Following on the six site design sins from last week, here is the completion of the list of thirteen SEO Website / Search Issues from Y2K.
7) Sites designed entirely in Flash
Flash is an incredibly cool design medium that enables animations, sound, video and user interaction with websites. As the web and the designers who work on it become more sophisticated, Flash is being used more often. Unfortunately, Flash files are often used without search engine spiders in mind. While Micromedia did distribute a Search Development Kit to help search engines decode information phrased in Flash files, it is still very difficult to perform SEO services on a site designed primarily in Flash.
Sites designed in a coding language search spiders can easily read and understand tend to fare much better in organic listings. The best advice for using Flash files is to embed them in a page designed in a more standard format.
8) Use of MS Word HTML generator
Did you know that a MSWord document can be saved as an HTML document? If you didn't, I am sorry to report it is possible. The problem is, MSWord documents saved as HTML documents have a bazillion or so lines of extraneous code and tend to perform quite poorly in search engine results. They are hard to work with from an SEO perspective as well. Removing extraneous code from a MSWord document can be difficult, even when using Dreamweaver.
9) Poor site maintenance, updates
Every town has a storefront that never changes and that store never seems to be very prosperous. Websites need to be updated and maintained, they are sort of like a storefront that way. There are actually two issues being addressed under this heading.
Maintenance: Many website owners do not properly maintain their websites. Some sites look years out of date while others continue to carry links to sites that no longer exist. We've even come across some sites with product information for items the business no longer carries. While operating a business in the real world can take a lot of time, the Internet is an active place of business. Spiders and live-visitors need to see a well maintained website to take the business seriously.
Updates: We have been preaching the values of regular site updates to clients for years. Adding fresh content to a site is important on so many levels. Google, for example, uses the rate at which new content is added to a site as a guideline when judging the relative importance of that site. Fresh content also increases the on-site inventory of documents that might achieve search engine placements.
Live-users also appreciate new content as it adds value to their experience at your site. As many online business owners understand, Internet users are a lot like regular shoppers. They follow patterns and purchase from places they are comfortable. Giving visitors a reason to revisit your site is always good for business.
10) Ignoring emerging technologies or pre-existing payment programs
This point follows the maintenance and update point for a good reason. For some website owners, the Internet is their primary place of business. Unlike brick and mortar operations, there is no physical location to purchase items, all sales are made online. That means the website is the store. Like their brink and mortar equivalents, online stores need to use a variety of tools to attract customers.
XML based sitemaps that feed information to the search engines via RSS is an example of a beneficial emerging technology that is being ignored by the majority of webmasters out there. Blogs, podcasting, social or industrial networking and the purchase of PPC advertising are others. By ignoring emerging technologies, business owners can miss vast groups of potential clients.
Online business is dependent on the electronic transfer of funds. For most that means using a credit card. Some people don’t use credit cards and others use them only for specific purposes. There are several types of online payment systems that are not dependent on credit cards, the most well known being PayPal. Surprisingly, relatively few online businesses accept PayPal as a payment option. How many brick and mortar businesses still use an abacus and a cigar box as the cash till? Aside from a few quaint grocers and herbalists in the older part of my town, I don't know anyone else who even knows how to use an abacus. That's the power of technology. There are still a few brick and mortar stores who refuse to honour bank debit cards or credit cards. By refusing to use newer technologies, their businesses either stagnate in a previous century (which in some cases is a welcome respite from the 21st century), or lose customers like myself who rarely use coin or cash.
The last three frightening things for SEOs are not on-site related but have an enormous sway on how our industry evolves and the practices we employ.
11) Over-reliance on Google Results
Google remains the most important search engine in the world. A strong placement on Google can make the difference between success and failure for many online businesses. Over time, Google has come to dominate the search sphere but as businesses affected by the series of Jagger Updates this month are learning, Google listings can be a very volatile place to do business in.
That shouldn't be an issue for webmasters and online businesses as there are literally dozens of other marketplaces aside from Google. eBay is an example. There are other search engines as well. Yahoo, MSN and ASK all offer excellent search results and can collectively drive similar levels of traffic as Google. At the end of the day however, it must be noted that Google offers a heck of a lot of bang for the marketing buck and search users continue to love using Google.
