BEST SEO SPECIALIST IN JACKSONVILLE: Building High Quality Backlinks with Dofollow Rela...: Had a request to write an article specifically about this topic: how to build high quality links with a “dofollow” relationship. Of course, ...
Here are some other links: http://bestseospecialist.com/jacksonville-seo/
http://bestseospecialist.com/local-seo-jacksonville/the-local-seo-frenzy/
Why your business needs SEO
If you are thinking about getting your house painted, go with Rhino Shield of Jax and get a 25 year warranty. Never Paint again.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Why Create a Microsite About Yourself?
Someone found SEO Theory for an interesting question that I haven’t really addressed in the past. And, in fact, if I had addressed it in the past the topic would probably need a refresh by now anyway. The question concerns creating microsites for one’s self. Why do that?
Search engine optimization is about obtaining the best possible performance from search referral traffic. That means you want the traffic to be interested in your content and you want the people searching for your content to be able to easily find your content. So when YOU are the topic of the query, having a microsite does sometimes make sense.
In fact, every Web searchable social media profile you create is a microsite; your Twitter account, your Linkedin profile, your Pinterest board, your Facebook page — these are all little sites that tell people something about you
.
Google+ gives you the ability — through its (now drifting) Authorship markup — to create a hub for your microsites so that people can see where your content may be found. You can link to social media profiles or blogs where you contribute content.
So, with all these social media options, you have to ask who really needs anything more, like a dedicated, branded microsite. We can still go for the vanity option and create our own personal domains but if (like me) you don’t do much with that domain you’re probably not going to see a lot of traffic to it. In fact, if (like me) your name is shared by one or more celebrities, Google’s current set of algorithms may bury you in bullshit about the celebrities.
In my case I helped Google do the burying — no need to dwell on why. But it’s a rare day when you find any content about any Michael Martinez other than the former Philadelphia Phillies baseball player on the front page of a search for “michael martinez”. Only a few years ago you could have found six natural listings for me (I never tried to own that query).
There are certainly some professional benefits to being found for your name, but there are also drawbacks. For example, if you have a colorful online life you should probably be glad that prospective employers are not finding so much information about you when they search your name.
Then again, if you’re a professional SEO and you cannot be found for your name, people may look askance of your skills. It’s a tough decision even for a marketer. So I think the answer to the question “who really needs a microsite” comes down to whomever really can benefit from one in some measurable way.
Simply building a microsite around your name for a vanity purpose is taking on potentially a lot of Local SEO challenge for a relatively small reward. There are probably better things you can do with your time to promote yourself online.
Some people are so disturbed by the nasty, hostile content published under their names (and found in the search results) that they build a dozen or maybe several dozen microsites about themselves. This strategy may work in weak queries but it’s a good way to draw attention to yourself. After all, if you’re NOT a celebrity and people who know who you are start to find dozens of Websites about you, it will be pretty obvious to them you’re trying to take control of the SERPs.
Celebrities, wealthy business people, and corporations do sometimes invest in the microsite strategy for reputation management. I have tried to steer my clients away from populating their SERPs with vanity Websites; I favor creating useful, task-specific Websites that can provide some visibility (and shielding) for a contested name space. A large corporation may already have an existing set of Websites that can be tweaked or enhanced to do the job, for example.
\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\BEST SEO SPECIALIST IN JACKSONVILLE\SEO Theory\reflective-dynamics-ad-06.jpg "Just getting DISMAL TRAFFIC to your Website? Let's change all that. CLICK HERE to contact Reflective Dynamics...")
The thing about microsites, though, is that they need to act like normal, ordinary, everyday Websites too. They need links, they should link out to good content, and they should provide people with a clear indication of what to expect if those people choose to visit those Websites.
Search reputation management has evolved over the past few years. I don’t think it’s evolved much
but you do tend to have more options to work with. Back in 2006 and 2007 when I looked at other people’s RepMan campaigns all I found were empty profile pages (even for companies). They looked awful and often the results drew criticism.
Now with a lot of marketing attention, budget, and emphasis directed toward creating and managing active social media communities around brands peppering a corporate name (or even a personal name space) with a dozen social media profiles looks natural — provided they serve a purpose. Creating an empty YouTube channel is kind of silly and it’s not going to be able to compete well against hostile content.
It’s true that some people like to have fun with their name space. Especially when your name is unusual, you can create content that is interesting and engaging and people probably won’t be offended when they search about you. After all, they’re not likely to be looking for anyone else by your name, right?
Vanity query optimization has assumed a permanent place in the search engine optimization practices category. It’s not necessarily a big money-maker but it can be a good practice ground for people who are learning how to manage complicated SEO campaigns. Competing against yourself can also help you identify better practices for creating content. So vanity query optimization is a good training ground for anyone who is new to Jacksonville SEO.
But you should pursue vanity query optimization responsibly. You could be generous and populate your name space with content about someone else (as I did a few years ago) but that other person may one day come to overshadow you. You may one day want to take back that name space and suddenly find that you’re competing with professional news media, and that’s not so easy an SEO campaign.
For the record, I have NOT tried to take back my name space but if I were to try I would probably have to focus on just one Website and build really good content there. While I am not the only Michael Martinez who has an interest in being found on the Web, there are actually several other people (authors, artists, performers) who are ALSO being overshadowed by the baseball player’s content. That was never my intention and my philosophy for the past couple of years has been “I’ve done enough harm in this name space”.
Looking back, maybe I would have done things differently. It’s too late for that. I don’t have the time or desire to try to fix the name space, and so many people have written so much hostile content about the former Phillies baseball player (he was, unfortunately, not a very good hitter in the major leagues) that it probably would be a massive undertaking.
The pianist, the drummer, the political scientists, the reporters — all those guys named Michael Martinez who can no longer be found in a search for “michael martinez” — they have probably learned to live with that; maybe they don’t even care. But if they do care, then they probably have good reason to be angry with me for messing with the SERPs to begin with.
So think long and hard before you try to take control over a shared name space. It’s not just about drawing attention to yourself, or blotting out unwanted content — it’s also about what happens to the other people who share your name.
View the original article here
Search engine optimization is about obtaining the best possible performance from search referral traffic. That means you want the traffic to be interested in your content and you want the people searching for your content to be able to easily find your content. So when YOU are the topic of the query, having a microsite does sometimes make sense.
In fact, every Web searchable social media profile you create is a microsite; your Twitter account, your Linkedin profile, your Pinterest board, your Facebook page — these are all little sites that tell people something about you
.
Google+ gives you the ability — through its (now drifting) Authorship markup — to create a hub for your microsites so that people can see where your content may be found. You can link to social media profiles or blogs where you contribute content.
So, with all these social media options, you have to ask who really needs anything more, like a dedicated, branded microsite. We can still go for the vanity option and create our own personal domains but if (like me) you don’t do much with that domain you’re probably not going to see a lot of traffic to it. In fact, if (like me) your name is shared by one or more celebrities, Google’s current set of algorithms may bury you in bullshit about the celebrities.
In my case I helped Google do the burying — no need to dwell on why. But it’s a rare day when you find any content about any Michael Martinez other than the former Philadelphia Phillies baseball player on the front page of a search for “michael martinez”. Only a few years ago you could have found six natural listings for me (I never tried to own that query).
There are certainly some professional benefits to being found for your name, but there are also drawbacks. For example, if you have a colorful online life you should probably be glad that prospective employers are not finding so much information about you when they search your name.
Then again, if you’re a professional SEO and you cannot be found for your name, people may look askance of your skills. It’s a tough decision even for a marketer. So I think the answer to the question “who really needs a microsite” comes down to whomever really can benefit from one in some measurable way.
Simply building a microsite around your name for a vanity purpose is taking on potentially a lot of Local SEO challenge for a relatively small reward. There are probably better things you can do with your time to promote yourself online.
Some people are so disturbed by the nasty, hostile content published under their names (and found in the search results) that they build a dozen or maybe several dozen microsites about themselves. This strategy may work in weak queries but it’s a good way to draw attention to yourself. After all, if you’re NOT a celebrity and people who know who you are start to find dozens of Websites about you, it will be pretty obvious to them you’re trying to take control of the SERPs.
Celebrities, wealthy business people, and corporations do sometimes invest in the microsite strategy for reputation management. I have tried to steer my clients away from populating their SERPs with vanity Websites; I favor creating useful, task-specific Websites that can provide some visibility (and shielding) for a contested name space. A large corporation may already have an existing set of Websites that can be tweaked or enhanced to do the job, for example.
The thing about microsites, though, is that they need to act like normal, ordinary, everyday Websites too. They need links, they should link out to good content, and they should provide people with a clear indication of what to expect if those people choose to visit those Websites.
Search reputation management has evolved over the past few years. I don’t think it’s evolved much
but you do tend to have more options to work with. Back in 2006 and 2007 when I looked at other people’s RepMan campaigns all I found were empty profile pages (even for companies). They looked awful and often the results drew criticism.
Now with a lot of marketing attention, budget, and emphasis directed toward creating and managing active social media communities around brands peppering a corporate name (or even a personal name space) with a dozen social media profiles looks natural — provided they serve a purpose. Creating an empty YouTube channel is kind of silly and it’s not going to be able to compete well against hostile content.
It’s true that some people like to have fun with their name space. Especially when your name is unusual, you can create content that is interesting and engaging and people probably won’t be offended when they search about you. After all, they’re not likely to be looking for anyone else by your name, right?
Vanity query optimization has assumed a permanent place in the search engine optimization practices category. It’s not necessarily a big money-maker but it can be a good practice ground for people who are learning how to manage complicated SEO campaigns. Competing against yourself can also help you identify better practices for creating content. So vanity query optimization is a good training ground for anyone who is new to Jacksonville SEO.
But you should pursue vanity query optimization responsibly. You could be generous and populate your name space with content about someone else (as I did a few years ago) but that other person may one day come to overshadow you. You may one day want to take back that name space and suddenly find that you’re competing with professional news media, and that’s not so easy an SEO campaign.
For the record, I have NOT tried to take back my name space but if I were to try I would probably have to focus on just one Website and build really good content there. While I am not the only Michael Martinez who has an interest in being found on the Web, there are actually several other people (authors, artists, performers) who are ALSO being overshadowed by the baseball player’s content. That was never my intention and my philosophy for the past couple of years has been “I’ve done enough harm in this name space”.
Looking back, maybe I would have done things differently. It’s too late for that. I don’t have the time or desire to try to fix the name space, and so many people have written so much hostile content about the former Phillies baseball player (he was, unfortunately, not a very good hitter in the major leagues) that it probably would be a massive undertaking.
The pianist, the drummer, the political scientists, the reporters — all those guys named Michael Martinez who can no longer be found in a search for “michael martinez” — they have probably learned to live with that; maybe they don’t even care. But if they do care, then they probably have good reason to be angry with me for messing with the SERPs to begin with.
So think long and hard before you try to take control over a shared name space. It’s not just about drawing attention to yourself, or blotting out unwanted content — it’s also about what happens to the other people who share your name.
Disclaimer: I have never had a business relationship or any connection with the baseball player. He did not solicit or request my help in managing the search results. He was unaware of any SEO work I did in that name space.See also:
View the original article here
Building High Quality Backlinks with Dofollow Relationship
Had a request to write an article specifically about this topic: how to build high quality links with a “dofollow” relationship. Of course, “dofollow” is a figurative label we apply to any link that a search engine is likely to follow and allow to pass value. There remains, to this day, no “rel=’dofollow’” link attribute in the standards. I think that still has to be said because we are starting to mentally blot out the basic facts of link architecture.
A link is just a reference to a document. It neither conveys sentiment nor measures quality. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally tested their citation-analysis link strategy against a very small set of documents, found only on the Stanford University Website, which were anything but representative of the Web in general. Manipulative links already existed in volume before Page and Brin typed up their little white paper on PageRank. Paid links were already rampant on the Web. When Google stepped into the search space, it was easy fodder for link spammers and their SERPs made that plain and clear.
Nonetheless, despite the many spankings that spammers handed to the Google engineers over the past 15 years, they have persisted with their little link experiment — expanding it into new directions, dressing it up with filters, and otherwise looking for ways to make links work the way Page and Brin thought they should
.
Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if Google succeeded with this noble goal but they do seem to be going about it the wrong way. I say that because people are still trying to figure out how to manipulate the search results with links. That’s doable, easily doable, and being done easily still by many people. But sooner or later the search engines seem to catch up with the latest link manipulation techniques. And therefore I think Google has yet to de-incentivize manipulative linking. I don’t think this linking arms race will ever end — not unless some profound philosophical change occurs on one side of the conversation or the other.
So how important should the “dofollow relationship” be to search engine optimization
? After all, it’s not optimal if the link only survives or passes value for a short time. That’s sub-optimal.
Of course, this must be the point where people add the “high quality” (or, as most folks just say, “quality”) to the “(dofollow )links”. I never in my life found a “(high )quality link”. I keep wondering what people mean by that. I’ve been reading about “(high )quality links” for years but to this day no one has managed to present one.
Let’s back up here and revisit the basics.
Leaving aside the fact that Larry and Sergey had it all wrong to begin with, anyone who has worked with large data sets can tell the rest of us that often the SET OF DATA says much more interesting stuff than any specific piece of data. I concede that aggregate link data has been very revealing about all sorts of things from the start.
Where Larry and Sergey were wrong was in treating links as “votes”. Links have never been “votes”. But the aggregate data analysis really doesn’t need to use that metaphor. Or, rather, I should say it’s a neutral metaphor at the aggregate level — it doesn’t matter if you say “links are votes” or “links are NOT votes” when you look at the SET OF LINKS.
Linking behavior always reveals a pattern. And most people who create links don’t even think about patterns or how the links might influence search results. So when you go looking for links that are intentionally influencing search results sooner or later you will find a pattern. It’s not a matter of “if” but “when”, as pundits like to say.
When you step back and look at the kinds of patterns that search engineers have paid special attention to, they are mostly patterns created through manipulative linking. Take reciprocal linking, for example. That’s a perfectly fine practice found across the Web “in the wild”. Millions of sites reciprocate links every day. The links sometimes help and they don’t hurt.
But ask someone to set up a reciprocal linking plan “to help with SEO” and suddenly you’re in trouble. Of course, it’s the “for SEO/help with SEO” part that gets you into trouble. Reciprocal linking when done without thought of search engines looks very different from reciprocal linking done for SEO.
There are two classes of patterns: linking (techniques) done FOR SEO and linking (techniques) NOT “done for SEO”. Every linking practice falls into both of those buckets, but the patterns look very different.
Yes, Virginia, you’re allowed to “build links” for your Website. Heck, you’re even allowed to build them “for SEO” — up to a certain point. That is, the search engines tell people to get links to their sites so that the sites can be found.
Search engine optimization begins with publishing content, but search indexing begins with crawling, and crawling only occurs when the search engine knows about a URL. You can submit a sitemap containing a list of freshly published URLs to the search engine and many if not all of them will be fetched; but most Websites don’t publish sitemaps. So indexing for most sites is built on crawl.
