!

Widget #6 & #7: SEO Geographic Summary (Table) & Language (Table)

Is it time to consider translating your site for a new geographic audience? This type of change will definitely need your attention as an SEO. It's also an opportunity for you to branch out your link building into new languages.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Geographic Summary

The organic traffic filter I have in place is definitely optional. I think it helps keep the data set you're looking at more consistent by restricting it to organic visits only like the other widgets are set to.

For the Language widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Language Summary

You'll note that I also filtered out all non-organic traffic here, too.

Widget #8: Top Exit/Bounce Pages (Table)

For this particular widget, we're once again trying to identify problem pages. Any pages that have a high exit/bounce rate should get a close review to see if the cause for people leaving can easily be identified.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Exit and Bounces Summary

It's important that we filter out any blog content that naturally creates high bounce rates. If you also have an event like a Account Login on your site, you may wish to use Google's Event Tracking to filter out those visits as well.

Widget #9: Mobile Devices (Pie)

Which mobile devices are your visitors using to access your site? Are you getting a substantial number of visits? Do you anticipate it growing during the life of the next site design? More than likely this will be an area of focus for your redesign. It's important that you know exactly which devices your consumers are using to view your site so you can ensure compatibility.

For this widget, we'll add a Pie with the following dimensions:

Mobile Summary

Widget #10: Browser Conversion Rate (Table)

Finally, I like to take a look into what browser our visitors are using most, and what their conversion rate currently is. We all say we test all browsers for compatibility, but there are always pages that were rushed or that just fell through the cracks that might not be presenting themselves the way you had hoped.

For this widget, we'll add a Pie with the following dimensions:

Browsers Summary

Holistic Dashboard

It's no secret that to succeed in today's online marketing world you need to be doing more than just SEO. Not just from the sense that other marketing efforts can help drive in new leads, but because it helps your SEO campaign succeed.

This dashboard highlights how your PPC and social media efforts are performing, so you can take that information and apply it to your SEO campaigns.

Widget #1: Top Social Action Content (SEO Monitoring Widget #5)

This widget will allow us to keep track of what types of content are performing best from a social perspective.

Widget #2: Top Referral Conversion/Transaction Sources (Table)

Within this report we'll be able to quickly see which social networks are the most profitable in terms of conversions and/or actual transactions. This is a great way to see which social networks respond well to your offering, and that you should be investing more time in.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Ideally you'll want to setup a filter to only look at social networks. If you're good about tagging your URLs with custom variables, then you can change the filter to look at the medium and enter the medium value you use for social URLs (example: social).

Widget #3: Top Paid Converting/Transaction Keywords (Table)

Ever since the (not provided) update, we've all lost out on valuable keyword data. But just as Google hoped we would, we can get this information from our PPC spend. With this widget we'll look at the keywords that are driving the most conversions/transactions for our PPC marketing, so we can look into targeting them in our SEO marketing, too.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Top Paid Converting Keywords

Widget #4: Top Paid Revenue Generating Ad Groups

Just like with our previous keyword widget, I also like to look at the top performing ad groups. This is a good way to know what top level topics are performing the best for your paid search campaigns, so you can prioritize them in your SEO campaigns.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Top PPC Ad Groups

Widget #5: Top Paid Landing Pages (Table)

If you're not using custom landing pages for your paid search campaigns, this is a great way to see which keywords are working best for the various pages on your site. I like to run these types of tests before I commit to any keywords for SEO.

For this widget, we'll add a Table with the following dimensions:

Top Paid Landing Pages

That's just three of the 20 dashboards you could setup in Google Analytics. What are you adding to your dashboards to make them more actionable?

Categories:

conversion tracking

Publ.Date : Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:57:10 +0000

Tracking Micro Conversions with Event Tracking for Improving SEO Campaigns

Conversions. The one metric we all know we should be focusing on, and yet it's the one thing that gets overlooked the most. So many of us focus on just one main conversion point, and forget how many other types of visitor engagement exist on our sites. These other engagement points, or less-important conversions are what experts call "micro conversions."

