Filed under: General, Google, Industry Stuff by Stuntdubl SEO at 11:02 am, 4/6/2006
It is against my better judgment to stir the pot on this issue, but it’s upsetting to me whenever the topic gets brought up. I don’t understand why engines are resorting to fear, uncertainty, and doubt to retain their relevancy, so I thought I’d bite the bullet and drop my .02, rather than let what I view as misinformation continue.
Saying, “buying links may not help your website” is much different than saying that “you shouldn’t buy links because it may hurt your rankings”. I think the tendency is towards the former, but I think the latter should be avoided for a handful of different reasons. Telling people not to buy links may scare off some folks who haven’t figured out that relevance is the SE’s primary agenda, but in doing so may alienate many more people in the process, and potentially damage brand reputation.
The Indifference Principle
When I talk about SE’s…in this case, most of you know which one I am referring to. One of the big differences between G and Y, is that Y tends to observe the indifference principle. G folks…if you’re listening…it’s time to get a couple Economics P.h.d’s on staff to help make some of these very difficult decisions you have to make. You are defining our culture and an entire economy (beyond just the text link micro economy) with your decisions. I’m not saying I envy you a bit, or know anyone that could do it any better…just saying that they are important decisions to make, and economists tend to have some pretty good perspectives on things.
Back to the indifference principle and how it affects buying links - The indifference principle is a probability-based principle used also in economics. Most economists would choose that SOMEONE benefit from any given situation where there is equal probability of outcome versus no one. While this sometimes contradicts some folks moral rationale, I find economics theory to be much more logical, rational, and overall beneficial than emotional human logic based on religion or other belief structures in the majority of instances.
The “Principle of insufficient reason” was renamed the “Principle of Indifference” by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was careful to note that it applies only when there is no knowledge indicating unequal probabilities. -
Principle of Indifference at Wikipedia
So how does this apply to buying links you may ask? Well, people are GOING to buy links because they are given incentive to do so. Why is this a problem for SEO’s and link sellers to benefit from a market that was created? I really don’t see how RELEVANT link purchase creates relevance problems in search engines. The act of condemning link buying is no different than the corporate schlubs from fedex who got upset with the guy who built furniture with their boxes, or any other such demonstration of corporate cluelessness. In their case, they even had an opportunity to BUILD their brand and blew it. The engines are only hurting their supporter’s and themselves by insisting that no one benefit from a market that was unintentionally created. Accept the marketplace, or argue a losing battle, but the market will exist.
Misinformation threatens credibility
By spreading misinformation or perhaps even enforcing not buying links through temporary penalization, the smaller naive business owners are the ones that are hurt. These business owners attend a conference and believe everything that the search engine representatives say. Not only are engines fighting a losing battle, they are tarnishing their credibility with those that believe what you have to say. I may have a fairly vested interest in this stance, since I would be the one to stand up and contradict the “don’t buy” policy, but my statements only effect my own credibility, coming from the search engines it would impact the entire brand. Yes, link buying is just a small microcosm of the search space, but it is also an area occupied by many folks that understand search best and are the “sneezers” to other folks that just don’t get it. These are the folks that are going to DEFEND the logic when times get tough…why would engines want to alienate them? Why else would engines throw big parties for there seemingly adversaries if they didn’t want to court them to their own line of thinking?
Wasted Resources
Combating purchased links is a temporary fix to a temporary problem in the same way that buying links is. The difference is, buying relevant text links does no damage to relevance…combating relevant purchased text links only creates new problems. Buying links raises the competition level in a given industry to a point of diminishing returns when all the folks in the top 10 are spending the bulk of their profit on retaining their rankings. Combating paid links may serve to level the playing field…in the same way communism does…by removing competition. It removes the competition, which is worse for the consumer because as a monopoly builds that power may be abused through excessive price gouging, discrimination and the like unless it is regulated (which brings a whole host of other problems). If link popularity is part of the rules of the game, paying for link popularity should not be an issue (Is it all that different from political lobbying).
Why waste the time and energy on short-term manual removal or promoting fear and doubt when that same energy could be put into finding alternative positive solutions and letting the marketplace exist? Does buying RELEVANT links really effect search relevancy that detrimentally? I guess we could try to do away with all advertising, but that wouldn’t be the greatest argument for any of us to put up I don’t suppose.