The real question is how many links are you allowed to build? What is acceptable for a site? It’s a pity there is no universal number to answer that question. SEO link building would be much easier if we could all agree that “you’re allowed to build (place by yourself) 100 links (or 10 links)”.
While it’s okay to build
links what is not okay is building too many links. I don’t know how many links are too many but I know you eventually cross that threshold when you just keep blindly building links.
Search engines never asked you to build thousands of links to a Website. You decided to build [Whatever My Competitor Has Plus X More] so that you could have a competitive advantage. And then you lied and said that the search algorithms were all about links.
So if the search engines encourage you to build the barest minimum of helpful links (to get your crawl/indexing started) then it follows that you are
permitted to build “helpful” links that influence search results.
You just have to curtail your compulsive desire to place as many “helpful” links as you possibly can. That’s not what SEO is all about — that’s what “self-penalization” is all about.
In other words, Horatio, I submit that whenever you cross that invisible threshold all of your “helpful” links become “UNhelpful”.
And there’s the rub. A perfectly good link may “go bad” not because it is a bad link but because it is one link too many, or part of a set of links that are one too many, or part of a set of links that create a pattern that reveals manipulation.
Search engines don’t have to see a complete pattern of manipulation; they only have to see enough manipulation to know that — if they dig deeper — they will see a pattern.
If it’s not this link
or that link that gets you into trouble, but rather all these links, then the fact you didn’t drop links in a thousand blog comments and forum profiles doesn’t matter. You still created too many “helpful” links.
1 infographic is probably good. 10 infographics is a pattern. 50 infographics is most likely abusive.
But there are always exceptions
, and so we excuse or pardon those exceptions by glibly concluding that “it comes down to intent” (I have said that myself). Intent is not yet the killer buzzword that it could be, but I suppose we’re working on it.
Every self-placed link has some sort of self-serving intention behind it. The intention itself may be good or bad but I think a lot of self-serving link placements are essentially neutral (in and of themselves). It’s when you have “a lot of self-serving link placements” that your intentions (to manipulate search results) become more clear.
This is why every attempt to define “(high )quality links” fails. Because when you get enough of these types of links you create a pattern that reveals your intention to tilt the search results in your favor. You’re not playing fairly.
I could argue that the Website with the most manipulative keyword-rich anchor text is Wikipedia. I don’t have the data to back that up but people generally link to Wikipedia articles with keyword-rich anchor text. So why doesn’t Google slap down Wikipedia for all that manipulative linking?
Because Wikipedia’s keyword-rich anchors are natural
. People naturally link to articles with their titles. I want to laugh out loud every time I read some SEO blog or opinion column that advises people to vary their anchor text. Talk about overthinking a problem, you’re just replacing one spammy pattern with another one.
People run their backlink reports and they check nonsense metrics like “domain authority”, “page authority”, “pagerank”, “someotherrank” and they conclude that since Competitor Joe gets X-links with values greater than THIS that all they have to do is get X+Y links with at least similar (or higher values).
Using the other guy’s (partial) backlink profile as an excuse for not playing fairly doesn’t sway the search engines when it comes to detecting and blocking manipulative linking patterns. Just because you see the links doesn’t mean they are helping (or hurting).
Take links in press releases, for example. Earlier this year many people thought Matt Cutts was lying (or just plain ignorant) when a badly designed press release link test showed that the link passed anchor text
. Even Danny Sullivan made the mistake of concluding that if an individual link passes anchor text it must be influencing search results.
Anyone (including Danny Sullivan) who has written an article about Google’s Panda algorithm, where they suggest that it downgrades a site’s performance in search results, should understand that no matter how many “helpful” links you point at a site, it’s rankings are going to be determined by MORE than just the links.
We knew this to be true before Panda but everyone winked and nudged each other in the shoulder and whispered, “yeah, right”. But when Panda started knocking Websites down right and left and no one could tie backlink profiles into the Panda downgrades, everyone should have realized that it doesn’t matter if a link is capable of passing anchor text
.
There were so many comments posted on that Search Engine Land article, let me pull out two:
Several months before Barry Schwartz published that Search Engine Land article about the press release link experiment, Danny wrote “Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update”.
If you want to get metaphorical about this, in a showdown between the Panda and the Links, THE PANDA ALWAYS WINS. Panda downgrades short-circuit the generally helpful effects of targeted link anchor text.
So what if your press release links pass anchor text? That doesn’t mean they will help with your search rankings. And that was the point Matt Cutts originally made in the Google Webmaster Support Forums.
I’ve been saying this for years and will have to say it again, so let’s move on.
If you knew that Google would ignore any link on the front page of a PR 9 Website (and let’s not get into whether Google will ever update the Toolbar PageRank again) — that the link would not pass PageRank or Anchor Text — would YOU accept a link from that front page?
The classic example people cite when it comes to “sculpting PageRank” is Google’s use of “rel=’nofollow’” on the front page of YouTube (they no longer do this, by the way). If you could have gotten one of those NoFollowed links, would you have turned it down?
The majority of Websites can never be assigned a Toolbar PR value of 9 (the distribution is governed by a power law). You’re not going to find nearly as many PR 6 sites that will link to you as PR 1 sites. A lot of PR 1 sites will eventually earn more PageRank, but not all of them.
A link from a PR 1 Website can be nearly as helpful as a link from a PR 9 Website, if only because once a linking document has enough (internal) PageRank its anchor text will be passed to (some or all of) its link destinations. So you can have ten times, 100 times the internal PageRank but you’re only going to pass that anchor text once.
If a link passes anchor text and IF the anchor text helps with rankings, then why should anyone care if the link is on a PR 1 or a PR 10 page? You got the anchor text. Move on.
If link spammers who use automated software could drop their links only on PR 8 and above sites, they would do that. In fact, I have seen advertisements for link dropping services that claim to do just that. If you believe the high Toolbar PageRank will somehow protect those links from being detected through a pattern of manipulation then congratulations. You have earned your Most Naive SEO Idiot card for 2013 and beyond. It’s a lifetime membership.
There is no such thing as “a high quality link”. There never has been. There may never be such a thing.
Yes, Googlers talk about “high quality links” but I don’t think they mean what you
think they mean. Ask a Googler if a high-PR Website can fail to pass anchor text and I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to say, “Yes, under certain circumstances, those links won’t pass anchor text (or PageRank)”. In fact, we know that Google has publicly penalized high-PR Websites for selling manipulative links.
Your “high quality links” don’t exist. Google’s “high quality links” exist at Google’s whim and discretion. This is why I have been saying for years that if your SEO plan is built on links you need a new SEO plan.
Let’s go back to the original request. Can you build these kinds of links?
Sure — just as long as you have a clear and precise definition for what you mean by “high quality links”. I’ll assume that you do and it’s not my responsibility to knock down your illusions if you don’t. Here are ways you can build “high quality links” (in no particular order):
Reciprocal linksBlog comment linksForum profile linksGuest blog linksBlog network linksBlogroll linksSocial media linksInfographic linksRemotely hosted widget linksAsking people to link to your sitePaying for links
I will even go further and say that you can do all these things without violating search engine guidelines.
Sure, I am leaving out various disclaimers and qualifying details in making such a definitive statement. A typical link spammer dropping 10,000 links in a day isn’t going to worry over the details — he just wants to create his spammy little pattern and congratulate himself on his imagined cleverness.
Anyone engaged in serious link building should be creating links that are intended to last a long time. How you define quality is up to you. How you measure success is up to you.
Where you don’t have any discretion is in the facts about links. The facts are neither inconvenient truths nor excuses for doing really dumb stuff.
Links don’t kill Website rankings in search results.
Link building
kills Website rankings in search results.
You’re allowed to build links; you’re just not allowed to use links to create an unfair advantage for yourself (or your clients).
We can all agree that where the line is drawn is anyone’s guess. My guess is that it varies by Website.
In other words, too much of a good thing ruins it
. But that’s not to say “you can do each of these things in moderation and you’ll be safe”. Rather, it’s to say that “if you create a pattern of manipulative linking you won’t be fooling any algorithms for very long”.
It’s not about creating “the right pattern” or “no pattern”. It’s about putting the user experience ahead of the rankings.
Google has reset the linking environment for many Websites. The last 18 months of Google link-slaughter have given everyone in the Internet marketing field an opportunity to stop, take a deep breath, and say, “Okay — we still need links and we can still place links, but we need to stop pretending that it’s all about links.”
As long as you don’t gorge on links again, chances are pretty good you’ll be okay. So if today you’re still wondering where you can get enough links to change the search results, you’re doing it wrong.
Search engine optimization is not all about links. It’s all about improving the search experience for all three members of the Searchable Web Ecosystem: Publishers, Indexers, and Searchers. Links help in that process but they are not enough by themselves.
All your banned and penalized Websites should have made that clear by now.
View the original article here
A link is just a reference to a document. It neither conveys sentiment nor measures quality. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally tested their citation-analysis link strategy against a very small set of documents, found only on the Stanford University Website, which were anything but representative of the Web in general. Manipulative links already existed in volume before Page and Brin typed up their little white paper on PageRank. Paid links were already rampant on the Web. When Google stepped into the search space, it was easy fodder for link spammers and their SERPs made that plain and clear.
Nonetheless, despite the many spankings that spammers handed to the Google engineers over the past 15 years, they have persisted with their little link experiment — expanding it into new directions, dressing it up with filters, and otherwise looking for ways to make links work the way Page and Brin thought they should
.
Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if Google succeeded with this noble goal but they do seem to be going about it the wrong way. I say that because people are still trying to figure out how to manipulate the search results with links. That’s doable, easily doable, and being done easily still by many people. But sooner or later the search engines seem to catch up with the latest link manipulation techniques. And therefore I think Google has yet to de-incentivize manipulative linking. I don’t think this linking arms race will ever end — not unless some profound philosophical change occurs on one side of the conversation or the other.
So how important should the “dofollow relationship” be to search engine optimization
? After all, it’s not optimal if the link only survives or passes value for a short time. That’s sub-optimal.
Of course, this must be the point where people add the “high quality” (or, as most folks just say, “quality”) to the “(dofollow )links”. I never in my life found a “(high )quality link”. I keep wondering what people mean by that. I’ve been reading about “(high )quality links” for years but to this day no one has managed to present one.
Let’s back up here and revisit the basics.
Leaving aside the fact that Larry and Sergey had it all wrong to begin with, anyone who has worked with large data sets can tell the rest of us that often the SET OF DATA says much more interesting stuff than any specific piece of data. I concede that aggregate link data has been very revealing about all sorts of things from the start.
Where Larry and Sergey were wrong was in treating links as “votes”. Links have never been “votes”. But the aggregate data analysis really doesn’t need to use that metaphor. Or, rather, I should say it’s a neutral metaphor at the aggregate level — it doesn’t matter if you say “links are votes” or “links are NOT votes” when you look at the SET OF LINKS.
Linking behavior always reveals a pattern. And most people who create links don’t even think about patterns or how the links might influence search results. So when you go looking for links that are intentionally influencing search results sooner or later you will find a pattern. It’s not a matter of “if” but “when”, as pundits like to say.
When you step back and look at the kinds of patterns that search engineers have paid special attention to, they are mostly patterns created through manipulative linking. Take reciprocal linking, for example. That’s a perfectly fine practice found across the Web “in the wild”. Millions of sites reciprocate links every day. The links sometimes help and they don’t hurt.
But ask someone to set up a reciprocal linking plan “to help with SEO” and suddenly you’re in trouble. Of course, it’s the “for SEO/help with SEO” part that gets you into trouble. Reciprocal linking when done without thought of search engines looks very different from reciprocal linking done for SEO.
There are two classes of patterns: linking (techniques) done FOR SEO and linking (techniques) NOT “done for SEO”. Every linking practice falls into both of those buckets, but the patterns look very different.
Yes, Virginia, you’re allowed to “build links” for your Website. Heck, you’re even allowed to build them “for SEO” — up to a certain point. That is, the search engines tell people to get links to their sites so that the sites can be found.
Search engine optimization begins with publishing content, but search indexing begins with crawling, and crawling only occurs when the search engine knows about a URL. You can submit a sitemap containing a list of freshly published URLs to the search engine and many if not all of them will be fetched; but most Websites don’t publish sitemaps. So indexing for most sites is built on crawl.
The real question is how many links are you allowed to build? What is acceptable for a site? It’s a pity there is no universal number to answer that question. SEO link building would be much easier if we could all agree that “you’re allowed to build (place by yourself) 100 links (or 10 links)”.
While it’s okay to build
links what is not okay is building too many links. I don’t know how many links are too many but I know you eventually cross that threshold when you just keep blindly building links.
Search engines never asked you to build thousands of links to a Website. You decided to build [Whatever My Competitor Has Plus X More] so that you could have a competitive advantage. And then you lied and said that the search algorithms were all about links.
So if the search engines encourage you to build the barest minimum of helpful links (to get your crawl/indexing started) then it follows that you are
permitted to build “helpful” links that influence search results.
You just have to curtail your compulsive desire to place as many “helpful” links as you possibly can. That’s not what SEO is all about — that’s what “self-penalization” is all about.
In other words, Horatio, I submit that whenever you cross that invisible threshold all of your “helpful” links become “UNhelpful”.
And there’s the rub. A perfectly good link may “go bad” not because it is a bad link but because it is one link too many, or part of a set of links that are one too many, or part of a set of links that create a pattern that reveals manipulation.
Search engines don’t have to see a complete pattern of manipulation; they only have to see enough manipulation to know that — if they dig deeper — they will see a pattern.
If it’s not this link
or that link that gets you into trouble, but rather all these links, then the fact you didn’t drop links in a thousand blog comments and forum profiles doesn’t matter. You still created too many “helpful” links.
1 infographic is probably good. 10 infographics is a pattern. 50 infographics is most likely abusive.
But there are always exceptions
, and so we excuse or pardon those exceptions by glibly concluding that “it comes down to intent” (I have said that myself). Intent is not yet the killer buzzword that it could be, but I suppose we’re working on it.
Every self-placed link has some sort of self-serving intention behind it. The intention itself may be good or bad but I think a lot of self-serving link placements are essentially neutral (in and of themselves). It’s when you have “a lot of self-serving link placements” that your intentions (to manipulate search results) become more clear.
This is why every attempt to define “(high )quality links” fails. Because when you get enough of these types of links you create a pattern that reveals your intention to tilt the search results in your favor. You’re not playing fairly.
I could argue that the Website with the most manipulative keyword-rich anchor text is Wikipedia. I don’t have the data to back that up but people generally link to Wikipedia articles with keyword-rich anchor text. So why doesn’t Google slap down Wikipedia for all that manipulative linking?
Because Wikipedia’s keyword-rich anchors are natural
. People naturally link to articles with their titles. I want to laugh out loud every time I read some SEO blog or opinion column that advises people to vary their anchor text. Talk about overthinking a problem, you’re just replacing one spammy pattern with another one.