It is strongly recommended that webmasters concentrate on getting strong organic and PPC placements at the other search engines and work to cultivate that business. Learning about and taking part in the Yahoo Publishing Network is a good alternative for webmasters and bloggers who want to diversify the advertising that appears on their documents. MSN is about to introduce a series of webmaster and business development features in their soon to be released paid advertising program.
12) Google's use of DMOZ information
Google is again reverting to DMOZ descriptions on some sites in its listings. This means that Google is querying DMOZ for sites to include in its general listings. This can be a potentially damaging thing for a host of reasons.
First of all, it is not very easy to get a site listed in the DMOZ directory. The backlog is huge and editors at DMOZ seem to find reasons to not include sites they feel are designed for marketing purposes only. Some website owners and SEOs have waited for years without word on the status of their submission to DMOZ.
DMOZ editors are better known for following the DMOZ system than they are for accuracy or marketing acumen. If a mistake is made in your description, it is often quite difficult to get it corrected.
13) Misunderstanding the role of the SEO sector
SEOs are not miracle workers. SEO, as a profession is a combination of good website designers and good online marketers. We do not control or even directly manipulate search engine rankings. For the most part, we don't even reverse engineer algorithms any more. We are simply online marketers who have learned a great deal about how search engines work and how they rank websites. Our technical job is to make client sites as friendly as possible for search engines. Our marketing job is to make the site as friendly as possible for live-visitors, to advise our clients about changes in the search sphere that might affect them for good or for ill, and to take action on items that might not be beneficial for clients.
We cannot make a site jump from number eight to number three, at least not with any guarantee of success. What we can do is make a website or document available to as many search engine spiders and search engine users as possible. We can help select keyword phrases and arrange them properly on the page. We can help with site design and structure, and leave trails for spiders to complete the submission phase. We can't however tell Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK or any other search engine to promote our client's sites higher in the organic listings. If we could, we would charge a heck of a lot more.
Everyone loves Top10 lists. In the SEO industry, where search engine results form the ultimate Top10 lists for clients and practitioners, the sheer number of ways a website, document or other spiderable object can be designed makes it very difficult to produce a general Top10 list for best practices. There are however, a number of basic mistakes made by webmasters, site designers and new online-entrepreneurs that inadvertently create obstacles to search placement success.
In other words, while it is difficult to say exactly what one should do in any given circumstance, it is fairly simple to say what one shouldn't do. In the spirit of the Friday before Halloween, here is a list of the Top13 worst things we've seen designers doing this year.
The worst and I mean absolute worst commercial websites to work on are designed using sub-standard shopping cart CMS generated templates. Often designed by micro-businesses new to the Internet, these sites tend to look as if they were created several years ago. In some cases, the templates they use were written in the last century.
These CMS systems rarely produce a quality product to represent your products. The advantage seen by new Internet businesses are often found in the "business in a box" solution these schemes offer by enabling website design with a shopping cart and credit-card processing. In the end, the business owner doesn't even get what he or she paid for as monthly fees are often more expensive over time than the development and hosting of a professional website.
A quick caveat... There are some very well designed Shopping Cart CMS systems out there that have worked hard to take SEO concerns into consideration. These systems tend to be newer, having been developed and instituted in the last two years. ApplePie from RoseRock Design is one example.
2) Continued use of duplicate-template CMS systems by competitors in the same industry (especially prevalent in real estate industry)
Following on the points above, the use of duplicate content templates makes achieving search placements very difficult. While some content such as name, location and region-specific information might vary; the layout is almost identical as are the all too common shared information-includes. Facilitating the creation of multiple incidents of duplicate content, even if everyone else in the local sector is doing it is not a particularly good search engine placement technique.
3) Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains
Speaking of duplicate content, there is a second, more damaging type of "dupe-content" which continues to be practiced out there. Some webmasters purchase multiple domain names, often trying to protect the brand name on their original one but sometimes in attempt to manipulate search rankings. The problem is, they populate those domains with duplicate content. Like most of us, search engines rarely enjoy reading the same stuff twice. They are very unlikely to give good rankings to incidents of duplicate content. Nevertheless, dupe-content persists, often due to neglect more than intent.
