Reuben Yau

If you’re going to try to promote a search conference, the worst possible way to promote it is to comment spam a blogger in the SEM community. Since I have math comment protection they had to have at least made some effort to fill out the form manually (unless there’s a workaround I didn’t know about).

The event talks about meeting gurus and learning the ins and outs of search engine marketing from the top experts. Do they think that comment spamming their event is an acceptable practice? Were they trying to get me to attend? I certainly never buy anything from a spammer (to discourage the practice).

What would you think if SMX or pubcon started comment spamming?

I’m going to hold this comment in my askimet bucket for now in case I decide to want to contact them or name them publically.

Hey Michael, here’s a nice meaty question you can get your chops around for your blank blog post :)

During your recent podcast with Jason Calacanis he asked if it was you that started the the negative campaign against him. So much these days is talked about reputation management from the standpoint of defending a company, but there’s not much info about the other side. So, if you were to start a negative PR campaign, or were trying to combat a reputation management campaign, what would you do?

I recently wrote a post with a glaring typo in the title – I wrote loose instead of lose (one of those late night posts). I hadn’t noticed until someone pointed it out to me. Since the post had already been cached by the search engines I thought I’d do the right thing and make the correction but also ensure it was all nice and search engine friendly. Here’s what I did:

1) Edited the title under Manage > Edit
2) Edited the post slug (you don’t have to do this if you don’t use the title as the post slug)
3) Added this line in the .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /top-5-ways-to-loose-rankings/

http://www.reubenyau.com/top-5-ways-to-lose-rankings/

(Note the code above needs to be all on one line, it’s wrapped here due to space constraints)

This will ensure that link popularity from the old URL is pushed on to the new one.

Through mybloglog, I came across the smashing magazine community and an article entitled Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It? The article does a very good job of explaining Google PageRank and has 15 points listed under how PageRank works and 13 factors impacting PageRank, but also does a good job of confusing content, quality and ranking factors with items that affect PageRank. I started writing a comment to the post, but quickly realized that it was going to be too long, so I decided to post my comments here:

Summary: How Does PageRank Work?
1. PageRank is only one of numerous methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance.Google uses over 200 signals to determine a page’s rank within the index. While PageRank is one of the signals, the PageRank calculation itself is not actually used to determine relevance or importance, that’s the job for other parts of the algorithm.

2. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google looks not only at the sheer volume of votes; among 100 other aspects it also analyzes the page that casts the vote.In the PageRank calculation there aren’t 100 other aspects, the formula calculates links, that’s it.

3. PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them – relevance and quality are important.Relevance and quality are not part of the PageRank calculation. You should try to obtain relevant, quality inbound links to your website, but judging relevance and quality is a content issue.

7. Bad incoming links don’t have impact on Page Rank.The PageRank calculation does not understand what is good and bad, it just calculates a value.

8. Page Rank considers site age, backlink relevancy and backlink duration.Site age and relevancy are ranking factors, although backlink duration is a factor. Just as you can accrue PR through links, it can also be diminished when links are removed.

14. Google calculates pages PRs once every few months.Actually it’s calculated all the time, but what we see in the Google Toolbar (or other online PR tools) is a snapshot in time which is updated every 3 months or so.

Summary: Impact on Google PageRank
1. Frequent content updates don’t improve Page Rank automatically.They don’t update them manually either. Content is not part of the PR calculation.

6. Wikipedia links don’t improve PageRank automatically (update: but pages which extract information from Wikipedia might improve PageRank).Content has nothing to do with the PageRank calculation. Creating great content will earn you links, but referencing Wikipedia here is misleading.

8. Efficient internal onsite linking has an impact on PageRank.I think this needs to be explained further. When developing a website, you should strive to make it search engine friendly and especially Google-friendly by ensuring that your site does a good job of linking to its internal pages. This passes on PageRank from page to page which can help keep internal pages out of the supplemental index. This is important because those pages aren’t spidered anywhere near as frequently and are indexed slightly differently than pages in the main index. So good internal linking has an affect on the PageRank of pages deeper in your site.

9. Related high ranked web-sites count stronger.Ideally you want to acquire links from pages with a high PageRank, but again, the reference to related sites (in terms of topicality) does not have an impact on PageRank. A page with high pagerank may actually pass you less if it has more links, because it’s spread too thin. A page with a PR of 4 could feasibly pass on more PR than a PR8 page depending on the number of links that are on the page.

