You can stay ahead of your competitors by leveraging useful data you collect from Facebook Ad Spy Tools to create high converting social ads. These tools literally cut down your learning curve and point you in the direction of what works so you can start making money without delay.

In this post, you will learn what Facebook Ad Spy Tools are and the best Facebook Ad Spy Tools used by top brands and digital marketers and how they work so you can use them to create winning campaigns with high ROI.

But before get into that, let’s try to answer this important question: Why Facebook?

If you’re new to internet marketing, you may be eager to know why Facebook has become a sweet spot for a great number of digital marketers around the globe. There are a couple of reasons for this as you will soon find out:

ONE, Facebook is the biggest and fastest growing social network with over 2.36 billion monthly active users. From this number, well over 1.56 billion users log in to their accounts every day. This shows that a sizable population of the world is using Facebook. This population represents different demographics of people including the prepubescent, teens, adults, and even senior citizens.

With more people spending time on the platform, Facebook remains a treasure house for businesses and brands. Using Facebook Advertising platform, you can advertise or promote your product or service or a combination of the two to a large audience.

Facebook ads are highly targeted. You can reach your target market using factors such as location, gender, age, income level, interest, and so on.
To ensure that you target the right group of people that will most likely show interest in your offers, Facebook allows you to choose the right campaign objective, targeting option, audiences, placement and advert formats when creating your ad campaigns.

It’s worth mentioning that Facebook is a cheap source of social traffic. Facebook gives you some great level of control over your ad spend. You can decide on how much you want to spend to promote or advertise your product or service.

When putting your money into Facebook Ads, make sure you define the KPI (key performance indicators) you want to track.

What Are Facebook Ad Spy Tools?

One of the latest innovations in the social advertising space is Facebook Ad Spy Tools. These ad intelligence tools make it easier to generate high traffic at a low cost per click (CPC). Overtime, it has grown to become an indispensable tool in a digital marketer’s toolbox.

A Facebook Ad Spy Tool is a social marketing software that shows you exactly what your competitors are doing and how they are using social ads successfully in their businesses. These tools allow you to peep into the entire ad assets of your competitors including the creatives they used, their copy, targeting options and list of responsive audiences.

Facebook Ad Spy Tools place you at a vantage position to have a comprehensive overview of the winning strategy of your competitors. That is, the tools give you an absolute knowledge of the entire efforts your competitors are putting into their campaigns. For example, you will know the deals they’re offering their target audience. You’ll know the kind of content they’re posting that engages their audience the most, the CTAs and links in their campaigns, and so on.

These tools help you to gain insights into what your strongest competitors are doing right, as well as provide you with valuable information on the changes you need to make your campaigns more profitable. Most especially, a Facebook Ad Spy tool will guide you to effectively define and refine your Facebook Target Audience.

Please note that you don’t have to copy and paste your competitor’s campaign. You should not use the tools to copy word for word your competitor’s messaging. Doing so will definitely not serve you right. While this may work for some time, you’ll later realize that the cheat is not sustainable. Copying your competitor’s business model verbatim from start to finish will make you look unauthentic, unreal and suppositious. As a result, your action may elicit negative dispositions from your target audience toward your product or service. At best, you will get some quick sales in the short run and lose much more prospects and clients in the long run.

Facebook Ad Spy Tools do not exactly intend to make you cheat on your competitors. Instead, they are designed to offer you a guide to see what others are doing right and how you can leverage these insights to build appealing campaigns that generate massive traffic at a low CPC.

The tools are available so that you can improve and replicate what works. This is true as you have the chance to analyze every aspect of your competitor’s strategy, improve on what they’re doing right and build a campaign that positions you as the best in your niche.

List of Best Facebook Ad Spy Tools Worth Trying

Maybe you want to spy into your competitor’s campaigns and you’re wondering which Facebook Ad Spy Tools are best for the job. Here’s a list of best Facebook Ad Spy Tools you can choose from:

PowerAdSpy

PowerAdSpy is the best and most reliable ad intelligence software for every business that wants to dominate their niche. The software offers you a comprehensive breakdown of each ad asset, including the landing page information, targeting option, copy, and so on. PowerAdSpy gives you access to the world’s largest ad library to search over 50 million ads from 20 different countries thousands of new ads added every day.

One of the cool things about PowerAdSpy is that it isn’t only powerful for spying on Facebook ads. You can also use it to analyze Instagram, Google, Reddit, YouTube and Native Ads.

The resource has the ability to see the countries, age group and marital status of the people your competitors are targeting as well as where their traffic is being channeled to. It brings together all the Facebook, Instagram, Google and Youtube ads in the world, plus the engaged audience of most successful ads and their landing pages so you can replicate and bank on the winners instantly. The platform can also be used as a native ad spy tool.

PowerAdSpy is good for a local marketing and offline business that wants to take the lead in their niche. The software can drive more customers to your business. You can easily leverage PowerAdSpy to analyze and replicate the winning ads for your business. You can search using domain, keyword or a fan page to gain access ads that are killing it in your industry. Simply get an overview of the strategy and replicate.

The demographic and engagement filters on the software allow you to search ads based on gender, age, marital status and location. You can also search most likes, comments or shares to see what users are engaging with the most.

PowerAdSpy offers users 20 searches for FREE. So, you can try it risk-free and decide if it is a good fit for your business.

PowerADSpy Free Trail

AdPlexity

AdPlexity is one of the leading Ads spying solutions available on the market market today. The tool enables you to monitor and download all the creatives used in your competitor’s campaign including promo materials, copies, content, and so on. AdPlexity is your plug to access millions of ads from different parts of the world.

AdPlexity provides deep and detailed insights into campaigns running across multiple platforms. The software enables you to spy on competitors’ ads running on desktop, mobile, native and API platforms so that you can leverage the pool of data collected to create a winning campaign for your brand or business.

The platform is easy to use. You can search competitive ads using keywords, advertisers’ URLs, publishers, affiliate networks, country and traffic sources.

MagicAdz

MagicAdz is another effective Ads spy option that you can rely on to build highly successful campaigns that produce massive traffic. Although the software is relatively new in the market, it’s one of the best that delivers high ROI on your ad spend.

MagicAdz offers you a large pool of marketing data across 49 countries. The software can find cloaked and uncloaked affiliate ads with just a click away.

The Ads spy resource is particularly useful as it helps to uncover ads that are being cloaked in Facebook Ads. It enables you to find the actual landing page your competitor is using so you can analyze the entirety of their marketing strategy and sales funnel.

With MagicAdz, you can venture into building your own cloaked campaigns and see which strategies and creatives are actually being implemented and used by affiliates. Also, you can download every bit of your competitor’s ad asset, including their landing pages and connect via mobile.

The platform basically targets affiliate ads. Thus, you don’t have to waste time searching brand ads before finding affiliate campaigns. It’s most useful if you’re looking for actual winning strategies and uncover the ads affiliates use in their cloaking campaigns. You can sort your searches using comments and likes to measure engagement on ads.