A few years ago, someone, (most likely working in the domain registrar industry), said it would be a good idea to purchase the URL for every possible incident of your corporate name. The logic is sound as it prevents confusion if another company with a similar name opens somewhere in the world. Lots of companies followed this logic and needing something to put up on those domains, they simply replicated content found at their original domain. In the past year, we have seen more than one incident where a global-scale corporation replicated duplicate content across dozens of nation specific TDLs (.ca, .ie, .co.uk, etc...) The correct way to use a number of TDLs is to either produce content that is unique and relevant to visitors from the region each TDL represents, or to use the 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect command to reference search spiders and site visitors to the site containing the original content.
In previous years, the words used to phrase a domain name had much more influence over organic search engine placements than they do today. That led to the purchase and proliferation of multi-word URLs networked together to blitz the Google algos. Mega-network promotions populated with URLs such as homes-in-walla-walla-washington.com and realestate-agents-walla-walla-washington.com and walla-walla-real-estate-homes.com were spawned and littered the web with duplicate content. Some of that duplicate content remains in use. In one extreme case, we saw what had been a duplicate-content site sold to a new and obviously cyber-naive real estate agent.
Every search engine uses a slightly different algorithm. Google's is heavily influenced by incoming links but considers an array of on-site/page elements. Yahoo is also influenced by incoming links but also considers a wider array of on-site/page factors as well. MSN is very influenced by on-site/page factors. The other search engines have their own unique ranking tendencies. Therefore, a version of each important page in a site should be designed to achieve high rankings on each search engine, based on the unique ranking method used by each search engine. On the surface, that thinking makes sense. With a dozen or so mini-sites, a link density network could be crafted to please Google's link-dependent algorithm. The method became a primary tool of the early SEO industry when there were eight different search engines to think about.
Search engines implemented filters to remove leader or doorway pages, a task made easier after the dot-com crash of 2000 when Google rose to be the only major algorithmic search engine. When Yahoo and MSN introduced their own proprietary search engines in 2004, a number of less than ethical SEO firms began using leader or doorway pages again, sometimes culminating in disastrous results as seen last year when two of the largest SEO spam-shops in the United States got entire client lists banned from Google's database.
5) Link-Network Schemes
The client-list bans mentioned under the previous heading happened for a couple of reasons. The first was duplicate content spread across a number of leader or doorway pages. The second was that these doorway pages had been connected together to form a massive link-network designed to game Google's page-rank dependent algorithms.
Link-networks as ranking schemes have sprung up over the course of the ten-year history of the SEO sector. The premise and sales pitch is relatively simple. Practically everyone familiar with Google's ranking formulas understands the importance of incoming links. What most people don't fully understand is the sophistication that goes into the way Google and the other search engines judge the value and relevancy of links. The major search engines need to have very stringent link-evaluation tools as pieces of their ranking algorithms. Every search engine using links to recommend new sites for inclusion in their databases stresses the importance of topical relevance between linking documents. In other words, information on documents that are linked together should have a direct or even indirect relationship.
Both Google and Yahoo consider the content found on documents that link to each other before assigning a value to each link. They also consider the age, intent and context of each linking document. In order to prevent bogus link-networks from being established, both claim to and attempt to consider the entire link-tree surrounding a URL before placing a value on links found within or directed to it.
6) Hidden text
Hidden text describes a technique as simple as the name implies. By placing keyword loaded text in places search engine spiders will see it but live-visitors won't, ill-informed webmasters and SEOs are trying to achieve high placements through higher keyword to non-keyword ratios or densities. Hidden text often takes the form of poorly camouflaged place names and services tagged to the bottom of documents.
Sometimes hidden text takes the form of white-text on a white-background. Other times it can be found in comment tags included in the source-code. A more sophisticated way to hide text is to place it behind a [div] layer. However one tries to hide hidden text, search engines always see through the trick and will tend to apply penalties against sites using it.
Part Two of: "SEO FrightSites :: Top Thirteen Worst Website / Search Issues seen in 2K5" will be published on Monday
Online advertising is entering a fourth phase of innovation. Each of the previous waves of online marketing innovation has directly influenced or informed the development of successive waves. Starting with banner ads ten years ago, the online economy has revolved around advertising. While subscriber fees, government grants and private investment capital paid for the development of the backbone, advertisers paid for the development and sustentation of commercial websites. The same is true today but, just over a decade into the evolution of the public/commercial Internet, advertising has become much more precise, targeted and universally pervasive.