Capitalism Drives the Advancement of the Web
For all it’s faults, capitalism has been proven as a pretty good system imho. I’m sure their are some kinks that will work themselves out in the next few millenia, but I sure hope I don’t have to live in a communal utopia anytime soon. I love geeks, dorks, computer nerds, engineers, scientists, and many of the same things that they do. They CREATED the web for altruistic means that have created a wonderful infrastructure for something much bigger. The simple fact is that it wouldn’t have advanced and improved it wasn’t for the propensity towards commerce. Capitalism and commerce have driven the advancement of the web, and should be considered when making decisions of relevance. It was a simple decision to take into account economics principles into relevance that led Bill Gross to the brilliant solution of pay-per-click. Considering the commercial nature of the web actually INCREASED relevancy to users. Acting like there should be no market for top organic rankings will not get rid of the market that has been created.
Problems caused by lack of consideration for the commercial web:
-Meta tag spam
-Alt tag spam
-Page Rank micro economy
-Back link mining
-”Pimping” of the natural web for links
-Buying old sites to bypass the age barrier to entry
-Redirection manipulation
Sometimes the solutions to these problems were valid ones, and sometimes they have changed the entire face of the web (*cough* nofollow). I’ll leave those for you to decide. It’s much easier to blame the people that exploit the system, than it is to blame those that design it, but the naivete in design can’t be ignored.
Buying links is ADVERTISING. Wasn’t it the commercial nature of the web and the monetary value of the marketplace involved what gave that little idealistic search engine startup so much power in the first place? Why should link communism now be promoted for the sake of preserving the “non-biased editorial standards of algorithmic search results”?
While it is nice and easy to place most the blame on those that pushed the limits of what is acceptable by search engines, it was also their limit pushing that spurned the search engines to improve. If it weren’t for the commercial biases of the web, search retrieval probably wouldn’t have evolved much further than meta tags because there would be no incentive for anyone to “optimize” their meta tags.
A few notes:
Incentives are the best determinate of human behavior. There are exceptions to the rule, but on a mass scale incentives provide the most reliable data for prediction models. If people are going to be incentivized to buy links, they are going to buy links, until the risks are substantial enough not to do so, or there are no rewards to do so.
What do you view as the primary differences between buying a text link on a RELEVANT or even general topic site for search engine rankings different than buying say radio advertising that may push visitors to a website?
New media companies like Google and Ebay often get caught up in the ideals of “removing friction in the marketplace”. While this is an admirable goal, the ends sometimes don’t justify the means. There will always be “friction” in a marketplace, and short term opportunities. Fighting the short term opportunity seekers with short sighted solutions will only create more long term problems.
Viva la link revolution!
Yes, people buy and sell text links for the sole purpose of influencing search engine rankings. It is not an exact science. It is a response to the marketplace created by the monetary value of high rankings in a search engine. Remember, that algorithm based on link popularity that made everyone there rich and famous?
I am not a link communist. I freely buy and sell links based solely on their value to search engines. The marketplace for search rankings is a valuable one that will not disappear anytime soon, and I hope to continue to take advantage of it while the opportunity remains. Competition, contracts, property rights, appropriate incentives, and market forces serve us well, and I think those principles of capitalism should be observed and respected rather than decisions that cater only to fear, uncertainty, and doubt for short term solutions.
Link buying exists because of the high margins created by ranking high in natural search engine results. These margins give merchants the ability to use their adspend on areas that will increase their likelihood of top rankings. The competition will fuel itself to a point of saturation and diminishing returns. At this point the “problem” will cease. By allowing the market to run itself, resources will be allocated more efficiently. (invisible hand…yadda yadda).
Another topic worth checking out is the “efficient markets hypothesis” which supports the idea that the more information SE’s make publicly available the less valuable SEO services would be (which seems to support Y’s direction).
There are many moral philosophies to choose among, and I believe that economic reasoning is the most powerful tool we have for evaluating their merits.
-Steven E. Landsburg - “Armchair Economics”
Related threads:
Nofollow Nastiness - Webmasters afraid to give link credit
Paid links are advertising
Buying links is BAD
Filed under: General, Google, Industry Stuff, Yahoo/ MSN by Stuntdubl SEO at 6:31 pm, 1/4/2006
I am constantly baffled by Google’s insistence that there is such a low level of human discretion and editorial control in their organic search result determination. Isn’t the decision to leave editorial control up to a silicon based form of intelligence even SOME level of editorial control to begin with? Determining which forms of user data from the toolbar and other sources must certainly qualify as a certain level of editorial control based on human bias. There is nothing inherently wrong with human bias, and it becomes less of a bias if the views and decisions are directly expressed. I think Yahoo is a bit more open about their level of editorial control, but not really much. I really hope that the transparency of these decisions improves with both engines over time. Insight to this process would help to MEET those guidelines and stay within less ambiguous confines of the terms of service.
