Search Engine News
Keeping You Informed on the SEO Landscape
Dec
21st 2007: A History of Search Engine
Optimization May Help Us Understand Today's SEO Process
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By Donovan Baldwin (c) 2007 |
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Anyone involved in any
sort of Internet marketing sees the term, "search engine
optimization", or SEO, everywhere these days. Everybody throws it around
as if they were experts on the subject. It crops up again and again in forums
and advertising alike. People offer their "SEO services" for fees
ranging from a few bucks to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Everybody
seems poised to offer free advice on how to effectively incorporate SEO into
YOUR website. However, hardly anyone
ever comes out and says WHAT search engine optimization really is! So, as we
explore the history of SEO, let's try to get an idea of what it is and what
it does. At its simplest,
search engine optimization is just the art and/or science (often more art
than science) of making web pages attractive, or MORE attractive, to the
Internet search engines. Obviously, most Internet businesses will consider
search engine optimization to be one of THE major factors of any search
engine marketing plan or program. So, how did a need for
"optimizing" a website so as to attract the attention of search
engines come about? Well, back in the dark
ages of the Internet, say the mid 90's, was when the arcane art of SEO began
to blossom. Maybe it was the Renaissance, but "dark ages" is easier
to spell. However, search engine optimization was pretty basic back in those
days. As a matter of fact, many of the available "search engines"
back then really weren't much more than web crawling (sorry Spider-Man)
directories eventually extracting a bit more data from the site than was
submitted originally by the website owner. Even in those dark
days, a good quality search engine was able to perform some discriminatory
evaluation and assign a weight, or search engine rank, based on the relevance
of the site's informational content, and other data, such as keywords,
description, and textual and graphic content, to certain topics and queries.
Unfortunately, although the web crawler, or spider, of the search engine was
able to extract a certain amount of data, a large portion of a site's ability
to achieve high search engine rank depended on material submitted by the
webmaster. Webmasters aren't
stupid, you know, and they soon realized that by using various techniques
they could increase their site's search engine rank. One such technique was
manipulating content by increasing the usage of keywords, often to huge
multiples which might be hidden in the background of the site, for example.
In this way they could increase their website's search engine rank. A higher
rank meant more visitors, which usually meant more money. A fact the
webmasters easily understood. Enter the search
engine algorithm. "Algorithm" is possibly one of the least
understood words commonly found on the Internet. All it means is the system,
or instructions, which, in this case, the search engine follows in its quest
to rank websites. To be absolutely silly, a search engine owner could decide
that his or her algorithm will include instructions to assign the lowest rank
to websites with the word "blue" in them. The point is that the
magical, mystical ALGORITHM is simply the set of instructions that has been
provided to the software that the search engine uses to assign search engine
ranking. Now, it isn't as if
search engine algorithms didn't exist before, but, as with cops and robbers,
as the webmasters got better at subverting the existing algorithms, the
search engines tweaked their algorithms to counter their tricks and ploys. One major change was
that search engines began to place less faith on the presentations and
protestations of the webmasters and developed software capable of
investigating the site itself and forming conclusions on what it actually
found there. Instead of the webmaster filling in a form providing a title,
description, and a bunch of keywords which was checked by a "Mortimer
Snerd" indexer which said, "Yup, Mr. Bergen. Them keywords is
there, all right, and there's a bunch of 'em!", the search engine
software began to look more deeply for itself and make logical, or at least
quasi-logical, determinations about what it found. BREAK FOR THOSE UNDER
50: Okay, 200 per cent of Internet users are people nowhere near my age, so
here's the skinny on Mortimer Snerd. Back in the 1930's and into the 60's, I
believe, there was a popular ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen, father of
Candice Bergen. He mainly worked with two dummies, Charley McCarthy and
Mortimer Snerd. Charley McCarthy, although a smart aleck, was usually dressed
in tie and tails and seemed to be up on the comings and goings of society.
Bergen's other major dummy was Mortimer Snerd, a hick straight off the turnip
truck who believed whatever he was told...and believed it literally. Back to search engine
optimization. Okay, rather than just
accepting the webmaster's word that keywords "weight loss",
"diet", and "exercise" were applicable to the subject
matter of the site and then checking to see if those words were there, the
software began looking at a long list of factors. It would check the domain
name, and the words used in the title. It would check to see how often
keywords appeared, how close they were together, and the sequence in which
they appeared. It would check such things as what the "ALT"
attribute attached to images contained, and what the META tags had to say.