World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik is a strong supporter of the use of micro conversions. In his Excellent Analytics Tip series, he explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions:

3. It will force you to understand the multiple persona's on your website, trust me that in of itself is worth a million bucks. It will encourage you to segment (my favorite activity) visitors and visits and behavior and outcomes. Success will be yours.

When you understand your various visitor personas, you can create better targeted content, value-adds and better messaging overall. This will only strengthen your SEO campaign and will help guide you to improving your conversion rate and the ROI of your SEO efforts.

Event Tracking in Google Analytics

One of my favorite ways to track micro conversions is with event tracking in Google Analytics. Before I walk you through how to setup events, let's first make sure we understand the difference between events and your traditional goals in Google Analytics.

In the past, a goal in Google Analytics was when any action a visitor would take on your site that took them to a confirmation page. When the visitor reached that confirmation page, Google Analytics would count it as a goal completion.

An event, on the other hand, is when a visitor takes action on your site and there is no confirmation page. A good example of this would be when someone clicks a "Follow Me on Twitter" link on your site. It takes the visitor off of your website and makes you unable to add conversion tracking code to their destination page (because it lives on Twitter.com).

In addition to bringing us cool features like custom dashboards, the new Google Analytics also made it much easier to track events as goals. Which is what we'll be focusing on today.

Setting Up an Event

Events are much easier to setup then you might imagine. All you need to do is add a little piece of customized code to the URL a visitor will be clicking on to trigger the event, and you're halfway there. Let's start with understanding what our event tracking options are.

There are five fields in total that you can use to categorize your event, two of which are optional:

Category: The general name of the type of event you wish to track. If you'll be setting up events of a similar topic (like form submissions), you'll want to keep this consistent across all of the events you setup.
Action: A description of the action the visitor is taking to trigger the event. So if your category is set to "Forms", your action might be set to "Sales Inquiry".
Label: This is an optional field used to further describe the type of event. If you're tracking multiple forms of the same type (like contact forms), you may consider using this field to avoid any confusion with the other events.
Value: Suppose each micro conversion does have a monetary value of sorts for you, this is the field you'd use to track that numeric number.
Non-Interaction: A true/false field that you can use to prevent a visitor who completes the event and leaves your domain from being recorded as a bounce in Google Analytics

Still with me? Now here comes the fun part: building the event tracking script.

The framework of your event tracking script looks like this:

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label', Value, false]);"

There are a couple of things you need to remember when you customize the various fields in the script (e.g. "Category"):

You must fill in the Category, Action and Non-Interaction fields
The Value and Non-Interaction fields do not have a single quote around around them like the others
If you choose to omit the Label or Value fields, also omit the single quote but not the comma that separates them from the other fields. In this example I've ommitted both fields, but not their commas:

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action',,, false]);"

The Non-Interaction field can only be set to true or false (remember: no quotes!)

Now that you've set up the script, you should place it within the href component of any link you are setting up. Here's an example of what it would look like:

<a href="http://twitter.com/seobook" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label', Value, false]);">Follow us on Twitter!</a>

The final piece of the puzzle is adding the event as a goal in Google Analytics.

Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Google Analytics profile you're setting up the goal in
Using the sub-navigation where your Profile information is listed, select the Goals tab
Choose the goal set you wish to add the event to (I like to categorize my goal sets)
After you name your goal, select the Event radio button
You now need to populate the event details exactly how you set them up in your script. If you omitted a field, just leave it blank

Event Tracking

You've now setup your event as a goal!

Types of SEO Micro Conversions

Now that the hard part is out of the way, let's brainstorm some micro conversions we could be tracking.

Social Engagement

You can use event tracking to track Share This links and blog comments. That way you can quickly see which content has the highest engagement so you can build more of it.