I am constantly questioned by clients or prospects on the “ethics” of search engine marketing. Three examples that tend to be recurring:
-Is it okay to create a page for every state?
-Can we create two sites to rank for the same terms?
-Can we use a domain for every one of our twenty niches?
I think these are all fairly valid questions of a business owner who is hungry for market share. I have seen instances where any of these three have worked, and I have seen instances where they have all caused problems. My answers generally sway towards the same theories of creating quality content and focusing on the user, but the subject itself leads me on a philosophical tangent into the ethics of editorial control and the search engines.
It only matters if someone sees it (no one complains until it ranks)
The number one spam fighter (other than Matt Cutts) is competitors who can’t compete. If you ever get the chance to listen to people talk to Matt at a conference you will understand this. EVERYONE whines about their competitor’s unethical tactics (among other things), and then goes and tries to get them banned. Leaving the irony of this aside, it is a testament to the fact that you are not a target until you are over the radar. No one cares if you have 8 sites in the top 10 for “fuzzy and furry alpha widgets in podunk”. The will care, however, if you have 3 of the top 5 sites for 10 different variations on “home loan” terms or other phrases with many competitors all trying to rank for the same SERPS. I’m sure Matt (and the rest of the engineering team) have become quite adept at siphoning out the intentions of a site, but the rest of the evaluation team may not have the same level of insights, and create “hand ban collateral damage”.
This is still a working theory, as the search engines will generally not even confess to DOING hand edits, it is still pretty uncharted territory, and most of this is pure speculation. I must also state that I have personally never had a client site banned. Any client that wants to push the envelope with tactics is made aware of the risks ahead of time. This being said, I have SEEN plenty of banned websites. They are often prospects shopping around for an SEO who they think may be able to get them out of the doghouse.
With all three of the above mentioned questions here is my usual answer:
Is it okay to create a page for every state?
Yes. Provided that you create at least SOME unique content for each page. You cannot just change the state name and expect it will work. Even if you DO manage to get by duplicate content filters, you will have to face quality control review if you start to rank for all of the “statename + keyword” variations. If you have only minimal content, your pseudo-directory will not last for long even if you do attain top rankings.
Can we create two sites to rank for the same terms?
Yes, but it will be twice as much work, and double the risk. I would strongly recommend putting all the effort in ONE site to start with. If you do wish to go the multiple site route, the two sites should remain completely separate, and association should be kept to an absolute minimum. Retail site owners often have multiple websites selling the same products under different names. Obviously competitors don’t like this, and are willing to report them for “spamming”. You can see where this would be a very fine line full of ambiguity for a quality control rep. THIS is a judgment call. There will NEVER be hard and fast guidelines for this type of activity, and if there is, we most likely will never know about them.
Can we use a domain for every one of our twenty niches?
Yes. You can also just use subdomains, or subdirectories. If you interlink your sites, the search engines will associate them together anyhow. If you interlink your sites, and rank too well, you may have problems upon manual review. I would stick to one site, a nice subdirectory layout, and a strategy to drive deeplinks into each of the twenty areas.
So as you can see, the answer is generally “yes, but…”. This conveys the level of risk involved, and helps to open the eyes of the prospect or client that it really is about the user…whether that user be a search engine quality control rep, or a prospective customer, the site should reflect what it advertises, and should have a unique value proposition or in the case of retail, at LEAST be honest and true to how it is portrayed. Saavy internet users can smell something afoul from a mile away.
Hand Ban Collateral Damage
After several discussions with Jim on prospect sites that were banned, I’ve come to the conclusion that some of the quality control reps are not as educated as others. There is not much consistency with hand bannings that I have seen. The best insights we’ve had into the mind of a quality control rep was the information released from searchbistro on eval.google.com.