Most important of all, it would check the textual content of the site to get
a major feel for the way all these things came together and how they matched
the claims of the webmaster and the expectations of the search engine's
clients. Now you see why so
many people say, "Content is king!" However, for a major
search engine such as Google, website content alone was not enough to insure
that its customers were seeing the most valuable search results and that
websites were getting the most accurate page rank. Therefore, Google
developed a system known as "Page Rank" which also looks at the
number of incoming links to the site. In other words, how many other sites
around the Internet considered this site relevant to the interests of their
clients and hence of value to the interests of the search engines' clients. As search engines
became bigger and more powerful, and as webmasters became more inventive at
circumventing their algorithms, the major search engines such as Google made
their particular algorithms tightly controlled secrets. This has made it
extremely difficult for amateur webmasters and search engine optimization
services alike to predict exactly which technique or tactic was going to be
the most successful for achieving a high web page rank on a given search
engine. However, some
deductions have been made based on the pages and sites that DO seem to
achieve high page ranks with Google and other search engines. Techniques such as
picking a relevant domain name, including important keywords and phrases in
the title, having keywords show up in such places as the image ALT tag, and
stressing keywords through the use of headline text and by placement at the
beginning and end of the page are all of importance. Having lots of inbound
links from relevant sites is important as is internal linking (the
development and value of the sitemap is another important topic). Over and above all the
smooth moves, however, it appears that as search engine algorithms expand
their capabilities, based of course on the instructions they have been
provided, they begin to approach the viewpoint of the human website viewer.
As a human would ask, "Does this site make sense and provide relevant
data in an understandable manner?", so too are search engines becoming
more interested in the structure and content of the website. Search engine crawlers
are becoming more efficient as well in simply finding your site if someone
somewhere has considered it important enough to provide a link from their
website to yours. This is another reason why links from other pages can be
important for getting your website indexed in the first place as well helping
get it a good page rank. As in the good old
days of the Internet in the previous century (I needed to say that), the most
common means of offering your website to a search engine for its
consideration is by a simple task of filling in a form. You will notice in
the modern era, however, that the search engines are asking you for less and
less information about the site. They prefer to go and get it themselves. On
the other hand, filling in the form does not guarantee immediate, or even
soon, indexing of your site...if it happens at all. From the viewpoint of
the search engine or the human visitor, while various techniques of search
engine optimization are important, the quality of the content provided to
your visitor is probably going to be the best search engine optimization
method of all.
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Dec 18th 2007:
FLASH Presentation on How
Google Works!
Dec 14th 2007:
Blog Update (December 14, 2007): Rogers
Replies re Web Ambushing: White is Black, Up is Down, Ignorance is Strength
Update (December 10, 2007 3:30 PM PST): Rogers has now publicly
confirmed the activities described below.
Greetings. Please observe closely
the image to your left, showing the home page for Google Canada (click the
image for a full-sized, full-resolution version).
Does anything seem a bit odd about
the normally clean and pristine Google front door? What the blazes is all that
ISP-related verbiage taking up the top third of the page? Why would Google ever
give an ISP permission to muddy up Google's public face that way?
Well, as you've probably already
guessed, Google didn't give this ISP any such permission. The ISP simply
decided to modify Google on their own, demonstrating a real world example of ISPs Spying On and
Modifying Web Traffic that I was discussing yesterday.
Just brought to my attention today
by a concerned reader who chose Google for his example, what you're looking at
is reportedly an ongoing test by Rogers in Canada, scheduled for deployment to
Rogers Internet customers next quarter.
In case you're curious, "ISNS"
on the test Google interception page apparently stands for Internet
Subscriber Notification System. For the morbidly curious, here's the javascript and
associated code that enables this procedure, which can presumably be
applied to any http: (unencrypted) traffic.
While Rogers' current planned use
for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system (reportedly
manufactured by "In-Browser Marketing" firm "PerfTech") is
for account status messages, it's obvious that commercial ISP content and ads
(beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through
this mechanism. By the way, PerfTech is even using Google for one of its linked
promotional examples on the PerfTech home
page. I wonder if they bothered to ask Google's permission for that?
Anyway, the fact that there's an
opt-out present for future account status messages on the Rogers page
insertions hardly changes the extremely problematic and network neutrality
unfriendly aspects of such situations, as I noted in yesterday's blog item.
