Yesterday a consulting lead came through and I viewed the company's site on my mobile device. Very illustrative indeed! For whatever reason that showed me a lot of the hidden junk they'd stuffed on the page. I immediately decided against working with them. Labels: consulting, seo
Getting back to my laptop and taking more time to view the source code only confirmed my decision. Code like "input type= hidden" and "class=stealth" feels like it's begging to find its way into a Matt Cutts PowerPoint, guaranteed to get laffs at the "what not to do" seminars.
The company also had four more kinds of metadata than necessary in the document head, stuffed full of the exact same kinds of keywords in an overkill type scenario. Looks like something someone sold to someone, telling them it would get them somewhere.
Granted, most of what this prospect was looking for was paid search -- but experience has shown that companies doing so much deceptive stuff are hard to talk to in general. They may say one thing and mean another. Why listen to someone who says "oh yeah, we really want to go legit" when there are plenty of folks out there who say it and mean it?
input type = hidden. LOL! "class type = stealth" -- nothing like naming your CSS styles after sneaky SEO tactics!
In some cases you do have a company that is mortified that their SEO company did all that stuff, and they're looking for someone to genuinely help them go legit. In which case, it shouldn't be all that hard to get off on the right foot: there is plenty of field space in our lead forms over at Page Zero to explain background situations like "hey by the way, we know there is a lot of black hat code on our site right now -- this is not our philosophy at all, and we are seeking to hire you because we know you are reputable and we are looking for a firm that will do things right."
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Some search marketers do protest their outlaw image too much. Others revel in it. Whatever, you comport yourself in this way, don't be shocked by the lukewarm response when you try to "go straight."
(P.S. The actual blog content is good, but do you really want those thread topics following you around for the rest of your 'professional' career?)
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Leafing through this month's issue of PROFIT magazine (sorry but the current issue is not yet online as I write this), I came across a sidebar about a concept called DAO or "Digital Asset Optimization." The argument is that a more comprehensive strategy is required today for websites trying to maximize their visibility for all types of searches for all types of media and content (for example, video, products, news, images, etc.). Lee Odden was quoted in the piece. I had to say to myself "nice PR work, Lee, getting quoted in that story!"
Looking back to the first mention of this term around June 2007, it turns out that our good friend Lee Odden at Toprank may have coined the term, but it hasn't yet fully caught on (after enjoying a brief heyday). A number of people responded to his June 2007 post, and seemed willing to use the term, but you don't see a million "DAO" references in Google. One SEO from India got so excited about the term, though, that he registered the domain "daodigitalassetoptimization.com" in February 2008.
What we are seeing, if not lighting-fast growth of the term DAO, is growing acceptance of the idea. People are coming at the idea of "being more visible" from a variety of angles: talking about the growing importance of blended and universal search; deliberate & planned use of video to augment written articles and promotions; properly labeling & tagging your existing digital media content; etc.
What you call something seems to have an impact on whether people think it is something worth talking about. Greg Jarboe mentioned that attendance to training sessions (Incisive Media - in conjunction with SES) rose when they changed the title from "Getting Found in All the Right Places" (people didn't know what it was supposed to mean) to "Universal and Blended Search" (people cottoned onto the fact that it was something new and technical that Google was doing that we'd better be aware of).
So, I guess we probably won't all be calling it DAO (but just in case, I've stuffed this post with the term), or GFIATRP, but rather, "Universal and Blended Search," "Online Reputation and PR," and "Social Media Marketing." They're interrelated, but they can be discussed as if they were separate topics.