10. The anchor text of a link is often far more important than whether it’s on a high PageRank pageThis is a ranking factor, not something specific to calculating PageRank. Again, the content or topicality has nothing to do with the PR calculation.

11. Links from and to high quality related sites have an impact on Page Rank.Topicality again, see previous comments.

Lee Odden wrote a post about how he thought search engine rankings are turning into a myth and that there’s much more involved than just monitoring search engine rankings. He also mentions monitoring visibility in blog, video and audio searches and that his firm stopped using Web Position Gold in 2003.

I posted a comment, but I guess it got caught up in his spam filters or something, so I thought I’d post here and hopefully get my opinion heard via a trackback.

Lee’s point is that with personalization, search engine rankings are turning into a myth because results are going to vary for each person performing the search. While this is true my tests show that the results do not change significantly enough for this to be called a myth.

Ranking reports are still beneficial because they give you a sense of whether your optimization techniques are working. Since personalization is now an issue, I use ranking reports as a guide and tell clients likewise. So many people are hung up on the rankings of a few key terms that they sometimes miss the big picture.

As far as blog, video and audio search and other “visibility” factors are concerned, for the SME clients I deal with, there’s so little content and such little demand in those spaces right now that it’s not worth it for them to invest their time in writing a blog, or creating other content. As a marketing consultant that keeps business through showing proven sales results, I have to think about my clients’ best interests as far as resource allocation, so advising them to blindly follow the latest trend isn’t always in their best interests.

As far as calling search engine rankings a myth, I think that’s taking it a little too far, they aren’t (yet) on par with the myth of search engine submissions.

I really enjoyed this post by donna, so I thought I’d put together my own favorite five, based on what I’ve seen over the years:

1) Renaming pages or moving them to a different directory location without putting in 301 redirects (this is by far the most common and worst of all mistakes)

2) URL spamming (by choice or by accident)

3) Redesigned website/homepage with a flash intro page – but it looks so cool!

4) Relying too heavily on one type of inbound link (playing the cat and mouse game with Google)

5) Moved to a new webhost and forgot to also move the robots.txt and/or .htaccess files.

Many of these items could easily be avoided if the website owner retained the services of an online marketing consultant.

Matt Cutts [post] requested that people use their account in the webmaster central console to report sites that are selling links. This kicked off a storm, among the webmasters and SEO community, which was bound to happen. Here are a few of my thoughts about this whole paid link issue.

It’s Just The Next Step
Over the past few years we’ve seen all kinds of methods used to try and artificially inflate a site’s PageRank, but every step of the way Google has been making updates to discount these methods, which have included:

1) Link farms
2) Reciprocal links
3) 3 way links
4) Directories

There may be others, but these have been the most obvious methods tackled.

This Isn’t New
Matt warned about paying for links specifically for PageRank purposes back in September 2005. In that post he says:
Google does consider buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.

I talked to my business partner about it and the only thing that really came out of our conversation was how they would detect paid links and how aggressive the algo would become. Our concern is that if they turned up the wick too high it would catch valid, non paid links.

Although being caught in the cross fire and being wrongly identified as buying or selling text links wouldn’t be fun for myself or any of my clients, I do think that Google will be stepping very cautiously on this issue.

People Have Been Asking For This
One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically

Redirects Pass PageRank
The suggested guidelines for anyone selling links is to use the rel=nofollow attribute, which prevents link popularity from being passed on, or to use a redirect script, which is Disallowed in the robots.txt file. Something which some people may not have picked up on, is that the latter method actually confirms that redirect scripts actually do pass on link popularity.

Affiliate Links
Some people are stretching the definition to include affiliate links or other links which are given through some means of compensation. Remember Google’s goal is to identify sites that sell links for PR. Affiliate links are not put in place to artificially inflate PR, infact by their very nature, they don’t do that because most often they aren’t text links with a key phrase as the link text. The link either goes through a 3rd party tracking script or includes some affiliate id, which is not ideal for PR inflating.

But Google Sells Links – It’s Hypocritical!
Yes they do, but those links are not intended to artificially inflate a site’s PageRank, they’re designed to send traffic.

