WebProNews - Aaron Wall

New Details on Google Caffeine Update

Chris Crum — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:05:32 +0000

Update 2: Matt Cutts gave WebProNews another exclusive interview, in which he gave some more details about Caffeine (among other things. It's only hitting one data center before the holidays, and it isn't even live quite yet. Google will roll it out to more data centers in January.

Update: Out at PubCon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:

Original Article: It appears that the effects of Google's Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.

What are your thoughts on Google's Caffeine update? Discuss here.

If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google's Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn't about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won't notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," says Cutts on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays."

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google's frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.

When SEOBook's Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was:

- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is.

As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It's going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world's most popular search engine.

Have you tested Caffeine? What do you think about the update? Share your findings here.

Related Articles:

> Matt Cutts Talks Google Caffeine Update

> Where's Bing's Real-Time Search?

> Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More for Google/Bing Rankings

Is Brand the Key to Ranking on Google?

Chris Crum — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:31:53 +0000

A recent SEOBook article highlights a good deal of evidence that Google is placing more emphasis on brands than ever before. Author Aaron Wall takes an in depth look at how Google's algorithm has evolved over his own SEO career, and points out some hints Google has provided in the media as to where its headed before answering a few questions from me for this article.

He cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comments about branding being the cure to cleaning up the "Internet Cesspool" and a quote of his from the company's most recent earnings call in which he said, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."

Here is the text of my discussion with Aaron Wall:

Chris Crum: With Google giving big brands so much attention, how does the little guy stand a chance?

Aaron Wall: They will always have some balance to the search results, but part of the longterm search game is going to come down to building a brand. Keep in mind the current brand changes are mostly happening for core industry keywords, and smaller websites will still be able to get decent exposure by working longtail keywords.

CC: You say the January 18th Google Update was bigger than Florida, but few people noticed it. Why do you think that is?

AW: Well the Florida update was a big update with a more violent change in the overall rankings, but it just required a few more technical hoops to jump through. Building a brand is time consuming and difficult...it is much more difficult than jumping through a few more algorithmic hoops. If Google expands on this front many people who have a mechanical approach to SEO and online marketing will be looking for a new job in the not too distant future. ;)

I think few people noticed this update because there was a smaller change in rankings, and many of the search results are relevant sites that are logical to rank...whereas with the Florida update some of the sites that were ranking were quite off topic, or only near matches.

CC: I'm intrigued by the other point you pulled from Schmidt's earnings call about Google understanding the meaning of your phrases rather than just the words. Clearly this would greatly increase relevancy on a lot of searches if they are able to get it right. How close do you think they are to being able to pull this off?

AW: They still have a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format. Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how do different things in Ubuntu. I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like.

Another big issue is information accuracy...which is yet another reason they might want to put a lot of weight on brand.

Sidenote (CC): With regards to relevancy and branding, there are some interesting possibilties on the way as ICANN begins accepting more new generic Top-Level Domains. This is discussed in the following exclusive WPN interview between SEOMoz's Sarah Bird and Clarke Walton of Walton Law Firm:

More WebProNews Videos

CC: Do you think this (Google recognizing meaning over words) is something the majority of searchers want to see happen or do you think they would prefer to have to specify their own searches further?

AW: We like to feel like we are in control, but we under-estimate our own laziness. People prefer Google to be sophisticated under the hood rather than having to re-query again.

Thanks to Aaron for talking with me. Read his article "Google's New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding". It's full of illustrated examples, and I think you'll find it quite interesting.

Update: Matt Cutts has shared the following video regarding the subject of Google placing weight on brand. He says it's not really about brand....

FAQ Pages Could Boost Your Google Rankings

Chris Crum — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:00:00 +0000

In a recent report, Hitwise said that the length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of 5+ words in length, have increased 10% from January '08 to January '09 they noted.

Ask has an interesting blog post up interpreting this data, and the gist of it is summed up with this paragraph from it:

In a nutshell, users are now expecting search engines to not just index the Internet, they are expecting search engines to process the data on the Internet. Searchers don't consider their query to be just keywords; they are starting to expect that the search engine will understand the intent of the query better. Expressing a query with intent requires more words, and the user's investment of more words means that his or her expectations on the search engine are higher. We are clearly experiencing a transition in the way that people are using the Internet.

Intent-based search. We've been hearing the phrase dropped more and more. In a popular WebProNews interview with Bruce Clay, late last year, he spoke of where search was headed and a good deal of that had to do with personalized search. The SearchWiki side of that has gotten the most attention in this area, but he had some things to say about intent-based search as well.

More WebProNews Videos

He talked about Google looking up your IP and revising results based on it while making assumptions about the intent of your search. This would have an affect on SEO, obviously. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query," said Clay.

It's a topic SEOBook author Aaron Wall and I discussed recently as well. Aaron noted that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent conference call, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."

The idea of relevancy based on intent is a fantastic one, but chances are the search engines are still going to have to rely on the content that users create to increase search relevancy, at least in this manner. Google still has "a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format," Wall told WebProNews.

"Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how to do different things in Ubuntu," he continued. "I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like."

What is another great way to feed answers into a search engine? Keith Hogan, VP, Technology at Ask offers a piece of pretty sound advice for online businesses: "Web business should take notice of Question/Answering sites that have been built and SEO'd to fill the search engine rankings for these types of user questions (e.g. Q&A aggregators like WikiAnswers, AnswerBag, and Yahoo Answers). While this content is generally very relevant, content directly from companies could be more authoritative. Web businesses may benefit by creating FAQ content that is targeted at answering real user questions about their products."

FAQs as relevant results to intent-based searches about what your business offers. What a concept. And considering the emphasis Google seems to be putting on brand (although Matt Cutts says it's not so much about brand exactly), it sounds like a can't-miss.

As Mike McDonald of WebProNews suggested around New Year's, look for more intent-based stuff coming from Microsoft as well, as it rebrands its search engine. That is what the company's acquisition of Powerset was all about.

In concluding, let me work in two clichéd (but true) statements. Content is king and the " Internet is a cesspool." If only the entire world could work together to build quality content and clean it up, the web (or at least Google's search results) would be a more relevant place. So which one will happen first, that or world peace?

Changes and Significance in Search: Looking Back on 2008

Chris Crum — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:00:00 +0000

I initially intended to piece together a retrospective article about the happenings in the search industry and SEO from throughout the year, based on our coverage of it., much like what I did with online video and online music. I quickly realized this would be a monumental task given that something like 90% of what we cover is search or SEO related. We have articles numbering in the thousands from this year alone covering these things.

So I decided to go down a slightly different path for this article. For this, I wanted to get the opinions of some big names in the field about what they thought the most significant things of 2008 were with regards to search, and what the biggest changes were from 2007 to 2008. I figured it would make for a more interesting article and certainly a less time-consuming one not only for me, but for readers as well.

