During the week leading up to May 1st 2013, CNET.com managed to churn out a total of seven Google Glass articles. Most of these articles weren’t very insightful and are essentially shells for a Samsung S4 campaign that had the phone featured on the banner header and in the right rail. From a white hat perspective this worries me.

CNET.com was one of the first websites that many a geek would come across in the first few years of the internet taking shape. CNET.com and ZDnet.com stood out above the fold when most websites were only still a few pages deep. Now it seems to be reducing itself to blog fodder in order to come up at the top of Google News’ daily feeds.

Here is the list of articles published on CNET.com the week leading up to May 1st 2013. I think taking a close look at each of these articles we can further understand how CNET.com and other news outlets push thier articles to the top of Google news feeds:

• Google Glass kernel software goes publicThis one is two short paragrphs talking about a blog reporting that the Kernel code has been made public. Why not just report what’s posted on Google’s official blog?From: April 28th 2013
• Twitter may already have an app for Google GlassAgain an obviouse spin.From: April 29th 2013
• Can Google Glass ever be fashionable?From: April 29, 2013
• Yes, you can tweet from Google GlassYou can tweet from Google Glass, would’ve never guessed it could do such a thing…From: April 30th 2013
• Google releases Glass tutorialThis “article” is really just two short paragraphs describing what’s seen in a youtube video that’s literally 1-minute long.From: April 30, 2013
• How Google Glass works: now and tomorrowFrom CNET Australia here is an article focused on the inner workings of the device.From: May 1st 2013
• Google shows you how to use Glass in new videoThis one was written on the same day but hosted on the UK version of CNETFrom: May 1st 2013
• Hey Google Glass, are you recording me?Written by Dan Farber who’s the Editor and Chief at CNET.com. I actually found this article informative and news worthy. Funny enough though, this one came out after all the fluff this past week.From: May 1st 2013
• Embarking on a Google Glass explorationTo quote the intro blurb “In this special edition of CNET Update, Bridget Carey shows off Google Glass and explains the basics of the computer headset.” Thought we already went through this?From: May 1st 2013
• Hands-on with Google Glass: Limited, fascinating, full of potentialThis was the Coup de gras for me. The official Google Glass review which of course should be expected from CNET.com. This review mentions the word Glass 170 times. I am not kidding, go ahead and CMD/CTRL+F “Glass”.
  
  
  Here’s an excerpt from a paragraph in this article illustrating the overt spamming going on:“As an actual glasses-wearer, I found Glass feels more like the framework for a pair of fancy 3D glasses than a regular glasses frame. They can fit on top of my regular glasses with some flex, but they’re really meant to be used glasses-free (for now; prescription versions and other variations are in the works). This meant I had to rush to get a pair of contact lenses, which was as disorienting as being fitted for Glass. But Glass has an undeniably solid build quality. It’s not always the most comfortable device, but it sits evenly on my face and remains as innocuous as a pair of glasses. Adding on the clip-on sunglasses made Glass feel a little less awkward. Maybe it’s the psychological framework of actual glasses.”The word Glass appears 11 times just in this one paragraph. It’s the kind of thing that no-one who wears a white hat should ever concoct, much less a reputable “News” site.From: May 2nd 2013

Could it be that this is how CNET.com gets fresh impressions for it’s advertisers? On March, 1st 2013 during the Samsung S4 campaign they were publishing at least one Google Glass article per day that in turn would show up in the Google News feeds usually between the first and third spots.

Ranking at the top page of google for Glass and driving in fresh daily views can be one benefit, another one could be the potential to outrank future news competition for related Glass terms. If the news article about tweeting with Google glass was published way before anyone elses then likely your fresh Google Glass articles are going to outrank the competition even if the quality of the older content is negligible.

I understand people might have an insatiable hunger for news and there’s a ton of competition out there but wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if websites like CNET.com, which is essentially a product review website, wasn’t provided the same clout as a news organization? Is CNET.com in the business of writing negligible content so it can outrank its competitors when it really matters? How could any up-and-coming news site battle against giants like CNET.com without conducting a cat-and-mouse SEO spam campaign to come up on top in Google News feeds? At this very moment if you do this advanced search on google,[site:cnet.com “google glass”] you’ll see Google come up with About 161,000 results. Doesn’t this smell of spam? When you try the same search and change the site to [site:googleblog.blogspot.com “google glass”] you only get three results.

