Jerry West of SEORevolution.com has been an SEO expert for some time. He has over 500 domains through the country on various hosting platforms in which he performs in-depth testing. So all his advice comes from actual results of many sites. This is an email I just received and thought you may find it helpful. I will keep you apprised of the new changes going on with Google on this blog so be sure to bookmark it and come back often.

I am about to leave for the airport in just a few minutes and wanted to get this update out. Overall PubCon was good, but Google did not have their normal presence there, in fact, for the first time that I have been attending, they didn’t have a booth.

That meant that the contacts I usually sit and talk with weren’t there, but I got all of your questions answered, it just took a little longer than usual.

I will be preparing more updates on the long flight home.

This hasn’t been edited, so there maybe spelling or grammar issues … just a warning.

Question: I’m helping a friend right now try to push some bogus extortion site “complaints” off his first page on the SERP.

So my question is how can someone go to google to rid themselves of a bogus complaint on one of those sites like ripoofreport.com or complaintsboard.com ?

I know we can work on the SEO but in some cases they are very well entrenched and are trying to charge the victim money to take the “complaint” off the site. In some cases they have gotten edu and gov links and have leveraged their SEO power for “evil”. And the pages or posts are often “closed” so you can’t even add your side of the story.

You would think Google would have a way to approach getting that dealt with. It can cost an individual or small business a lot of money in lost business and in hiring an SEO pro to combat bogus complaints which leaves this client with a bad taste for internet marketing. I wonder how many business owners have decided never to advertise in adwords or online after an experience like this?

Answer: Google has remained very consistent on this issue – they aren’t a censor.  While they can sympathize with you over this issue, if they began to act as a censor, the line begins to get fuzzy. They best that you can do is promote your company the best you can and customers realize that there aren’t always going to be favorable things said about your company. In fact, a company that has a spotless record is always a red flag in my book because no company can satisfy every person.

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Question: When will Google Caffeine be rolled out?

Answer: Matt Cutts stated not until after the holidays, but he didn’t say which holiday. My guess is that it will be during the Christmas/New Years break since that is usually a “dead” time for business.

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Question: What is the future of the Blogger platform. How it might integrate into their other app developments. Do they see Blogger having a vital future? Or is it one of those channels like Google Video that may be left on the back burner?

Answer: This is on their radar for 2010. It is still an important part of their business strategy. No details were shared, however.

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Question: Is it still true that most searches don’t bring the results that people are looking for?

Answer: Google didn’t have any hard data to share, but Microsoft said they have a 25% “back” trend (hitting the back button). So a quarter of all searches result in a refinement of some sort.

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Question: What are the total information searches for a given topic vs. product searches?

Answer: This information wasn’t available.

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Question: What is the most reliable way to get and retain high search engine rankings?

Answer: According to Matt Cutts it is creating unique content and getting good, quality links to your site.

We all know that answer won’t get you top ranking. The best thing to do is use my SEO in a Box technique along with my Keyword Competition Tool.

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Question: When will integration of Google Docs with Google Wave happen?

Answer: No date has been announced.

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Question: How is Sidewiki going to be policed?

Answer: As with any user generated content, they are monitoring for spam. Since it is still new and the traction hasn’t been fully realized, there are still some growing pains.

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Question: How do you know if you have been “slapped” by Google? How to avoid it?

Answer: The “Google Slap” is only for AdWords and does NOT effect the organic listings.  You will know if you have gotten slapped if your Quality Score has tanked and/or your minimum bid has been raised to the $15-25 per click range … just to be on the first page. Read that again, not the first position, but the first page. That’s a slap.

Here are some options to go through to correct the Slap:

1) If you’re an affiliate, and you are directly linking to the merchant’s page with your affiliate code, change the CTA to /yourdomain.com/buy/ and do a 301 redirect to the merchant.
2) Make sure your Title tag is unique and contains the targeted keyword phrase.
3) Ditto with the Meta Description.
4) Ditto with the H1 tag.
5) Get the Privacy, Contact Us, About Us, Terms, etc. on the page if they aren’t already there.
6) Put the keyword phrase at the bottom of the page, just above the footer links. But don’t link it to anything.
7) Use it at least twice in the body of the page.
8 ) Get some good solid links 5-10 or so to your landing page. As strange as it sounds, getting links from pages that are cached and it gets spidered by GoogleBot has helped in the slap – but not consistently.

