SEO Book.com

Whitespark's Local Citation Finder Review

Eric Covino — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:35:31 +0000

Local citations are a critical part of a local SEO campaign. In looking at David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors you can see that a majority of the top 10 factors focus on business information structure and links. Half of the top ten factors relate to items which local citations can help with:

Physical Address in City of Search
Crawlable Address Matching Place Page Address
Volume of Traditional Structured Citations (IYPs, Data Aggregators)
Quality of Inbound Links to Website
Crawlable Phone Number Matching Place Page Phone Number

Making local citation building a part of your local SEO campaign has more benefits than simply "building citations". Think of all the ways it can help with both local search (see factors above) and web search in general:

Many of the better citation sources are actually good links (for your domain in general), from diverse domains
A good amount of folks searching locally are likely to use apps for searches in addition to Google (you want to make sure you are listed in as many places as possible)
Ensuring that your business data is structured in a similar way across the web helps with client communication and Google Places
Building citations naturally leads to other business enhancing activities you can offer your clients; things like helping them get their clients to leave positive reviews and provide helpful feedback to the company post-sale
A potential client is likely to do research on your or your client's business before they buy. Being represented, in a good way, across the web helps the company's reputation and clout with potential customers

Citation building can be tedious on multiple fronts. Finding quality citations that you do not currently have, comparing citation profiles (yours and your competitor's), and actually building the citations as well as following up on them.

Whitespark takes care of the first two, searching and comparing, quite well and provides the framework for building citations efficiently. Whitespark can also rerun your search queries to check on whether your citation has been completed or not.

Whitespark Pricing

Whitespark has 5 plans:

Free
20$ per month - 20 searches per day, 5 projects, unlimited citations per search, comparison tool, monitoring tool, CSV export options
30$ per month - 30 searches per day, 10 projects, and all the features of the 20$ plan
40$ per month - 40 searches per day, 20 projects, same features as above
100$ per month, 100 searches per day, unlimited projects, same features as above

I like how the pricing scales with projects and searches. The pricing is a great value for anyone doing local SEO at scale and there are options to support any size agency.

Setting Up a Project

When you first get inside the tool you'll be able to set up a search straight away. You'll be able to select the following:

Country (Whitespark supports over 30)
State/Province
City or Town (they pull from a database, when you start typing you'll be able to select your desired location)
Keyphrase (just the keyword)
A drop down to select your preferred search phrase
Project Assignment or Creation

Here, I've started a query for insurance quotes in Providence, Rhode Island

When you select state and city/town it sets the location inside of Google. However, sometimes you do need to add the state or state abbreviation to the query to get the best results (in my experience).

You have options on the final keyphrase. The dropdown, seen below, gives you the option to broaden the area, rearrange the order of the query, or create a custom query:

Once you click on that, you can add whatever query you want. In this case, based on my experience, I just added "RI" to the end of the query to help with hyper-local targeting.

Next up is the project creation (or addition). I haven't created a project to store this query in, but it's super easy to do from this page. Click on "Manage Projects" and you'll be able to create a new one:

You are then brought to the create project page. You can name your project and add your phone number (I added one for an agency ranking organically for the term) to check current citations.

*Important* - The formatting of the number is important. You should use (401) 438-8345 or 401-438-8345 as 4014388345 results in far fewer results than properly formatted numbers.

You should add the business name (yours or your client's) as the project name for more accurate citation mapping.

Now just go back and add that query to that particular project on the Search by Keyphrase Page and you are good to go. The tool will email you when the results are ready.

Ideally, you'll want to have a seed list of terms to start out with so you can check your results versus your competitions across your most important local terms. So for an insurance agency I might go with:

Auto Insurance Providence RI
Life Insurance Providence RI
Insurance Agent in Providence Ri

In a perfect world you'd want to do some keyword research on these terms, look at keywords your competition might be ranking for, look at the site's current analytics and PPC data (if available), and so on in order to find the best keywords to target.

Search by Phone Number

While we are waiting for those results to come back, let's talk about the search by phone number option. This is a great way of checking your own citations or that of a competitor, or even a prospective client (especially if their citations are a mess or missing).

So I added a competitor, their phone number and saved it to my project. Very simple, very straightforward. We'll let that run and circle back to it once the report is ready.

Working with the Data

It took about 3 minutes for our first query to complete :)

You can go back to your project and view all the searches assigned to it:

From here you can edit the name and phone number of the project, view the searches (I have the 1 keyword phrase search and the competitor phone number search) assigned to the project, and just view the citation opportunities for the business without the competitor information.

There are 2 components to a keywords search report. The first piece displays the top ranking (in places/maps) sites for the query. It allows you to see the total citations for each site and offers links to view specific sources for each site as well as a comparison of those sites:

You can view sources for each competitor or compare them against each other for total citation counts.

The second piece of the report are the actual citation sources. The citation sources have the following data points:

Site (the citation url)
Link to the submission page, if available
OC - number of times the citation source appeared in the SERP during the searches (higher counts are good indicators of domain authority)
Discovery - date the citation source was discovered
Site Type - the type of site (still in beta), could be social, directory, news, etc
AC - Majestic SEO's AC Rank
DA - SeoMoz's Domain Authority
Got It (checkbox) - used for when a citation is acquired
Useless - used when a citation source is not applicable or undesired

All columns are sortable, making it easy to manipulate the data however you'd like to spot the best opportunities.

When you view the report that includes the competition, you can click the plus sign to expand the URL of the citation source for more specific data:

You'll be able to see a spread of co-occurring citations on specific pages. This can be useful in spotting category listing opportunities on specific citation sources (for example, being listed on YellowPages.Com/Providence-RI/Homeowners-Insurance as well as your own listing).

If you have associated the search with a project, then for citations that already were acquired before the search was run, you'll see them as highlighted in green with the "got it" check box already checked:

When you check off one as "useless" it simply gets grayed out.

A cool feature here is that already acquired (citations found by Whitespark and citations checked off by you) carry across other searches in your project. At any point you can come back to the search and re-run it (after a citation building campaign is always a good time) to see the status of your citation profile.

Also, when you export the list it exports (2 options) the following criteria:

(Choosing Export as CSV)

Root Citation URL
SERP Appearance Count
AC Rank
Domain Authority
Submission URL (if available)
Got It and Useless check marks

If you choose "Export CSV (w/URLs) you get all of the above plus the url's of the actual citations.

Choosing the first option makes it incredible easy to hand off to a citation builder.

Darren's Pro Tips

I always like to go directly to the creator of a tool to get their thoughts and tips. Darren was gracious enough to provide his insights for us (see below):

The local citation finder has two main citation search capabilities:

Search by keyword and the tool will find all the top ranking businesses, then find their citations, and present them in a big list for you.
Search by phone number, and the tool will find the list of citations for that particular business. Use this to find your own citations, or a specific competitor's citations.

We use the data in three ways:

Use it to find places where your competitors are listed, but you're not, and then get listed in those places.
Use it as a competitive analysis tool to identify where the competition is getting citations. This extends beyond basic business directories as the tool will reveal competitor's citations from local blogs, newspapers, event listings, job sites, business partners, etc. Looking at their strategies will give you ideas for creative citation building tactics you can employ in your practice.
Use it to find citation sources focused on the city, or the industry

I think the best way to look at the tool is as competitive analysis. You run a keyword search, see who's rankings, then get a big list of all the citations they collectively have. You can click the "compare citations for this business" link to see who's listed where.

A great little hidden feature of the tool is to do a phone number search for your business, plus a keyword search, then in the Your Search Results section, check off the two searches and choose "compare" from the dropdown at the top of the table. This will show you all the places where the competition is listed and you're not.

I also like to use the tool to find hyper-local citation opportunities. Here's how:

Run a LOT of KW queries on the local citation finder in the city/niche and associate them all with a project. So, for a lawyer in chicago: chicago lawyer, lawyers, attorneys, dui lawyer, robbery lawyer, criminal lawyer, etc.
Go under “Your Projects” and ALL the citation sources from all the queries will be listed under “view sources”. Ctrl-f in your browser for “law”, “legal”, “chicago”, “illinois”, etc.
Any niche or location related terms. Copy all the domains that match the Ctrl-f searches into a spreadsheet. These are your hyper local citations.

We found that getting listed on sites that had the city or keyword in the domain provided a big boost in the local rankings. The more you can find, the better. You'll have to pick through the list to pull out actual directories, as many of the results will be businesses with the city or keyword in the domain, but it's worth it.

Thanks to Darren for the insight and for making Local SEO a bit easier :) Give Whitespark a try for your local SEO campaigns, I think you'll like it :)

Categories:

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

Aaron Wall — Mon, 21 May 2012 08:43:12 +0000

Maybe something like this...

...or this...

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

Categories:

GWT notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.seobook.com/

Aaron Wall — Wed, 09 May 2012 01:28:01 +0000

I am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line & the following message:

Hello dear managers of http://www.seobook.com/! My name is Olivia, and the issue I’m gonna to discuss is for sure not new, but really actual and complicated, otherwise your website and therefore business wouldn’t have lost their favourable positions. Yes, I want to talk about Google Panda and Penguin. These virtual beasts become more and more freakish. Don't you think it's time to pacify them? Google intends to clean its search results from poor content websites, low quality links and hype. Are you sure your website has nothing common with this stuff?
Our team has been constantly studying Google search algorithms. We have already faced the latest freaks of Google Panda 3.4 and will be happy to win back your top positions.
We will heal your website from:

poor on page optimization;
same content submission;
low quality links to your website;
absence of website moderation;
black hat SEO applied earlier.
We will make Google be proud of you with:

high quality SEO strategy;
backlinks from relevant resources;
quality SMO;
links diversity;
unique content for every submission directory;
constatnt situation analysis and reporting.
Contact us and you will get a reliable website healer, strategy planner and safe guard of your top positions.

Looking forward to your answer!

And Gmail is letting this stuff slide through the spam filters. Along with garbage like this:

Our Web Site [the url] is definitely related to yours and by placing a link from your site to a Web page of ours, you may not only bring further value to your visitors but you may improve your search engine rankings potential as well. By NOT being what Google and other search engines refer to as a "dead-end" site or a site that does not link to other industry related and content sites, your rankings have a good chance of increasing for important keyword searches. We can explain this in further detail following a response from you.

Create FUD & some huckster will sell into your messaging with inbound spamming.

If you ever wonder where the "reputation problem" of the SEO industry comes from, wonder no more.

One company in particular does a great job of riding these trends on through to their logical conclusion, then riding them a bit longer. And that company is Google.

On a positive note, it great to see Demand Media had solid growth & a stellar quarter. They will plow that capital into registering about 100 new domain extensions. ~~Nothing to worry about there. It's not like~~ they were known to redirect expired customer domain names for their link juice.

Good job Googlers!

Categories:

Ha! Bullets Can't Hurt ME

Aaron Wall — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:23:49 +0000

Negative SEO vs Sabotage

Just about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized. A person can say "not me" but how do they operate optimally in both the short term and long term if they never operate near limits or thresholds? But now that Google has begun actively penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles & tightening these thresholds, competitors have been giving one another shoves. Some of the most widely highlighted examples of crappy SEO were not attempts at SEO, but intentional competitive sabotage.

Why Many SEO Thought Leaders Remain Ignorant About SEO

Recently there have been numerous claims that negative SEO doesn't work made by people who should know better.

Many of them don't know any better though, due to a combination of being naive, trusting public relations messaging as being the truth, and a general lack of recent experience on smaller sites.

If someone only...

does consulting for large corporate clients
works in house at a big company
publishes a site about SEO and doesn't build & market sites in competitive areas

... it is easy to bleat on about how negative SEO isn't generally possible except for weak sites. Sites that (allegedly) deserve to be hit & must (obviously) lack quality to be so weak.

The Risk of Labeling "Spam"

As highlighted above, some of the most frequently & widely cited spam examples were not examples of spam, but examples of competitive sabotage. Thus anyone who recommends highlighting "spam" can potentially hose businesses that did nothing wrong.

Why Many SEO Consultants Pretend Success & Cheer Brand

Most sites focused on search typically write a syndication of Google fluff public relations and/or are doing cloaked sales pieces claiming that the death of spammers is great because they and their clients keep becoming more successful. Its all fake it until you make it / fake it until you too are driven out of the ecosystem & pretend things are always getting better even when signs point the other direction. This is done for a variety of reasons:

not wanting to lose access to Google
signaling you have experience working with big brands
wanting to signal that you are a safe play in the marketplace

Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

Marketers Sell Whatever Google Promotes

It is far easier to get paid to do nothing than it is to get paid to fight against the waves of the ocean.

So long as Google keeps feeding macro-parasites trying to kill off smaller & independent players you can expect a lot of consultants to push themselves as being a good fit for the big brands that Google is explicitly designing their algorithms around promoting. However this trend won't last forever. Many of those bigger sites are becoming ad networks & at some point Google will see that competitive threat for what it is. They will then decide "the user" would like a bit more diversity in the results & to see more smaller sites rank.

Most Businesses Must be Small

Much like wealth, business distributions follow power laws & most businesses are small in scale. Sure "build brand" is a nice cure all, but building a strong brand requires scale. Not all businesses have the margins required to build brands. And businesses take time to grow.

Quality vs Scale

Scale & quality are not the same thing. Some businesses are intentionally kept small because their owners feel scale requires compromising on quality. Remember the Olive Garden review that went viral, or what the biggest banks did to the global economy a few years ago?

Most Big Companies Start Off Small

Since going public in 1987, Fastenal has been the fastest growing public company. The company was started by a guy who was sorting bolts and nuts in his basement. Now that they are worth $13 billion they are virtually untouchable, but if 30 years ago online was a big sales channel & someone negative SEOed him his business could have been toast.

Big businesses come from small businesses, as does most innovation. However, if the underlying market is absurdly unstable that retards investment in growth and innovation in companies like Fastenal:

The Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the "grand opening" weekend, and the first month's sales totaled $157.

One of the biggest failures of modern societies is the self-serving myth of too big to fail.

If SEOs believe that size of a business is the primary legitimate proxy for quality, they should either hire thousands of employees or go get a job at Wal-Mart.

Categories:

pay per click search engines

Google AdWords Ads Add Album Cover & Song Preview

Aaron Wall — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:49:27 +0000

Before I get any drops of jupiter hate on the following...I was typing in training.seobook.com & somehow accidentally hit enter after typing train & when the URL completion didn't work I got the following SERP.

If you click the feature video link it does a YouTube video overlay. The other links lead into the relevant iTunes webpage.

Such media extensions have been in place for movies for quite a while now, but this is the first time I have seen them on music-related search results. In time one could expect similar ad expansions to hit other media areas like books, games, and maybe even other vertical search features. Google could possibly roll it out globally on brand searches as well at some point, allowing companies to offer intro videos (or even reviews of new product lines) directly in the search results.

Categories:

The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages

Aaron Wall — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:21:06 +0000

Huge Update

Google recently launched their ~~webspam~~ Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the "commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money" category.

Based on the number of complaints online about it (there is even a petition!) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update.

Spam vs OOP

Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer.

A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.

Why the quick turn around on the naming?

If you smoke a bunch of webmasters & then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and look for the edge cases that make you look bad & promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for make money online.

As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D

Another site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that users can't tell them apart & force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn't get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits.

Google also put out a form to collect feedback about the update. They only ever do that if they know they went too far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:

So Worried About Manipulation That They Manipulate Themselves

When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia & in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards & in the first page of search results was:

a big ecommerce site where the review on that product stated that the retail described the quantity as being 10x what you actually get (the same site had other better pages)
a user-driven aggregator site with a thin affiliate post made years ago & attributed to a site that no longer exists
a Facebook note that was auto-generated from a feed
an old blogspot splog
a broader tag page for a social site
a Yahoo! Shopping page that was completely empty

That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google's cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name.

The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.

Part of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms).

SEO-based Business Models

Now more than ever SEO requires threading the needle: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but not so aggressive that you get clipped for it (and hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics & analytics back into efforts) & a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens & throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won't on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff.

And your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings & then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn't consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?

The Unknowable Future

As search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. Many trends can be predicted, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well.

This year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda & now Penguin) & the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a candle wick adjuster was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:

Blekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run for only a few million a year. As computers get cheaper & Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does & Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file & how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake.

At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:

I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. “More than 90 percent.”

There will be many more casualties in that war.

Categories:

GoogleBowling, Negative SEO & Outing

Aaron Wall — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:46:54 +0000

Excessive Complexity & Unintended Consequences

Sergey Brin recently said:

You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.

He was talking about Facebook, but those words are far more applicable to Google.

A Social Experiment

In the movie Dark Knight the Joker ran a social experiment where he offered 2 boats full of people the opportunity to save their own lives by blowing up the other boat. The boat full of "criminals" threw the button overboard & the other boat also decided not to push the button.

Of course taking someone's life is more extreme than taking their livelihood, but if you do the latter it might create stress and/or other issues which in effect lead to the former. Some people who see their income disappear might have a heart attack, others might have marriages that soon falls apart, leading into a spiral of depression and substance abuse & eventually suicide. Others still might have employees that get laid off & end up heading down some of the same scary paths - through no fault of their own.

Negative SEO Goes Mainstream

Anyone who outs or link bombs smaller businesses (small enough that Google punishing them destroys their livelihood rather than just giving them a bad quarter) is a _______. Anyone who advocates outing or link bombing such businesses is an even larger _______.

Why?

With all of Google's warning messages about abnormal links they have built the negative SEO industry in a big way. In some instances those who are not good enough to compete try to harm competitors. I received emails & support tickets like the following one for years and years...

...but the rate of demand increase for such "services" has been sharp this year. Every additional warning message from Google creates additional incremental demand.

And this is where outing a competitor makes one a total and complete _______ of a human being.

A Recent (& Very Public) Example of Negative SEO

Dan Thies mentioned that it was "about time" that Google started hitting some of the splog link networks.

Anyone who knows the tiniest bit about the social sciences could predict what came next.

In response to his Tweet, someone signed his site up for some splog links & Scrapebox action. Now he is getting warnings about his unnatural link profile. Dan didn't intentionally violate Google's guidelines, but he became a convenient target:

15th March - Dan Thies posts smug tweets to Matt Cutts and pisses off the entire internet.
18th March - seofaststart.com - blog posts started - anchor text "seo" "seo service" and "seo book"
22th March - seofaststart.com - 1 million scrapebox blast started - 100% anchor text "Dan Thies"
26th March - Dan Thies posts in Twitter that he has received an unnatural links message.

Since then Dan has installed a new template & his rankings tanked. Is it the template or the spam links? Probably the spam links, given how many other sites have got hit for using too much focused anchor text.

Will the site stay tanked? If so, now Google's approach to anchor text & link spikes allows independent websites to get torched in a few weeks for a few Dollars.
Or will the site come back stronger than ever with the help of the spam links? If it does, then how long is it before people start accidentally spam blasting their own websites & posting a public case study about burning a competitor on a forum, then citing that forum thread in their reconsideration request?
If the site quickly comes back, will that be due to a manual intervention by a search engineer, or from an algorithm more advanced than some people are giving it credit for being?

When asking such questions one quickly arrives at another set of questions. Is it the web that is broken? Or is it Google's editorial approach that is broken? If the observer breaks the system they observe, then the observer is the problem.

The Bigger Issue

The bigger issue isn't the short term trends for SEO related keywords or Dan's site (he will be fine & rankings are not that important for sites about SEO), but the big issue is that if this can happen to a decade old website then this can happen to literally anybody.

Piss off a ...

competitor
SEO
web designer
web developer
business partner
blogger
blog reader
former customer
freetard
ex-friend
bitter family member
insert any classification or category you like
etc.

... and risk getting torched.