Editor's Note: It's been a very interesting year for search, and the coming year promises to be even more so. This article looks at how some of the most recognizable names in the industry view the everchanging industry. Where it has gone and where it is going. What do you think?

And while we're on celebrating the year coming to the end and the holidays, we'd also like to share this holiday greeting video with you:

More WebProNews Videos

Semantic and Intent-Based Search

I decided to start in-house and find out what our own Mike McDonald thought the most significant thing to the search industry was in the year 2008. "I think the biggest POTENTIAL event of '08 was Microsoft's purchase of Powerset," he told me. Now keep in mind (in case the emphasis wasn't enough), he said potential, meaning it could have big implications for the search industry's future. Powerset is all about language analysis and semantic search. "Semantic search and interpretive queries based on semantics are going to be big. Language and implied intent is a major direction for search moving forward," Mike said. "So, in my opinion, 2008 marks the start of the real race to a more language/intent/semantic approach to search."

There is no doubt that how we receive search results is in for some change. There has certainly been a lot of talk about it with regards to Google, and Yahoo too for that matter with their whole "open" strategy, but we haven't heard as much about Microsoft on this. Mike may be on to something here. Microsoft no doubt hopes Powerset will be its ace in the hole to gain some search market share.

Personalization, Universal Search, and SearchWiki

Search Engine Roundtable Editor Barry Schwartz had this to say: "I think one of the most significant changes in 2008 was just about a month ago with the launch of SearchWiki in the search results. Although I think the average searcher is not ready for it, it is here and there are no signs that it will be going away any time soon. Not only does this give a searcher the ability to boost or remove search results, Google has admitted that they may be using data gleaned from SearchWiki to change the search results for everyone else. So, I think that this, along with Universal Search, will have one of the most significant impacts in early 2009."

The mere fact that it is Google changing the way they deliver results is enough to make this significant. Google is obviously the top dog in terms of search market share (though not in every country), and most of us use it over its competitors. No matter what Yahoo, Microsoft or anyone else is doing, what Google is doing is going to have a tremendous impact just because its the one more people use.

"The biggest change is the SERP itself. With more universal search, more personalized search, and now SearchWiki, Google is training users to expect 'more than 10 blue links'," says Atlas Web Service Owner and President Michael Gray. "Other search engines that don't provide rich results are seen [as] behind the times."

"I'd say that the most significant thing to happen in the search industry in 2008 was the advent of more personalized search, and even more so, the new addition of SearchWiki showing up in Google," says High Rankings CEO Jill Whalen. "It's too soon to really know what will happen with that, but my guess is that it will cause some reputation management nightmares for many companies."

This is a point that has crossed my mind, and one I intend to explore further in the near future. I think it will be quite interesting to see what kinds of reputation management changes will have to come into play as a result of the changing SERP strategies of the major search engines.

"The biggest change from 2007-2008 was the advent of Universal/Blended Search results which came out in May of 2007," added Whalen. "It has caused some urgency in companies to create multimedia content in order to have their images and/or video snippets show up in the search results."

The Economy and SEO

"In terms of the biggest changes, that might go as far to worry me a bit, is what is going on in the economy," says Schwartz. "We all know about the financial trouble Yahoo is going through to compete with Google and Microsoft. Yahoo is struggling to survive, as opposed to struggling to even compete and that is scary. Google, for the first time, is cutting back big time. They even have decided to not give out holiday gifts this year - which is significant, in terms of Google. What type of impact will the economic turn down play in 2009 and search? Will this impact SEO jobs? I have seen more and more SEMs loose their jobs recently. Will this stifle search relevancy? These are my concerns."

These are certainly valid concerns. Changes in how search results are going to be delivered are going to be challenging for SEOs as it is. 2009 will definitely be a crucial year for SEOs in terms of staying on top of their game.

Community, Professionalism, Clients, and Browsing

"I would say the single biggest change in the field of SEO is the deterioration of the sense of community and professional decency in favor of self-promotion at any cost - where people promote spam reporting each other even when their own past reports were both damaging and inconsistent with search engine editorial policies," SEOBook Author Aaron Wall tells me. "The next biggest change would be Google launching a browser. They still have limited market share, but as they gain market share that gives them yet another dimension to view the web through, and gives them even more search market share."

Google's Chrome browser could really turn into another big thorn in Microsoft's side not only by dominating more search market share as a result of increased Chrome use, but obviously by cutting into Internet Explorer use, a browser that already had its fair share of competition from the likes of Apple, Mozilla, and Opera.

As far as the deterioration of the sense of community and professional decency, this is no doubt directly related to the growth in "social media marketing" and the lack of understanding of the goals of such on the part of many of the people engaging in it.

On the other hand, Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization CEO Dave Davies says, "The biggest change has got to be in the clients. Clients are coming to us [SEOs] far more informed as to what they want and what the limitations of SEO are. No longer are people asking for top 10 results for competitive phrases and disappointed when we tell them 3 months just isn't going to happen. They understand a lot more about what we're doing and how long it takes."

Competition and Google's Increased Domination

"I think 2008 might go down as the year Google moved into complete market share domination, not completely through their own doings, but because Microsoft and Yahoo! failed to reach a deal to combine efforts and because the market has been so tough on Yahoo! while both engines (and other tertiary engines like Ask.com) lost share to Google," says Wizard of Moz (SEOmoz) Rand Fishkin. "In 2007, I held out hope that together, these three - Ask, Yahoo! and Microsoft - along with the possible newcomer, Cuil.com, would have some positive impact in preventing or postponing a Google monopoly, but after 2008, I'm very skeptical that we'll see anyone keep Google from reaching 90%+ search share in the next few years."

That doesn't mean the competition won't continue to try. Yahoo seems to be doing all it can with it's open search strategy to bring new forms of relevancy to its search results, though its ability to steal away a remarkable amount of Google users remains to be seen.

"The Yahoo-Microsoft Merger That Wasn't was the most significant thing, as it caused both companies to be weakened against Google and remains as the biggest doubt about their success, as the off-again, on-again rumors continue," says Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan. "Search marketers need healthy competition among the search engines, and the competition ain’t healthy."

Dave Davies also cited this. "Refusing a deal at $33/share and now sitting at around $13 has got to go down as one of the big 'tragedies' of 2008 in the search industry," he says.

Adjusting Focus

"The biggest change was probably more awareness that it's not about getting more traffic but how to better convert the existing traffic you have," says Sullivan. "I hear more and more people paying attention to metrics, these days." I suspect this type of mentality will continue to increase as changes in SERPs render some traditional SEO tactics obsolete.