Question: Will Web service providers
such as Google and many others, who have spent vast resources in both talent
and treasure creating and maintaining their services' appearances and quality,
be willing to stand still while any ISP intercepts and modifies their traffic
in such a manner?
I can't say for sure of course, but
I suspect that a likely reaction might be discerned by paraphrasing Bugs Bunny:
"Eh, he don't know them very well, do he?"
Posted by Lauren
Blog Update (December 14, 2007): Rogers
Replies re Web Ambushing: White is Black, Up is Down, Ignorance is Strength
The Day in Search on Dec 10th 2007:
SearchCap
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.
From
Search Engine Land
- When
Links Are Dead But Not Forgotten
Five years ago, in June of 2002, I was helping announce and build links for Home Depot's Online Kitchen & Bath Design Center. Have a look at the announcement I ran on my URLwire site here. Notice that the URL Home Depot used for the design center was http://www.homedepot.com/designcenter/.... - Some
GMail Accounts Wrongly Disabled As Spammers
IDG News and Search Engine Roundtable discuss the "inappropriate disabling" of an unknown number of GMail accounts late last week. Google was apparently going after spammers and got a little overzealous. The company said that the outage affected less than 1 percent of all users and reportedly all the accounts... - Microsoft
To Be Exclusive Ad Provider To CNBC.com
Microsoft announced today that it would become the exclusive third party provider of contextual and display advertising on CNBC.com, which reportedly has 2.6 million monthly uniques. While NBC and Microsoft already have a relationship, this deal is indicative of a bigger push by Microsoft for third party ad syndication. Microsoft's... - Coming
Layoffs At AOL, Yahoo?
Silicon Alley Insider is predicting impending layoffs at AOL and recommending them at Yahoo. Alley Insider's Henry Blodget says that layoffs would be good for Yahoo and "Demonstrate that CEO Jerry Yang can make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to get this company humming again." I think that he's correct... - LinkedIn
Redesigns, Adds Features
LinkedIn has responded to the challenge of Facebook by joining OpenSocial and today launching its developer platform as well as a new look (still to come) and host of new features. They're described in some detail on VentureBeat. The design changes include a new homepage, an emphasis on activity feeds,... - MSN
Introduces Advertising On Mobile Portal
Not long ago Microsoft's MSN relaunched its WAP portal. Today the company is introducing display advertising (graphical and text ads) to MSN Mobile in the US market. (Mobile display advertising is already present on MSN in Belgium, France, Japan, Spain and the UK.) According to AP, inaugural advertisers include Bank... - Google
Tweaks "Host Crowding" Algorithm To Reduce Results From Same
Domain For Search
Friday I reported that Google would be treating sub domains like sub directories. That turned out not to be a 100% true. Matt Cutts clarified at his blog that Google tweaked their “host crowding” algorithm to reduce the amount of search results shown from the same domain. The examples I... - TechTicker,
Yahoo's New Tech Focused Investor Portal
Yahoo to Start Internet Program for Technology Investors from New York Times reports Yahoo is going to launch a new technology finance portal named TechTicker next month. The portal will focus exclusively on technology companies and stocks. Brian Nelson, Yahoo spokesperson said the portal would offer daily streaming-video segments, blog... - Google
News Updates Algorithm: Sourcing Story Updates & Local Context To News
The Google News Blog announced they have updated their algorithms to become more relevant and fresh with news. The first update Google told us about is that they are not offering news from the original source, but now they will update the news cluster to show updated information from a... - Links
& SEO: The Huge Link Value Factors Survey
Wiep Knol has surveyed 17 well-known and respected SEOs in the industry all about links. His survey asked questions exclusively about links and the value they had on search rankings. There were about 40 factors included in this survey. You can find the full survey results over here but if... - Searcharazzi
Saturday Spectacular: The Larry Page Wedding Details
Now that the “who attended which conference this week" gossip chatter is over, we have a bigger question: Who is attending Larry Page’s wedding today? As previously reported, Larry is getting married today and Searcharazzi is reporting to you live from an undisclosed location at the island location, if... - Local
Online Ads Will Reach $12.6 Billion In 2008, Local Search Will Bring In $5
Billion Of That Total
Using an expansive definition of the marketplace, Borrell Associates says that "local online advertising" is worth $8.5 billion today. That number consists of local search, "local banners" and local video. Banners is the biggest spending category and video the smallest. But Borrell expects local search to grow substantially to become...