Doesn’t Google Have the Resources To Do This?
Yes of course they do, but what better way to gather many examples, than from people in the field who are monitoring their competitors. Let’s face it, many people do a lot worse than reporting a bit of paid link spam.

You Democrats Can’t Have It Both Ways!
1) At pubcon 2006 Matt Cutts did a red/blue poll and the overwhelming majority were blue.
2) People complain that Digg.com isn’t being democratic when it pulls certain stories
3) Since Al Gore invented the internet (yeah I know… ) it should be a democratic state right? ;-)

But you complain when Google wants to put a stop to sites buying their way up instead of obtaining links based on their merit?

So You Like What Google Is Doing?
Yes, I love it. I have even sent in my own paid link spam report. It levels the playing field and hopefully gets rid of a lot of junk. I want to see quality content in the SERPs and on sites I visit – all those obvious paid links don’t add any value to me reading the site and I never click on them.

Obviously an April fools joke… I mean look at all the references to known SEO/marketing people…

scbl – Robert Scoble?
davenator – David Naylor?
RandomFish – Randfish?
Z-man – G man?
Shchoeoe+npMMo – Shoemoney?

You need to do better than that Matt :)

Here’s a screenshot for prosperity:

Here’s a very common theory I come across all the time: “If I have great organic rankings, I can save money by turning off pay per click listings for the same terms”.

This reasoning is only valid if you’re bidding on keywords with poor ROI, or your campaigns are not properly optimized. The one thing that people often overlook is that if you’re paying $100 to get $5000 in business and you’re making say $500 profit, why would you cut that? By cutting advertising with a positive ROI, you’re actually hurting your revenue and profit!

Math aside, here are a few more reasons why it’s good to buy sponsored listings, even if you rank number 1 for a specific term.

1) You are showing the audience that you are serious about acquiring traffic – it shows that you have a strong selling intent.

2) It implies market dominance

3) You provide 2 places (sometimes 3 on Yahoo) where a user can find a link to your website

4) You eliminate one of the sites you’re competing with

5) It caters to both sets of audiences, those who prefer organic, and those who prefer sponsored listings

6) It enables you to use the PPC ad copy to compliment your organic listing, by promoting special offers, trust, or unique selling points

7) Even if your PPC ROI breaks even, you’ve just acquired another customer and increased your marketshare

Edit (3/28/07):
A recent post by Rob Garner of Search Insider: Yes, Co-managed PPC And SEO Campaigns Work also backs up my experiences and proves that this strategy can work very well.

When appearing in both natural and paid search for the same keyword impression, clicks lifted 92 percent, actions lifted 45percent, orders lifted 45 percent, page views lifted 44 percent, visitors increased by 41 percent, and time on site increased by 40 percent.

The results of an iCrossing study found that organic listings actually boost the performance of PPC campaigns significantly, which really emphasizes the point that when you have both an organic and PPC listing on one page, the PPC better have positive ROI.

More Thoughts:

• Mixing Organic SEO and Pay Per Click Marketing by Aaron Wall
• PPC & Organic SEO by Intrapromote
• PPC VS Orqanic SEO by ebrandmarketing.com
• PPC vs Organic Ranks Thread on Seochat.com
• How Paid SEM Helps Organic Search Optimization by Clickz
• PPC VS Organic Search Thread on Searchengineforums.com
• Organic SEO vs. PPC Advertising by WebProNews

Ecommerce websites are usually database driven and use templates to generate the website. There are usually 3 or 4 levels to the site structure, as well as informational and miscellaneous pages. If you’re not careful, your website can quickly disappear into the supplemental index and you will have a hard time getting anything other than a few of your pages ranked. I’ve outlined some basic search engine optimization tips for a typical small to medium sized ecommerce website.

1) Homepage

Optimize for your most important and broadest phrases – stick to your top sellers, or your most profitable items. If you’re a brick and mortar store, also ensure that you publish your store’s physical location or mailing address and local phone number for local search. If you’re a local supplier of dog food in Dallas, then you could use:

<title>ACME Company - Dog Food Supplier Dallas, TX</title>

This is your shop window, so just like the big department stores do in real life, make sure you include small windows into the various departments within the website. Provide text links directly into those categories surrounded by appropriate text. Writing in short paragraphs with embedded text links is more effective than just a list of links.

2) Main Category Page

Target the brand names and plural versions of products. Make sure you describe the products that can be found in this department or category and include text links to them, and/or their subcategories within the first few paragraphs.