Advertising techniques are changing and a coordinated series of discussions and experimentation surrounding emerging forms of online advertising known as Web2.0 is taking place. To be more precise, the experimentation has been going on for about two years at a much less coordinated technical level. A virtual slew of online marketing gurus are catching on to a number of new ideas and concepts and struggling to put them together into a coherent marketing philosophy, hence the slew of hopeful hype surrounding Web2.0 last week.
There's often a seriousness to hype that shouldn't be dismissed just because the messenger sounds like a huckster. When mass-marketing ideas are exchanged by a lot of mass-marketers, (even far-fetched philosophical ones), the stuff we do in marketing is subtly changed.
As we've seen in the past, some ideas will work well and some will not. All hyperbole aside, a month worth of headlines in the search-media clearly shows a rapid evolution in the world of online marketing is taking place. It is happening for a number of reasons. Advertisers need to expand on Internet marketing models, more players are entering the field, and technology is allowing developers to do amazing new things.
While theoretical mountains are being moved around Madison Ave , the simple and practical business of organic search engine optimization and placement continues to operate under the radar of the mainstream business world. The irony is, the one thing about each of the previous (and most of the newer) online promotional trends that remains constant is a dependence on some form of organic search.
Organic search is the backbone of all other search-based advertising formats. Representing the fastest research and reference tool, various types of search are the most used applications on the Internet after email. Several user behaviour studies have confirmed that the majority of search engine users click on the Top organic placements before looking at the paid placements to the right and above. Organic search optimization also remains the least expensive form of online marketing.
Google continues to understand the importance of its organic search listings and if the conversations taking place over at Digital Point and Search Engine Watch are any indication, so do many webmasters making money through Google's AdSense program. It is a human tendency to neglect the simplest things and a business tendency to promote things that make the most money. Often those that tend to simple things are successful beyond those stuck in auras of complexity. In our complex world however, those that learn to use the simplest tools along with complex systems tend to do better than the rest.
An excellent example of this is the long-term StagedHomes.com online advertising campaign we've worked with for two years. The campaign features a real estate service developed and taught by our client. By targeting the most frequently search keywords and phrases for her specific niche of the massive US real estate industry, we have managed to achieve and maintain a wide range of Top5 organic placements over the past two years. I'm going to use this campaign as an example as I think the client is one of the savviest long-term thinkers when it comes to making practical use of new technologies to market and facilitate her business.
Being found on the search engine results pages wasn't enough for our client's ambitions or the capacity of her business. Not only did she want to grow quickly, the demand for her professional and teaching services is immense and continues to grow. About eighteen months ago, she started using AdWords and Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing) to promote her business and expand her reach by having her ads appear in online versions of publications through content-distribution and AdSense subscribers.
Now, she has enjoyed the benefits of both worlds with amazing and persistent organic placements and prominent AdWords and YSM placements under a wide array of keywords and phrases. The organic placements continue to be the most clicked from the search engine results pages themselves but she has also gained a substantial number of clicks from ads appearing in online trade magazines, real estate sites and blogs displaying ads generated by Google or Yahoo.
She is always interested in expanding her markets and has done several television and radio pieces along with producing her own series of videos, products and educational services. It will be interesting to see what happens when she begins to focus on the expanding array of online advertising options from pod-casting commercials to targeting her messages through social networking applications.
While the cost of advertising will likely be calculated based on the familiar pay-per-click/call/action business model, the number of methods of expressing her message is about to expand, rapidly.
In the coming months, search advertisers and webmasters will be able to incorporate sound and video to keyword-specific landing pages. Pod-casting, blogs and social networking trees will become means of delivering messages and advertising. The search behaviours of members of social networks are going to be been incorporated into algorithms of search results tailored to meet the individual needs of each search-consumer. Some marketers even speculate the rise of social networking and peer-recommendations will lead to the diminishment of traditional search engines.
The rapidity of the evolution is being propelled by a number of extraordinary events, the first and foremost of which is a sudden sense of urgency in an environment increasingly dominated by Google. With Google assuming the leadership role Microsoft held before 2000, every other online advertising provider large and small has a universal competitor to examine, copy and target.
Human life is reflected in human art. Today's business drama is sort of Shakespearian. In a world where there is one king who appears to dominate above all others, there is only one main character for rivals to study, emulate and undercut. When the king acts like a fink, as all corporate kings tend to do from time to time, pretenders beget plotters who in turn tend to stage an interesting second and third act. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and even LookSmart have all made subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) Google-bashing a pillar of their corporate PR strategies while working to copy and out-innovate Google in the background.