Another thing SEOs and Internet marketers are going to have to watch out for is what happens with regards to net neutrality. This issue isn't always brought up in the search engine marketing discussion, but as Cindy Krum discussed with Abby Johnson) in the following video from SES Chicago, it should be.

More WebProNews Videos

"The victory of a Net Neutrality supporter in the Presidential race is also a significant event though many may not know it," says Davies. "If I had to say what will have the biggest long term affect on the search industry (and in fact the Internet as a whole) it will be this win by Obama. No matter where you stand on the issue, the victory itself paints the picture of the future of the Internet."

Mobile Search

"In 2008, we finally witnessed mobile search go mainstream," says MordComm Co-Founder Boris Mordkovich. "With the arrival of the much anticipated Apple iPhone, followed by a collaboration between Google and T-Mobile on the G1, it is becoming clear that mobile devices are going to a whole new level - and taking the Internet and the search experience, as we know it, with them. The SEM marketing community has been anticipating this for quite a while, so I think that we are well prepared to face the challenges that lie ahead."

Wrapping up

In concluding, I would like to thank all of the people mentioned in this article for providing their opinions and insight into the everchanging search industry. I am very pleased with the variety of answers, and I feel it has made for a well-rounded outlook on where the industry is heading. 2008 has been an interesting year for search, but 2009 promises to really shake things up, and you can bet we'll be there keeping an eye on it. Then, this time next year, perhaps we can reflect on how it all really went down.

What do you think was the most significant thing to happen in the search industry in 2008? What was the biggest change from 2007 to 2008?

PubCon: Aaron Wall Talks Link Buying Without Getting in Trouble

Chris Crum — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:50:54 +0000

Aaron Wall knows a thing or two about SEO. He's been in this game as long as I can remember. He's the brains behind the hugely popular SEOBook. When he talks about ways of getting links, people looking to increase their search engine rankings should pay attention.

Our own Mike McDonald scored an interview with him out in Las Vegas while attending the PubCon conference. Video of that can be seen below.

As you probably know, Google isn't very high on people buying links, but there are ways around this without directly "buying" a link. Wall elaborates on this. Three methods highlighted are through:

- Testimonials
- Conferences
- Charity Events

Testimonials will help build credibility (and links). Conferences are good places to network and hand out business cards, which can also lead to links, and charity events will not only reflect a positive image upon your brand, but also drive links (not to mention serve a good cause).

There are actually a number of other methods to "buy" links without being called a spammer. Wall goes into them in this article he wrote a while back.

Stay tuned to WebProNews.com and the WebProNews Video Blog for more coverage of PubCon in Las Vegas.

Top Search Engine Marketing Tools

Aaron Wall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:58:47 +0000

The number of internet marketing tools launched over the past couple years has been staggering. Many of them are both free and highly valuable. SEO, which was once considered a bit of a seedy niche, has grown with search to become a mainstream marketing practice, with...

Google providing Webmaster Central, a blog for webmasters, & many of the best free SEO tools
Yahoo! offering a paid inclusion service & a webmaster focused tool by the name of Site Explorer
Microsoft offering SEO services

This article aims to highlight the best search engine marketing tools.

Keyword Research

Keywords are at the core of search, so any effective SEO campaign starts with keyword research. My 4 favorite keyword research tools are

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
SEO Book Keyword Tool
Google Traffic Estimator
Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Given Google’s enormous search marketshare they have the most keyword data, though typically they have been less open than others with sharing data. Recently the Google AdWords Keyword Tool has started to show estimated search volumes using numbers (rather than graphs).

Cool features:

Match Types: Shows search estimates for exact match keywords (the exact keyword), phrase match (searches containing that keyword as part of the search), and broad match (additionally related searches that may have words in a different order).
URL Related Keywords: Allows you to enter in a specific page and/or site and find relevant keywords based on that page/site.

SEO Book Keyword Tool

I partnered with the fine folks at Wordtracker to create a free keyword tool powered by their API. The SEO Book keyword tool acts like a meta search keyword tool, where the results are powered by Wordtracker and link to other related keyword tools.

Cool features:

Cross referencing: Like search engines, all keyword tools have some biases to them, so the quick ability to compare results from different sources makes this the first keyword tool I typically use.
CSV Export: This tool offers a quick CSV export option, which makes it easy to create a keyword list that can be inserted into other tools for further analysis (which I will mention in the Google Traffic Estimator & Microsoft Ad Intelligence sections).

Google Traffic Estimator

Google Traffic Estimator is a tool which estimates the number of ad clicks that a particular keyword would get at a particular bid price. Given how ad clickthrough rate can vary greatly based on ad copy the estimates can be a bit rough, but this tool does give relative volumes AND values for keywords.

The addition of click cost estimates makes this a nice tool to submit a keyword list to in order to find out which keywords are the most valuable.

Cool features:

Bid Price Estimation: If you do not enter in a bid price, they return a bid price that should return your ads in the top position 85% of the time.
Match Types: Shows search estimates for [exact match] , "phrase match", and broad match. In this context it is easy to see how long the tail is for a keyword.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Microsoft Ad Intelligence is an Excel Plug In for Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.

It is similar to a combination of the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator, with a couple additional features included.

Cool features:

Real data: One of the ways Microsoft is playing catch up in search is providing their actual search data via this tool (these search counts are the same data set that they use internally). Most search services offer somewhat doctored up estimates.
Near realtime: This tool offers many advanced filters, which allow you to sort data as recently as yesterday.
Category based keywords: You can find the all time top category based keywords, or category based keywords that have recently become popular... a service that is great for niche publishers.

Search Analytics Tools

If you are not using web analytics you are flying blind. Analytics data gives you the power to refine your strategy based on what is working and what is not. 3 of my favorite analytics tools are:

Google Analytics
Clicky
Mint

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust free analytics tool. The only concern I have with using it is that if you are profiting from a market inefficiency you might be revealing that inefficiency to the largest online ad network... which may then reveal it to other people. With their large search marketshare, their free keyword tools, industry benchmarking data, and the launch of Google Ad Planner (still in beta), Google Trends for Websites, and Google Insights for Search, Google is the leading source of keyword and market data for many online businesses.

Clicky

Clicky is an inexpensive web based analytics tool. In addition to being fairly feature rich, they also offer a white label service that allows webmasters to resell their analytics product.

Mint

Mint is an analytics program you can install on your server for a one time $30 licensing fee. It offers realtime data and has a wide array of extensions that display information in convenient panes, but is not as feature rich as the above options.

More Analytics Tools

There are a wide array of analytics tools on the market. There are niche tools specifically for PPC campaigns like Optimize My Site and Tracking 202, as well as higher end offerings from companies like Omniture... finding the right tool for your needs is largely a function of defining your needs and budget, and if your budget is quite extensive it might make sense to program something in house.