When you out someone for shady links, you can't be certain they were responsible for it. They could have had a falling out with a consultant or business partner or another competitor who wanted to hose them. Or their SEO or webmaster could have been non-transparent with them.

Then you out them & they might be toast.

White Hat, Black Hat & ________ Hat SEO

Any of the ________ who promote competitor smoking or competitor outing as somehow being "ethical" or "white hat" never bother to explain what happens to YOU when someone else does that to you.

Sketchy marketers can make just about anything look good at first glance. No matter how shiny the package in concept, it is hard to appreciate the pain until you are the one undergoing it.

Building things up is typically far more profitable than tearing things down & if SEOs go after each other then the only winner is Google. Literally every other participant in the ecosystem has higher risk, higher costs & is taxed by the additional uncertainty. Sure some of the conscripts might get a bit of revenues and some of the "white hat" hacks might gain incremental short term exposure, but as the marrow is scraped out of the bone, they too will fall hard.

Google is betting that the SEO industry is full of ________. If our trade is to worth being in, I hope Google is wrong! If not, you will soon see most of the quality professionals in our trade go underground, while only the hacks who misinform people & are an unofficial extension of Google's public relations team remain publicly visible.

That might be Google's goal.

Will they be successful at it?

That depends entirely on how intelligent members of the SEO industry are.

Categories:

Consumer Ad Awareness in Search Results

Aaron Wall — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:08:37 +0000

For the following study, we asked "Does this search result have ads on it? " to 1,000 searchers, per search results. Due to these surveys requiring a smaller image (to fit the ad unit size) we chose search results that generally had more ads on them (typically 3 or 4) so that the background had a significant portion of real estate devoted to ads, in spite of its small size. The one exception here was DuckDuckGo, as it only displays one ad at most even on highly commercial keywords like credit cards.

Other than resizing the search result to fit, the only modifications we generally made were removing the graphic picture from the Wikipedia page near the top of the DuckDuckGo SERP (since a prior study showed that users presumed there was a correlation between graphics and the perception of ads) and that in most cases we removed the right sidebar. We did include the sidebar ads on 3 different Bing, Google, & Yahoo! search results so that we could compare the impact of sidebar ads vs not having a sidebar.

Executive Summary

The 3 big takeaways are:

For most search engines, people are generally unaware of ads vs organic results if there are no ads in the right column ... most of these yes/no questions came down to about a 50/50 vote, even though all of them had ads on them. It is every bit as true today as it was in 2003.
If there is a right column, the percent of people who voted that there are ads on the page jumps significantly. Thus it is pretty safe to say that people think ads are in the right column & that the right column is ads.
- In part perhaps due to placement and a lack of user knowledge between ads vs content, paid ads do significantly cannibalize organic traffic.
- SERP heat maps have shown heavy focus on the left column. This is perhaps why Google feels comfortable putting brand oriented Google+ promotions in the right column, while they put further ads at the bottom of the organic search results - people tend to view the left rail as organic search results and the right rail as ads.
- In the past Google also stated that graphic product ads in the right column got about double the CTR of text ads in the same location, thus if Google ever offers search-branding graphical campaigns I would expect those to primarily appear in the right column.
Interestingly, among major search engines, Yahoo! (without sidebar) got more "yes, it has ads" votes than other search engines. In fact, Yahoo! without sidebar ads scored within 1% of Bing with sidebar ads.
- Years ago they decided to get out of search in part because they under-monetized competitors (in part due to paying arbitrages to destroy their click value by pumping their network full of fraudulent clicks). Advertisers didn't even have a mechanism to opt out of such scammy ad syndication until AFTER Yahoo! signed the search deal with Bing.
- Yahoo! still under-monetizes search (& complains about it publicly, blaming Bing) in part because Bing cut out a lot of the arbitrage, in part due to ad matching issues on longtail queries, and in part because Yahoo!'s ad background color is more noticeable to users, where other portals and search companies like Google & Bing blend it in so well that many users simply can not see it, particularly on laptops and older computers. Ask is the most aggressive ad blender of all search engines. If you click through to their results from a Google ad it plants a cookie to remove the background color on the Ask search result ads on all subsequent searches until you clear that cookie.

Combined Survey Results

For the question Does this search results have ads on it?

search engine	yes	no
AOL	53.1% (+3.9 / -3.9)	46.9% (+3.9 / -3.9)
Ask	52.0% (+4.0 / -4.1)	48.0% (+4.1 / -4.0)
Ask Arbitrage	51.6% (+3.9 / -3.9)	48.4% (+3.9 / -3.9)
Bing	50.2% (+3.8 / -3.8)	49.8% (+3.8 / -3.8)
Bing w Sidebar	57.7% (+3.7 / -3.8)	42.3% (+3.8 / -3.7)
Dogpile	44.7% (+4.1 / -4.0)	55.3% (+4.0 / -4.1)
Duck Duck Go	52.3% (+3.9 / -3.9)	47.7% (+3.9 / -3.9)
Google	54.5% (+4.0 / -4.0)	45.5% (+4.0 / -4.0)
Google w Sidebar	62.9% (+3.6 / -3.8)	37.1% (+3.8 / -3.6)
Yahoo!	56.8% (+3.9 / -4.0)	43.2% (+4.0 / -3.9)
Yahoo! w Sidebar	59.8% (+3.9 / -4.1)	40.2% (+4.1 / -3.9)

User Voting Images

Here are the images users saw when they voted:

AOL SERP

Ask SERP

Ask Arbitrage SERP

Bing SERP

Bing With Sidebar SERP

Dogpile SERP

DuckDuckGo SERP

Google SERP

Google With Sidebar SERP

Yahoo! SERP

Yahoo! With Sidebar SERP

Which SERP Has an Ad? (Maps vs AdWords Ads)

Prior to doing the above study, we asked users to please click on the search result which has an ad in it, listing search results side by side. Any bias presented in this (outside of both having smaller than actual sizes) impacts both images. At first we did a regular Google SERP where we included the branding & then we followed up with one that is more zoomed in on the actual search results but does not include branding. On the one that was less zoomed in people thought the map was an ad more often, but upon further zooming they thought it was roughly 50/50.

SERP	All (1172)
Left	53.7% (+3.3 / -3.4)
Right	46.3% (+3.4 / -3.3)

SERP	All (1198)
Left	49.6% (+3.4 / -3.4)
Right	50.4% (+3.4 / -3.4)

Comparing Google+ to Ads

Does this search result have ads on it?

layout	yes	no
Google+ without ads	56.3% (+3.1 / -3.1)	43.7% (+3.1 / -3.1)
Google+ with ads	56.9% (+3.2 / -3.2)	43.1% (+3.2 / -3.2)
large top ads w/o Google+	53.6% (+3.2 / -3.2)	46.4% (+3.2 / -3.2)

Searchers tend to think that Google+ integration in the right rail is an ad unit. More people voted that Google+ without ads had ads in the search results than a SERP with 4 AdWords ad units and no Google+ integration.

Search Engine Ad Background Color

After seeing that users generally guessed no better than a coin toss at best in most cases, we decided to ask What background color do Google search results use to denote top left search advertisements? The same question was asked of Yahoo! & Bing search results.

Google

Google	All (1147)
none, they are white	49.7% (+3.2 / -3.2)
blue	25.5% (+3.0 / -2.8)
yellow	10.6% (+2.3 / -2.0)
pink	7.0% (+2.1 / -1.6)
purple	7.2% (+2.2 / -1.7)

Yahoo!

Yahoo!	All (1080)
none, they are white	44.6% (+3.4 / -3.4)
blue	20.9% (+3.0 / -2.7)
yellow	15.6% (+2.7 / -2.4)
magenta	11.2% (+2.5 / -2.1)
orange	7.7% (+2.3 / -1.8)

Bing

Bing	All (1063)
none, they are white	49.0% (+3.6 / -3.6)
blue	23.5% (+3.2 / -3.0)
yellow	13.0% (+2.8 / -2.4)
purple	7.5% (+2.4 / -1.9)
pink	7.1% (+2.4 / -1.8)

Summary

Bing scored highest, however blue also scored as the 2nd highest color for all 3 search engines. Nearly half of searchers believe that top ads have a white background, which highlights a general widespread lack of awareness of search ads.

Search Engine	% Who Answered Correctly
Bing (blue)	23.5%
Yahoo! (magenta)	11.2%
Google (yellow)	10.6%

Ad Location on the SERP

Given how little awareness users have of ad background color, I decided to ask: Where might ads appear on search results at top search engines like Bing & Google?

Vote	All (1144)
right column	34.2% (+3.4 / -3.3)
all 3 locations	29.6% (+3.2 / -3.0)
search results do not carry ads	19.4% (+3.0 / -2.7)
top of the left column	9.2% (+2.5 / -2.0)
bottom of the left column	7.6% (+2.4 / -1.9)

Less than 3 in 10 answered the question correctly & nearly 20% of people do not think search results carry any ads, which explains how an algorithmic penalty can create a bad quarter, why Google was sued in Australia for misleading ads & why the Rosetta Stone vs Google case was overturned. Next time you hear a search engineer talk about clearly labeling paid links, ask them why they do such a poor job of it themselves!

User Trust in Ad Versus Organic Results

Ever since search engines have weeded out some of the more exploitative reverse billing fraud ads, trust in online ads has been growing. Based on the above, we wanted to see how users perceive ads vs organic search results, so I asked: Search engines include both algorithmic search results and ads in them. Which do you trust more?

Answer	All (1168)
I trust both equally	45.8% (+3.3 / -3.2)
Algorithmic search results	40.9% (+3.2 / -3.1)
Ads that appear in search results	13.3% (+2.5 / -2.2)

The above result surprised me given how people disliked money influencing search results. It is a strong compliment to the ads that only 40% of people trust the editorial more than the ads. However this number might be thrown off by the fact that many people are unaware of where the ads actually appear in the search results & what results are ads. (As noted above, most people voted that they thought that either search ads were only in the right column or that there weren't ads in the SERPs.)

Making Up for the Small Image Problem

One of the bigger issues with Google's current survey solution is that you are limited to rather small sized images. Such limitations do not harm asking a question like "what color does Google use for x" but they do make the search result a bit harder to see. To compensate for that problem we ran a separate survey on AYTM, where users were able to view a search result in full screen mode for 10 seconds & then they were asked 3 questions.

The purpose of the first question was to put a few seconds in between them seeing the image and them answering the second question. One other improvement that was made here (in addition to allowing users to see a larger sized search result image) was that we added an "I am not sure" answer to the questions. Below are the responses in table + graphic form, followed by the AYTM widget.

Where May Ads Appear on Google's Search Results Page?

Location	Vote
in the right column	28.70%
top of the left column	6.20%
bottom of the left column	1.90%
middle of the left column	2.30%
search results do not have ads in them	6.80%
I am not sure	18.90%
right column & the top + bottom of the left column	35.20%

Did the Viewed Search Result Have Any Ads On It?

Answer	Vote
I'm not sure	41.00%
no	12.40%
yes	46.60%

What Background Color Does Google Use to Denote Ads At the Top Left of Their Search Results?

Answer	Vote
none, they are white	28.10%
blue	20.80%
purple	1%
I'm not sure	22.60%
pink	6.80%
yellow	20.70%

Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it!

Users confusing the yellow background as white shortly after seeing it is anything but an accident:

In a RGB color space, hex #fef7e6 is composed of 99.6% red, 96.9% green and 90.2% blue. Whereas in a CMYK color space, it is composed of 0% cyan, 2.8% magenta, 9.4% yellow and 0.4% black. It has a hue angle of 42.5 degrees, a saturation of 92.3% and a lightness of 94.9%. #fef7e6 color hex could be obtained by blending #ffffff with #fdefcd. .

If you have an older monitor or a laptop which you are viewing at an angle these colors are nearly impossible to see.

Embed The AYTM Graph in Your Website

Here is the AYTM widget of the above 1,000 person survey, which you can embed in your website.

Ask Your Target Market via SEO Book

Embed Code:

Categories:

Which Source Do You Trust Most?

Aaron Wall — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:46:05 +0000

Which do you trust most as a source of advice on important issues?

People tend to trust friends & family and the mainstream media far more than they trust websites & search engines.

Vote	All (1204)
friends & family	37.1% (+3.0 / -2.9)
newspapers	32.5% (+3.0 / -2.8)
search engines	19.3% (+2.6 / -2.4)
social media websites	6.7% (+2.0 / -1.6)
weblogs	4.4% (+1.9 / -1.3)

Relative to one another, men tend to trust newspapers, search engines & weblogs more; whereas women tend to trust friends & family and social media websites more.

Vote	Men (643)	Women (561)
friends & family	34.7% (+4.0 / -3.8)	39.4% (+4.6 / -4.4)
newspapers	34.1% (+4.0 / -3.8)	31.0% (+4.4 / -4.1)
search engines	20.1% (+3.5 / -3.1)	18.6% (+3.9 / -3.4)
social media websites	5.7% (+2.5 / -1.8)	7.6% (+3.3 / -2.3)
weblogs	5.5% (+2.5 / -1.8)	3.4% (+3.3 / -1.7)

The youngest age group tends to trust social media a bit more & newspapers a bit less than other age groups do. Outside of that, it is somewhat hard to see other age-based patterns.

Vote	18-24 year-olds (278)	25-34 year-olds (307)	35-44 year-olds (158)	45-54 year-olds (191)	55-64 year-olds (166)	65+ year-olds (104)
friends & family	39.8% (+5.8 / -5.5)	34.2% (+5.8 / -5.4)	38.9% (+7.8 / -7.2)	34.0% (+6.9 / -6.3)	36.3% (+7.6 / -6.9)	37.2% (+9.8 / -8.8)
newspapers	26.2% (+5.5 / -4.8)	35.8% (+5.9 / -5.5)	33.9% (+7.7 / -6.9)	31.7% (+6.8 / -6.1)	33.1% (+7.6 / -6.8)	34.6% (+10.0 / -8.8)
search engines	19.7% (+5.1 / -4.2)	16.8% (+4.9 / -4.0)	17.7% (+6.7 / -5.2)	23.5% (+6.5 / -5.5)	21.8% (+7.1 / -5.7)	17.7% (+8.5 / -6.2)
social media websites	11.0% (+4.2 / -3.1)	6.8% (+3.6 / -2.4)	3.6% (+5.1 / -2.1)	7.4% (+4.6 / -2.9)	4.3% (+4.5 / -2.3)	6.6% (+8.0 / -3.8)
weblogs	3.3% (+2.8 / -1.5)	6.4% (+3.5 / -2.3)	6.0% (+5.1 / -2.9)	3.4% (+4.1 / -1.9)	4.4% (+5.3 / -2.5)	3.9% (+7.4 / -2.6)

Here is data by geographic region.

Vote	The US Midwest (252)	The US Northeast (311)	The US South (372)	The US West (269)
friends & family	40.2% (+6.9 / -6.6)	39.0% (+6.2 / -5.9)	34.9% (+5.3 / -5.0)	36.1% (+6.2 / -5.8)
newspapers	30.4% (+6.8 / -6.1)	36.0% (+6.1 / -5.7)	33.7% (+5.2 / -4.9)	29.9% (+6.1 / -5.5)
search engines	21.5% (+6.4 / -5.3)	15.7% (+5.2 / -4.1)	18.7% (+4.6 / -3.9)	21.2% (+5.5 / -4.6)
social media websites	6.7% (+5.1 / -3.0)	5.2% (+4.3 / -2.4)	6.6% (+3.8 / -2.5)	7.9% (+4.5 / -3.0)
weblogs	1.3% (+9.5 / -1.1)	4.1% (+4.3 / -2.1)	6.2% (+3.6 / -2.3)	4.8% (+4.3 / -2.3)

Rural people tend to trust friends & family more, while urban people tend to trust newspapers more.

Vote	Urban areas (602)	Rural areas (91)	Suburban areas (480)
friends & family	30.9% (+4.4 / -4.0)	45.8% (+11.3 / -10.9)	38.7% (+4.9 / -4.7)
newspapers	38.5% (+4.7 / -4.5)	25.4% (+11.3 / -8.7)	30.0% (+4.5 / -4.2)
search engines	18.4% (+4.2 / -3.6)	20.2% (+10.4 / -7.5)	20.2% (+4.3 / -3.7)
social media websites	8.5% (+4.1 / -2.8)	2.3% (+14.6 / -2.1)	6.2% (+4.3 / -2.6)
weblogs	3.7% (+4.2 / -2.0)	6.3% (+11.2 / -4.2)	4.8% (+4.3 / -2.3)

The richer you are, the less you generally trust friends & family. The rich also trust newspapers & blogs more (though the blog data point had a small sample size).

Vote	People earning $0-24K (138)	People earning $25-49K (655)	People earning $50-74K (307)	People earning $75-99K (81)	People earning $100-149K (25)
friends & family	40.6% (+8.7 / -8.2)	38.2% (+4.1 / -4.0)	33.9% (+6.3 / -5.8)	36.6% (+11.1 / -9.8)	14.4% (+19.1 / -9.1)
newspapers	25.6% (+9.1 / -7.4)	30.6% (+4.0 / -3.7)	37.0% (+6.4 / -6.0)	42.2% (+10.6 / -10.0)	42.2% (+20.3 / -18.0)
search engines	22.8% (+9.1 / -7.1)	20.6% (+3.7 / -3.3)	17.4% (+5.7 / -4.5)	13.4% (+10.9 / -6.4)	22.0% (+21.5 / -12.7)
social media websites	7.2% (+9.2 / -4.2)	7.0% (+3.2 / -2.3)	5.4% (+5.6 / -2.8)	5.2% (+13.2 / -3.9)	5.8% (+23.7 / -4.9)
weblogs	3.8% (+11.0 / -2.9)	3.6% (+3.5 / -1.8)	6.3% (+5.4 / -3.0)	2.6% (+18.2 / -2.3)	15.6% (+21.7 / -10.2)

Categories:

How Did You Choose Your Primary Search Engine?

Aaron Wall — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:24:58 +0000

When you search, how did you pick your primary search engine?

Most people use the search engine which they believe has the best relevancy, whatever their computer came with, or what a friend recommended.

Vote	All (1190)
it has superior relevancy	30.4% (+3.0 / -2.9)
the computer had a default selected	26.8% (+2.9 / -2.7)
a friend told me about it	23.1% (+2.9 / -2.7)
I saw it on a TV ad	10.3% (+2.3 / -1.9)
it came bundled with software	9.5% (+2.3 / -1.9)

Men are more inclined to believe in superior relevancy, whereas women are more likely to use the default or what a friend recommends

Vote	Men (621)	Women (569)
it has superior relevancy	35.4% (+4.2 / -3.9)	25.5% (+4.4 / -4.0)
the computer had a default selected	21.8% (+3.7 / -3.3)	31.5% (+4.6 / -4.3)
a friend told me about it	21.3% (+3.7 / -3.3)	24.8% (+4.5 / -4.0)
I saw it on a TV ad	11.9% (+3.1 / -2.5)	8.8% (+3.5 / -2.6)
it came bundled with software	9.7% (+2.9 / -2.3)	9.3% (+3.8 / -2.8)

The youngest age group is easiest to influence with advertising or buying the default placement. 25 to 34 is more concerned about relevancy & older people are more likely to have it bundled with software than younger people are.