The general idea is unlikely to go away, and it will keep marketers mighty busy keeping on top of these trends.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Wednesday, January 02, 2008
SEO techniques typically linger long after their "good til" dates. 2008 should be no exception, but if you're paying attention it's time to move onto the stuff that works. Labels: seo
This useful review of techniques that Google clamped down on this year included:
(hat tip Search Engine Roundtable)
One thing that won't change: search marketing professionals will be selling you something this year. With the authors of that article, I hope folks will at least be buying relatively current services, not futile make-work projects.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Thursday, October 25, 2007
There's an unwritten rule in search marketing: when a Google update knocks the stuffing out of a bunch of sites that were unfairly ranking too high, you're not supposed to gloat if you came out unscathed. But for the Grace of GOOG, there go I, etc.
Even when the infamous Florida update had webmasters scurrying in circles, and we noticed a sharp uptick in interest in paid search opportunities, I only gloated mildly.
That's why I almost considered letting this latest assault by Google on the practices of link buying, link farming, and business models that constitute premeditated interlinking schemes by their very nature, slide by without comment. But the lessons learned by this latest cannot be emphasized enough. It's time to stop ignoring these things or treating them as episodic examples of Google's high-horse madness, and to begin realizing that they continue to take aim at rank improvement "schemes" in their role as consumer advocates, attempting to reflect legitimate real-world authority and usefulness, just as they do with their increasingly tough rules on the paid search side.
Sounding every bit like a woman with a clear conscience, Jill Whalen gloats a bit in her recent commentary about these developments, and resolves to get out the popcorn to watch things unfold.
Put plainly, the reason the majority of the search marketing world responds so ineffectually to such issues is because of tunnel vision. At the most general level of professionalism, many in the "agency world" will advocate "integrated marketing," "brand management," and other long-term views of marketing strategy. This is the furthest thing from the minds of many SEO hacks.
And granted, that's too high-concept and not appropriate to the work many search marketers do. However, I'd propose that to be effective, the hyper-focus on the details of ranking tactics needs to be brought back into a mid-level focus. More on this as we go, later in this post.
The fallout of Google's latest rejiggering has been fairly severe, if you go by PageRank. On one of the PageRank checkers I use, you can see the multiple datacenters, so you see the "old" PageRanks and the "new." Traffick.com, I had nary a worry about because of the long-term, stable way we gathered external mentions since launch in 1999. We're stable at 7.
A number of the blog networks have been hard hit, with sites like AutoBlog losing one or two notches in PageRank. I would have to assume that this would take a direct hit out of the pockets of blog network owners such as Nick Denton. Organic traffic from search engines is a free lunch to many private entrepreneurs like this. Quality content deserves search visibility, of course. The question is really how much. There is only so much search traffic in a given month, so every Google reassessment of ranking and weighting methods amounts to a zero-sum game of "who gets the available free referrals."
One well known search industry site, Search Engine Guide, clocks in with a drop of 6 to 4, at least if you believe this PR checker. In the old days, they often came in with an 8, which is very high. I'm not saying the current drop is justified - Google decides on that. But it is probably the case that the 8 was too high.
And yes, I realize that PageRank's only a rough guide to Google's opinion of your site's authority, after weeding out phony forms of authority as best as they can. Some of those hard hit are claiming they see "no drop in traffic" and speculate that "Google is putting on a show." In denial to the end? Could traffic drops be coming soon?
Dropping two notches in PageRank may not sound like much, but it could constitute a severe penalty because the scale is logarithmic. The difference between 4 and 6 is really significant, as any experienced site owner will tell you.
But the point here is not to single any one actor out. It's to point out that search marketing as a profession became so popular so fast that many actors assumed that popularity or prevalence equated to real marketing expertise. The momentum of the industry translated into a "everything's fine here" sensibility, and an insular view that more experienced marketers had nothing to teach us. We're taking over! (With bought links, keyword research, and meta tags, you're taking over?)
What it looks like, to draw upon some of the beautiful photos I picked out to dress up this post, is that search marketers were so sure of themselves that they turned into the fuzzy, wool-bearing little creatures below. Matt Cutts says bought links are bad? Selling PageRank is bad? Baaaa humbug! 1,000 of my friends agree with me, so Matt must be wrong, and possibly evil.