People run their backlink reports and they check nonsense metrics like “domain authority”, “page authority”, “pagerank”, “someotherrank” and they conclude that since Competitor Joe gets X-links with values greater than THIS that all they have to do is get X+Y links with at least similar (or higher values).
Using the other guy’s (partial) backlink profile as an excuse for not playing fairly doesn’t sway the search engines when it comes to detecting and blocking manipulative linking patterns. Just because you see the links doesn’t mean they are helping (or hurting).
Take links in press releases, for example. Earlier this year many people thought Matt Cutts was lying (or just plain ignorant) when a badly designed press release link test showed that the link passed anchor text
. Even Danny Sullivan made the mistake of concluding that if an individual link passes anchor text it must be influencing search results.
Anyone (including Danny Sullivan) who has written an article about Google’s Panda algorithm, where they suggest that it downgrades a site’s performance in search results, should understand that no matter how many “helpful” links you point at a site, it’s rankings are going to be determined by MORE than just the links.
We knew this to be true before Panda but everyone winked and nudged each other in the shoulder and whispered, “yeah, right”. But when Panda started knocking Websites down right and left and no one could tie backlink profiles into the Panda downgrades, everyone should have realized that it doesn’t matter if a link is capable of passing anchor text
.
There were so many comments posted on that Search Engine Land article, let me pull out two:
Danny Sullivan: [Daniel Tan's press release experiment] proves that with a few links, you can rank something or an unusual terms. Agreed, that’s not necessarily new. But it comes when there’s renewed attention on press release links and when Matt’s freshly said they don’t count. Clearly, they do.I am not picking on Danny because I want to embarrass him — I am picking on Danny because few people in our industry are seldom right more often than he on any technical detail. Danny Sullivan has asked every question, investigated every scenario, hosted numerous conferences where (nearly) all the angles were discussed. I don’t believe you can say anyone is better informed than Danny Sullivan when it comes to SEO, but like all of us his opinions are sometimes influenced by chaotic circumstances.
Michael Martinez: First of all, Matt did NOT say that press release links won’t pass anchor text. So for Danny and Barry to carry on as if he did is simply outrageous. He DID say that the original poster in the Google Web forum discussion (and perhaps by extension everyone) should not expect the links to help with rankings. There is a huge flaw in the assumption that “passing anchor text” = “helps with rankings”. A LOT of other factors are taken into consideration and Danny Sullivan of all people knows that very well — who has made that point more often than him (outside the search engines)?
Several months before Barry Schwartz published that Search Engine Land article about the press release link experiment, Danny wrote “Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update”.
If you want to get metaphorical about this, in a showdown between the Panda and the Links, THE PANDA ALWAYS WINS. Panda downgrades short-circuit the generally helpful effects of targeted link anchor text.
So what if your press release links pass anchor text? That doesn’t mean they will help with your search rankings. And that was the point Matt Cutts originally made in the Google Webmaster Support Forums.
I’ve been saying this for years and will have to say it again, so let’s move on.
If you knew that Google would ignore any link on the front page of a PR 9 Website (and let’s not get into whether Google will ever update the Toolbar PageRank again) — that the link would not pass PageRank or Anchor Text — would YOU accept a link from that front page?
The classic example people cite when it comes to “sculpting PageRank” is Google’s use of “rel=’nofollow’” on the front page of YouTube (they no longer do this, by the way). If you could have gotten one of those NoFollowed links, would you have turned it down?
The majority of Websites can never be assigned a Toolbar PR value of 9 (the distribution is governed by a power law). You’re not going to find nearly as many PR 6 sites that will link to you as PR 1 sites. A lot of PR 1 sites will eventually earn more PageRank, but not all of them.
A link from a PR 1 Website can be nearly as helpful as a link from a PR 9 Website, if only because once a linking document has enough (internal) PageRank its anchor text will be passed to (some or all of) its link destinations. So you can have ten times, 100 times the internal PageRank but you’re only going to pass that anchor text once.
If a link passes anchor text and IF the anchor text helps with rankings, then why should anyone care if the link is on a PR 1 or a PR 10 page? You got the anchor text. Move on.
If link spammers who use automated software could drop their links only on PR 8 and above sites, they would do that. In fact, I have seen advertisements for link dropping services that claim to do just that. If you believe the high Toolbar PageRank will somehow protect those links from being detected through a pattern of manipulation then congratulations. You have earned your Most Naive SEO Idiot card for 2013 and beyond. It’s a lifetime membership.
There is no such thing as “a high quality link”. There never has been. There may never be such a thing.
Yes, Googlers talk about “high quality links” but I don’t think they mean what you
think they mean. Ask a Googler if a high-PR Website can fail to pass anchor text and I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to say, “Yes, under certain circumstances, those links won’t pass anchor text (or PageRank)”. In fact, we know that Google has publicly penalized high-PR Websites for selling manipulative links.
Your “high quality links” don’t exist. Google’s “high quality links” exist at Google’s whim and discretion. This is why I have been saying for years that if your SEO plan is built on links you need a new SEO plan.
Let’s go back to the original request. Can you build these kinds of links?
Sure — just as long as you have a clear and precise definition for what you mean by “high quality links”. I’ll assume that you do and it’s not my responsibility to knock down your illusions if you don’t. Here are ways you can build “high quality links” (in no particular order):
Reciprocal linksBlog comment linksForum profile linksGuest blog linksBlog network linksBlogroll linksSocial media linksInfographic linksRemotely hosted widget linksAsking people to link to your sitePaying for links
I will even go further and say that you can do all these things without violating search engine guidelines.
Sure, I am leaving out various disclaimers and qualifying details in making such a definitive statement. A typical link spammer dropping 10,000 links in a day isn’t going to worry over the details — he just wants to create his spammy little pattern and congratulate himself on his imagined cleverness.
Anyone engaged in serious link building should be creating links that are intended to last a long time. How you define quality is up to you. How you measure success is up to you.
Where you don’t have any discretion is in the facts about links. The facts are neither inconvenient truths nor excuses for doing really dumb stuff.
Links don’t kill Website rankings in search results.
Link building
kills Website rankings in search results.
You’re allowed to build links; you’re just not allowed to use links to create an unfair advantage for yourself (or your clients).
We can all agree that where the line is drawn is anyone’s guess. My guess is that it varies by Website.
In other words, too much of a good thing ruins it
. But that’s not to say “you can do each of these things in moderation and you’ll be safe”. Rather, it’s to say that “if you create a pattern of manipulative linking you won’t be fooling any algorithms for very long”.
It’s not about creating “the right pattern” or “no pattern”. It’s about putting the user experience ahead of the rankings.
Google has reset the linking environment for many Websites. The last 18 months of Google link-slaughter have given everyone in the Internet marketing field an opportunity to stop, take a deep breath, and say, “Okay — we still need links and we can still place links, but we need to stop pretending that it’s all about links.”
As long as you don’t gorge on links again, chances are pretty good you’ll be okay. So if today you’re still wondering where you can get enough links to change the search results, you’re doing it wrong.
Search engine optimization is not all about links. It’s all about improving the search experience for all three members of the Searchable Web Ecosystem: Publishers, Indexers, and Searchers. Links help in that process but they are not enough by themselves.
All your banned and penalized Websites should have made that clear by now.
View the original article here
Native Advertising Represents A New Search Frontier
With both Google and the Federal Trade Commission (and possibly other groups) warning publishers and advertisers against creating consumer confusion through “native advertising”, “advertorials”, or “guest content”, a lot of big publishers are pushing their native ads into the Dark Web. The Dark Web consists of those uncrawlable regions that search engines cannot or choose not to reach.
Some native advertising is creative and entertaining enough to merit its own audience. Just as TV commercials can become wildly popular with viewing audiences, online advertising can stir discussion and build up loyal followings.
But how are consumers to find all this native advertising? Brand loyalty will help surface some of the content through social media connections but presently there is no general purpose search tool available that allows consumers to look for all the native advertising their favorite brands publish.
You have to rely on site search at the major publisher Websites, and if they are using a Google Custom Search Engine but blocking Google through robots.txt then you won’t find the native advertising.
YouTube and Pinterest have proven beyond question that people search for and share commercial advertising. What’s more, some YouTube channels republish vintage and recent TV and radio promotions emblazoned with their own advertising. YouTube itself also embeds advertising on top of the videos of old ads.
The remonetization of old advertising is well underway and probably is almost unstoppable at this point. It may only be a matter of time before someone figures out how to remonetize new advertising content, especially in the “native advertising” style.
Consumers love this stuff. They create digital collections of their favorite ads and share them on social media and blogs. The creativity that goes into making advertising both interesting and entertaining, in some cases highly informative, does not go unrewarded.
It’s arguable how much some of these creative ads drive sales. In fact, there have been a few case studies over the years that show ads can “jump the shark” just like anything else — taking the creativity so far that consumers become more interested in the advertising than the products being sold.
Nonetheless, we live in an age when information is repackaged a hundred different ways, and we now routinely compile data about data. The advertising-made-as-content content is now fair game for collection and sharing; some advertising campaigns even embrace the sharing. So why should there not be a search service that only indexes native advertising? This would just be a variation on product search, for which several dedicated search engines already exist.
If that day should come the SEO community will no doubt be drawn into the experience as marketers turn to marketers to help market their marketing content through marketing content search tools. And consumers will love them.
View the original article here
Some native advertising is creative and entertaining enough to merit its own audience. Just as TV commercials can become wildly popular with viewing audiences, online advertising can stir discussion and build up loyal followings.
But how are consumers to find all this native advertising? Brand loyalty will help surface some of the content through social media connections but presently there is no general purpose search tool available that allows consumers to look for all the native advertising their favorite brands publish.
You have to rely on site search at the major publisher Websites, and if they are using a Google Custom Search Engine but blocking Google through robots.txt then you won’t find the native advertising.
YouTube and Pinterest have proven beyond question that people search for and share commercial advertising. What’s more, some YouTube channels republish vintage and recent TV and radio promotions emblazoned with their own advertising. YouTube itself also embeds advertising on top of the videos of old ads.
The remonetization of old advertising is well underway and probably is almost unstoppable at this point. It may only be a matter of time before someone figures out how to remonetize new advertising content, especially in the “native advertising” style.
Consumers love this stuff. They create digital collections of their favorite ads and share them on social media and blogs. The creativity that goes into making advertising both interesting and entertaining, in some cases highly informative, does not go unrewarded.
It’s arguable how much some of these creative ads drive sales. In fact, there have been a few case studies over the years that show ads can “jump the shark” just like anything else — taking the creativity so far that consumers become more interested in the advertising than the products being sold.
Nonetheless, we live in an age when information is repackaged a hundred different ways, and we now routinely compile data about data. The advertising-made-as-content content is now fair game for collection and sharing; some advertising campaigns even embrace the sharing. So why should there not be a search service that only indexes native advertising? This would just be a variation on product search, for which several dedicated search engines already exist.
If that day should come the SEO community will no doubt be drawn into the experience as marketers turn to marketers to help market their marketing content through marketing content search tools. And consumers will love them.
View the original article here
After the Penalty, What Do You Do for Links?
From February 2005 through May 2005 Google went through what I have sometimes called the Google Awful Update
. Their search results were characterized by many URL-only listings and they often displayed 2-year-old data in place of contemporary information that their crawlers should have been picking up. Danny Sullivan seemed unaware of the issue at the time when I mentioned it to him but I confirmed it was happening to many Websites. The only way you could improve your Google performance at the time (if your site was affected by the Awful Update) was to publish new content, which could not be replaced by 2-year-old data and was not shown in URL-only format.
What I took away from that experience was that “Google remembers everything”. I have been telling people that Google remembers everything for years.
At the SMX Advanced 2007 conference in Seattle, during the “You-and-A” session with Matt Cutts, this memory thing came up again with an example where Matt mentioned if you own 200 spammy sites your 201st site may be flagged for review. This was not the first time the issue had come up. At an earlier conference during a Website review session someone asked Matt why his Website was having issues. Matt looked up the site on his laptop (which he shielded from public view) and said, “I see you have a lot of other Websites that have been flagged for spam.” The audience was stunned by the depth and detail of Google’s knowledge about the Website owner
.
Google has a long memory. Their data centers are large not just because the Web is growing, but also because they are trying to hang on to as much data as possible. “Google remembers everything” is not just a trite saying.
I noticed a forum discussion a few weeks ago (and this is most likely characteristic of such discussions through the past year to year-and-a-half) where someone said, “I was hit by Penguin and had to clean up a lot of bad links. But my rankings won’t come back.”
If you weren’t hit by Penguin then you had a manual action against you for “unnatural links”. It’s the same story just with different details.
At the end of November Barry Schwartz highlighted a discussion in the Google Webmaster forums, noting that Google says you may need to earn their trust again after having engaged in serious violations of their guidelines.
When you clean up a toxic backlink profile, your expectations should be low. It’s a rare website (in my opinion) that will quickly earn back a lot of Google traffic. There are two reasons why I say this. First, if you were counting on links to boost your rankings in Google before, all that link value is gone forever. The foundation on which you built your search success rotted out from under you and simply getting the penalty lifted or recovering from the Penguin downgrade isn’t sufficient to restore your once glorious listing positions.
Second, Google has a long memory. They remember everything.
If you were in doubt before about whether you were out of the deep, dark valley, you should now understand that it isn’t that simple. Google trusted you to abide by their guidelines and you found all sorts of ways to get around those guidelines. Teehee! You were so clever. It worked for years.
But now that the drugs have worn off and you cannot get another quick fix you’re feeling the dreary after effects and they are not pleasant.
The Internet being what it is, those who misled you with their bad SEO advice are already pretending they never said those awful things. It’s your
fault you got caught. They’re now content marketers and advocates of natural linking, whatever that may be.
Meanwhile, you’re stuck in the dog house and you want to know when and how you can get out.
So, the hard answer you don’t need to hear is that you probably need links. Your Website has lost a lot of link value.
But needing links doesn’t excuse you from future excess. You’re still in the embarrassing position of being one of the people that Google is watching. You can’t just rush out and do it all over again.
\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\BEST SEO SPECIALIST IN JACKSONVILLE\SEO Theory\reflective-dynamics-ad-07.jpg "Tired of seeing the effects of TOXIC SEO on your Website traffic? You can change it. CLICK HERE to work with Reflective Dynamics...")
So if you’re thinking of guest posting campaigns and infographics, you really need to stop and consider just how much worse it will be for you the next time you get caught.
Earning links when you have little to no Web visibility is not easy. If you have money for advertising and you can make a profit from using Adwords or Bing’s AdCenter, you should do so. Don’t fly off the deep end and blame Google for what you did to yourself. Don’t dwell on conspiracy theories about Google wanting more people to purchase ads. Google didn’t hold a gun to your head and tell you to get thousands of spammy links. You made that decision yourself, even if at the time you didn’t understand the risks that were involved.