Vote	18-24 year-olds (289)	25-34 year-olds (309)	35-44 year-olds (151)	45-54 year-olds (186)	55-64 year-olds (167)	65+ year-olds (88)
it has superior relevancy	30.1% (+5.5 / -5.0)	36.9% (+5.9 / -5.5)	32.4% (+7.8 / -6.9)	28.2% (+7.0 / -6.1)	27.6% (+7.7 / -6.6)	28.0% (+10.8 / -8.7)
the computer had a default selected	29.0% (+5.5 / -4.9)	23.8% (+5.4 / -4.7)	27.6% (+7.6 / -6.5)	24.2% (+6.8 / -5.7)	26.0% (+7.6 / -6.4)	26.1% (+11.3 / -8.8)
a friend told me about it	20.7% (+5.0 / -4.3)	21.1% (+5.5 / -4.6)	23.8% (+7.7 / -6.3)	24.8% (+7.0 / -5.9)	25.0% (+7.4 / -6.2)	24.6% (+11.4 / -8.7)
I saw it on a TV ad	14.2% (+4.5 / -3.6)	10.8% (+4.2 / -3.1)	10.5% (+6.0 / -4.0)	12.8% (+5.7 / -4.1)	8.3% (+5.5 / -3.4)	3.1% (+10.7 / -2.5)
it came bundled with software	6.0% (+3.4 / -2.2)	7.5% (+3.9 / -2.6)	5.8% (+5.4 / -2.9)	10.0% (+5.3 / -3.6)	13.1% (+5.8 / -4.2)	18.2% (+10.6 / -7.3)

People out west tend to be more concerned with / driven by perceived relevancy. People in the midwest rely more on word of mouth. People in the south and north east are more likely to use the default.

Vote	The US Midwest (236)	The US Northeast (317)	The US South (369)	The US West (268)
it has superior relevancy	24.4% (+6.8 / -5.7)	29.8% (+5.9 / -5.3)	29.6% (+5.3 / -4.8)	37.2% (+6.6 / -6.2)
the computer had a default selected	27.3% (+6.7 / -5.8)	29.3% (+6.0 / -5.3)	29.8% (+5.5 / -5.0)	19.8% (+5.6 / -4.7)
a friend told me about it	25.6% (+6.9 / -5.9)	18.4% (+5.4 / -4.4)	22.6% (+5.3 / -4.5)	25.0% (+6.1 / -5.3)
I saw it on a TV ad	11.5% (+5.8 / -4.0)	12.6% (+4.6 / -3.5)	9.8% (+4.4 / -3.1)	8.2% (+4.6 / -3.0)
it came bundled with software	11.2% (+6.1 / -4.1)	9.9% (+4.5 / -3.2)	8.1% (+4.3 / -2.9)	9.7% (+5.1 / -3.5)

Here is data by population density.

Vote	Urban areas (612)	Rural areas (107)	Suburban areas (445)
it has superior relevancy	29.9% (+4.2 / -3.9)	27.8% (+9.9 / -8.1)	30.4% (+5.3 / -4.8)
the computer had a default selected	27.2% (+4.4 / -4.0)	27.7% (+9.5 / -7.9)	26.5% (+5.1 / -4.5)
a friend told me about it	23.1% (+4.3 / -3.8)	25.1% (+9.6 / -7.6)	23.2% (+4.8 / -4.2)
I saw it on a TV ad	10.4% (+3.8 / -2.9)	8.7% (+8.6 / -4.5)	10.5% (+4.6 / -3.3)
it came bundled with software	9.4% (+4.0 / -2.9)	10.6% (+8.8 / -5.1)	9.3% (+4.5 / -3.1)

There doesn't appear to be any obvious correlations with age.

Vote	People earning $0-24K (133)	People earning $25-49K (658)	People earning $50-74K (315)	People earning $75-99K (68)	People earning $100-149K (18)
it has superior relevancy	32.8% (+9.1 / -7.9)	29.8% (+4.2 / -3.9)	30.9% (+6.5 / -5.8)	27.7% (+11.9 / -9.4)	32.6% (+21.2 / -15.9)
the computer had a default selected	21.7% (+8.6 / -6.7)	29.0% (+4.3 / -4.0)	22.1% (+6.0 / -5.0)	30.7% (+12.4 / -10.1)	20.9% (+22.5 / -12.6)
a friend told me about it	23.5% (+9.0 / -7.1)	24.5% (+4.1 / -3.7)	20.1% (+6.0 / -4.9)	17.2% (+12.0 / -7.7)	13.9% (+23.4 / -9.7)
I saw it on a TV ad	11.8% (+7.3 / -4.7)	8.4% (+3.5 / -2.5)	15.6% (+6.0 / -4.5)	4.2% (+13.7 / -3.3)	25.6% (+22.1 / -14.1)
it came bundled with software	10.2% (+7.7 / -4.6)	8.3% (+3.3 / -2.4)	11.4% (+5.5 / -3.9)	20.2% (+12.2 / -8.4)	7.0% (+27.3 / -5.9)

Categories:

How Many Search Engines?

Aaron Wall — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:54:38 +0000

How many search engines do you typically use in a given month?

Most people only use 1 or 2 search engines in any given month.

Vote	All (1223)
1	48.9% (+3.1 / -3.1)
2	26.2% (+2.9 / -2.7)
3	9.1% (+2.2 / -1.8)
4	4.7% (+2.0 / -1.4)
5 or more	11.1% (+2.3 / -2.0)

There isn't much difference between men & women on this front.

Vote	Men (669)	Women (554)
1	49.4% (+4.0 / -4.0)	48.4% (+4.8 / -4.8)
2	25.5% (+3.6 / -3.3)	26.9% (+4.6 / -4.1)
5 or more	10.6% (+2.9 / -2.3)	11.7% (+3.8 / -3.0)
3	9.7% (+2.8 / -2.2)	8.5% (+3.6 / -2.6)
4	4.8% (+2.5 / -1.7)	4.5% (+3.6 / -2.0)

Surprisingly, older people are more likely to use a variety of search services while younger people are more likely to stick with their one favorite. I would have guessed that to be the other way around.

Vote	18-24 year-olds (295)	25-34 year-olds (300)	35-44 year-olds (165)	45-54 year-olds (204)	55-64 year-olds (182)	65+ year-olds (77)
1	54.9% (+5.5 / -5.7)	57.7% (+5.7 / -6.0)	45.6% (+7.7 / -7.5)	50.4% (+6.9 / -6.9)	48.1% (+7.3 / -7.3)	35.8% (+11.5 / -10.1)
2	23.0% (+5.1 / -4.4)	23.0% (+5.4 / -4.6)	23.1% (+7.1 / -5.8)	22.5% (+6.3 / -5.3)	29.2% (+7.1 / -6.2)	36.8% (+11.3 / -10.1)
3	5.8% (+3.3 / -2.1)	5.5% (+3.4 / -2.2)	13.7% (+6.0 / -4.4)	10.5% (+5.0 / -3.5)	11.5% (+5.5 / -3.9)	7.0% (+8.0 / -3.9)
4	6.8% (+3.5 / -2.4)	4.7% (+3.3 / -2.0)	4.2% (+4.7 / -2.3)	4.9% (+4.3 / -2.3)	2.1% (+3.8 / -1.4)	5.4% (+9.1 / -3.5)
5 or more	9.6% (+3.9 / -2.8)	9.1% (+3.9 / -2.8)	13.4% (+6.2 / -4.4)	11.7% (+5.3 / -3.8)	9.0% (+5.2 / -3.4)	15.0% (+9.7 / -6.3)

Here is the geographic breakdown.

Vote	The US Midwest (260)	The US Northeast (320)	The US South (374)	The US West (269)
1	53.6% (+6.5 / -6.6)	45.1% (+6.1 / -6.0)	47.0% (+5.8 / -5.7)	50.4% (+6.4 / -6.4)
2	22.7% (+6.2 / -5.2)	27.1% (+5.7 / -5.1)	26.8% (+5.5 / -4.8)	27.9% (+6.1 / -5.4)
3	8.7% (+4.9 / -3.2)	11.4% (+4.8 / -3.5)	8.6% (+4.4 / -3.0)	8.2% (+4.8 / -3.1)
4	3.5% (+5.2 / -2.1)	5.3% (+4.3 / -2.4)	5.7% (+4.1 / -2.5)	3.8% (+5.4 / -2.3)
5 or more	11.5% (+5.5 / -3.9)	11.1% (+4.7 / -3.5)	11.9% (+4.5 / -3.4)	9.7% (+5.2 / -3.5)

Here are stats by population density.

Vote	Urban areas (608)	Rural areas (107)	Suburban areas (499)
1	48.1% (+4.5 / -4.5)	50.2% (+9.8 / -9.8)	47.2% (+4.7 / -4.7)
2	26.4% (+4.1 / -3.8)	21.2% (+10.6 / -7.8)	27.8% (+4.5 / -4.1)
3	9.1% (+3.6 / -2.7)	14.2% (+10.7 / -6.6)	9.6% (+4.0 / -2.9)
4	5.3% (+4.0 / -2.3)	6.5% (+12.0 / -4.4)	3.8% (+4.4 / -2.1)
5 or more	11.0% (+3.8 / -2.9)	7.9% (+11.4 / -4.9)	11.6% (+4.2 / -3.2)

Here is data by income groups. No obvious pattern here either.

Vote	People earning $0-24K (132)	People earning $25-49K (673)	People earning $50-74K (326)	People earning $75-99K (70)	People earning $100-149K (27)
1	45.0% (+8.9 / -8.6)	47.7% (+4.2 / -4.2)	50.2% (+6.1 / -6.1)	42.1% (+12.3 / -11.4)	48.3% (+17.9 / -17.5)
2	29.1% (+9.0 / -7.6)	26.3% (+3.8 / -3.5)	23.1% (+6.2 / -5.3)	35.2% (+12.2 / -10.5)	37.4% (+18.8 / -15.6)
3	8.7% (+9.1 / -4.7)	8.6% (+3.2 / -2.4)	11.6% (+5.8 / -4.0)	9.7% (+11.7 / -5.6)	0.0% (+12.5 / -0.0)
4	6.1% (+9.5 / -3.9)	5.2% (+3.2 / -2.0)	4.3% (+6.3 / -2.6)	2.6% (+17.0 / -2.3)	3.4% (+22.2 / -3.0)
5 or more	11.0% (+8.9 / -5.2)	12.1% (+3.3 / -2.7)	10.9% (+5.8 / -3.9)	10.4% (+11.9 / -5.9)	10.9% (+16.7 / -7.1)

Categories:

Search Again or Click On the Second Page of Search Results?

Aaron Wall — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:41:00 +0000

If you use a search engine but don't find what you are looking for, which are you more likely to do?

People are more likely to search again with a new keyword than they are to click onto the second page of search results.

Vote	All (1189)
search again with a different word	55.7% (+3.2 / -3.3)
go to the second page of the results	44.3% (+3.3 / -3.2)

The split is fairly consistent among men and women.

Vote	Men (651)	Women (538)
search again with a different word	55.4% (+4.0 / -4.1)	56.1% (+5.0 / -5.1)
go to the second page of the results	44.6% (+4.1 / -4.0)	43.9% (+5.1 / -5.0)

There isn't an obvious pattern among age either.

Vote	18-24 year-olds (284)	25-34 year-olds (309)	35-44 year-olds (144)	45-54 year-olds (195)	55-64 year-olds (150)	65+ year-olds (107)
search again with a different word	52.1% (+5.7 / -5.8)	56.7% (+5.7 / -5.9)	51.7% (+8.0 / -8.1)	57.5% (+6.7 / -7.0)	61.4% (+7.7 / -8.4)	54.2% (+9.4 / -9.8)
go to the second page of the results	47.9% (+5.8 / -5.7)	43.3% (+5.9 / -5.7)	48.3% (+8.1 / -8.0)	42.5% (+7.0 / -6.7)	38.6% (+8.4 / -7.7)	45.8% (+9.8 / -9.4)

People in the west & midwest are more likely to change keywords, whereas people in the north east & south are roughly equally likely to change keywords or go to page 2 of the search results.

Vote	The US Midwest (244)	The US Northeast (320)	The US South (363)	The US West (262)
search again with a different word	58.6% (+6.6 / -6.9)	52.2% (+6.3 / -6.4)	51.7% (+6.0 / -6.1)	61.8% (+6.2 / -6.6)
go to the second page of the results	41.4% (+6.9 / -6.6)	47.8% (+6.4 / -6.3)	48.3% (+6.1 / -6.0)	38.2% (+6.6 / -6.2)

Suburban people are more likely to change keywords than to click on to page 2.

Vote	Urban areas (590)	Rural areas (109)	Suburban areas (468)
search again with a different word	51.8% (+4.6 / -4.6)	48.0% (+9.3 / -9.1)	61.1% (+4.8 / -5.0)
go to the second page of the results	48.2% (+4.6 / -4.6)	52.0% (+9.1 / -9.3)	38.9% (+5.0 / -4.8)

There isn't much of an income correlation either.

Vote	People earning $0-24K (123)	People earning $25-49K (638)	People earning $50-74K (319)	People earning $75-99K (88)	People earning $100-149K (22)
search again with a different word	57.9% (+9.3 / -9.9)	55.9% (+4.4 / -4.5)	58.8% (+5.8 / -6.1)	54.5% (+9.3 / -9.6)	50.0% (+21.4 / -21.4)
go to the second page of the results	42.1% (+9.9 / -9.3)	44.1% (+4.5 / -4.4)	41.2% (+6.1 / -5.8)	45.5% (+9.6 / -9.3)	50.0% (+21.4 / -21.4)

It would also be interesting to run this question again & include the option of trying another search engine as an answer.

Categories:

Citation Labs Review - Here's Why I Use it

Eric Covino — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:30:41 +0000

So what are we calling it today? Link building, link prospecting, content marketing, linkbait, socialbait, PR ? Whatever it is and whatever sub-definitions exist for the process of finding quality, related websites to link back to yours is difficult and time-consuming work.

As with most processes associated with SEO campaigns, or website marketing campaigns in general, enterprising folks have built tools to make our lives a little easier and our time more fruitful and productive. A couple of those enterprising fellows are Garrett French and Darren Shaw (from Whitespark.Ca) over at Citation Labs.

Garrett has a suite of link building tools available, many of them complement his flagship tool; The Link Prospector.

Link Prospector Review TOC

To help you navigate to specific sections of the review we've included in-content links below.

Getting Started
Selecting a Report
Customizing Your Prospecting
Working With the Data
Creating Your Own Queries
Garrett's Pro Tips
Free Credits and Pricing

Getting Started

So let's assume I've been contracted to embark on a link building campaign for SeoBook :) It's very easy to create a campaign and get up and running:

Create your campaign:

Move right into the prospects section:

Start prospecting :)

Selecting a Report

The nice thing about this tool is that it's designed for a specific purpose; link prospecting. It's not bloated with a bunch of other stuff you may not need and it's easy to use, yet powerful, because it focus on doing one thing and doing it very well.

The UI of this tool is right on the money, in my opinion. Garrett has built in his own queries to find specific types of links for you (preset Reports). Here you can see the reports available to you, which are built to help you find common link types:

Customizing Your Prospecting

As you can see, there are a variety of built in queries available which run the gamut of most of the link outreach goals you might have (interviews, resource pages, guest posts, directories, and so on). Once you settle on the report type it's time to select additional parameters like:

Region
Web or Blog, or Web AND Blog results
Search Depth (You can go up to 1,000 deep here, but if you make use of your exclusion lists you shouldn't have to dive that deep)
TLD Options
Date Range (Google's "past our, day, week, month, year, or anytime" options)

Try to make your queries as relevant but broad as possible to get the best results. Searches that are too specific will either net to few results or many of your direct competitors. Here, you can see my report parameters for interviews I may want to do in specific areas of SEO (Garrett includes a helpful video on that page, which I highly recommend watching):

Using Exclusions

The use of exclusions is an often overlooked feature of this toolset. Brands are all over the SERPs these days so when you have the Link Prospector go out to crawl potential link sources based on keywords/queries, you'll want to make sure you exclude sites you are fairly certain you won't get a link from.

You may want to exclude such sites as Ebay, Amazon, NewEgg, and so on if you are running a site about computer parts. You can put your exclusions into 2 categories:

Global Exclusions
Campaign Exclusions

Global exclusions apply to each campaign automatically. You might want to go out and download top 100 site lists (or top 1,000) lists to stick in the Global Exclusions area or simply apply specific sites you know are irrelevant to your prospecting on the whole. To access Exclusion lists, just click on the exclusion option. From there, it's just a matter of entering your domains:

Campaign exclusions only apply to a specific campaign. This is good news if you provide link building services and work with a variety of clients; you are not constrained to one draconian exclusion list. In speaking with Garrett, he does mention that this is an often overlooked feature of the toolset but one of the most effective features (both Global and Campaign exclusions).

Working With the Data

So I ran my report which was designed to find interviewees within certain broader areas of the SEO landscape. The tool will confirm submission of your request and email you when it's complete, at any time you can go in and check the status of your reports by going to Prospects -> View Prospects. Here's what the queue looks like:

The results are presented in a web interface but can be easily exported to excel. From the web interface, you can see:

Total Domains
Total Paths (pages on the domain where relevancy exists, maybe we would find a relevant video channel on YouTube where it makes sense to reach out)
TLD
LTS - Link Target Score
PR of Domain
Export Options

LTS is a proprietary score provided by Citation Labs (essentially a measure of domain frequency and position within the SERPs pulled back for a given report).

If we expand the domain to see the paths, using Search Engine Land as an example, we can see pages where targets outside of the main domain might exist for our interviewing needs:

This is where Citation Labs really shines. Rather than just spitting back a bunch of domains for you to pursue at a broad level, it breaks down authoritative domains into specific prospecting opportunities which are super-relevant to your query/keyword relationship.

If you are on Windows (or run Windows via a virutal machine) you can use SEO Tools for Excel to take all these URLs, or the ones you want to target, and pull in social metrics, backlink data, and many other data points to further refine your list.

You can also import this data right into Buzzstream (export from Citation Labs to a CSV or Excel, then import into Buzzstream) and Buzzstream will go off and look up relevant social and contact details for outreach purposes.

We recently did a Buzzstream Review that you might find helpful.

You can also utilize Garrett's Contact Finder for contact research.

Creating Your Own Queries

Another nice thing about Citation Labs's Link Prospector is that you can enter your own query parameters. You are not locked in to any specific type of data output (even though the built in ones are solid). You can do this by selecting "Custom" in the report selection field

In the Custom Report area you can create your own search operators along with the following options:

Region
Web or Blog, or Web AND Blog results
Search Depth (You can go up to 1,000 deep here, but if you make use of your exclusion lists you shouldn't have to dive that deep)
TLD Options
Date Range (Google's "past our, day, week, month, year, or anytime" options)

One of the tools we mention quite a bit inside the forums is the Solo SEO Link Search Tool. You can grab a lot of search operators from that tool for your own use inside the Citation Labs tool.

Garrett's Pro Tips

Can you give us some tips on using the right phrases?

One objection I hear from folks who test the link prospector is "my results are full of competitors." This is typically because the research phrases they've selected don't line up with the type of prospects they're seeking. And more often than not it's because they've added their target SEO keywords rather than "category keywords" that define their area of practice.

The solution is simple though - you just need to experiment with some "bigger head" phrases. Instead of using "Atlanta Divorce Lawyer" for guest post prospecting, try just "Divorce Lawyer," or even "Divorce."

And I'd definitely recommend experimenting with the tilde "~Divorce" as it will help with synonyms that you may not have thought of. So if you're looking for guest posting opportunities for a divorce lawyer your five research phrases could look like this:

divorce
~divorce
~divorce -divorce
Divorce ~Lawyer
"family law"

The link prospector tool will take these five phrases and combine them with 20+ guest posting footprints so we end up doing 100+ queries for you. And there WILL be domain repetitions due to the close semantic clustering of these phrases. This overlap can help "float up" the best opportunities based on our LTS score (which is essentially a measurement of relevance).

All this said there are PLENTY of situations where using your SEO keywords can be productive... For example in guest posting it's common for people to use competitive keywords as anchor text. You could (and yes I'm completely contradicting my example) use "Atlanta Divorce Lawyer" as a guest posting research phrase along with your other target SEO KWs. The prospects that come back will probably have been placed by competitors.

