seo

Networking, Solutions, Special Sessions and More: The Network Pass at SMX Advanced

2012-05-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

Meet nearly 40 leading solution providers. Attend 2 sessions on emerging search engine marketing topics. Attend Matt Cutts’ keynote via simulcast. Connect with your next client, employer, vendor or mentor at three networking events.

Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced hits the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle June 5-6. Be part of this exclusive event when you pre-register for a Network Pass.

Here’s everything you get…

Attend “Plus” sessions that cover emerging search engine marketing topics. Plus sessions feature case studies, best practices and search marketing solutions presentations. Check out this great line-up:

A Summer Blockbuster: Famous Brands Showcase Four Star Consumer Search and Social Strategies
Tuesday, June 5 at 1:45pm – Sponsored by Covario
Presentations from Sony Pictures Entertainment, T-Mobile and Celebrity Cruises. See the full description here.Up Close With Bing Webmaster Tools!
Wednesday, June 6 at 10:45am – Sponsored by Bing
Bing Webmaster team will address updates, introduce new tools and answer your questions. See the full description here.

Visit the market-defining vendors. Exhibitors include the search engines, PPC management platforms, web analytics solutions, site development tools and a host of others. See the complete list of exhibitors and sponsors.

Watch the keynote on Tuesday June 5 from high-def monitors in the Expo Hall. The keynote features Google’s Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan in a no-holds-barred Q&A.

Network with speakers, conference attendees and vendors. A Network Pass earns you admission to:

SMX Meet & Greet on Monday, June 4th. Sponsored by Adobe, Brafton, BrightEdge and Bruce Clay Inc.SMX Expo Hall Reception on Tuesday June 5thSMX After Dark on Tuesday June 5th. The legendary event will be held this year at the Seattle Aquarium, sponsored by Covario.

Still need convincing? Learn more about the Network Pass. Ready to block out time on your calendar? Register now!

Come spend a couple of hours, a day or stay for both days! You’ll be a more knowledgeable, inspired and motivated internet marketer.

Register today for your SMX Advanced Network Pass, just $99 when you pre-register by June 4th!

Related Topics: SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX | SMX & SMN Alerts

About The Author: Search Engine Land is a news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry. Special site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Search Engine Land. See more articles by Search Engine Land

Connect with the author via: Email

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9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions

2012-05-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in Q&A is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

The most frequent excuse I hear in Q&A is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

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Google Provides Competitive Information In New Auction Insights Report

2012-05-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

AdWords marketers’ days of regularly refreshing on all their keywords may be over — or at least that activity may not be quite so necessary. Google is releasing a new report — Auction Insights — that helps marketers understand how their ads stand, compared to others in the same auctions.

“For a given keyword, the report tells you in aggregate how you’re doing as compared to other participants,” Bhanu Narasimhan, group product manager for AdWords, told us.

While the report lists the landing page domains for all of the other competitors in a particular auction, Google stresses that the information provided about competitors is no more than a marketer would get by performing the search on Google.com.

The reports won’t give the competitors’ keywords, quality or settings. For example, you can see that a competitor’s ad will be triggered by your keyword, but the other advertiser may not be actively bidding on that specific keyword — perhaps they are using broad match, for example.

The new report provides new data at the keyword level on five different statistics:

Impression share: the percentage of total impressions the ads will get based on current settings.Average position: the average rank of your ad, compared to other domains appearing for the auction.Overlap rate: how often your ads overlap with those of another domain.Position above rate: how often your ads are above a certain other domain.Top of page percent: how often your ads appear in the ad block on the top of the page.

The report, rolling out globally in the next few days, is only available for highly-trafficked keywords, as there’s not enough data available for less-popular ones. Marketers can only see one keyword at a time, currently.

To find the report, go to the Keywords tab, click the box next to the keyword — available keywords will show an icon that indicates the report is available for that keyword. Click the “Keyword Details” tab and choose “Selected (single keyword)” under “Auction insights.”

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Top News

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

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Getting Started with the Mozscape API

2012-05-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

I’m pretty new here at SEOmoz, and one of the projects I’m working on is improving the Mozscape API wiki content so it’s easier for you to learn how to access all of the cool data available through the Mozscape API.

I decided to jump in and try to figure it out. My initial plan was not to cheat... that is, not use the help I have as an employee that’s not available to most API users. But I got stuck, so I had to change the rules... You’ve heard of Calvinball, right? I made a new rule that I get to cheat, as long as I share.

I’d already signed up, since I work here, but this part isn’t hard. If you’re not already a member, go to this page, and either sign up for a free PRO trial, or register for the SEOmoz community. Both of these give you access to the free version of the Mozscape API. If you like what you see and want more requests and full access to the API, details on what’s available are on our API Pricing page.

This part would fit right into Calvin Ball... I get a secret key! Once I’m signed in, the Getting Started page shows the Generate API Credentials section. I wasn’t sure what to put in the Your Access ID section, so I just clicked the button. Then had to agree to the terms of service, and clicked it again, and voila, I have my Access ID and my Secret Key.

Tip #1: You don’t enter Your Access ID, we generate it. Just read our terms of service, click the box agreeing to them, and then push the big Generate Secret Key button (or Regenerate, if you’ve already done it once).

As I looked at creating my first API request, I came to a complete standstill figuring out how to authenticate my request. My problems were completely self-inflicted, but I had to resort to cheating to overcome them.

I’d started reading the forums, and the number one issue on the forums at the moment is failed authentication. Before I started this exercise, I’d read a forum post that said the authentication example on the Getting Started page was old and no longer the recommended way to do things.

This led me to ignoring what it actually said on this page, and trying all sorts of things to create a Unix Timestamp and Valid Signature on my own, when it was sitting in front of me the whole time. It took talking to folks here to get me back on track.

Tip #2: Remember that the forums represent a moment in time. We’ve been changing things, and fixing things, and what you read in the forums *could* be outdated. We noticed the sample was bad, wrote about it in the forums, and then fixed it, meaning the forum post is now out-of-date.

After the above flailing about, and my first cheat, I realized the Sample Valid API Signature is actually a genuine, A#1, valid API signature, and allows me to do a query right away.

So, I was able to use the Sample Request on the Getting Started page to get the correct member ID, timestamp, and signature in the correct format.

Tip #3 & 4:

If you've been flailing about after getting your secret key (as I did), you'll need to refresh the page to update the timestamp. The timestamp on the sample is only valid for about 5 minutes.Your signature has to be base64 and then URL encoded. This is why the Signature line on the Getting Started page is slightly different from the Signature in the Sample Request, which has been encoded for you. Make sure you use the Sample Request string.

Once I realized the signed authentication was provided for me in the sample request, it came down to just using the wiki documentation to modify the request for the URL and metrics that I wanted. The URL was easy; I just changed the website in the sample request from “www.seomoz.org&2fblog” to the website of my local food coop.

Then, since the sample request uses the url-metrics API call, I looked up how to add the URL metrics I wanted on the URL-Metrics API wiki page. I picked these metrics:

Adding all of the bit flags for these up gives me 2061. So I put 2061 in the Cols parameter.

Since I’ve been here a little over a month, I had already looked at the URL-metrics API page, and been working on improving the content there. So I already knew how to use the Cols parameter and how to add up the bit flags to get the metrics I wanted.

All of the above modifications to the Sample Request gave me my first working query:

http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/url-metrics/www.snoislefoods.coop?Cols=2061&AccessID=&Expires=&Signature=

I put it in a new browser window, hit enter, and got my first response:

{"ufq":"www.snoislefoods.coop/","uid":864,"ut":"Organic Produce Co op, Natural Food Cooperative | Sno-Isle Natural Foods Co-op Everett WA","uu":"www.snoislefoods.coop/"}

Success! I used the table on the URL-metrics API page (excerpted above) to interpret my link data.

So, this is what I learned that might be helpful to you if you’re just starting out. Now, most of the time, you’re not going to access your link data by typing a request like I did in the browser window, but I hope this helps you in understanding what all of the moving pieces are when generating your queries programmatically.

After my experience with this, I’ll be working on improving the Getting Started page, forum pages, and the wiki docs to help you avoid the parts that confused me on my first go around.

If you have any suggestions, success stories, or really good cheats, I’d love to hear from you. Email api@seomoz.org.

Lisa - Mozstaff

About Lisa - MozStaff — I’m a technical writer at SEOmoz, which is great for me because I really love technical writing. My favorite thing in the world is to take something that makes your head spin and change it into something you don’t even notice, because you found the information you were looking for and are getting stuff done. If you’re reading anything from SEOmoz and it’s making your head spin, let me know at lisa@seomoz.org.

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Ways to Win Customers and Influence Rankings - Whiteboard Friday

2012-05-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"
We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.
So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.
So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.
Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.
Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."
A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.
The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.
But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.
Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.
Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.
I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.
There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.
Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.
Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.
All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

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In-depth Guide To Content Creation [With Infographic]

2012-05-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an on-site SEO consultant, a link-building specialist or an all-round ‘internet marketer’, content creation should be particularly high on your list of priorities. We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘content is king’ for years now, but given Google’s recent de-indexation of low-quality blog networks, the Panda updates and the new algorithm burning across the horizon, it seems it’s never been more true than in 2012.

It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult.

So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content?

To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns.

Click for a full size version if you'd like to print it.

Research

Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it.

Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages.

Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites).

To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal;

Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news

Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest

Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts

Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing

These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research.

This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer - suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage.

Ideas

Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information.

The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry?

Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc).

An excellent example is SEOmoz's own Google Algorithm Change History; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they've provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change).

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes:

Infographic section via PlayVille

You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event - a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn't necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic.

Infographic section via Autoblog

Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in.

Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion.

If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production.

Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed.

Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage.

It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers.

Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else.

When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces.

So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content.

Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics.

Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience.

Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you.

Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic -- there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!):

Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog

Infographic section via Volvo

Infographic section via HotelshopUK

Infographic section via Geekosystem

When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’.

Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished.

My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it).

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can.

Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading).

Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts.

Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org. Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing.

You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this, tell them how to do it.

Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal.

So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails.

I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content.

Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved.

It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage.

It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can.

You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post, this list of infographic distribution sites, this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites.

You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people.

So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below.

Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd.

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Google’s Latest Interactive Logo: The Moog Synthesizer

2012-05-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

People absolutely love Google Doodles and today Google has went way over the top to pay respect to Bob Moog, the man who is credited for revolutionizing modern day music. He invented the first electrical music device, he named the Moog Synthesizer.

The Moog Synthesizer was first introduced at the Audio Engineering Society convention in 1964. Google and others credit Moog for the music of legends such as The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and others.

To celebrate Moog’s life, he passed away 7 years ago in 2005 at the age of 71, Google has an interactive web based Moog Synthesizer that you can play, record and share with friends.

To give it a try, go to Google.com and let the page load. Then you can click on the device and to record your music, click the record button. After the recording is done, you can share it on Google+ or via a special short URL.

Google posted instructions on how to use the Moog Synthesizer on their Google Blog.

Google also explained it works best in Google Chrome. Google said the “sound is generated natively using the Web Audio API—a doodle first (for other browsers the Flash plugin is used). This doodle also takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.”

Related Topics: Google: Logos

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

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GM's Doing it Wrong: Facebook Marketing Lessons

2012-05-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

GM made a huge stink last week when they pulled their $10 million Facebook advertising budget.

They’re doing it wrong. And you can learn some valuable lessons from their mistake:

The Register pointed out that Facebook ads average a .05% click-through rate. Click-through rate is the total number of clicks on an ad, divided by the number of ad views, or impressions. That’s very low, compared to .4% on Google’s Display Network.

But you can purchase ads on both networks on a cost-per-click basis: You only pay if someone actually clicks on the ad. If a GM ad shows up on my Facebook page, and I glance at it but move on, GM doesn’t pay a thing. But I still saw GM’s ad. It’s free display advertising!

There’s no way to pin a value on that glance, but there is a value. If nothing else, GM just occupied attention otherwise available for Toyota.

Managed correctly, Facebook advertising is an unbeatable display ad bargain. GM’s losing a huge branding opportunity.

Social media is earned media. Selling in earned media is a two-step process:

Attract and build an audience over time.Then you sell to that audience.

Facebook ads boost step 1.

GM claims Facebook ads aren’t delivering results. But they’re measuring the wrong results, I’ll bet: They’re looking at clicks, sales and web site traffic. They should be looking at new followers, share of voice, and the quality of the following they build.

You can grow your brand without paid Facebook ads, by posting to your Facebook page. In our tests, 2-4 great posts per day is the minimum effective pace for a major brand. Post less often and your brand shrinks. General Motors posts every 1-2 days, at best. With that pace, and without ads, they can’t grow their brand.

Don’t repeat their mistake: Understand earned media. Your Facebook following is a long-term asset. It’s a community that’s primed for your marketing message. Neglect it and you’ll fail. GM has to either maintain their ad spend (clearly they won’t) or step up their other efforts (hopefully they will). As it stands now, when GM stops their ad campaign, their Facebook page will stagnate.

You can measure the return from earned media on Facebook. Run Facebook-specific offers. GM could run a regional campaign with participating dealers and offer cash back, or free oil changes for 3 years, or similar. See how many people participate. Use the performance of those campaigns over time to track the value of your average Facebook follower.

That’s only part of the value generated, but it’s a start. It lets you sketch out a comparison of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ ads, content and offers.

Learn to measure earned media performance.

$10 million is a huge Facebook spend. Chances are, GM can optimize it and improve performance, or reduce waste by removing non-performing ads and segments. Instead, they’re chucking the entire budget baby out with the bathwater. If GM applied the budgeting technique to print and television, they’d shut down those campaigns, too.

If you manage a Facebook campaign, you’ll hit a point where you want to turn it off. Don’t. Instead, test, refine and improve. Use Facebook’s amazing segmenting tools to create precisely-targeted ads.

Don’t hack off a limb because of a hangnail. That’s what GM is doing.

Facebook ads represent .5% of GM’s total marketing budget. To be worthwhile, Facebook ads would need to generate 45,000 cars sold. Staggering numbers for you and I, but for a company that sold 9 million cars last year, that’s a totally achievable goal.

My last advice: Don’t shut down an ad spend that’s less than 1% of your budget unless you’re 100% certain it’s a failure. When the stakes are low and the potential high, keep perspective. Bottom line, that’s what GM forgot to do, and it’s going to hurt them a lot more than Facebook in the long run.

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SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 22, 2012

2012-05-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

May 22, 2012 at 5:00pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Google Provides Competitive Information In New Auction Insights Report

Just Because Someone Works At Google Doesn’t Make Them An SEO Expert

I had an interesting email hit my inbox, someone showing me how a Google employee was “100%” sure there had been no Penguin Update. There was, of course, and it’s a reminder that just because someone is a Googler, that doesn’t mean they know how Google Search works. Google has nearly 25,000 employees (according to [...]

How To Tweet What You Want, Because Content Matters

Former Yahoo Executive Pleads Guilty To Securities Fraud Charge Related To Microsoft Deal

The Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft had some unintended beneficiaries (now casualties). Yahoo’s former senior director of business management, Robert Kwok, has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, after being accused that he told a mutual fund manager in July 2009 that the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft was imminent. Among its [...]

Link Building Tool Review: Link Prospector

Our link building tool review series continues today with Link Prospector by Citation Labs. A joint venture between Garrett French and Darren Shaw, Link Prospector is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina and has been online since February 2012. Garrett and Darren continue to add features to the tool, foreign-language support and an API are scheduled to [...]

5 Tips To Manage Your Multinational Social Media

One of the biggest challenges to delivering an effective social media campaign for big, multinational brands is executing the strategy on a practical level: you’ll have multiple networks, profiles, languages, and social media managers to control across different countries. Implementing your social channels effectively is critical for search optimisation these days, so getting on top [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Google AdWords Auction Insights Reveals Who You’re Competing Against, Search Engine WatchGoogle Listing Name Servers Instead Of Web Address?, Search Engine RoundtableGoogle Webmaster Academy, Search Engine RoundtableSEO, Why You Are Doing it Wrong, Search Engine WatchThe Google AdWords Rotate Ads Workaround, Search Engine RoundtableIntroducing Webmaster Academy, Official Google Webmaster Central BlogPPC Basics – adCenter, an introduction, adCenter BlogWhat should I do if my competitors are using webspam techniques?, YouTube

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Related Topics: SearchCap

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. You can read more about our comments policy here.

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7 Achievable Steps For Great SEO After The Penguin Update

2012-05-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The Penguin update sent a strong message that not knowing SEO basics is going to be dangerous in the future. You have to have the basics down or you could be at risk. Penguin is a signal from Google that these updates are going to continue at a rapid pace and they don't care what color your hat is, it's all about relevance. You need to take a look at every seemingly viable "SEO strategy" with this lens. What you don't know can hurt you. It's not that what you are doing is wrong or bad, the reality is that the march towards relevance is coming faster than ever before. Google doesn't care what used to work, they are determined to provide relevance and that means big changes are the new normal.

eHow / Demand Media after the Panda update

All that said doing great SEO is an achievable goal, make sure you are taking these steps.

This is essential knowledge post Penguin. The biggest risk factors are a combination of lots of low quality links with targeted anchor text. There seems to be some evidence that there is a new 60% threshold for matching anchor text but don't forget about the future, I recommend at most 2 rankings focused anchor texts out of 10. The key metrics I look at for this are:

Anchor text distributionThe link type distribution (for example, article, comment, directory, etc.)Domain Authority and Page Authority distributions

The goal here is to find out what is currently going on and where you should be going. Compare your site with the examples below.

For anchor text Open Site Explorer gives you an immediate snapshot of what's going on while MajesticSEO and Excel can be better at digging into some of the really spammy links.

Great Excel templates for DA/PA analysis

Natural Domain Authority profile

For link type analysis I use Link Detective but it seems to be down at the moment (please come back!).

Great links:

Come from respected brands, sites, people and organizationsExist on pages that lots of other sites link toProvide value to the userAre within the content of the pageAren't replicated many times over on the linking site

Those are lofty requirements but there is a lot of evidence that these high value links are really the main drivers of a domain's link authority. At the 1:00 mark Matt Cutts talks about how many links are actually ignored by Google:

That's not to say there isn't wiggle room but the direction of the future is quite clear, you have no control over how Google or Bing values your links and there's plenty of evidence that sometimes they get it wrong. The beauty of getting great links is that they aren't just helping you rank, they are VALUABLE assets for your business SEO value aside. At Distilled this was one of the primary ways we built our business, it's powerful stuff.