Next, advancements in technology over the past two years are now being accepted and used in the development and marketing communities. Ajax, a tool developed in the late 90's by Microsoft to run an online version of Outlook, is now being used to operate server-side applications such as Google Maps, and the subsequent explosion of using the Google Maps API to customize maps to specific interests.
Lastly, as new technologies come into mainstream usage, they tend to disrupt or change the way the mainstream does things. Think about the way instant messaging has replaced Email in many circumstances. As Internet marketers dream up new ways to present ideas and products, they advance thinking on how to merge the most useful aspects of new communications technologies. Users of the newest version of MSN IM will soon see contextual advertising based on their current conversation appearing where banner ads now appear.
For the past two years, interest in pay-per-click search advertising has dominated the search engine marketing environment. Easily explained and understood, PPC offers definite answers to advertisers and more control over ad-placements than any other form of mass-marketing, on or off-line. PPC offers tangible, reportable results gained from a predictable investment. It also offers a flexibility that no other form of mass marketing can facilitate.
PPC has also been a cash cow for the search engines themselves. Interest in PPC allowed Google to go public fifteen months ago and paid-advertising account for the vast majority of Google's revenues. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask have all modeled their businesses on the provision of contextually delivered paid advertising.
The paid-per-click/call/action business model is obviously successful and will almost certainly form one of the pillars of future paid advertising venues offered by the major search engines.
A decade ago, the websites were littered with banner ads of every shape, size and colour. Marketing costs were calculated based on how many times the banner would appear in rotation with other advertising banners on a site. As time moved on, these banners became more sophisticated, featuring animations and even sound. The biggest problem with the model was that even if people did click the banner ad, mainstream consumers had not yet adopted online commerce. In other words, the chances of making a sale were often dependent on the consumer using the traditional communications mediums of voice and telephone to place an order. By the time the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, banner ads had lost their luster and, as the dominant means of Internet advertising, were on a steady decline. A new form of advertising had taken form and for want of a pricing structure, it was totally free.
1999 was the year Google started to be known as the coolest thing since spliced cable. Those were the days when being a geek was entirely chic. The first stages of the SEO industry had already formed around Alta Vista, Yahoo and Lycos but the Internet itself was just starting to be used by most of the general public.
Google appeared at just the right time and in just the right format to please the people and via the new fangled miracle of email, viral marketing word-of-mouth testimonies drove millions to try it. It created a very big and very sudden buzz, becoming the poster-child homepage of the millions of new Internet users. In the mid to late 90's, nearly everybody was an Internet newbie and Google helped them find stuff fast.
Around the same time, consumers were starting to trust the Internet environment. A similar phenomenon has been happening since the Google IPO last year. The intense buzz created around Google has spurred interest in the rest of the sector. Search marketing is about to become a lot more interesting and, if previous trends hold true, much of the change will have a distinctly organic flavour.
As advertisers, webmasters and search marketers take advantage of the emerging possibilities, finding and sorting information through organic algorithms will remain a core consistency for the search service providers. In other words, while the rest of the search-advertising milieu evolves into more complex and targeted forms of paid-ad distribution, most consumers will still find those paid-ads (whatever format they take) and the documents they are embedded in via organic search results.
The best known of all weekly alternative newspapers, New York's Village Voice has been purchased by New Times Media. New Times owns eleven other large alternative weekly papers including The Pitch (Kansas City MO) and the Houston Press. The two publishing companies will be merged into a new firm, Village Voice Media. A part of the merger plan calls for the development of an Internet portal to compete with Yahoo and AOL.
David Schneiderman, current CEO of the Village Voice was yesterday named president of Village Voice Digital, the arm of the new company responsible for developing the portal. New Times Media also holds an Internet-based advertising agency known as the Ruxton Media Group.
The merger gives Village Voice Media access to seventeen of the largest urban markets in the United States, allowing them to compete on a more even playing field for both traditional and digital advertisers. The new firm will have a combined weekly circulation of 1.8 million papers and approximately 4.5 million weekly readers.