Search Engine Rank Checkers

While most successful SEO professionals pay more attention to traffic trends, conversions, and profits – it is still helpful to track where some sites rank for certain keywords. Tracking how sites move in the rankings for specific keywords gives you clues as to when search engineers change the weightings on things like domain authority, anchor text, and related words.

While Google Webmaster Central shows you some keywords you rank for, they do not show you the keywords you rank on page 5 or 6 for... just the keywords where you show up near the top of the search results often. Years ago Google had a useful search API, but more recently they have been using an Ajax API which does not work well with rank checkers.

My 2 favorite rank checkers are

SEO Book Rank Checker
Advanced Web Ranking

SEO Book Rank Checker

This free rank checking tool is a Firefox extension which allows you to track how you rank in the search engines for a variety of keywords.

Cool features

International: It works with international versions of Google.
Automated: Allows you to create preset lists which automatically run at a set periodicity .
Exportable: Allows you to export the results and see how rankings for a keyword have changed over time.

Advanced Web Ranking

Starting at $99, Advanced Web Ranking is one of the more popular desktop search engine rank checking tools.

Cool features

Graphs: Allows you to view graphs of how your rankings change over time.
Wide Selection of Search Engines: If you live in China, Russia, or another market where Google is not the clear market leader, then this tool will still work for you, as they allow you to track rankings in hundreds of search engines.

Link Analysis Tools

Link analysis is a field which has lost a bit of its importance over the past couple years. Google has clamped down on paid links, web directories, and article directories. At the same time more people are blogging online, and more webmasters have become aware to the field of public relations and the value of links. These combine to make it is much harder to catch up with a competitor if you are trying to duplicate their link building strategy.

To some degree link analysis has moved away from PageRank and anchor text toward analyzing news in the marketplace and understanding why stories are spreading (link analysis is evolving into media analysis and public relations). Here are 6 of my favorite link analysis tools

Yahoo! Site Explorer
Google Blog Search
Google Webmaster Central
SEO Link Analysis
Xenu Link Sleuth
Advanced Link Manager

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Google and Microsoft generally show rather limited link data to the public. Yahoo! Site Explorer shows a much deeper and more representative sampling of inbound link data.

SEO Link Analysis

SEO Link Analysis is a free Firefox extension that adds link anchor text, PageRank score, and if a link is nofollowed to Yahoo! Site Explorer results.

Google Blogsearch

While Google tends to show a small sample of backlinks their Blogsearch is much better at detecting new links from blogs.

Google Webmaster Central

If you verify you own a website inside Google Webmaster Central, they will allow you to download a list of links pointing at your site. If you notice your rankings for a keyword are decent (but could be better) you could look through some of the people linking at your page and ask them to link at your page using more specific anchor text.

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu Link Sleuth crawls websites looking for broken links. This helps you keep your website maximally clean and functional by finding any broken internal links and any references to documents that are no longer online.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager is a paid software package starting at $199 which allows you to automatically track new backlinks obtained by competitors. It also crawls pages to find anchor text, if the link is using nofollow, and the PageRank score of the linking page.

We also created a free tool somewhat similar to Advanced Link Manager, named Backlink Analyzer. We have not updated our tool in a while though, and it is sorely in need of an update.

PPC Tools

As search ad networks have become less transparent many PPC tools that did things like bid gap management have been rendered useless, while Google has built out a powerful AdWords API, an ad platform that allows you to bid per click or per conversion, and the Google AdWords Editor.

Google AdWords Editor
Google Website Optimizer
Speed PPC
PPC Tools suite
PPC Analytics Tools

Google AdWords Editor

Google AdWords Editor is a free desktop tool advertisers can use to quickly edit their AdWords campaigns in bulk.

Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that makes it easy to test and improve your landing page and conversion process. Conversion Rate Experts offers a great overview article about how to take advantage of Website Optimizer and other conversion boosting tools.

Speed PPC

Speed PPC is a paid desktop software program which makes it easy to generate many cross referenced ad campaigns and landing pages for geo-targeted keyword combinations. At $497 Speed PPC is not cheap, but if it is beyond your means and you are a good programmer then Zipcode Guy offers a free database of U.S. cities and zip codes.

PPC Tool suite

My wife has build a free collection of useful web based PPC tools including a keyword list generator, a keyword list cleaner, a typo generator, a keyword wrapper, an ad group generator, and a ROI calculator.

The keyword list generator can be good for creating a quick list of keywords to plug into a PPC account to see what variations get the most search volume, then trim back the fat after you collect some account feedback data.
The keyword list cleaner is good for taking a dirty keyword list and making it useful. For example, lets say you have a list of MP3 player related keywords. This tool allows you to quickly filter out any keywords related to car and automotive MP3 players.
The ad group generator makes it easy to create ad groups for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter at the same time.

PPC Analytics Tools

Many big affiliate marketers create their own bid management software, but newer affiliates may find tracking tools like Optimize My Site and Tracking 202 useful.
Many enterprise level websites create custom bid management software for their company, but for enterprise level merchants who do not manage paid search in house, firms like Efficient Frontier can help with management.

Competitive Research

Services like comScore and Hitwise have been around for many years for the people who could afford to buy their data, but their price points are north of what most people are willing to pay. Competitive research is one of the areas which has improved the most in the past few years, largely by a number of companies making products and tools at a more accessible price point. Here are 5 of my favorite competitive analysis tools.

Compete.com Search Analytics
Google Website Trends & Google Insights for Search
Microsoft Ad Intelligence
KeyCompete
SEO Digger

Compete.com Search Analytics

Much of the consumer facing innovation in the competitive analysis industry stemmed from Compete.com launching with free basic analytics data, and using a credit based system that allowed anyone to buy competitive data for as little as $20. Since then they have changed their pricing model to one based on a flat monthly fee starting at $299 a month. Here are some of their top keywords for blogoscoped.com... and they offer the option to download hundreds more

Cool features

Category based top keywords: they were one of the first services to offer top keywords by category (this feature has since been cloned by Microsoft Ad Intelligence and Google Insights for Search).
Weighting based analytics: they not only show popular keywords sending traffic to competing sites, but they show the approximate percent of traffic driven by each keyword.
Organic vs paid breakout: they break out which traffic came from organic search vs paid search ads.

Google Website Trends & Google Insights for Search

Google Trends for Websites displays related sites, related search queries, and what countries a website is popular in. Google Insights for Search shows category related keywords, top search terms related to the keyword you entered, and top rising related keywords.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Microsoft Ad Intelligence, also covered in the above keyword tools section, offers top category based keywords and allows you to research keywords based on campaign association with competing advertisers (along with confidence estimates).