This is a simple goal but it can be very difficult for larger sites. If it's really complex and hard to figure out then it's going to be hard for Google to crawl. There are few bigger wins in SEO than getting content that wasn't previously being indexed out there working for you.

Sitemaps unfortunately can only help you so much in terms of getting things indexed. Furthermore, putting the pages that are the most important higher up in the crawl path lets you prioritize which pages get passed the most link authority.

I have never consulted on a website that didn't have duplicate or thin content somewhere. The real issue here is not that duplicate content always causes problems or a penalty but rather if you don't understand the structure of your website you don't know what *could* be wrong. Certainty is a powerful thing, knowing that you can confidently invest in your website is very important.

A great place to start is to use Google to break apart the different sections of your site:

Start with a site search in Google Now add on to the search removing one folder or subdomain at a time Compare this number you get to the amount of pages you expect in that section and dig deeper if the number seems high

Note: The number of indexed pages that Google features here can be extremely inaccurate; the core idea is to reveal areas for further investigation. As you go through these searches go deeper into the results with inflated numbers. Duplicate and thin content will often show up after the first 100 results.

It's extremely common to change URLs, reasons like new design, new content management systems, new software, new apps... But this does serious damage and even if you manage it perfectly the 301 redirects cut a small portion of the value of EVERY single link to the page. And no one handles it perfectly. One of my favorite pieces of software Balsamiq has several thousand links and 500+ linking root domains pointed at 404s and blank pages. Balsamiq is so awesome they rank their head terms anyway but until you are Balsamiq cool you might need those links.

If you are worried that you have really bad URLs that could be causing problems Dr. Pete has already done a comprehensive analysis of when you should consider changing them. And then you only do it once.

This is an often overlooked step in the process. As we talked about before if your content isn't up and indexed any SEO work is going to go to waste. Will Critchlow has already done a great job outlining how to monitor your website:

Watch for traffic drops with Google Analytics custom alertsMonitor your uptime with services like PingdomMonitor what pages you noindex with meta tags or robots.txt (you would be shocked how often this happens)

Some more tools to help you keep an eye out for problems:

Dave Sottimano's traffic and rankings drop diagnosis toolGoogle Analytics DebuggerThe various rank tracking toolsSEOmoz's Google Analytics hook formats landing pages sending traffic in an easy graph

To me inbound marketing is just a logical progression from SEO, thinking about your organic traffic in a vacuum really just doesn't make sense. Dedicate yourself to improving your website for your users and they will reward you, Balsamiq which I mentioned earlier is a perfect example of this. I guarantee you they have done little to no SEO and yet they rank first for their most important keywords and have a Domain Authority of 81. How did they do it? Less features.

So what does that really mean? Balsamiq had a rigorous dedication to what their customers really wanted. That's really good marketing, smart business and intelligent product design all in one. Remember the future is all about relevance to your users, if you aren't actively seeking this you will get left behind. There is no excuse anymore there are plenty of proven examples of making seemingly boring page types fascinating and engaging.

If you need more high impact changes to your SEO check out the topic list for SearchLove San Francisco, it's the first time Distilled is going to be doing a conference on the West Coast.

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What Can We Learn From The Latest Brand To Be Called Out For Paid Links?

2012-05-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

Move over JC Penney. Another brand is getting attention over buying links, this time Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation. Today’s news is less news and more a reminder of lessons that SEO companies, clients and publishers all need to keep in mind, to avoid trouble.

Josh Davis drew attention to the DBCC situation in his post today, documenting how after receiving three link requests from the same person, he finally followed up, only to be pitched on placing a link from one of his articles to the DBCC site in return for $30 per month.

What’s Dun & Bradstreet — the nearly 200-year-old Fortune 500 company that brokers information about people and companies for business decisions — doing buying links? It’s not. DBCC was spun-off from D&B in 2010 and is a privately-held company, providing credit solutions to small businesses, with a license to use the D&B brand.

That DBCC isn’t a Fortune 500 company takes some of the “wow” factor out of the story. In addition, we’ve already had stories about big companies ranging from JC Penney to Overstock to even Google itself getting caught for paid links. That makes what DBCC was doing seem even less newsworthy to some. After all, doesn’t everyone do this now? What’s really new or unique here?

I supposed there is nothing particularly new, but clearly there’s a bunch of reminders that are useful to have out there.

Judy Hacket, the chief marketing officer of DBCC, sounded pretty horrified when I talked with her today about the situation. Her department was scrambling to discover how exactly it ended up with these links being purchased.

Davis connects the link request in his story back to iAcquire. Hacket wouldn’t say if DBCC is working with that firm, citing possible confidentiality clauses in contacts. She did say, however, “we have absolutely no agreement with iAcquire or anyone else allowing them to use any grey hat or black hat practices.”

Hacket was also adamant that DBCC had no desire to violate any of Google’s guidelines.

“We would never endorse something like this,” she said.

Of course, we’ve heard this type of denial / shock before. Recall what JC Penney said last year, after the New York Times profiled it for using paid links:

J.C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies.

Curious to learn more, I asked JC Penney what those policies were after the New York Times story came out. A JCP spokesperson emailed me back:

We are not going to provide our policies, but obviously, they would include staying within Google’s guidelines.

Well, obviously! Except they didn’t, otherwise JC Penney wouldn’t have been banned. When JCP said it didn’t authorize or was involved with paid links, it meant that its SEO firm did all that. As I was told further in my email exchange:

SearchDex ran our SEO program. We do not pay for links as they go against Google’s guidelines. SearchDex was terminated because as our SEO provider they should have known. This was a clear failure on their part.

It was also a clear failure on JCP’s part, for not understanding what its SEO company was doing. The same is true for DBCC. Indeed, I’ve been joking that for some time, whenever some large brand gets dinged for paid links, it’s handy to have an SEO firm they can pin the blame on.

The reality is that for the large companies or brand names, this type of behavior seems to get a 90 day slap, then they’re back in Google’s good graces. It’s difficult for Google to permanently remove an important company that people expect to find. That means as a client, or as an important brand, keep these lessons in mind:

Do you fully understand how your SEO company will obtain links for you?If you don’t want paid links, have you made that crystal-clear?If you approve of buying paid links, are you prepared for a potential short-term PR black eye?If you approve of buying paid links, is that worth a potnetial short-term Google penalty?

If you’re not a major brand or an essential resource that Google has to list, there’s really only one question you need to ask. Are you prepared to lose all your traffic from Google? That’s because for the non-essential people, being caught for paid links can be a death sentence, not a temporarily set-back.

As for the SEO company buying links, you’d better be prepared for your client to toss you to the wolves, if a paid link campaign comes to light. Also do be prepared for that campaign to come to light, unless you’re incredibly careful with whom you are soliciting.

In this case, the SEO company pitched someone whose “About” page explains that he writes about marketing. That should have been a warning that this person is probably somewhat savvy about paid links, so some disguised pitch for one wasn’t wise.

I get these types of pitches myself. So does Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team. If I’d gotten this type of email sent to me on behalf of a major brand, I might very well have written about it myself and concerns about “outing” be damned. I’d view it as a protective service to the general human population. It’s like watching someone drive backwards on the freeway. They’re a danger to everyone.

As for iAcquire itself, it won’t comment on the case, citing client confidentiality. It won’t acknowledge that it was involved in any way, nor confirm if it has worked with DBCC. But the company did give me this statement:

We work with many of the largest brands in the world. It’s very common that we run into large brands everyday buying links from blog networks and large paid link marketplaces, and our mission as a business is to direct brand strategy towards whiter hat link building approaches.
That movement often takes time and effort – and, in the real world in working with big brands with pre-established objectives it frequently is a multi-step process, and requires a lot of education at both the SEO manager, online marketing marketing manager and CMO-levels. We are literally driving the education process every day.
To be clear, we are not a link network. Every link we build is based on the very same principles touted throughout the industry. Our links are contextual and relevant through outreach performed by 40 actual in-house people that sit in our Arizona office and everything is pushed through strenuous quality assurance.
Our business is to push brands to white hat strategy, but we frequently acquire new customers that are still on that path, and we support these companies toward that white hat direction. We have been investing significantly into our content marketing, social media, and digital PR channels to more rapidly make those changes internally and for these brands.
Regarding the article written about our company, we can’t talk about specific strategy for specific customers or potential customers – due to confidentiality agreements. Financial compensation for links does not represent the strategic direction of our company. iAcquire’s services are holistic and include a great deal of content marketing, digital PR and social media promotion, and on-page SEO consulting.
We’ve never had a problem with Google’s algorithm and our clients – and, we understand that it is important for us to continue to drive the market towards techniques that best represent the guidelines established by search engines. iAcquire continues to evolve its service lines, and recently brought in Mike King to help drive that direction to ensure we are considering search engine guidelines and industry best practices. In addition, he continues to promote these best practices at various conferences worldwide.

