Archive for the ‘SEOmoz’ Category

Posted by Dr. Pete

Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google’s argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?

Unraveling Search Intent

One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It’s nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.

Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":

1. "itunes"
2. "facebook"
3. "youtube"
4. "apple"
5. "best buy"
6. "apple store"
7. "google"
8. "craigslist"
9. "itunes download"

Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn’t get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don’t succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there’s also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.

Bing Search Funnel

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:

Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:

1. "bestbuy"
2. "ebay"
3. "ipod"
4. "dell"
5. "appleipod"
6. "circuitcity"
7. "apple vacations"
8. "apple.com"
9. "sony"
10. "target"

Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.

The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown’s Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn’t want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

What Do We Want?

Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there’s a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it’s obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.

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Posted by jennita

Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.

Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.

1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?

At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.

How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they’re on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.

But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn’t only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.

This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let’s see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.

Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn’t send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.

These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!

2. Don’t forget about mobile

My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.

Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!

I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools.

That’s 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.

3.    “UGC is content that rocks”

That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.

Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.

In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.

Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!

The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions.

The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!

4.    Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people

This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.

For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.

There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.

Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there’s no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let’s motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.

Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we’re currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?

5.    Public Relations, the other PR

Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!

She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you’ve optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:

• Use a social media newsroom like PRESSfeed
• Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
• Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
• Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
• Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
• Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
• Look at LinkedIn and Facebook

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn’t spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the… what?!

One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I’m stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.

This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?

Final Takeaways and Actions

1. Don’t forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
2. What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can’t?
3. UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
4. Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
5. Public Relations is social now, so get on it.

This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we’re completely sold out!

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Posted by randfish

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it’s fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft’s Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it’s a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that’s now unavailable.

While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results.

For the query above, Yahoo! previously showed pages that pointed to any page on SEOmoz.org from sites with the .edu TLD extension (these now return no results)
_

Webmasters and marketers will no longer be able to use advanced parameters on link: and linkdomain: searches such as inurl, intitle, site, etc. breaking many data sources for software tools and limiting link research abilities. However, there are several worthwhile solutions/replacements, including tools from SEOmoz (though I’ll also cover a few others).

#1 – Linkscape Advanced Reports

SEOmoz PRO members now have unlimited access to Linkscape advanced reports, which can apply filters through the UI in much the same way one could with Yahoo! link searches.

Using the filters and search capabilities, I can add nearly all of the filters previously possible through Yahoo!, and many others unique to Linkscape.
_

This tool is available at www.seomoz.org/linkscape

#2 – OpenSiteExplorer CSV Exports

Another methodology without quite as many bells and whistles, is to use Open Site Explorer. While Linkscape offers filtering right inside the interface, Open Site Explorer is built for speed, meaning you can see lots of links, but only in the views directly ported from our API. To get into the deep filtering, you’ll need to use the CSV export + Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet program).

The filters in OSE are more limited than Linkscape, but most reports take <10 seconds to generate
_

When I export the results to CSV and open in Microsoft Excel, I can easily filter for the .edu links (or any other modifier I’m interested in). OSE also shows up to 10,000 links per report vs. Linkscape’s 3,000.

Using the "find" command in Excel is the simplest methodology, but you can do all sorts of awesome filtering using more advanced techniques
_

This tool is available at www.opensiteexplorer.org

#3 – Majestic SEO

A UK-based search engine built using distributed crawlers, MJ-12, offers an SEO tool for backlink research. The index varies slightly to how major search engines and Linkscape build – instead of new indices built from regular crawls, MJ-12 adds new links and pages as they’re discovered to an ongoing index. This means a much larger dataset, but not always the same level of freshness and limited de-duplication/canonicalization. However, many SEOs like this project a lot, and MJ-12 enables the same filtering available in Linkscape:

Many cool filters and ordering are available via MJ’s tool and reports typically return fairly quickly
_

This tool is available at www.majesticseo.com

#4 – Yahoo! Site Explorer CSV Exports

Just as CSV exports from Open Site Explorer can enable link searching, so too can exports from Yahoo! ‘s Site Explorer. The big limitation is the 1,000 link limit (1/3rd that of Linkscape and 1/10th that of Open Site Explorer). Previously, SEOs would use modified queries to make requests and get more link data from Yahoo!, but with this switch, the only remaining option is to request links for many pages on a single domain to help get a better sense of sites with greater than 1,000 external links.

The "Export first 1000 results to TSV" button + Excel filtering option enables marketers to do research, but is limited in quantity
_

This tool is available at search.siteexplorer.yahoo.com

#5 – The SEOmoz API

For those with some programming skills, SEOmoz offers a free API for link data with up to 1 million calls per month, as well as a larger, full featured link data API starting at $500/month. This is the same API that powers both the Linkscape tool and Open Site Explorer, as well as integrations with Conductor, Hubspot, Flippa, Brightedge and many others.

The APIWiki offers lots of information and examples on how to make calls to the service and integrate with your own softare or practices.
_

This API is available at www.seomoz.org/api

#6 – Other possibilities

In addition to these sources, there are a few other options, albeit with less fully functional or open systems. These include:

• Google’s Webmaster Tools (which enables you to export links, but only for sites you own/control)
• Bing’s Webmaster Tools (with similar limitations, and fewer link options)
• Exalead (a European search engine with limited link command functionality)
• Blekko (a new search engine with a comparatively small index, but interesting link functions – though it’s still in private beta)
• Alexa (which contains a limited set of link data for some sites)

Other sources may yet emerge, and certainly players like Majestic and SEOmoz are working hard to improve their coverage, quality and functionality. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the link research landscape – hopefully Bing is working on something valuable to help replace this functionality and to serve up data when Yahoo! Site Explorer is also retired (currently scheduled for 2012).