How do you fine-tune your research phrases?

I often test my research phrases before throwing them in the tool. Let's go back to the divorce guest posting example above. To test I simply head to Google and search [divorce "guest post"]. If I see 4 or more results in the top 10 that look like "maybes" I consider that a good keyword to run with. The test footprint you should use will vary from report-type to report-type.

A good links page test is to take a potential research phrase and add intitle:links. For content promoters you could combine a potential research phrase with intitle:"round up".

I find that this testing does two things. For one it helps me drop research phrases that are only going to clog my reports with junk.

Secondarily I often discover new phrases that are likely to be productive. Look back at the list of divorce research phrases above - the last one, "family law," is there because I spotted it while testing [~divorce "guest post"]. Spending time in Google is always, always productive and I highly advise it.

What tips can you give us regarding proper Search Depth usage?

Depth is a measure of how many results the link prospector brings back from Google. How often do you find useful results on the third page of Google? How about the tenth page? There's a gem now and again, but I find that if I've carefully selected 5 awesome research phrases I save time by just analyzing the results in the top 20.

Your mileage may vary, and the tool DOES enable users to scrape all the way down to 1000 for those rare cases where you have discovered a mega-productive footprint. Test it once for sure, don't just take my word for it - my guess is you'll end up with tons of junk that actually kills the efficiency that the tool creates.

Any more expert tips on how to best use phrases and search operators?

You can addadvanced search operators in all your research phrases. Combine them with your research phrases and try them out in Google first (see tip 2) and then use them as you see fit. I use the heck out of the tilde now, as it saves me time and aids in research phrase discovery when I vet my phrases in Google. The tilde even works in conjunction with the wildcard operator (*).

So if you're looking for law links pages you could test [~law* intitle:links] and then add ~law* as one of your research phrases if it seems productive. It's not super productive by the way, because the word "code" is a law synonym... but I wouldn't have known if I didn't test, and if I didn't test I'd end up with link prospetor results that don't have anything to do with the targets I'm seeking.

Any tips on how to best leverage Exclusions (beyond putting in sites like google.com into your Global Exclusions :D )

If you have junk, not-ops that keeps turning up in your reports, add the domain as domain.com and www.domain.com to the exclusions file. Poof. It's gone from future reports you run.

You can even add the domains you've already viewed so they won't show up anymore. Be careful though - make sure you're adding them to your campaign-level excludes rather than Global.

How often do you update the tool and what is coming down the pike?

If you sign up and you find yourself asking "I wonder what would happen if I..." please write me an email. If I don't have an answer for you I will send you credits for you to do some testing. I will end up learning from you. I have users continually pushing the limits with the tool and finding new ways to use it.

We've added PR for domains, titles and snippets for each URL, blog-only search, and fixed numerous bugs and inefficiencies based on requests from our users. We're also bringing in DA, MozRank and an API because of user requests.

Thanks Garrett!!

Free Trial and Pricing

Citation Labs is currently offering a free trial. They have monthly and per credit (love that!) pricing as well. You can find their pricing structure here.

Categories:

seo tools

General Consumer Awareness of SEM & SEO

Aaron Wall — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:47:39 +0000

Which of the following have you heard of?

More people have heard of paid search / AdWords than have SEO / link building. One of the big issues with this question is that since it had numerous check boxes it had a lower response rate (roughly 10% vs an average of closer to 16% to 18%) & took longer for the answers to come in. In the future I can see Google adding quality score styled factors to quizes where pricing is in part based on response rate & they charge premiums for quicker responses. Anyhow, on to the results...

Vote	All (1501)
Pay Per Click	45.8% (+2.5 / -2.5)
AdWords	32.7% (+2.4 / -2.3)
SEO	21.3% (+2.1 / -2.0)
Link Building	15.9% (+1.9 / -1.8)
Ad Retargeting	14.9% (+1.9 / -1.7)

Men tend to have slightly greater awareness of SEO than women. That sort of makes sense given that most SEO conferences are heavily dominated by male attendees.

Vote	Men (755)	Women (543)	Gender unknown (203)
Pay Per Click	45.2% (+3.6 / -3.5)	45.7% (+4.2 / -4.1)	48.3% (+6.8 / -6.8)
AdWords	33.4% (+3.4 / -3.3)	32.2% (+4.0 / -3.8)	31.5% (+6.7 / -6.0)
SEO	24.8% (+3.2 / -2.9)	18.6% (+3.5 / -3.0)	15.3% (+5.6 / -4.3)
Link Building	18.9% (+2.9 / -2.6)	12.2% (+3.0 / -2.5)	14.3% (+5.5 / -4.2)
Ad Retargeting	16.4% (+2.8 / -2.5)	13.1% (+3.1 / -2.6)	13.8% (+5.4 / -4.1)

People in the 25 to 34 age range tend to be more aware of these terms than other age groups.

Vote	18-24 year-olds (229)	25-34 year-olds (316)	35-44 year-olds (162)	45-54 year-olds (227)	55-64 year-olds (182)	65+ year-olds (99)
Pay Per Click	30.1% (+6.2 / -5.6)	50.3% (+5.5 / -5.5)	48.8% (+7.6 / -7.6)	44.9% (+6.5 / -6.3)	51.1% (+7.2 / -7.2)	51.5% (+9.6 / -9.7)
AdWords	37.1% (+6.4 / -6.0)	40.5% (+5.5 / -5.3)	32.7% (+7.6 / -6.8)	33.0% (+6.4 / -5.8)	22.0% (+6.6 / -5.4)	20.2% (+9.0 / -6.7)
SEO	21.4% (+5.8 / -4.8)	32.6% (+5.4 / -4.9)	29.6% (+7.4 / -6.5)	14.1% (+5.1 / -3.9)	13.2% (+5.7 / -4.2)	18.2% (+8.7 / -6.4)
Link Building	17.0% (+5.4 / -4.3)	17.4% (+4.6 / -3.8)	16.0% (+6.4 / -4.9)	15.9% (+5.3 / -4.2)	15.4% (+6.0 / -4.5)	12.1% (+7.9 / -5.0)
Ad Retargeting	12.2% (+4.9 / -3.6)	16.1% (+4.5 / -3.6)	17.3% (+6.6 / -5.0)	18.9% (+5.6 / -4.6)	11.0% (+5.4 / -3.8)	16.2% (+8.5 / -6.0)

The map is sort of all over the map...there are no easily definable regional patterns.

Vote	The US Midwest (320)	The US Northeast (415)	The US South (432)	The US West (316)
Pay Per Click	43.8% (+5.5 / -5.3)	47.5% (+4.8 / -4.8)	43.1% (+4.7 / -4.6)	48.7% (+5.5 / -5.5)
AdWords	33.1% (+5.3 / -4.9)	30.6% (+4.6 / -4.2)	33.1% (+4.6 / -4.3)	34.5% (+5.4 / -5.0)
SEO	18.1% (+4.6 / -3.8)	24.3% (+4.4 / -3.9)	19.2% (+4.0 / -3.4)	22.2% (+4.9 / -4.2)
Link Building	15.3% (+4.4 / -3.5)	13.5% (+3.6 / -3.0)	18.5% (+3.9 / -3.4)	16.1% (+4.5 / -3.6)
Ad Retargeting	13.8% (+4.2 / -3.3)	14.2% (+3.7 / -3.0)	17.1% (+3.8 / -3.3)	13.6% (+4.2 / -3.3)

People in urban areas tend to be more aware of SEM terms than rural people are. This is not particularly surprising since in smaller towns word of mouth and word around the town goes a long way (I used to live in a town of 1200 people) and in cities there is a lot more options than any one person can try & there is far greater noise/competition in the marketplace, both from a consumer and business perspective.

The "unknown" density category only had 32 total responses, so that is just noise.

Vote	Urban areas (793)	Rural areas (113)	Suburban areas (563)	Urban Density unknown (32)
Pay Per Click	45.4% (+3.5 / -3.4)	38.9% (+9.2 / -8.5)	47.8% (+4.1 / -4.1)	43.8% (+16.9 / -15.6)
AdWords	35.6% (+3.4 / -3.3)	27.4% (+8.9 / -7.4)	29.3% (+3.9 / -3.6)	40.6% (+17.1 / -15.1)
SEO	24.7% (+3.1 / -2.9)	15.9% (+7.8 / -5.6)	16.9% (+3.3 / -2.9)	31.2% (+17.3 / -13.3)
Link Building	15.5% (+2.7 / -2.4)	17.7% (+8.1 / -5.9)	16.2% (+3.3 / -2.8)	12.5% (+15.6 / -7.5)
Ad Retargeting	14.6% (+2.6 / -2.3)	19.5% (+8.3 / -6.2)	13.3% (+3.1 / -2.6)	31.2% (+17.3 / -13.3)

There are not many clear patterns among income (that surprises me as I would have thought there was a strong correlation). However, once again, the data is skewed to exclude most people with higher incomes, as there was only 1 response at > $150,000 / year.

Here is the opening chart, followed by the same chart

Vote	People earning $0-24K (178)	People earning $25-49K (828)	People earning $50-74K (371)	People earning $75-99K (88)	People earning $100-149K (24)	People earning $150K+ (1)	Income unknown (11)
Pay Per Click	43.3% (+7.3 / -7.1)	44.2% (+3.4 / -3.3)	48.8% (+5.1 / -5.0)	52.3% (+10.1 / -10.3)	50.0% (+18.6 / -18.6)	0.0% (+79.3 / -0.0)	45.5% (+26.5 / -24.2)
AdWords	34.3% (+7.2 / -6.6)	31.9% (+3.3 / -3.1)	35.0% (+5.0 / -4.7)	28.4% (+10.2 / -8.4)	20.8% (+19.6 / -11.6)	100.0% (+0.0 / -79.3)	45.5% (+26.5 / -24.2)
SEO	21.9% (+6.6 / -5.4)	20.4% (+2.9 / -2.6)	23.7% (+4.6 / -4.0)	13.6% (+8.7 / -5.7)	29.2% (+20.0 / -14.3)	0.0% (+79.3 / -0.0)	36.4% (+28.3 / -21.2)
Link Building	19.1% (+6.4 / -5.1)	16.3% (+2.7 / -2.4)	14.6% (+4.0 / -3.2)	12.5% (+8.5 / -5.4)	12.5% (+18.5 / -8.2)	0.0% (+79.3 / -0.0)	9.1% (+28.6 / -7.5)
Ad Retargeting	13.5% (+5.8 / -4.3)	14.1% (+2.5 / -2.2)	17.0% (+4.2 / -3.5)	12.5% (+8.5 / -5.4)	20.8% (+19.6 / -11.6)	0.0% (+79.3 / -0.0)	27.3% (+29.3 / -17.5)

Here is the chart again with those last 2 columns lopped off

Vote	People earning $0-24K (178)	People earning $25-49K (828)	People earning $50-74K (371)	People earning $75-99K (88)	People earning $100-149K (24)
Pay Per Click	43.3% (+7.3 / -7.1)	44.2% (+3.4 / -3.3)	48.8% (+5.1 / -5.0)	52.3% (+10.1 / -10.3)	50.0% (+18.6 / -18.6)
AdWords	34.3% (+7.2 / -6.6)	31.9% (+3.3 / -3.1)	35.0% (+5.0 / -4.7)	28.4% (+10.2 / -8.4)	20.8% (+19.6 / -11.6)
SEO	21.9% (+6.6 / -5.4)	20.4% (+2.9 / -2.6)	23.7% (+4.6 / -4.0)	13.6% (+8.7 / -5.7)	29.2% (+20.0 / -14.3)
Link Building	19.1% (+6.4 / -5.1)	16.3% (+2.7 / -2.4)	14.6% (+4.0 / -3.2)	12.5% (+8.5 / -5.4)	12.5% (+18.5 / -8.2)
Ad Retargeting	13.5% (+5.8 / -4.3)	14.1% (+2.5 / -2.2)	17.0% (+4.2 / -3.5)	12.5% (+8.5 / -5.4)	20.8% (+19.6 / -11.6)

Categories:

Paid Placement in Search Engines

Aaron Wall — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:08:09 +0000

In the below poll we didn't make any distinction between AdWords & organic SEO investments. If we did I am not sure how it would have impacted the voting.

How do you feel about people paying for placement in search engines?

Nearly 2 in 3 people dislike money manipulating search results.

response	All (1201)
I think it is deceptive	65.4% (+3.3 / -3.5)
It is good if it is relevant	34.6% (+3.5 / -3.3)

Women tend to dislike it slightly more than men.

answer	Men (813)	Women (388)
I think it is deceptive	63.6% (+3.6 / -3.8)	67.2% (+5.4 / -5.9)
It is good if it is relevant	36.4% (+3.8 / -3.6)	32.8% (+5.9 / -5.4)

Older people tend to think money influencing search is manipulative, as do younger people who have not had their idealism beaten out of them by the harshness of the world. However the people in the 25 to 34 range who grew up with the web tend to like paid search far more than other groups do.

response	18-24 year-olds (350)	25-34 year-olds (266)	35-44 year-olds (164)	45-54 year-olds (194)	55-64 year-olds (148)	65+ year-olds (80)
I think it is deceptive	61.3% (+5.0 / -5.2)	47.9% (+6.6 / -6.6)	63.8% (+7.0 / -7.7)	72.5% (+5.8 / -6.7)	72.8% (+6.9 / -8.1)	70.6% (+9.9 / -12.3)
It is good if it is relevant	38.7% (+5.2 / -5.0)	52.1% (+6.6 / -6.6)	36.2% (+7.7 / -7.0)	27.5% (+6.7 / -5.8)	27.2% (+8.1 / -6.9)	29.4% (+12.3 / -9.9)

People in the south tend to dislike money influencing search than any other region & people out west are more accepting of it. Perhaps the audience from California is more likely to understand how search impacts the local economy?

answer	The US Midwest (267)	The US Northeast (333)	The US South (355)	The US West (246)
I think it is deceptive	64.3% (+6.9 / -7.5)	66.4% (+5.9 / -6.4)	69.5% (+5.6 / -6.2)	59.8% (+7.4 / -7.8)
It is good if it is relevant	35.7% (+7.5 / -6.9)	33.6% (+6.4 / -5.9)	30.5% (+6.2 / -5.6)	40.2% (+7.8 / -7.4)

Rural people dislike money influencing search more than urban people do.

response	Urban areas (620)	Rural areas (109)	Suburban areas (460)
I think it is deceptive	63.2% (+4.4 / -4.6)	70.9% (+8.9 / -10.8)	65.3% (+4.9 / -5.2)
It is good if it is relevant	36.8% (+4.6 / -4.4)	29.1% (+10.8 / -8.9)	34.7% (+5.2 / -4.9)

Income has essentially no impact on the perception of the influence of money in search (though there was insufficient data at the upper end of the income range).

response	People earning $0-24K (135)	People earning $25-49K (675)	People earning $50-74K (307)	People earning $75-99K (71)	People earning $100-149K	People earning $150K+
I think it is deceptive	65.1% (+7.4 / -8.2)	65.8% (+4.3 / -4.6)	65.4% (+6.1 / -6.7)	66.5% (+9.2 / -10.7)	Insufficient data	Insufficient data
It is good if it is relevant	34.9% (+8.2 / -7.4)	34.2% (+4.6 / -4.3)	34.6% (+6.7 / -6.1)	33.5% (+10.7 / -9.2)	Insufficient data	Insufficient data

Categories:

Content Locking Ads

Aaron Wall — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:53:51 +0000

Google recently launched a consumer insights survey product, which quizes users for access to premium content.

How do users get access to these poll questions? Google locks premium content behind them, likeso:

Google has long stated that "cloaking is bad" and that it was deceptive & users didn't like it. Earlier this year Google also rolled out an algorithm to penalize sites that were too ad heavy:

We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.

Also recall that the second version of the Panda update encouraged users to block sites & many programmers blocked Experts-exchange due to disliking their scroll cloaking. That in turn caused Experts-exchange to get hit & see a nose dive in traffic.

Between the above & seeing how implementation of this quiz technology works, I had to ask:
How do you feel about ads that lock content behind poll questions like this one?

Response	Vote
Hate them. A total waste of time	63.7% (+3.3 / -3.4)
I am indifferent	30.8% (+3.3 / -3.1)
I love them. These are fun	5.5% (+2.5 / -1.7)

There isn't a huge split between men & women. Men hate them a bit more, but they also like them a bit more...they are just less indifferent.

Vote	Men (811)	Women (409)
Hate them. A total waste of time	66.1% (+3.4 / -3.6)	61.5% (+5.4 / -5.7)
I am indifferent	27.2% (+3.4 / -3.2)	34.2% (+5.6 / -5.2)
I love them. These are fun	6.7% (+2.3 / -1.7)	4.3% (+5.1 / -2.4)

Young people & old people tend to like such quizes more than people in the middle. My guess is this is because older people are a bit lonely & younger people do not value their time as much and presume it is more important that they voice their opinions on trivial matters. People just before their retirement (who have recently been hosed by the financial markets) tend not to like these polls as much & same with people in their mid 30s to mid 40s, who are likely short on time trying to balance career, family & finances.

Vote	18-24 year-olds (359)	25-34 year-olds (267)	35-44 year-olds (151)	45-54 year-olds (200)	55-64 year-olds (158)	65+ year-olds (83)
Hate them. A total waste of time	62.1% (+4.9 / -5.2)	62.6% (+6.0 / -6.4)	69.4% (+6.9 / -7.9)	64.5% (+6.5 / -7.1)	68.3% (+6.3 / -7.1)	62.3% (+10.2 / -11.4)
I am indifferent	28.9% (+4.9 / -4.5)	32.1% (+6.2 / -5.6)	24.0% (+7.6 / -6.2)	30.8% (+7.0 / -6.2)	28.4% (+6.9 / -6.0)	28.7% (+11.3 / -9.1)
I love them. These are fun	8.9% (+3.4 / -2.5)	5.3% (+3.7 / -2.2)	6.6% (+5.3 / -3.0)	4.7% (+3.7 / -2.1)	3.3% (+4.4 / -1.9)	9.0% (+9.7 / -4.9)

People out west tend to be more indifferent. Like, whatever man. This may or may not have something to do with California's marijuana laws. ;)

vote	The US Midwest (280)	The US Northeast (331)	The US South (363)	The US West (246)
Hate them. A total waste of time	65.2% (+5.6 / -6.0)	69.0% (+6.2 / -7.0)	65.6% (+5.9 / -6.4)	55.6% (+7.2 / -7.5)
I am indifferent	29.7% (+5.9 / -5.3)	25.6% (+6.8 / -5.8)	28.7% (+6.2 / -5.5)	38.7% (+7.4 / -6.9)
I love them. These are fun	5.1% (+4.5 / -2.4)	5.4% (+5.9 / -2.9)	5.7% (+4.8 / -2.7)	5.6% (+7.4 / -3.3)

Rural people tend to like such polls more than others. Perhaps it has to do with a greater longing for connection due to being more isolated?

vote	Urban areas (608)	Rural areas (117)	Suburban areas (477)
Hate them. A total waste of time	62.6% (+4.6 / -4.9)	53.6% (+10.1 / -10.4)	63.8% (+4.8 / -5.1)
I am indifferent	32.2% (+4.8 / -4.4)	37.5% (+10.4 / -9.3)	29.1% (+5.0 / -4.6)
I love them. These are fun	5.2% (+4.4 / -2.5)	8.9% (+9.5 / -4.8)	7.2% (+5.2 / -3.1)

There aren't any conclusive bits based on income. Wealthier people appear to be more indifferent, however the sampling error on that is huge due to the small sample size.

vote	People earning $0-24K (151)	People earning $25-49K (670)	People earning $50-74K (303)	People earning $75-99K (77)	People earning $100-149K (20)	People earning $150K+
Hate them. A total waste of time	69.0% (+7.7 / -8.9)	62.1% (+4.4 / -4.6)	69.7% (+5.5 / -6.1)	69.7% (+9.1 / -10.9)	53.8% (+19.3 / -20.5)	Insufficient data
I am indifferent	26.0% (+8.5 / -7.0)	32.6% (+4.6 / -4.3)	23.6% (+5.8 / -5.0)	26.0% (+11.1 / -8.7)	41.7% (+20.6 / -18.1)	Insufficient data
I love them. These are fun	5.0% (+6.8 / -3.0)	5.3% (+4.0 / -2.4)	6.7% (+5.7 / -3.2)	4.3% (+11.8 / -3.3)	4.4% (+27.1 / -4.0)	Insufficient data

So, ultimately, Google was right that users hate excessive ads & cloaking. But the one thing users hate more than either of those is paying for content. ;)

Some of the traditional publishing businesses are dying on the vine & this is certainly a great experiment to try to generate incremental revenues.