Affiliate Links and Ads

You may also wish to track when someone clicks one of your affiliate links or a banner you have on your site. This is a great opportunity to take advantage of the Value field so you can keep track of how much each of those clicks are worth (and perhaps double-check that you're getting paid the right amount).

Downloads

If your site has white papers, presentations, video, audio or any other type of file that users can download, you can easily keep track of those downloads with event tracking.

Follow Me/Like Us Links

If one of your macro conversion goals is brand awareness, you should consider adding an event whenever someone clicks a "follow me on Twitter" or "Like us on Facebook" link on your site. That way you can track back the source of those follows/likes to SEO.

Live Chats & Customer Support

Many service companies still utilize live chat to quickly address customer inquiries and problems. When someone clicks the live chat link, you can trigger an event to count it as a goal completion.

Additionally, if you use a third party customer support center, you can trigger an event whenever a user clicks the outbound links for those services.

These are just a few of the micro conversions you could be tracking on your site. While every site is different and is interested in tracking different things, hopefully this will give you a few ideas of additional conversion points you could be looking at to better understand your audience. The better we understand our visitors, the better job we can do as SEOs to attract more of them.

Categories:

seo tips

Publ.Date : Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:37:12 +0000

9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions

Posted by Dr. Pete

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

6. Check Your Headers

7. Use Basic Tools Well

8. Learn When to Be Patient

9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work

DO THE FUCKING WORK.

Publ.Date : 2012-05-16T20:08:19+01:00

Why SEO Consultants Push Brand

At SMX I gave a presentation on brand & how Google has biased the algorithms toward brands. having already seeing the bulk of my argument months prior, Bryson Meunier spoke after me and put together a presentation that used bogus statistics & was basically a smear of me. He was so over the top with his obnoxious behavior that when Danny Sullivan mentioned the next speaker after him he jokingly said "up next, Ron Paul."

I honestly thought the point of the discussion was to highlight how Google has (or hasn't) biased the algorithms, editorial policies & search interface toward brands. However, if a person speaks after you and uses bogus statistics to reach junk conclusions, you can't debunk their aggregate information until after you have looked into it some. An honest person can put what they know out there & share it publicly in advanced, a dishonest person hides behind junk research and the label of science to ram through poorly thought out trash, collecting whatever "data" confirms their own bias while ignorning the pieces of reality that don't.

As an example, he suggested that based on the number of employees and revenues Wikipedia is a small business. He then went on to say that since Wikipedia wasn't on Interbrand's "scientific" study that they were not a top brand. Nevermind that no countries, religions, sports, celebrities, or non-profits make the list of top "companies."
After IAC figured out that they were able to get away with running Ask.com as a thin scraper site, they outsourced "the algorithm" and fired many of their employees. Because they have fewer employees, Bryson considers Ask as "a mid-sized business" even though they are part of a multi-billion Dollar company and IAC is Google's #1 advertiser!
According to Compete's downstream traffic stats, YouTube receives about 1 in 13 search clicks from Google, but since it wasn't on Interbrand's list "who cares?" Incidentally, the folks at Interbrand do have a mention of YouTube on their top 100 brands page, but it was a suggestion that you watch their videos on YouTube. Their methodology is so suspect that Goldman Sachs and Yahoo! made the cut while YouTube didn't, even though YouTube is one of their few offsite promotional channels they promote on that very page. Their list also puts Microsoft's brand value at about double Apple's (and the list came out when Steve Jobs was still alive).
Bryson also claimed that since big brands are inefficient and slow moving they already have a big disadvantage so it makes sense for search engines to compensate for that. That is at best an illegitimate line of reasoning because those companies have plenty of solutions available to them & have the capital needed to buy out competitors. Even when the SERPs look independent, a lot of the listed sites are owned by large conglomorates. As an example, here is a random search from earlier today:

Meanwhile the same idiotic logic ignores the lack of resources at small businesses. Nowhere in his presentation was a highlight of how Google favored affiliates & direct marketers until the profit margins of the direct response marketing model started to peak & then Google transitioned to promoting brands, as they wanted to keep increasing revenues and monetize more clicks.
Bryson also shared an example of where he got a photo sharing site 40,000 unique visitors a month as a case study of the power of white hat SEO. 40,000 monthly visits to a photo sharing site might fund a light Starbucks addiction (assuming you value your time at nothing, have no employees, ignore hosting costs and the SEO is free), but not much beyond that. If that is a success case study, that shows how much harder the ecosystem is getting to operate in as a small business.
He also put out a painfully fluffy "white paper" / sales letter which stated that since Wal-Mart has a page about SEO they should outrank seobook on "SEO" related queries if my theories of brand bias are correct. That misses the point entirely. I never stated that garbage content on branded sites always outperforms quality content on niche sites, but rather that a lot of smaller websites were intentionally being squeezed out of the ecosystem. Sure some small sites manage to compete, but the odds of them succeeding today are much lower than they were 3 or 4 years ago.
At SMX near the end of our session a question was asked about the audience composition & most people were either big brands or people working for big brands. If you go back to when I first got into SEO in 2003 the audience composition was almost entirely small publishers and independent SEOs. This squeezing out of small players is not something new to search or the web. If you look at the history of any modern communications network this cycle has repeated itself in every single medium - phone, radio, television, and the web.

To be fair, I can understand why a no-name also ran SEO consultant would want to pitch himself for being up for doing SEO work for large brands. Brands generally have fatter margins, economies of scale, and large budgets. As Google tilts the algorithm toward the big brands (to where they can fall over the finish line in first place) they are the best clients to work for, since you are swimming downstream.

Why push huge boulders up the side of the mountain for crumbs when you can get paid far more to blow on a snowflake at the top of the mountain?

That is why so many SEOs fawn over trying to get brand clients. The work is high-paying, low risk, and relatively easy.

If we were ever to close up our membership site & focus primarily on SEO consulting work in more structured arrangements then absolutely we would aim at brands & help them fall over the finsh line in first place. ;)

Back when I worked with Clientside SEM we did a good number of big brand projects with some of the largest online portals & retailers. Understanding the business objectives & communicating things in a way that builds buy in from other departments is of course challenging. You need simplicity & directness without oversimplifying. But (if you work for great clients - like we did), then that is nowhere near as challenging as building a site from scratch into something that can compete for lucrative keywords. I recently stepped back from the client consulting model for a bit simply because I was pulling myself in too many directions & working too long, but Scott is still flourishing & delivering excellent results for clients.

I have nothing against the concept of branding (think of how many years I slaved building up this site & the capital I have poured into it), but I like to share the trends in the ecosystem as they are, rather than as a hack warping my view to try to pick up consulting clients. Our site would likely make far more income if we kept using the words "enterprise" "brand" "fortune 500" and then sold consulting to that target audience. In fact, a large % of our members here are fortune 500s, conglomerates, newspaper chains, magazine publishers, and so on.

It is not that brand counts for nothing (or that it should count for nothing) but anyone who claims the table isn't tilted is either ignorant, a liar, or both.

Truth has to count for something.

Disclaimer: I am not saying enterprise SEO is always easy (there are real challenges, especially with internal politics that add arbitrary constraints). And I am not saying that everyone who targets the enterprise market is a hack (there are some super talented folks out there). But the challenge of being a profitable small webmaster is much more of a struggle than ranking a site that Google is intentionally biasing their algorithms toward promoting.

Disclaimer2: I realize refuting a douchebag like Bryson Meunier is batting below my league, however as a matter of principal I won't let sleazeballs get away with taking a swipe using junk science. The word science deserves better than that.

Categories:

publishing & media

Publ.Date : Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:35:02 +0000

The Return of GoTo / Overture (and AOL)?

Overture wasn't able to build itself into a credible search destination in part because their brand was positioned incorrectly as being primarily about paid ads that only would backfill with other results in when the ad auction was empty, so as a destination it was seen as a payolla engine. Likewise AOL peaked because it was seen as a walled garden & couldn't keep up with DSL and the open web.