Hand bannings are a tough pill to swallow. Several people a month contact me asking about problems with their rankings, and there are often sites I would potentially attribute to a hand penalty - some of which I would argue are not worthy of completely losing their rankings (though I certainly may be missing something) . This is a much tougher adversary than the algorithmic filters, and the penalties for failure last MUCH longer. It hurts to NEVER have a site rank well or have it drop briefly from glory during an algorithm update, it REALLY hurts when you get a site to rank well only to have it get wacked after a short period of time with the knowledge that it will probably NEVER return to its’ former status.
Inside the mind of a quality control rep.
This post is not designed to try to psychoanalyze Matt Cutts or Tim Mayer. It is is designed to better understand the “little cuttlings” all over the world that rate sites with only a fraction of Matt or Tim’s knowledge and understanding of the internet. They are basing their conclusions on a limited amount of understanding (comparatively to most SEO’s and engineers). Imagine teaching your brother, sister, or cousin how to evaluate a “quality” website. I’m not sure of the education requirements necessary to be a quality rater, but I’m guessing it’s not engineer level. This gives a substantial amount of power to the “average user” (which is probably quite logical, but a bit unnerving at the same time).
Open Questions to the Search Engines on Behalf of SEO’s
So the question becomes, what type of quality control guidelines are these raters given? The documents posted at search bistro gave a bit of insight into this process. I’m a bit reluctant to repost some of the documentation here, as I am not a huge fan of controversy even though the links are nice. My personal question is…wouldn’t it make sense to make this information publically available? Wouldn’t it aid search engine marketers to make sites that are more quality oriented? Perhaps more examples of what constitutes “quality value add”, as well as more extensive examples of sites that would fall into the “penalized/ not-penalized” categories in ambiguous areas may be of benefit. I think there has been too much emphasis placed on fighting spam vs. encouraging quality. As with most things, encouragement is a more positive long term approach in my humble opinion. I think Matt tries to do this on his blog on occasion, and I’m sure these types of discussions will be brought up on Tim and Jeremy Z’s new show on Webmasterradio.fm. While this post may sound negative, it is fact just the opposite. I certainly appreciate the valient efforts of the SE reps to appease the blood thirsty lynch mob of crazed webmasters and SEO. The purpose is to encourage their efforts and voice concern in an area with very little communication. There are certainly attempts being made, and I hope this post will contribute to encouraging discussion in pursuit of those efforts.
I really hope that both search engines (and MSN even perhaps one day) will embrace the webmasters that help provide them with their mountains of content, rather than just catering to the media moguls with the advertising dollars. There are still glimmers of hope that the SE’s are really here to HELP webmasters and SEO’s, but there are still lots of examples (at least in my mind) of opportunities that they have missed. Helping us to better understand the manual review process, will help the SE’s to introduce the concept to the rest of the world that they are afraid of exposing it to. We are your link between the Mountain View ivory towers and the “general public”. We understand your need for keeping the results “untainted”, but just how long do you think you can maintain the appearance that there isn’t editorial control in the organic search results? Isn’t the decision to keep the editorial decisions as algorithmic as possible a editorial decision in and of itself?
If you have examples or questions about any site that you think may have incurred a manual penalty, feel free to e-mail it to me for research purposes (it will stay completely anonymous). You also may want to give the anatomy of a successful reinclusion request, or the guide to filters, penalties, and bannings a look.
Related reading:
Filed under: Book Reviews, General, Google, SEM Research by Stuntdubl SEO at 10:10 am, 12/21/2005
Subtitle: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Here’s the scoop: I really was excited when this came out. I purchased it, and waited a long time, and was ultimately quite pleased with the read. I think I’ve re-read most every single piece of google news SOMEWHERE in the last 2 years, so I wasn’t too psyched about reading more about the big G, but it was still quite interesting.
Interpreted Thesis:
Google is a large beast of a company that has “crossed the chasm” by evolving in as short a period of time as any company in history. They have not experienced much failure as a company and have demonstrated and acheived tremendous growth. They will have to make difficult decisions regarding new media in the future. Google tries to base decisions on artificial intelligence and technology with less demonstration of human intervention this being a fundamental difference between them and their seemingly largest competitor Yahoo who views themselves as a media company. Validation that Google is branded as Search since the time they became the verb for it.
Topics:
-Search evolution
-Search business models
-Search philosophy
-Search definition
-Sociology
-Communication
-Statistics
-Google
Quotes from dogeared pages:
“The search all starts with you: your query, your intent - the desire to get an answer, find a site, or learn something new. Intent drives searcch…”
“Arguably, there is no greater act of creativity than the formation of a good question, and every day the wired world asks hundreds of millions of questions via search.”