AdSector

This is another incredible Facebook Ad Spy Tool that you would want to give a try. AdSector is a features-rich innovative ad intelligence software that allows you to filter results by affiliates network and tracking system.

You can find high-performing ads in your niche/industry and dissect your competitors’ marketing strategies and leverage the insights gained to create your own winning campaigns. One of the many amazing features of AdSector is the one that enables you to download competitors’ landing pages, audience targeted, and other important metrics that scale.

You will find the tool a lot more useful. Worth mentioning that it is one of the most expensive ad spying platforms around. It costs around $249 per month.

SocialAdScout

SocialAdScout is another Facebook Ad Spy Tool you’ll find very useful in your social marketing efforts. SocialAdScout is popular for its excellent targeting options. The platform is easy to navigate as you can easily make precise searches using its filters. It also has live creatives you can interact with within the search result pages.

SocialAdScout gives you access to a large database of ads running desktop and mobile platforms in 21 countries. It has a feature that allows you to search by redirects. You can leverage this feature to spy on affiliate campaigns.

You will sure love this tool if you’re an internet marketer looking to find detailed information on the segmentation and targeting options of your competitors. It provides useful insights into audience targeting and demographics selection that your competitors are using to run successful campaigns.

AdSpy

AdSpy is a great ad intelligence software you can use to track, analyze and replicate competitors’ campaigns in your niche or industry.
This tool can grant you access to more than 80 million ads in 88 different languages across 198 countries. Giving these appealing statistics, it’s no surprise that many successful digital marketers are using AdSpy to spy on competitors’ campaigns. And leverage the data collected to create working campaigns for their clients.

You can use the software to uncover winning Facebook and Instagram campaigns to discover text copies, comments, landing page URLs among other useful data to optimize your own campaign.

The platform has great filters that make it easy to search with precision. You can use the tool to search by affiliate network as well as affiliate ID or offer ID. This makes it easy for you to spy on your strongest competitors’ sales funnel and content asset at the easy stage of the funnel.

Adsova

Adsova is a great ad intelligent tool that will help you have more wins in your digital marketing efforts. It works like a typical ads spy tool that uncovers competitors’ ad strategies that you can leverage to boost your own campaigns.

The platform is rated for its easy-to-navigate search filter which presents results in a seamless manner to browse and analyze competitors’ creatives. The software empowers you to search by Newsfeed ads and other active ads running on Facebook currently.

Adsova comes in handy with a tracker that allows you to follow your competitors’ campaigns over time. This way, you can get updates on new campaigns they just launch and spy into their creatives to build your own highly-optimized ads.

It’s one of the least expensive Facebook Ad Spy Tools although the platform only has 500,000 ads for now. You can try the platform for five days with just 1$ before you commit to a monthly fee.

What Is The Number 1 Facebook Ad Spy Tool On The Market?

Every tool talked about in this article works really well and will give you a headstart. However, if you are looking for something with great features and delivers outstanding results, PowerAdSpy is the clearest choice. It is loved by some of the biggest and most successful internet marketers, this is because it offers accurate data and metrics.

You can get started with PowerAdSpy for FREE today.

The post Best Facebook Ad Spy Tools For High ROI appeared first on SEO Doctor.

Most blackhat link building tactics that you see in forums these days have been around for years and are not blackhat in my opinion. These are greyhat tactics, they are not illegal, just outside of Google guidelines.

Typical stuff you see is:

Comment spam using GSA
Link networks
Private blog networks (PBNs)
Tiered link building
etc etc

I used to do loads of this type of stuff, but over time prefer building quality for my own sites and for clients. I’ll still play with some new stuff I see on test sites, this should be standard as an SEO even if you are holier than the holiest.

True blackhat link building is based around illegal activities, primarily hacking websites and placing links on the sites.  Link building that you could be arrested for under the computer misuse act 1990, though most of this act relates to stealing data.  But there is a another link building method that skates very closely on the blackhat edge- link injection via scripts.   This type of link building is scaled commercially by the Russian link network SAPE.  The network consists of 90,000+ sites all with the link injection scripts on them, mainly placed on them knowingly by webmasters or administrators that manage the sites. A small percentage of the sites are actually hacked and the link injection script placed on them.

Another way link injection scripts are added to sites is through vulnerable plugins, particularly on the WordPress.org platform.

Link Injection Case Study Example

The recent example I’ve seen was in the payday loan niche. One website was ranking #2 for a long time with seemingly only a handful of links. “How the fuck are they there?” – an SEO’s daily conundrum.  Initially I thought it was from shitload of cross-domain canonical links which are not picked up by any link analysis tools.

The domain in question was paydayloansnow.co.uk. Google has finally caught up with them and they’ve received a monster slap, totally banished from the SERPs.

After some digging, I discovered the site’s SERP position was being propped up by backlinks injected into websites, then cloaked so only Google could see them. The site owners would have been totally oblivious to what was going on.

Example:

Oracle Finance – as seen by users and domain owner

What Google was seeing:

Now the hack has been sorted and the cloaking turned off, Majestic started quickly picking up the lost links.  These were previously hidden from all link analysis tools:

How was it done?

It looks like the links were inserted into websites from a WordPress plugin (404-301) , highlighted by Wordfence in this article – a plugin with 70K installs.  Wordfence stated that the sites were not technically hacked, as you had to agree to the following to download the plugin:

By clicking the button here below, you agree to the terms and conditions and give permission to place text links on your website when search engine crawlers access it.

I have spoken to the developer, who is mortified, and he pointed me in the direction of his response.  It seems like he was totally unaware of what was actually going on when he teamed up with another developer.

Though the sites were not technically hacked, it’s still beyond grey and verging on the black.  You won’t go to jail for this kind of stuff and the owner probably made some decent cash in the #2 position. The site is part of the Quint Pingtree which pays from £0.50 – £120 per lead. Form submissions are sent to a range of the top payday loan providers who bid on them depending on the quality of the lead.

Update: I’ve had it on good authority that the site should have been making around £10k/day – that’s from someone who has been in the niche for years and made a lot of money.

Though the sites were not technically hacked, there are plenty of other link injection scripts being placed on sites through hacking, mainly through vulnerabilities of the CMS.

WordPress Vulernabilities and Link Spam

Of all the content management systems (CMS) on the market, WordPress is by far the most vulnerable to attacks. Infact, WordPress is a complete joke.

Source

The rise of hacking has increased dramatically over the last few years, mainly for seo spam.  Though some hacks are done for Ad injection, spread malware, just to deface and even reports of ISIS hacking sites to spread propaganda.

Sucuri also breaks down how these hacks were carried out and the most used plugins.

Woprdpress Plugins – The weakest link

Source

Google’s algo cannot keep up

Though Google sometimes can detect website hacks/changes most often they don’t.

You only have to search for ‘buy viagra’ and refine search to last week to see recent hacks.

Link and content injections can be spotted using waybackmachine and Google’s cache of website.