A not so funny thread over at the Digital Point forums asks webmasters to estimate how much money they are losing due to the Jagger update. Some webmasters are claiming to be losing up to $9000 per month. Others claim to have seen their traffic decline by up to 85% over the past week.
One post on the fourth page asks if anyone offers Google upate insurance. Why didn't we think of that?
We've had quite the week over the past seven days, eh?
Whenever Google implements an algorithm update, the search engine optimization sector gets inundated with phone calls from clients questioning why their site placements took a sudden dive.
Though most SEOs realize that the dislocation seen by some well optimized sites is almost always corrected by the time the algo-shift runs its course, when a client has a problem, the good SEO goes into overdrive to provide solutions. Blaming Google or any other search engine is simply not enough. That means adding hours to the day doing extraordinary research while staying on top of the myriad of other responsibilities and job tasks.
For sleepy-eyed algo chasers working the web, this week is likely going to be as crazy-making as last week was. Google is rumoured to have implemented the second phase of what is said to be a three-piece update. The good news is that results we see this week will change by next week. The bad news is nobody has any idea what next week's results will look like.
Dislocation caused by previous Google algo-updates have tended to last for about one month after the start of the update. In some cases, most notably with the Florida update two years ago, it might take up to three months for the results to settle down to what can be considered "normal".
One thing that is different this year than in previous years is the increased power of Google's spider and the ability for webmasters to move Google's spiders using XML sitemaps. GoogleBot visits websites with far more frequency than in previous years which should make the time it takes to update their rankings far shorter. Also, Google invites webmasters to directly inform it using an RSS fed XML sitemap.
Given that this is only the second step in what is expected to be three phase implementation strategy, it is way too early to offer anything but speculative advice on how to deal with the Jagger Update. The only solid advice we can honestly offer is that of patience. For site owners who've lost position in the past week, chances are your site will bounce back in a few weeks. If not, your SEO specialist should be able to offer strong advice at that time.
SEOs see a lot of different Content Management System (CMS) driven websites in the course of a day. Some are very well designed and some are not. The ones that are well designed are often delightful to work with, even the most technically complicated. The ones that are poorly designed however, even the most basic; provide an unlimited well of headaches, extraneous lines of code, and frustration.
A few minutes ago, one of our sales staff asked me into his office to look at a site that was submitted to our review queue. It was a real estate related website designed using a CMS. The site structure was awful, the template looked like dog-food, internal links led to pages four directories deep and the image based navigation system was built on buttons that looked five years out of date.
A note attached to the review request stated that the template and CMS had been purchased from a firm that is possibly the oldest domain registrar on the commercial internet. That information prompted a quick visit to their website where I came across a page bearing this message:
Build Your Web Site Yourself
Create your own Web site, even if you don't have any technical or design skills.
Use our online Web site builder tools or (even easier!) templates, or products such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.
Build the site you need, yourself - and update it yourself as your needs change
All packages include Web hosting
Many packages also include e-mailboxes and free domain name registration
Now, I dislike raining on anyone else's parade, especially when the leader of that parade is one of the largest Internet related corporations on the planet but someone's got to say it. No one is doing anybody any business favours by offering the opportunity to build substandard sites using substandard tools.
If one is building a vanity page, a family images page or something non-commercial, the use of free tools is a very good idea. If, however one is trying to build a commercial enterprise, and they expect to be found anywhere near the Top10 on a major search engine, the use of such templates is not such a good idea.
Those tempted towards the free side of things should remember that in business, free is a four-letter F word that often produces results that are best described with a commonly used four letter S word. The only thing that beats investing in professional designers when building a commercial site is learning to do the job properly in house.
Here is yet another cool use of the Google Maps API. Earlier this week, Search Engine Watch Forums moderator Elisabeth Osmelowski created a Google map showing where hundreds of search engine optimizers and marketers are located.
The map is open for SEO/SEM practitioners to place a marker on their city or region. As of the time of this writing, 265 search marketers had indentified themselves and their location. After reading their writing and looking at their work, it is sort of interesting to see where our colleagues are located.
Our firm, StepForth Placement is located in Victoria British Columbia, at the southern end of Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada. Aside from being one of the most beautiful places on the planet, it is the home to three well known search marketing experts from three different ends of the SEM spectrum.
Jensense is known as one of the world's leading authorities on paid search advertising and is the author of the highly popular JenSense blog.