KeyCompete

KeyCompete is a paid tool that lets you find what keywords competing advertisers are buying. This tool is especially powerful for affiliate marketers, where many of them resell the same product or service and need to get a baseline idea of what competitors are doing. SpyFu offers a similar service.

SEO Digger

SEO Digger is similar to KeyCompete, but is free and works on showing what organic keywords a website is ranking for. URLTrends, which is currently undergoing redesign, is similar to SEO Digger.

[Source of first image Creative Commons-licensed by Brian Caldwell.]

Comments

Google's Favoritism Makes Knoll SEO Magnet

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:38:56 +0000

Author and search optimization expert Aaron Wall headed to Google's Knol, as did many SEO professionals, to create a page. He doesn't sound happy about what he found.

We have already seen how Knol grabbed great Google rankings for a significant percentage of pages listed on Knol's home page. Knol isn't supposed to have a high PageRank yet, but Google may be giving its house resource a little algorithmic love behind the scenes.

Wall suggested this as he reached out to see how a page on the site might fare for him. He created an SEO Basics Knol that "was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com)," he said.

Google cited the new Knol as being similar to work already on the web at Work.com and Business.com. Wall searched for a string of text from the article and found it ranking on Google; searching for it with duplicate content filters negated found the Knol piece ranking above its syndicated and much older placement on Business.com.

"Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm," said Wall.

"Google knows the content is duplicate, and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source."

Whether Google changes this behavior or not, which could happen given all the algorithm tweaking they regularly do, probably won't change the flood of SEOs churning out pages at Knol. Considering Google's treatment of such content with favorable rankings, SEOs may have to do this out of a need to compete.

And we've all seen how well competitors fare against Google. Ask.com seems moribund, and depends on Google advertising; Yahoo took an ad deal with Google to avoid being taken over by Microsoft; and even Microsoft sees Google as a major competitor.

By ranking Knol articles highly, Google, by design or accident, made Knol a go-to destination for anyone seeking traffic for a website. Knol became something SEOs must consider in their work for their sites and clients because of this, and that may not be a great thing.

Speculation About a New Google Filter

Eric Enge — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:18:28 +0000

Aaron Wall put up a post about a new Google filter that causes people with high ranking terms to be bumped down to position #6. There is also a thread at Webmaster World about this phenomenon. This is still reasonably speculative in nature, but there are a lot of people who have seen this.

Aaron offers some really interesting speculation about why this may be occurring. The most interesting theory was the notion that it was an anchor text problem. Here is what Aaron had to say:

I think this issue is likely tied to a stagnant link profile with a too tightly aligned anchor text profile, with the anchor text being overly-optimized when compared against competing sites.

Whether or not this is occurring now, this makes complete sense. It is well within Google’s (or any other search engine’s) ability to detect an unusually high density of one form of anchor text to a given domain. For example, if your site is called yourdomain.com, and you sell widgets, and the anchor text in 48 or your 65 links says “Widgets on Sale”, this is not natural.

Most of the links to your site should be the name of your domain itself (i.e. in this example, “yourdomain”). Such a distribution of anchor text is a flag that the anchor text of your links are being artificially influenced. How is that done? Why by purchasing links, or by heavy duty link swapping.

This is potentially another step in Google’s stepped up war against the practice of link buying. I have long maintained that the main advantage the link buying has over natural links is the fact that people who buy links get to specify the exact (keyword rich) anchor text. used. Looking for unnatural patterns of anchor text provides a backdoor into detecting people who are purchasing links.

It might be a bit heavy handed for Google to ban a site based on this type of evidence, but reducing the impact of anchor text on rankings when there is an unnatural distribution in play still helps them meet their goal. After all, even if the unnatural acnhor text campaign does not represent the result of a link buying campaign, and all those keyword laden links are in fact completely natural, it might still provide better relevance for Google to filter in this manner.

Thinking about this further, this might be a simple search quality adjustment for skewed anchor text distribution. If it affects paid links, from Google’s perspective, this might just be a bonus.

Comments

The Paid Link Stages Of Grief

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:44:25 +0000

Let the bargaining begin. It's a natural stage of mourning. As Google shuffles loose the paid links from its algorithms, SEOs are cycling past their initial denial, their outrage, and have begun negotiating. Stay tuned; depression and acceptance are likely to follow.

The Paid Link Stages Of Grief

On his blog this morning, SEOMoz.org's Rand Fishkin gave a sneak peak at the presentation he has intended for PubCon in Las Vegas. It's topic: A solution to the paid links debate.

Fishkin introduces (I'm using a looser sense of this verb, which I'll get to later) his solution/compromise as "Sponsored Editorials." If this strikes you immediately as similar to pay-per-post, you might be right, but Fishkin has put some idealistic stipulations on an admittedly imperfect model without actually outlining how it differs.

Instead of selling a link, Fishkin suggests selling reviews with links in them. In essence, webmasters are paying for the review, not the link. The reviewer is paid whether or not he or she posts something positive. The link is designated "nofollow" if the reviewer is not offering an endorsement, or the nofollow attribute is removed is the reviewer does offer endorsement.

"The marketplace has to exist," he writes, "and search engine have to fight against what they perceive to be manipulative, non-editorial votes. But, what if there was a solution that could make both sides happy? A place where money changed hands between parties, but editorial decisions still came into play?"

Commentators are quick to point out that while it as at least a step in some direction, it seems only a matter of time (and perhaps very quickly) before this system is also gamed, before money under the table is exchanged for the removal of nofollow tags, before reviewers run unscrupulous review systems. One suggests a more complicated system of credibility ranking, to help control for that.

Or the kind of credibility system like the one Google's been working on for years. Fishkin's proposal comes with unfortunate timing. Over the weekend, Google's Matt Cutts, in a lengthy post, intimated that paid reviews (paid posts) are also on the webspam team's radar.

Cutts reiterates Google's commitment to assuring quality information and utilizes the sobering example of brain tumor treatment research. A person researching such a horrifying diagnosis would most likely be aghast, or at least potentially ill-served (if you'll forgive the pun) if sponsored reviews of medical treatments like radiosurgery influenced the patient's research results.

Especially if they are reviews like the ones Cutts exhibits where reviewers have bad spelling or demonstrative lack of knowledge about that which they are reviewing.

"For this very important (potentially even life-or-death) medical topic," writes Cutts, "we saw paid reviewers admit that they knew nothing about a treatment before getting paid to post about it, or who didn’t research the subject enough to know that a treatment was decades old instead of brand-new. We saw people writing about brain tumors who didn’t even spell 'tumor' correctly, and we saw people who got the name of the sponsor wrong."

In short, things aren't looking good for the paid post. At least, where one is openly or obviously paid.