Before
https://web.archive.org/web/20131207081038/http://silvers.ca/silvers.ca/Home.html

After
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p_BSIK_RqVUJ:www.silvers.ca/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

Google really needs to do better with this type of link spam – surely it’s not that hard for them to detect website changes through hacking or even link injection scripts.  But as they continue to work, people will keep using these methods. Let’s see what the penguin 4.0 has to offer.

Secure your WordPress site

I’m not going to write about securing your site there are plenty of good posts out there, but here is a good quick checklist >  Wordfence’s checklist

Tools to scan the vulnerability of your website

Securi site check – if you are running a large, profitable site I would recommend investing in their paid options.

Hacker target wordpress scan

Wpscan

WordPress exploit scanner plugin

Further reading

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Nakibly-TCP-Injection-Attacks-in-the-Wild-A-Large-Scale-Study.pdf

https://www.imperva.com/docs/Imperva_HII_Black_Hat_SEO.pdf

http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/

The post Blackhat Link Building: Payday Loans, Link Injection and WordPress appeared first on SEO Doctor.

It seems like a month doesn’t go by without a story popping up on some tech news blog regarding another major DDoS attack.Only this past few days has Moz been suffering from a DDoS attack on their site.

We are under a DDOS attack. Right now, no ETA on when we’ll be back up, but we’ll keep you posted here. — Moz (@Moz) May 17, 2014

The term “DDoS” stands for “Distributed Denial of Service” and it’s an attack that is commonly used by hackers to bring down a website temporarily. While this hack doesn’t really help anyone gain access to specific information on its own, it is a very useful tool for making a website unreachable by its intended audience. These attacks have been around for quite some time, but they were more recently popularized by those perpetrated by Anonymous against various large companies.

The Original Denial of Service

The way these attacks work is fairly simple. Websites servers are only able to provide access to a certain number of users at any given time due to bandwidth and other considerations. When too many people try to access the site on the server at once, the server cannot handle the load being placed on it and the site becomes unavailable. People use specialized software programs to access a website from many different IP addresses at once. When many people get together to target the same website at the same time, this can overload the host server and make the site impossible to reach. Some of these tools are made up of proprietary software, but some are open source to the public. For example, Anonymous has freely distributed the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” software for free public use in DDoS attacks.

In the end, there’s a lot of argument over whether all DDoS attacks are pure vandalism or if some fall under the blanket of Hacktivism. After all, many of the most famous DDoS attacks did specifically target certain companies and organizations for very specific reasons. While that debate rages on, people will still continue to perform these attacks on websites.

The Impact to Your Website

DDoS attacks can hurt your revenues but there are of course other concerns too:

1. Brand and customer perception – inflicting potential brand damage at the same time as granting a competitive advantage to your rivals.

2. Email and contact centers – once network infrastructure and routers are targeted, DDoS attacks might bring down email and client contact centers, particularly if the call center is on a voice-over-IP (VoIP) network. During this incident, a DDoS attack can interrupt communication with customers, partners, vendors and even staff.

3. Stock price and market confidence – Some organisations hit by DDoS attacks have seen stock prices briefly fall and/or suffer volatile fluctuations because of market concerns for large brands this can be significantly expensive.

4. Search engine rankings – one negative consequence from DDoS attacks that usually gets overlooked is the potential affect it might have on rankings. We already know that if your web site isn’t accessible or crawlable, it could hurt your rankings. After all, Google needs to serve its users with quality results and websites that work. So, once your web site is down from a DDoS attack and Google sees that it’s “uncrawlable” it’s fair to assume that your rankings could take some form of impact.

It’s important to point out that the length of time your site is down plays a role in determining whether or not your rankings will be affected. According to everyone’s favourite Googler Matt Cutts, “If it [your site being down] was just for a day, you should be in pretty good shape. If your host is down for two weeks, then there’s a better indicator that the website is actually down and we don’t want to send users to a website that is actually down. So if it was only just a short period of downtime, I wouldn’t really worry about that [affecting your rankings].”

DDoS attacks are very often incorrectly associated with a service outage. In fact the biggest impact of DDoS/DoS attacks in 2013 was service degradation, which in most cases presents itself as a slow website.

A recent study by TRAC Research of 300 businesses, reported three very interesting things:

• Average revenue losses of $21k per hour of downtime.

• Average revenue losses of $4k per hour of performance slowdown.

• Website slow-downs occur up to ten times more frequently than website outages.

In other words, website slowdowns, can have a greater impact over time on your revenues as outages. While temporary outages cost more per minute, slowdowns take up significantly more time and can ultimately cost more.

And what about the impact on customer retention:

• During a temporary outage, 9% of customers will permanently abandon your website.

• When your website is unacceptably slow; 28% of customers will permanently abandon it.

Or to put it another way: the permanent abandonment rate for a slow site is more than three times greater than the abandonment rate for a site that is temporarily down. Think about that for a minute.

Unfortunately, some black hat SEOs have already started using DDoS attacks against competitors as a tactic to damage their sales and rankings.

How to Identify a DDos Attack

Most cloud DDoS mitigation services are available on demand which means that customers will enable the service once they are the victim of a DDoS attack.

There are multiple monitoring tools you’ll be able to use to capture traffic changes, which might help confirm whether or not you’re under a DDoS attack.

#1. Internal server, network and infrastructure monitoring applications

Companies have plenty of monitoring package and applications to decide on from, however one of the morestandard pieces of software, referred to as Nagios, allows you to monitor internal infrastructure status and performance of applications, services, operational systems, network protocols, system metrics and network infrastructure.

For example, monitoring software packages will check your HTTP service to make sure that a web site or server is functioning properly, and if the service isn’t functioning, most software includes real-time notification. As a result most DDoS attacks target a web server or application server, monitoring software could show the HTTP service to be experiencing a problem with slowness, high CPU utilization or complete failure. While watching servers and infrastructure are useful, there’s no guarantee that DDoS is the issue. Abnormal spikes in traffic and usage do occur for legitimate reasons from time to time.

#2. External Performance watching Solutions within the Cloud

Companies that don’t host their own websites and use services like Amazon EC2 would get the most from third-party solutions. Network/infrastructure tools — that are sometimes put in within your network — external performance watching solutions are usually provided by a 3rd party and leverage various monitoring locations from round the world.

External watching tools will study many elements:

• Virtual browsers to check the basic web site over time and performance

• Real browsers to look for site / application performance, errors and repair degradation

• Network services like DNS, FTP and your email, among others

From a DDoS perspective, associated external third-party monitoring is the sensible answer. The aim of this kind of tool is to perpetually monitor an internet site, service or application and check for potential indicators of a DDoS attack.

That said, though a 3rd party external tool will work on capturing DDoS attacks, these solutions don’t seem to be foolproof. While external tools will point out that site performance is degrading or is failing, it cannot confirm the explanation.

Originally, the goal of third-party tools was to make sure that ISPs, hosting and servers were functioning as designed. Slow response times and outages may indicate a hosting provider or server being down.