Todd "Oilman" Friesen is very well regarded as one of the nicest "blackhats" (or is he a whitehat today?) in the SEO industry and is a host of the popular Webmasterradio.fm broadcasts.
And then there is us, the lil' ol' StepForth team. Located deep in the heart of downtown Victoria, StepForth Placement is one of the oldest and most established SEO firms operating on the Internet.
The map application is interesting, especially for those of us in the industry who rarely get the opportunity to meet each other in person. It is also interesting as it shows how easy it is to create an application that attracts visitors and keeps them coming back.
In case you haven't noticed, there is a fairly significant update happening at Google right now. As with all other major updates, Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld has given it a name, Jagger.
Jagger is keeping true to previous Google updates and is wreaking havoc on the nerves of many webmasters, SEOs and small businesses who's placements seem to have vanished overnight. Starting sometime over the weekend, Google started showing results that looked somewhat different from the results shown earlier.
The changes actually started with a string of back-link updates that began in early September and continued into the first week of October. Two weeks later, the information Google has in regards to links directed towards a specific website is likely different than the information it had two months ago. That is likely the cause of immediate changes to the SERPS.
The most important advice in dealing with any type of Jagger is simple; don't panic.
Like temporary hearing loss, effects suffered by a visit of the Jagger Update will likely dissipate over time. What you are experiencing right now is the flash of the live-time update show in which everything is bigger (like the big-boxes who dominate the rankings right now), and badder (like the spam that rises to the surface before sinking).
Google updates happen in phases and tend to take a few weeks to fully work themselves out. If your website has suddenly lost rankings for no reason whatsoever, there is likely a simple explanation. It tends to happen during updates. More often than not, the site moves itself back up again as it and its document histories are reweighed against sites with similarly themed content.
During the infamous Florida Update , the StepForth site dropped to the mid 100's and then to the 1000's before bobbing back up to the #6 spot it holds today.
That's not to say a sudden loss of ranking is ok by any stretch. If your site loses its placement overnight, there might be a problem it shares with other sites that lost placements at the same time.
According to Google Engineer Matt Cutts , the changes stem from a series of back-link updates starting in early September. Obviously, that's where we are looking when investigating client sites that have been adversely affected by this phase of the update. We have noticed that some clients sharing similar outbound link pages have dropped in rankings. While stopping short of advising clients to immediately remove those pages, we are looking very closely at the link-paths established by our clients to try to judge how Google is looking at those links.
We hope to have concrete information to print in our blog in coming days but it will take a while to really see how Jagger is going to play out. In the meantime, we will have advice for our clients in coming days.
The other day, an article appeared in Search Engine Journal suggesting webmasters monetize their sites using Google AdSense. While the article neglected to mention an alternative webmaster advertising program offered by Yahoo Search Marketing, the idea of using one's website as a commercial medium (if possible or practical) makes good sense and can provide a minor side-income. Such minor side-incomes are often the first ingredients in making the gravy craved by all small business owners.
Since the advent of Google's AdWords grassroots distribution program, AdSense, several webmasters have built businesses out of taking content off of other people's websites and using that content to build pages designed specifically to attract ad-clicks. As the average commission earned by sites running AdSense generated advertising is approximately $20/month, webmasters working this type of scheme need to create hundreds, if not thousands of pages to make a living. In order to create those pages and attract ad-clicking visitors, content must be created, begged, borrowed, or most commonly, simply stolen. Known as Splogs , these sites only exist to game Google in one way or another, mostly for money but also for increased search rankings or as a means of manipulating search spiders.
Splogs most often get their content by scraping, the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents. By running advertising generated through the AdSense program, the owners of the splogs make money when visitors click on the ads. In other words, literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.
Before continuing, I would like to make it clear that there are several publications that request permission to reprint content. That's ok. Chances are, this article is being read in one of those publications. Online business runs on such agreements.
Splogs are bad business and the practice is finally getting the notice it deserves. Several search heavyweights have weighed in on Splogs over the past two weeks and a flame-war (the virtual equivalent of fisticuffs) broke out between members of two well-known SEO/SEM forums. As a result, the practice of producing AdSense revenues from stolen content on spammy sites got a little bit harder, starting today.