A cynical contributor to Aaron Wall's SEObook, though, makes a fair point that Cutts' example (that it was fear-based notwithstanding) denies the reality of medical research and the big money behind it. Wall questions whether paid posts are worse than sponsored research, and calls on "RFK" to drive it home:

"The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it's become more and more apparent that the 'studies' published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline."

Surely, and one is also reminded of recent accusations that certain FDA commissioners rejected experimental cancer drug Provenge because of their investments in chemotherapy, a competing treatment.

Though Wall's post switches direction and delves into the more esoteric concept of "the googlization of reality," the point that no industry or topic is without its vested interests and stakeholders rings a resonant (and perhaps more deeply frightening) bell.

For even the purity of Wikipedia, which Google loves to champion, is not without its soiled fringes – what with secret mailing lists and editor witch hunts gumming up the gears from time to time (watch out for "free range sarcasm").

On to the next stage of grieving then, which is depression for SEOs now looking to bargain with Google about (overtly) paid anything – and that general malaise that comes with the cracking of an ideal that anything, even within Google's gleaming search rankings, is pure.

And acceptance? Well, if it ever comes, it will be accepting that our porcelain ideals are chipped in practice, are borrowed eventually from the realization that the Behaviorists were right (nothing is without prior motivation), and are never without a dark mirror of an ideal to contradict. But that's no reason not to have them, now is it?

Wall and Cutts Talk Things Over

Aaron Wall — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:05:44 +0000

Matt Cutts recently offered a public voting for my lynching, but we just talked things over, and there will be no lynching - at least not yet. I think Matt is a great guy, but his job is tough as a public face of THE company dominating the web.

It is easy to take a series of events as being personal, but sometimes they are just a series of events and no personal damage is meant, and/or the person doing the damage is an anonymous third party. Also, priorities and goals and reasoning inside a large company can seem vastly different than how they appear outside of the same company, especially when the company has 13,000 employees and keeps doubling in size about every other year.

I still believe that many of my Google criticisms and concerns are valid, but there is only so much Matt can do, and he is doing the best he feels he can, and probably far better than I could do if I had his job. The keyboard is mightier than the pen.

Comments

Wall: Cutts "Blindlingly Hypocritical" About Google

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:59:55 +0000

Not much love in the SEO blogosphere today, as Aaron Wall slams the most accessible member of the Googleplex over Google's alleged treatment of SEO as spam.

Wall: Cutts "Blindlingly Hypocritical" About Google

Considering Matt Cutts and his enormous popularity at search industry conventions, to the point where his swarm of followers have been dubbed "Cuttlets," it's surprising to see him being trashed by another prominent person in the field.

Wall has tapped out a lengthy post at Google Blogoscoped, where he discussed the state of the US search optimization market. But after admitting he "was a spammer out of necessity" when starting in SEO, Wall then lambasted Google for what he sees as the search engine treating all SEO that way.

"If you read Google’s official page about SEOs, you will see they paint the field with some ugly remarks," he said. "Yet if I were to tell you that you should expect a full and unconditional money-back guarantee if your AdWords ad spend did not produce profits, Google would tell you that I am a nutcase."

The money-back guarantee is what Google suggests clients should require of an SEO firm for that client's legal protection. That sent Wall into a lengthy diatribe about Google's recent practices, including the alteration of PageRank scores for sites that sold text links.

There's no question about Wall wanting his criticism of Cutts to gain attention. He not only called Cutts blindlingly hypocritical at times over his employer's practices, but highlighted the quote in a separate box. After that, Wall wrote:

Google pushes the concept of fairness, but as soon as they place the financial viability of websites in the hands and judgement of a single individual that fairness is thrown in the trash can.
Some large corporations are buying out their competition to own virtually the entire first page of search results, others use a large number of subdomains, and yet both go unscathed by the hands of search engineers. Even when a large corporation gets busted, they rank again in a matter of days.

Cutts responded on his blog by pointing out Wall's steady increase in anti-Google postings. He also hinted at knowing what has set Wall on this path:

Suffice it to say that in my opinion there is another side to Aaron’s story. I’m on the fence about whether to talk about the specifics of what’s going on with Aaron.

Now it's up to one or both of these luminaries to either explain what's happening, or bury it and move on to other topics.

follow me on Twitter

Long Haul To The Top of Google

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:15:39 +0000

Alright, you've got your bright idea and your website and you're ready to roll. Now all you need is a first page Google ranking. Easy enough, right? Well, maybe if you're selling fish sweaters, otherwise, there's a lot of people with quite the head start.

Long Haul To The Top of Google

Editor's Note: There are enough basic SEO Tips to fill a book, and they have filled books, so they can't all be listed here. Any essentials you'd like to add to the list? Let us know in the comment section.

Quite likely, you've found yourself in the same predicament as Eric Dytzel of Madisonville, Kentucky, who operates the website TruckerHub.com. Eric's basic dilemma: pay $12,000 to an SEO firm or research and do it himself.

» Watch the video with John Chow, Eric Dytzel, and Aaron Wall «

And well, he decided to give it a go himself. As he boasts on his blog, he took his site from rank 600 to rank 14 in about 100 days for the term "trucker jobs," his prime target keyword phrase. Not first page, but not far from it, and not bad for his money.

Dytzel credits a few well-known SEO bloggers as resources – names you'll probably recognize if you've followed the industry, like John Chow, Andy Hagans, Aaron Wall, and Chris Garrett – and he lists the ten most valuable DIY lessons for novices at that post.

WebProNews got in touch with Wall and with Chow, as you can see from our video, to get some more practical SEO tips. Wall reminds that if you decide to hire an SEO that you do indeed get what you pay for in today's competitive market, and says that "cheap SEOs either don't know what they're doing or don't know what they're worth." So hire cautiously.

At the end of the day, though, you're creating a site with three masters: the end-user; the business; and the search engine. I'll leave it up to you which order those should be in, but it might be best to leave the end-user first.

So what type of magic did Dytzel perform to get his site to rise so fast? No magic, just fundamental SEO that involved content, design, links, and good old fashioned marketing.

And so, here's a quick review of some of those fundamentals:

Content

Stay on topic. This isn't your home library where you can just bounce from subject to subject. Make sure your site is targeted and stays that way. Have a site about shoes and another about dinosaurs, but unless you're carving a niche for dinosaur shoes, leave them separate.

Your site needs a blog. Especially if the site content doesn't change often. (Search spiders like fresh text.) Three times a week minimum, the more the better, mostly about dinosaur shoes or related topics. Watch the video.

Product reviews. Intelligent shoppers like to know all they can about a product before they buy it. They research and research and then they find your site where you've provided an extensive review and have extensive reviews of other things. You get bookmarked and/or linked to. (Be creative – doesn't have to be a product.)