...but...

How does Google's definition of cloaking square with the above? If publishers (or a competing ad network) do the same thing without Google, would it be considered spam?

Categories:

Ad Retargeting

Aaron Wall — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:48:37 +0000

How do you feel about companies tracking your online behavior to target ads?

Surprisingly, nearly 1 in 11 people like ad retargeting. However, over 3 in 5 people dislike it.

response	All (1250)
I dislike it because it feels creepy	62.3% (+3.1 / -3.3)
I don't care either way	29.3% (+3.1 / -2.9)
I like more relevant ads	8.3% (+2.3 / -1.9)

Women tend to think being stalked by ads is creepier than men do.

vote	Men (822)	Women (428)
I dislike it because it feels creepy	60.6% (+3.7 / -3.8)	64.1% (+5.0 / -5.3)
I don't care either way	30.0% (+3.6 / -3.4)	28.7% (+5.1 / -4.6)
I like more relevant ads	9.5% (+2.6 / -2.1)	7.2% (+4.2 / -2.7)

Younger people who are old enough to be starting families tend to be more financially stressed than most other age groups, so they are likely more appreciative of relevant ads tied to discounts & such. Younger people have also used the web for so much of their lives that they are not as creeped out by tracking & privacy issues as older people are. People in retirement also like relevant ads, perhaps in part because they are feeling the Ben "printing press gone wild but no inflation" Bernake pinch & see their fixed income retirements collapse under artificially low interest rates tied to money printing game.

age	18-24 year-olds (372)	25-34 year-olds (270)	35-44 year-olds (150)	45-54 year-olds (217)	55-64 year-olds (164)	65+ year-olds (77)
I dislike it because it feels creepy	60.2% (+4.8 / -5.0)	52.3% (+6.3 / -6.4)	65.1% (+7.2 / -8.0)	66.0% (+6.1 / -6.6)	66.6% (+6.9 / -7.7)	55.7% (+11.2 / -11.8)
I don't care either way	33.6% (+4.9 / -4.6)	35.0% (+6.4 / -5.9)	25.5% (+7.6 / -6.3)	27.9% (+6.4 / -5.6)	26.9% (+7.5 / -6.3)	33.5% (+11.9 / -10.1)
I like more relevant ads	6.2% (+2.9 / -2.0)	12.7% (+5.1 / -3.8)	9.5% (+5.9 / -3.8)	6.1% (+3.9 / -2.5)	6.4% (+5.2 / -2.9)	10.7% (+9.1 / -5.2)

People from the west coast are perhaps slightly more aware of the risks of online tracking. People from the south couldn't care either way. In the midwest the stereotype of the mom who clips coupons is shown in the data (though the sample size is small).

vote	The US Midwest (259)	The US Northeast (340)	The US South (404)	The US West (247)
I dislike it because it feels creepy	58.5% (+6.5 / -6.9)	61.8% (+5.9 / -6.3)	61.6% (+5.7 / -6.0)	67.2% (+6.2 / -6.8)
I don't care either way	29.9% (+6.6 / -5.9)	29.1% (+5.8 / -5.2)	32.4% (+5.9 / -5.4)	24.6% (+6.7 / -5.6)
I like more relevant ads	11.6% (+5.6 / -4.0)	9.1% (+5.0 / -3.3)	6.0% (+4.6 / -2.7)	8.2% (+5.7 / -3.5)

On everything outside of disliking online tracking the margin of error is wide enough that it is somewhat hard to notice any strong patterns based on population data.

vote	Urban areas (636)	Rural areas (108)	Suburban areas (480)
I dislike it because it feels creepy	58.9% (+5.0 / -5.1)	61.1% (+9.0 / -9.8)	62.6% (+4.5 / -4.7)
I don't care either way	32.3% (+5.1 / -4.7)	33.9% (+9.9 / -8.6)	27.6% (+4.5 / -4.1)
I like more relevant ads	8.8% (+4.4 / -3.0)	5.0% (+8.7 / -3.3)	9.8% (+3.6 / -2.7)

It is also hard to see much of a broad pattern based on income levels.

vote	People earning $0-24K (150)	People earning $25-49K (691)	People earning $50-74K (304)	People earning $75-99K (88)
I dislike it because it feels creepy	62.2% (+8.4 / -9.1)	60.2% (+4.2 / -4.4)	66.5% (+5.8 / -6.4)	55.1% (+10.2 / -10.6)
I don't care either way	30.0% (+9.2 / -7.8)	30.8% (+4.3 / -4.0)	25.9% (+6.1 / -5.3)	35.8% (+10.4 / -9.2)
I like more relevant ads	7.9% (+8.6 / -4.3)	9.0% (+3.7 / -2.7)	7.5% (+5.5 / -3.3)	9.2% (+9.0 / -4.8)

Categories:

Google+ Integration

Aaron Wall — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:11:06 +0000

As publishers we tend to be quite concerned with the over-promotion of Google+ because it carves up the search landscape, is potentially another hoop that we have to jump through, and in some cases, the Google+ hosted version of a page will outrank the legitimate original source - which screws up the economics of online publishing.

But do users care about how Google+ was integrated directly into the search results? Generally no.

How do you feel Google+ integration has impacted Google's relevancy?

Under 1 in 5 people said it made the search results better, under 1 in 5 said it made the search results worse & over 3 in 5 didn't notice any material impact.

vote	All (1260)
no noticeable impact	64.7% (+3.3 / -3.5)
made it better	17.4% (+2.9 / -2.6)
made it worse	17.9% (+3.0 / -2.7)

Men liked it slightly more than women. However, that difference was within the estimated range of error. If this difference was more significant one might guestimate that women are better at socializing offline & have less need for artificial web relationships, given their relatively larger corpus callosum. ;)

vote	Men (875)	Women (385)
no noticeable impact	64.1% (+3.4 / -3.6)	65.3% (+5.5 / -5.9)
made it better	18.7% (+3.0 / -2.6)	16.2% (+5.2 / -4.1)
made it worse	17.2% (+2.9 / -2.6)	18.5% (+5.3 / -4.4)

Older people are less likely to have loads of online friends & relationships (as they spent most of their lives building relationships in the physical world, before the web or online social networks were popular). Older people also tend to be more set in their ways. Thus many older people won't be signed up for Google+ & won't notice as much of an impact from it.

Younger people are more likely to want to try out new technology, thus they are more likely to notice an impact from it. Some generations tend to be more isolated & individualistic (like the baby boomers) while millennials tend to like to work in groups & network more (it isn't an accident that Facebook started on a college campus & targeted college students), thus younger people are not only more likely to notice something like Google+, but they are also more likely to like its impact.

vote	18-24 year-olds (334)	25-34 year-olds (322)	35-44 year-olds (141)	45-54 year-olds (204)	55-64 year-olds (167)	65+ year-olds (93)
no noticeable impact	59.8% (+5.1 / -5.4)	64.0% (+5.4 / -5.7)	66.6% (+7.3 / -8.2)	59.3% (+6.6 / -7.0)	65.7% (+6.9 / -7.7)	73.9% (+8.1 / -10.1)
made it better	26.6% (+5.0 / -4.4)	18.8% (+5.0 / -4.1)	16.3% (+7.2 / -5.3)	19.1% (+6.2 / -4.9)	16.4% (+6.7 / -5.0)	7.9% (+8.7 / -4.3)
made it worse	13.6% (+4.1 / -3.3)	17.2% (+4.8 / -3.9)	17.1% (+7.4 / -5.5)	21.6% (+6.0 / -5.0)	17.9% (+6.5 / -5.0)	18.2% (+9.9 / -7.0)

I didn't notice any obvious trends or patterns aligned with locations across the country.

vote	The US Midwest (267)	The US Northeast (360)	The US South (378)	The US West (255)
no noticeable impact	65.5% (+6.7 / -7.3)	61.3% (+7.3 / -7.8)	67.6% (+5.6 / -6.1)	62.4% (+6.6 / -7.1)
made it better	16.2% (+6.2 / -4.7)	20.5% (+7.8 / -6.1)	17.2% (+5.0 / -4.1)	16.5% (+6.3 / -4.8)
made it worse	18.4% (+6.9 / -5.3)	18.2% (+6.3 / -4.9)	15.1% (+5.6 / -4.3)	21.1% (+6.6 / -5.3)

Suburban people were more likely to notice an impact, though they were not heavily skewed in one way or the other

vote	Urban areas (669)	Rural areas (124)	Suburban areas (450)
no noticeable impact	65.9% (+4.1 / -4.4)	66.8% (+9.0 / -10.4)	62.0% (+4.7 / -5.0)
made it better	16.4% (+3.7 / -3.1)	14.3% (+8.5 / -5.7)	20.4% (+4.4 / -3.8)
made it worse	17.6% (+3.9 / -3.3)	18.9% (+9.8 / -7.0)	17.6% (+4.2 / -3.6)

People who earned less were less likely to notice positive or negative impact from Google+ integration (somewhat surprising since younger people tend to skew toward lower incomes & younger people were more likely to notice & like Google+ integration). Outside of that, the data is too bunched up to see any other significant patterns based on income.

vote	People earning $0-24K (162)	People earning $25-49K (698)	People earning $50-74K (312)	People earning $75-99K (71)
no noticeable impact	71.1% (+7.8 / -9.2)	62.8% (+4.4 / -4.6)	61.9% (+6.3 / -6.8)	61.3% (+10.6 / -11.9)
made it better	14.8% (+8.8 / -5.9)	17.5% (+4.0 / -3.4)	18.9% (+5.9 / -4.8)	17.1% (+11.5 / -7.5)
made it worse	14.1% (+9.5 / -6.1)	19.7% (+4.3 / -3.7)	19.2% (+6.4 / -5.1)	21.6% (+11.2 / -8.1)

Categories:

Editorial Objectivity

Aaron Wall — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:17:54 +0000

Should search engines be able to preferentially promote their own services in their search results?

Nearly 3 in 4 people think that search engines should not be able to preferentially promote their own services.

vote	All (1226)
no, results should be objective	74.1% (+3.1 / -3.4)
yes, it is their search results	25.9% (+3.4 / -3.1)

There was essentially no split between men & women.

vote	Men (827)	Women (399)
no, results should be objective	73.7% (+3.1 / -3.4)	74.4% (+5.2 / -6.0)
yes, it is their search results	26.3% (+3.4 / -3.1)	25.6% (+6.0 / -5.2)

Older people tend to prefer/want more editorial objectivity, whereas younger people are more fine with search engines preferentially promoting their own services. Older people tend to be more fixed in their ways & younger people are much less so.

vote	18-24 year-olds (338)	25-34 year-olds (269)	35-44 year-olds (158)	45-54 year-olds (209)	55-64 year-olds (169)	65+ year-olds (83)
no, results should be objective	65.0% (+4.9 / -5.2)	76.0% (+5.1 / -6.0)	74.0% (+6.5 / -7.7)	71.2% (+5.7 / -6.5)	71.4% (+6.5 / -7.5)	87.2% (+6.1 / -10.4)
yes, it is their search results	35.0% (+5.2 / -4.9)	24.0% (+6.0 / -5.1)	26.0% (+7.7 / -6.5)	28.8% (+6.5 / -5.7)	28.6% (+7.5 / -6.5)	12.8% (+10.4 / -6.1)

Geographically, people in the south & midwest tend to be slightly more trusting, perhaps due to the lower cost of living & less competitive markets. However, any differences here are fairly minor & are within the margin of error.

vote	The US Midwest (244)	The US Northeast (367)	The US South (352)	The US West (263)
no, results should be objective	72.2% (+6.4 / -7.4)	77.7% (+4.5 / -5.3)	72.1% (+6.0 / -6.9)	75.9% (+5.7 / -6.9)
yes, it is their search results	27.8% (+7.4 / -6.4)	22.3% (+5.3 / -4.5)	27.9% (+6.9 / -6.0)	24.1% (+6.9 / -5.7)

People who are rural tend to be slightly more accepting of Google doing as it wishes, though this is also a small sample size & well within the margin of error.

vote	Urban areas (647)	Rural areas (106)	Suburban areas (453)
no, results should be objective	74.3% (+4.3 / -4.9)	71.9% (+8.5 / -10.5)	74.4% (+4.2 / -4.7)
yes, it is their search results	25.7% (+4.9 / -4.3)	28.1% (+10.5 / -8.5)	25.6% (+4.7 / -4.2)

There isn't a strong correlation with income on this issue either. People cared a bit more at higher income levels, but there was also a wider margin of error due to small sampling size.

vote	People earning $0-24K (142)	People earning $25-49K (677)	People earning $50-74K (316)	People earning $75-99K (75)	People earning $100-149K	People earning $150K+
no, results should be objective	72.0% (+7.8 / -9.4)	76.8% (+3.7 / -4.1)	68.7% (+6.1 / -6.8)	83.1% (+6.9 / -10.2)	Insufficient data	Insufficient data
yes, it is their search results	28.0% (+9.4 / -7.8)	23.2% (+4.1 / -3.7)	31.3% (+6.8 / -6.1)	16.9% (+10.2 / -6.9)	Insufficient data	Insufficient data

Categories:

Jim Boykin Interview

Aaron Wall — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:46:26 +0000

Internet Marketing Ninja Jim Boykin has promoted link building since before I even knew what SEO was. Nearly a decade later so many things have changed in SEO (including renaming We Build Pages to Internet Marketing Ninjas), but he still sees links as a key SEO driver (as do I). I recently interviewed him about links & the changing face of SEO.

so, links links links ... these were the backbone of ranking in Google for years and years. are they still? Is social a huge signal, or something that has been over-hyped?

Yes, I do see backlinks at the backbone of rankings in Google. Every day I see sites that trump the rankings with links, and no social signals...but I've never seen a site that had "poor" backlinks compared to others, but a strong social signal, be ranked great.

There are other signal that I feel are more important than social, like content and user behavior, but then after those, I'd put social signals. Even though I don't think they're more important thank links by any stretch, I do feel that social has a place, in areas like branding, community building, and in assisting in organic search results. I always recommend that people have a strong social presence, even if for only sending additional signals to Google to assist in higher rankings.

Google recently nailed a bunch of lower quality bulk link networks. Were you surprised these lasted as long as they did? Was the fact that they worked at all an indication of the sustained importance of links?

Well...surprised...no... filtering out networks is something that's always going to happen....once something gets too big, or too popular, or too talked about...then it's in danger of being burned... the popular "short cuts" of today are the popular penalized networks of tomorrow... there will always be someone who will create a network (of others sites they control, or their new friends control, or of near expired domains, or blogger groups, etc etc) and that someone will start selling links, and advertising, and it will catch on, and they will sell to everyone and it will become so interconnected that it will cause it's own algorthymitic penalty, or it will get popular, and get the eyes of Google on it, and then it will get filtered, or there will be exact match penalties, or entire site penalties.

If that's the game you play, just understand the risks...or, don't play that game and give other reasons for people to link to you, and get permanent non-paid links, but that takes a lot of time and effort and marketing. That's the price you have to pay...because, yes, rankings in Google still comes down to #1, Links.

After such networks get hit, how hard is it for such sites to recover? Does it create a "flight to quality" impact on link building? Are many of them better off starting from scratch rather than trying to recover the sites?

We've worked with several people who have come to us with after being penalized by Google to some degree (either phrase based penalty, or entire site penalties). Probably the low budget people who got hit just started other sites and tossed their penalized site, but most of the people who come to us can't afford to toss their branded site away.

In almost all of those cases it takes someone removing all the paid and un-natural links that they can. They must understand then that their days of buying links are Over, and they Must create great things on their site that gets natural links....and they must forever give up the chase of being #1 for the big short tail phrases..unless you own the exact .com, or your brand name includes that phrase...In order to recover, they must purge the backlinks of the paid links and the networks, do a reinclusion request, and then start doing "natural things", and then wait and wait and wait...90 days is typical...it's the one Google gave to themselves after you pointed out that Google themselves were buying blog links.

Over time it has become easier to hit various trip wires when link building. You mentioned some things being phrse based or entire site & so on...how does a person determine the difference between these? Some of Google's automated penalties and manual penalties have quite similar footprints, are there easy ways to tell which is which?

A phrase based penalty work like this...let's say you've been targeting "green widgets" and "red widgets" for years...you have lots of backlinks with those exact anchor text....and you were in the top 10 for both phrases....then one day, you rank somewhere on page 3 or higher for those phrases.. you may still rank #3 for "cheap red widgets" or #7 for "widgets green" (reversed phrases)...but for the few exact phrases...it's page 3+ of the SERPS for you....nothing else changes, just those exact phrases.. on the other hand, a sitewide penalty is where pretty much nothing rankings on page 1 or page 2 in the SERPS, when the prior day you had lots of keywords rankings in there. I have no way of knowing which were automatic and which were hand done....sometimes I have a feeling in my gut...but it doesn't really matter...the solution is always the same...clean up the backlinks, and change your methods.

Earlier you mentioned foregoing the head phrase, in spite of things like Google Instant guiding searchers down a path, is there still plenty of tail to be had? Are tail keywords significantly under-rated by the market? How does one square going after tail keywords with algorithms like Panda?

I'm a big believer in the long tail. When we analyze content on a site we tend to grab ranking data from ahrefs for the client, as well as for several of their competitors, and we end up merging all the phrases and showing the search volume and the average cost per click for each phrase...we can always find a huge long tail, even if the clients site currently doesn't have that content (they have to add new original content), there is always a huge long tail to be had.

In 98% of the cases, there are no one or two or three main phrases that account for more than 2% of the total potential search traffic. Even with a sites existing content and existing traffic, the short tail tends not to be more than 5% of traffic for any sites I've been seeing.We often find that a site that may have 5,000 pages, but only 500 pages that site are of value via ranking for anything that has a decent search volume, and a decent worth in a CPC value in Google. If you look at those 500 urls, and you optimize each url for say 5 phrases on average, then you're looking at 2,500 phrases...of those, 50 phrases might be the short tail, and 2450 I would consider the middle tail. If you also add words like "shop" "store" "online" "sale" "cheap" "discount" etc to all those pages, you'll pick up tons more phrases. And from there, the more original content you can add, the more long tail you can get.... but..be careful...no one wants a site to be hit from a Google panda update...make sure the content is original, of value, and that it's of use to the viewers of the page.

When going after head or tail keywords...with one or the other do you feel that link quality is more important than link quantity?

Link quality always trumps. Otherwise, I'd buy those 10,000 backlinks for $100 packages that I see in Google AdWords... and my job would be a lot easier :)

With Google it is getting easier to hit tripwires with anchor text or building links too fast, does this also play into the bias toward quality & away from quantity?