Through the years many people have disagreed with the SEO practices I have advocated. People who didn’t want to hear about the long, slow path to search success went looking for quick fixes and they found them on plenty of popular Websites. You can still find supportive points of view on the Web today.
Content marketing is your greasy road to salvation.
Search engine optimization is now digital marketing.
It’s all bullshit but if you just want feelgood advice it’s there, waiting for you, ready to envelope you in its arms.
If you start over with a new Website some of that advice may help you quickly build up a lot of search traffic. Then again, Google may know who is behind the new site. If you get into trouble again starting a third site may not be so easy.
Just because you read a happy little case study on a popular SEO Website doesn’t mean it’s showing you the way out of the dog house. Search engine optimization was never simple or easy. There is always a price to pay.
Now you’re in the position of having to choose between following all the gurus who are changing horses in the middle of the stream or trying to find a new way.
For my part, I am preaching and practicing the same principles I was in 1999. I can place manipulative links along with the best of manipulative linkers. But I prefer creating content that people are interested in. It just works better, always has, and probably always will.
For those of you who have been to the penalty box and are struggling now that you’re out, creating content that people are interested in may be your only path to long-term success at this point. And it’s a pretty simple path to follow.
If you build it and they do NOT come, then it’s really NOT that interesting. I know for a fact that truly interesting content gets noticed regardless of where you publish it.
You just have to be consistent, not angry.
As for the links you need, if you build truly interesting content, someone will link to it.
Don’t be so quick to get your hands dirty again. The dirt may not wash off so quickly the next time.
Google has a long memory. They forget nothing. You can probably say the same about Bing.
View the original article here
. Their search results were characterized by many URL-only listings and they often displayed 2-year-old data in place of contemporary information that their crawlers should have been picking up. Danny Sullivan seemed unaware of the issue at the time when I mentioned it to him but I confirmed it was happening to many Websites. The only way you could improve your Google performance at the time (if your site was affected by the Awful Update) was to publish new content, which could not be replaced by 2-year-old data and was not shown in URL-only format.
What I took away from that experience was that “Google remembers everything”. I have been telling people that Google remembers everything for years.
At the SMX Advanced 2007 conference in Seattle, during the “You-and-A” session with Matt Cutts, this memory thing came up again with an example where Matt mentioned if you own 200 spammy sites your 201st site may be flagged for review. This was not the first time the issue had come up. At an earlier conference during a Website review session someone asked Matt why his Website was having issues. Matt looked up the site on his laptop (which he shielded from public view) and said, “I see you have a lot of other Websites that have been flagged for spam.” The audience was stunned by the depth and detail of Google’s knowledge about the Website owner
.
Google has a long memory. Their data centers are large not just because the Web is growing, but also because they are trying to hang on to as much data as possible. “Google remembers everything” is not just a trite saying.
I noticed a forum discussion a few weeks ago (and this is most likely characteristic of such discussions through the past year to year-and-a-half) where someone said, “I was hit by Penguin and had to clean up a lot of bad links. But my rankings won’t come back.”
If you weren’t hit by Penguin then you had a manual action against you for “unnatural links”. It’s the same story just with different details.
At the end of November Barry Schwartz highlighted a discussion in the Google Webmaster forums, noting that Google says you may need to earn their trust again after having engaged in serious violations of their guidelines.
When you clean up a toxic backlink profile, your expectations should be low. It’s a rare website (in my opinion) that will quickly earn back a lot of Google traffic. There are two reasons why I say this. First, if you were counting on links to boost your rankings in Google before, all that link value is gone forever. The foundation on which you built your search success rotted out from under you and simply getting the penalty lifted or recovering from the Penguin downgrade isn’t sufficient to restore your once glorious listing positions.
Second, Google has a long memory. They remember everything.
If you were in doubt before about whether you were out of the deep, dark valley, you should now understand that it isn’t that simple. Google trusted you to abide by their guidelines and you found all sorts of ways to get around those guidelines. Teehee! You were so clever. It worked for years.
But now that the drugs have worn off and you cannot get another quick fix you’re feeling the dreary after effects and they are not pleasant.
The Internet being what it is, those who misled you with their bad SEO advice are already pretending they never said those awful things. It’s your
fault you got caught. They’re now content marketers and advocates of natural linking, whatever that may be.
Meanwhile, you’re stuck in the dog house and you want to know when and how you can get out.
So, the hard answer you don’t need to hear is that you probably need links. Your Website has lost a lot of link value.
But needing links doesn’t excuse you from future excess. You’re still in the embarrassing position of being one of the people that Google is watching. You can’t just rush out and do it all over again.
So if you’re thinking of guest posting campaigns and infographics, you really need to stop and consider just how much worse it will be for you the next time you get caught.
Earning links when you have little to no Web visibility is not easy. If you have money for advertising and you can make a profit from using Adwords or Bing’s AdCenter, you should do so. Don’t fly off the deep end and blame Google for what you did to yourself. Don’t dwell on conspiracy theories about Google wanting more people to purchase ads. Google didn’t hold a gun to your head and tell you to get thousands of spammy links. You made that decision yourself, even if at the time you didn’t understand the risks that were involved.
Through the years many people have disagreed with the SEO practices I have advocated. People who didn’t want to hear about the long, slow path to search success went looking for quick fixes and they found them on plenty of popular Websites. You can still find supportive points of view on the Web today.
Content marketing is your greasy road to salvation.
Search engine optimization is now digital marketing.
It’s all bullshit but if you just want feelgood advice it’s there, waiting for you, ready to envelope you in its arms.
If you start over with a new Website some of that advice may help you quickly build up a lot of search traffic. Then again, Google may know who is behind the new site. If you get into trouble again starting a third site may not be so easy.
Just because you read a happy little case study on a popular SEO Website doesn’t mean it’s showing you the way out of the dog house. Search engine optimization was never simple or easy. There is always a price to pay.
Now you’re in the position of having to choose between following all the gurus who are changing horses in the middle of the stream or trying to find a new way.
For my part, I am preaching and practicing the same principles I was in 1999. I can place manipulative links along with the best of manipulative linkers. But I prefer creating content that people are interested in. It just works better, always has, and probably always will.
For those of you who have been to the penalty box and are struggling now that you’re out, creating content that people are interested in may be your only path to long-term success at this point. And it’s a pretty simple path to follow.
If you build it and they do NOT come, then it’s really NOT that interesting. I know for a fact that truly interesting content gets noticed regardless of where you publish it.
You just have to be consistent, not angry.
As for the links you need, if you build truly interesting content, someone will link to it.
Don’t be so quick to get your hands dirty again. The dirt may not wash off so quickly the next time.
Google has a long memory. They forget nothing. You can probably say the same about Bing.
View the original article here
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Search Reputation Management Advice for ORM Professionals
Of all people whom one might expect to keep a squeaky clean online profile, I would say that anyone engaged in search reputation management marketing or social media brand management should be included in that relatively small class.
Everyone has some dirty laundry in their past. Dig deep enough and you’ll find I was once engaged in pretty nasty flame wars over … books
. At the time it was a consuming passion, defending myself against lies from people who really didn’t matter to me. The reputation I built from that period followed me around for years. Occasionally I still run across some obscure nitwit who repeats the lies that were written about me. But I set about the hard task of putting all that nastiness (not participating in it any more) behind me many years ago.
It helps that some of the hard core liars have died and can no longer work their evil against me or anyone else. But I cannot take back the words I wrote, the nasty things I said, or recover the good will I lost among people who once respected my opinion … about books
.
I didn’t realize it at the time but that experience prepared me for a career in online reputation management. When my clients shared their pain with me, I understood that, yes, they found themselves in situations that spiraled out of control and they did and said things that didn’t work out well. Billionaires and Fortune 500 companies sometimes do dumb things just like the rest of us.
I have always taken responsibility for the things I have done and I have tried to practice the advice I freely give to people undergoing reputation management nightmares.
Even in the SEO industry I occasionally rankle feathers and upset people by calling “bullshit” on their preferred marketing beliefs. “It’s all about links” is one of my favorite targets for criticism. SEO was never “all about links” — it’s just that some of your favorite SEO bloggers and forum managers never saw any value in producing worthwhile content without spamming content to the top of the SERPs with links; they justified or rationalized what they were doing by saying nonsense like “links are the most important factor in the search algorithms”.
When I occasionally attend an SEO conference there are usually a few people who approach me tentatively, having heard all about me from their more knowledgeable and experienced friends and mentors (many of whom have argued with me online). These poor folks never quite knew what to make of me. I guess that’s fair because I never quite knew what to make of them
, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and I guess some of them gave me a similar benefit.
I’m not so mean and dreary when you meet me in real life, especially after 6-8 hours of plodding back and forth at a convention where people are saying things like “it’s all about links” or “I’m a content marketer”….
Your reputation precedes you in many ways. I won’t share any more details as I think I have made my point well enough.
Technically, you don’t need any credentials to provide a search reputation management service to people. But some people, apparently, feel the need to manufacture credentials. I will not name names as — so far — these people are having little to no impact on my life (that I can determine). At least one of these people has (I have been told) lied about me to clients and business partners in order to shift blame for failing projects with which I was not involved at the time.
I understand your need to reassure people that, yes, you have the experience and the background to deal with sensitive information presentation campaigns. I also understand that when you are fired from your job for being nasty to a co-worker that you have a need to go out and find a new source of income. And when your former employer seems disinterested in continuing the only profitable line of business they have, the temptation to leverage your business contacts and bring those business partners into new relationships is both natural and obvious.
So let’s assume that anyone who has acquired a bit of experience (and perhaps two years’ worth of technical SEO training on a weekly basis from one of the world’s leading SEO theorists) at managing communications between technical teams and clients decides, “Hey, I can do this too.” Let’s further assume that this person understands the basics of how search works and — having watched many dozens of keyword campaigns rise and fall with the strategies and the search algorithms — knows how to articulate these ups and downs to people.
That is pretty decent experience, in my book, and it is about all the credentials you need, in my opinion. After all, I started doing search reputation management with Forbes 50 and Fortune 500 clients with far less impressive credentials, so it’s not like credentials matter that much. Landing these highly sensitive clients depends more on connections and sales expertise, and we had some pretty well-connected sales people. There is, in my book, no need to make DEMONSTRABLY FALSE claims about how important you are or were in any particular industry (like search reputation management). Just be honest with people about what you
did. You don’t have to take credit for what other people actually did.
So let’s assume that now you have what may be a successful job or business, and that you brought yourself from the ranks of the unemployed to this current pinnacle of personal success through a lot of hard work, with some help from a few old associates who, perhaps, felt you did a good job before you lost it.
Let’s further assume that you have partnered with some honest, hard-working people who only mean well (at least in their public-facing profiles and content) and that they believe in the things you teach them. You have, after all, survived some pretty nasty shit storms in public relations (if I may say so myself) even though you were NOT the architect of the solutions to those nasty shit storms
.
Several years have passed since you enhanced your experience and past responsibilities in order to impress people. You have been fortunate not to have crossed paths with anyone about whom you have lied or otherwise infuriated. But your old resumes — falsely claiming responsibilities you never had, falsely taking credit for success in campaigns you never managed — are still available online.
What does it say about your good sense in the search reputation management arena that you have exposed yourself to public outing, criticism, and rebuke? What if one of your lies comes back to haunt you because something you said about someone else — something demonstrably false — suddenly disrupts that person’s life?
Personally, I am not involved in such a situation. Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the lies that others have shared about me in the past. That’s a long line of people and so far, fortunately, no one has come to me in a business relationship and said, “Michael, I heard such-and-such about you and I am concerned….” I certainly hope that never happens but you can rest assured that if it did I would respond only with the truth. I would not respond to lies with lies.
But if you’re the person who built your current reputation on lies and you’re selling reputation management services on the basis of those lies, well, there’s only one thing I have to say to you.
I’m serious. The enhanced resume and the false claims about who designed and managed the reputation management campaigns have served their purpose. If you’re running a successful business NOW
or happily engaged in a good job NOW, then put all that behind you. Take down the false claims so that no one can come back and point out to the world that you lied about yourself.
Many people dress up their resumes and sometimes they come to regret doing so, but in a lot of cases it’s relatively harmless. You might lose a job for making false claims on your resume but most companies don’t spread that around because they are afraid of being sued. So most people probably learn from their mistake, clean up their resume, and find a job where they don’t have to misrepresent their past experience.
But if you’re making a business out of online reputation management — even though you may have brought some old clients along on your new venture — even if someone may have published an absolutely ridiculous quote from you in a book, giving you a false credibility that just would not hold up under a fair and skeptical investigation of the facts — I should think it would be obvious that now you have much more to lose than just an income.
You could lose your business, your colleagues’ trust and good faith, your clients, and your reputation in the search reputation management industry.
I would hope that any person who benefitted from two+ years’ of intense training in search reputation management and search engine optimization theory would have taken away useful knowledge. Such a person could be a considerable asset to any company or organization, either as an employee or a consultant.
But if the truth comes out — that you have no integrity — what will you do to repair your reputation? Will more lies fix that problem? I hope no one tries to find out.
No matter what bad choices or mistakes you have made in the past, there is no time like the present for setting out on a new path where you don’t repeat those mistakes.
There may always be someone out there waiting to spring a hostile campaign against you. You can’t prevent that from happening. But why give them new ammunition? Just clean up your public record by removing the false claims you have made and go forward.
No one has to know the sordid details, and you have no idea of where the truth may slip out from. It usually comes from a less-than-obvious source. I don’t picture myself as being the architect of such a campaign but, let’s face it, if the lies ever made about me came down on my career and business path in some way, I would make sure that everyone saw the truth and knew just exactly who it was had lied in the first place.
Some people might continue to work with you even so. But wouldn’t it be better to know that you led by example and cleaned up your own SERPs before a problem arose?
I know I would want to do that, had I made false claims about myself.
Redressing the lies you have said about someone else may never be an option for you — but you could at least stop lying from now on. Most people won’t know you were lying to begin with if you don’t get outed, and you can still continue to build a successful life and career.
To me, that’s a pretty simple choice with rich rewards. Perhaps some people just like living on the edge. I don’t know. I don’t think that way.
Maybe one day I’ll write about some of the people who really
founded the online reputation management industry. Trust me, your name won’t be among them.
View the original article here
Everyone has some dirty laundry in their past. Dig deep enough and you’ll find I was once engaged in pretty nasty flame wars over … books
. At the time it was a consuming passion, defending myself against lies from people who really didn’t matter to me. The reputation I built from that period followed me around for years. Occasionally I still run across some obscure nitwit who repeats the lies that were written about me. But I set about the hard task of putting all that nastiness (not participating in it any more) behind me many years ago.
It helps that some of the hard core liars have died and can no longer work their evil against me or anyone else. But I cannot take back the words I wrote, the nasty things I said, or recover the good will I lost among people who once respected my opinion … about books
.