How to Test your Sites Vulnerability

If you are a competent technical person and have a few friends you could try LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) or HOIC (High Orbit Ion Cannon) which were released to the public by Anonymous, but of course you could just spend $5 on Fiverr and get a report carried out for you to highlight the most common vulnerabilities. Regular DDOS attacks like those launched by LOIC work by overwhelming the server with complete requests. Slowloris works differently. It opens connections to the server but never actually completes them which ties up all the server’s sockets resulting in a DOS. The easiest way to mitigate this sort of attack is by denying many connections from a single client. But of course there’s a way to get around this using Tor and Pyloris a Python version of Slowloris.

hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer. Hping is one of the de-facto tools for security auditing and testing of firewalls and networks.

Of course SEO’s have made the ability to carry out a DDoS attack really easy for just about anyone. Russ Jones wrote an article that showed that free SEO tools that create XML sitemaps or crawl sites could be utilised all at the same time to cause a significant increase in bandwidth and CPU Usage.

You should do whatever you feasibly can to prevent DDoS attacks or at the very least mitigate against any attack that does hit your website. Make sure that you have systems in place to detect potential attacks and have a plan in place for responding to them as quickly and effectively as possible.

The post What are the Marketing Costs of a DDoS attack? appeared first on SEO Doctor.

I really miss the good old blackhat days, but Google has done really well of ridding the interwebz of spam recently.  As I’ve been delving a lot into conversion rate optimisation (CRO) recently, I thought it would be good to look at blackhat CRO tactics. Like blackhat SEO, there are all different shades of grey depending on your morality, but with blackhat CRO you are deceiving real people not just search bots which is fine.

To carry out blackhat CRO you need to understand the main principles and techniques of CRO, then fake them.  Here’s how Wikipedia defines CRO:

conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers. It is also commonly referred to as CRO

Key elements of CRO

CRO is about understanding the psychology of your visitors and providing them with the experience they need to reach your goals. There are many factors effecting a users decision making process, but they are always driven by emotions then reinforced with logic once the decision is made.  Many CRO techniques are taken from old marketing ideas around influence, like Cialdini’s Psychology of Persuasion.

The key element of CRO is to create credibility and trust on your landing page or website. You need to give the users the confidence to proceed and complete your goal whether  it’s subscribing to a newsletter, gaining a Facebook like or proceeding down an ecommerce buying funnel.  The ecommerce conversion funnel is more complex than a simple converting landing page,  each step creates risk of abandonment.  Each step of the funnel needs to be examined to find negative user sentiment so it can be eliminated, each of the steps can also include blackhat techniques.

What is Blackhat CRO?

Blackhat CRO is any tactic used to mislead a user to complete a desired goal.   Harry Brignall describes these as ‘Dark Patterns‘, which he describes below:

Dark Patterns are User Interfaces that are designed to trick people.
Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

Google’s Blackhat Conversion Tactics

Even Google is partial to a few blackhat/greyhat conversion tricks.   Ever found it hard to detect Google’s sponsored links?  Moving your laptop screen around to see the colours?   That’s Google intentionally changing the adsense background colour to ‘trick’ people into clicking through.  To me this is pure deception.  Google used to get around 30% of adwords clicks with 70% going to the organic listings, but I would love to know the ratios now for a query like this.

Another shady tactic is Google’s new arrow box on adwords.  I’ve actually clicked on one of these on my ipad thinking I as about to scroll right to the next page. With 25%  of ad clicks coming from mobile, I’m convinced this is done out of pure deception.

Now we have seen examples of Google’s art of deception, lets look at some of the tactics used by other websites skating the grey boundaries of user experience (UX).

Blackhat Copy

The key element of blackhat copy is to get the user to convert as quickly as possible on the landing page or start them heading down the conversion funnel.  Tactics range from straight out lying to greyhat use of hidden truths.  Below are a few examples that I found.

Many sites will use the terms ‘FREE’, even though you will have to hand over your card details to register.  Sites will then conveniently not remind you after 30 days to cancel your subscription.  It’s more than likely you will forget.  This tactic is called forced continuity and can been seen on hundreds of websites, here is the stage of LoveFilm’s free trial.

Once you have subscribed and given your card details, many sites will use the tactic of making it difficult to cancel the service.  This tactic can also be aided and abetted by 3rd party transaction houses.  I have noticed Paypal hide away your payment subscriptions. Try it now, log in and see how long it takes you to find all the websites and services you are subscribed to.  I recently did a Paypal review and found I was subscribed to over 30 services, which I have now reduced. You only see a paypal transaction on your bank statements so never see the service you are subscribed to.  2Checkout also makes it difficult to to see what the payments relate to.

Greyhat copy is also seen where the whole truth or offering is misleading. Here are some examples that have been held up by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), who continue without taking down their false claims.  These sites are named and shamed on the ASA website until they change their copy.

Below Webhost was found to be using ‘100% customer satisfaction’ misleadingly as they could not provide evidence to the ASA.

Here Nuratrim were found to be using ‘scientifically proven‘ without any research to back up the statement.

Here 25poundlogo make the date dynamically change to today’s date every day. The ASA found this to me misleading.  Time sensitive sales is a great conversion tactic used by many legit sites like Groupon and Qwertee.

The ASA concluded kidz5aday  did not provide a child with 5-per-day and used misleading claims.

Widgets such as calculators can also be used to give people false information in the form of price ‘estimates’ encouraging the user to proceed.  Here daddycashforgold.co.uk were found to give totally misleading gold prices in their calculator.

Hidden Costs

Advertising a product or service with a disguised low price is a common problem online. As with the widget example above, the aim is to get the user to click through and proceed.  There are hundreds of pricing tricks out there, but here’s a couple of examples.

Hosting companies showing prices that are monthly but only if you sign up for more than 1 year.

Here Pacifhost show monthly prices that you would assume are for a 1 year contract.  The $2.49 price is actually for 3 years and this basic package for 1 year is $4.99.  Even clicking through to compare the plans does not highlight the deal properly, you have to hover over the pricing to see the time spans.

 click to expand

Here ironeasy.co.uk broke the advertising standards code by quoting prices exclusive of V.A.T.  Ex VAT prices are also incorporated into many prices comparison calculators.

Fake Endoresments & Testimonials

Social proof is an extremely powerful marketing tool to aid CRO.  Users have a strong psychological need to see what others have done in order to make the correct decision themselves.  Social proof is also one of the easiest to fake and least regulated, there must be hundreds out there. The ASA will also take action for the misuse of logos on a website, but they need a few complaints before they investigate the website.

Here’s one using Kristi Hines’  image, feel free to call her Pamela from now on! :)

 Source: contentproz.net

This site’s whole ‘Testimonials’, ‘As seen on’ and ‘Featured Clients’ must be totally faked.  At the time of writing Kristi just got her images removed after much hounding.

 click to expand

The above are totally fabricated, but what about using affiliates to promote your product and writing amazing reviews?  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US has previously fined websites in which the affiliates did not disclose the full intent of their promotional material. As started by the FTC’s head of consumer protection, David Vladeck:

Advertisers using affiliate marketers to promote their products would be wise to put in place a reasonable monitoring program to verify that those affiliates follow the principles of truth in advertising

As an affiliate of a few products myself, I’m not sure if I comply to these ‘principles of truth‘.