Matt Cutts , Google's spam fighter and quality assurance czar , has taken an obvious and positive interest in Splogs. In the SEO/SEM community, Cutts' name is as widely known as Page, Brin, and even Gates' names are. Cutts is "the man" when it comes to explaining the state of Google's various indexes and how they work. He is referred to as the Chief Spam Fighter at Google. In a posting to his Gadgets, Google, and SEO blog earlier today, Cutts invites Google users to report Splogs displaying AdSense driven advertising.
"You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the "Ads by Goooooogle" link and click "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw". Enter the words spamreport and jagger1 in the comments field."
The name, "Jagger1" is the reference name given the Google algorithm update that is currently causing the present shuffling of Google's search results. (Please see today's Major Players section for more information on the Jagger Update.)
Splog fraud is a big problem for Google and a growing concern for the other major search advertising providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN. It is also a problem for others working on the Internet. The way content is taken from one site and replicated to dozens of others can cause no end to technical and financial issues for honest webmasters. Content, incidentally, is not always limited to what the viewer sees on the screen. Stolen content often includes source-code and as anyone familiar with code can tell you, there's a lot of domain and document specific information embedded in source-code.
Over at Search Engine Journal , a funny posting shows how one poorly executed scrape made an honest webmaster afraid of being branded a click-fraud artist by Google. After scraping the site, the splog-artist apparently forgot to remove the AdSense code from the stolen content. That's how the honest webmaster found out he had been stolen from. He was moved to contact Google before his AdSense account status was affected. If the webmaster hadn't been paying attention, he might have been badly branded by Google, burned by someone else's scam.
That's not the only way that scrappers could adversely affect honest webmasters however. The content webmasters create, or have created for them, is the attraction that prompts visitors to their sites. Attracting lots of site visitors is a pretty important step to making money from AdSense or the Yahoo Publishing Network. If someone is stealing that content, they are also stealing potential visitors. For the webmaster, that content represents investment. For the content creator, it represents product. Either way, the scraping of content is theft.
The stolen product is then used to create what is essentially duplicate content on another site. Duplication of content can have an adverse effect on the search engine placement of all documents containing the similar items. Imagine losing your placements because someone else took the material you laboured over. Fortunately, Google's historic record of documents is fairly good at weeding through which source first displayed specific content.
Search engines have several other reasons to be concerned about splogs. As many of them are created using the free-blog software offered and hosted by most of the major search engines, the proliferation of so many splogs consumes a lot of resources. They also gum up search results with sites not actually relevant to search engine users. Lastly, they devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools, which might lead future blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere. Citizen's publishing is seen as a major revenue source for both Google and Yahoo. Having invested so much time, energy and money into the establishment of blogs, the major search engines would be loath to let their investments go the way of the dodos without a fight.
Now that the web development community is talking about the issue in earnest, some forms of protections might evolve. As it stands currently, there is little a webmaster can do to protect his or her content from being stolen for profit. You can use Copyscape to see if your material has been nabbed but after doing that, there is little one can do except write angry letters to the thief and a lawyer.
Google is inviting users and webmasters to report splogs running AdSense whenever they are seen. In a just universe, not only would the AdSense accounts of those scrappers be closed, their bank accounts would be emptied after Google sues them for fraud.
Late yesterday, LookSmart reported that they received a delisting notice from NASDAQ staff on October 13. Stating that shares in the search company had failed to remain above the $1.00 level, NASDAQ began the process of removing LookSmart from its stock-board under MarketPlace Rule 4450(a).
LookSmart is allowed to request an appeal which will delay delisting pending a decision from the NASDAQ Listing Qualifications Panel. In a press release issued by PRNEWSWIRE, LookSmart CEO David Hills said,
"Maintaining our listing on the Nasdaq National Market is an element ofour strategy to return this company to sustainable growth and increase stockholder value. We are taking appropriate measures to maintain our listing through the request for review and the stockholder meeting on a proposedreverse split. We look forward to providing an update on our operationalprogress on our next earnings call on October 27th." (click here to read press release)
There are over 113 million outstanding shares of LookSmart. The majority of shareholders would have to give their approval before the reverse stock split could take place.
Many webmasters are reporting what appears to be an update at Google. We have seen it here at StepForth as well though, like most recent Google updates, this one seems to be starting slowly. At the time of this writing, real estate clients have been the most affected, leading to speculation that similarities seen in template-driven CMS systems commonly used by the real estate industry might be a trigger.
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