The thing about it is, if you're in high school and well compensated (if not well dressed), you and your peers don't look like sheep to one another. It's such a cool gig to have, you actually look like Heathers...
No, I did not mean those heathers, and plus there are still sheep grazing nearby... can someone please...
Right, that's better. Heathers.
These Heathers were so compellingly popular, it seemed sometimes like you'd want to do anything to be like them. Even if you were the aloof, independent, and lovely Winona Ryder. Stop, Winona! You're better off without them!
So, I'm here to make the case for a mid-level focus rather than a close-up view that a narrow set of tactics in a toolkit will give you any clear guide of what to do to improve your company's long term reach and connection with prospects. As Goldilocks (or Winona, before she began shoplifting) I'll suggest that for many search-focused professionals, the idea of "integrated marketing" is too high level to be practical; whereas pure old-school SEO tactics always get you into the same mess eventually. You're not VP Marketing at a Fortune 500, or any other type of lifer; nor are you going to get far in life if your only skill is to tweak an H1 tag. In between, there needs to be an integrated understanding of what makes customers and markets tick today, and how to put that together with a search visibility strategy. That entails a lot of detail work, but deciding on the appropriate types of campaign work will be more effective if it's done within a structured framework that recognizes Google, and other sites for visibility online, as the complex consumer advocates they are. Call it "integrated online attention-getting," if you will.
So whereas for a couple of years on the Page Zero site, we joked about that we don't do SEO at all, we realize that what we've developed for some clients (at the moment we call it SEO 2.0) is something that yes, we actually do, and will continue to do. A long-term focus on "integrated online attention-getting" means a sustained strategic implementation, with particular action items leading to detail work performed by the appropriate party (sometimes us). When we launch the new version of our consulting site in a couple of weeks, that's what we'll make clear to current and prospective clients.
If that's gloating, well... unwritten rules were made to be broken. The way we see it, our clients are not in business to sit around wondering when they'll be "Google-slapped."
Update: Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, responded to this piece to note that "the Google demotion of link farms has only hit offending blog networks. Engadget and other Weblogs Inc blogs have taken a hit of a couple of points of PageRank. But Gawker sites, which are much more sparing in their linking, are unaffected by the latest change."
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007
OK, maybe I'm not about to call for its "death" as I did with the keyword meta tag, but Duane Forrester's fine piece about Big SEO and automation just triggered a couple of morbid thoughts about our old friend "title tag". Labels: cms, seo, title tags
Let's say you have a million pages. So you say you need SEO, eh? That sounds like it's going to be a mighty big job. Forrester correctly points out there isn't very much you can do manually. Although I would counter that you can work on between 500 and 2,000 pages to cover some pretty impressive ground, search-frequency-wise, if you're so inclined.
So what is on-page SEO, exactly. Is it adding appropriate titles, heading tags and headings, meta keyword tags and description tags, to all pages, thereby increasing their rank potential?
Let's work through the logic here. You're going to make sure certain "core" keywords appear multiple times in the document, "amplifying" their weight. But doesn't that just take us back to keyword density?
If the automation process involves "a way to automate the insertion of meta tag based on the actual content of a given page," as Forrester writes, then let's be clear on what's really happening: you're taking what's already on the page, and copying and pasting it into another page element.
If you do something similar for titles, the logical principle is no different.
Let's be honest. These various page elements and approaches to ranking content were mostly invented for a manual world. Logically speaking, if all you're doing to try to rank better (on a million pages at once) is to replicate some existing words within other elements of the page, you're adding only slight value, and zero additional meaning. It might be a good idea, but it's hardly life-changing for the user.
There is still some minimal value left. Well-labeled pages are easier to find and respond to, in that page titles appear in SERP's and in the browser.
You'll need to automate correctly to put keywords and meaning-related cues in the URL structure of the site, as well... but largely because this seems to matter to search engines.