Wait, is iAcquire suggesting that DBCC — assuming it eventually emerges as a client — was one of those companies needing to be nudged into the white hat world? Cofounder Joe Griffin effectively said no, when he emailed this follow-up statement:

We aren’t talking about D&BCC (when we mention that we transition people from grey to white in the second sentence) – we can’t talk about specifics of clients or potential clients – we are prevented from doing so.
The enterprise world has a lot of nuances, and we believe we have more than anyone helped to correct SEO brand strategy as it relates to off-page SEO and specifically as it relates to killing black hat link networks.
At the end of the day we run into a lot of different goals, and different approaches, and we try to bring all clients to a fully white hat solution. Our team is heavily focused on high quality editorial content and creative development to attract links. We do a TON of link reclamation as well.
We brought Mike on board specifically to continue to build upon this direction. Mike is one of the best in the business in educating SEOs about how to properly implement off-page SEO strategy – he’s helping us here as well.
We are not a paid link company. We deliver holistic off-page SEO to small and large companies – and are the leading charge in proper off-page SEO education.

By Mike, Griffin is referring to Michael King, who I’d say has built a good reputation for himself in some SEO circles over the past year in his writings and speaking. He’s spoken at our own SMX events and is slated to again next month. He’s sharp, has lots of insight, and he seemed a win for iAcquire when they hired him about two months ago.

Suffice to say, I was pretty surprised that he appeared mixed up with all this. He’s seemed very white hat. I think it’s great if he’s going to help iAcquire and/or its clients move to white hat activities, but I’d say the sooner the better, if iAcquire really doesn’t want to be known as a paid link company.

Right now, however, if that link request is effectively coming out of iAcquire’s work, it might not be a paid link company, but it sure seems as if it has been buying links. That’s tough to square talk of following search engine guidelines.

Meanwhile, there’s Google. This time last year, it was counting the news about JC Penney as a win in the war against paid links. A year later, has anything changed? Was it really that much a deterrent?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve heard some say that many SEOs buy links. That’s it’s just what you have to do. I don’t have any good survey data to back those types of statements up or knock them down.

Fair to say, however, today’s news didn’t surprise many. Even if it it had been D&B itself, I’m not sure if the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would have cared to run stories, as they did last year with JC Penney and Overstock.

I do know that Google has got to come up with something better than counting links. I keep expecting that social will be a larger signal, and my previous story below explains more about why this makes sense:

In the meantime, we’re stuck with the increasingly creaking, rotting link signal. But for anyone who thinks that’s an excuse for anything goes, look again to what I said the Client Beware section above. Are you really big enough to take a chance on being dropped from Google?

There are plenty of people who bought links who did get caught in the Penguin Update. Some of them are learning to their horror that the only chance of coming back will be to start completely over.

Finally, I did ask Google if it had any comment on the DBBC situation. Nothing specific, just this general warning:

Our guidance on paid links remains the same as ever: paying for links that pass PageRank violates our guidelines, and Google takes appropriate action in response.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, well, read our guide: What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

For those being approached about selling links, this is a reminder that Google really doesn’t like you to do that and has penalized sites for doing so since 2007. If you’re approached out of the blue with a link request, unless you block that link by using something like the nofollow attribute, you’re placing your site at jeopardy.

Don’t expect the link request to alert you to any of these things. The request that went out on behalf of DBCC was a classic example of non-disclosure. It lacks warnings about possible Google penalties. It even required that there be no visible disclosure, which might very well violate US Federal Trade Commission guidelines. From the request:

Link must not be marked as Paid in the visible content or source code (Common designations include: Partner, Links, Paid Links, Ads or Sponsored Links)

When Davis followed-up about this, he was again told not to disclose payment:

The link can’t have any disclosures, we want it to appear natural.

The whole thing reminds me of the type of spammy requests I get all the time. While people in the SEO space may want to debate whether it’s fair or required or commonplace to buy links or not, I don’t see much room for debate that you shouldn’t try to foist a paid link on someone without full disclosure.

As I wrote before, in my Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker article from 2008

There are plenty of people who disagree over the paid link issue, plus whether Google actually penalizes sites that hard for it. That disagreement is no excuse for unethical behavior. And there is unethical behavior in search marketing, and this is a perfect example of it. No risk was disclosed. When asked repeatedly about risk issues, they were denied….
You want to buy links or be a link broker? Then be upfront that this is an activity that Google does not like and that the faint hearted shouldn’t apply. Only after you’ve scared the heck out of them should you start talking about the ways that you’ll try to reduce the risk, if they choose to carry on.

Personally, I’m somewhat amazed, or really, disheartened, over some of the comments Davis is taking over his post. As I said, some dismiss the paid links as old news. Some are angry, viewing his post as some unnecessary “outing” of paid links.

No one seems bothered that some SEO firm was potentially getting a third-party web site into trouble with Google. That’s the most disturbing aspect of all of this. That’s not new, either, but it ought to be stamped out.

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | Top News

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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Just Because Someone Works At Google Doesn’t Make Them An SEO Expert

2012-05-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

Google has nearly 25,000 employees (according to a search I did on Google just now), and they’re involved with all types of projects. Many have nothing to do with search.

In the email I saw, a Googler (yes, it really was someone who worked for Google) was asked about the Penguin update, if they knew anything. Response?

I assure you 100% that there has been nothing at Google referred to as “Penguin.”
If you notice on those search results you sent me, not a single source is from Google itself.

The person asking had forwarded the Googler search results for “Penguin Update.” I’m not surprised there was no source from Google itself in those results. That’s because Google didn’t formally give Penguin its name until I pried it out of them two days after the launch, two days after the official blog post went up.

The Googler went on:

From what I just saw on this whole Penguin thing–it sounds to me like a lot of SEO companies that use shady and unethical practices are upset that their loop holes have been cut out!

Actually, it’s not really been a lot of SEO companies that I’ve seen complaining. It’s been a lot of individuals who have been hit, and quite likely for black hat SEO tactics that Penguin was intended to punish.

Bottom line: should you encounter one of those 25,000 Googlers, don’t assume that they have inside knowledge about ranking issues. Chances are, they don’t.

Related Topics: Featured | Google: Employees | Google: SEO | Top News

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Former Yahoo Executive Pleads Guilty To Securities Fraud Charge Related To Microsoft Deal

2012-05-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

Among its many provisions, the deal — officially announced in late July of 2009 — called for Microsoft to pay Yahoo $50 million annually, for three years, for implementation costs.

The mutual fund manager, Reema Shah, formerly of Ameriprise Financial Inc., had heard rumors that a deal — what became The Search Alliance — was in the works, and called Kwok to find out. Despite Kwok’s responsibility to keep confidentiality, he told Shah about the soon-to-be-announced agreement.

Afterwards, the mutual funds she managed bought more than 700,000 shares of Yahoo stock that were later sold for profits of around $389,000. Shah also pled guilty to securities fraud in the case.

Kwok may have talked to Shah because she previously did a similar favor for him, tipping him to that Autodesk intended to acquire Moldflow Corporation. He traded on that information, and made $4,754. The two met in January 2008, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says they began a relationship in which Kwok provided Shah with non-public information about Yahoo — including about its quarterly financial performance. In return, she told him information she learned in the course of her work.

“Kwok and Shah played a game of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” said Scott W. Friestad, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement.

Both Kwok and Shah have agreed to settle SEC charges and have also pled guilty in parallel criminal cases. Under the settlement agreement, Shah will be barred permanently from working in the securities industry. Kwok will be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company. Penalties and sentences haven’t yet been announced.

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Yahoo: Business Issues

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How To Tweet What You Want, Because Content Matters

2012-05-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

With the trends that we are seeing in the search engines as they become more and more social, I think it is fair to assume that social sharing will be a major part (or at the very least, be a piece) of consideration in any future updates. This is exactly why it’s more important than ever for marketers to understand what aspects of Social Media and which social signals actually help us and our clients get maximum visibility in the search engines.

To be clear, I have always been, and (unless proven other wise) will continue to be a proponent of quality. Having said that, I did at one point make the argument that quantity is a force not to be ignored and increasing quantity does have some merit to it.

This is why it’s always important to re-examine this and keep up with the changes.

Specifically with regards to Penguin, I hypothesized that social did in fact have a positive affect on sites, and that sites engaged in social benefited, whereas sites with a low social presence suffered.

In order to get the best data possible, I asked my friends at Brightedge for a little help pulling some data and here is what we found:

“For close to 300K keywords across more than 200 domains, there was a common characteristic. Many sites which had strong social sharing before the update stayed about the same or showed a rank improvement. However, when tweets reduced even slightly the average rank for that page decreased disproportionately.”

Not Impressed yet? Well, I agree. Aside from giving justification to what many of us believed already, I don’t think this data is necessarily all that insightful either.

But just hold on a second…

It’s the next piece of data, layered on top of this, which gets more into the heart of social sharing, and the importance of Social Media.

In a different study done by Brightedge in conjunction with Tiny Prints, Feeding America and Twitter, they determined through mapping keywords in the tweets, that by reaching out to users using targeted keywords in a tweet:

“Tiny Prints saw a 300% rise in user engagement which, in turn, improved the average rank across keywords for targeted pages by 47%. This was over a four week period. Feeding America’s users responded positively to the Tweets since the content of the Tweets ( keywords and pages) matched their interests. This resulted in a 2.5X improvement in traffic for the pages mentioned in the Tweets.”

With this new insight, that increasing the levels of tweets, while including specific keywords can affect rankings, traffic and over all user engagement, this points directly to the quality of the content. With this in mind, the obvious next question is, as marketers, what can we do to improve the message we want people to share?