I didn’t realize it at the time but that experience prepared me for a career in online reputation management. When my clients shared their pain with me, I understood that, yes, they found themselves in situations that spiraled out of control and they did and said things that didn’t work out well. Billionaires and Fortune 500 companies sometimes do dumb things just like the rest of us.
I have always taken responsibility for the things I have done and I have tried to practice the advice I freely give to people undergoing reputation management nightmares.
Even in the SEO industry I occasionally rankle feathers and upset people by calling “bullshit” on their preferred marketing beliefs. “It’s all about links” is one of my favorite targets for criticism. SEO was never “all about links” — it’s just that some of your favorite SEO bloggers and forum managers never saw any value in producing worthwhile content without spamming content to the top of the SERPs with links; they justified or rationalized what they were doing by saying nonsense like “links are the most important factor in the search algorithms”.
When I occasionally attend an SEO conference there are usually a few people who approach me tentatively, having heard all about me from their more knowledgeable and experienced friends and mentors (many of whom have argued with me online). These poor folks never quite knew what to make of me. I guess that’s fair because I never quite knew what to make of them
, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and I guess some of them gave me a similar benefit.
I’m not so mean and dreary when you meet me in real life, especially after 6-8 hours of plodding back and forth at a convention where people are saying things like “it’s all about links” or “I’m a content marketer”….
Your reputation precedes you in many ways. I won’t share any more details as I think I have made my point well enough.
Technically, you don’t need any credentials to provide a search reputation management service to people. But some people, apparently, feel the need to manufacture credentials. I will not name names as — so far — these people are having little to no impact on my life (that I can determine). At least one of these people has (I have been told) lied about me to clients and business partners in order to shift blame for failing projects with which I was not involved at the time.
I understand your need to reassure people that, yes, you have the experience and the background to deal with sensitive information presentation campaigns. I also understand that when you are fired from your job for being nasty to a co-worker that you have a need to go out and find a new source of income. And when your former employer seems disinterested in continuing the only profitable line of business they have, the temptation to leverage your business contacts and bring those business partners into new relationships is both natural and obvious.
So let’s assume that anyone who has acquired a bit of experience (and perhaps two years’ worth of technical SEO training on a weekly basis from one of the world’s leading SEO theorists) at managing communications between technical teams and clients decides, “Hey, I can do this too.” Let’s further assume that this person understands the basics of how search works and — having watched many dozens of keyword campaigns rise and fall with the strategies and the search algorithms — knows how to articulate these ups and downs to people.
That is pretty decent experience, in my book, and it is about all the credentials you need, in my opinion. After all, I started doing search reputation management with Forbes 50 and Fortune 500 clients with far less impressive credentials, so it’s not like credentials matter that much. Landing these highly sensitive clients depends more on connections and sales expertise, and we had some pretty well-connected sales people. There is, in my book, no need to make DEMONSTRABLY FALSE claims about how important you are or were in any particular industry (like search reputation management). Just be honest with people about what you
did. You don’t have to take credit for what other people actually did.
So let’s assume that now you have what may be a successful job or business, and that you brought yourself from the ranks of the unemployed to this current pinnacle of personal success through a lot of hard work, with some help from a few old associates who, perhaps, felt you did a good job before you lost it.
Let’s further assume that you have partnered with some honest, hard-working people who only mean well (at least in their public-facing profiles and content) and that they believe in the things you teach them. You have, after all, survived some pretty nasty shit storms in public relations (if I may say so myself) even though you were NOT the architect of the solutions to those nasty shit storms
.
Several years have passed since you enhanced your experience and past responsibilities in order to impress people. You have been fortunate not to have crossed paths with anyone about whom you have lied or otherwise infuriated. But your old resumes — falsely claiming responsibilities you never had, falsely taking credit for success in campaigns you never managed — are still available online.
What does it say about your good sense in the search reputation management arena that you have exposed yourself to public outing, criticism, and rebuke? What if one of your lies comes back to haunt you because something you said about someone else — something demonstrably false — suddenly disrupts that person’s life?
Personally, I am not involved in such a situation. Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the lies that others have shared about me in the past. That’s a long line of people and so far, fortunately, no one has come to me in a business relationship and said, “Michael, I heard such-and-such about you and I am concerned….” I certainly hope that never happens but you can rest assured that if it did I would respond only with the truth. I would not respond to lies with lies.
But if you’re the person who built your current reputation on lies and you’re selling reputation management services on the basis of those lies, well, there’s only one thing I have to say to you.
I’m serious. The enhanced resume and the false claims about who designed and managed the reputation management campaigns have served their purpose. If you’re running a successful business NOW
or happily engaged in a good job NOW, then put all that behind you. Take down the false claims so that no one can come back and point out to the world that you lied about yourself.
Many people dress up their resumes and sometimes they come to regret doing so, but in a lot of cases it’s relatively harmless. You might lose a job for making false claims on your resume but most companies don’t spread that around because they are afraid of being sued. So most people probably learn from their mistake, clean up their resume, and find a job where they don’t have to misrepresent their past experience.
But if you’re making a business out of online reputation management — even though you may have brought some old clients along on your new venture — even if someone may have published an absolutely ridiculous quote from you in a book, giving you a false credibility that just would not hold up under a fair and skeptical investigation of the facts — I should think it would be obvious that now you have much more to lose than just an income.
You could lose your business, your colleagues’ trust and good faith, your clients, and your reputation in the search reputation management industry.
I would hope that any person who benefitted from two+ years’ of intense training in search reputation management and search engine optimization theory would have taken away useful knowledge. Such a person could be a considerable asset to any company or organization, either as an employee or a consultant.
But if the truth comes out — that you have no integrity — what will you do to repair your reputation? Will more lies fix that problem? I hope no one tries to find out.
No matter what bad choices or mistakes you have made in the past, there is no time like the present for setting out on a new path where you don’t repeat those mistakes.
There may always be someone out there waiting to spring a hostile campaign against you. You can’t prevent that from happening. But why give them new ammunition? Just clean up your public record by removing the false claims you have made and go forward.
No one has to know the sordid details, and you have no idea of where the truth may slip out from. It usually comes from a less-than-obvious source. I don’t picture myself as being the architect of such a campaign but, let’s face it, if the lies ever made about me came down on my career and business path in some way, I would make sure that everyone saw the truth and knew just exactly who it was had lied in the first place.
Some people might continue to work with you even so. But wouldn’t it be better to know that you led by example and cleaned up your own SERPs before a problem arose?
I know I would want to do that, had I made false claims about myself.
Redressing the lies you have said about someone else may never be an option for you — but you could at least stop lying from now on. Most people won’t know you were lying to begin with if you don’t get outed, and you can still continue to build a successful life and career.
To me, that’s a pretty simple choice with rich rewards. Perhaps some people just like living on the edge. I don’t know. I don’t think that way.
Maybe one day I’ll write about some of the people who really
founded the online reputation management industry. Trust me, your name won’t be among them.
View the original article here
Please Sign This Petition to Limit Google’s Abuse of Your Internet Privacy
Google has been highly critical of the US government’s monitoring of Internet activity, a practice that is only intended to protect us against Al Qaeda’s secretive communications. Regardless of whether you feel the governments of western nations have taken their monitoring too far, I am deeply alarmed by the apathy that people have expressed toward the far more invasive and manipulative monitoring of your Internet activity that Google and other advertising networks regularly engage in for the sole purpose of making a profit.
While every business has the right to seek reward for its services, any advertising company that tracks user behavior and structures its technologies so as to manipulate consumer interest and consent has no business telling governments what they should or should not be doing on behalf of citizen privacy.
Google has in fact said in court that its users have “no legitimate expectation of privacy”. If that is the case, then there are no limits to what Google could do as it monitors your every move and engages with you through technologies that are designed to enhance its profits.
Google’s oversight of these technologies has been called into question by consumer advocates, business rivals, and government agencies. It is no secret that they have paid various fines for violating individuals’ privacy, and yet Google continues to develop and deploy technologies that are designed to manipulate and influence consumer interest and behavior.
Google is not an elected government. They are answerable to no one for their behavior if we the consumers they seek to manipulate do not stand up and demand that our governments place sufficient barriers to these abuses in their ways. You can fully expect every advertising network to oppose this petition.
The surveillance state you fear is not the one coming out of government efforts to fight Al Qaeda, whose insane war has spread to nearly 30 countries around the world. The surveillance state you fear is the one that the advertising networks have created through their invasive technologies and 24/7 monitoring of consumer Internet activity.
You have no privacy on the Internet. You never had any privacy on the Internet. If you seriously want privacy on the Internet then now is the time to deal with the most effective threat to your hoped-for privacy: stand up and demand that your government take action to restrict and monitor the abusive activities of these advertising networks.
Please visit this link and sign the petition: http://wh.gov/l8KVK
Even if you do NOT sign the petition, please share the link with your friends and followers. This is too important an issue to allow companies like Google to bury it beneath a wave of misdirecting propaganda.
In case that link doesn’t work, try this one: WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: propose a law limiting the amount of private consumer information that companies collect and use on the Internet.
View the original article here
While every business has the right to seek reward for its services, any advertising company that tracks user behavior and structures its technologies so as to manipulate consumer interest and consent has no business telling governments what they should or should not be doing on behalf of citizen privacy.
Google has in fact said in court that its users have “no legitimate expectation of privacy”. If that is the case, then there are no limits to what Google could do as it monitors your every move and engages with you through technologies that are designed to enhance its profits.
Google’s oversight of these technologies has been called into question by consumer advocates, business rivals, and government agencies. It is no secret that they have paid various fines for violating individuals’ privacy, and yet Google continues to develop and deploy technologies that are designed to manipulate and influence consumer interest and behavior.
Google is not an elected government. They are answerable to no one for their behavior if we the consumers they seek to manipulate do not stand up and demand that our governments place sufficient barriers to these abuses in their ways. You can fully expect every advertising network to oppose this petition.
The surveillance state you fear is not the one coming out of government efforts to fight Al Qaeda, whose insane war has spread to nearly 30 countries around the world. The surveillance state you fear is the one that the advertising networks have created through their invasive technologies and 24/7 monitoring of consumer Internet activity.
You have no privacy on the Internet. You never had any privacy on the Internet. If you seriously want privacy on the Internet then now is the time to deal with the most effective threat to your hoped-for privacy: stand up and demand that your government take action to restrict and monitor the abusive activities of these advertising networks.
Please visit this link and sign the petition: http://wh.gov/l8KVK
Even if you do NOT sign the petition, please share the link with your friends and followers. This is too important an issue to allow companies like Google to bury it beneath a wave of misdirecting propaganda.
In case that link doesn’t work, try this one: WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: propose a law limiting the amount of private consumer information that companies collect and use on the Internet.
View the original article here
One Year Without Google Analytics
In mid-2012 I decided I was fed up with Google Analytics’ bogus data and horrible interface. I replaced the free tool with my own self-served installation of Piwik. Unfortunately I run enough Websites that Piwik put a considerable load on my server. It didn’t help that constant robot probing from hackers and spammers kept knocking the server offline.
In late November 2012 I decided to try the “less is more” approach to analytics reporting. Rather than spending hours every day poring over the minutiae of what people were doing on my sites, I decided to try just looking at the high-level data that might be reported by a simpler tool.
As many of my sites are now built on WordPress the Jetpack module/plugin came to mind. So I installed Jetpack, connected my sites to a couple of WordPress.com accounts, and proceeded to depend on that dashboard for my personal analytics solution.
To say that Jetpack offers fewer details and reporting options than Google Analytics should suffice. People who feel compelled to bury themselves in data every day (even if the data is nonsense) have no reason to look at Jetpack. It was designed for folks who want to focus on blogging, not on chasing keywords.
And that’s all I am going to say about Jetpack.
I still ask clients for access to their Google Analytics data because any metric, even a bad one, is still useful if it’s consistent. I’m not convinced that Google Analytics meets that relatively low standard but since the clients are already using Google Analytics I might as well look at the data.
I can eek out some barely useful reports for most clients from their analytics accounts. If they feel they have been penalized or downgraded then GA gives me enough data (assuming the history goes back far enough) to pinpoint referral traffic events that signal such penalties or downgrades. Even gradual declines in traffic have to start somewhere.
A good analytics package would allow you to create a baseline in your data. To date I have never come across such an analytics package, but one can always hope.
Unlike other analytics software GA has always seemed incapable of providing even the most minimal of competent filtering of robotic data. Still, in a recent site audit I found relatively little indication of robotic activity in the GA data. I had access to raw server logs and so was able to calibrate what I found in GA with some real-world data. But one site audit doesn’t prove much of anything about an analytics tool.
Not knowing when an algorithmic downgrade or manual penalty action occurred is annoying but as an SEO you have to be able to deal with the lack of data. There are other ways to see that a Website is struggling in search. In fact, I have looked at many sites this year for which the owners were NOT collecting analytics data of any kind.
So while it’s nice to have that GA trend line when you’re looking for the precise date a Website lost search referral traffic, the fact it’s not there (either due to lack of analytics or insufficient data) is not a deal-killer. Anyone with 2-3 years’ SEO experience should have an idea by now of what to look for (of course, I say that, but many people continue to fuss over nonsense metrics like “time on site” and “bounce rate” so maybe I should say you need at least 10 years’ experience).
If you don’t need analytics data to figure out what to do about penalties and downgrades, where does it help?
One popular crutch was to use the search referral keyword data to calibrate your landing page strategy. At times this has proven to be moderately useful. Most of the time when I looked at clients’ analytics data I found what I expected: that their landing pages were ranking 1st for most of the queries that sent them traffic, and NOT ranking 1st for their highly coveted 2-word and 3-word queries.
When I have been able to tie the income to the keywords, the income is rarely dominated by those highly coveted keywords. And no off-the-shelf analytics package tells you this. I have seen some nifty custom solutions but because the income data collection is separated from the Web traffic data collection most people who know to do this have to do it in a spreadsheet.
People who keep their noses in the numbers give me all sorts of excuses about why they need analytics data but to date I have yet to see anyone other than a serious data analyst explain to me (in coherent fashion, using complete sentences, supported by charts and screen captures) what they actually accomplish toward a business goal with those analytics.
If you’re manufacturing Web content, such that you need to “plug the holes” in your keyword coverage, the analytics data will help you build the map you need to find the holes. Google Analytics doesn’t give you that map but you can download its data and integrate it into an offline process that produces such a map.
Most Websites don’t need to do this kind of analysis, though. Unless you have about 50 people working for your Website there is no way you can possibly maximize coverage of your potential keyword map. A Keyword Map for a typical Website — when done properly — should run to several million queries.
I just struggle with the concept that the average “Internet marketer” has the time and capacity to produce that much content. Assuming you’re actually good at what you do and you target about 20 queries with every article, you’d need about 50,000 articles just to hit your 1st 1,000,000 queries.
Even the legendary Lance Winslow has yet to produce 50,000 articles. The rest of you are just dreaming.