But if that's all we've got, it's not clear that such pages should be ranking higher than their equals with less zealous automated efforts at keyword densification/replication on any given search query. In the case of scraper sites who are super good at this kind of automation, of course their well-constructed pages should not rank at all.
It's little wonder that based on such characterizations of SEO, many businesses view it as a purely technical function. It is not.
It's certainly a sad thing that a good CMS deployment (for example) can improve your overall level of search referrals, as compared with a bad one. Sad or not, it's a practical reality that companies need to study, at least until search engines get even smarter.
Still, there are plenty of other elements of information architecture that tend to get lost in such discussions. Should we use breadcrumb navigation or not? What's the right number of links in the nav bar to aid navigation? What approach should we take to site search? Should we add interactive capability to the site?
Overdo your efforts to please search engines alone, and you might not allocate the time and budget you need to please users. And happy users are the ones that spread the word so well, giving you the off-page love that is a prerequisite to high reputation and thus standing in the search engines.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Monday, October 08, 2007
Eric Enge's extensive discussion of hidden text and its dangers illustrates a key issue for anyone working on a search marketing strategy. (Hat tip seroundtable.com) Labels: hidden text, seo
As much as you "might" escape sanctions from the Google indexing gods if you construct pages that "just look like" other, more spammy, pages, the reality is, if you go into the forest dressed up like a duck... it may not matter if you even quack like one, your danger rating goes up.
Basically: my personal philosophy on the SEO side is to dial back on excessive "on-page tactics" intended to give rankings that "extra boost." There are other ways to rank.
A particular SEO bugaboo for me is that "text way below the fold" technique. Fine if it's somewhat below the fold and it's navigational in nature. But not fine if it just looks cheesy and spammy. What "respectable" site would do that?
Search marketing is marketing first, and that involves a consistent, professional process for communicating with readers and customers. A comprehensive, analytical, patient approach *does* work. Creating more useful content *does* work. And above all, off-page stuff does the heavy lifting of enhancing your reputation and standing in the engines.
So back to why you'd use hidden text in the first place? Oh, I'm sure we can dream up all kinds of "legitimate" scenarios. Not pretending I play in this particular sandbox, the "illegitimate" scenarios involve low quality content being "thrown at" the search index while showing users something else. Whether they're gibberish pages users actually see, as opposed to gibberish hidden from users, and from there... gathering data on which of these two not only ranks in spite of Google's vigilance, and which leads to conversions to sales of porn or hot tubs... this would be the daily existence of the professional index spammer and the amateur index spammer-dabbler. If you're a real company, isn't it nice not to have to worry about those kinds of calculations? So if you are real, don't hire the amateur index spammer/dabbler person! A little knowledge residing in the brain of the business owner's nephew who built the site and knows "a lot about SEO"... can be a dangerous thing.
The bottom line? Quibbling about whether Google does or does not allow some specific sub-technique is not the way to go. It's not like they can give you "license" to work some "loophole". They use automated methods on both the paid and unpaid sides to flag violations. This in turn may trigger some human review, which can and will exercise editorial judgment as to intent. And as we've seen of late on the paid side, Google even makes official comments on "business models to avoid."
Google has been talking about intent for years. The spamsters don't want to hear it.
The webmaster forums may be loaded with folks trying to find out how to best spam Google with hidden text tricks they don't mind, or can't catch. But this misses the entire point. A human rater can look at your site and decide, based on criteria, that it falls into some category that is low quality in users' eyes, such as "thin affiliate." This can lead to low rankings, penalties, and banning. Even this system is highly imperfect because it still gives too much advantage to serial spammers and sophisticated cheaters. Something new is needed to rebalance things in favor of quality sites, even more so than today.
Creators of quality content will increasingly be rewarded through new ranking methods, in my opinion.