Brilliance on the key distinction between Google and Yahoo:
Yahoo is far more willing to have overt editorial and commercial agendas, and to let humans intervene in search results so as to create media that suppports those agendas. Google, on the other hand, is repelled by the idea of ecoming a content or editorially driven company.
Wonder how AOL will effect that, if at all.
Favorite part:
I really enjoyed reading about the interpretation of how Google is a technology company and Yahoo is a media company. This point shined through and brought me validation on why I have preferred Yahoo at times since G had become the media darling.
Favorite portions:
-Reading about Bill Gross and how Goto turned into a multi-billion idea
-Bill Gross selling vertical search distribution to the point where he could become his own destination
-Bill Gross fighting spam by putting a price on a commodity
-Reading someone else’s account of the dreaded “florida update”
Application to SEO:
If you don’t understand history, you are bound to repeat it’s mistakes. The history of Google and other topics in this book are fundemental to understanding SEO. Either you were there and it was entertaining (for me about half the book), or it’s downright enlightening because you weren’t.
Filed under: General, Google, SEM Research, Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 7:51 pm, 12/11/2005
What is a scraper site
Question from client:
What do you make of this site?
http:// shittyadsensescrappersite.com goes here
Whats the purpose?
My response:
It’s what we call a “scraper site”
Designed specifically to game adsense and make money
from clicks. It’s an evolution of the escalating information arms race between spammers and search engineers.
They “scrape” the title and descriptions for the search top 10,20, 50 search results and spit it out to a webpage. There are LOTS of variations of this technique, and one of the reasons I worry so much about duplicate content, as it’s one of the biggest problems SE’s currently face.
The real question is why google allows them as much as they do, and don’t shut down or penalize accounts that use them. Tin foil hat theory says to pollute yahoo and msn and make extra money from advertisers using content targeting. That and it’s a very new gray area.
This is the darker side of SEO that includes heavy automation of webpage creation for gaming the engines.I’ve heard it joked before that about a couple dozen SEO’s are responsible for 3/4’s of the SE’s indexes…the funny part is that it is probably nearly true (I’ve met a couple of them).
Sincerely,
Todd
The Clone Wars
“DMOZ clones” were among the first “scaper sites”. They rendered “common backlink tools” much less useful, as any site that is listed in DMOZ would show up on many of these clone sites. They also pollute the search engines. The engines have managed to get rid of most DMOZ clones, and are doing better on ridding themselves of scraper sites, but it is still a hotly debated issue that probably isn’t going to go away completely anytime soon.
I think G has realized that some things that seem detrimental may have certain benefits associated with them as well. I’m sure the web spam team doesn’t like scrapers (and I agree with them), but if they investors (or board for that matter) knew about them would they really care, or would it be seen as a nice added short term revenue stream? I won’t add fuel to the tin hat fire, but I don’t think scrapers are all that different than click fraud, when left to the eyes of someone outside the search space (especially if they see THEIR ad on a sh*t site). It’s going to take a long time for the ROI of advertisers to dip low enough for them to realize all the trash that they don’t need to be paying for shouldn’t be considered a cost of doing business.
The Rules of SE Ambiguity
Duplicate content and scrapers are going to be ongoing concerns with the search engines for quite some time. As aggregation becomes more and more simple, so does abusing the uses of aggregation. Button pushers are testing the limits all the time to establish thresh-holds. This is also why you won’t get black and white answers from webmaster guidelines. They are not going to tell you anything even remotely close to variable threshholds. Google and Yahoo are not going to tell you that you can copy up to 20% of content and not get kicked. Then nearly every page on the net (or at least in SEO-land) would have 19.9999% dupe content. Most likely, this is not how the content is filtered anyhow. It’s more likely that “overlays” and pattern matching are used.
Don’t be collateral damage
Understanding how duplicate content filtering works is important to those that are legitimately aggregating portions of content on their site. You don’t want to create a problem in the engines, just so your users can read CNN headlines on your website. Try to keep the content as unique as possible, and you won’t end up as collateral damage.
Unique content also poses an interesting question. What is “quality content”? Do you need to be Harvard educated to write a piece on the sociological implications of search on the political structure of our country? If I mention Harvard and big three and four syllable words, will the assumption be that my content is fit for college graduate readership, and thus deemed higher “quality”?