Search engines have recently pushed aggressively to revive the Web 0.1 game of walled gardens. Ever since I have been in search, Ask has been a (the?) leader in arbitrage. To this day IAC is Google's #1 advertiser & while AOL's search marketshare keeps dropping like a rock, Ask has managed to hold their marketshare relatively constant while over-monetizing the search results.

Even though Ask exited algorithmic search, IAC's stock price is up over 160% since they split off their other companies.

What makes that growth even more impressive is when it is compared against Google or Yahoo!.

Yahoo! bowed out of search, outsourcing to Bing. Over the past year Yahoo! has dialed up on over-promotion of their verticals in the search results quite aggressively.

In the above search result, Yahoo! ...

added an "official site" label & favicon to the PPC ad
inserted Yahoo! finance
inserted Yahoo! Search sitesearch
inserted Yahoo! Deals coupons (with a huge graphic)
inserted Yahoo! Downloads (with a big button)

While Yahoo! has been able to increase "engagement" they have done so in part at the expense of losing users.

Surely some of that loss is due to Google's Chrome promotions, but that doesn't put Yahoo! in any stronger of a competitive position going forward, especially as Google clones their portal model.

Increasingly, when we search & when we surf the web it is getting harder to leave the networks we are on. Facebook offers advertisers discounts for advertising other Facebook pages. YouTube signs premium content partners like Motor Trend (and backfill garbage) & then advertises the manufacturer YouTube channels next to that content. The user never leaves the portal throughout the entire process & brands are forced to buy their own pre-existing brand equity, or Google will sell it off to competitors.

Google recently added a Yahoo!-like global portal navigation bar at the top of their pages & Google+ gets over-represented in the organic search results. Even while not logged in & doing advanced longtail searches Google still shows promotional Google+ boxes like this one:

A couple years ago Amit Singhal said:

?We deal with those responsibilities by having very concrete principles. All rankings are decided algorithmically, and the focus is on user benefit, not advertiser or commercial benefit. We ask ourselves, ?Can a random company who does not want to be part of any Google system be harmed by a change we?re proposing?? If they are, we won?t do it.?

Today that is simply not true.

Then again, who would expect the head of organizing the world's information during the information age to have a year or two of foresight? Or, is the double-speak intentional:

"Things keep happening where you can?t even trust [Google's] word. I don?t think they were ever not evil." - Danny Sullivan

Now that Google may show AdWords ads at the bottom of the search results, Google is testing showing fewer organic listings on navigational searches. In some cases the 7 Google Places listings act as 7 results & the search results only contain 3 other listings. What's even uglier than this is a new enhanced AdWords sitelink option where a single ad unit takes up nearly a third of the screen real estate on a large monitor (and much more on a smaller screen).

And that doesn't account for all of Google's various vertical search services & the ways Google inserts itself into the sales stream, with...

Google Checkout & Google Wallet
Software: Android Apps, Chrome Apps & their Enterprise Marketplace @ google.com/enterprise/marketplace/
Google Offers
Google Books ebook sales
Google Music song downloads
YouTube movie rentals

And even when you leave Google, they invest in heavily SEOed sites and are still tracking you wherever & however they can, even if it violates Safari or Internet Explorer terms of service. Such an anti-privacy policy works brilliantly for ad networks (so long as users do not get creeped out) as the ad networks can slice and dice who receives how much credit for any measurable online action.

As Google redefines how credit is shared & competes more directly against publishers, those publishers need to adjust their business models. If Google grows too parasitic & captures too much of the value creation they will turn the media against them & give billions of Dollars worth of coverage to smaller search upstarts that actually respect their users.

Both DuckDuckGo & Blekko are increasing traffic & monetization.

Along with the nepotistic portalization of search, the rise of algorithmic journalism that can turn Tweets into an automated story puts further pressure on publishers. As the web becomes a series of walled gardens the opportunity in SEO diminishes, which is why some SEO websites want to drop the SEO label.