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Posted by Suzzicks

When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer.  You can click on a phone number to place a phone call, click on a map to get walking directions, click on a song to buy it or play it, and you can even click on an app to download it directly to your phone from the search results.

Interactive and fun, but so far, it is hard to predict when you will get a certain type of Universal Result and when you won’t, and there have been lots of major algorithm tweaks with little attention or fanfare. For example, I have screen shots taken in the past year comparing the search ‘Britney Spears’ on an iPhone and a traditional computer. The traditional computer had music downloads near the very top of the page, but the iPhone didn’t. Why? The results weren’t iTunes results, so they wouldn’t have worked on the phone – so there was no need to rank them. (Kind’a cool!)

Last week, the Verizon/Google coalition got lots of press about a proposal that appears to fly in the face of basic Network Neutrality tenants that Google has supported for a long time. Believe it or not, this has been something on my mind for a long time, because the carriers are in-fact impacting search results, and have been for a long time (2008 interview about Mobile Network Neutrality – starting at 3:30 m:s). All of the major mobile carriers have mobile portals that they use as ‘start’ pages for web access on the phones that they sell. These ‘start’ pages of-course, include a search box, and it usually includes a logo of one of the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. It is definitely much smaller in scale, but to me, this has always seemed a bit … less than neutral, and possibly even … ‘evil.’ Search engines broker deals directly with carriers and handset manufacturers to secure pre-loaded placement on phones.

Carriers Universal Search Results:

I like to say that the Universal Triggers in mobile search seem to be more erratic, and sometimes on a hair-trigger. It is rare that there will be just one type of Universal Result in a mobile SERP – it appears to usually be an all or nothing proposition.

But, speaking of propositions, did you know that Google is doing deals with carriers to provide their on-deck search? It is true that there are financial agreements between search engines (not just Google) and both mobile phone carrier companies (ex: T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) and handset manufacturers (ex: Samsung , LG, iPhone, etc.) The search engine agrees to provide a search engine for the default web home page included on the phone. These are generally branded with the name & logo of the search engine, so most people would think that they provide the same results as if they were searching from Google.com or Google.com/m but THEY DON’T. While the results appear to be based on the existing algorithm, searches performed from these start-pages will give different results that appear to preference content from the carrier or handset manufacturer.

To see how this works, go to T-mobile’s start page – http://home.web2go.com and search for ‘poker.’ This is a very competitive search in the traditional and mobile SEO space, but you will find that, instead of the gaming websites and news sites, one of the top ranking results Lady Gaga ring tones for the song ‘PokerFace from T-mobile. (This test works on an iPhone too, as long as you start from the web2go home page). Other than that, the results are largely the same as normal mobile web search that starts from Google.com or Google.com/m. (This has been happening with the carriers for a long time – you just might have missed it!)

If you knew that, (I’m guessing you didn’t), here is something you probably didn’t know: T-mobile sets a cookie, SO now that you have done a search that started from http://home.web2go.com, any time T-Mobile has a universal result that they would like included in your SERP, it will be, unless you clear your cookies, even if you just start from Google.com or Google.com/m. (Those jerks!) You can see this passed in the search string.

When the cookie is there, it looks like this: http://www.google.com/m/search?client=ms-hms-tmobile-wow-us&channel=portal&q=Poker

When the cookie is not there, it looks like this: http://www.google.com/m/search?q=poker&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari

Carriers Impacting Mobile SEO

In reality, many people will assign new home pages on their phones, and eventually clear their cookies, but not everyone. Many people are still not web-savvy enough to change their ‘start’ page on a computer, much less a mobile phone. The carrier and Carrier Universal Search Results are a new variable that most SEO’s have never had to deal with. But they have the same impact as any other type of Universal search result; pushing other listings down below the fold. It will be hard to anticipate how many people are getting the carrier-specific Universal results in their search results, and how much mobile traffic those results will take from our listings.

This, like personalization and localization, makes predicting mobile search results accurately almost impossible.  None of the search engines have been particularly open about the carrier-deals that they have established, and the carriers are rarely clear or opened about how to get content indexed on their portals. The one thing you can be sure about though, is that these deals were not made for free, and the carriers are paying to have their content indexed and included differently than other organic results.

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Posted by willcritchlow

I’d like to invite you to the London Pro SEO seminar we are running on the 25th and 26th October.

With a 98% satisfaction rating and 95% of attendees recommending it to others, we were blown away by the positive feedback we received last year. Seasoned pros like Rob from Easynet Connect called it the "highlight of the year" and we have plenty more where that came from (see for example: "a must attend event for any SEO professional" –PricewaterhouseCoopers). This year we are aiming to put together something even better.

Just like last year, we expect it to sell out, so if you are already sold on coming, I would recommend booking now.

The Details:
Where: The Congress Centre in London’s West End
When: October 25th and 26th
Price: £699 +VAT
(plus optional super-exclusive breakfast with the speakers @ £149 <– this is very nearly sold out so be super-quick if you want to come to this)
Book: now!