Nov 30th 2007: Facebook Retreats on Online
Tracking
By LOUISE STORY and BRAD STONE
Faced with its second mass protest
by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular
social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new
advertising program.
Within the last 10 days, more than
50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program,
which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites
like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com
and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely
with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.
Late yesterday the company made an
important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet
activities without getting explicit approval each time.
MoveOn.org Civic Action, the
political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive
one.
“Before, if you ignored their warning,
they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a
spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no
private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook
without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right
direction.”
Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who
created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly
successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But
now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into
profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising
revenue.
The system Facebook introduced this
month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a
popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where
consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely
track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they
have visited and the searches they have conducted.
But Facebook is taking a far more
transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about
the goods and services they buy and view online.
Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to
find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook
feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She
says she did not see an opt-out box.
“Beacon crosses the line to being
Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”
Facebook executives say the people
who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users
will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book
and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile
pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are
already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced
Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.
“Whenever we innovate and create
great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the
outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with
them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while,
they fall in love with them.”
Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to
Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More
than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly
apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and
eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would
not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.
MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon
petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had
signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook,
they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their
permission.
The complaints may seem paradoxical,
given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to
divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and
college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and
drunken escapades, are protesting.
“We know we don’t have a right to
privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of
what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los
Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just
because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else
I do on the Internet?”
Two privacy groups said this week
that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the
Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to
stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in
program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad
executives have poked fun at Facebook users.
“Isn’t this community getting a
little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at
Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want
to share something?”
Facebook users each get a home page
where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and
religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their
friends’ pages.
Under Beacon, when Facebook members
purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com,
for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the
News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel
venues on NYTimes.com, friends are
also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but
users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is
making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.
Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that
his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding
if it would still push for a universal opt-out.
The whole purpose of Beacon is to
allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about
someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad,
for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a
“recommendation from a trusted friend.”
But Facebook users say they do not
want to endorse products.
“Just because I use a Web site,
doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year
old student at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was
cheaper.”
Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on
Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene
It?” game.
“I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this
game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are
getting me for Christmas.”
Nov 29th 2007 is Google Changing Their
Algorithm?
The following is from Internet Business Entrepreneur Chris Compton's Blog.
A friend showed me the following
page a few hours ago:
http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html
This is an experiment Google is
conducting which allows users to “rate” web pages directly in the search result
area. You can bet they will use this data in their algorithm.
People will tell Google when a
“spammy” site is found. But this sort of data is already being collected
by Google.
When you click to a site in the
search results, then immediately click the “back” button due to the poor
result… Google knows.
When you linger on a page and never
return to the search results because you found what you were looking for…
Google knows.
You can bet they are already using
such data in their algorithm. If certain sites have a lower than average
“stick” rate, they are likely given a negative mark for that keyword.
So this seems to be more of a user
interface change than an algorithm change.
Time will tell.
- Chris
(end article)
Click fraud would be of most
interest.
Still 11/29/2007:
Adobe,
Yahoo Testing PDF Ad Service
by David A. Utter on Thu, 11/29/2007
A beta test of Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo opened for publishers,
offering placement and tracking of contextual ads alongside Portable Document
Format content.
PDF has been an appealing format due
to its ability to preserve the look and feel of a document, while providing it
to others in an easily accessible way. The free Adobe Reader became a fixture
on computer desktops as adoption of PDF increased.
Yahoo has managed to score a
significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the
opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo
announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this
morning.
The opt-in program pulls ads
from Yahoo's network to place in a panel next to the PDF content. Each time the
PDF is opened, the ads will be refreshed to keep timely and relevant ones in
place.
Publishers gain the ability to track
their ad performance in the PDFs. Yahoo Publisher Network senior VP Todd Teresi
called this a "previously untapped opportunity" for advertisers to
gain exposure, and publishers to derive revenue from these documents.
The program picked up some big name
participants for this initial beta. CondeNast's Wired, IDG InfoWorld, and Reed
Elsevier were among those named in a statement from Adobe.
To participate, publishers register
and then upload their PDFs so the ad functionality can be enabled for the
document. After that has been completed, the publisher distributes the PDF as
usual.