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Question: How do you lower the keyword costs in AdWords?

Answer: Simply put, you can lower your bids, which will, of course, lower your position. That isn’t what you want. What you are probably asking is how to increase your margins, and that comes with solid landing page designs which are build on “continuing the conversation” the prospect has in their minds. I will be updating my Landing Page testing results this month in the SEO Revolution.

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Question: What are the least important ranking factors?

Answer: This question is too generic and Google isn’t really going to answer this accurately other than to say they ignore the Keyword Meta Tag and Spam content (which they don’t ignore).

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Question: How to better optimize for Google local, not in Google Maps, but in the regular SERPs.

Answer: There is still a hole in Google Local that Matt Cutts admitted to that I have been reporting for the last three years or so. That is, you can focus on an address near the City Center and the local post office for the ZIP code you are targeting and will get a top ranking – even if you use a fake address. They state they are going to start using their own collected date in order to be more accurate.

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Question: Does the click through rate influence the SERPs?

Answer: While Matt Cutts stated that currently there is no correlation between click through rate and the rankings in the SERPs, I am seeing some evidence of this. However, it isn’t consistent and it might be the Caffeine injection which has been going on for the last few weeks.

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Question: If you buy an expired domain what do you do with the non-existent pages so you can capture the backlinks?

Answer: You can use mod_rewrite or 301 redirects to point them to the right page. It is not recommended that you just do a blanket 301 redirect to the home page.

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Question: What date does Google see as the registration date of expired domains that are re-registered?

Answer: Google doesn’t look at the registration date, instead it looks at “first time spidered”. If there is a significant time where Google cannot index the site, it will “reset” the age of the domain. I have found in my testing, that if you get the site built (you can use WinHTTrack or Archive.org to get the previous content of the site) on your server and as soon as you win the auction and the domain is given to you, you can switch the DNS and be ready for Google’s next crawl. That is usually very effective in saving the domain. However, if you sit on it and spend a week or two developing the site and Google comes back, they will often deindex much or all of the site making it worthless for the reason you bought it.

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Question: Is the PageRank preserved if all pages are redirected to the homepage?

Answer: There is some “PageRank” leakage, but details were not given. Personally, I don’t find this a big deal. Leakage is going to happen. As long as the home page is spidered often, you should be able to use the authority to push link power to your other properties.

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Question: What should be done with the upcoming Caffeine update? Are traditional SEO techniques going to become useless? Are they being replaced with semantic-optimized pages?

Answer: You can read my analysis I posted on August 16th: http://www.seorevolution.com/members/training/?p=4424 The “sandbox” for Caffeine has been disabled as they are getting ready for the rollout after the holidays (probably between Christmas and New Years). Even though it is stated that Caffeine is NOT an algorithm update, there is enough changes in the SERPs to believe that there is an algo change.

In terms of it being replaced with semantic-optimized pages, I am not seeing that in my tests. I think this is more hype and rumor. What my tests are showing is that the authority on the home page is mattering more and the total number of domains linking to you is becoming more of a factor. This is making “run of site links” less effective, however, internal linking is getting more powerful. So, if you have a large authoritative site, your advantage will greatly increase once Caffeine goes live.

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Question: How much does bounce rate and average time on site affect rankings? What about a blog or internal pages?

Answer: Matt Cutts stated that this is NOT part of the algorithm yet, but I am seeing some evidence of it, although nothing conclusive. I would assume the reason for this is to get rid of the Made for AdSense sites which typically have high bounce rates because that is their business model.

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Question: Is the value of links and merit of link different for each industry?

Answer: It isn’t that the value of links is different, it is how the keyword is scored. Since Google has access to know what the dollar value is (through AdWords), it will rank the keywords accordingly. Higher value keywords have more off-page factors and lower value keywords have more on-page factors attributing to the ranking process.