I think it is easier to hit tripwires...but it's nice that Google sent out 700,000 "be careful" emails a few weeks ago... those were automatic....I think the "over optimization update" that Google has been speaking of will trip a lot of wires and people will have to mimic the natural web more and not focus on exact short tail phrases.

Those scammy AdWords ads proming link riches for nothing in part shape the perception of the cost & value of links. How do you get prospective clients to see & appreciate the value of higher quality links (while in some cases some of them will be competing with some of the bulk stuff that ranks today & is gone tomorrow)?

Well, luckily I'm not in sales calls anymore so I don't have to do the convincing :) but I'd say that if you can get links that you just can't buy (ie, a link from NASA.gov or harvard.edu/library/) then they're priceless. Each update Google will filter out some of the links from sites that it feels are artificial. If you can build things that stick and stand the test of time, and if you don't need to be #1 tomorrow, and are willing to invest in the sites content and the sites future, then think long tail and long term. If you're all about today, then do what you have to do today, but those cheap links won't move you much anyways & you'll just have a spammy backlink profile.

Building quality links that last isn't particularly cheap or easy. Even harder to do it in volume. What has allowed/enabled you to succeed where so many others have failed on this front? Is it that you care more about the client's well being, or is it that you have to tie together a bunch of clever bits to make it all back out?

Well, I have an army here....nearly 100 ninjas..the biggest group is the link builders, so I have a lot of link ninjas, we also have a lot of tools...tools that suggest the things we should write that has the highest probability of getting trusted backlinks, we have a content teams that knows how to write to get links from professors and orgs and government agencies, etc.

We have tools that help us to know who to write to after we've written the content..and we have tools that help us send out a lot of personal emails...between the tools and the people and the content, we manage to make it work. If we had to do all the work by hand, and by human guesses, it would never work, but with the tools (and human intervention along the way), we're able to get the links and scale it, while keeping the high quality.

When you talk about getting quality links that are priceless, those have that sort of value precisely because they are so hard to get. How big of a role does content play in the process? Is this something anyone can do?

Content is Key to getting links. There's different types of links....there's the low hanging fruit..then there's the fruit that's way on the top of the tree....the things that tend to be harder to get, also tend to be the most valued and the most trusted. If I wrote to a college professor at Harvard and said, "Hey, Professor Bob, I just wrote a great paper on "The History Of Widgets", you should add it to your article in the Harvard library" then if the article isn't Great, they'll never link to it. It starts with a great idea that morphs into great content, and then we promote it to those we're targeting. Anyone can write this content, guess at what a gov page would link to, or a college professor..see what they currently link out to...write them an email that's been personalized...and with enough emails, you can get the links if your content is good enough. It's a long slow process, but anyone can do it. Thank goodness I have tool that make that process much easier and more accurate to getting links.

You mentioned thinking long term, how long does it usually take to start seeing results from quality link building? Do you ever work on new sites, or do you mostly try to work on older websites that tend to respond quicker? Also have you noticed newer sites being able to rank much quicker if they do a quality-first approach to link building?

With getting the trusted links we tend to see an increase in traffic during the first 3 months. I do the 3 month review phone calls here, and my goal is to show them the ROI via overall rankings increase of the long tail, and an increase in google's organic traffic. Sites tend to see much better increases in these if they also follow our internal linking strategies, and our on page optimization strategies. If someone does link building, on page optimization, and internal linking, after 3 months there's almost no way someone can not increase the traffic to their site.

----

Thanks Jim!

Jim Boykin is the founder and CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas (formerly We Build Pages, since 1999). Jim's team of marketing ninjas offer a full range of internet marketing services including link building services and social media branding, as well as they employ an in-house team of website designers. Follow Jim and the Ninjas on their blog, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, foursquare, and Linkedin.

Categories:

interviews

Patience is a Virtue

Aaron Wall — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:39:41 +0000

Sorry I haven't blogged as much lately, but one of our employees recently had a child and Google sending out so many warning messages in webmaster central has created a ton of demand for independent SEO advice. Our growth in demand last month was higher than any month outside of the time a few years ago when we announced we would be raising prices and got so many new subscribers that I had to close down the ability to sign up for about 3 or 4 months because there were so many new customers.

Google has been firing on all cylinders this year. They did have a few snafus in the press, but those didn't have any noticeable impact on user perception or behavior & Google recently rolled out yet another billion Dollar business in their consumer surveys.

Google is doing an excellent job of adding friction to SEO & managing its perception to make it appear less stable, less trustworthy and to discourage investment in SEO. They send out warnings for unnatural links, warnings for traffic drops, and even warnings for traffic increases.

Webmaster Tools is a bit of a strange bird...

Any SEO consultant who has client sites tied into Webmaster Tools makes it easy to connect them together (making any black swan editorial decisions far riskier).
Any SEO company which has clients sign up for their own Webmaster Tools account now has to deal with explaining why things change, when many of the changes that happen are more driven by algorthmic shifts (adding local results to the SERPs or taking them away, other forms of localization, changing of ad placement on the SERP, etc.) than by the work of the SEO. This in turn adds costs to managing SEO projects while also making them seem less stable (even outside of those who were use paid link networks). Think through the sequence...
- Google first sends a warning for traffic going up, and the SEO tells the client that this is because they did such a great job with SEO.
- Then Google sends a warning for traffic dropping & the client worries that something is wrong.
- The net impact on actual traffic or conversions could be a 0, but the warnings amplify the perception of changes.
Any SEO who doesn't use Webmaster Tools loses search referral data. It first started with logged in Google users, but apparently it is also headed to Firefox. Who's to say Google Chrome & Safari won't follow Firefox at some point?

Google has changed & obfuscated so many things that it is very hard to isolate cause and effect. They have made changes to how much data you get, changes to their analytics interface & how they report unique visitors, changes to how tightly they filter certain link behaviors, they have rolled in frequent Panda updates, and they have nailed a number of the paid link networks.

BuildMyRank shut down after leaving a self-destructive footprint that made it easy for Google to nuke their network, and some of the remaining paid link networks are getting nailed. Some of their customers are at this point driven primarily by fear, counting down their remaining days as the sky is falling. Fear is an important emotion designed to protect us, but when it is a primary driver we risk self-destruction.

The big winners in these moves by Google are:

Google, since they grant themselves more editorial leeway. If everyone is a scofflaw then they can hit just about anyone they want. And the organic search results are going to be far easier to police if many market participants are held back by a fear tax.
Larger businesses which are harder to justify hitting & which can buy out smaller businesses at lower multiples based on the perception of fear.
Sites which were outranked by people using the obvious paid links, which now rank a bit better after some of those paid link buyers were removed from the search results.
SEOs who out others & market themselves by using polarizing commentary (at least in the short run, whereas in the long run that may backfire).
Those engaging in negative SEO, which sell services to smoke competitors.

The big losers from these Google moves are:

some of the paid link networks & those who used them for years
under-priced SEO service providers who were only able to make the model work by scaling up on risk
smaller businesses who are not particularly spammy, but are so paralyzed by fear that they won't put in enough effort & investment to compete in the marketplace

One of the reasons I haven't advocated using the paid link networks is I was afraid of putting the associated keywords into a hopper of automated competition that I would then have to compete against year after year. Even if you usually win, over the course of years you can still lose a lot of money by promoting the creation of disposable, automated & scalable competing sites. If you don't mind projects getting hit & starting over the ROI on such efforts might work out, but after so many years in the industry the idea of starting over again and again as sites get hit is less appealing.

It is not just that the links are not trusted, but now they stand a far greater chance of causing penalties:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

If that doesn't change then negative SEO will become a bigger issue than paid links ever were.

What is hard about Google penalizing websites for such links is that it is cheap & easy for someone else to set you up. Shortly after Dan Thies mentioned that it was "about time" to Matt Cutts on Twitter someone started throwing some of the splog links at his site. It is safe to say that Dan didn't build those links, but there are many people who will be in the same situation as Dan who did nothing wrong but had a competitor set them up.

And there is no easy way to disconnect your site from those types of links.

If you go back a few years, it was quite easy to win at SEO by doing it in a "paint by number" fashion. One rarely got hit unless they were exceptionally excessive and stuck out like a sore thumb.

But after all of Google's recent moves, a few missed steps in a drunken stupor can have the same result.

Now more than ever, patience is a virtue!

Categories:

Review of Jim Boykin's Free Broken Link Tool

Eric Covino — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:39:42 +0000

Jim Boykin recently released a free, but powerful tool, that can help you check on broken links, redirects, in addition to helping you generate a Google Sitemap.

Being a free, web-based tool you might think it's a bit lightweight but you'd be wrong :) It can crawl up to 10,000 internal pages, up to 5 runs per day per user.

In addition to the features mentioned above, the tool offers other helpful data points as well as the ability to export the data to CSV/Excel, HTML, and the ability to generate a Google XML Sitemap.

The other data points available to you are:

URL of the page spidered
Link to an On-Page SEO report for that URL
Link depth from the home page
HTTP status code
Internal links to the page (with the ability to get a report off the in-links themselves)
External links on the page (a one-click report is available to see the outlinks)
Overall size of the page with a link to the Google page speed tool (cool!)
Link to their Image check tool (size, alt text, header check of the page)
Rows for Title Tag, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
Canonical tag field

Using the Tool

The tool is really easy to use, just enter the domain, the crawl depth, and your email if you don't care to watch the magic happen live :)

For larger crawls entering your email makes a lot of sense as it can take a bit on big crawls:

Click Ninja Check and off you go!

Working With The Data

The top of the results page auto-updates and shows you:

Status of the report
Internal pages crawled
External links found
Internal redirects found
External redirects found
Internal and External errors

When you click any of the yellow text(s) you are brought to that specific report table (which are below the main results I'll show you below).

This is also where you can export the XML sitemap, download results to Excel/HTML.

The results pane (broken up into 2 images given the horizontal length of the table) looks like:

More to the right is:

The On Page Report

If you click on the On Page Report link in the first table you are brought to their free On-Page Optimization Analysis tool. Enter the URL and 5 targeted phrases:

Their tool does the following:

Metadata tool: Displays text in title tags and meta elements
Keyword density tool: Reveals statistics for linked and unlinked content
Keyword optimization tool: Shows the number of words used in the content, including anchor text of internal and external links
Link Accounting tool: Displays the number and types of links used
Header check tool: Shows HTTP Status Response codes for links
Source code tool: Provides quick access to on-page HTML source code

The data is presented in the same table form as the original crawl. This first section shows the selected domain and keywords in addition to on-page items like your title tag, meta description, meta keywords, external links on the page, and words on the page (linked and non-linked text).

You can also see the density of all words on the page in addition to the density of words that are not links, on the page.

Next up is a word breakdown as well as the internal links on the page (with titles, link text, and response codes).

The word cloud displays targeted keywords in red, linked words underlined, and non-linked words as regular text.

You'll see a total word count, non-linked word count, linked word count, and total unique words on the.

This can be helpful in digging into deep on-page optimization factors as well as your internal link layout on a per page basis:

Next, you'll get a nice breakdown of internal links and the text of those links, the titles, and the words in the url.

Also, you can see any links to sub-domains as well as external links (with anchor text and response codes):

Each section has a show/hide option where you can see all the data or just a snippet.

Another report you get access to is the image checker (accessible from the main report "Check Image Info" option):

Here you'll get a report that shows a breakdown of the files and redirects on the page in addition to the image link, image dimensions, file size, alt text, and a spot to click to view the image:

After that section is the link section which shows the actual link, the file type (html, css, etc), status code and a link check (broken, redirect, ok, and so on)

Additional Reports

The main report referenced at the beginning of this post is the Internal Page Report. There are five additional reports:

External Links
Internal Redirects
External Redirects
Internal Errors
External Errors

External Links

This report will show you:

HTTP Status
Internal links to the external link
Actual link URL
Link anchor text
Where the link was first found on the domain

Internal and External Redirects

HTTP Status
Internal links to the external link
Actual link URL
Link anchor text
Page the URL redirects to

Internal and External Errors

HTTP Status

Internal links to the external link

Actual link URL

Link anchor text

Give it a Spin

It's free but more importantly it's quite useful. I find a lot of value in this tool in a variety of ways but mostly with the ability to hone in on your (or your competitor's) internal site and linking structure.

There are certainly a few on-page tools on the marketing but I found this tool easy to use and full of helpful information, especially with internal structure and link data.

Try it. :)

Google Instant Answers: Rich Snippets & Poor Webmasters

Aaron Wall — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:36:18 +0000

This is a pretty powerful & instructive image in terms of "where search is headed."

It's a Yahoo! Directory page that was ranking in the Google search results on a Google Android mobile device.

Note the following

the page is hosted on Google.com
the page disclaims that it is not endorsed by Google
the page embeds a Google search box
the page strips out the Yahoo! Directory search box
the page strips out the Yahoo! Directory PPC ads (on the categories which have them)
the page strips out the Yahoo! Directory logo

Recall that when Google ran their bogus sting operation on Bing, Google engineers suggest that Bing was below board for using user clickstreams to potentially influence their search results. That level of outrage & the smear PR campaign look ridiculous when compared against Google's behavior toward the Yahoo! Directory, which is orders of magnitude worse:

	Bing vs Google	Google vs Yahoo! Directory
editorial	Uses user-experience across a wide range of search engines to potentially impact a limited number of search queries in a minor way.	Shags expensive hand-created editorial content wholesale & hosts it on Google.com.
hosting	Bing hosts Bing search results using Bing snippets.	Google hosts Yahoo! Directory results using Yahoo! Directory listing content & keeps all the user data.
attribution	Bing publicly claimed for years to be using a user-driven search signal based on query streams.	Google removes the Yahoo! Directory logo to format the page. Does Google remove the Google logo from Google.com when formatting for mobile? Nope.
ads	Bing sells their own ads & is not scraping Google content wholesale.	Google scrapes Yahoo! Directory content wholesale & strips out the sidebar CPC ads.
search box	Bing puts their own search box on their own website.	Google puts their own search box on the content of the Yahoo! Directory.
user behavior	Google claimed that Bing was using "their data" when tracking end user behavior.	Google hosts the Yahoo! Directory page, allowing themselves to fully track user behavior, while robbing Yahoo! of the opportunity to even see their own data with how users interact with their own listings.

In the above case the publisher absorbs 100% of the editorial cost & Google absorbs nearly 100% of the benefit (while disclaiming they do not endorse the page they host, wrap in their own search ad, and track user behavior on).

As we move into a search market where the search engines give you a slightly larger listing for marking up your pages with rich snippets, you will see a short term 10% or 20% lift in traffic followed by a 50% or more decline when Google enters your market with "instant answers."

The ads remain up top & the organic resultss get pushed down. It isn't scraping if they get 10 or 20 competitors to do it & then use the aggregate data to launch a competing service ... talk to the bankrupt Yellow Pages companies & ask them how Google has helped to build their businesses.

Update: looks like this has been around for a while...though when I spoke to numerous friends nobody had ever seen it before. The only reason I came across it was seeing a referrer through a new page type from Google & not knowing what the heck it was. Clearly this search option doesn't get much traffic because Google even removes their own ads from their own search results. I am glad to know this isn't something that is widespread, though still surprised it exists at all given that it effectively removes monetization from the publisher & takes the content wholesale and re-publishes it across domain names.

Categories:

Interview of Jonah Stein

Aaron Wall — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:50:58 +0000

I was recently chatting with Jonah Stein about Panda & we decided it probably made sense to do a full on interview.

You mentioned that you had a couple customers that were hit by Panda. What sort of impact did that have on those websites?

Both of these sites saw an immediate hit of about 35% of google traffic. Ranking dropped 3-7 spots. The traffic hit was across the board, especially in the case of GreatSchools, who saw all content types hit (school profile pages, editorial content, UGC)

GreatSchools was hit on the 4-9 (panda 2.0) update and called out in the Sistrix analysis.

How hard has GreatSchools been hit? Sistrix data suggested that GreatSchools was loosing about 56% of Google traffic. The real answer is that organic Google-referred traffic to the site fell 30% on April 11 (week over week) and overall site entries are down 16%. Total page views are down 13%. The penalty, of course, is a “site wide” penalty but not all entry page types are being affected equally

Google suggested that there was perhaps some false positives but that they were generally pretty satisfied with the algorithms. For sites that were hit, how do clients respond to the SEOs? I mean did the SEO get a lot of the blame or did the clients get that the change was sort of a massive black swan?

I think I actually took it harder then they did. Sure, it hit their bottom line pretty hard, but it hit my ego. Getting paid is important but the real rush for me is ranking #1.

Fortunately none of my clients think they are inherently entitled to Google traffic, so I didn't get blamed. They were happy that I was on top of it (telling them before they noticed) and primarily wanted to know what Panda was about.

Once you get over the initial shock and the grieving, responding to Panda was a rorschach test, everyone saw something different. But is also an interesting self - reflection, especially when the initial advice coming from Greg Boser and a few others was to start to de-index content.

For clients who are not ad driven, the other interesting aspect is that generally speaking conversions were not hurt as much as traffic, so once you start focusing on the bottom line you discover the pain is a little less severe than it seemed initially.

So you mentioned that not all pages were impacted equally. I think pages where there was more competition were generally hit harder than pages that had less competition. Is that sort of inline with what you saw?

Originally I thought that was maybe the case, but as I looked at the data during the recovery process I became convinced that Panda is really the public face of a much deeper switch towards user engagement. While the Panda score is sitewide the engagement "penalty" or weighting effect on also occurs at the individual page. The pages or content areas that were hurt less by Panda seem to be the ones that were not also being hurt by the engagement issue.

On one of my clients we moved a couple sections to sub-domains, following the HubPages example and the experience of some members of your community. The interesting thing is that we moved the blog from /blog to blog.domain.com and we moved one vertical niche from /vertical-kw to vertical-kw.example.com. The vertical almost immediately recovered to pre-panda levels while the traffic to the blog stayed flat.

So the vertical was suddenly getting 2x the traffic. On the next panda push the vertical dropped 20% but that was still a huge improvement over before we moved to the subdomain. The blog didn't budge.

The primary domain also seemed to improve some, but it was hard to isolate that from the impact of all of the other changes, improvements and content consolidation we were doing.

After the next panda data push did not kill the vertical sub domain, we elected to move a second one. On the next data push, everything recovered - a clean bill of health - no pandalization at all.

but....

GreatSchools completely recovered the same day and that was November 11th, so Panda 3.0. I cannot isolate the impact of any particular change versus Google tweaking the algorithm and I think both sites were potentially edge cases for Panda anyway.

Now that we are in 3.3 or whatever the numbering calls it, I can say with confidence that moving "bad" content to a sub-domain carries the Panda score with it and you won't get any significant recovery.

You mentioned Greg Boser suggesting deindexing & doing some consolidation. Outside of canonicalization, did you test doing massive deindexing (or were subdomains your main means of testing isolation)?

We definitely collapse a lot of content, mostly 301s but maybe 25% of it was just de-indexing. That was the first response. We took 1150 categories/keyword focused landing pages and reduced to maybe 300. We did see some gains but nothing that resembled the huge boost when Panda was lifted.

Back to the rorschach test: We did a lot of improvements that yielded incremental gains but were still weighed down. I reminds me of when I used to work on cars. I had this old Audi 100 that was running poorly so I did a complete tune up, new wires, plugs, etc., but it was still running badly. Then I noticed the jet in the carburetor was mis-aligned. As soon as I fixed that, boom, the car was running great. Everything else we fixed may have been the right thing to do for SEO and/or users but it didn't solve the problem we were experiencing.