I have found two approaches to go about this and ensure you are effectively conveying your message.

The first is something that my friend AJ Kohn does really well (and I will credit him for making this idea popular). In almost every post AJ writes, he leaves a TL;DR - which stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read.

This is probably one of the most effective ways I have ever come across to summarize the main points you are trying to get across in a piece of content.

Most Twitter buttons on a site default to the title of the page or even the title tag element. Both of these are usually much less than the allotted 140 characters on Twitter.

Woah, it's a post inside a post... Inception!

What this really means is that if your title is not very descriptive, or if its short, you are letting the user fill in the blank, which may or may not work to your benefit. And all this really depends on if they got the main point of the article.

This is a quick work around that I came up with and my friend Josh (my go-to developer) who helped me put it together.

Simply install this code in the place where you would place a Twitter share button:

Then, in the code of your post (beginning or end, it doesn’t make a difference) add this tag:

THIS IS WHERE YOUR MESSAGE GOES

In this tag, you can craft your own message, which is descriptive, contains the targeted keywords and utilizes the allotted space.

When the share button is clicked, it will automatically use the message that you put in the tweet tag.

One final thought. I would suggest paying attention to a few key points when crafting this message to ensure the perfect tweet is sent out:

Characters should be kept to about 120 to account for a Retweet plus user handles.Make sure the keywords you target in the post are in the tweet.Do NOT keyword stuff! (sorry, I got really passionate about that last one). The point here is to improve the user experience and make your tweets more engaging. Making spammy messages will not help you with this.Change it up. The message you start with for the first day might be different than the second. Change the message a day or two later to give a new experience to people and maybe catch people’s attention who didn’t respond well to the message the first time.

I hope these tips are useful. As always, I would love to hear your feedback or hear how other people have benefited using this strategy.

Happy Tweeting!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Search & Social

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Bing’s Visual Search Is Gone (Has Been For A While, Actually)

2012-05-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

The fact that almost no one noticed might be one reason why Bing has dropped its Visual Search feature … something that apparently happened months ago.

To be clear, this isn’t traditional image search that we’re talking about; that’s still available at bing.com/images. We’re talking about the “Visual Search” tool/interface that Bing launched in 2009 with a unique interface that used Silverlight technology to let searchers view a large set of images and data.

In our article about the launch, we used this screenshot as a sample of the Visual Search interface:

The independent Microsoft/Windows blog, Liveside.net, reported today that the old URL for Visual Search (www.bing.com/visualsearch) no longer works.

A Microsoft spokesperson tells Liveside.net that the company began removing Visual Search galleries last fall — a long time for something to be shut down with virtually no one noticing.

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Image Search

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

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SPONSOR MESSAGE: Webinar, Thurs., May 31: Mobile Matters: Optimizing Search for Mobile Devices

2012-05-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

Noon EDT, 9 AM PDT. Join speakers Austin Bankhead and Mike Fogarty of Adobe Systems as they discuss the latest trends in mobile, best practices and mobile optimization strategies you can implement, plus how to optimize your webpages for mobile devices.

Related Topics: Sponsor Messages

Connect with the author via: Email

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If Matt Cutts Was Made of LEGO, What Would He Look Like?

2012-05-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

Maybe something like this...

...or this...

A bunch more here, with cut & paste code near your favorites.

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Once you set up your free account you can comment on our blog, and you are eligible to receive our search engine success SEO newsletter.

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Response Codes Explained with Pictures

2012-05-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Friends and I were recently debating the finer points of serving a 410 versus a 404 response code when a brick and mortar retail analogy was born. I hope you'll have half as much fun reading through these amateur comics as I've had putting them together. You might also come away with an extra line of lingo when explaining HTTP Response Codes to clients or colleagues.

When a search engine or website visitor makes a request to a web server, a three digit HTTP Response Status Code is returned. This code indicates what is about to happen. A response code of 200 means "OK, here is the content you were asking for." A 301 says, "Gotcha. That page has moved, so I'll send you there now." And so on.

Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough." It is in this spirit that I present to you my brick-and-mortar retail store analogy.

A man walks into a store looking for a particular model water gun. In each scenario, he is greeted by a different Sales Associate (our response codes).

A 200 is the most common type of response code, and the one we experience most of the time when browsing the web. We asked to see a web page, and it was presented to us without any trouble.

We were expecting to find a web page in a particular location, but it has been moved. No worries though, the web server has sent us to the new location. Most users won't notice that this has happened unless they watch the URL change.

You're in the right place, but the page has moved temporarily to a new location. Just like a 301 the user doesn't usually notice anything because the web server seemlessly moves them to the new URL.

Important SEO Implication: A 302 isn't a permanent move. Any SEO strength that the original page had won't be granted to the new URL.

We've requested a page, but a username and password are required to access it. We're presented with a way to login.

Important SEO Implication: Search engines won't submit a username and password for entry. If you have content hidden behind a login, it won't show up in the search results.

We've requested a page that we don't have permission to access at all. This page isn't for us.

We've requested a page, but the web server doesn't recognize our request. The page can't be shown because the server doesn't know what it is.

Important SEO Implication: Most default 404 pages are a dead end for users and search engines. Look at using a custom 404 for these cases.

We've requested a page and the web server knows what we're asking for, but the page is gone.

Important SEO Implication: There is some debate in the SEO world as to the advantage (if any) of using a 410 over a 404 in certain cases. This post by Barry Schwartz is a good place to start your own research.

I prefer to use a 410 when removing unfavorable (perhaps penalized) content from a website. Perhaps the website has some bad links pointing to a bad neighborhood within an otherwise quality site. I'd use a 410 to say, "We know what you're asking for, but we've deliberately removed it from the site, permanently."

We've requested a page, and in return, we get a generic error message. No information is given. It is like looking a sales associate in the eye, asking a question, and recieving a blank stare in return.

We asked for a page, but are told that it is temporarily unavailable. Something is wrong. Perhaps the website is down for maintenance.

If you're like me, you came to SEO out of an interest and background in Marketing, rather than approaching it from a start on the Techology side. I understood the meaning of the basic response codes for SEO (301, 302, 404) long before I understood what was technically happening. I needed to see it before I really got it. If you're feeling the same way, you can use a browser plugin to watch the communication between the your browser and a website behind the scenes as you browse the web.

Try these:

There are a number of excellent resources available to help you better understand HTTP Status Codes and determine when to use them to your best advantage for user experience and SEO.

Happy optimizing!

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Why the Marketing World Needs More Correlation Research

2012-05-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Do more tweets of a URL lead to higher search rankings on Google? Do longer articles get more shares on Facebook? Do emails that contain images have lower open rates?

These, and hundreds of other questions marketers are constantly asking, can be answered mathematically through correlation data. Yet, it seems there's an unfortunate bias against correlations, specifically in the SEO community. Part of this has to do with the well-known maxim "correlation is not causation." This is eminently true.

However, I LOVE to know correlation, even when it's wholly disconnected from causation, and I'm surprised more marketers rail against the acquisition of this knowledge. After all, we constantly use correlation-based observations in our everyday lives, scientists use it frequently to discover potential hypotheses and put forward experiments to test them.

For example, I personally care less about what Google actually uses as ranking elements in their massive algorithm than on what kinds of sites and pages tend to perform well. To my mind, it's much more fascinating to learn, that, for example, stories that appear in the Google News results are much more likely to have images originally sourced by the news publisher than it would be to find out that the algorithm uses an exponential decay factor on freshness based on inputs from a certain set of trusted account usage. The former is actionable; the latter much less so.

We can apply this to email outreach, public relations, talks at conferences, conversion rate optimization (a practice based almost entirely on correlation), and virtually any other quantifiable practice in our work.

Here are just a few examples of great work in the field of marketing that leverage correlation data:

I fail to understand why this work is criticized as being "just correlation; doesn't mean anything" rather than embraced as "awesome; new correlation data on which to form testable hypotheses." Yes - correlation does not imply causation. But it does show a relationship, and those relationships can form the basis of guesses and tests. I find it challenging to argue why this work should not be done and shared, yet the bias is clearly out there.

Of course, there's always the danger of presenting correlation research which is then misinterpreted or misused, as the folks from PHDComics brilliantly illustrated below:

But, I'd rather risk some misunderstanding and have the data available than not investigate the connections between things in the marketing world out of fear.

Here's just a few ideas for correlation-based research that I'd love to see someone put together:

Correlation between a topic/phrase/brand trending on Twitter and search volume spiking on GoogleCorrelation between Facebook shares, Tweets and Google+ shares for URLs across various industries (where are some networks potentially stronger/weaker, what are the outliers, etc)Correlation between amount of funding and revenue/growth/success across industries (think this would be fascinating to entrepreneurs)Correlation between types of share buttons used on a website and quantity of shares receivedCorrelation between # of email subscribers to an RSS feed and the rankings / social shares of that feed's contentCorrelation between search rankings and RSS feed inclusion overall (do URLs that are included in feeds tend to perform better than those that aren't?)Correlation between sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of content on various sites and their success in social mediaCorrelation between social shares and trafficCorrelation between Klout score and traffic driven to URLs shared (to see if Klout lines up with how much traffic that person's tweets/shares drive)

If you or your team feel confident, capable, and excited about potentially doing this work but need some funding or publishing support, we'd love to talk. Just drop me an email (rand followed by the @ and seomoz dot org).

p.s. Check out Dr. Pete's excellent "Mathographic" on correlation vs. causation to learn more about the difference and the nuances.