The perpetual trend in search marketing (and social media marketing and content
marketing) is to collect as much data as you possibly can, tidy it up into some sort of report, and then set goals that are supposed to magically produce incredible growth in traffic and conversions.
I can tell you right now, just glancing at the highest level report in Jetpack and comparing that information with information I had to compile by hand when I was relying on Google Analytics, that SEO Theory is coming off its highest traffic year ever.
And I did that without setting keyword goals, building keyword maps, targeting keywords, chasing queries, or trying to plug holes in some convoluted strategy.
Virtually everyone needs to see the map early in their career. You need to understand that relevance is broad, far-reaching, and has almost nothing to do with those highly coveted 2-word and 3-word “vanity queries” that small business owners, “Internet marketers”, and vice presidents love to obsess over.
The bulk of your search referral traffic should be coming from the long tail of search. Of THAT traffic, a hefty portion of it should be coming from previously unseen queries — at least 20%, and on some sites that number should be as high as 50%. It depends on whether you’re rehashing popular topics (“how to play Texas Holdem”) or introducing new concepts to a concept-hungry search public.
You should be able to see this in some sort of analytics report early in your career so that you know intrinsically in your bones that this is actually how search plays out for most Websites.
But once you know that, you need to move on and get away from the analytics. Yes, someone at your company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a high-falutin’ analytics tool that captures all sorts of BIG DATA for your company. The executive team on down want to make sure you are getting investors’ value out of that expense.
But BIG DATA has to support BIG PROCESSES. If all you’re doing is scanning trend tools for keywords and assigning articles to writers, you don’t have a BIG PROCESS. You don’t need BIG DATA. Just pay lip service to the analytics dashboard (if it’s not tracking money) and keep your head in the editorial calendar.
If you cannot see the return on investment in analytics that is because there is NO return on your investment. In some cases this just may mean you need to learn how to use your analytics tool better. In most cases it means you have set your expectations too high.
But the bigger challenge in measuring ROI for use of analytics tools is deprogramming yourself from believing that all that analytics data is telling you something useful. If you know which pages are receiving traffic and why then what else do you need to know? Just look at the reports once a month. Once a year may be better unless your sales drop off.
If you’re not actually selling
anything then what are you trying to do with your analytics?
The less time you spend in mesmerizing data that doesn’t tell you a story, the more likely you’ll be able to ask yourself intelligent questions about what your Website is doing and should be doing.
In other words, before you go into the data and the report, you need to know what you need to know. If you have no questions about your site’s performance then why are you wasting your time looking at analytics reports?
Sure, something might
go wrong but until something does go wrong you’re wasting a lot of time in “What If…” dreamland. You need to keep your feet on the ground and your attention on what you need to be doing to be productive.
One of the chief reasons why people created crappy Websites that led to the Panda algorithm was that they were allowing the analytics to drive their search marketing strategies. You’d think some folks would connect the dots and say, “Oh — we’re not supposed to be mindless keyword-chasing robots” but apparently that is too hard an equation to work out.
I don’t expect to reach much of the vice presidential crowd on this score because they have meetings and have to mentor their underlings in how to condense a lot of information down to 1 or 2 Power Point slides. In fact, it is NOT the vice president’s job to come to the conclusion that his team is spending too much time in the analytics data — it’s HIS job to present that finding to the executive board AFTER the team produces the 1-2 slides that show just how much productivity is lost while people twiddle their thumbs in analytics data.
In other words, waiting for someone else to tell you the obvious just makes your problem worse. I was pretty confident when I gave up on Google Analytics that I would not need it. I was right.
If you have been doing SEO for 2-3 years then you should have figured out by now that it’s not all about analytics and measurement any more than it is all about links.
Don’t make me say you need TEN YEARS’ experience to figure that out.
View the original article here
In late November 2012 I decided to try the “less is more” approach to analytics reporting. Rather than spending hours every day poring over the minutiae of what people were doing on my sites, I decided to try just looking at the high-level data that might be reported by a simpler tool.
As many of my sites are now built on WordPress the Jetpack module/plugin came to mind. So I installed Jetpack, connected my sites to a couple of WordPress.com accounts, and proceeded to depend on that dashboard for my personal analytics solution.
To say that Jetpack offers fewer details and reporting options than Google Analytics should suffice. People who feel compelled to bury themselves in data every day (even if the data is nonsense) have no reason to look at Jetpack. It was designed for folks who want to focus on blogging, not on chasing keywords.
And that’s all I am going to say about Jetpack.
I still ask clients for access to their Google Analytics data because any metric, even a bad one, is still useful if it’s consistent. I’m not convinced that Google Analytics meets that relatively low standard but since the clients are already using Google Analytics I might as well look at the data.
I can eek out some barely useful reports for most clients from their analytics accounts. If they feel they have been penalized or downgraded then GA gives me enough data (assuming the history goes back far enough) to pinpoint referral traffic events that signal such penalties or downgrades. Even gradual declines in traffic have to start somewhere.
A good analytics package would allow you to create a baseline in your data. To date I have never come across such an analytics package, but one can always hope.
Unlike other analytics software GA has always seemed incapable of providing even the most minimal of competent filtering of robotic data. Still, in a recent site audit I found relatively little indication of robotic activity in the GA data. I had access to raw server logs and so was able to calibrate what I found in GA with some real-world data. But one site audit doesn’t prove much of anything about an analytics tool.
Not knowing when an algorithmic downgrade or manual penalty action occurred is annoying but as an SEO you have to be able to deal with the lack of data. There are other ways to see that a Website is struggling in search. In fact, I have looked at many sites this year for which the owners were NOT collecting analytics data of any kind.
So while it’s nice to have that GA trend line when you’re looking for the precise date a Website lost search referral traffic, the fact it’s not there (either due to lack of analytics or insufficient data) is not a deal-killer. Anyone with 2-3 years’ SEO experience should have an idea by now of what to look for (of course, I say that, but many people continue to fuss over nonsense metrics like “time on site” and “bounce rate” so maybe I should say you need at least 10 years’ experience).
If you don’t need analytics data to figure out what to do about penalties and downgrades, where does it help?
One popular crutch was to use the search referral keyword data to calibrate your landing page strategy. At times this has proven to be moderately useful. Most of the time when I looked at clients’ analytics data I found what I expected: that their landing pages were ranking 1st for most of the queries that sent them traffic, and NOT ranking 1st for their highly coveted 2-word and 3-word queries.
When I have been able to tie the income to the keywords, the income is rarely dominated by those highly coveted keywords. And no off-the-shelf analytics package tells you this. I have seen some nifty custom solutions but because the income data collection is separated from the Web traffic data collection most people who know to do this have to do it in a spreadsheet.
People who keep their noses in the numbers give me all sorts of excuses about why they need analytics data but to date I have yet to see anyone other than a serious data analyst explain to me (in coherent fashion, using complete sentences, supported by charts and screen captures) what they actually accomplish toward a business goal with those analytics.
If you’re manufacturing Web content, such that you need to “plug the holes” in your keyword coverage, the analytics data will help you build the map you need to find the holes. Google Analytics doesn’t give you that map but you can download its data and integrate it into an offline process that produces such a map.
Most Websites don’t need to do this kind of analysis, though. Unless you have about 50 people working for your Website there is no way you can possibly maximize coverage of your potential keyword map. A Keyword Map for a typical Website — when done properly — should run to several million queries.
I just struggle with the concept that the average “Internet marketer” has the time and capacity to produce that much content. Assuming you’re actually good at what you do and you target about 20 queries with every article, you’d need about 50,000 articles just to hit your 1st 1,000,000 queries.
Even the legendary Lance Winslow has yet to produce 50,000 articles. The rest of you are just dreaming.
The perpetual trend in search marketing (and social media marketing and content
marketing) is to collect as much data as you possibly can, tidy it up into some sort of report, and then set goals that are supposed to magically produce incredible growth in traffic and conversions.
I can tell you right now, just glancing at the highest level report in Jetpack and comparing that information with information I had to compile by hand when I was relying on Google Analytics, that SEO Theory is coming off its highest traffic year ever.
And I did that without setting keyword goals, building keyword maps, targeting keywords, chasing queries, or trying to plug holes in some convoluted strategy.
Virtually everyone needs to see the map early in their career. You need to understand that relevance is broad, far-reaching, and has almost nothing to do with those highly coveted 2-word and 3-word “vanity queries” that small business owners, “Internet marketers”, and vice presidents love to obsess over.
The bulk of your search referral traffic should be coming from the long tail of search. Of THAT traffic, a hefty portion of it should be coming from previously unseen queries — at least 20%, and on some sites that number should be as high as 50%. It depends on whether you’re rehashing popular topics (“how to play Texas Holdem”) or introducing new concepts to a concept-hungry search public.
You should be able to see this in some sort of analytics report early in your career so that you know intrinsically in your bones that this is actually how search plays out for most Websites.
But once you know that, you need to move on and get away from the analytics. Yes, someone at your company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a high-falutin’ analytics tool that captures all sorts of BIG DATA for your company. The executive team on down want to make sure you are getting investors’ value out of that expense.
But BIG DATA has to support BIG PROCESSES. If all you’re doing is scanning trend tools for keywords and assigning articles to writers, you don’t have a BIG PROCESS. You don’t need BIG DATA. Just pay lip service to the analytics dashboard (if it’s not tracking money) and keep your head in the editorial calendar.
If you cannot see the return on investment in analytics that is because there is NO return on your investment. In some cases this just may mean you need to learn how to use your analytics tool better. In most cases it means you have set your expectations too high.
But the bigger challenge in measuring ROI for use of analytics tools is deprogramming yourself from believing that all that analytics data is telling you something useful. If you know which pages are receiving traffic and why then what else do you need to know? Just look at the reports once a month. Once a year may be better unless your sales drop off.
If you’re not actually selling
anything then what are you trying to do with your analytics?
The less time you spend in mesmerizing data that doesn’t tell you a story, the more likely you’ll be able to ask yourself intelligent questions about what your Website is doing and should be doing.
In other words, before you go into the data and the report, you need to know what you need to know. If you have no questions about your site’s performance then why are you wasting your time looking at analytics reports?
Sure, something might
go wrong but until something does go wrong you’re wasting a lot of time in “What If…” dreamland. You need to keep your feet on the ground and your attention on what you need to be doing to be productive.
One of the chief reasons why people created crappy Websites that led to the Panda algorithm was that they were allowing the analytics to drive their search marketing strategies. You’d think some folks would connect the dots and say, “Oh — we’re not supposed to be mindless keyword-chasing robots” but apparently that is too hard an equation to work out.
I don’t expect to reach much of the vice presidential crowd on this score because they have meetings and have to mentor their underlings in how to condense a lot of information down to 1 or 2 Power Point slides. In fact, it is NOT the vice president’s job to come to the conclusion that his team is spending too much time in the analytics data — it’s HIS job to present that finding to the executive board AFTER the team produces the 1-2 slides that show just how much productivity is lost while people twiddle their thumbs in analytics data.
In other words, waiting for someone else to tell you the obvious just makes your problem worse. I was pretty confident when I gave up on Google Analytics that I would not need it. I was right.
If you have been doing SEO for 2-3 years then you should have figured out by now that it’s not all about analytics and measurement any more than it is all about links.
Don’t make me say you need TEN YEARS’ experience to figure that out.
View the original article here
Principles of Transformational Search Engine Optimization
Up until now search engine optimization has largely followed one of two philosophies. Let us call the older philosophy in situ optimization
and let us call the younger philosophy prima facie optimization.
In situ optimization originally called for little more than publishing text on a page and embedding some comments (these were originally crawled and indexed by several search engines) and meta tags (especially keywords
). Some early search engines, including Alta Vista, attempted to analyze on-page structure (techniques for which were developed decades ago for large document management systems).
Prima facie optimization called for placing links on other Websites to expedite crawl and confer sufficient trust and value that a search engine index would prefer the link destination over less frequently linked destinations. Inktomi was heavily influenced by prima facie optimization
but other search engines, including Alta Vista, incorporated it into their second and succeeding generation algorithms.
When Google came along they worked with both in situ optimization
(ignoring the keywords meta tag) and prima facie optimization. Google attempted to limit the effectiveness of prima facie optimization by using PageRank to impose a hierarchical order on linking documents.
From 1998 to 2003, while Google was still competing for market share, both forms of search engine optimization were widely used. But a blogger named Adam Mathes noticed in 2001 that if he attracted a lot of links with similar anchor text his blog would perform well in Google’s search results.
Internet marketers began to exploit the practice, dubbed “google bombing” (more generally described as “link bombing” when it affects multiple search engines or search engines other than Google). By late 2003 link bombing had surpassed on-site SEO as a preferred method for ranking Websites. But all that began to change in April 2004 when Google made a change the way it evaluates links. That was the month the “Google Sandbox Effect” was first observed in the wild. Within a year Internet marketers began to understand that earning high-value links from “trusted Websites” would help you get past the so-called Sandbox (which appears to be a six-month trust filter or dampening factor applied to newly discovered links/linking resources).
In 2004 John Scott brought up the “probation” idea, which he heard from “a guy who knows a guy”. In 2006 I put together enough clues to convince me that John had been right. Since then I have seen comments from several Googlers that lead me to conclude that was basically the whole deal. And so far as I know, this probation for new links continues in one form or another (I doubt it works exactly as originally implemented).
The Sandbox Effect launched the perpetual cat-and-mouse game that marketers have played with Google ever since. And despite all the gloomy blog posts and news articles you have probably read since March 2012, Google has not yet won the war on links. They took down a lot of spammy links but link spam continues, largely unabated, and much of it is still working.
By 2006 the pendulum in aggressive search marketing swung back the other way. As social media services began dominating news headlines with big money buyouts, companies like Demand Media began experimenting with scalable content production
. I think it was Copy Blogger that gave this strategy the name “content farm” but many companies, frustrated with linking strategies that either stopped working or led to penalties, began publishing more content than was really necessary. It probably did not help that people like me explained how to create a keyword matrix and plan your content according to a simple formula.
Matrix-driven content production usually produces drivel. And we got lots of drivel from 2008 through mid-2011. Of course, Google rolled out the Panda algorithm in February 2011. By 2012 Panda had crushed the life out of most scalable content production strategies and they moved on to crushing the large, well-organized blog networks that were selling links by the truckloads.
So, here we are, trying to save Websites that were spammed with links and which published too much poorly written content. Of course, there were other problems — structural problems — with these Websites. In the drunken orgy of link building many of those sites adopted bad practices like “PageRank Sculpting” (blindly choking off PageRank to important pages) and “flat site architecture” (embedding as many navigational links on a page as possible, keeping content as close to the root folder as possible).
To save a Website that has been depending on spammy links we have to replace the spammy links with good links.
To save a Website that has been depending on spammy content manufacturing we have to consolidate content into rich articles.
To save a Website that has poisoned itself with PageRank sculpting we have to rebuild on-site navigation.