With the huge growth of the review market, I can see a few sites being fined in the future for falsifying reviews.   Last year Beony International was hit with a $13m judgement for producing fake news based around the miracles of the acai berry.

Adding dirt to the conversion funnel

Along with tricks to help conversion, some ecommerce sites will add extras in the conversion funnel to maximize profits.  Greyhat CRO tactics are not just about the conversion, but ensuring customers are converting on the products that are most profitable.

Adding extras to your shopping basket

This is my pet hate.  Here you will see 123Reg adding in other domains to my purchase by default. You have to deselect them otherwise you will buy 2 extra domains.

Making most profitable products default

Setting the most profitable option as default is also a common trick.  Sorry Buzzstream, we still love you but that Solo plan is really hidden away!!

 click to expand

Paying for extras

Making you pay for things that are essential, like a bag when you fly!  Ryanair.

I hate you Ryan air (but that’s a separate rant), so I decided to pay for some user testing.  They make their whole conversion funnel so messy, even including adsense on the final pages.  I believe the tactic is to create a nasty experience so you rush through the order process adding their extras as you go.  The final assault is the big push to get you to buy ‘Ryanair talk’.   I plan to do some further testing on this site to investigate cookie based price manipulation.

 click to expand

Ryanair User Testing 

Godaddy

Another one of my pet hates and worth a user test. To be fair, they have cleaned up their whole site and sales process considerably.

The test highlighted Godaddy making the domain registration of a .com 2yrs by default. When the tester amended to 1year and hit the back button to test something, it reverts back to the 2 yr default.

Users are continually getting smarter with these types of tricks, I believe a clean user experience is the best way to increase conversion.  ASOS previously reduced their abandonment rate by 50% by using more transparacy in the checkout process.

Blackhat tactics for Social Media CRO

Conversion goals for social media include likes, shares, follows, comments etc . As companies are seeing real ROI from social media marketing, more dark tactics are being found across the Internet.   Again many shades of grey exist in this arena, you can decide what is white, grey and blackhat from the examples below.

Faking followers

Even big brands have been caught out creating fake profiles to either manipulate Facebook’s edgerank of to appear more popular.  Users are more likely to like a page if others have also done so, its back to social proof again.

Account automation

Not really blackhat but once you have trusting faithful followers you won’t have to do much to garner more likes and comments to keep your brand fresh in people’s mind for a future promotional opportunity.

‘Like’ to Play

I actually really love this campaign, even though it is slightly greyhat into deceiving FB users to share the Ecover page.  You cannot enter the competition without liking the page first.

Creating ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ with fake status updates 

Here nothing actually happens, but has created hundreds of interactions.

 Oauth Misuse

From apps that kindly update your status for you to pure blackhat hacking of Facebook accounts, Oauth has plenty of room for misuse.

Like Jacking

Like jacking is the technique of making users like a page without them really knowing it, it stems from the old technique of clickjacking and is a social engineering attack.  You can get browser plugins to identify hidden widgets on a page.  Here you can see like jacking in action on a page

If you want to play with some like jacking codes, Martin Mcdonald did a post on it a while back, giving you all the code you need.

Have you seen any deceptive CRO techniques lately?  Let me know in the comments.  Thanks.

The post Blackhat CRO: The Dark Side of Conversion Rate Optimisation appeared first on SEO Doctor.

As news broke yesterday of Interflora’s Google penalty, I thought it would be worth a quick dive into their link profile to see where it went wrong.

The penalty

The agency working for Interflora have been doing a big link removal campaign since last summer, they must have received a webmaster tools warning.

There was talk of the penalty being related to Interflora sending flowers to bloggers, but I don’t believe this is the case.  Looking a ahrefs’ overview shows a huge amount of sitewide links.

With sitewide links being a big part of the penguin update, I don’t think they removed these links fast enough. MajesticSEO also shows the use of possible link networks with 311 linking websites on 1 single ip address!!??  That’s some lazy seo.

Bulk checking the Whois on these domains shows similar registration details or privacy protected. Link removal software also shows 60% suspicious linking domains:  (click image to expand)

Download the shitty suspicious links here > https://dl.dropbox.com/u/17565553/interflora%20shit%20links.xlsx

The post Interflora Google Penalty – A quick deep dive appeared first on SEO Doctor.

This is a guest post from Tad Chef  (Onreact), you can check out more of his blogging on SEO 2.0 and over at SEOptimise.

Over the years Google has maintained that inbound links can’t hurt your site yet many webmasters get notified via Google Webmaster Tools of “unnatural links” when they get penalized. What are unnatural links and how can you spot them? Aren’t all links great? How to prevent an epic link building FAIL?

The bad news: Not all links are created equal, some of them are evil. The good news: We know how the evil links look and we can spot them. There are even tools which assist you with this task.

As we all know good natural links grow on trees, so to say.

As on the Web there are no trees, unless in games like Farmville, you have to grow your organic links on websites. Unlike organic food sadly websites do not have clear badges proving that a site has certified organic links. Some sites may boast they have such links but you have to check and find out yourself whether it’s true.

Here are 5 kinds of links you don’t want like you don’t want to feed your newborn genetically modified Frankenfood.

100.000 site wide footer links – Unless your name is WordPress or Joomla nobody will believe you 100k footer links are organic, not even Google.

out of context exact match anchor text links – Imagine somebody asking for your name and you answering “best SEO company London”. Does that sound natural? So consider not getting after artificially sounding anchor text links on places like your aunts yoga studio.

10.000 nofollow blog comment links – Do you like spam? Do you like reading blog comment saying things like “Hey, exceptional weblog. I like your design. I recently got carried out with cosmetic classes and want to initial my own personal site. Thank you for the truly great publish!” on a site that does have nothing to do with cosmetics? Now imagine how natural it looks when you spread them all over the place?

juicy xxx site links – Unless you sell these images of three legged bald teens showing off their feet you don’t really want to get links from adult sites. Also cheap herbal online poker won’t help you much and they might look just a bit unnatural when they link to your car dealership.

obvious paid links – Paid links are evil Google says. SEO practicioners aren’t so sure as they don not even know exactly what paid links are in some cases. I know, not everybody can be a famous SEO guru like myself and thus spot paid links from afar. Nonetheless you have to shun obvious paid links. Where the site says sponsors, or even donations, has PageRank 7 or higher and your rich anchor text link is in Bulgarian instead of English like the rest of the site the link is probably paid. I know it, you know it and everybody else who can see and report it does know it as well.

So now that you know what to look for how can you do it without having to spend ages on checking your links? Well, I use the impressive link building tools by cognitiveSEO. You can use a plethora filters to search for

• anchor texts
• xxx links
• footer links
• nofollow links
• high PageRank links

among others.

You may not yet get notifications for all of the above mentioned “unnatural links” but you can rest assured that they do not affect your site positively. So you better find out before Google does.

* CC image by Organic Nation.