3) Subcategory Page

Here you can go into more detail about the products in your target keywords. Include size or material options to go for those valuable 3, 4 and 5 word search phrases.

4) Product Detail Page

These are some of the most important pages on your website because they’re typically the start of the funnel or shopping cart and users entering your website on these specific pages tend to convert very well since they will have entered very specific search criteria.

Since the category pages are targeting the plural versions, use these pages to target the singular of the product and if appropriate include specific model numbers. If there are related products or accessories (even in different departments) feel free to link to those pages too.

Make sure your internal linking structure is both hierarchical and lateral. Make sure that the programmers don’t trap you into a site with only a hierarchical linking structure.

Variable Substitution
In many cases there will be one template used to generate all the product detail pages. If your CMS or programming team allows, use variables to populate these HTML elements, for example:

<title>{brand} {model} - {model number}</title>

If your company differentiates itself by price, then you can use:

<title>Cheap {brand} {model} - {model number}</title>

The meta description tag can also be written out with variable substitution in the same way. This is a really effective way of optimizing thousands of product detail pages with unique tags in one go and certainly beats writing each one by hand. The most important page elements you’ll want to address using this method are the title, meta description and H1 tags.

Crafting the H1 tag.
Keep it short and concise with the product name and model number. Resist the urge to include calls to action – this is not the place, there’s plenty of opportunity elsewhere on the page to entice users onto the next step.

Unique Product Descriptions
If you take a data feed from a manufacturer or supplier, try to rewrite the product descriptions. If you haven’t already do this, then take your top 10 products and rewrite those, then move on down the line. Sometimes the manufacturer’s product descriptions are filled with so much technical specification information and technical jargon that the keywords containing the product name, or type/category of product are missing completely!

Try to be verbose in your descriptions. It’s important to ensure that the copy to html ratio is in the right proportion. Search engines do not like pages with lots of template HTML code and a very short descriptions. Wherever possible, try to ensure that your product descriptions and body copy definitely outweighs the template HTML code.

By doing these few things you will ensure that every product detail page is unique, which will help to avoid those pages dropping into the supplemental index.

5) Informational Pages

For certain types of products you can target “how to” type phrases or maintenance tips. Ensure that whenever you talk about a product type, or a specific model, that you link to the appropriate category or product detail page using the model name as the link text.

6) Misc Pages

The 4 most important pages here are:

a) About Us
Talk about your company history, perhaps some customer testimonials and benefits of using your company. Perhaps you have some experts on your payroll that you want to show off.

b) Contact Us
Use your company name or primary product/service and your physical location again in the title tag and meta description. Include as much contact info as you can, the full mailing address, toll free and local telephone numbers are especially important. Make sure you write out the address in a simple text format so it’s easy for the search engine to decipher. For instance use line breaks or commas as word separators not fancy blob or circle characters. It may look cool, but the object here is to ensure that the search engine can recognise the address for local search.

You may also want to include payment methods accepted and hours of operation. If you have multiple locations, be sure to list them all. You may also want to link to one of the popular mapping services for driving directions.

c) Privacy Policy
If you want to become a member of the Better Business Bureau or TRUSTe, you will need a privacy policy. Make sure you include the date it was last updated and contact information specifically for questions regarding privacy.

d) Sitemap
Most often this is one page which lists every page on your website, but if you have a large shopping cart with hundreds or thousands of products, it’s not practical to list them all. In this case, list the main categories and use sub pages for each section. Try to limit the number of links to 100 or less per sitemap page.

Other pages will cover topics such as ordering info, customer service, shipping and return policies, sizing charts, privacy policy and frequently asked questions. There’s not much effective optimization that can be done on these pages, so make the title and meta description tags functional and concise.

Where To Put Your Company Name

If you have a fairly new website, then you’ll need to include the company name in the title tag of the homepage. Never put your company name in the title tag on every page, it’s simply a waste of characters. Most search engines only display up to approximately 60 words in the results, so if you have a long company name, you may inadvertently have your juicy model names and numbers truncated.

If your website is well established, then you may not even need to have the company name listed in any title tags, as there will be enough links pointing to your website with your company name in the anchor text to offset the need to place it within the title tag. And since your website is established, users will recognize your company in the website address after the snippet.