What’s Your Site’s Reading Level?
My guess is that as the benefits to being more relevant improve for the search engines (there are certainly arguments against why efficiency is not currently in the SE’s best interest), they will get increasingly better at determining “reading levels” of sites. Someone searching for information on investing in a stock portfolio or 401k plan will not want to read an article written by a high school dropout, or click through a strange looking page with ads at the top to get to what they are really looking for. Whenever you are pondering a subject like duplicate content, you have to assume that at the very least G is three moves ahead of what you are thinking. What are their next three moves AFTER duplicate content detection? Think ahead, and you won’t be worrying about increasing your site’s reading grade level in a year, or talking about the “11th grade penalty vs. filter”.
Scraper Site Discussions and articles:
Filed under: General, Google, SEM Research, Search Engine Optimization by Stuntdubl SEO at 2:14 pm, 11/25/2005
I received an e-mail from a kind gent in the UK this morning in regards to his take on the “sandbox” and his summmation of it. I asked if he would like to have it “guest posted” here as I thought it quite insightful. He has posted at WMW in the excellent thread there as well (*note supporter’s forum thread).
Thanks Calum, I’m sure your Team Building site will do quite well with your excellent knowledge of current algorithms (of course now it’s associated with a known SEO site you realize ;)).
Many of Calum’s observations were inspired by the Coffee Talk with Matt Cutts.
Guest Sandbox/ Trustbox post:
A sandbox is not a penalty or even a ‘thing’ - it’s a collection of filters
in G’s algo that causes a site (not a page) to not rank well for a period of
time (and it’s usually felt worst by sites that are):
1. released for the first time
(other sites affected are expired domains, and domains that have their originating registered dates changed - I think).
So what filters are we talking about then? This is for me the most important first question for us to address:
2. Filters are applied to certain keywords, and not to others.
They are usually the competitive commercial/business keywords. If your site is about an obscure non-commercial subject, then you’re likely to escape the sandbox.
3. Filters are usually applied for 6 months, but can be applied for up to 2 years.
If you make some changes (discussed in this thread) they may only last a couple or so weeks…
4. Filters will look for behaviour of SEO’s or spamsters
and will be applied if a site shows certain tell-tale signs of being optimised. So this is where the discussion got interesting (for me). So what are SEO’s to do for new sites?
4.1 Talked about getting listed in lots of directories as one.
4.2 Also talked about getting general directories rather than specific niche directories that are highly relevant to your product and service offering.
4.3 Talked about getting links from sites that are known to sell links.
An important distinction needs to be made here - the 2nd post from DaveN (linked to in this thread) hinted to me at certain paid advertising not being picked up as a bad neighbourhood. What follows is guesswork at this stage - my guess would be sites that are reputable and perhaps expensive to buy links from. So perhaps sites that have not been identified by G as link sellers worthy link penalties. Another previous post talked about making sure that the first few links you gather are all quality links that are on topic. This gives G the indication that your site is ‘really’ covering the topic you say it is covering, and that you’re not doing SEO work to get it ranked.
The danger is getting associated in what is being nicknamed a “bad neighbourhood”. So if enough credible trusworthy people say that you’re also
a credible trustworthy person, then hey, in G’s eyes you probably are a credible trustworthy person! This points to effective marketing, press releases, one way links. (it’s the ‘etc’ I’d love to know more about ;))
4.4 Talked about getting lots of traffic as something that can not only keep you out of the sandbox, but a definite proven method to get you out once you are in!
So again, this points to effective marketing. Also mentioned that the idea as to whether this needs to be sustained traffic, or whether G only looks for a short time and then stops the filter watch on your new site. No one has answered this questions yet, so we’re left to guess. Of course we would prefer to get a continued stream of traffic rather than one initial boost followed by little… The focus it appears to be then for a new site is that you don’t look to the SE’s for good traffic, but rather that you look towards non SE methods of pulling in the visitors.
4.5 Of course a good by-product of getting an authority site to send you initial traffic is that they often lead to your gathering a number of OWL’s
from other sites.
Eg. Prweb article gets picked up by Y and G newsfeeds and in turn these 3 sites will be read by thousands. This could lead to your site either being republished online by other news sites, or just in webmasters giving you a link because they like your article. So between the lines something that probably has an impact is your gathering natural looking OWL (one way links) after getting the quality link.