Want to see what Google will look like in a couple years? Set your default search engine to Yahoo! or Ask & you can see the future today. The push for social garbage & nepotism over quality will last until Google's search traffic chart looks like the above Yahoo! chart. At that point we will focus more on Bing & other search engines.

Categories:

internet

Publ.Date : Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:35:06 +0000

Ha! Bullets Can\'t Hurt ME

Negative SEO vs Sabotage

Just about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized. A person can say "not me" but how do they operate optimally in both the short term and long term if they never operate near limits or thresholds? But now that Google has begun actively penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles & tightening these thresholds, competitors have been giving one another shoves. Some of the most widely highlighted examples of crappy SEO were not attempts at SEO, but intentional competitive sabotage.

Why Many SEO Thought Leaders Remain Ignorant About SEO

Recently there have been numerous claims that negative SEO doesn't work made by people who should know better.

Many of them don't know any better though, due to a combination of being naive, trusting public relations messaging as being the truth, and a general lack of recent experience on smaller sites.

If someone only...

does consulting for large corporate clients
works in house at a big company
publishes a site about SEO and doesn't build & market sites in competitive areas

... it is easy to bleat on about how negative SEO isn't generally possible except for weak sites. Sites that (allegedly) deserve to be hit & must (obviously) lack quality to be so weak.

The Risk of Labeling "Spam"

As highlighted above, some of the most frequently & widely cited spam examples were not examples of spam, but examples of competitive sabotage. Thus anyone who recommends highlighting "spam" can potentially hose businesses that did nothing wrong.

Why Many SEO Consultants Pretend Success & Cheer Brand

Most sites focused on search typically write a syndication of Google fluff public relations and/or are doing cloaked sales pieces claiming that the death of spammers is great because they and their clients keep becoming more successful. Its all fake it until you make it / fake it until you too are driven out of the ecosystem & pretend things are always getting better even when signs point the other direction. This is done for a variety of reasons:

not wanting to lose access to Google
signaling you have experience working with big brands
wanting to signal that you are a safe play in the marketplace

Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

Marketers Sell Whatever Google Promotes

It is far easier to get paid to do nothing than it is to get paid to fight against the waves of the ocean.

So long as Google keeps feeding macro-parasites trying to kill off smaller & independent players you can expect a lot of consultants to push themselves as being a good fit for the big brands that Google is explicitly designing their algorithms around promoting. However this trend won't last forever. Many of those bigger sites are becoming ad networks & at some point Google will see that competitive threat for what it is. They will then decide "the user" would like a bit more diversity in the results & to see more smaller sites rank.

Most Businesses Must be Small

Much like wealth, business distributions follow power laws & most businesses are small in scale. Sure "build brand" is a nice cure all, but building a strong brand requires scale. Not all businesses have the margins required to build brands. And businesses take time to grow.

Quality vs Scale

Scale & quality are not the same thing. Some businesses are intentionally kept small because their owners feel scale requires compromising on quality. Remember the Olive Garden review that went viral, or what the biggest banks did to the global economy a few years ago?

Most Big Companies Start Off Small

Since going public in 1987, Fastenal has been the fastest growing public company. The company was started by a guy who was sorting bolts and nuts in his basement. Now that they are worth $13 billion they are virtually untouchable, but if 30 years ago online was a big sales channel & someone negative SEOed him his business could have been toast.

Big businesses come from small businesses, as does most innovation. However, if the underlying market is absurdly unstable that retards investment in growth and innovation in companies like Fastenal:

The Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the "grand opening" weekend, and the first month's sales totaled $157.

One of the biggest failures of modern societies is the self-serving myth of too big to fail.

If SEOs believe that size of a business is the primary legitimate proxy for quality, they should either hire thousands of employees or go get a job at Wal-Mart.

Categories:

marketing

Publ.Date : Tue, 08 May 2012 15:23:49 +0000

17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid

Posted by Carson Ward

1. Cleansing Domains

A cleansing domain for NFL jersies

When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight.