Even though on-page factors do not give as much benefit as they once did, if you get them wrong, you will never rank as high as you could, so make sure you get them right.

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Question: What will happen to the Yahoo SSP campaigns when the merger with Microsoft occurs?

Answer: The SSP (Search Submit Pro) program will be discontinued.

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Question: Will the SERPs appear more like Bing or Yahoo rankings?

Answer: When the merger occurs, they will be Bing results. Yahoo! has never been able to serve quality search results ever since they took the directory listings out of their algorithm.

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Question: Are links hidden in search engine friendly CSS drop downs as strong as links viewed normally through the page load?

Answer: I haven’t tested this and Matt Cutts stated there is never a time when “hidden links” are search engine friendly. While I haven’t tested this, never take what Matt Cutts says as absolute truth. Test it first.

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Question: Does Google made a distinction between a Postweb page and Pageweb page in WordPress? Which is better for SEO?

Answer: Lisa Brown, with WordPressAngel.com handles all of my WordPress issues. There was probably a time when this mattered, but I don’t see any issues now. Just make sure you have the SEO Plugin.

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Question: Is Google giving more weight to the keyword in the domain name?

Answer: Yes they are, especially in .org domains.

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Question: What is the one thing you could do for Google so it would be 100% greater, what would it be?

Answer: The answer was very political and not worth reporting.

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Question: How is the influence on social sites with the Google algorithm?

Answer: With Caffeine, the impact of Web 2.0 properties has been lessened. That doesn’t mean they won’t be as effective, it just means it will take more effort to get them to rank.

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Question: What about personalized search?

Answer: This is becoming more and more of an issue. If you notice if you are logged in to your Google account, your search results will be different than if you are not logged in. However, even if you are logged out, Google is tracking your search behavior through the IP address you are using and will begin to give you personalized search results based on your search behavior. They are getting good.

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Question: Do links going through a redirect click tracking script count?

Answer: The answer is “yes” from Google, but I don’t have testing results to back it up. My viewpoint is worry about real links and if you get extra juice from a redirect, then you are getting something extra.

Best Regards,

Jerry West

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First Place Positioning provides Philadelphia SEO Services and is happy to provide a free SEO report and a strategic custom SEO plan for your company.  Reach us at 1-800-430-0205 or direct at 610-768-0357, or fill out the SEO form to have the details emailed to you.

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Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

A few years ago, Google’s apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm “relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. ”

That Google was impartial was one of the articles of faith. For if Google was ever to be found to be applying subjective human judgment directly on the process, it would be akin to the voting machines being rigged.

For these soothsayers of the Hive Mind, the years ahead looked prosperous. As blog-aware marketing and media consultants, they saw a lucrative future in explaining the New Emergent World Order to the uninitiated. (That part has come true – Web 2.0 “gurus” now advise large media companies).

It wasn’t surprising, then, that when five years ago I described how a small, self-selected number of people could rig Google’s search results, the reaction from the people doing the rigging was violently antagonistic. Who lifted that rock? they cried.

But what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google’s active participation.

This week Marissa Meyer explained that editorial judgments will play a key role in Google searches. It was reported by Tech Crunch proprietor Michael Arrington – who Nick Carr called the “Madam of the Web 2.0 Brothel” – but its significance wasn’t noted. The irony flew safely over his head at 30,000 feet. Arrington observed:

Mayer also talked about Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

Now what, you may be thinking, is an “obvious change”? Is it one that is frivolous? (Thereby introducing a Google Frivolitimeter™ [Beta]). Or is it one that goes against the grain of the consensus? If so, then who decides what the consensus must be? Make no mistake, Google is moving into new territory: not only making arbitrary, editorial choices – really no different to Fox News, say, or any other media organization. It’s now in the business of validating and manufacturing consent: not only reporting what people say, but how you should think.

Who’s hand is upon the wheel, here?

None of this would matter, if it wasn’t for one other trend: a paralysing loss of confidence in media companies.