The other interesting thing is that I had a 3rd client who appeared to get hit by Panda or at least suffer from Panda like symptoms after their host went down for about 9 hours. Rankings tanked across the board, traffic down 50% for 10 days. They fully recovered on the next panda push. My theory is that this outage pushed their engagement metrics over the edge somehow. Of course, it may not have really been Panda at all but the ranking reports and traffic drops felt like Panda. The timing was after November 11th, so it was a more recent version of the Panda infrastructure.

Panda 1.0 was clearly a rush job and 2.0 seemed to be a response to the issues it created and the fact that demand media got a free pass. I think it took 6-8 months for them to really get the infrastructure robust.

My takeaways from Panda are that this is not an individual change or something with a magic bullet solution. Panda is clearly based on data about the user interacting with the SERP (Bounce, Pogo Sticking), time on site, page views, etc., but it is not something you can easily reduce to 1 number or a short set of recommendations. To address a site that has been Pandalized requires you to isolate the "best content" based on your user engagement and try to improve that.

I don't know if it was intentional or not but engagement as a relevancy factor winds up punishing sites who have built links and traffic through link bait and infographics because by definition these users have a very high bounce rate and a relatively low time on site. Look at the behavioral metrics in GA; if your content has 50% of people spending less than 10 seconds, that may be a problem or that may be normal. The key is to look below that top graph and see if you have a bell curve or if the next largest segment is the 11-30 second crowd.

I also think Panda is rewarding sites that have a diversified traffic stream. The higher percentage of your users who are coming direct or searching for you by name (brand) or visiting you from social the more likely Google is to see your content as high quality. Think of this from the engine's point of view instead of the site owner. Algorithmic relevancy was enough until we all learned to game that, then came links as a vote of trust. While everyone was looking at social and talking about likes as the new links they jumped ahead to the big data solution and baked an algorithm that tries to measure interaction of users as a whole with your site. The more time people spend on your site, the more ways they find it aside from organic search, the more they search for you by name, the more Google is confident you are a good site.

Based on that, are there some sites that you think have absolutely no chance of recovery? In some cases did getting hit by Panda cause sites to show even worse user metrics? (there was a guy named walkman on WebmasterWorld who suggested that some sites that had "size 13 shoe out of stock" might no longer rank for the head keywords but would rank for the "size 13" related queries.

I certainly think that if you have a IYP and you have been hit with Panda your toast unless you find a way to get huge amounts of fresh content (yelp). I don't think the size 13 shoe site has a chance but it is not about Panda. Google is about to roll out lots of semantic search changes and the only way ecommerce sites (outside of the 10 or so brands that dominate Google Products) will have a chance is with schema.org markup and Google's next generation search. The truth is the results for a search for shoes by size is a miserable experience at the moment. I wear size 16 EEEE, so I have a certain amount of expertise on this topic. :)

Do you see Schema as a real chance for small players? Or something that is a short term carrot before they get beat with the stick? I look at hotel search results like & and I fear that spreading as more people format their content in a format that is easy to scrape & displace. (For illustration purposes, in the below image, the areas in red are clicks that Google is paid for or clicks to fraternal Google pages.)

I doubt small players will be able to use Schema as a lifeline but it may keep you in the game long enough to transition into being a brand. The reason I have taken your advice about brands to heart and preach it to my clients is that it is short sighted to believe that any of the SEO niche strategies are going to survive if they are not supported with PR, social, PPC and display.

More importantly, however, is that they are going to focus on meeting the needs of the user as opposed to simply converting them during that visit. To use a baseball analogy, we have spent 15 years keeping score of home runs while the companies that are winning the game have been tracking walks, singles, doubles and outs. Schema may deliver some short term opportunities for traffic but I don't think size13shoes.com will be saved by the magic of semantic markup.

On the other hand, if I were running an ecommerce store, particularly if I was competing with Amazon, Bestbuy, Walmart and the hand full of giant brands that dominate the product listings in the SERP, I wouldn't bury my head in the sand and pretend that everyone else wasn't moving in that direction anyway. Maybe if you can do it right you can emerge as a winner, at least over the short and medium term.

In that sense SEO is a moving target, where "best practices" depend on the timing in the marketplace, the site you are applying the strategy to, and the cost of implementation.

Absolutely...but that is only half the story. If you are an entrepreneur who likes to build site based on a monetization strategy, then it is a moving target where you always have to keep your eyes on the horizon. For most of my clients the name of the game is actually to focus on trying to own your keyword space and take advantage of inertia. That is to say that if you understand the keywords you want to target, develop a strategy for them and then go out and be a solid brand, you will eventually win. Most of my clients rank in the top couple of spots for the key terms for their industry with a fairly conservative slow and steady strategy, but I wouldn't accept a new client who comes to me and says they want to rank a new site #1 for credit cards or debt consolidation and they have $200,000 to spend..or even $2,000,000. We may able to get there for the short term but not with strategies that will stand the test of time.

Of course, as I illustrated with the Nuts.com example on SearchEngineLand last month, the same strategy that works on a 14 year old domain may not be as effective for a newer site, even if you 301 that old domain. SEO is an art, not a science. As practitioners we need to constantly be following the latest developments but the real skill is in knowing when to apply them and how much; even then occasionally the results are surprising, disappointing or both.

I think there is a bit of a chicken vs egg problem there then if a company can't access a strong SEO without already having both significant capital & a bit of traction in the marketplace. As Google keeps making SEO more complex & more expensive do you think that will drive a lot of small players out of the market?

I think it has already happened. It isn't about the inability to access a strong SEO it is that anyone with integrity is going to lay out the obstacles they face. Time and time again we see opportunity for creativity to triumph but the odds are really stacked against you if you are an underfunded retailer.

Just last year I helped a client with 450 domains who had been hit with Panda and then with a landing page penalty. It took a few months to sort out and get the reconsideration granted (by instituting cross domain rel=canonical and eliminating all the duplicate content across their network). They are gradually recovering to maybe 80% of where they were before Panda 2.0 but I can't provide them an organic link building strategy that will lift 450 niche ecommerce sites. I can't tell them how they are going to get any placement in a shrinking organic SERP dominated by Google's dogfood, shopping results from big box retailers and enormous Adwords Product Listings with images

From that perspective, if your funding is limited, do you think you are better off attacking a market from an editorial perspective & bolting on commerce after you build momentum (rather than starting with ecommerce and then trying to bolt on editorial?

Absolutely. Clearly the path is to have built Pinterest, but seriously...

if you are passionate about something or have a disruptive idea you will succeed (or maybe fail), but if you think you can copy what others are doing and carve out a niche based on exploits I disagree. Of course, autoinsurancequoteeasy.com seems to be saying you can still make a ton of money in the quick flip world, even with a big bank roll, you need to be disruptive or innovative.

On the other hand, if you have some success in your niche you can use creativity to grow, but it has to be something new. Widget bait launched @oatmeal's online dating site but it is more likely to bury you now than help you rank #1, or at least prevent you from ranking on the matching anchor text.

When a company starts off small & editorially focused how do you know that it is time to scale up on monetization? Like if I had a successful 200 page site & wanted to add a 20,000 page database to it...would you advise against that, or how would you suggest doing that in a post-Panda world?

This is a tough call. I actually have a client in exactly this position. I guess it depends on the nature of the 20,000 pages. If you are running a niche directory (like my client) my advice to them was to add the pages to the site but no index the individual listing until they can get some unique content. This is still likely to run fowl of the engagement issue presented by Panda, so we kept the expanded pages on geo oriented sub-domains.

Earlier you mentioned that Panda challenged some of your assumptions. Could you describe how it changed your views on search?

I always tell prospects that 10-15 years ago my job was to trick search engines into delivering traffic but over the last 5-6 years it has evolved and now my job is to trick clients into developing content that users want. Panda just changed the definition of "good content" from relevant, well linked content to relevant, well linked, sticky content.

It has also made me more of a believer in diversifying traffic.

Last year Google made a huge stink about MSN "stealing" results because they were sniffing traffic streams and crawling queries on Google. The truth is that Google has so many data sources and so many signals to analyze that they don't need to crawl facebook or index links on twitter. They know where traffic is coming from and where it is going and if you are getting traffic from social, they know it.

As Google folds more data into their mix do you worry that SEO will one day become too complex to analyze (or move the needle)? Would that push SEOs to mostly work in house at bigger companies, or would being an SEO become more akin to being a public relations & media relations expert?

I think it may already be too complex to analyze in the sense that it is almost impossible to get repeatable results for every client or tell them how much traffic they are going to achieve. On the other hand, moving the needles is still reasonably easy—as long as you are in agreement about what direction everyone is going. SEO for me is about Website Optimization, about asking everyone about the search intent of the query that brings the visitors to the site and making sure we have actions that match this intent. Most of my engagements wind up being a combination of technical seo/problem solving, analytics, strategy and company wide or at least team wide education. All of these elements are driven by keyword research and are geared towards delivering traffic so it is an SEO based methodology, but the requirements for the job have morphed.

As for moving in house, I have been there and I doubt I will ever go back. Likewise, I am not really a PR or media relations expert but if the client doesn't have those skills in house I strongly suggest they invest in getting them.

Ironically, many companies still fail to get the basics right. They don't empower their team, they don't leverage their real world relationships and most importantly they don't invest enough in developing high quality content. Writing sales copy is not something you should outsource to college students!

It still amazes me how hard it is to get content from clients and how often this task is delegated to whoever is at the bottom of the org chart. Changing a few words on a page can pay huge dividends but the highest paid people in the room are rarely involved enough.

In the enterprise, SEO success is largely driven by getting everyone on board. Being a successful SEO consultant (as opposed to running your own sites) is actually one quarter about being a subject matter expert on everything related to Google, one quarter about social, PR, Link building, conversion, etc and half about being a project manager. You need to get buying from all the stake holders, strive to educate the whole team and hit deliverables.

Given the increased complexity of SEO (in needing to understand user intent, fixing a variety of symptoms to dig to the core of a problem, understanding web analytics data, faster algorithm changes, etc.) is there still a sweet spot for independent consultants who do not want to get bogged down by those who won't fully take on their advice? And what are some of your best strategies for building buy in from various stakeholders at larger companies?

The key is to charge enough and to work on a monthly retainer instead of hourly. This sounds flippant but the bottom line is to balance how many engagements you can manage at one time versus how much you want to earn every month. You can't do justice to the needs of a client and bill hourly. That creates an artificial barrier between you and their team. All of my clients know I am always available to answer any SEO related question from anyone on the team at almost any time.

The increased complexity is really job security. Most of my clients are long term relationships and the ones I enjoy the most are more or less permanent partnerships. We have been very successful together and they value having me around for strategic advice, to keep them abreast of changes and to be available when changes happen. Both of the clients who got hit by Panda have been with me for more than four years.

No one can be an expert in everything. I definitely enjoy analytics and data but I have very strong partnerships with a few other agencies that I bring in when I need them. I am very happy with the work that AnalyticsPros has done for my clients. Likewise David Rodnitzky (PPC Associates) and I have partnered on a number of clients. Both allow me to be involved in the strategy and know that the execution will be very high quality. I only wish I had some link builders I felt as passionate about (given that Deborah Mastaler is always too busy to take my clients.)

You mentioned that you thought user engagement metrics were a big part of Panda based on analytics data & such...how would a person look through analytics data to uncover such trends?

I would focus on the behavioral metrics tab in GA. It is pretty normal to have a large percentage of visitors leave before 10 seconds, but after that you should see a bell curve. Low quality content will actually have 60-70% abandonment in less than 10 seconds, but the trick is for some searches 10 seconds is a good result: weather, what is your address, hours of operations. Lots of users get what they need from searches, sometimes even from the SERP, so look for outliers. Compare different sections of your site, say the blog or those infographics & bad page types.

Its hard to say until you get your hands in the data but if you assume that individual pages can be weighed down by poor engagement and that this trend is maybe 1 year old and evolving, you can find some clues. Learn to use those advance segments and build out meaningful segmentation on your dashboard and you will be surprised how much of this will jump out at you. It is like over optimization: until you believed in it you never noticed & now you can spot it within a few seconds of looking at a page. I won't pretend engagement issues jump out that fast but it is possible to find them, especially if you are an in house SEO who really knows your site.

The other important consideration is that improving engagement for an given page is a win regardless of whether it impacts your rankings or your Panda situation. The mantra about doing what is right for the users, not the search engine may sound cliche but they reality is that most of your decisions and priorities should be driven by giving the user what they want. I won't pretend that this is the short road to SERP dominance but my philosophy is to target the user with 80% of your efforts and feed the engines with the other 20.