The post Link Building FAIL: 5 Kinds of Unnatural Links You Don’t Want appeared first on SEO Doctor.

So Gareth James asked me to blather about the role of IP delivery in geo targeting. I answered “That’s a complex topic with gazillions of ‘depends’ lacking the potential of getting handled with a panacea”, and thought he’d just bugger off before I’ve to write a book published on his pathetic UK SEO blog. Unfortunately, it didn’t work according to plan A. This @seo_doctor dude is as persistent as a blowfly attacking a huge horse dump. He dared to reply “lol thats why I asked you!”. OMFG! Usually I throw insults at folks starting a sentence with “lol”, and I don’t communicate with native speakers who niggardly shorten “that’s” to “thats” and don’t capitalize any letter except off “I” for egomaniac purposes.

However, I didn’t annoy the Interwebz with a pamphlet for (perceived) ages, and the topic doesn’t exactly lacks controversial discussion, so read on. By the way, Gareth James is a decent guy. I’m just not fair making fun out of his interesting question for the sake of a somewhat funny opening. (That’s why you’ve read this pamphlet on his SEO blog earlier.)

How to increase your bounce rate and get your site tanked on search engine result pages with IP delivery in geo targeting

A sure fire way to make me use my browser’s back button is any sort of redirect based on my current latitude and longitude. If you try it, you can measure my blood pressure in comparision to an altitude some light-years above mother earth’s ground. You’ve seriously fucked up my surfing experience, therefore you’re blacklisted back to the stone age, and even a few stones farther just to make sure your shitty Internet outlet can’t make it to my browser’s rendering engine any more. Also, I’ll report your crappy attempt to make me sick of you to all major search engines for deceptive cloaking. Don’t screw red crabs. Related protip: Treat your visitors with due respect.

Geo targeted ads are annoying enough. When I’m in a Swiss airport’s transit area reading an article on any US news site about the congress’ latest fuck-up in foreign policy, most probably it’s not your best idea to plaster my cell phone’s limited screen real estate with ads recommending Zurich’s hottest brothel that offers a flat rate as low as 500 ‘fränkli’ (SFR) per night. It makes no sense to make me horny minutes before I enter a plane where I can’t smoke for fucking eight+ hours!

Then if you’re the popular search engine that in its almighty wisdom decides that I’ve to seek a reservation Web form of Boston’s best whorehouse for 10am local time (that’s ETA Logan + 2 hours) via google.ch in french language, you’re totally screwed. In other words, because it’s not Google, I go search for it at Bing. (The “goto Google.com” thingy is not exactly reliable, and a totally obsolete detour when I come by with a google.com cookie.)

The same goes for a popular shopping site that redirects me to its Swiss outlet based on my location, although I want to order a book to be delivered to the United States. I’ll place my order elsewhere.

Got it? It’s perfectly fine with me to ask “Do you want to visit our Swiss site? Click here for its version in French, German, Italian or English language”. Just do not force me to view crap I can’t read and didn’t expect to see when I clicked a link!

Regardless whether you redirect me server sided using a questionable ip2location lookup, or client sided evaluating the location I carelessly opened up to your HTML5 based code, you’re doomed coz I’m pissed. I’ve just increased your bounce rate in lightning speed, and trust me that’s not just yours truly alone who tells click tracking search engines that your site is scum.

How to fuck up your geo targeting with IP delivery, SEO-wise

Of course there’s no bullet proof way to obtain a visitor’s actual location based on the HTTP request’s IP address. Also, if the visitor is a search engine crawler, it requests your stuff from Mountain View, Redmond, or an undisclosed location in China, Russia, or some dubious banana republic. I bet that as a US based Internet marketer offering local services accross all states you can’t serve a meaningful ad targeting Berlin, Paris, Moscow or Canton. Not that Ms Googlebot appreciates cloaked content tailored for folks residing at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, by the way.

There’s nothing wrong with delivering a cialis™ or viagra® dealer’s sales pitch to search engine users from a throwaway domain that appeared on a [how to enhance my sexual performance] SERP for undisclosable reasons, but you really shouldn’t do that (or something similar) from your bread and butter site.

When you’ve content in different languages and/or you’re targeting different countries, regions, or whatever, you shall link that content together by language and geographical targets, providing prominent but not obfuscating links to other areas of your site (or local domains) for visitors who –indicated by browser language settings, search terms taken from the query string of the referring page, detected (well, guessed) location, or other available signals– might be interested in these versions. You can and should group those site areas by sitemaps as well as reasonable internal linkage, and use other techniques that distribute link love to each localized version.

Thou shalt not serve more than one version of localized content under one URI! If you can’t resist, you’ll piss off your visitors and you’ll ask for troubles with search engines. This golden rule applies to IP delivery as well as to any other method that redirects users without explicit agreement. Don’t rely on cookies and such to determine the user’s preferred region or language, always provide visible alternatives when you serve localized content based on previously collected user decisions.

But …

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. For example it’s not exactly recommended to provide content featuring freedom of assembly and expression in fascist countries like Iran, Russia or China, and bare boobs as well as Web analytics or Facebook ‘like’ buttons can get you into deep shit in countries like Germany, where last century nazis make the Internat laws. So sometimes, IP delivery is the way to go.

For more IP delivery information I recommend Refugeeks, refugeeks.com is worlds best seo website

The post IP Delivery and Geo Targeting by SebastianX appeared first on SEO Doctor.

What is link decay

‘Web decay’ in information retrieval science refers to the loss of pages from the Internet.  Back in 2006 Bill Slawski blogged about a patent that looked at link decay, where web pages were found to disappear from the web at a rate of 0.5% per week.

Worldwidewebsize calculates total pages on the Internet at 19.64 Billion, while SEOmoz say the average page has 13.32 external links on it.  By my calculations that’s 1.3 Billion links being wiped out each week!

Here I want to split the terms. Web/link decay being the loss of pages from the Internet, but ‘link equity decay’ to mean the deterioration of link equity over time or the link being totally lost.

Link Equity, measuring the juice

“Link equity is the concept of the influence of links on a pages ability to rank for particular search queries. Link equity takes into account things like relevance, authority and trust, link placement and accessibility, the positive value of relevant outbound links, and the like”

(Eric Enge 6 ways to sculpt your Site link equity)

Measuring precisely link equity is difficult but a very very rough calculation is dividing a page’s toolbar Pagerank between the number of links (internal & outbound) on that page.  SEOmoz’s  Linkscape measures the raw Mozrank passed in a similar way.  I am hoping this will be tweaked and updated in the future versions of Open Site Explorer .  Once you download the csv from linkscape you end up with the raw figure.  Adam Feldstein, VP Product at SEOMoz explained how you convert this figure back to the cleaner version:

They are in fact the same values, but for some reason the raw number is showing in the .csv file vs. the ‘pretty’ value that you see in the online report. If you want to convert the raw value to the pretty value in the spreadsheet, you can use the following formula.

(m * ln(raw)) + b

Raw is the raw value, and m and b are constants. The current m and b constants for URL mozRank are 0.385005057627582 and 12.7260317160508, respectively. These constants change just a little bit from index to index, but not generally in any significant way.