4.6. Looks like there’s not just 1 site that can keep you out of the sandbox - it’s best to have a handful. Dmoz alone can’t do it.
——–End guest post———-
While I could certainly debate certain points of Calum’s speculation, I think to do so would detract from a nice piece of work. Thanks mate.
Filed under: General, Google, Industry Stuff by Stuntdubl SEO at 6:53 pm, 11/2/2005
“All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.” - Napolean Hill
Don’t search for great truths with search engine updates! Analyzing updates is a necessary evil of practicing SEO, made increasingly painful if you try to wade through “update threads”. Staying on top of things is important, but even more important is maintaining your sanity (and thus power of observation). The simple fact is that like it or not Google’s engineers will probably always be much smarter than you or I on a macro-search scale. Google will continue to lead the pack with their mountains of P.H.d’s, and cause headaches for those SEO’s that take a reactive approach to updates and base their conclusions on small fragmented data sets.
They are going to continue to combat SEO tactics that manipulate the relevancy of their results. The methods used to combat the “hot button” issues will be create some colleteral damage. A big part of learning to not worry too much about analyzing the updates comes from trying to foresee what that damage will be to avoid it. By knowing that duplicate content is a key issue, you should work harder to avoid that. When the dust settles in a month or so, and some true logical conclusions come into play…we’ll know what to be avoiding for next time.
Google will be working on:
-Latent semantic indexing
-Duplicate content filtering
-Better and faster spidering
-Devaluing manipulated variables
-Migrating vertical search results
SEO tactics on the decline:
-Reciprocal links
-Keyword stuffing
-Link Networks
-Meta Information
-Internal anchor text stuffing
SEO tactics on the rise:
-Related phrases/ Semantic analysis
-Keyword co-occurence
-Unique IP links
- “Trusted” links
-Quality indicators
-Geo-targeting
-Behavioral targeting, more
-Personalization
-Trustrank
-Many of the other things in their patent paper
-More editorial control via eval.google.com
-User Tagging
-(oxymoron alert!) Community intelligence
What I try to spend the most time analyzing:
-Which purchased links I think still pass value
-Which sites have improved their “trust value”
-How I can find links from old trusted sites better
-What content are my users looking for
-How I can improve the indexability of my sites
-How I can improve the site architecture in the “eyes of the engines”
-What I would focus on if buying links becomes ineffective
Don’t get too used to “free” traffic, and if you like it…figure out how to keep it.
I don’t like violence, Tom. I’m a businessman; blood is a big expense.
- Sollozzo
Disclaimer: I’ve never engaged in any of these practices, nor will I ever engage in these practices. I don’t think anyone else should either. They are unethical, and downright wrong. Even the mob knows that wars are “bad for business”. The Google TOS state there is “almost nothing” a competitor can do to harm your rankings. I’d just like to be prepared for not being that low percentage statistic.
The purpose of this post is also to demonstrate that you shouldn’t place the fate of your business in the hands of your natural search engine rankings alone. Be prepared to hedge your bets with alternative traffic sources if something like these were to ever happend to you. Don’t believe everything that you hear from a search engine rep.
Don’t be OVERLY paranoid, just an open-minded skeptic. Be prepared, enjoy the ride, and start a good PPC campaign. Even exceptional SEO’s don’t have control over all the circumstantial variables - a good SEO just uses as many of those variables to their advantage as possible, very similar to the way a sports bettor knows all the angles in a game.
I would imagine Google’s view on the subject goes something like this - You’re not ever gonna stop ALL the evil folks, so just let them gun for each other in industries like pharmaceuticals, travel, mortgages, loans, and real estate where we’ll just hand edit the top results. Of course this would be “off the record”, and eventually all their base will belong to us anyways. I think the search engines are all working quite hard in this area to keep the collateral damage of fighting spammers low.
Things Your Competitor Can do to Tank Your Rank
- Google Bowling
- Google Washing - more googlewashing
- 302 hijack
- Blog *ahem* signing on your behalf
- Get you a crappy Yahoo directory listing?
- Get you a crappy DMOZ directory listing (or keep submitting so they never get listed)
- Send out a couple hundred thousand link requests on your behalf
More reading:
Disclaimer reiterated: I have never done any of this, and don’t think that you should either. The idea is to be prepared for unscrupulous competitors.