To save a Website that has marred itself with flat site architecture we have to rebuild on-site navigation.
But there is another problem that has not yet received much attention. I still see this practice way too often. People embed a large number of self-referential links in their copy, often linking to the same pages that are included in their sitewide navigation. All these extra links are not doing what you want them to do and they may be creating statistical signals associated with “low quality” content.
You know a link has been placed “for SEO” if it’s using keyword-rich anchor text or if it’s linking to the home page of the Website with something other than the name of the site. Why do you need to link to the root URL of your Website in your article copy if you’re linking there in your site navigation? This is an amateurish attempt as structuring PageRank flow (the step-child of “PageRank Sculpting”).
Transformational search engine optimization is the practice of carefully replacing or rebuilding what is already in place, so as to preserve or create the value that should make a Website successful. Think of a house that has been burned out. The house is structurally unsound but it’s not so badly devastated that it needs to be completely destroyed. You can rebuild it, one piece at a time, by replacing the burned/damaged parts. You can start anywhere; you fix one thing at a time. Gradually, you transform the site into a healthy Website capable of growing traffic and earning natural links.
Transformational SEO will not put an end to older practices. In fact, some people may just go right back to doing what they were doing before with both in situ SEO
and prima facie SEO. This time around they believe they’ll buy better content, acquire better links. Maybe they will.
Transformational SEO is a repair process, a healing philosophy that detofies a poisoned Website. It doesn’t (yet) go far enough to ensure that a Website will “recover rankings” or restore lost traffic. It just brings the Website to a place where it can grow again, grow in a healthy way (or an unhealthy way).
If you have been handed the challenge of bringing a Website back from a bad optimization path, it is incumbent upon you to impress upon the site owner that they may not get a third chance with the site. That is, if the aggressive SEO led to a manual action by a Web spam team at a major search engine, that Website now has a “rap sheet” and it will be treated differently from a first-time offender if it violates search engine guidelines again.
So Transformational SEO
is not just about fixing the unhealthy Website. It must also include honest discussion about what went wrong and what alternatives are more likely to keep the site out of trouble in the future. One benefit that has come out of all the manual actions and algorithmic downgrades of the last two years (in my experience) is that site owners seem to be more willing to follow the longer road to success. Not always. I still occasionally talk with people who want the quick success to come back. They have drunk of the wine of spam and they like the delightful way it makes them feel. They’re just not ready to admit there will be a hangover the next day.
Transformational SEO
cannot cure bad judgment. Nor can it derail a high-risk personality’s inclination to try again. The transformational process stops when you have covered all the basis. You’re not responsible for either failure or success after that point, unless you play a role in making the choices that lead the site into the future.
We have been practicing Transformational SEO
for years. We just haven’t had a really descriptive name for it. “Fixing penalties” is no longer adequate because it’s not always about penalties. Transformational SEO must substantially and fundamentally alter both the in situ and prima facie practices of an ailing Website. Fail to do either and you’re really not being transformational.
Excessive content production remains a problem. In fact, it has become a big problem, hiding under the mask of “content marketing”, which is really just a hybridization of in situ
and prima facie practices. Only “content marketing” is now drawing other sites into its web of false promises.
All of which means that, sooner or later, Transformational SEO
will be called upon to clean up the mess that “content marketing” is making on the Web.
View the original article here
and let us call the younger philosophy prima facie optimization.
In situ optimization originally called for little more than publishing text on a page and embedding some comments (these were originally crawled and indexed by several search engines) and meta tags (especially keywords
). Some early search engines, including Alta Vista, attempted to analyze on-page structure (techniques for which were developed decades ago for large document management systems).
Prima facie optimization called for placing links on other Websites to expedite crawl and confer sufficient trust and value that a search engine index would prefer the link destination over less frequently linked destinations. Inktomi was heavily influenced by prima facie optimization
but other search engines, including Alta Vista, incorporated it into their second and succeeding generation algorithms.
When Google came along they worked with both in situ optimization
(ignoring the keywords meta tag) and prima facie optimization. Google attempted to limit the effectiveness of prima facie optimization by using PageRank to impose a hierarchical order on linking documents.
From 1998 to 2003, while Google was still competing for market share, both forms of search engine optimization were widely used. But a blogger named Adam Mathes noticed in 2001 that if he attracted a lot of links with similar anchor text his blog would perform well in Google’s search results.
Internet marketers began to exploit the practice, dubbed “google bombing” (more generally described as “link bombing” when it affects multiple search engines or search engines other than Google). By late 2003 link bombing had surpassed on-site SEO as a preferred method for ranking Websites. But all that began to change in April 2004 when Google made a change the way it evaluates links. That was the month the “Google Sandbox Effect” was first observed in the wild. Within a year Internet marketers began to understand that earning high-value links from “trusted Websites” would help you get past the so-called Sandbox (which appears to be a six-month trust filter or dampening factor applied to newly discovered links/linking resources).
In 2004 John Scott brought up the “probation” idea, which he heard from “a guy who knows a guy”. In 2006 I put together enough clues to convince me that John had been right. Since then I have seen comments from several Googlers that lead me to conclude that was basically the whole deal. And so far as I know, this probation for new links continues in one form or another (I doubt it works exactly as originally implemented).
The Sandbox Effect launched the perpetual cat-and-mouse game that marketers have played with Google ever since. And despite all the gloomy blog posts and news articles you have probably read since March 2012, Google has not yet won the war on links. They took down a lot of spammy links but link spam continues, largely unabated, and much of it is still working.
By 2006 the pendulum in aggressive search marketing swung back the other way. As social media services began dominating news headlines with big money buyouts, companies like Demand Media began experimenting with scalable content production
. I think it was Copy Blogger that gave this strategy the name “content farm” but many companies, frustrated with linking strategies that either stopped working or led to penalties, began publishing more content than was really necessary. It probably did not help that people like me explained how to create a keyword matrix and plan your content according to a simple formula.
Matrix-driven content production usually produces drivel. And we got lots of drivel from 2008 through mid-2011. Of course, Google rolled out the Panda algorithm in February 2011. By 2012 Panda had crushed the life out of most scalable content production strategies and they moved on to crushing the large, well-organized blog networks that were selling links by the truckloads.
So, here we are, trying to save Websites that were spammed with links and which published too much poorly written content. Of course, there were other problems — structural problems — with these Websites. In the drunken orgy of link building many of those sites adopted bad practices like “PageRank Sculpting” (blindly choking off PageRank to important pages) and “flat site architecture” (embedding as many navigational links on a page as possible, keeping content as close to the root folder as possible).
To save a Website that has been depending on spammy links we have to replace the spammy links with good links.
To save a Website that has been depending on spammy content manufacturing we have to consolidate content into rich articles.
To save a Website that has poisoned itself with PageRank sculpting we have to rebuild on-site navigation.
To save a Website that has marred itself with flat site architecture we have to rebuild on-site navigation.
But there is another problem that has not yet received much attention. I still see this practice way too often. People embed a large number of self-referential links in their copy, often linking to the same pages that are included in their sitewide navigation. All these extra links are not doing what you want them to do and they may be creating statistical signals associated with “low quality” content.
You know a link has been placed “for SEO” if it’s using keyword-rich anchor text or if it’s linking to the home page of the Website with something other than the name of the site. Why do you need to link to the root URL of your Website in your article copy if you’re linking there in your site navigation? This is an amateurish attempt as structuring PageRank flow (the step-child of “PageRank Sculpting”).
Transformational search engine optimization is the practice of carefully replacing or rebuilding what is already in place, so as to preserve or create the value that should make a Website successful. Think of a house that has been burned out. The house is structurally unsound but it’s not so badly devastated that it needs to be completely destroyed. You can rebuild it, one piece at a time, by replacing the burned/damaged parts. You can start anywhere; you fix one thing at a time. Gradually, you transform the site into a healthy Website capable of growing traffic and earning natural links.
Transformational SEO will not put an end to older practices. In fact, some people may just go right back to doing what they were doing before with both in situ SEO
and prima facie SEO. This time around they believe they’ll buy better content, acquire better links. Maybe they will.
Transformational SEO is a repair process, a healing philosophy that detofies a poisoned Website. It doesn’t (yet) go far enough to ensure that a Website will “recover rankings” or restore lost traffic. It just brings the Website to a place where it can grow again, grow in a healthy way (or an unhealthy way).
If you have been handed the challenge of bringing a Website back from a bad optimization path, it is incumbent upon you to impress upon the site owner that they may not get a third chance with the site. That is, if the aggressive SEO led to a manual action by a Web spam team at a major search engine, that Website now has a “rap sheet” and it will be treated differently from a first-time offender if it violates search engine guidelines again.
So Transformational SEO
is not just about fixing the unhealthy Website. It must also include honest discussion about what went wrong and what alternatives are more likely to keep the site out of trouble in the future. One benefit that has come out of all the manual actions and algorithmic downgrades of the last two years (in my experience) is that site owners seem to be more willing to follow the longer road to success. Not always. I still occasionally talk with people who want the quick success to come back. They have drunk of the wine of spam and they like the delightful way it makes them feel. They’re just not ready to admit there will be a hangover the next day.
Transformational SEO
cannot cure bad judgment. Nor can it derail a high-risk personality’s inclination to try again. The transformational process stops when you have covered all the basis. You’re not responsible for either failure or success after that point, unless you play a role in making the choices that lead the site into the future.
We have been practicing Transformational SEO
for years. We just haven’t had a really descriptive name for it. “Fixing penalties” is no longer adequate because it’s not always about penalties. Transformational SEO must substantially and fundamentally alter both the in situ and prima facie practices of an ailing Website. Fail to do either and you’re really not being transformational.
Excessive content production remains a problem. In fact, it has become a big problem, hiding under the mask of “content marketing”, which is really just a hybridization of in situ
and prima facie practices. Only “content marketing” is now drawing other sites into its web of false promises.
All of which means that, sooner or later, Transformational SEO
will be called upon to clean up the mess that “content marketing” is making on the Web.
View the original article here
Local SEO Scam Of The Month: Craigslist SEO
Most SEO consultants I have met are pretty decent, hard-working folks. But there are plenty of SEO con artists out there, and it kills me every time I see a small business (or a big business) get taken. Recently, I had the privilege to witness a true Picasso of SEO con artists. I am sharing this with you, dear reader, so that the next time you are jonesing for that cheap, quick SEO fix, you might calm yourself down and add some great content to your site instead.
I was consulting for an agency that builds websites for local businesses. One of their clients had lost patience waiting for the SEO magic to kick in and decided to hire their own SEO. The agency called me up to say this new SEO was only one day in and already killing it. I logged into GA and was quite impressed by the Organic Search graph that greeted me:
I asked the agency who was this SEO miracle worker who can take a newly launched domain with few backlinks, messed up NAP, and generally bad juju and crank up the organic traffic as if by command?
His response: “I don’t know. They found him on Craigslist
.”
I once hired a guy to build a sandbox for me on Craigslist.
I once bought some used furniture on Craiglist.
I once may have tried to find the love of my life on Craigslist.
I went back to GA, created a custom segment for Non-US traffic (orange) and compared it to organic search visits (blue) and guess what?
The Location report in GA confirmed my suspicions — 90% of the new traffic was coming from China, Philippines, Brazil and India.
I dug a bit deeper and found that the majority of this new traffic was hitting the home page, staying for less than a second, and bouncing out. Although I didn’t have a lot of keyword data — scammers like searching securely, after all — I strongly suspected that these new visits came from people searching the business’ name in Google and then clicking to the site from the results.
By this point, you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Craigslist SEO Co. was basically paying people to find the site and click on it. I’ll give him credit — he sure did know how to crank up the organic traffic fast.
Here’s what Craigslist says about avoiding scams on Craiglist:
You can avoid would-be scammers by following these common-sense rules:
DEAL LOCALLY WITH FOLKS YOU CAN MEET IN PERSON — follow this one rule and avoid 99% of scam attempts.
(Hint: Craigslist wouldn’t have a page about avoiding scams if Craigslist wasn’t an assisted living facility for scammers.)
Now, I am sure there are plenty of legit SEOs on Craigslist; but, if you are going to hire one, maybe at least talk to some references or meet them in person?
I know some SEOs will spank me on Twitter because posts like these tend to tar the SEO industry with the scammer brush. Like I said, I have rarely met an SEO consultant who didn’t try to do his or her best for their clients. But businesses that seek quick fixes and fall for these Craigslist scheisters need some cold water in the face more than we as an industry need cheerleading.
So, next time you find yourself looking for a SEO consultant on Craigslist, perhaps try looking for that person you had a split-second of eye contact with at 24 Hour Fitness instead. You might have a better chance of having a happy ending.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Channel: Local | Local Search Column | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: Local
View the original article here
I was consulting for an agency that builds websites for local businesses. One of their clients had lost patience waiting for the SEO magic to kick in and decided to hire their own SEO. The agency called me up to say this new SEO was only one day in and already killing it. I logged into GA and was quite impressed by the Organic Search graph that greeted me:
I asked the agency who was this SEO miracle worker who can take a newly launched domain with few backlinks, messed up NAP, and generally bad juju and crank up the organic traffic as if by command?His response: “I don’t know. They found him on Craigslist
.”
I once hired a guy to build a sandbox for me on Craigslist.
I once bought some used furniture on Craiglist.
I once may have tried to find the love of my life on Craigslist.
I went back to GA, created a custom segment for Non-US traffic (orange) and compared it to organic search visits (blue) and guess what?
The Location report in GA confirmed my suspicions — 90% of the new traffic was coming from China, Philippines, Brazil and India.
I dug a bit deeper and found that the majority of this new traffic was hitting the home page, staying for less than a second, and bouncing out. Although I didn’t have a lot of keyword data — scammers like searching securely, after all — I strongly suspected that these new visits came from people searching the business’ name in Google and then clicking to the site from the results.
By this point, you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Craigslist SEO Co. was basically paying people to find the site and click on it. I’ll give him credit — he sure did know how to crank up the organic traffic fast.
Here’s what Craigslist says about avoiding scams on Craiglist:
You can avoid would-be scammers by following these common-sense rules:
DEAL LOCALLY WITH FOLKS YOU CAN MEET IN PERSON — follow this one rule and avoid 99% of scam attempts.
(Hint: Craigslist wouldn’t have a page about avoiding scams if Craigslist wasn’t an assisted living facility for scammers.)
Now, I am sure there are plenty of legit SEOs on Craigslist; but, if you are going to hire one, maybe at least talk to some references or meet them in person?
I know some SEOs will spank me on Twitter because posts like these tend to tar the SEO industry with the scammer brush. Like I said, I have rarely met an SEO consultant who didn’t try to do his or her best for their clients. But businesses that seek quick fixes and fall for these Craigslist scheisters need some cold water in the face more than we as an industry need cheerleading.