You could also do your own calculations using Open Site Explorer.  Take the Page Authority (PA) figure and divide it my the number of links on the page.  You need to calculate the total number of links on the page, both internal and external (try this tool).

MajesticSEO uses ‘AC rank’ to order their links, though this is only a rough measure of the page strength where your link sits you could still use the above approach to get the AC per link.

It’s also important to note that some links will not be passing any equity from the start, you can see if they are working by running link tests.  See my Q&A inspired post by Rand Fishkin here.  The problem is measuring old links, its simply not viable to test every link in your profile.

How does link equity decay?

Links become broken

As discussed above, pages are lost from the web each day.  Webmasters continually tweak websites and make changes, which can often cause broken links, pages where your link sat can simply be deleted or moved creating 404 pages.

I tried to find the percentage of broken links on the web, but couldn’t find this figure anywhere so asked Dr Pete for the % of 404s in Linkscapes last crawled.

Out of 416,475,264,279 links crawled I asked how many were broken:

“9.155% of all URLs in our last index were 404’d specifically. 10.217% of URLs had an error code of some kind (4xx, 5xx, 7xx, etc.) ”

Algorithm Changes & External Factors

Google makes between 350 to 550 algorithm changes a year to improve search quality and reduce spam.  The majority of the changes will be undetectable, but links are continually being devalued.  Over time many types of links have been devalued such as directory links, reciprocal links and footer links.  Google also continually improves its ability to spot and devalue paid links.

If you are wondering why you have had a big rankings drop, the chances are it is not a penalty…you have just had links discounted or devalued.

Along with algorithm changes, Google is constantly finding link networks and sites that are created solely for link building. Links are continually being discounted on site by site basis directly and indirectly, would a link from a Panda hit site now pass less link equity?

Site Changes

Link equity decay can occur when sites have makeovers and are updated, the site/page redesign may add more internal links to the page for example.

Along with pages being redesigned, link equity decay can happen through added outbound links to a page.  You see this with directory links,  every time a new listing is added, link juice is taken away from your link.  Is it worth paying XXX amount  when your link is on a page with a hundred others?  Out of Linkscapes last web crawl the average page has 60.88 links on it, including interal pages which will still take link equity away from your link.

Poor website architecture can also cause your link juice to decay.   You see this with WordPress posts as they get pushed off the home page from the standard 10 posts, only crawlable via next/previous links.

Webmaster/Site Manipulation

Webmasters can easily manipulate your link to stop it passing any value, example being Linkedin profiles now sending external links through a redirect.  There are many ways besides just adding ‘Nofollow’ to block your link’s value, the entire page may later be blocked by the webmaster – a sneaky trick but this still happens.   I’ve seen even more cunning link scams like reciprocal link cloaking.  You get an email asking for a link exchange and they tell you your link has been added.  You click on the url provided which then causes a cookie drop or your ip is logged and your website ‘appears’ in their sidebar (nice :) ), as discussed above, make sure the link is passing equity from the offset!!

Webmaster Greed

Links being added to a page that are off topic will lower the trust metrics of the page/domain.  You will see this a lot if you are in the market for buying links.  Webmasters will add links to pharmacy, debt and sex sites if the price is right.  A good example is seen with the $5000 Wikipedia links, not only is your link on a page with 182 other sites but the page links out to casino and drug sites.  Do you really want your link to be on that page?

Link Buyers Stupidity

Many webmasters who buy/rent links will let their link expire through lack of organisation.  As you scale your link building you will need sytems in place to manage these link placements.

Rand argued that aged links do not add value, but I tend to disagree.  If your link is removed and the page is cached, then your link appears next time the page is cached isn’t that an obvious signal?  It may not have a direct impact but you have left a footprint.

Ways to stop link equity loss

1) Monitor your best links closely, especially if you have paid for them.  Here is a script I just got built for the job.  The script will check that your links are still live, just upload a spreadsheet with all your links that you want to track.  It’s also pretty handy if you are doing a few reciprocal niche link exchanges with some webmasters you don’t entirly trust.

SEO Doctor’s Link Tracking Script

To find out how to run, just go to my quick installation guide.

2) Use a Link Atrophy Tool – this one is good and powered by Linkscape, though you will have to wait for the update.

You can also discover your dropped links using MajesticSEO.   I have just tried it out on Beatthatquotes dropped links.  Let’s see what links Google removed from this sites link profile > removed links.

3) Control your own links.  Creating a powerful network of sites is expensive and time consuming.  I have seen SEOs cower at the term ‘network’ and associate them with badly thought out link networks by link brokers, but it doesn’t have to be this way.  There is nothing wrong with having a network of sites, just make sure you do right.   If you don’t have time, just  pay Fantomaster 500, 000 Euros and he’ll sort you out!

4) Keep linking to your good guest posts, especially if on authority domains.   A link on a strong domain will work better if you build links to the page.

6)Monitor OBLs and bad neighbours, especially if you are ‘renting links’.  Just keep checking the pages from time to time and make sure the webmaster is keeping his link sales on topic.  Remove your link when you start seeing and pharamacy, escort, casino or debt consolidation links. Try this Bad Neighborhood Checker:

7) Monitor the content quality of your link placement sites.  Often sites change hands and new webmasters may start publishing duplicate content which will lower the trust metrics of the site and the link equity passed.

8 ) Monitor the rate of link sales. Before you buy a link on a page, check the rate new links are added to that page and remember each one added will dilute your link equity.

9) Track changes to the Mozrank passed (mR passed) on the bulk of your quality links.  I  haven’t tried this yet, but it may be possible with the SEOmoz api.

10) Keep on top of Google’s algorithm changes, especially the ones that may devalue your links.  Also find out what industry leaders consider as link devaluation metrics.

11) As social metrics are now a ranking signal, I’m sure a link on a highly shared page will have more value.  The key is to find links on pages that are likely to be continually shared such as good resource pages, they will also be more likely to attract links over time.

Every professional link builder should think about link equity decay, especially if they are tracking link velocity closely against competitors.  If you have any thoughts or ideas on this topic let me know in the comments below.

Update: Since I started writing this post SEOmoz has totally turned off Linkscape and have not included any mozrank passed metrics into OSE, I’m hoping they have something up their sleeve that will be rolled out soon.Link 

Link Rot Example

Link rot can be seen by comparing Majestics to data bases: The historic index v Fresh index (90days). Take a look at this post for example:

http://readwrite.com/2013/01/16/facebooks-graph-search-the-ultimate-online-dating-service/

Majestic Historical Index

Majestic Fresh Index

This equates to 1,943 lost linking domains over 3 years!

The post Link Decay And Link Equity Preservation appeared first on SEO Doctor.

Just 2 weeks ago, I run a test on the “First Link Counts” rule trying to understand if there are some effective ways to avoid that bad anchor texts can devalue our SEO efforts in internal link building. As I reported on my YouMoz post, I found there are at least 3 different ways to make Google associate different anchor texts when linking to the same url from the same page. This post generated an interesting discussion and some user asked about how Google handles images. This was an interesting question: we often see ecommerce sites with an image of a product and then a text link after it, or we can think to logos pointing to the site homepage… are ALT attributes counted as the first link anchor text (and so the following anchor text is ignored) or not?

I supposed images are treated in a different way, but I was not sure, so I run a new test that specifically was aiming at answering that question.   Again, I used my SEO site Posizionamento Zen as a testing theatre and this is how I proceeded.

Setup

I created a page named paginaA3.html, about the fantastic topic “Grisotelaio”. In the HTML code we have 2 links to paginaG.html and 2 links to paginaH.html.

PaginaG.html is about the term “bidognano” and the 2 links pointing to it are (in the order they appear in the code):

#1 – image link with ALT attribute: “bolufaretto”

#2 – text link with anchor text:”usportignazione”

None of these 2 words appear in paginaG.html text, so this page can be indexed for these two terms only if Google uses both the anchor text.

PaginaH.html is about the term “bidopolpetto” and receives the following 2 links:

#1 – text link with anchor text “mornuborato”

#2 – image link with ALT attribute: “gollomallo”

Again, none of these terms appears in paginaH.html text, so this page can appear in the relative SERPs only if Google counts the links.

Expected results

If the “First Link Counts” rule applies to images, paginaG.html has not to rank for “usportignazione”, as it is a second link text and paginaH.html has not to rank for “gollomallo”. If images are handled in a different way, maybe things can change if the image link appears before or after the textual one in the HTML code.

If the rule doesn’t apply to images, all the anchor text have to be counted.

Testing

I linked paginaA3.html in the footer of my site to make Google index it. paginaG.html and paginaH.html weren’t linked from any other page besides it.

After 2 weeks, paginaG.html and paginaH.html were indexed, and this is the situation:

paginaG.html ranking for “bolufaretto”

paginaG.html ranking for “usportignazione”

paginaH.html ranking for “mornuborato”

paginaH.html ranking for “gollomallo”

Conclusions

As the pictures above show, the first link rule doesn’t apply to image links, whatever the order they appear in the HTML code. Probably it can be interesting to see what happens if we have 2 or more images pointing to the same url (do all Alt attributes count?).

I think I’m going to test this too…

If you are interested in my tests, you can found them at my SEO test archive. Posts are in Italian, but images and code are an universally spoken language! ;)

The post First Link Counts Rule and Alt Text appeared first on SEO Doctor.

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While Gareth and I were deciding on the subject of this guest post, we ended up discussing the differences between paid and natural search. Paid search has often been maligned: many of my clients have had bad experiences in the past with agencies who have sought to look at the number of people coming to the site. On the other hand, at the agency I work for we often recommend paid search to new clients as the easiest way of bringing new customers to the site. This has been made that bit more topical over on SEOMoz where the old question of “SEO vs PPC: which would win in a fight?” has recently been discussed. So, Gareth and I decided it could be interesting to look at site engagement and conversion rates for paid and non-paid search.

At the agency we have several clients for whom we do both PPC and SEO, from a variety of industries including:

• An online kitchen appliance store
• A New Zealand wine merchant
• An interior design and hardware showroom
• An overseas volunteering charity
• An outdoor e-commerce store
• A chain of tile showrooms.

The data for the above has been amalgamated over a six month period and analysed, and I shall try to explore what it means.

PPC vs SEO: The Rivalry

First of all the usual arguments for and against each. These are arguments that we certainly present to new clients. I won’t do a table of pros and cons because my opinion is that things are a bit more subtle than that

PPC Starts Quickly, SEO Takes Time To Build

For a business wanting to get off the mark today, this is definitely a pro for PPC. In the long term, however, the build up for SEO allows testing of on-page elements and application of conversion rate optimisation on a small audience so that when it finally starts pulling in traffic that traffic converts well. Of course you can also keep your PPC budget low while testing on-page factors before ramping it up to keep ROI high, but then you lose some of that initial acceleration of sales. So which is better? It depends: on a brand new site I would say PPC. On a mature site, though, both can be used to meet different objectives.

PPC Costs Every Time Someone Clicks, SEO Costs Are Initiative-Based

This means that it’s easy to count the cost of PPC: just take the amount you spent in a month and add the amount spent on your agency or in-house team. Calculating ROI then follows on smoothly, as long as your website tracking is set up properly. With SEO are a bit more difficult to track. We can track costs to build a certain number of links in the month, keep social media up to date, create articles for distribution and all the other things that take up our time as SEOs. But measuring ROI from each is a lot more difficult. So which is better? Well, in some ways PPC – you know your costs and returns immediately. But links will keep on giving juice, and visitors, for months to come, so ROI for a certain amount of resource spent on SEO keeps going up.

You Can Share Results between the Two

As Danny Dover comments on the SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday (see below), PPC best practices are very different to SEO best practices. PPC landing page tests generate huge amounts of duplicate content and cannibalise keywords from other pages, which is exactly the opposite of what you want in SEO. However, the results from those landing page tests can be very useful for SEOs as well, so both teams can derive benefits. Also, rel=canonical tags can be used to minimise overlap.

At least as important are the SEO and CRO benefits of ad testing. Now, you may think I’m slightly daft for saying this. But: the aim of ads is to entice people to your site as often as possible and get them engaged. The aim of meta titles and even the headlines on your landing pages are exactly the same, so if a PPC ad has a higher CTR for the headline “Blue Widgets 30% Off” than for “30% Off Blue Widgets” you can almost guarantee that using the text this way round for the page headline will result in improved ROI.

Engagement and ROI

Now that the question of which to implement is solved, that is campaigns for both if you can, what about results?

The New Zealand wine merchant makes a good case study. Over the past six months we have seen that for non-branded traffic natural search has a conversion rate 60% higher than paid search. However, the aims of this client are long term – getting the best lifetime customer value they can. For that they have their email list and both segments have around a 2.70% sign-up rate for the monthly newsletter, meaning that LCV will be very close in a couple of years time.

With the tile showroom, things are even more interesting. As you may expect, local search plays an important part in their campaigns and this importance is especially high for paid search, where local terms have a conversion rate four times greater than the rest of the PPC account. While conversion rates are again lower for PPC overall, conversion rates for local keywords are the same for paid and non-paid search.

So how do clients fair overall? The table below gives an impression of success by looking at conversion rates and using bounce rate as a measure of engagement. We have also included Google Product Search results out of interest and excluded keywords containing the clients’ brands.

As you can see, PPC advertising does have a place: engagement is higher than with other media, even if conversion rate is the lowest of the three. These PPC accounts do seem profitable, which can never be a bad thing, but they evidently need refinement.

This is perhaps the crux of the problem with PPC: although an account can be set up and set live in a day, it takes much longer to refine keyword lists, test ads and improve landing pages. In getting them up to speed, then, PPC and SEO are in many ways on a level footing and as the first section of this post postulates which is better depends on your short- and long-term goals, budget and how to please the person who pays you.

SEOmoz – SEO Software

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