2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

3. Article Marketing Spam

Ezine Articles SEO visibility

4. Single-Post Blogs

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

6. Paid Links in Content

If you do buy links, knowing what you're doing isn't enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they're doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

9. Linkbait and Switch

10. Directories

Would I pay money for a listing here?
Are the majority of current listings quality sites?
Do listings link with the business or site name?

11. Link Farms and Networks

I honestly can't speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.

My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites

13. Forum Spam

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

15. Profile Spam

What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn't match your site or brand name.

"The name's Insurance. Car Insurance"

16. Comment Spam

I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn't. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:

Followed blog comments

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble.

Spam Links: Not Worth It

Publ.Date : 2012-05-15T22:02:50+01:00

The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages

Huge Update

Google recently launched their ~~webspam~~ Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the "commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money" category.

Based on the number of complaints online about it (there is even a petition!) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update.

Spam vs OOP

Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer.

A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.

Why the quick turn around on the naming?

If you smoke a bunch of webmasters & then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and look for the edge cases that make you look bad & promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for make money online.

As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D

Another site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that users can't tell them apart & force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn't get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits.

Google also put out a form to collect feedback about the update. They only ever do that if they know they went too far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:

So Worried About Manipulation That They Manipulate Themselves

When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia & in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards & in the first page of search results was:

a big ecommerce site where the review on that product stated that the retail described the quantity as being 10x what you actually get (the same site had other better pages)
a user-driven aggregator site with a thin affiliate post made years ago & attributed to a site that no longer exists
a Facebook note that was auto-generated from a feed
an old blogspot splog
a broader tag page for a social site
a Yahoo! Shopping page that was completely empty

That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google's cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name.

The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.

Part of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms).

SEO-based Business Models

Now more than ever SEO requires threading the needle: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but not so aggressive that you get clipped for it (and hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics & analytics back into efforts) & a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens & throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won't on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff.

And your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings & then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn't consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?

The Unknowable Future

As search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. Many trends can be predicted, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well.

This year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda & now Penguin) & the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a candle wick adjuster was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:

Blekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run for only a few million a year. As computers get cheaper & Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does & Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file & how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake.

At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:

I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. ?More than 90 percent.?

There will be many more casualties in that war.

Categories:

google

Publ.Date : Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:21:06 +0000

Search Engine Watch - Latest
Updated :

Multi-Channel Ads: The Importance of \'Scent\'
TV or Mass Media ads create awareness and possible interest, so PPC, display or Facebook ads should pick up where the other ads leave off. But they can?t pick up anything unless they also carry a "scent trail" of keywords, terminology, and imagery.
Publ.Date : Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:00 GMT

Facebook App Center Announced
Facebook has unveiled plans for its App Center service, which will allow developers to offer their applications to users as both free and paid applications on the iOS and Android mobile platforms, as well as desktop- and web-based applications.
Publ.Date : Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid

Posted by Carson Ward

1. Cleansing Domains

A cleansing domain for NFL jersies

When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight.

2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

3. Article Marketing Spam

Ezine Articles SEO visibility

4. Single-Post Blogs

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

6. Paid Links in Content

If you do buy links, knowing what you're doing isn't enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they're doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

9. Linkbait and Switch

10. Directories

Would I pay money for a listing here?
Are the majority of current listings quality sites?
Do listings link with the business or site name?

11. Link Farms and Networks

I honestly can't speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.

My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites

13. Forum Spam

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

15. Profile Spam

What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn't match your site or brand name.

"The name's Insurance. Car Insurance"

16. Comment Spam

I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn't. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:

Followed blog comments

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble.

Spam Links: Not Worth It

Publ.Date : 2012-05-15T22:02:50+01:00

The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages

Huge Update

Spam vs OOP

A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.

Why the quick turn around on the naming?