So is CNET.com just a tabloid? I will be monitoring CNET.com from now on and continue to analyze its approach.

Design a site that provides insight into every facet you want the user to explore. How do you accomplish this? Start by creating a wire-frame for the site, doing so will save you any headaches when you move on to designing the look and feel of the site.

Every site has a menu section that’s usually located on the top of a site. This menu section isn’t suppose to change from page to page. If you find yourself needing to remind the user where they are then make use of breadcrumbs.

The homepage is the best and probably the only place for you to visually expound on what the site really has to offer. On the homepage you can present all of your navigation and its sub-hierarchy in a friendly way through blurbs and images that preview important subsections.

So let’s say you’re developing a website for a local cookie vendor. The vendor would like you to develop a site that provides baking advice, sells cookies, talks about cookie events in her local area, can talk about her business, and offers a free weekly newsletter. She tells you, “All I really need is like six pages”, you know better though, how is it possible to get much traffic to a site that only has six pages and is targeting a well saturated cookie market.

I immediately see a tremendous opportunity to reach for the top in local rankings, along with possibly ranking well in Google for organic content that can target niche cookie segments.

You can either go the simple route of coughing up a six page website that is geared towards creating merely a simple online presence or develop a website where you’re looking to lay the groundwork as potentially lucrative organic SEO traffic magnet. Users love it when they come across niche websites that really know their stuff. Create six sections on the site that each offer their own organic niche content. This kind of design really allows a small business site to breath and open itself to greater possibilities creatively.

Working closely with the client you can create 20 or more pages that accurately describe all facets of the business and keep you from developing a stagnant SEO site which does nothing but add a line to someones business card.

I began to wonder where was Google pulling this information from and started searching for clues within the content of the sitelink pages. If you look at the Macys.com site you’ll realized that there aren’t any drop down menus and the only alt text available is a description of the menu in it’s simplest form; e.x. “Women” for the Women menu. In looking at the Home Depot site menu, its a whole other story. When hovering over its navigational menus Home Depot will show the sub-categories capitalized in white and sub-sub-categories are nested below in gray. It doesn’t seem that Google pulls the site navigation descriptions from either image alt descriptions or sub-menus.

I decided to just COMMAND-F/CTRL-F some of the sitelink descriptions. In the case of Home Depot I grabbed the term “ROOFING INSTALLATION” and looked for it within the “Building Materials” section of the site. Funny enough I found it in the right-rail. It isn’t really part of any sub-navigation but an AD for their roofing installation service. I did the same thing for Macy’s and in the case of “Womens” in took the sitelink description directly from the pages meta description tag. I wondered why Google would utilize Macy’s description tag and not Home Depot.

Home depots meta description tag reads “Building materials & Building Supplies at The Home Depot”. It turns out Home Depots description might’ve gotten ignored because Google is interpreting the overuse of the word “Building” as borderline spam. Also that meta description lacks any real compelling actionable click-through phrases. Next I investigated the Gardening section and found that it’s sitelink description is also pulled from the right-rail. The description tag once again begins with the name of the page “Garden Center, Landscaping, Trees & Plants Care at The Home Depot” and just like the aforementioned section it seems to lack any verbs. All it does is list keywords and phrases without any real action words.

So it looks like Google might first pay attention to a page meta description tag if it contains verbs and nouns that can lead the user somewhere. Another reason why going the white hat SEO route is always the way to go and content is king.

Producing duplicate content can push your website to the bottom of Google’s index, so much so that no matter what you do to correct mistakes, it can be trapped at the bottom for months at a time.

I’ve seen many sites that spam Google who outrank well built ones. Google made changes to it’s search algorithm in early 2011 to combat this fault. Known as the Panda update, which was named after a lead engineer on the project, it was created in order to clean up search results by filtering out sites that would either aggregate stolen data as their own or sites that released duplicate content.