If you are an SEOmoz PRO member, you can get access to special pricing by using the code in the discount store – making it a steal at £499 +VAT / person.

Get your ticket now!

If you haven’t been before and don’t know anyone who has, then I figure I need to do a little more to convince you. Here are three big reasons to come:

#1: just look at this schedule

The full schedule (note: of course with two months to go, it’s possible some of the details of this could change) will look something like this:

#2 See Rand get whupped (again)^(*)

One of the things we do to get the quality as high as possible is to look at the list of subjects, pick the subject that we thought might be hard to make interesting but that we felt was important to cover and make it a presentation-off (hence the Reputation Management session). By making it competitive, we make sure we put in twice as much effort.

Rand and I have now gone head to head twice. The first time I beat Rand, he helped me make the announcement to a packed lecture hall that my first child was on the way by giving me a present of a babygro saying "my dad beat Rand Fishkin":

My daughter loves wearing it and wore it when she met Rand for the first time some months later:

^(*) yeah, I’m 2-0, but only in London – the first US test comes in just over a week at the Seattle seminar. I’m nowhere near as confident about either of them as my bluster makes it sound.

#3 The focus on adding value for experts

If you feel like you know most of the stuff being said at most conferences (or could even give most of the presentations), then the Pro seminar is for you. I learnt loads last year and envisage learning even more this year. I encourage our speakers (none of whom are slouches when it comes to this stuff) to do new research, learn new things and come up with interesting stuff to say that no-one has heard before.

I’m pretty sure that people who came last year will back me up on this in the comments below.

Bonus #4 Networking and fun

Exclusive breakfast with the speakers (if you book early enough), a party for everyone at The Circus (no, not clowns on unicycles – seriously – check out their photo gallery), no expo hall, no multiple tracks, loads of chances to pick the brains of the top minds in SEO – both speakers and attendees.

Were you paying attention? Here’s the details again.

The Details:
Where: The Congress Centre in London’s West End
When: October 25th and 26th
Price: £699 +VAT
(plus optional super-exclusive breakfast with the speakers @ £149 <– this is very nearly sold out so be super-quick if you want to come to this)
Book: now!

If you are an SEOmoz PRO member, you can get access to special pricing by using the code in the discount store – making it a steal at £499 +VAT / person.

Get your ticket now!

A big part of the value of the event is the quality of the other attendees you get to meet, so if you’re coming, please do spread the word (why not start with Twitter!). I hope to see you there.

If you can’t make it out to London, I understand that there are still a handful of tickets available for the Seattle seminar where both Tom and I will be speaking in a little over a week. We’re in town for almost a week so hopefully we’ll see some of the rest of you there.

In the meantime, normal service will be resumed with some less promotional posts

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Posted by Danny Dover

 In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.

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Hi, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO.
Today, I’m going to try to tackle answering the hard SEO questions. I
don’t have them all on this list, so feel free to ask me other ones below
in the comments. These are the ones that I came up with, so I’m going to
try my best to answer these for you.

Number one. I get this one a lot and it’s kind of awkward. Why don’t you
rank number one for SEO? Right? If I’m in SEO and I’m trying to sell my
services to somebody, why do I not rank number one for the service that I
claim to do? This one is kind of awkward, actually. Right? I probably
should rank number one for one. Awkward turtle, if you’ve ever seen this.
It’s awkward. Okay. The reason, and we’ve talked about this internally at
SEOmoz, the reason we think we don’t rank number one for it is that the
name SEOmoz is being combined when searching to see it, as opposed to Aaron
Wall’s website, SEO Book, has two words that search engines know about, SEO
and book. So he gets credit for both of those every time he gets a link
saying SEO Book, right? Whereas with SEOmoz, we only get credit for the
word SEOmoz.

There’s some other things that go into this as well. QDF algorithm. QDF
is query deserves freshness algorithm, which means new information we’ll
sometimes write at the top. We see this with some smaller companies.
There’s a lot of geolocation stuff that goes on. We’ll rank better in the
United States than we do in the UK, things like that. Frankly, what it
comes down to is that we do not have the best website optimized for just
the term SEO. We’re trying to rank for other things. SEO tools, we’re
trying to rank for learning SEO, that kind of thing. My way to answer this
to potential clients and other people is just be completely honest with
them. Like, "Yeah, we put a lot of thought in this and smart question.
Here’s the reason that we think it was." It was just the stuff that I
covered.

Number two. How can you do SEO if you don’t actually work for a search
engine? This one is similar to the one above. I do not work for Google.
I do not work for Bing. I have never read any of the code that they’ve
written to do their search engine algorithms. But I have put a lot of
thought, and more importantly, and actually the only important part is that
I have practiced this a lot. I have created a lot of websites, and I’ve
changed variables on them to figure out what helps rank better. I’ve also
relied on people who are much smarter than myself, so other SEOs in the
industry. I have kept abreast of the news. So there’s Search Engine Land,
for example. There’s lots of news things where they talk to people who do
work at Google and Bing and get their information about what they’re trying
to spread. I also learn from conferences, and I learn from other people
who are successful at SEO and are willing to share their tactics or their
strategies with me. In those ways, I have been able to learn SEO even
though I don’t work at the search engines.