As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D

So Worried About Manipulation That They Manipulate Themselves

a big ecommerce site where the review on that product stated that the retail described the quantity as being 10x what you actually get (the same site had other better pages)
a user-driven aggregator site with a thin affiliate post made years ago & attributed to a site that no longer exists
a Facebook note that was auto-generated from a feed
an old blogspot splog
a broader tag page for a social site
a Yahoo! Shopping page that was completely empty

The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.

SEO-based Business Models

The Unknowable Future

At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:

I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. ?More than 90 percent.?

There will be many more casualties in that war.

Categories:

google

Publ.Date : Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:21:06 +0000

7 Time-Saving Google Analytics Custom Reports
The right Custom Reports can be incredible time savers. Instead of spending time digging around for important metrics, you can find what you need separated neatly into columns for some analysis that will lead to some actionable insight.
Publ.Date : Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Why Your SEO & Social Strategy Should Include Pinterest
You don?t have to be a lifestyle-type site to win on Pinterest, you merely need to make your brand fun and create interesting, shareable images. Pinterest offers other benefits, including social links generated from content shared on Pinterest.
Publ.Date : Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

How to Get Rid of Unwanted Backlinks
Hit by a Google penalty because low-quality sites are linking to yours? This process will help you conduct a backlink audit of your website, drill down to identify bad links, and share tools to help you hunt down people who can remove those links.
Publ.Date : Mon, 14 May 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Ford Retains Confidence in Facebook Ads as GM Quits
Automaker tells ClickZ it will continue advertising on the social site. While General Motors may halt Facebook advertising, according to a Wall Street Journal story today, Ford has a different attitude toward paid promotions on the social site.
Publ.Date : Wed, 16 May 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Make Second Tier Search Engines Part of Your Lead Generation Strategy
Google and Bing can only get you so far. If you work in an extremely competitive industry you may find yourself paying anywhere from $30 to $50+ per click. Working with second tier engine/networks can provide an abundance of traffic at a low cost.
Publ.Date : Wed, 16 May 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Search Engine Optimization News

Video Transcription

Avoid Duplicate Content

Avoid 404 Errors and Misdirects

Project Management Is A Tool For Effecting Change

Project Collaboration - Trello

Project Collaboration - Google Docs

Inbox Zero Methodology

Our Consultants Work On-site Where Possible

Communication Solves All Problems

PPT Pitches

Monthly Industry Updates

What Works For You?

Further Reading

MONTH ONE – PLANNING AND QUICK HITS

PLANNING

QUICK HITS

MONTH TWO – EGOBAIT

MONTH THREE – LAUNCHING DATA VISUALIZATION

TACTICS

MONTH FOUR – RELEASE AN EBOOK AND GUEST POST

TACTICS

MONTH FIVE – HOST A BLOG CONTEST

TACTICS

MONTH SIX – THROW AN EVENT

TACTICS

FINAL QUICK HITS

CONGRATS!

What are Response Codes?

200 OK

301 Moved Permanently

302 Found (Moved Temporarily)

401 Unauthorized

403 Forbidden

404 Not Found

410 Gone

500 Internal Server Error

503 Service Unavailable

Status Code Readers & Additional Reading

1. Cleansing Domains

2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

3. Article Marketing Spam

4. Single-Post Blogs

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

6. Paid Links in Content

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

9. Linkbait and Switch

10. Directories

11. Link Farms and Networks

12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites

13. Forum Spam

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

15. Profile Spam

16. Comment Spam

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

Spam Links: Not Worth It

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

6. Check Your Headers

7. Use Basic Tools Well

8. Learn When to Be Patient

9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work

DO THE FUCKING WORK.

Executive Summary

Combined Survey Results

AOL SERP

Ask SERP

Ask Arbitrage SERP

Bing SERP

Bing With Sidebar SERP

Dogpile SERP

DuckDuckGo SERP

Google SERP

Google With Sidebar SERP

Yahoo! SERP

Yahoo! With Sidebar SERP