Site developers commenting on several legitimate uses of hidden text techniques (see the comments in Eric's seomoz post) just serve to emphasize the point that certain sites might fall into an *automated* net that flags certain deceptive techniques, but they do not deserve to. That just increases the load of human judgment on Google, or the importance of other (off-page) factors indicating quality and relevancy. Spammers *will* find ways of hiding text that Google simply does not want to work too hard to find algorithmically, as it would create too many false positives in any case.
Related: Matt Cutts on "The role of humans in Google search"
Funnily enough, then, after looking at it from all angles, the presence or absence of any but the most one-sidedly spammy hidden text techniques would appear to be a very weak signal of quality; one that Google cannot realistically weight very heavily for ranking purposes.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
That's the title of my upcoming... er,,,... this... post. Labels: mike grehan, seo
Mike, you may be right, but I'm guessing you'll never stop it. By "it," I mean the tendency of SEO snake-oil salesmen (sorry, "snake-oil 2.0") from selling their seemingly plausible SEO formula long past its "gone stinky" date.
I think in any industry that is sufficiently mysterious, and also lucrative and growing, you'll see this pattern. Even the most sincere practitioners will often be willing to give up aspects of this "let's just tell the truth to the clientele" fervor they had when they started in (this contrarianism sometimes proves profitable in the early going), to gravitate for the easy sell (because the gullible customer is often practically begging you to sell this way) that their competitors are making so much easy money on. It's called inertia, gravity, a plausible story, a myth you can't bust no matter hard you try, etc.
I don't believe in "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," personally. But many do.
Health clubs might be the perfect analogy. Localized small fitness club chains can remain relatively immune from the sales pressures of larger, publicly traded corporations. Local trainers are allowed to have their own personalities, they're allowed to help clients without selling, they're allowed to advise professionally without always tying it into a hook or a gimmick. Then one day, the fitness club gets bought up by a sales-oriented conglomerate, and some of the old staff are fired; others are asked to memorize sales pitches, even sleazy seduction tactics, in order to get the clients to buy more.
As you can guess, this recently happened at my health club. While I've always been somewhat amazed at the whoppers told by way of getting clients to sign up for personal training packages, it's become ever more cringe-worthy. They'll say anything, it seems. Especially to the newer customers. All in order to justify selling 16 sessions instead of 8, etc.
Examples:
Why does this stuff work? Because the methods are honed across many gullible clients, and as long as they're getting some benefit, truth matters less to the business than doubling or tripling the revenues from the same rough relationship and same basic quotient of truthiness.
Many in the search marketing industry have turned their back on outdated claims and demagogic pandering to the client's psychological propensity for wanting better metatags and higher PageRank. The best solutions evolve and work strategically with client needs, because unlike the physiology of the human body, the marketing landscape changes rapidly online, even if a few principles stay relatively consistent.
But Mike, don't think anything we say is going to stop all of the shenanigans or selling of outmoded methodologies... any more than I'd be well-advised to spend valuable energy karate-chopping the trainer who gets the client to sign up for more lessons with elaborate rationales for complicated exercise and naughty banter about Kegel exercises. I don't have time to learn karate, anyhoo. You know and I know there are always consultants out there willing to prey on ignorance, and firms that can even make that business model scale. Sadly.
But happily, in a way, because it reflects well on the health of our industry that there are many folks attuned to the benefits of a strong search presence.
Now give me ten pushups!
See, it was starting to work on you, wasn't it?
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
I have a somewhat strict policy against entering SEO contests, even impromptu ones. It boils down to the lessons taught by Homer, eagerly lapped up by Bart: "can't win? don't try." Or: can't win! Don't try! Labels: link bombing, seo, vanessa fox, vanessa fox nude
So try to get [a high ranking on] Vanessa Fox nude? No way! But there, I've just helped Vanessa up a notch in her race against Naylor. (I hope.)
Dave, you can't win! Won't a ton of people link to her, not you? Don't try!
(Plus, she works at Google, so she can hand-tweak the results.)
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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