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17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid

2012-05-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam.

It's become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the "danger zone" in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus.

I was only partially correct, as the majority of cases appear to be devalued links rather than penalties. Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they're doing doesn't look like a type of link spam. Google's response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone.

While not technically a form of link building, 301 "cleansing" domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers just cut the trouble redirected domains loose like anchors, and float on into the night with whatever treasure they've gathered.

When Penguin hit, this linkfarm cleansing domain changed from a 301 to a 404 almost overnight.

Link building through redirects should be easy to catch, as new links to a domain that is currently redirecting is hardly natural behavior. To anyone watching, it's like shooting up a flare that says, "I'm probably manipulating links." The fact that search engines aren't watching closely right now is no guarantee of future success, so I'd avoid this and similar behavior if future success is a goal.

I've already covered the potential risks of blog networks in depth here. Google hates blog networks - fake blogs that members pay or contribute content to in order to get links back to their or their clients' sites. Guest blogging and other forms of contributing content to legitimate sites is a much whiter tactic, but consider that a strategy that relies heavily on low-quality guest blogging looks a lot like blog network spam.

With blog networks, each blog has content with a constant ratio of words to links. It posts externally to a random sites multiple times, and with a lot of "inorganic" anchor text for commercially valuable terms. Almost all backlinks to blog networks are also spam.

I cringe when I see low-quality blogs with questionable backlinks accepting guest blog posts that meet rigid word length and external link guidelines. Quality blogs tend not to care if the post is 400-500 words with two links in the bio, and quality writers tend not to ruin the post with excessive linking. Most of us see guest blogging as a white-hat tactic, but a backlink profile filled with low-quality guest posts looks remarkably similar to the profile of a site using automated blog networks.

I'd obviously steer clear of blog networks, but I'd be just as wary of low-quality inorganic guest blogs that look unnatural. Guest blog on sites with high quality standards and legitimate backlink profiles of their own.

Article link addiction is still a real thing for new SEOs. You get one or two links with anchor text of your choice, and your rankings rise. You're not on the first page, but you do it again and get closer. The articles are easy and cheap, and they take no creativity or mental effort. You realize that you're reaching diminishing returns on the articles, but your solution isn't to stop - you just need to do more articles. Before you know it, you're searching for lists of the top article sites that give followed links and looking for automated solutions to build low-quality links to your low-quality links.

Most articles are made for the sole purpose of getting a link, and essentially all followed links are self-generated rather than endorsements. Google has accordingly made article links count for very little, and has hammered article sites for their low-quality content.

Maybe you're wondering how to get a piece of that awesome trend, but hopefully you'll join me in accepting that article directories aren't coming back. Because they can theoretically be legitimate, article links are generally devalued rather than penalized. As with all link spam, your risk of receiving more harsh punishment rises proportionate to the percentage of similar links in your profile.

Ironically named "Web 2.0 Blogs" by some spam peddlers, these two-page blogs on Tumblr and Wordpress sub-domains never see the light of day. After setting up the free content hub with an article or two, the site is then "infused" with link juice, generally from social bookmarking links (discussed below).

Despite their prevalence, these sites don't do much for rankings. Links with no weight come in, and links with no impact go out. They persist because with a decent free template, clients can be shown a link on a page that doesn't look bad. Google doesn't need to do much to weed these out, because they're already doing nothing.

Site-wide footer links used to be all the rage. Google crippled their link-juice-passing power because most footer links pointing to external sites are either Google Bombs or paid links. Where else would you put a site-wide link that you don't want your users to click?

To my point of avoiding the appearance of spam, Penguin slammed a number of sites with a high proportion of site-wide (footer) links that many would not have considered manipulative. Almost every free Wordpress theme that I've seen links back to the creator's page with choice anchor text, and now a lot of Wordpress themes are desperately pushing updates to alter or remove the link. Penguin didn't care if you got crazy with a plugin link, designed a web site, or hacked a template; the over-use of anchor text hit everyone. This goes to show that widespread industry practices aren't inherently safe.

There will never be a foolproof way to detect every paid link. That said it's easier than you think to leave a footprint when you do it in bulk. You have to trust your sellers not to make it obvious, and the other buyers to keep unwanted attention off their own sites. If one buyer that you have no relationship to buys links recklessly, the scrutiny can trickle down through the sites they're buying from and eventually back to you.

If you do buy links, knowing what you're doing isn't enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they're doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

Speaking of footprints, I believe it's possible to build a machine learning model to start with a profile of known links violating guidelines, which you can acquire from paid link sites and link wheel middlemen with nothing more than an email address. You can then assess a probability of a site being linked to in that manner, corroborating potential buyers and sellers with a link graph of similar profiles. I have no idea what kind of computing/programming power this would take, but the footprint is anomalous enough that it should be possible.

Exchanging links through link schemes requires a lot more faith in a bunch of strangers than I can muster. In a link wheel, you're only as strong and subtle as your "weakest links." My opinion is that if you're smart enough to avoid getting caught, you're probably smart enough to build or write something awesome that will have superior results and lower risk than link wheels.

High-quality syndication and wire services possess a few unattractive attributes for spammers: there are editorial guidelines, costs, and even fact checking. Low-quality syndication services will send almost anything through to any site that will take it. You'll end up with a bunch of links, but not many that get indexed, and even fewer that get counted.

My experience has been that press releases have rapidly diminishing returns on syndication only, and the only way to see ROI is to generate actual, real coverage. I still see link-packed press releases all over the web that don't have a chance of getting coverage - really, your site redesign is not news-worthy. I'm not sure whether to attribute this to bad PR, bad SEO, or both.

In this context, we're talking about creating a real piece of linkbait for credible links, and later replacing the content with something more financially beneficial. Tricking people into linking to content is clearly not something Google would be ok with. I don't see linkbait and switch done very often, but I die a little every time I see it. If you're able to create and spread viral content, there's no need to risk upsetting link partners and search engines. Instead, make the best of it with smart links on the viral URL, repeat success, and become a known source for great content.

Directories have been discussed to death. The summary is that Google wants to devalue links from directories with no true standards. Here's a Matt Cutts video and blog post on the topic. Directory links often suffer from a high out/in linking ratio, but those worth getting are those that are actually used for local businesses (think Yelp) and any trafficked industry directories.

Would I pay money for a listing here?Are the majority of current listings quality sites?Do listings link with the business or site name?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, don't bother with a link. This immediately excludes all but a handful of RSS or blog feed directories, which are mostly used to report higher quantities of links. When I was trained as an SEO, I was taught that directories would never hurt, but they might help a tiny bit, so I should go get thousands of them in the cheapest way possible. Recent experience has taught us that poor directory links can be a liability.

Even as I was in the process of writing this post, it appears that Google began deindexing low-quality directories. The effect seems small so far - perhaps testifying to their minimal impact on improving rankings in the first place - but we'll have to wait and see.

I honestly can't speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.

"I'm telling you right now, the engines are very very smart about this kind of thing, and they've seen link farming over and over and over again in every different permutation. Granted, you might find the one permutation - the one system - that works for you today, but guess what? It's not going to work tomorrow; it's not going to work in the long run." - Rand in 2009

My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Links from the majority of social bookmarking sites carry no value. Pointing a dozen of them at a page might not even be enough to get the page crawled. Any quality links that go in have their equity immediately torn a million different directions if links are followed. The prevalence of spam-filled and abandoned social bookmarking sites tells me that site builders seriously over-estimated how much we would care about other people's bookmarks.

Sites focusing on user-generated links and content have their own ways of handling trash. Active sites with good spam control and user involvement will filter spam on their own while placing the best content prominently. If you'd like to test this, just submit a commercial link to any front-page sub-Reddit and time how long it takes to get the link banned. Social sites with low spam control stop getting visitors and incoming links while being overrun by low quality external links. Just ask Digg.

Forum spam may never die, though it is already dead. About a year ago, we faced a question about a forum signature link that was in literally thousands of posts on a popular online forum. When we removed the signature links, the change was similar to effect of most forum links: zero. It doesn't even matter if you nofollow all links. Much like social sites, forums that can't manage the spam quickly turn into a cesspool of garbled phrases and anchor text links. Bing's webmaster forums are a depressing example.

From time to time you'll hear of a new way someone found to get a link on an authoritative site. Examples I have seen include links in bios, "workout journals" that the site let users keep, wish lists, and uploaded files. Sometimes these exploits (for lack of a better term) go viral, and everyone can't wait to fill out their bio on a DA 90+ site.

In rare instances, this kind of link spam works - until the hole is plugged. I can't help but shake my head when I see someone talking about how you can upload a random file or fill out a bio somewhere. This isn't the sort of thing to base your SEO strategy around. It's not long-term, and it's not high-impact.

While similar to unintended followed links on authority domains, profile spam deserves its own discussion due to their abundance. It would be difficult for Google to take any harsh action on profiles, as there is a legitimate reason for reserving massive numbers of profiles to prevent squatters and imitators from using a brand name.

What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn't match your site or brand name.

"The name's Insurance. Car Insurance"

When profile links are followed and indexed, Google usually interprets the page as a user page and values it accordingly. Obviously Google's system for devaluing profile links is not perfect right now. I know it's sometimes satisfying just to get an easy link somewhere, but profile link spam is a great example of running without moving.