InfoWorld's participation is of
particular interest. The long-time trade journal scrapped its print magazine in
opting for an online-only, ad-supported presence. If profitable, we expect to
see other print publishers express interest in trying out the program.
Another interesting possibility
comes to mind with the PDF advertising. The hot Amazon Kindle electronic book
reader has the capability to pick up PDF content, a feature Amazon currently
lists as being experimental in its ability to convert them for readability.
If Amazon works out PDF conversions,
the EVDO network supporting wireless content delivery to Kindle could work as a
conduit for the PDF ad program too. Since Amazon has its own interest in
delivering ads, there could be issues with this idea, however.
Nov 28th
2007: Structure Search Coming To Yahoo
Yahoo to offer
structured Web search from Macworld reports Yahoo is going to launch a new
structured search component to their web search engine.
Web search is typically considered
"unstructured," where there isn't a real method of comparing sets of
results side by side, in a data comparison grid structure. Yahoo hopes to offer
structured search for certain types of queries to help aid the searcher in
their information retrieval process.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo’s vice
president of research for Europe and Latin America, said they will likely start
offering structure search for e-commerce sites and similar online applications.
Baeza-Yates would not give a date for the launch, but he did tell Macworld that
"it could happen fast."
You can already see forms on
structured search on search engines like Ask.com and Google.
For example, a search at Ask.com for
ipods returns structured data from
Ask.com Shopping.
An other example is a search at
Google for rent
apartment in manchester, which shows drop downs in the search results,
enabling you to better fine tune your search through Google Base (a form of
structured search).
Yahoo also has elements of
structured search; for example, a search on Tom Brady returns
results from Yahoo Sports.
Structured Search and Chicken-Egg
Barry Schwartz reports
that Yahoo plans to roll out a "structured search" (article above)
functionality in the near future.
The example Barry gives of existing forms of structured search currently
available - a Google search for "apartments for rent in Manchester"
that brings up dropdowns and drilldowns facilitated by Google Base -
illustrates both the challenge and the promise of search as it moves into an
era of greater richness and user control. The main challenge is in terms of
adoption by information providers. (Back to the metadata issue. Who puts it
together? Who bothers to participate? Is Google Base weird for allowing any old
protocol to rule? Who decides which protocols get featured in raw Google
queries?) Google Base hasn't been widely adopted as a repository of data, so
until it is, experiments in presenting info to users will be halting.
I'm looking forward to discussions of these and similar issues on the Orion
Panel on Universal, Blended, and Vertical Search, next Monday Dec. 3 at SES Chicago.
Another can't-miss panel on that day explores privacy and community in this
emerging phase of social media.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
Nov 21st
2007: The Big Google PageRank Slap - Perception Is
Everything
by Titus Hoskins
Recently Google did a major PageRank update where a lot of sites were
downgraded. Many experts believe this PageRank update was Google's response to
link selling - sites which sell links lost points in their PageRank.
Google measures all web
pages on a scale of importance from 0 to 10, which is shown in a small green
pixel bar on browsers carrying the Google Toolbar. PageRank is
"supposedly" measured by the number of backlinks to your site.
Online democracy in
action, a link is a vote for your site. The more votes you have the higher your
site is ranked. At least that's how it was supposed to work until a lot of high
PR sites started selling links and put a monkey wrench into the whole system.
The latest update may
be a smart move on Google's part to curtail this practice; who's going to buy a
link from a PR2 or even a PR4 site? Besides this could be more than a warning
that your site will go down even further if you continue to sell links.
Now this is more of a
cosmetic change in PageRank than a real change in your true rankings in Google.
Just because your PR goes down doesn't mean your keyword rankings or traffíc
from Google also goes down.
I saw some of my sites
go up, some stayed the same, but my major site took a big hit - falling from PR6
to PR4. This was more of a devastating blow than I expected mainly for
psychological reasons than actual consequences. After years of building the
best content you can muster and constantly getting quality one-way links, to
see that PageRank drop was very disappointing and hits to the core of your
online work.
I have been around for
a while so I have experienced many Google Updates - anyone remember the Florida
Update? I also keep my ears peeled to discussions of the latest updates in
Webmasterworld and Stompernet, and I even read Matt Cutts when I get real
nervous... so I knew not to panic just because of the sudden drop in PageRank.