So, next time you find yourself looking for a SEO consultant on Craigslist, perhaps try looking for that person you had a split-second of eye contact with at 24 Hour Fitness instead. You might have a better chance of having a happy ending.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Channel: Local | Local Search Column | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: Local
View the original article here
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Google Alerts Get A Shiny New Redesign
Google flipped the switch this morning on a new design for its Google Alerts emails. The change brings Google Alerts closer in line with Google’s general aesthetic. The emails now have a similarly clean look-and-feel to the card-style layout that’s becoming so prevalent in Google search results, Google Now, on Google’s mobile apps and elsewhere.
The new alerts tell you what kind of alert you’re getting (hourly, etc.), have larger headlines to click on and get three social sharing buttons: Google+, Facebook and Twitter. There were no social buttons in the old alerts. Also new is a “Flag as irrelevant” link with each story.
Gone from the old alert emails is a link to “See all stories on this topic.”
Here’s a comparison between an old Google Alert that reached my In box during the 6 am PT hour, and then the new version that came in within the past hour.
Old Alert Email
New Alert Email
I’ve contacted Google to see if this is a permanent change or if I’m in a limited test. No reply yet, but I’m seeing plenty of tweets this morning from others also seeing the new-look alerts. Are you?
Postscript: In testing the new social buttons, I came upon a bug in the system somewhere. The ampersand in that first headline breaks the sharing when trying to post to Twitter:
That only happens when using the Twitter button; sharing that same headline to Facebook and Google+ didn’t break.
Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Alerts | Top News
About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He recently launched a site dedicated to Google Glass called Glass Almanac and also blogs at Small Business Search Marketing. Matt can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGeeConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn View the original article here
Searching For Gmail In Google Links You To Compose A Message To A Google Apps User
If you search for [gmail] in Google and if you click on the sitelink that reads “Google mail” — Google may push you to a page that composes an email to a Google Apps user.Here is the search result you may see when you search for [gmail]:
Clicking on that sitelink below the main listing may take you to the compose window to email a specific Google Apps user.
This will only happen if (1) you see the sitelink and (2) you are logged into a Google Account. Otherwise, if you don’t have a Google Account, you will need to create one to send this user an email.
Why is some stranger’s email address showing up in the Google search results for sitelink for Gmail? It must have been an indexing issue by Google. I suspect this will be fixed shortly after we post our story.
Credit goes to Rahul Mistry of 123-reg.co.uk for sending us this tip.
Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Gmail | Google: Web Search
About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry SchwartzConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn View the original article here
SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 17, 2014
Jan 17, 2014 at 4:00pm ET by Matt McGee
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google Alerts Get A Shiny New Redesign Google flipped the switch this morning on a new design for its Google Alerts emails. The change brings Google Alerts closer in line with Google’s general aesthetic. The emails now have a similarly clean look-and-feel to the card-style layout that’s becoming so prevalent in Google search results, Google Now, on Google’s mobile apps and elsewhere. […]AdWords Cross-Device Conversions: How 1-800-FLOWERS Is Using The Data To Be More Customer Centric Yesterday, we got an early preview of the first case study Google will publish on the use of estimated cross-device conversions in AdWords. It features 1-800-Flowers and also addresses the company’s use of click-to-call. When Google first announced the release of estimated cross-device conversions in October, it seemed to be received with a collective shrug. […]Search In Pics: Bing Hawks Towels, YouTube’s Emmy & Android Sugar Cubes In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Seattle Seahawks Bing Towels: Source: Twitter YouTube Emmy: Source: Google+ Back To The Future’s Christopher Lloyd […]Google Issues Bad Ads Report: 59 Percent More Ads Pulled, But Fewer Bad Advertisers In 2013 In the ongoing battle to keep its ads ecosystem free of scammers and malware, Google says it pulled more than 350 million bad ads from its systems last year, up 59 percent from the 224 million it struck down in 2012. Looking back at last year’s bad ads report, it appears that for the first […]Tax Season: Plan Now For Great Advertising Returns Someone once said that Americans deserved a tax system that looked as it if were designed on purpose. No doubt, the world is a complicated place when tax time looms. Rule changes, exemptions, complicated deductions — it’s no wonder that people start to sweat a little as April 15 approaches. If there’s one thing taxpayers can […]5 Go-Tos To Make Online Reviews Work For Your Business By now, everyone knows that online reviews can have a tremendous impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Ultimately, a single review — positive or negative — can tip the scale in favor of one company over another. No doubt, the power of reviews on Google+, Yelp, Angie’s List and other local search directories continues to mount. […]Local SEOs Sound Off On Google+ Local Hijackings Earlier this week, Danny Sullivan reported on the hijacking of thousands of local hotel listings within Google+ Local. Those listings had been replaced by third-party hotel booking services. And while it’s unclear how long those third-party links were in place, several knowledgeable people have surmised it may have been at least a month, if not longer. […]
Industry
Link Building
Local & Maps
Search Marketing
SEM / Paid Search
Searching
SEO
International SEO, Shimon SandlerAre You Crazy? Cool, You Have A Good Future In SEO, Daily SEO TipOutrank your Competitors Using Moz’s Tools for Beginners, WrightIMCTD Canada Trust Mobile Site Is Main Site In Google Canada, Search Engine RoundtableThe SEO content writers’ manifesto, SEO CopywritingWill Keywords be Replaced by Topics for Some Searches?, SEO By The Sea5 Things a Marketer Needs to Tell Her SEO in 2014, Search Engine PeopleSEO Threatens Client With Negative SEO, Search Engine RoundtableSEO: How to Create a 301 Redirect Map, for Site Redesigns, Practical E-CommerceWhy Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope – Whiteboard Friday, MozRelated Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He recently launched a site dedicated to Google Glass called Glass Almanac and also blogs at Small Business Search Marketing. Matt can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGeeConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn
View the original article here
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.Google Alerts Get A Shiny New Redesign Google flipped the switch this morning on a new design for its Google Alerts emails. The change brings Google Alerts closer in line with Google’s general aesthetic. The emails now have a similarly clean look-and-feel to the card-style layout that’s becoming so prevalent in Google search results, Google Now, on Google’s mobile apps and elsewhere. […]AdWords Cross-Device Conversions: How 1-800-FLOWERS Is Using The Data To Be More Customer Centric Yesterday, we got an early preview of the first case study Google will publish on the use of estimated cross-device conversions in AdWords. It features 1-800-Flowers and also addresses the company’s use of click-to-call. When Google first announced the release of estimated cross-device conversions in October, it seemed to be received with a collective shrug. […]Search In Pics: Bing Hawks Towels, YouTube’s Emmy & Android Sugar Cubes In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Seattle Seahawks Bing Towels: Source: Twitter YouTube Emmy: Source: Google+ Back To The Future’s Christopher Lloyd […]Google Issues Bad Ads Report: 59 Percent More Ads Pulled, But Fewer Bad Advertisers In 2013 In the ongoing battle to keep its ads ecosystem free of scammers and malware, Google says it pulled more than 350 million bad ads from its systems last year, up 59 percent from the 224 million it struck down in 2012. Looking back at last year’s bad ads report, it appears that for the first […]Tax Season: Plan Now For Great Advertising Returns Someone once said that Americans deserved a tax system that looked as it if were designed on purpose. No doubt, the world is a complicated place when tax time looms. Rule changes, exemptions, complicated deductions — it’s no wonder that people start to sweat a little as April 15 approaches. If there’s one thing taxpayers can […]5 Go-Tos To Make Online Reviews Work For Your Business By now, everyone knows that online reviews can have a tremendous impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Ultimately, a single review — positive or negative — can tip the scale in favor of one company over another. No doubt, the power of reviews on Google+, Yelp, Angie’s List and other local search directories continues to mount. […]Local SEOs Sound Off On Google+ Local Hijackings Earlier this week, Danny Sullivan reported on the hijacking of thousands of local hotel listings within Google+ Local. Those listings had been replaced by third-party hotel booking services. And while it’s unclear how long those third-party links were in place, several knowledgeable people have surmised it may have been at least a month, if not longer. […]
Industry
Link Building
Local & Maps
Search Marketing
SEM / Paid Search
Searching
SEO
International SEO, Shimon SandlerAre You Crazy? Cool, You Have A Good Future In SEO, Daily SEO TipOutrank your Competitors Using Moz’s Tools for Beginners, WrightIMCTD Canada Trust Mobile Site Is Main Site In Google Canada, Search Engine RoundtableThe SEO content writers’ manifesto, SEO CopywritingWill Keywords be Replaced by Topics for Some Searches?, SEO By The Sea5 Things a Marketer Needs to Tell Her SEO in 2014, Search Engine PeopleSEO Threatens Client With Negative SEO, Search Engine RoundtableSEO: How to Create a 301 Redirect Map, for Site Redesigns, Practical E-CommerceWhy Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope – Whiteboard Friday, MozRelated Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap
About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He recently launched a site dedicated to Google Glass called Glass Almanac and also blogs at Small Business Search Marketing. Matt can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGeeConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn View the original article here
Martin Luther King, Jr. Google Logo Marks Holiday Honoring Civil Rights Hero
Today’s Google logo marks Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a federal holiday recognizing the civil rights leader. The illustrated logo includes a profile of Martin Luther King, Jr., images of doves to represent King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Lincoln Memorial where King made his iconic “I Have a Dream” civil rights speech.Michigan Congressman John Carver introduced the original bill to make King’s January 15 birthday a federal holiday shortly after King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, but the bill failed to be enacted into law for a number of years.
Finally, on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. with a federal holiday to be celebrated on the third Monday of every January. Even though the bill was signed in 1983, the holiday was not observed until three years later in 1986.
Born on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Baptist minister and civil rights leader from Atlanta, Georgia. King dedicated his life to building a more peaceful, racially integrated United States. He helped create the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1964, King was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.
King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee by James Earl Ray. He was only 39 years old at the time of his death.
Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Logos | Top News
About The Author: Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Correspondent, and reports on the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles. See more articles by Amy GesenhuesConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn View the original article here
Expedia Lost 25% Of Their Search Visibility In Google Possibly Over Unnatural Links
The major travel website, Expedia, seems to have lost 25% of their search visibility in Google according to Search Metrics. It appears that drop was due to an unnatural link penalty, where Nenad called out Expedia over a month ago for possible paid links on article sites.Patrick Altoft noticed a drop in Expedia’s traffic today and posted about it on Twitter. If you look at their decline today, it looks like Google has penalized Expedia in their search results. We reached out to Marcus Tober from Search Metrics who sent us additional details showing that Expedia has indeed seen a major drop in rankings for most of their generic keywords. Here is a picture of their search visibility drop:
If you look at the specific keywords, they saw large declines for keywords like hotels, airline tickets, car rentals, vacation, and many other keywords. Here are some of the top keywords Expedia saw a drop for in the past day:
If you compare their traffic to one of their main competitors, you will see that this was not a seasonal drop:
If you review the blog post at nenadseo.com where they call out the link building tactics of Expedia, you will see a large number of unusual keyword-rich links pointing to Expedia from blogs and sites across the internet. This post turned itself into a discussion topic at Hacker News named How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google.
From the looks of it, it does appear Expedia was participating in paid linking schemes that eventually caught up with them.
It is unclear if this was done internally by Expedia itself or if it was done through an outside SEO firm. It is also unclear if they used some sort of link network or did all of this manually.
But drops like this do appear to be link related.
We have emailed Google for a comment on this story and will update you with anything we hear from Google.
If this was indeed a link scheme, Expedia will join the club of large sites being penalized by Google for unnatural links. This just happened to Rap Genius after they were outed and Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts said they would look into it. The penalty was soon confirmed by Google and resulted in a major traffic loss for Rap Genius. That penalty only last 10-days, but Rap Genius’s traffic is still not 100% back to normal; they did however recover most of their traffic loss.
Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Top News
About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry SchwartzConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn View the original article here
Google Remarketing Ads Found To Violate Canadian Privacy Law; To Revamp Ad Review System By June
Google has agreed to several concessions after an investigation by Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner found Google in violation of Canada’s privacy rights for the use of sensitive health history in remarketing campaigns.
The investigation began last January, when a man complained that his personal health history was being used for ad targeting purposes. After searching for and visiting sites related to medical devices for sleep apnea, he was retargeted with display ads for those devices when he browsed the web.
The Commissioner’s office has agreed with the man that Google unlawfully used sensitive health information for ad targeting purposes. It is inappropriate for this type of information to be used in online behavioural advertising,” says Interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier. Adding, “As Canadians spend more and more time online, they create a digital trail that can reveal a great deal about a person. Organizations such as Google must ensure privacy rights are respected in this complex environment.”
Two years ago the Office of the Privacy Commissioner issued guidelines around online behavioral advertising (OBA) as it relates to the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Ad targeting based on health, financial information or other interests that are considered “sensitive” is prohibited.
Google’s own privacy policy states it “will not associate sensitive interest categories with your cookie (such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories) and will not use these categories when showing you interest-based ads”.
In its response to the Commissioner’s office during the inquiry Google blamed advertisers for not following the policies,
Google stated that remarketing criteria and user lists are determined by the advertiser directly. Google requires all advertisers using this platform to agree to specific policies, which prohibit all forms of interest based advertising involving sensitive categories, including the use of user lists based on “health or medical information”. According to Google, it is up to each remarketer to determine the application of Google’s policies to any proposed remarketing. Google indicated that, despite its policies and guidance, certain advertisers or third party buyers can use remarketing products in error.Google also provided detailed information on how it monitors ads and advertisers to prevent abuses. Canada’s privacy office found the monitoring tools “were not scalable and had demonstrable shortcomings,” and made recommendations for developing a “more formalized and rigorous system for reviewing advertisements and addressing instances of non-compliance.”
When an advertiser uses Google’s system to set up remarketing, there is a reminder to advertisers: “review the remarketing program policy to find out what you need to include in your site’s privacy policy, and which sensitive categories of sites can’t use this feature” (with a link to the policy provided).
As a result, Google said it will upgrade its automated review systems by June 2014.
Additionally, Google says it has rejected all active retargeting campaigns involving CPAP devices and has increased searches of active retargeting campaigns potentially related to sensitive interest categories.
The move will likely impact a wide swath of advertisers running retargeting campaigns. Steve Cameron of Advent Communications in the UK discovered that Google deactivated remarketing lists for a cancer facility client in which members of the lists were located in Canada as a result of the ruling.
It remains unclear if Google will adopt this new level of stringency across the board when it revamps its automated ad review platform.
Meanwhile, Canada isn’t stopping with Google. Interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier added in a statement, “We also have concerns about whether other advertising networks are complying with Canadian privacy law. We will be contacting various advertising stakeholders in the near future to share these investigation results and remind them of their privacy obligations.”
Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google | Google: AdWords | Google: Legal | Google: Privacy | Legal | Legal: Privacy | Top News
About The Author: Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting. Beyond Search Engine Land, Ginny provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin. See more articles by Ginny MarvinConnect with the author via: Email | Twitter View the original article here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)