If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments. I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.

I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn't. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:

Let's pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you? Maybe I'm missing something here, because I can't imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let's just hope you didn't build anchor text into those comments.

Buying domains for their link juice is an old classic, but I don't think I have anything to add beyond what Danny Sullivan wrote on the matter. I'm also a fan of Rand's suggestion to buy blogs and run them rather than pulling out the fangs and sucking every ounce of life out of a once-thriving blog.

Domain buying still works disgustingly well in the (rare) cases where done correctly. I would imagine that dozens of redirected domains will eventually bring some unwelcome traffic to your site directly from Mountain View, but fighting spam has historically been much easier in my imagination than in reality.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble.

I have very deliberately written about what spam links "look like." If you do believe that black hat SEO is wrong, immoral, or in any way unsavory that's fine - just make sure your white hat links don't look like black hat links. If you think that white hat SEOs are sheep, or pawns of Google, the same still applies: your links shouldn't look manipulative.

I'm advising against the tactics above because the potential benefits don't outweigh the risks. If your questionable link building does fall apart and your links are devalued, there's a significant cost of time wasted building links that don't count. There's also the opportunity cost - what could you have been doing instead? Finally, clearing up a manual penalty can take insane amounts of effort and remove Google's revenue stream in the meantime.

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Project Management for SEO (2012 Edition!)

2012-05-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

So here's the truth - I used to suck at project management. But over the years I've determinedly turned myself into a half-decent project manager. Why? What was the driving force?

At the end of the day, I never have and still don't care that much for project management. But what I do care deeply about is effecting change. Driving action and results instead of talk and documentation. You can see my drive for getting things done in this whiteboard friday:

(Note, if you have thoughts about this video you'd do well to read my follow-up comment about the difference between reports and reportings.)

Although there are many ways of affecting change, project management is a crucial part of it. Below I'm going to outline a bunch of tools, tips, and tricks that we've discovered and implemented over the years at Distilled to get better at project management:

Personally I'm not a fan of clutter, either physical or virtual, and so I love technology that gets out of the way while you get on with getting shit done. I've tried lots of different project management solutions, and Trello is the first one I've fallen in love with. For those that saw the whiteboard friday I did with Jamie about a year ago it models the real life post-it note system very well:

I'm going to let Will explain why he likes it so much:

And I'm going to let Paddy break down the details in his blog post Using Trello to Manage SEO Projects.

A lot of you will already be familiar with Google Docs. Of course. But only recently have I come to realize the extreme power behind the collaboration elements. I've always hated track changes in Word and finally Google Docs has something better to offer. This video, although cutsey, actually demonstrates the power of real time collaboration:

In particular, two features that are really making me excited are in-line comments (with easy replies and notifications) and revision history (which allows you to see when, how, and who edited a document).

We use Google Docs extensively within Distilled to craft and send around documents even if ultimately we deliver the final report as a .PDF or some other format. After all, some large corporations still like the smell of .PDFs in the morning....

(image credit)

I can't explain how much of a life changing experience the inbox zero methodology is. For the modern day information worker, inbox zero is fundamental to happiness and productivity. If you're not using the inbox zero system then please trust me when I say it'll change your life. Here's Merlin Mann talking about the original system at Google:

When new employees start at Distilled, we coach them in the ancient ways of Inbox Zero. Although it's a personal revelation for many (myself included), the real power comes when you have an entire organization that is GOOD WITH EMAIL. Having seen a peek inside companies that are not so efficient with email the difference is night and day.

Life is organized chaos. Sometimes not so organized either. Project management is similar in that it's often more chaos than management. There's only so much you can really and truly work to get things done without being in the thick of it.

So, where possible, our consultants aim to spend some time on-site with our clients. The increase in results is striking. Not only are we better able to communicate our ideas, but we are also better placed to understand how the client's business works - not just the business model and mechanics, but communication, project management, hopes, and fears.

The best substitute for this if you're not able to get face-to-face with the client is to at least communicate often with many different points of contact within the client's organization. This improves the chances that you'll understand the real needs of the client as well as ensure that as many people as possible like you which is important for getting things done!

We have various memes within Distilled; you can read more about them in a post I wrote for Dharmesh a little while back called Startup Culture Memes - Do You Have A Duck Of Awesomeness. One of the ones I'm most proud of is the mantra "communication solves all problems". I'm constantly amazed at the ability to solve problems by communicating effectively. Either talking to other members of the team or talking directly with the client - just having some real interaction (face to face or on the phone ideally) and explaining the situation clearly solves 99.9% of all problems.

This mantra has infiltrated all parts of Distilled, but I see two key ways that this affects project management on every project.

At the start of any project, we have a kick-off meeting which has two clear outcomes; the first is a top to bottom understanding of the client's business, and the second is a detailed understanding of what the project is going to look like. Mark wrote up our project kick-off process in a little bit more detail here: How To Kick Start SEO Projects.

Secondly, I drill into people here that it's okay to miss deadlines. Really. It is. Do people really care if you deliver something on Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon? The answer is that yes, they care very much if you don't let them know. If you let them know that you will deliver it Monday instead of Friday, then in 99% of cases, they could care less. Why is this so powerful? Because a single missed deadline without communication tarnishes your perception in the client's eyes. So long as the communication is strong, the actual dates rarely matter.

PPT? As a project management tool? Well yes. Let me explain - there are broadly speaking three types of work that you do when you're consulting and there are three different tools you use for these tasks as follows:

Deliverables and specifications

Although this seems like a no-brainer, it's actually a very powerful mental model. Want to take a guess where setting the project vision and goals comes in? Yep - PPT. Although you won't keep track of a project in PowerPoint, you should be crafting and creating the vision and goals for the project in PPT. Without strong vision and goals, projects will fail.

So persuading a consultant to put together PPTs at the start of projects is a powerful tool to ensure we have a clear idea of where we're going, and importantly, the client is on board.

As part of our monthly reporting communication, we provide a letter from Will to our clients. This is a value add that allows our clients to keep abreast of industry news and changes. I've included a sample of the letter (and supporting links) for April here:

Why is this important? Well not all of our clients are SEO junkies like us. And they like to be kept abreast of the latest happenings in the industry.

How is this a project management tool? You might think it's tenuous, but actually it's crucially important. Running SEO projects on the shifting sands of Google's algorithms means we have to keep on our toes and be prepared to potentially shift our strategy at a moment's notice. So communicating these changes to our clients allows us to be on the same page when we start talking about pandas and penguins....

It's important to note that what works for us may not work for you. Hopefully this has been helpful for you to take a peek at how we manage projects and communication. I'd love to hear what you guys have to offer in the comments!

If you loved this psot and want to explore the subject further take a look at these:

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Second Google-Sponsored Legal Report Argues Government Would Lose Antitrust Case

2012-05-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

May 14, 2012 at 10:16am ET by Greg Sterling

Google is playing a sophisticated form of “head games” with antitrust regulators. A second legal report-cum-brief (embedded below) has appeared. It argues that antitrust challenges against Google are likely to fail because Google’s critics’ arguments lack legal merit and/or make little sense from a policy perspective.

The report was written by lawyers from the Ammori Group, “a law firm and Internet-law consulting practice whose clients include Google Inc.”

Last week a report by UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh literally made the case that the US First Amendment precludes any claim against Google under antitrust law. That document was structured and read like a formal brief submitted to a court. However the court in this instance is the “court of public opinion” where the “public” consists of policy makers, regulators and legislators.

Google is engaged in what appears to be a very sophisticated and shrewd PR campaign, having lawyers preemptively argue the antitrust issues in public and thereby alert those who would bring formal antitrust claims that their cases are all but sure to fail.

It’s akin to an athlete trying to “psych out” an opponent before a big match. The initiative is intended to create doubt (and fear) among those lawyers who would be on the other side that they risk failure by proceeding against Google. This is not to imply that the substantive legal arguments presented are not persuasive — they are. That’s the point.

The lengthy new document by attorneys Marvin Ammori and Luke Pelican takes principal aim at two related targets: the notion that the public would benefit in any way through regulation of Google and critics’ potential antitrust remedies. It essentially says that Google’s critics are all self-interested competitors arguing the public interest to benefit themselves. However antitrust law doesn’t protect the interests of individual competitors but competition generally to safeguard the public interest:

This article concludes that the cures proposed by the competitors are worse than Google’s alleged disease. The proposed remedies might benefit the short-term economic of Google’s competitors . . . but benefiting competitors is not the goal of antitrust law. The goal of antitrust law is to promote consumer welfare, competition, and innovation. The proposed remedies, however, would do the opposite: harm consumers, impede competition, and stifle innovation.
The remedies would invite government agencies and technical committees to second-guess and evaluate both mundane and game-changing engineering and user- interface decisions regarding Google Search, reverse long-standing fair use principles rooted in constitutional requirements, and empower competitors to litigate rather than compete against daily innovations and disclosures by Google.