I also knew what most
of the SEO experts were saying was true because my major keywords stayed the
same and my Google traffíc actually went up. But that's little comfort when
you're talking about Google; you immediately go into overdrive and try to
figure out where you went wrong. What caused the drop - because whether
PageRank is meaningless or not, you're still going in the wrong direction.
I saw many of my
competitors drop too, but many stayed the same and a few even increased in
PageRank. What are they doing right; what am I doing wrong? I don't sell links
but does Google think I am selling links was my main concern? I even moved one
external link from my main page to another part of my site, just in case Google
is mistaking that as a paid link.
Welcome To Webmaster's Paranoid Hell!
For SEO reasons I have
very few external links on my main page. Can't see why Google downgraded my
main site. I have been at PR6 for years.
Herein lies my main
beef - with Google you don't really know where you stand; you are constantly
walking on eggshells. No matter how good your content or your site is - one
misstep and you could be in the doghouse. All your hard work can be taken away
in a heartbeat.
It wouldn't matter so
much if it was one of the other two major search engines downgrading your site
but this is Google.
Free organic traffíc
from Google is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffíc from
Google over any other source of traffíc on the web, except for traffíc coming
from my articles on other sites, and even that traffíc probably originated from
a search in Google.
Google and Google
PageRank have always been important to me - that's one of the reasons a sudden
large drop causes so much concern. There's another important reason Google
PageRank is important to me.
Most SEO experts
mistakenly believe PageRank is meaningless because Google is not giving us the
true ranking of any site or revealing all the backlinks, which is supposedly
one of the major factors in how Google ranks sites. While this fact is
obviously true, it has caused many to jump to another conclusion.
Because Google is not
giving us the real ranking, many webmasters have dismissed PageRank as a vital
element in their sites. Don't make the same mistake.
Google PageRank is
extremely important if you're doing business on the web. The higher PR you
have, the better. But it has nothing to do with keyword rankings or first page
SERPs.
What many SEO experts
fail to realize (not really their business) is the whole "perceived"
value of PageRank.
Google, hate it or
love it, has become the most respected company on the web in the eyes of the
majority of the web's users. It carries enormous weíght and prestige. The
"perceived" value of a high PR7 or PR8 is extremely valuable.
We are not talking
about link selling; we are talking about how a perspective business partner or
customer will treat your site or business.
Say you have two
identical sites you want to do business with online and you discover one is a
Google PR2 site and the other is a Google PR8 site - which one would you choose
to do business with? Honestly?
From first-hand
experience, I know any online company or marketer will get more business offers
and be offered more partnerships/joint ventures if you have a high Google PR
site than a low one. It will make a difference to your bottom line.
PageRank is important.
PageRank has meaning. Even if it has little bearing on your SERPs rankings or
Google traffíc, PageRank can greatly influence the success of your online site
or venture. Don't ignore or dismiss PageRank as a meaningless relic that didn't
quite work out as Google had planned for it in the first place.
High PageRank Will Always Be Valuable
The day Google gives
its own site a PageRank of PR1 or PR2 instead of the current PR10 - that's the
day you can dismiss PageRank as truly meaningless.
November
16th 2007: A
Slippery Slope: Google Owns a Search Engine Optimization Company
by
Scott Buresh Medium Blue
If you own or work
with a search engine optimization company, or even if you're just hoping to
better your search engine placement, then you are probably aware of the recent
acquisition frenzy that took hold among the major search engines. Google paid
$3.1 billion for DoubleClick, Microsoft paid $6 billion for Aquantive, and
Yahoo paid $680 million for the 80 percent of Right Media that it did not
already own and another $300 million for BlueLithium. The companies purchased
are all intended to help widen the advertising range of each of the engines in
question, and to take advantage of increasingly sophisticated behavioral-based
ad-serving technologies that the acquired companies owned.
What many people
failed to realize was that when Google purchased DoubleClick, it now was also
the owner of a very large search engine optimization company called Performics,
which is a wholly owned subsidiary of DoubleClick.
This fact is of course
raising some eyebrows in the industry. Google has consistently maintained that
there is no way that people can pay for better search engine placement in the
organic index, a stance that the company still claims applies despite this
recent purchase. In fact, a portion of Google's published guidelines about SEO
says, "While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and
doesn't offer recommendations..." In another portion, Google says "While Google nevër
sells better ranking in our search results..." However, anyone who hires search engine optimization
company Performics is of course now paying Google for better search engine placement.