Number three. Is Company XYZ a Google killer? This comes up, I’d say,
once every other month. So is it Wolfram Alpha or is it Bing or is it
Facebook? Are any of these companies Google killers? The answer I usually
give is, "I don’t know, but probably not." Google’s extremely good at what
it does, being a search engine. Right? The thing that I think eventually
will kill Google will be something that looks absolutely nothing like
Google at all. It’ll be a completely different way of searching the
Internet or maybe searching something else. Right? Maybe more like Star
Trek or Star Wars, where you just talk into thin air and then an answer
comes to you on some beautiful girl on a screen that came out of nothing.
I’m hoping for that to happen soon actually. But what will kill Google? I
don’t know, but I bet it will not look like anything we’ve seen today, my
best guess.

Facebook does have an edge being able to make search results that are very,
very customized to your friends. If I’m looking for what’s the best TV,
I’m going to care about what Best Buy has to say, which is how Google
currently works, right, with these leaders in the industry. But I also
care about what my friends think. Maybe a better example is clothes,
right? What is the best shirt for me to buy? Target might be able to tell
me something or Abercrombie & Fitch or somebody else, but what I really
probably care about is the other people in my social network, what they
think. Facebook has an example there, but we’ll see if they’re a Google
killer. My guess is probably not.

Number four. This one’s tough. Why don’t I just buy links? A lot of
times it’s a lot easier and, quite frankly, buying links in some cases does
work. But when you’re doing that, you’re betting against the very, very
small people at the search engines who are working on algorithms to detect
paid links. So while it can work in some cases, my advice is not to do it
just because it is not a good long-term strategy. I’d much rather use that
same money and buy content or pay writers or pay people who are likely be
able to create links for themselves. This, I just feel, is a much better
long-term strategy. This is what we usually recommend at SEOmoz is not to
buy links but instead put it into other strategies that will work better
long term.

Number five. Danny, will you marry me? No. But if you have a hotter
sister, let me know.

Number six. How do I increase my PageRank? This one I usually break into
two areas. First, I break down PageRank. The PageRank that we normally
see in PageRank toolbar, I just don’t think it’s very helpful at all. The
exception to that is if it’s zero. If it’s zero, it means you have a
penalty or you haven’t been crawled yet. In both those cases, you need to
figure out what’s going on. The other part is how do I increase my
PageRank? If the person asking this question is just really relying on the
fact that PageRank is still important, the way to do it is to get more
links. If they’re going to ask a silly question, it’s okay to give them a
silly answer. The way to increase PageRank, even though in my opinion it’s
not important, is to gain more links.

That’s all the time I got here. I appreciate all of you paying attention.
I will talk to you next week. Thank you very much. Bye.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!

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Posted by MikeCP

There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.

To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of $2,000 and/or 60 hours. This isn’t to say that one needs $2,000 to build links, but for the purpose of this article it helps to keep things in perspective. And for those big business readers out there, I’m sure you could just ratchet up the investment by whatever order of magnitude you’d like.

The Budget is Set

So let’s imagine your client or boss (if you’re in-house) has promised to commit some time and money into a link building campaign. Huzzah! Finding yourself in a position to invest in SEO both financially and resourcefully is a great place to be, and these opportunities don’t grow on trees. So it’s tremendously important that this sum of money (and time) is invested wisely and provides a return, or else that "crazy SEO wizardry" might never make its way into the company budget again.

♫ If I had $2,000…I would send Matt Cutts some flowers ♫

So how best to go about spending this money? That, of course, depends on a lot. There are different kinds of link building strategies for different kinds of businesses in different stages of their SEO development. Answering some of the following questions may help with the "Who am I?" questions your website is surely asking itself (your-site.com/existential-crisis).

1. Have we done any link building in the past? In other words, how low are the "low hanging fruit"?
2. What is a reasonable goal here? Increasing overall domain authority and maybe increasing long tail traffic? Or boosting a specific page in the SERPs?
3. How does the competition stack up? How much work needs to be done to overtake the competition?

Directory Submissions

We COULD invest $2,000 pretty easily with directory submissions and it wouldn’t have to take anymore than 5 hours. The better strategy would be to invest a bit more time into the research phase before throwing $2,000 into a bunch of spammy directories.

Some of the big paid directories are a given; Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com and JoeAnt have established themselves as strong, link juice-passing options. Assuming our web site is not found in any of these directories we’re looking at almost $800 already, and that isn’t considering the annual renewal cost of most of these top-tier directories. This leaves us with around $1000 for submissions to niche and local directories that are deemed worthwhile; Rand discussed the litmus test for identifying these worthwhile directories in a recent Whiteboard Friday.

Who should do it?

In most cases, anyone that is not currently listed in the top-tier directories should make the investment. You do NOT want to be submitting to directories if your site is of low quality, as your site could be declined and you won’t get that money back.

Investing in directories is a good idea early, but I wouldn’t suggest shelling out $2,000 in directories and declaring "mission accomplished". The better plan would to be to submit to paid directories slowly over the course of a few months, supplementing directory submissions with some more creative link building strategies. Also, don’t forget that a sudden spike in backlinks followed by a lull of no new links is sure to set off a red flag or two.

Outreach (PR for links)

Outreach can be an inexpensive undertaking in terms of cash spent, but the real cost is in the time it takes to do it right. Commissioning under-worked call center staff or interns to call or email relevant site owners can be a great use of "found" time to generate links, but they’ll still need some guidance. I find its a great idea to craft a quick "SEO 101" document, including bits about how search engines value links, anchor text, and other best practices. You might do well to give a primer on how to quickly evaluate a potential linking partner (say, only target sites with a domain authority over 55?), so your minions don’t go wasting their time on spammy worthless links.