SEO Traps

Practicing ethical SEO isn’t the easiest thing to do, especially when you’re a novice beginning an SEO. Its easy to fall into the trap of creating shadowy link farms and have them due your bidding. These are temporary bandades. Optimizing a website should just be that, at least at the beginning. Here is a list of SEO steps that will guide you and can serve as a base foundation when ethically optimizing a website:

Ethical SEO Basic Steps

• Make sure your tags are cleanRun your site through the W3C Validator. It can provide great detail into the nuts and bolts of whats going on front-end wise.
  
• Duplicate content is a no-no
  • It’s important to have original content on your website. The more competition out there, the more unique and engaging your content needs to be in order for a site to succeed.
  • Use newsfeeds sparingly, many people fall into the trap of having a large part of a site be all newsfeeds. Sites can quickly move up in PageRank and overnight get pulled back to reality when Googles spider catches up.
    
• Link building 101
  • Make sure you link to trade organizations. Gaining links from trade organizations can do wonders for an SEO campaign. These are the easiest links to obtain.
  • Remember to utilize Google Places, Yelp, and other review sites. Sign your clients up for these kinds of websites, they provide wonderful visibility for local business sites and create more of a real-world link between the user and business.

From a white hat SEO perspective this year has been like a mini Aufklärung, an Age of Enlightenment that we’ve all been waiting for like a clean freak looking forward to spring. For the industry, this could be a game-changer and a true move towards fulfilling the dream of a semantic web. For the first time content farms have been penalized in a way that is bold and substantive.

Websites use to be able to generate lots of Google ad-sense revenue by creating hybride websites of regurgitated original content that the Google engine seemed to think was deserving of top-ten placement. Sites like Stack Overflow are coming up more prominently in search results related to programming and White hat SEO developers everywhere are swooning over the push to make Metadata the new de facto layer of effective SEO.

Structured Data

Metadata makes Google very happy, so happy in fact that it could pull up your postal address and display it right below your URL within its search results. By utilizing metadata and wrapping your content in the appropriate tags, that’ll send an important signal to the search engine as to how it should be treated.

A good example of this is the itemtype PostalAddress . Here is an example of it’s use:

<div itemscope itemtype="schema.org/PostalAddress"> 
<span itemprop="name">Apple</span> 
<span itemprop="streetAddress">1 Infinite Loop</span> 
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Cupertino</span> 
<span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span> 
<span itemprop="postalCode">95014</span> 
<span itemprop="addressCountry">United States</span> 
</div> 

With this you’re declaring data using a machine readable approach. The search engine or bot can properly consume the metadata and output through the appropriate channels. With the PostalAddress tag Google can match what’s going on in your places listing with what actually resides within your sites content. The depreciation of the keyword meta tag can make more sense when site owners realize how well structured this is for SEO. Why have a hodgepodge of keywords stuffed within a head tag when you can smartly declare a well defined bushel of data.

In order to understand the difference between White Hat SEO and its counterpart you’ll first need to know that these two popular methodologies of SEO do meet at a single point where the line is blurred between the two.

There are certain SEO techniques that 10 years ago were all the rage like repeating keywords and phrases through keyword stuffing that were viable tools, when all that mattered was coming up top in search results. Nowadays however that’s the last thing a viable internet property would want to do. It could hurt your image and Google Pagerank if abused.

Keyword stuffing has evolved, good SEO’d sites are now creating coherent human readable content that can inform the user while at the same time providing the search engine with keyword reliable content that doesn’t dizzy the user with marketing junk. There is a fine line though that as internet marketing professionals we need to be aware of.

Writing content shouldn’t be about SEO, first and foremost we need to write for the user of the site. The user and Google will disengage interest if what otherwise informative text is littered with subtle spam. A perfect example of this can be found when doing a search for the ending of inception. The first site that comes up provides a lot of details concerning the ending, the first few paragraphs talk much about the same thing but re-written slightly. This is not the way to engage a user, too many sites are grounded on loose content and cool user interfaces in order to draw users to ads or signing up for networked sites. This I believe should fall under the category of a Black Hat techniques based on the idea that many sites out there are answering simple questions in the most verbose way possible in order to fool the search engines and waste your precious time.