It seems like a pretty black and white issue, but Google would obviously prefer
that it was kept delightfully blurry.
A Serious Conflict of Interest
One would think that
Google, aware of the controversy that would come from the fact that it now
owned a search engine optimization company, would be eager to spin Performics
off quickly in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety and of selling
search engine placement. Not so, says the official Google/ Doubleclick
acquisition FAQ:
Q. What will Google do with Performics?
A. Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are
acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at
this time.[1]
All right, so Google
owns a search engine optimization company and seems prepared to hold onto it
for a little while at least. Yes, there seems to be a huge conflict of
interest. Yes, there appears to be a large double standard. Yes, Google appears
to have abandoned its long-standing principles regarding organic search engine
placement in the interests of profít. But surely, the search engine
optimization company that it bought will quickly be forced to follow the
guidelines that Google has published for companies that are looking for a
search engine optimization company. Right? Well, no.
Here is a verbatim
quote from the guidelines that Google provides to people thinking about hiring
a search engine optimization company:
* Make sure you're protected legally. For your
öwn safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantëe.
Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied for any reason...[2]
On the surface, this
advice seems solid enough, but as an owner of a search engine optimization
company, I can tell you how impractical it is. What would prevent a company
that achieved fantastic search engine placement using my service from asking
for its monëy back, claiming that it is unsatisfied? "For any reason"
is a very slippery slope, and apparently Google agrees – Performics does not provide
a guarantëe of any kind. How do I know? Simple -- one of my employees called
and asked. We also have it in writing from an email we received from one of
their sales reps.
What Are Google's Options?
Let's be charitable
and assume that in the heat of the acquisition Google has forgotten to update
the page of advice that it has created for website owners. This leaves only
four things that can happen:
1. Status Quo: Google keeps this advice up on the page and
Performics continues to provide no guarantëe regarding search engine placement.
We'll call this the "hypocritical" scenario.
2. Performics gets in
line: Google leaves the
advice up as is and forces Performics to provide an unconditional money-back
guarantëe. We'll call this the "free SEO from Performics" scenario.
3. Guidelines change: Performics maintains zero guarantees for
search engine placement but Google modifies the advice to remove the
inconsistencies pointed out in this article from its advice section. We'll call
this the "shareholder's delight moneygrubber special" scenario.
4. Google spins off
Performics and removes itself
from the search engine optimization industry. We'll call this the "sanity
over dollars" scenario.
I'm not betting on
which of these scenarios is most likely. Some time back I would have picked #4,
but as I pointed out in a recent article, Google has already
crossed an invisible line by offering free advice about organic search engine
placement to its biggest pay-per-click spenders.
Google owning a search
engine optimization company -- a slippery slope, indeed. What does this mean
for those hiring other companies and looking for great search engine placement?
We will just have to wait and see.
References:
[1] What will Google do with Performics
[2] Google Webmaster Help Center
The Great SEO Lie Exposed
By Stoney deGeyter -
November 6, 2007
I'm not a Google hater. In fact I have no real problems with Google other than
the standard fare. I don't always agree with what they do and they, at times,
appear to be quite hypocritical. Many would simply chalk that up to
big-business. But Google's no Enron, at least not yet. My only real problem is
that Google tends to talk out of both sides of its proverbial mouth, and
expects the SEO community to take them at face value. But we really can't
anymore.
I had an alternate title for this
post: "Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for
Google". We're moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention
what Google does -- despite what Google says.
I smell deceit
in the air
If I asked you to tell me the biggest lie perpetuated in the SEO industry, what
would you say? Now before you answer, notice I didn't say "biggest lie
perpetuated by SEO's". Sure there are plenty of those, whether deliberate
or out of ignorance, but none reach the status of being one of the greatest
all-time self-serving lies of all time when it comes to SEO. A lie, which many
have bought into, but has very recently been exposed for what it is. And here
it is:
Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my
users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
That quote is pulled directly from Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and
it's great advice. Unfortunately, Google has shown that, as much as we may
want, we really can't build websites for "users" alone. And if search
engines did not exist, websites would be developed differently than they are
today.
This particular lie was exposed very recently when Google fired a warning shot
across the bow of many high-profile sites by lowering their toolbar PageRank.
This was in response to an update to their help center discussing their policy on paid links.
Not all paid links violate our
guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web
when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.
Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done
in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <
a > tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is
blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
You'll notice that both of the
solutions Google provides for disclosing paid links have nothing to do with the
site visitor. In fact, neither solution does anything to benefit the user or
even informs them that you've used paid links. No, these solutions benefit
someone, but it's not the website visitor. That's quite the contradiction from
their longstanding rule of doing things to your site for users rather than the
search engines.
Turn to the
left and cough twice
And therein is the great SEO lie that Google has been kind enough to expose for
us. Google says that you shouldn't make changes to your site solely for search
engines. However, they are more than happy—neigh, they demand—that you make changes that fill in for their own
algorithmic shortcomings. Changes that would never be made if we based it on
the answer to the question, "Does this help my users?"
Welcome to a new SEO generation, where Google has us by the, uh, well, you
know. In the past, webmasters have been the ones in the drivers seat,
manipulating Google and other search engines to give us the results we want.
That manipulation has now become a two player game. We're still free to ask
what Google can do for us, but don't be surprised when Google demands we give a
little back. And that they are more than willing to squeeze their grip a tad
bit if that's what it takes to get our attention.
The cat is out. The lie has been exposed. I can live with that, but let's not
continue to pretend that it's only users that matter anymore. Google has made
it clear that Google matters. And Google cares about themselves far more than
they care about their users. The only thing left to do is for Google to stop
pretending otherwise. They do that and a little tug here and there won't be so
uncomfortable.
November
6th 2007
PageRank of Google shifts as websites across the entire web
see their pagerank drop several notches including high quality authoritative
sites. This older style site was a PR5 now down to an embarrassing
PR1 which pushed me to start the web re-design process from scratch... which
has been very exciting laying out the roadmap to a common sense,
straightforward SEO plan of action at the clients pace and budget producing
results at every level. At any rate, the below article will give some
insight into the goings on of the Google PageRank lately. Follow the
article links for related additional news.
FIRST PLACE POSITIONING
8 Things We Learned About
Google PageRank
October 25th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor
Yesterday, Google lowered the Toolbar PageRank of many sites in many
different online verticals, in what may be a permanent or temporary message to
sites about selling links.
Google also lowered the Toolbar
PageRank of many sites which do not sell links, so the link argument may not
even be relevant. Until Google comes out with a statement on the changes in
PageRank, we may be beating this argument into the ground. Especially since
blog networks and major media sites were also included in the update, which
seems to be hand delivered from the Google gods.
However, there has been a lot of
coverage about Google PageRank over the last day, and if anything, the public
is becoming more educated on the separation between Google Toolbar’s PageRank
and how Google ranks a site.
Search Engine Journal is now a
PageRank 4 or a PageRank 6, depending on what datacenter your toolbar is
working off of. We were PageRank 7 for several years and have not, in my
opinion, done much to offset this PageRank.
We have hundreds of thousands of
incoming links and have never purchased a link to this site.
Here are 8 different notes about the
Google PageRank ‘update’ (this could be a PageRank hiccup) from yesterday”
1. PageRank is not an indicator of
Google traffic or Google Rankings.
Since May 2007, our Google search
referral traffic has doubled and now stands at 45% to 50% of our incoming daily
traffic. Search Engine Roundtable reports similar findings.
In fact, Search Engine Journal’s
traffic from Google Search has shown a sharp increase over the past month,
possibly due to some changes we have implemented (or the popularity of the
subjects we cover).
2. Firing a PageRank Warning Shot
Google is not the Internet, but is
all powerful. A drop in Google Toolbar page rating system leads to advertisers
pulling out of sites, link deals being broken, widespread fear of paid links
hurting site ranking and traffic.
In my opinion, by flipping the
switch on changing the PageRank of some sites, Google is trying to send a
message that they have the power to turn this search marketing industry over on
its head. But they have not issued a rankings change.
3. Target the Authorities, But Not
the Wrong Doers
Does lowering Search Engine
Journal’s PageRank to a 4 stop a multi-million dollar industry from shutting
down? No.
Do we deserve to be publicly
humiliated or targeted by Google for having a couple of links in our ad
section? No.
Are we still an authority site? Yes,
of course.
Google targeted the PageRank of high
profile sites in what is becoming a trickle down effect. ‘Engadget got hit, I
better stop before I get hit too.” Yeah, but hit for what?
4. PageRank stands for PR, or Public
Relations