Where outreach can get costly is in offering products, discounts, or other financial incentives to acquire links. Of course, we’re getting a bit close to grey-hat SEO here, but is there really anything wrong with offering free product samples to generate interest? I suppose the white-hat method of product samples/discounts/etc. is to not require a link back, but if you ask me this is where the whole distinction gets kind of silly.

Can you spot the difference? Regardless, I am infinitely clever.

Your odds of acquiring links through outreach get a lot better when samples or other incentives are involved. B2B? No problem. Incentives could include a free trial, a demo or white paper. If you do your homework, you’ll know who to approach to make sure your not just giving away hundreds of dollars of product without any hope of acquiring new customers.

Your overall outreach costs could get a bit fuzzy, and measuring a return will require some serious tracking in most cases. Some tracking ideas include:

• Utilizing separate coupon codes for every outreach target
• Sending visitors to a mini-site, landing page, or tracking URL
• Making use of custom variables in Google Analytics to track the long term value of the campaign

Who should do it?

There’s not much of a disadvantage in spreading the good word of your company around via public relations, so really every business should do it. Your SEO mileage may vary, however, if your business’s website is not finished, a complete mess, or an otherwise unattractive linking partner. No matter how attractive your pitch, no one will want to link to a one-page or "coming soon" site. 

No matter what, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got all your tracking ducks in a row, so that you can report good things to the big boss (wo)man.

"But what’s the lifetime value?!"

Buying Links

Buying links is sort of like the elephant in the room. In one hand, we have 2,000 dollars, in the other, we have a mouse that can easily point its way off to a link broker network. We can spend 10 hours max and lock down $2,000 worth of links and have them all live by COB. Do those links lead to better rankings? They might. BUT! The likelihood of these links ceasing to pass value in the near future is extremely high.

Who should do it?

Almost no one. Investing $2,000 into paid links, especially from a link broker, is not liable to provide a long-term return on that investment. While I agree with Rand in his post about the somewhat discouraging amount of webspam making its way into the index, the optimist in me is hoping Google’s just working on some super spam detector and soon all the white-hats will be rewarded.

Linkbait/viral marketing

Call it what you will, but the name of the game here is content. Whether its a blog post, an infographic, a widget, a video, a funny 404 page, a comic, and so on, if its done well, there’s no greater way to invest in link building.

There are tons of great examples of linkbait that have cost less than $2,000, but the most recent campaign that went hot was the whiteboard HOPA girl. After conceptualizing the project, theChive put out a job listing for a "girl next door" model at a rate of $400 per day. Even if the shoot took 2 days, theChive probably paid no more than $1,000 to make it happen.

This image brought to you by Comic Sans™.

Who should do it?

Most anyone. With a great idea, $2,000 is plenty of money to build some great links via content marketing. Of course, the important part is the great idea. This is where your 60 hour allotment of time may come in handy for brainstorming. If the idea can’t be executed in-house, tap your network for a good resource to help, or use services like oDesk, guru, and eLance to find a freelancer.

One caveat here is that your link building campaign can only go as far as your (social) network will take it. Before hitting "publish", make sure you’ve got a good seed of retweeters, rebloggers, and likers standing by. 

Reporting Your Results

This is arguably the most important part of your SEO campaign! Keep an eye on your website’s organic traffic and mark any upward trends. Can this be attributed back to your link building campaign? If so, this is no time to be shy.

Best of luck!

And now a quick introduction! My name is Mike Pantoliano and I work for Distilled in the US. I would love your feedback on my first post and I hope you get something from it! Follow me on Twitter @MikeCP because my complaining about having to wear shoes is absolutely vital to your SEO success.

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Posted by randfish

For the past few years, I’ve given numerous presentations introducing SEO to new audiences of marketers, engineers and executives. With the end of SEOmoz’s consulting business this past January and the completion of our final contract obligations this Spring, I thought it would be wise to share the 190+ page deck to hopefully help those of you who are tasked with introducing SEO to your companies, agencies and colleagues.

The deck is updated as of August 2010, but I hope to update it again in the future. Along with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, this resource should help those seeking to learn SEO or catch up on key points from the past few years.

You can find the download link via Slidesare here (I normally use Scribd, but couldn’t get it to display properly in all browsers, so switched).

Feel free to use it or any elements inside. We always appreciate attribution, but even if you can’t (which I understand happens), go ahead and make use of it or the images/contents. We love to introduce new people to the magical world of SEO, and if this resource can be of help, it’s done its job!

p.s. We’ve been murmuring about a BIG launch for SEOmoz coming up in the next couple weeks. Launch day is still a bit up in the air, but should be nailed down in the next few days, at which point we’ll share a bit more. The new web app has proven pretty popular, and folks here are working many, many overtime hours to keep those reports running smoothly and fixing bugs (a big thanks to everyone who’s sent us feedback so far!).

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Some of you know that I spend a lot of time behind the scenes here on Pro Q&A. One of the challenges of Q&A is that we often have to tackle complex problems in a very short amount of time – we might have 10-15 minutes to solve an issue like "Why isn’t my page showing up on Google?" with no access to internal data, server-side code, etc.

Of course, I’d never suggest you try to solve your own SEO problems in just 10 minutes, but it’s amazing what you can do when you’re forced to really make your time count. I’d like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a "missing" page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including:

• Finding out why a page isn’t getting indexed
• Discovering why a page isn’t ranking
• Determining if a page has been penalized
• Spotting duplicate content problems

I’ll break the 10 minutes down, minute by minute (give or take). The mini-clock on each item shows you the elapsed time, for real-time drama.

 0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexed

Always start at the beginning – is your page really missing? Although it sometimes gets a bad rap for accuracy (mainly, the total page counts), Google’s site: command is still the best tool for the job. It’s great for deep dives, since you can combine it with keyword searches, "keyword" searches (exact match), and other operators (intitle:, inurl:, etc.). Of course, the most basic format is just:

For this particular job, always use the root domain. You never know when Google is indexing multiple sub-domains (or the wrong sub-domain), and that information could come in handy later. Of course, for now you just want to see that Google knows you exist.

 0:30-1:00 – Confirm the page is not indexed

Assuming Google knows your site exists, it’s time to check the specific page in question. You can enter a full path behind the site: command or use a combination of site: and inurl:

If the page doesn’t seem to be on Google’s radar, narrow down the problem by testing out just "/folder" and see if anything on the same level is being indexed. If the page isn’t being indexed at all, you can skip the next step.

 1:00-1:30 – Confirm the page is not ranking

If the page is being indexed but you can’t seem to find it in the SERPs, pull out a snippet of the TITLE tag and do an exact-match search (in quotes) on Google. If you still can’t find it, combine a site:example.com with your page TITLE or a portion of it. If the page is indexed but not ranking, you can probably skip the next couple of steps (jump to the 4:00 mark).

 1:30-2:00 – Check for bad Robots.txt

For now, let’s assume your site is being partially indexed, but the page in question is missing from the index. Although bad Robots.txt files are, thankfully, getting rarer, it’s still worth taking a quick peek to make sure you’re not accidentally blocking search bots. Luckily, the file is almost always at:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

What you’re looking for is source code that looks something like this:

It could either be a directive blocking all user agents, or just one, like Googlebot. Likewise, check for any directives that disallow the specific folder or page in question.

 2:00-2:30 – Check for META Noindex

Another accidental blocking problem can occur with a bad META Noindex directive. In the header of the HTML source code (between <head> and </head>), you’re looking for something like this:

Although it might seem odd for someone to block a page they clearly want indexed, bad META tags and Rel=Canonical (see below) can easily be created by a bad CMS set-up.

 2:30-3:00 – Check for bad Rel=Canonical

This one’s a bit trickier. The Rel=Canonical tag is, by itself, often a good thing, helping to effectively canonicalize pages and remove duplicate content. The tag itself looks like this:

The problem comes when you canonicalize too narrowly. Let’s say for example, that every page on your site had a canonical tag with the URL "www.example.com" – Google would take that as an instruction to collapse your entire search index down to just ONE page.

Why would you do this? You probably wouldn’t, on purpose, but it’s easy for a bad CMS or plug-in to go wrong. Even if it’s not sitewide, it’s easy to canonicalize too narrowly and knock out important pages. This is a problem that seems to be on the rise.

 3:00-4:00 – Check for bad header/redirects

In some cases, a page may be returning a bad header, error code (404, for example) or poorly structured redirect (301/302) that’s preventing proper indexation. You’ll need a header checker for this – there are plenty of free ones online (try HTTP Web-Sniffer). You’re looking for a "200 OK" status code. If you receive a string of redirects, a 404, or any error code (4xx or 5xx series), you could have a problem. If you get a redirect (301 or 302), you’re sending the "missing" page to another page. Turns out, it’s not really missing at all.

 4:00-5:00 – Check for cross-site duplication

There are basically two potential buckets of duplicate content – duplicate pages within your site and duplicates between sites. The latter may happen due to sharing content with your own properties, legally repurposing contents (like an affiliate marketer might do), or flat-out scraping. The problem is that, once Google detects these duplicates, it’s probably going to pick one and ignore the rest.

If you suspect that content from your "missing" page has been either taken from another site or taken by another site, grab a unique-sounding sentence, and Google it with quotes (to do an exact match). If another site pops up, your page may have been flagged as a duplicate.

 5:00-7:00 – Check for internal duplication

Internal duplication usually happens when Google crawls multiple URL variations for the same page, such as CGI parameters in the URL. If Google reaches the same page by two URL paths, it sees two separate pages, and one of them is probably going to get ignored. Sometimes, that’s fine, but other times, Google ignores the wrong one.

For internal duplication, use a focused site: query with some unique title keywords from the page (again, in quotes), either stand-alone or using intitle:. URL-driven duplicates naturally have duplicate titles and META data, so the page title is one of the easiest places to find it. If you see either the same page pop up multiple times with different URLs, or one or two pages followed by this:

…then it’s entirely possible that your missing page was filtered out due to internal duplication.

 7:00-8:00 – Review anchor text quality

These last two are a bit tougher and more subjective, but I want to give a few quick tips for where to start if you suspect a page-specific penalty or devaluation. One pretty easy to spot problem is when you have a pattern of suspicious anchor text – usually, an uncommon keyword combination that dominates your inbound links. This could come from a very aggressive (and often low-quality) link-building campaign or from something like a widget that’s dominating your link profile.

Open Site Explorer allows you to pretty easily look at your anchor text in broad strokes. Just enter your URL, click on Anchor Text Distributions (the 4th tab), and select Phrases:

What you’re looking for is a pattern of unnatural repetition. Some repetition is fine – you’re naturally going to have anchor text to your domain name keywords and your exact brand name, for example. Let’s say, though, that 70% of our links pointing back to SEOmoz had the anchor text "Danny Dover Is Awesome." That would be unnatural. If Google thinks this is a sign of manipulative link building, you may see that target page penalized.

 8:00-10:00 – Review link profile quality

Link profile quality can be very subjective, and it’s not a task that you can do justice to in two minutes, but if you do have a penalty in play, it’s sometimes easy to spot some shady links quickly. Again, I’m going to use Open Site Explorer, and I’m going to select the following options: Followed + 301, External Pages Only, All Pages on The Root Domain:

You can export the links to Excel if you want to (great for deep analysis), but for now, just spot-check. If there’s something fishy on the first couple of pages, odds are pretty good that the weaker links are a mess. Click through to a few pages, looking out for issues such as:

• Suspicious anchor text (irrelevant, spammy, etc.)
• Sites with wildly irrelevant topics
• Links embedded in an obviously paid or exchanged block
• Links that are part of a multi-link page footer
• Advertising links that are followed (and shouldn’t be)

Also, look for any over-reliance on one kind of low-quality link (blog comments, article marketing, etc.). Although a full link-profile analysis can take hours, it’s often surprisingly easy to spot spammy link-building in just a few minutes. If you can spot it that fast, chances are pretty good that Google can, too.

(10:00) – Time’s Up

Ten minutes may not seem like much (it may have taken you that long just to read this post), but once you put a process in place, you can learn a lot about a site in just a few minutes. Of course, finding a problem and solving it are two entirely different things, but I hope this at least gives you the beginning of a process to try out yourself and refine for your own SEO issues.

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Posted by randfish

For a long time, if you asked me about spamming the search engines, whether with hardcore black hat tactics or merely gray hat link acquisition, I’d say that in the long run, neither was the right move. Building a great site and a great brand through hard work, white hat links, solid content and marketing strategies has always been my path of choice. It still is today, but my faith is definitely wavering.

Why?

In the last 12 months, I’ve seen (or, at least, felt) less progress from Google’s webspam team than in any previous year I can remember. Popular paid link services that Google’s search quality folks are clearly aware of have worked for months on end (some have done so for years). Crummy, low quality directories and link exchanges have made a comeback since the big shutdowns in 2007-8. Even off-topic link exchanges, which experienced their own blowback in 2006-2007 have started working again. Horrifyingly bad sites are ranking atop the results using little more than exact match domain names and a few poor quality links. There’s even a return of the link farms of the early 2000s, with operators creating (or buying old domains and converting them into) junky, one-page sites to boost their own link popularity.

On nearly every commercially lucrative search results I pull up these days, I see bad links pushing bad sites into the top rankings at Google.

Examples of Web Spam in the Rankings

I made a promise to Aaron that I wouldn’t "out" spam, and although I still don’t believe it’s the wrong thing to do morally (it hurts everyone’s search/web experience, why should SEOs band together to protect it?), I do want to keep that promise. So, while I can’t point you to any particular links or sites, here’s a good set of queries where plenty of link manipulation is keeping a few, some or many of the top (5-10) ranking sites in those positions:

• SEO Software
• Starcraft 2 Strategies
• Birthday Party Supplies
• Currency Trading Online
• Tennis Racquet Reviews
• Leather Crafting Supplies
• Nanny Services
• Home Business Ideas
• French Doors
• Vietnam Tours
• Antioxidant Supplements
• Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Just run a few OSE reports on some sites that rank well here and you’ll see what I mean. There are numerous players in these listings who don’t have a single natural or editorially endorsed link. And you don’t need to limit yourself to these queries either.

3 Steps to Find Lots of Link Manipulation

Step #1: Search for "SEO Friendly Directory" and visit a few of the sections included in the resulting sites that come up.

Step #2: Search for the primary keywords the directory-listed sites are targeting in their title tags or the anchor text they’ve gotten from the directories.

Step #3: Check out the top 5-10 listings in the rankings and you’ll find an abundance of sites with few to no "natural" links whatsoever

Why is Google Letting So Much Spam/Manipulation Go Unpenalized?

I don’t know. But, I do have some guesses:

• Scalability of Spam Fighting Tactics – it could be that the ability for Google’s team to combat web spam has diminished due to the increasing size, complexity and demand in search. Perhaps fighting spam is a much tougher problem in the 100s of billions of pages than it was in the 10s.
• They’re Working on Something Big – for many years, Google would let lots of spam they clearly knew about pass… for a while. Then, they’d release an algorithmic update to defeat a huge layer of spam or seriously cripple certain types of link manipulation. If that’s the case today, this would be one of the longest times between updates we’ve seen (MayDay had a small impact, but it wasn’t link-manipulation targeted from everything I’ve seen).
• Too Much Baby Thrown Out with the Bathwater – perhaps, as link manipulation and spam have grown in popularity, Google’s found that they can’t penalize a technique or sites employing it without dramatically reducing the usefulness of their index (because so many "good," "relevant" sites/pages do some dirty stuff, too). If this is the case, they’ll need to work on much more subtle, targeted detection and elimination systems, and these might be substantially harder to employ.
• WebSpam Team Brain Drain – The spam fighting team put together by Matt Cutts from 2001-2006 was Google’s cream of the crop. He personally hand-selected engineers from search quality (and other departments) to combat the black hat menaces of Google’s early growth days. SEOs could frequently interact with many of these crazy smart folks, from Brian White to Aaron D’Souza to Evan Roseman and many more. That interaction today is largely limited to the webmaster tools team, which may be an appropriate PR move, but it’s hard to know whether the new team is up to the task. We do have one new, semi-publicly contributing webspam team member, Moultano, on Hacker News (you can see all the threads he/she has participated in on the spam topic with this query).