Using case law and public policy arguments, the Ammori report then lays out and seeks to dismantle each of Google’s critic’s would-be remedies, which the document groups under five headings. Here they are verbatim:

Search Neutrality: inviting government to second-guess and reject algorithmic and manual changes to Google Search based on an elusive, ill-defined “neutrality” concept that neither agencies nor technical committees could effectively adjudicate.Ten Blue Links, not Universal Search: forbidding Google from presenting answers to search queries as both Google and its largest competitors have done since 2007, with results that deliver a mix of Web links, news links, places, maps, and images, rather than merely providing 10 blue links to Web sites, just as many search engines did years ago.Google-Specific Fair-Use Limits: forbidding Google from crawling and using others’ Web content while forcing Google to let others crawl and use Google’s content thereby inverting the fair-use doctrine, the trespass-to-chattels doctrine, and raising constitutional concerns.No Bidding: constraining Google’s ability to compete for acquisitions and exclusive partnerships, harming acquisition targets and consumers while favoring the most deep-pocketed competitors.Continuous Disclosure: requiring numerous ongoing disclosures, many of which Google already provides, and others that would enable spammers to manipulate Google’s search algorithms or empower its less innovative competitors merely to copy new Google products more rapidly.

The report begins and concludes with the notion that it’s ultimately a waste of time and scarce resources for regulators (in the US) to pursue an antitrust case against Google:

In short, the FTC has better uses for its scarce resources than pursuing an inquiry or investigation that would merely raise the cost of one rival, Google, for the benefit of other rivals that have proposed unworkable and detrimental remedies for their novel theories of antitrust harm that is effected through “search bias.”

Both the Volokh brief and this new Ammori report are persuasive though I’m not sure they will prevent the FTC from bringing a case against Google. However if it comes, much of the legal research will already have been done.

Related Topics: Google: Critics | Google: Legal | Legal: Regulation

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

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Google’s Happy Mother’s Day Logo (2012 Edition)

2012-05-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

Google has a special animated logo on their home pages worldwide to celebrate Mother’s Day. Below is both the animated and static version of the Mother’s Day logo.

A special Happy Mother’s Day to all the search geek Mother’s out there!

Google is not the only search engine with a logo, Bing, Yahoo and others have. Here is Bing and Yahoo’s and to see more, check out the Search Engine Roundtable.

Related Topics: Google: Logos

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

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4 Alternatives You Need To Consider Beyond AdWords

2012-05-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

While there’s no arguing with the fact that Google’s Adwords program is the dominant player in the PPC industry, it’s by no means the only option when it comes to paying for website traffic.

In fact, the size of the Google Adwords program creates a number of challenges for “small-time” webmasters. The service’s immense popularity has resulted in extreme competition, driving up keyword bid prices and lowering ad placements for sites running on smaller budgets.

If you’ve been struggling to gain traction on this highly competitive network, take a look at the following PPC alternatives for generating paid traffic.

Advertising on Facebook’s Paid Ads platform (whose “Sponsored Stories” typically appear in user profile sidebars) can be a mixed bag.

On the one hand, Facebook’s Paid Ads program provides much better targeting features than Google Adwords, enabling merchants to target users according to a number of different criteria, including age, gender, hobbies, geographic areas and more.

However, user engagement on the site is notoriously low. While some marketers speculate that the limited number of characters granted to advertisers account for these limitations, a much more likely explanation for the universally low clickthrough rates seen on the site is ad burnout.

Because Facebook users have been trained to gloss over advertisement sections on the site, your message must be truly captivating in order to draw clicks. Take a look at my article 3 Steps To Combat Image Fatigue In Facebook for more information on this.

If you do decide to pursue advertising opportunities on this site, remember that it’s nearly all about the image you position alongside your ad text. To stand out from the blur of other features on the site, select the most eye-catching graphic possible – even if it isn’t entirely related to your ad text.

For more information on this, take a look at my article called 3 Types of Image Ads That Work. In addition, choose your targeting options carefully to ensure that your promotions are seen only by the audience members to whom they’re most relevant.

Overall, LinkedIn’s DirectAds platform functions more like Facebook’s Paid Ads than Google’s Adwords, in that this PPC alternative also allows you to target the specific users who will see your advertisements within the LinkedIn website, based on their stated criteria.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn’s advertising program isn’t for the faint of heart – or the small of budget. Clicks through DirectAds promotions cost a minimum of $2/click, and although advertisers can set minimum daily budgets of $10/day, language contained in the site’s Terms of Service allows LinkedIn to exceed set limits by as much as 20%, depending on ad performance. Left unchecked, these overages could easily total thousands of dollars a month.

Given these financial ramifications, use caution when enrolling in the LinkedIn DirectAds program. Take the time to analyze LinkedIn’s core demographics to determine whether the site’s users are a good match for your ads.

In addition, because the DirectAds program provides very little information on how or when your promotions are displayed, you may also find it necessary to invest in a third-party bid measurement program to maintain a positive ROI in relation to the site’s high bid prices.

In general, Kontera is best known for its in-text advertisements, which appear as linked content within Internet articles, blog posts and more. But besides these contextual link ads, the company also offers social media promotion services, editorial advertisements and mobile solutions, though few objective reviews are available on the efficacy of these newer service offerings.

When considering this PPC alternative, be aware that many users seriously dislike the way in-text Kontera ads display on their favorite websites. In fact, a Google search for the company’s brand name turns up as many results asking, “How do I get rid of Kontera ads?” as it does news articles praising the company’s traffic-generation services.

In addition, reviews of Kontera’s in-text ad service by industry figures aren’t that promising when it comes to ad relevancy. Consider the following ad placement that prominent Internet marketing blogger Chris Guthrie received while testing Kontera on one of his sites:

As an advertiser, it’s imperative that you know your promotions are being displayed to the best possible candidates. But for now, my verdict is to stay away from Kontera. Despite the site’s wide reach and generally low click charges, the quality of its placements simply isn’t high enough to justify its savings over other PPC alternatives.

One final alternative PPC program that deserves mention is StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery program, which is unique from the other options discussed here in that it does not require users to click on an advertisement in order to participate.

To understand Paid Discovery, we must first understand how StumbleUpon’s traditional service works. Essentially, users who are interested in discovering new Web content install the StumbleUpon browser toolbar, which randomly serves up pages designed to match their stated interests and past preferences. Paid Discovery allows advertisers to “cut in line,” introducing their content into the StumbleUpon stream ahead of other recommended pages.

But is it worth it? In many cases, no. StumbleUpon traffic performance is often quite poor when it comes to conversions; because users are simply being served pages instead of actively clicking chosen ads, their motivation to engage further with an advertiser’s site is often limited.

On the other hand, the service does have some interesting potential when it comes to link building, brand awareness expansion and social media marketing.

If you have established metrics in these areas through which you can measure the impact of StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery service on your website’s success, the program could be worth a try.

Of course, these are only a few of the different PPC alternative sites available today. If you’ve had particular success with another option, share your results in the comment section below.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Paid Search

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Report: Scott Thompson To Step Down As Yahoo CEO, Ross Levinsohn To Step In

2012-05-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is reporting that embattled Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is going to step down for “personal reasons.” Swisher has one or more “moles” inside the company and consistently gets inside information — which generally turns out to be correct.

Thompson’s “personal reasons,” as we all know, are: misrepresenting that he had a computer science degree. Yahoo EVP Ross Levinsohn is reportedly set to become interim CEO, with the apparent hope that he could take the helm permanently.

Swisher adds that the situation is still in flux and could change. The board is apparently meeting this morning.

Shareholder and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb aggressively pushed for Thompson’s ouster and kept pressure on the board. It’s seems relatively clear that the ethics issue was an opportunity for Loeb to push his agenda.

He stoked a public-relations crisis at Yahoo that gave him more leverage in asserting demands and extracting concessions from the board. Indeed, as part of a Yahoo “settlement” with Loeb, he is “set to get three board seats from a slate proposed by him as part of a proxy fight aimed at Yahoo,” according to AllThingsD.

When the news first broke that Thompson didn’t have the computer science degree he claimed I didn’t believe it would result in his ultimate resignation. After all, he had many years of experience as a successful tech executive in Silicon Valley. In other words, he had the desired experience; the paper was a technicality of sorts — not to minimize the ethics issue.

Yet the scandal refused to go away and had become a major PR headache for Yahoo and a distraction for employees. Yahoo announced Thompson’s appointment as CEO in early January of this year. The Yahoo director who was instrumental in Thompson’s hiring, Patti Hart, resigned last week. But that didn’t put the matter to rest or satisfy Loeb.

Yahoo has endured a remarkably tumultuous period over the past three or so years. It has seen multiple CEOs, the disruption of the Microsoft search deal, waves of layoffs and executive departures as well as multiple reorganizations and strategy shifts. What an amazing and sad spectacle.

Thompson had begun to execute on a new turnaround plan, including reducing headcount at Yahoo by 2,000 employees. Levinsohn came in under previous CEO Carol Bartz and is well regarded inside the company and in the industry. His background is very different from Thompson’s. It’s not clear whether he’ll now want to put his own stamp on the company or will proceed with Thompson’s plan.

Before coming to Yahoo, Levinsohn was president of Fox Interactive Media.

Out earlier today came the Yahoo release announcing Levinsohn’s appointment and that of Fred Amoroso as the new Chairman of the Yahoo Board.

Postscript, 11:15 pm PT by Matt McGee: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Thompson told Yahoo’s board of directors that he’s been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and that his decision to leave the Yahoo CEO post was influenced “in part” by the diagnosis.

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Employees | Yahoo: General

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