Press Releases. This goes in two places, in Content and Good Old Fashioned Marketing. Whatever you're company's doing that's positive, write up a press release to publish on the site as fresh content, then submit it to a press release distribution service. There is an art to press releases, which should also be optimized, but that's another topic.

Industry news. You could have a section on your site devoted to your industry's news, or provide a news feed there instead. It's another way to keep your site freshly updated with relevant content.

Eleven DIY SEO Tips

1. Regularly updated, useful
    content

2. Submit your site to reputable
    directories

3. Get people to link to you

4. Stay on topic

5. Send out press releases

6. Test, wait, measure

7. Add ALT tags to images

8. Create link bait

9. Pay careful attention to
    keyword density

10. Think quality links, not
     quantity

11. Create title tags with your
     search terms

Feed the Spiders

Keywords. Spiders look for keywords and keyword phrases, so make sure the language contains a decent density of the words and phrases you want to be found for. But also remember that people vary their words at times (so find a thesaurus) and often misspell words. Your blog's a good opportunity to misspell a word from time to time (not too terribly, or you'll look unprofessional) – you know, just leave the "h" out of tecnology, or sneak one or two into the keyword tags where nobody but spiders see them anyway (but don't overstuff the tags or you'll be flagged for spamming).

Links. A burst of low-authority, low quality links will get you flagged and dropped by the search engines. When building links, make sure they are from quality sites that are relevant to your topic.

Submit to directories. Directories have suddenly become a controversial topic in light of Google's recent assault on paid directories that pass PageRank. Submitting your site to a directory is one of the first steps in SEO, and as a general overarching rule, keep your site in good neighborhoods. Google's not going to hit Yahoo, notes Wall, and Chow recommends DMOZ.

Good Old Fashioned Marketing

Nothing beats getting the word out via email, on the street, snail mail, and these days, of course, online communities. If applying brick-and-mortar world ideas online, then you should arrive at the creation of link bait – something so compelling people won't be able to help but link to you.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz supplies a nice sample list of things that can work as link bait in his Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization. They include things like offering free tools, Web 2.0 applications, top 10 lists, industry-related humor, event reviews, interviews, surveys, data, contests and giveaways, and, of course, expert advice.

» Watch the video with John Chow, Eric Dytzel, and Aaron Wall

Are Big Brands Stealing (Buying) the SERPS?

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:14:10 +0000

For a long time, search engine marketers wondered why the big brands were so slow to adopt, why they seemed to be ignoring Google. They may be wishing for the old days, when smaller players with smaller budgets had a better shot at the SERPs.

Are Big Brands Stealing (Buying) the SERPS?

Coke still hasn't quite figured it out yet, as KillerCoke.com is still staring at them menacingly from the number four spot. Pontiac and Mazda, after a short scuffle over competitive keyword bidding, seem to have forgotten each other for now, too.

But notice the domains listed in the organic results for "Pontiac":

1.    Pontiac.com
2.    Pontiac.com/solstice/index.jsp
7.    Pontiacunderground.autos.yahoo.com
9.    GmcCanada.com/English/vehicles/Pontiac/index.jsp

You're saying "so what?" right? It's reasonable that Pontiac or General Motors-owned sites show up in the top ten. That's relevance.

But what makes the Yahoo forum greater than ClassicalPontiac.com, or GMC Canada, or any of the other 35 million results?

SEObook's Aaron Wall would argue that Google is "over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms." This isn't to say that Yahoo's Pontiac forum isn't a great authority, only to note that some links are worth more than others in Google's eyes.

Wall says big brands with big budgets "have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains." They have a tremendous amount of authority, and can set subdomains to leverage that authority, linking to the sites they want to rank higher.

What may be more ethically questionable than that is that these big brands are buying up the other sites they want to rank higher. The end result of that is they are manipulating the search results so that only sites they own with positive messages about their brands show up.

Add that budget leverage to an innate ability to outbid smaller competitors on highly competitive keywords, and you have SERPs literally owned by big business.

"While small businesses are worried about the risks of buying or renting a few links," writes Wall, "some large corporations are launching shadow brands or buying out competing domains en mass."

He uses eBay (which just pulled its ads from Google), Monster.com, Bankrate, and Yahoo as examples. Yahoo has at least nine verticals with Nintendo Wii coverage, Bankrate nails the rankings for "mortgage calculator" and Monster.com has a bag full of educational subdomains.

This type of manipulation isn't much different than Black SEO Google frowns on, nor is it all that different from buying links, which Google also isn't crazy about. This will be Google's next relevancy challenge, then, to find a way to prevent the dollar from overriding the relevance.

A Nifty Keyword Cleaning Tool

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:12:11 +0000

Managing keywords is a daunting task, and while there are a number of places from which you can pull keyword lists, whittling that list down to specific targets of value is often nonplussing and discouraging.

Luckily, there are some philanthropic souls out there willing to help out. Recently, Aaron Wall, author of SEObook.com, created and made available a "Keyword List Cleaner Tool" that helps organize those vision-blurring lists.

"Some keyword sources provide data that is in a format that is hard to use," writes Wall. "The goal of this tool is to make it easy to grab a list of keywords from just about any public source, clean it up, and sort it in order of which terms have the greatest potential value."

What sounds especially useful from Aaron's description:

"Imagine that you use a tool like KeyCompete, and it returns some results that are related to your marketplace, but off topic to your niche site. This will trim out any keyword phrases that are far off topic. For example, if you wanted to remove wallpaper triggers from showing your ringtone ads."

The source code for the tool is also embeddable to a website or blog.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Google Ranking Flux Probably Just A Hiccup

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:38:11 +0000

Everybody stay calm. Go on with your usual SEO business. What looked like a President's Day weekend Google algorithm update was most like a tiny ripple in cyberspace.

A handful of bloggers were asking "did you see that?" referring to a sudden, and brief, fluctuation in keyword positioning in the Google search results. SEObook's Aaron Wall begins the discussion:

[A] number of keywords I watch I have seen large authority sites get demoted in favor of smaller niche players with spammy keyword rich backlink profiles. I am seeing things like spammy new(ish) lead generation sites outranking fortune 500s and long standing industry association sites.

Commentators in the peanut gallery say they saw it too as positions slipped from the top to as far as ten pages down and then returned to normal, as if it were just a Google hiccup. Many suspect it was a "data refresh" rather than a full update.

Michael of GoogleOrganic.com submits:

[I]f it was an update there would be serious movements on these keywords for me by now. With that said a data refresh would seem possible.

I have noticed over a long period of time that while a data refresh is very important, it usually goes through a "cycling" period with minimal shifting, but seems to "bounce back" to a more normal flux within a week.

But commentator "Cygnus," thinks it's more specific:

I see a few things that can probably be summed up as one change...the sandbox/trustbox was modified to be less restrictive on age and theme. I'm betting it'll tighten up again, but hopefully just on the theme.