  Matt himself is finally taking a well deserved break, but even at home he’s much less public on the web, much less active on webspam topics on his blog, visits fewer conferences and now invests in startups, too (which surely takes up time). I don’t mean to criticize Matt in any way – if I were him, I’d have left Google long ago (and he’s clearly put in more than his dues), but the possibility remains that the team he built is no longer intact, or no longer of the quality it was in the early years.

• Live and Let Live – It could be that although Google’s public messaging about webspam and link manipulation hasn’t changed, internally their attitude has. Perhaps they’ve found that sites/pages that buy links or run low quality link farms aren’t much worse than those who don’t and having relevant results, even if they’ve used black/gray hat tactics, isn’t highly detrimental to search quality. Certainly in some of the examples above, that’s the case, while in others it’s less true. I recall that years ago, the MSN Search team noted that they’d much rather fight poor quality results in the index than fight high quality results who happened to buy links. Maybe Google’s come around to the same philosophy.
• They’re Counting on New Inputs to Help – Part of Google’s initiative in acquiring social gaming companies, building social platforms and making data deals with folks like Twitter could be to help combat spam. They may have hopes that leveraging these new, less polluted (or, at least, more easily trackable) forms of recommendation/citation can be a big win for webspam and search quality.

Why Rant About Spam?

"Blah. Blah Blah. So what if Google’s not doing as much to stop spam as they have in years past?" I hear you ask.

My concern is primarily around the experience of searchers and what it might mean if results become polluted not just by good or relatively good sites that happen to buy or manipulate links, but by really bad crap – the sort that makes searchers want to find a new way of getting information on the web (Facebook Q+A? Twitter? Yelp?). Search today is an amazing marketplace of web builders, marketers, suppliers and customers. If the last of these – the customer – slowly becomes disenchanted with Google, the world of search marketing and the amazing utility of search in general may come to an end.

If you use search engines or work in search marketing, that should be the last thing you want.

That said, if you believe that most of the "spam" will eventually be beaten out by either legitimate results or by better sites that also spam/manipulate links, then there’s much less to worry about (I’m not fully in either camp and can see both sides).

So, What Should Legimitate Marketers Do?

Please DO NOT go out and spam the results, buy links, submit to crap directories and open up link farms. Even with this current trend, I believe that would be terrible advice. Plenty of sites do get caught and filtered, and I’d rather know that my site was safe and every piece of content I added and link I built would help bring more traffic than constantly worry about the small but real risk of being penalized or banned.

One thing Google has done is continue to make the experience of penalization a horrific one. It’s hard to know if you really have a penalty, nearly impossible to figure out what triggered it and onerous, almost Kafka-esque, to attempt to get back into their good graces. If you can live with that risk, as professional black hats do with their churn-and-burn strategies, then it’s less of a concern. But if you’re building a real business, Google is still driving 70%+ of the searches on the web in the US (and 90%+ in many other geographies), and it would be foolish to take such a terrific risk.

As to the question of reporting the spam of your competitors – that’s up to you. However, Google has certainly made it a less likely, less rewarding activity. Nearly every day, we answer PRO Q+A related to the question of link manipulators outranking legitimate marketers and sites, and I can recall only once in the hundreds of questions I’ve answered in the last few years when a spam report actually led to action (to be fair, I don’t follow up consistently on every one, but many of our PRO members will send a regular ping with updates).

What we can do is to re-double our efforts to build great sites with amazing value for people. No matter what the "search" experience of the future is like, those sites and pages that provide a remarkable experience are sure to surface near the top and receive the added benefit of word-of-mouth praise, viral spread and citation in whatever forms it may evolve to, both online and off.

Some Caveats to My Experience

There are millions of queries that are remarkably spam free and Google has done a consistently exception job fighting spam over the years. However, the recent past has me concerned that they are no longer as interested, diligent or capable of combatting even the most basic spam techniques.

It’s also certainly the case that I’m regularly exposed to many queries and topics that SEOs, both black hat and white, focus on, and thus might see more spam than the average searcher (though anecdotally I’d guess they’re seeing more, too).

What Do You Think?

Have you been seeing more results in the rankings that are performing well despite having virtually no "natural" links? Have you seen Google take action on spam reports? Why do you think the recent past has many fewer examples of big spam-cleaning updates?

I’m looking forward to some great discussion – and this week I’ll be at SES San Francisco (on 5 different panels!) – feel free to grab me and chat privately there, too!

p.s. With regards to Bing, the only other major US search engine now that they’re powering Yahoo! (or on the verge), my opinion is that they have been making substantive strides. They’re still behind Google in many areas (and ahead in a few), but at the current rate, we might actually see Bing surpass Google’s spam detection and filtering in the next 18-24 months, though they will probably still be playing catch up in long tail relevancy/quality.

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