Thanks Jonah :)

~~~~~~~~~~

Jonah Stein has 15 years of online marketing experience and is the founder of ItsTheROI, a San Francisco Search Engine Marketing Company that specializes in ROI driven SEO and PPC initiatives. Jonah has spoken at numerous industry conferences including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), SMX Advanced, SIIA On Demand, the Kelsey Groups Ultimate Search Workshop and LT Pact. He also developed panels Virtual Blight for the Web 2.0 Summit and the Web 2.0 Expo. He has written for Context Web, Search Engine Land and SEO Book

Jonah is also the cofounder of two SaaS companies, including CodeGuard.com, a cloud based backup service that provides a time machine for websites and Hubkick.com, an online collaboration and task management tool that provides a simple way for groups to work together-instantly.

Categories:

interviews

Branding & The Cycle

Aaron Wall — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:36:12 +0000

Since it took me a few hours to put together my SMX presentation I figured it was worth sharing that information on the blog as well. This post will discuss examples of how Google has dialed up their brand bias over time & points to where Google may be headed in the future.

Note that I don't have anything against them promoting brands, I just think it is dishonest to claim they are not.

Against All Odds

When analyzing Google's big-brand bias the question is not "do some small sites manage to succeed against all odds" but…

What are the trends?
What are the biases?

Quotable Quotes

Eric Schmidt once stated that "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired."

We have a fear of the unknown. Thus that which we have already experienced is seen as less risky than something new & different. This is a big part of why & how cumulative advantage works - it lowers perceived risk.

A significant portion of brand-related searches are driven by offline advertising. When a story becomes popular in the news people look online to learn more. The same sort of impact can be seen with ads - from infomercials to Superbowl ads. Geico alone spends nearly a billion Dollars per year on advertising, & Warren Buffet mentioned that 3/4 of their quotes come from the internet.

Some of the most profitable business models are built off of questionable means.

Many big brands are owned by conglomorates with many horses in the race. When one gets caught doing something illegal they close it down or sell off the assets & move to promote their parallel projects more aggressively.

If things aligned with brands become relevancy signals then to some degree those measure longevity & size of a company (and their ad budget) rather than the quality of their offering.

Even before the Panda update Google's Amit Singhal suggested the problem with this:

Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By “pointing” to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence.
...
Google’s Mr Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition”: where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect, he adds.

Since Panda Overstock has moved into offering ebooks & insurance quotes while companies like Barnes & Noble run affiliate listings for rugs.

As an example of the above trend gone astray, my wonderful wife recently purchased me a new computer. I was trying to figure out how to move over some user databases (like our Rank Checker & Advanced Web Ranking) and in the search results were pages like this one:

The problems with the above are:

actual legitimate reviews get pushed down by such filler
the business model behind doing such actual reviews gets eroded by the automated syndicated reviews
outside of branding & navigation the content is fully syndicated
that particular page is referencing the 2005 version of the software, so the listed price is wrong & the feature set has changed a lot in the last 7 years

Such scrape-n-mash content strategies by large brands are not uncommon. Sites like Answers.com can quickly add a coupons section, sites like FindTheBest can create 10s of millions of automated cross-referencing pages that load a massive keyword net of related keywords below the fold, news sites can create auto-generated subdomains of scraped content, etc.

Eric Schmidt highlighted FindTheBest publicly as an example of a successful vertical search play. That site was launched by an ex-Googler, but if I did the same thing you can be certain that the only way Google would highlight it publicly would be as a "type of spam."

The issue with broadly measuring user experience is that I am still going to visit Yahoo! Sports repeatedly even if my experience on Yahoo! Downloads is pretty crappy. A site which is a market leader in one niche can take thoe signals to launch a "me too" service in other parallel markets & quickly dominate the market.

Potential Brand Signals

When attempting to debunk the concept of "brand bias" some people claim that it would be rediculous for Google to have a list of brands that get an across-the-board boost. Of course that debunking is debunking a straw man that was never stated publicly (outside of the irrelevant debunking).

However, some of Google's old rater documents *did* have certain sites whitelisted & Google's Scott Huffman once wrote the following:

At a [search] quality level, we have something similar. On a continuous basis in every one of our data centers, a large set of queries are being run in the background, and we’re looking at the results, looking up our evaluations of them and making sure that all of our quality metrics are within tolerance.

These are queries that we have used as ongoing tests, sort of a sample of queries that we have scored results for; our evaluators have given scores to them. So we’re constantly running these across dozens of locales. Both broad query sets and navigational query sets, like “San Francisco bike shop” to the more mundane, like: Here’s every U.S. state and they have a home page and we better get that home page in the top results, and if we don’t … then literally somebody’s pager goes off.

(Outside of some fraternal Google properties) the algorithm isn't hardcoded to rank sites x & y at #1, but if some sites don't rank for certain queries it does cause an alert to be sent out.

Google has a wide host of quality-based metrics they could look at and analyze when determining if something gets a brand boost, gets ignored, or gets hit by an algorithm like Panda.

A while back we wrote a post on potential brand signals, but a short list of examples would be:

Classical relevancy signals
- domain name
- website age
- anchor text
- link diversity
- keyword co-citation
- inclusion in trusted databases
Search behavior
- keyword search volume trends
- CTR of users on search results (including how users respond to changes in rank)
- URL-based searches & other branded searches (the most popular keyword on Google is Facebook)
- back button clicks (did the user find what they were looking for? or did they look somewhere else?)
- repeat visitors (if someone repeatedly visits a website that is generally a pretty strong indication they had a positive user experience)
- search query chains (Google suggested this was a big driver in the Vince update)
Passive user monitoring
- search has become the primary mode of navigation online
- Google has long offered a search toolbar & paid to have it installed in new computers
- Google paid Mozilla about a billion Dollars for default search placement in Firefox
- Google owns Chrome & Android
- Google offers the most widely used analytics program
- Google can also use AdSense ads and YouTube data to track users
- Google was recently caught in privacy-related snafus with tracking Safari & Internet Explorer users

Brand-focused Editorial

In 2008 Rhea Drysdale created the following image, which highted how the same activity could be viewed as a legitimate marketing strategy or spam based on nothing other than who was doing it.

The Vince Update

In 2009 Google rolled some of their brand bias directly into the relevancy algorithms. A bunch of branded sites all jumped up in rankings out of nowhere for core industry keywords.

Around that time Microsoft offered a search funnels tool, which showed what people searched for after searching for a particular keyword.

The above screenshots (from Rankpulse and the Microsoft Search Funnels) are both from now defunct tools, but Yahoo! has since launched a tool called Yahoo! Clues which shows similar relationships.

Amit Singhal told the Telegraph that Google is "the biggest kingmaker on this Earth."

A Google engineer admitted that the Vince update was largely driven by search funnels. Google then rolled out a search results interface change which promoted brands & stores directly in the search results.

If you search for "fishing gear" and then click their Bass Shop refinement link in the search results, you are thus directly creating that search funnels relevancy "signal." Even if you don't click on that link the exposure to the term may make you remember it and search for it later.

Paid Links

Are paid links evil?

Once again, it depends on who is doing it.

When the largest flower websites were caught buying massive quantities of links, a Google spokesperson told the New York Times: "None of the links … had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links."

When some small bloggers were selling paid links to K-Mart as part of a "sponsored conversations" outreach, Matt Cutts equated the practice to selling bogus solutions to brain cancer & stated: "Those blogs are not trusted in Google's algorithms any more."

Google also started sending webmasters automated messages for bad links pointing at their sites:

Dear site owner or webmaster of domain.com, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
...
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

So if you run a big site & they automatically detect paid links they generally just ignore those links and leave your site alone. If you are a small site & they automatically detect paid links they may decide to automatically penalize your site.

Same offence, entirely different outcome.

Cloaking

Is cloaking evil?

Once again, it depends on who is doing it.

I have a Vistaprint Visa card (so I could get a credit card with our dog's picture on it) and one of the pages that was ranking for Vistaprint Visa was the Singapore Groupon website.

The page forces a pop up and you can't do anything on that page (view the content, scroll around the site, etc.) other than filling in the lead generation form or logging into an existing account. I would never try that because I know I would get smoked for it. ;)

Groupon has also ran AdWords accounts where the only option was to fill in the lead generation form or click into the TOS which are in another language!

After the first iteration of the Google Panda update Google allowed users to vote to block websites. Experts Exchange was hated among some programmers in part because they used scroll cloaking. That in turn got their site hit by the second Panda update.

Google then later rolled out a new ad unit where you pay for viewing content by taking a Google survey & some YouTube videos use preroll ads.

Doorway Pages

Are doorway pages evil?

Once again, it depends on who is doing it.

After the Panda update Ikea's thin content-free pages started ranking page 1 for some pretty competitive keywords.

Huffington Post later wrapped 3rd party Tweets in their site's template & ranked those in Google.

Smaller webmasters who ran network of sites in some cases got hit with "doorway page" penalties for owning networks of sites registered in Google Webmaster Tools, even if each site was a full fledged ecommerce website.

Content Farming

Is content farming evil?

Once again, it depends on who is doing it (and where it is hosted).

Long before the Panda update I highlighted some of the informationless videos Demand Media was uploading to Youtube.

In spite of Google's Panda hitting eHow, Google still decided to pre-pay Demand Media to keep uploading YouTube videos.

Another thing that is interesting about the content farms and the alleged need for the Panda algorithm was that in spite of flagrant editorial violations by both eHow and Mahalo, Google didn't smoke them until it could be done "algorithmically."

On the flip side of the above, in some cases Google has chose to keep smaller webmasters penalized because content that was at one point on their site months in the past!

Google+

When Google+ launched I highlighted how it was acting as a scraper site by outranking original publisher content. About a half-year later some tech blogger noticed that issue & caused a big stink over it. A Google engineer then suggested that it was childish to place any of the blame on Google. Shortly after that Google integrated Google+ in the search results far more aggressively.

A couple weeks after that aggressive promotional integration Amit Singal stated: "The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term."

The problem with build preferential rankings first & increase quality later is that is the exact opposite of what Google is asking publishers to do with algorithms like Panda. Worse yet, Google not only does this integration when you are logged in, but also shows it on obscure longtail advanced queries when you are not logged in.

Affiliates

When Google's ad ecosystem was young they loved affiliates, but that changed over time.

In Google's remote rater documents they suggested that hotel affiliate sites be marked as spam, even if they are helpful.

On Google's reconsideration request form they also stated: "In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered."

And while Google has biased their editorial philosophies away from affiliates, some of the trusted brands like Barnes & Noble added affiliate listings to their websites, selling things like rugs.

The Business Cycle

Most businesses tend to grow in a cycle...

Boostrap / self-funded
Raise funds / take out a loan
Build exposure
Monetize attention
Re-invest in increased quality
Build a brand
Build further exposure
Monetize more attention
Re-invest in increased quality

The broken piggy bank in the above cycle highlights the break that exists in the process to building a big brand. It is quite hard to have any level of certainty in the search ecosystem with an alogorithm like Panda. Without that level of certainty companies must build from low cost structures, but that very constraint makes them more likely to get hit by an algorithm or search engineer.

Pricing Risk

Being an entrepreneur is all about taking smart calculated bets & managing risk. However as search engines become closed off portals that compete with (& exclude) publishers, there are so many unknowns that estimating risk is exceptionally challenging.

When the New York Times bought About.com Google was one of the leading competing bidders. But after Panda, About.com's profit declined by 2/3.
TeachStreet was a fast growing start up that was shut down due to Panda.
CustomMade is a Google-funded start up launched by an SEO who purchased an old website & created a vertical directory out of it (just like TeachStreet was trying to do, but in a different vertical). Googler's helped with the project & the article highlighting that shared this quote: "Having Google as an investor gives you a branding piece that you can't ignore." - Christopher Ahlberg.

Penalties: How Hard Were They Hit?

Years ago when BMW or Wordpress.org got caught spamming aggressively they were back in good graces in a mater of days.
About the only times well known (non-affiliate) sites have been penalized for a significant duration was when JC Penney & Overstock.com were hit. But that happened around the time of the Panda fiasco & Google had incentive to show who was boss. When the flower sites were outed for massive link buying that was ignored because Google had already rolled out Panda & reasserted the perception of their brand.
When Google was caught buying links (again) to promote Google's Chrome browser & that story spread widely throughout the mainstream press, Googlers lied & claimed there was only 1 paid link in 1 single page & penalized a single page of their site. Small website owners that have been caught in similar link buying (or selling) campaigns have been hit much harder. Remember the above story about the bloggers blogging about K-Mart? So far this year Google has sent webmasters over 700,000 messages in Google Webmaster Central.

1 Strike - You're Out

In 2009 Google banned over 30,000 affiliates from the AdWords auction. In some cases the problem was not with a current ad (or even a landing page the advertiser controlled), but rather ads that ran years ago promoting 3rd party products. In some cases Google changed their AdWords TOS after the fact in an ex-post facto style. Google won't allow some of these advertisers to advertise unless they fix the landing page, but if they don't control the landing page they can't ever fix the problem. Making things worse, to this day Google still suggests affiliates do direct linking. But if the company they promote gets bought out by someone too aggressive then that affiliate could be waiting for a lifetime ban through no fault of their own.

A popular programmer who has been an AdSense publisher for 8 years had their AdSense account arbitrarily suspended without warning. After an ex-Googler expressed outrage over the issue he was able to get his AdSense account reactivated. A publisher without those friendships would have been done.

In Australia a small travel site had a similar issue with AdSense. The only way they were able to get a reconsideration was to lodge a formal complaint with regulators. If that is how Google treats their business partners, it colors how they view non-business partners who monetize traffic without giving Google a taste of the revenues.

Why Does Google Lean Into Brand?

Minimize legal risks: if they hit small businesses almost nobody will see/notice/care, but big businesses are flush with cash and political connections. When Google hits big businesses they create organizations & movements like Fair Search & Search Neutrality.
Minimize duplication: some small businesses & affiliates simply repeat offers that exist on larger merchant sites. That said, many big businesses buy out a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or even 5th site in a verticle to have multiple placements in the search results.
Better user experience: the theory is that the larger sites have more data and capital to improve user experience, but they don't always do it.
Business partnerships: if Google wants to strike up closed door business partnerships with big business then some of those negotiations will have specific terms attached to them. It costs Google nothing to give away part of the organic results as part of some custom deals. If Google wants to sell TV ads & run a media streaming device they need to play well with brands.
CPA-based product ads: on some searches Google provides CPA-based product ads above the search results. It makes sense for Google to promote those who are buying their ads to get the best relationships possible.
Fewer people tasting the revenues: the fewer organizations an ecosystem needs to support the more of the profits from that ecosystem that can be kept by the manager.
More complete ad cycle: if Google caters to direct response advertisers they get to monetize the demand fulfillment of demand, however that is only a small slice of the complete ad cycle. If Google caters to brands they get to monetize (directly or indirectly) every piece of the ad cycle. For example, buying display ads helps build brand searches which helps create brand signals. In such a way, improved rankings in the organic results subsidize ad buying.
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
- Satisfaction
Brands buying their equity: Google has create exceptionally large ad units & has convinced many brands to buy their own pre-existing brand equity.

Lack of Diversity

The big issue with brand bias is that a lot of the same *types* of companies rank with roughly similar consumer experiences. If there is a mix of large and small businesses that rank then many of those small businesses will be able to differentiate their offering by adding services to their products, doing in-depth reviews, and so on.

Sure Zappos is a big company known for customer service, but how different is the consumer-facing experience if I click on Target.com or Walmart.com? Sure the text on the page may be slightly different, but is there any real difference beyond aesthetic? Further, a lot of the business models built around strong in-depth editorial reviews & comparisons are eroded by the current algorithms. If the consumer reviews are not good enough, then tough luck!

Do Brands Always Provide a Better User Experience?

Some larger retailers track people in ways that are creepy:

For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. "If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we've sent you or visit our Web site, we'll record it and link it to your Guest ID," Pole said. "We want to know everything we can."

Many big media companies provided watered down versions of their content online because they don't want to cannibalize their offline channels. Likewise some large stores may consider their website an afterthought. When I wanted to order my wife a specific shoe directly from the brand they didn't have customer support open for extended hours during the holidays and their shopping cart kept kicking an error. Since they *are* the brand, that brand strength allows them to get away with other issues that need fixed.

Some of those same sites carry huge AdSense ad blocks on the category pages & have funky technical issues which act like doorway pages & force users who are using any browser to go through their homepage if they land on a deep page.

Missing the Target indeed.

That above "screw you" redirect error has been going on literally for weeks now, with Target's webmaster asleep at the wheel. Perhaps they want you to navigate their site by internal search so they can track every character you type.

Riding The Waves

With SEO many aggressive techniques work for a period of time & then suddenly stop working. Every so often there are major changes like the Florida update & the Panda update, but in between these there are other smaller algorithmic updates that aim to fill in the holes until a big change comes about.

No matter what Google promotes, they will always have some gaps & relevancy issues. Some businesses that "ignore the algorithms and focus on the user" are likely to run on thinner margins than those who understand where they algorithms are headed. Those thin margins can quickly turn negative if either Google enters your niche or top competitors keep reinvesting in growth to buy more marketshare.

Profit Potential

Given the above pattern - where trends spread until they get hit hard - those who quickly figure out where the algorithms are going & where there are opportunities have plenty of time to monetize their efforts. Whereas if you have to wait until things are widely spread on SEO blogs as common "tricks of the trade" or wait until a Google engineer explicitly confirms something then you are likely only going to be adopting techniques and strategies after most of the profit potential is sucked out of them, just before the goal posts move yet again.

People who cloned some of the most profitable eHow articles years ago had plenty of time to profit before the content farm business model got hit. Those who waited until Demand Media spelled their business model out in a Wired article had about 1.5 years until the hammer. Those who waited until the content farm controversy started creating a public relations issue to clone the model may have only had a couple months of enhanced revenues before their site got hit & was worse off than before they chased the algorithm late in the game.

Ride The Brand

If Google does over-represent established branded websites in their algorithms then in many cases it will be far easier to rank a Facebook notes page or a YouTube video than to try to rank a new site from scratch. There are a ton of web 2.0 sites driven by user generated content.

In addition to those sorts of sites, also consider participating in industry websites in your niche & buying presell pages on sites that rank especially well.

Collecting (& Abusing) User Data

Google has been repeatedly branded as being a bit creepy for their interest in user tracking.

Their latest privacy policy change was rolled out in spite of EU warnings that it might not comply with the law.

Collecting that data & using it for ad targeting can have profound personal implications (think of serving a girl with anorexia ads about losing weight everywhere she goes online, simply because she clicks the ad, in such a case Google reinforces a warped worldview). Then when the person needs counseling Google can recommend a service provider there as well. ;)

Trust in Google's ability to do the right thing would be greater if they were not caught in that drug sting selling ads to fake Mexican pharmacies selling illicit products, a practice they were involved in before going public.

They also take aggregate collected data and sell it off to banksters.

Google as Content Host (& Merchant)

Throughout the history of the web there will be many cycles between open and closed ecosystems. Currently we are cyling toward closed silos (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook). As these silos become more closed off they will end up leaving gaps that create new opportunities.

Goolge has been pushing aggressively for years to host content & crowd out the organic search results.

As publishers mark up their content Google can aggregate & displace publishers higher up the value chain. Google has done research on measuring non-click user satisfaction (no need to bother leaving Google & visiting the publisher site). If your business model was one of the examples on that list I would bet on Google entering your niche aggressively sooner rather than later.
When many other content farms were hit YouTube gained traffic. YouTube is investing in original content & partnering with NBC for Olympics coverage and Disney for kid shows.
Google+ is inserted directly in the organic search results & often outranks the original content source.
Google Books has seen aggressive integration in the search results, even before the legal issues have been resolved.
Google Places has long pushed down the organic search results & in some cases (like with hotels) Google also adds price ads to these listings.
Google Flights has pushed down the organic search results & Google is also powering flight booking options on some smaller regional carriers.

While on one front Google keeps making it easier for brands to compete against non-brands, Google also keeps clawing back a bigger slice of that branded traffic through larger AdWords ad units & integration of listings from services like Google+, which can in some cases outrank the actual brand.

Google has multiple platforms (Android Marketplace, Chrome Marketplace, Enterprise Marketplace) competing against iTunes. Google recently decided to merge some of their offerings into Google Play. In addition to games, music & books, Play will soon include audiobooks, magazines & other content formats.

Google also wants to compete against Amazon.com to launch an Amazon Prime-like delivery service.

Having a brand & following will still be important for allowing preimium rates, fatter margins, building non-search distribution (which can be used to influence the "relevancy" signals), and to help overturn manual editorial interventions. But algorithmically brand emphasis will peak in the next year or two as Google comes to appreciate that they have excesssively consolidated some markets and made it too hard for themselves to break into those markets. (Recall how Google came up with their QDF algorithm only *after* Google Finance wasn't able to rank). At that point in time Google will push their own verticals more aggressively & launch some aggressive public relations campaigns about helping small businesses succeed online.

Once Google is the merchant of record, almost everyone is just an affiliate, especially in digital marketplaces with digital delivery.

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Why SEO Consultants Push Brand

Aaron Wall — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:35:02 +0000

At SMX I gave a presentation on brand & how Google has biased the algorithms toward brands. having already seeing the bulk of my argument months prior, Bryson Meunier spoke after me and put together a presentation that used bogus statistics & was basically a smear of me. He was so over the top with his obnoxious behavior that when Danny Sullivan mentioned the next speaker after him he jokingly said "up next, Ron Paul."

I honestly thought the point of the discussion was to highlight how Google has (or hasn't) biased the algorithms, editorial policies & search interface toward brands. However, if a person speaks after you and uses bogus statistics to reach junk conclusions, you can't debunk their aggregate information until after you have looked into it some. An honest person can put what they know out there & share it publicly in advanced, a dishonest person hides behind junk research and the label of science to ram through poorly thought out trash, collecting whatever "data" confirms their own bias while ignorning the pieces of reality that don't.

As an example, he suggested that based on the number of employees and revenues Wikipedia is a small business. He then went on to say that since Wikipedia wasn't on Interbrand's "scientific" study that they were not a top brand. Nevermind that no countries, religions, sports, celebrities, or non-profits make the list of top "companies."
After IAC figured out that they were able to get away with running Ask.com as a thin scraper site, they outsourced "the algorithm" and fired many of their employees. Because they have fewer employees, Bryson considers Ask as "a mid-sized business" even though they are part of a multi-billion Dollar company and IAC is Google's #1 advertiser!
According to Compete's downstream traffic stats, YouTube receives about 1 in 13 search clicks from Google, but since it wasn't on Interbrand's list "who cares?" Incidentally, the folks at Interbrand do have a mention of YouTube on their top 100 brands page, but it was a suggestion that you watch their videos on YouTube. Their methodology is so suspect that Goldman Sachs and Yahoo! made the cut while YouTube didn't, even though YouTube is one of their few offsite promotional channels they promote on that very page. Their list also puts Microsoft's brand value at about double Apple's (and the list came out when Steve Jobs was still alive).
Bryson also claimed that since big brands are inefficient and slow moving they already have a big disadvantage so it makes sense for search engines to compensate for that. That is at best an illegitimate line of reasoning because those companies have plenty of solutions available to them & have the capital needed to buy out competitors. Even when the SERPs look independent, a lot of the listed sites are owned by large conglomorates. As an example, here is a random search from earlier today:

Meanwhile the same idiotic logic ignores the lack of resources at small businesses. Nowhere in his presentation was a highlight of how Google favored affiliates & direct marketers until the profit margins of the direct response marketing model started to peak & then Google transitioned to promoting brands, as they wanted to keep increasing revenues and monetize more clicks.
Bryson also shared an example of where he got a photo sharing site 40,000 unique visitors a month as a case study of the power of white hat SEO. 40,000 monthly visits to a photo sharing site might fund a light Starbucks addiction (assuming you value your time at nothing, have no employees, ignore hosting costs and the SEO is free), but not much beyond that. If that is a success case study, that shows how much harder the ecosystem is getting to operate in as a small business.
He also put out a painfully fluffy "white paper" / sales letter which stated that since Wal-Mart has a page about SEO they should outrank seobook on "SEO" related queries if my theories of brand bias are correct. That misses the point entirely. I never stated that garbage content on branded sites always outperforms quality content on niche sites, but rather that a lot of smaller websites were intentionally being squeezed out of the ecosystem. Sure some small sites manage to compete, but the odds of them succeeding today are much lower than they were 3 or 4 years ago.
At SMX near the end of our session a question was asked about the audience composition & most people were either big brands or people working for big brands. If you go back to when I first got into SEO in 2003 the audience composition was almost entirely small publishers and independent SEOs. This squeezing out of small players is not something new to search or the web. If you look at the history of any modern communications network this cycle has repeated itself in every single medium - phone, radio, television, and the web.

To be fair, I can understand why a no-name also ran SEO consultant would want to pitch himself for being up for doing SEO work for large brands. Brands generally have fatter margins, economies of scale, and large budgets. As Google tilts the algorithm toward the big brands (to where they can fall over the finish line in first place) they are the best clients to work for, since you are swimming downstream.

Why push huge boulders up the side of the mountain for crumbs when you can get paid far more to blow on a snowflake at the top of the mountain?

That is why so many SEOs fawn over trying to get brand clients. The work is high-paying, low risk, and relatively easy.

If we were ever to close up our membership site & focus primarily on SEO consulting work in more structured arrangements then absolutely we would aim at brands & help them fall over the finsh line in first place. ;)

Back when I worked with Clientside SEM we did a good number of big brand projects with some of the largest online portals & retailers. Understanding the business objectives & communicating things in a way that builds buy in from other departments is of course challenging. You need simplicity & directness without oversimplifying. But (if you work for great clients - like we did), then that is nowhere near as challenging as building a site from scratch into something that can compete for lucrative keywords. I recently stepped back from the client consulting model for a bit simply because I was pulling myself in too many directions & working too long, but Scott is still flourishing & delivering excellent results for clients.

I have nothing against the concept of branding (think of how many years I slaved building up this site & the capital I have poured into it), but I like to share the trends in the ecosystem as they are, rather than as a hack warping my view to try to pick up consulting clients. Our site would likely make far more income if we kept using the words "enterprise" "brand" "fortune 500" and then sold consulting to that target audience. In fact, a large % of our members here are fortune 500s, conglomerates, newspaper chains, magazine publishers, and so on.

It is not that brand counts for nothing (or that it should count for nothing) but anyone who claims the table isn't tilted is either ignorant, a liar, or both.

Truth has to count for something.

Disclaimer: I am not saying enterprise SEO is always easy (there are real challenges, especially with internal politics that add arbitrary constraints). And I am not saying that everyone who targets the enterprise market is a hack (there are some super talented folks out there). But the challenge of being a profitable small webmaster is much more of a struggle than ranking a site that Google is intentionally biasing their algorithms toward promoting.

Disclaimer2: I realize refuting a douchebag like Bryson Meunier is batting below my league, however as a matter of principal I won't let sleazeballs get away with taking a swipe using junk science. The word science deserves better than that.

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