To me, this was their way of tackling the ever-growing .edu spam. A lot of that is gone from some of the SERPs I watch.

Well, whatever it was, it's over and everybody can get back to their Anna Nicole Circus coverage.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Links And Content Need Each Other, For Now

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:47:54 +0000

I can't help but think this is a silly discussion, like an argument about whether or not Lois Lane could really have Superman's baby, but I'm diving in anyway to wrap my head around it and, in the process, take you with me.

Links And Content Need Each Other, For Now

Over at Media Post, David Berkowitz (of 360i, not Attica prison) writes about a Web where links don't matter in SEO. You can read that article here, if you don't mind a half an hour of the third degree to get the content (Media Post hasn't ascribed to the concept of registration-free content, yet).

Berkowitz writes:

Content is SO 2006, as far as search engine optimization goes.

Everywhere I turn, the SEO discussions center on linking and link development…

Instead of just extolling the value of links, I started to wonder what would happen if links weren’t so highly valued. Imagine if, in this “Twilight Zone” exercise, you woke up one day to find that the major search engines no longer used inbound links as a way to rank Web sites or other types of online content. The effect would be calamitous, on par with the Department of Treasury one day saying that greenbacks would no longer be valued as currency.

From the first line its difficult to tell if Berkowitz is downgrading the role of content or criticizing the SEO world for not focusing on content enough. The concept that inbound links are a sort of online currency is a fascinating one, but as a content creator, my knee-jerk reaction to naysaying the role of stellar content is, hopefully, forgivable.

That first line was troubling enough, but in his summarization of "Content" and its sudden importance in the absence of valuable links was a lid-flipper:

Content would really become king. Keyword density, the imperfect science of including just enough of the most important keywords on any given page without spamming the search engines, becomes more important than ever.

Now here, we have a fundamental conflict in regards the concept of content, what it is, its purpose, and understanding what readers/viewers/listeners seek as opposed to what marketers (who ensure the bills are paid) want them to seek.

Berkowitz is a strategist. I am a writer. And the two of them, writers and strategists, in the real world, must work together. We could get into a philosophical discussion of backgrounds and approaches to content (I'm the indignant artist, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, hoping all of us can join hands in a haze of patchouli and sing the praises of perfect prose), but that's a discussion for later.

The real truth here is: one doesn't exist without the other.

What good is content if nobody can find it? What's the purpose of linking if there is nothing in which to link? Content drives linking and linking drives content, the two of them working in perfect symbiosis.

And all that's great until the crafty weasels (strategists excluded) out there muddy the pure waters of relevance with keyword stuffing, link spam, et cetera. Suddenly we're reminded why the brick-and-mortar world needs law, and why the Web needs Google as a police agent as much as organizer. Penalties are instituted, and concepts like link quality are born. Suddenly it matters who links to your content, and why.

So this is where SEObook's Aaron Wall pipes up:

But links are openly gamed today and there are an increasing number of affordable marketing techniques that allow virtually any site to garner hundreds or thousands of quality links.

One day Google might come up with better ways to determine what to trust, but if they do, it is going to be based on who humans trust more, and who amongst those trusted sources does the best job of providing editorial value and noise filtering on their site.

Shorter, Google's going to have to get better at understanding intrinsic end-user desire. They're working on this, according to some patents and recent forays into personalized search. When that happens – when digital robots suddenly understand your innermost thoughts – the power of the link is not destroyed, but it is weakened.

And what do you think is left when that artificial intelligence revolution takes hold?

Content, content, content, forever content, driving the masses online to find it and share it with each other. Everything else, the noise that prevents those masses from finding what they want, either disappears or is pushed to the periphery of the page, the frame of the content. And then, quoting Berkowitz, "Copywriters' salaries skyrocket."

Or at least, such is the hope of the content creator.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Google’s Supplemental Index Continues To Grow

Joe Lewis — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:37:55 +0000

Reports are surfacing throughout the blogosphere concerning the ever-growing recesses of Google’s supplemental results. Now more than ever, sites that were once highly ranked in the main index are beginning to find themselves in the confines of the supplemental index.

Some have likened Google’s supplemental index to a virtual refuse pile, an online prison where all sorts of outdated web content are doomed to a fate of obscurity for all time.

Others, such as Matt Cutts, believe that the fear and loathing (forgive me Dr. Thompson) that accompany supplemental results may be a tad melodramatic. In a blog entry last month, Matt talked a bit about the SI and the nature of its content:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher.

Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

Don’t be afraid of the supplemental index? When is the last time you heard Google users praising the relevant information they found within the supplemental results?

And your expert advice is to get high quality links? Come on Matt, we’re not teaching SEO 101 here. This idea of quality linkage is not a new concept, and is certainly not unique to the dilemma of winding up in the supplemental index. Surely there must be some other factor that contribute to a site’s presence within the SI, or at least some methods of prevention?

Luckily for the faithful WebProNews readers, I’ve done some digging and have found some insightful commentary with methods to avoid the supplemental index.

We talk a lot about the external links coming into a site, but Andy Hagans tells us that internal links can be equally vital in avoiding the SI:

Get some links to internal pages. This is all about convincing Google your site doesn’t have “hollow shell syndrome”–when a site has, say, 20 pages, and a few dozen backlinks, but 100% of those backlinks are pointing to the homepage. Most often, the homepage of the site is in the normal index but all of the internal pages have gone supplemental.

I usually go “brute force” at one internal page and get 3 or 4 links to it (giving this one internal page so much link weight that Google pretty much has to index it); normally, GoogleBot revisits the entire site and re-crawls and indexes the other internal pages, too (up to a point: if the site has hundreds or thousands of pages, you’ll need to rinse+repeat this a few times).

Staying the realm of links, Aaron Wall fills us in on how the site you link to can also have an impact:

Since your site has a rather low PageRank you may want to only list your blogroll on your home page instead of every page of your blog. Take out other parts of your site that heavily duplicate each other from page to page. Also consider removing your sitewide links to some of the unimportant pages on your site to flow more of your link equity throughout your site.

I would also recommend removing the tagging pages on your site as your site is already navigable via your categories, and the tags create low value noise pages that reduce your link equity distributed on the quality pages. I also think it is foolish to link at all those auto-generated Technorati pages...that wastes a lot of your link authority.

I would also recommend not linking to some of the pages you don't want Google to index, such as those printer friendly pages. You may also want to block those printer friendly URLs using the Robots.txt protocol.

This is just a sampling of the information that both Aaron and Andy offer up to those looking to stay out of the supplemental results. So if you’re not like Matt Cutts and you believe that the SI is something to be afraid, I suggest you check out what these guys have to say.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl