It is our policy at StepForth to try and help out anyone who calls and is searching for a service that we either do not provide or we cannot offer at the level they are requesting. To this end I would like to put out a request for companies with proven multi-language content development services and foreign SEO experience.
The prospect that contacted us is looking for rankings within the major European markets as well as Japan. Native language content creation will be required for each country.
Reply by Creating a Comment for this Posting: If you represent a qualifed company please create a comment for this posting: the prospect in question is going to be keeping tabs on this posting and will reply if there is interest. Please DO NOT contact StepForth directly.
Please provide at least:
Your company name,
Languages you can optimize for,
Your website address and a link to your proven results,
Finally please note your name and number so that the prospect can contact you directly.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 10:22 AM
A few short months ago Microsoft quietly introduced adCenter, their Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising platform. My first impressions of adCenter are relatively positive. Based mostly on the setup process here are my thoughts on the newest player in the PPC industry.
Signing up for a new account is quite simple. There is a $5 sign up charge though, so take note, you won't get a look at the inner workings unless you are willing to spend a couple bucks. Years ago when I first looked at Google AdWords, I loved the fact that you could create an account, and go in and play with everything and look around. You didn't pay a dime until you were ready to have your ads go live, that is when the setup fee of $5US or $10CDN (not sure where this exchange rate came from?) was charged.
One thing worth noting that I found amusing, was when signing up for a new account you can select your "secret question" and provide an answer. I selected "Spouses middle name". I entered her name, which is 4 characters long, and received an error. "Secret answer has to be at least 5 characters long". Say what? It's a name? How many people out there have 4 characters or less in their names? Well, of the StepForth staff 60% alone do! Anyways, I misspelled her name to add a 5th character and continued on.
adCenter is following in YSM's footsteps in that it requires approval before going live. This is one thing that I had never liked about YSM. I prefer the Google model where you submit your ads and they are generally live within minutes. The waiting game is a bit of a pain.
Ads are set up into campaigns and orders. An "order" with adCenter, is basically the equivalent of an AdGroup in Google. Campaign creation is relatively easy and straightforward.
Ad length is limited to 25 characters for the title and 70 for the description. You can also add dynamic text to your ad copy such as the keyword used ie: "{keyword}". MSN makes adding this dynamic variable quite simple with a basic dropdown that will insert it, or selected dynamic text for you, so there is really no need to remember the exact syntax, although it is straightforward. Ads are ranked based on bid, click through rate, and relevance... very similar to how Google ranks their AdWords ads.
The GUI is quite user friendly. Anyone who has used Google AdWords should not have too much trouble finding their way around in this system. As it stands it is certainly more advanced than YSM, however, the new YSM interface should be live soon and available to the general public. I will comment on it once it goes mainstream.
Billing is done on a post click basis similar to that of Google. No paying in advance for clicks, that you may not receive. If you are setting up a small test account, it just doesn't make sense to put down a $50 deposit when, depending on your keywords and goals etc, may never reach that amount.
Overall the system is quite easy to use, although when searching the help it is difficult to find the information one is seeking. For instance, try looking for their ad distribution list. I am sure that in time their help feature will improve significantly, but for a new system, things look pretty good thus far.
Over the years we have answered many a phone call where a prospective client is frustrated with the poor performance of their website(s). Obviously the business profile for each website is unique, but common to many of conversations is the following scenario that we would like to share with you. For the purpose of this example we will use a site owner by the name of Sam.
The question from Sam (the caller): “ My site is 2 years old and well established online; it is well indexed on the major search engines and has a couple rankings here and there. Unfortunately after so many years of work on the site the rankings and traffic for the website are still not where I need them. I am just not sure if I should commit my limited budget to reworking a website that has been so difficult to promote; it is becoming a bigger money hole than my boat. Should I continue to invest in my current website or try launching another site with slightly different content and a new domain?”
Just to be sure I understand, I state a summarized version of what I heard back to Sam: So the site isn’t performing after years of work and you have become disillusioned enough that you don’t want to drop more money into it. As a result, you are close to launching an entirely new one while leaving the other, older site as a backup.
Now that Sam has confirmed that I understand his predicament I weave my answer in the direction of a recommended course of action – but I want to be sure he understands my reasons for the path I recommend: First of all it is vital to remember that having multiple sites promoting the same service and content can get you in hot water with the major players such as Google, Yahoo and MSN; it is spam, through and through. So, if you are going to go the route of creating a new website you will have to be “all-in” and 301 (permanently redirect) all traffic from your old site’s domain to your new one. Yes, that does mean you will have to pull down the old site. This will also mean that, unless you are very careful you will find that many of your old pages indexed by the search engines will be broken links.
The fact is that there are always reasons that a site is not performing well and, in general, dividing your attentions to another site is simply asking for another headache. After all, who says you won’t make the same mistakes when designing and promoting the new site if you don’t know what was wrong with the older one?
Now I am going to provide you with a proven SEO strategy that costs as little as a $1000 Fix your main website! There is no reason why your main site cannot recover from the issues it is facing. These are the steps I recommend you take to ensure that you invest your budget for the best results. For all steps I have provided a minimum budget to provide you with an idea where the budget is divided.
Discover the Problem. Cost $600 to $1200 We will try to unearth the problem by reviewing your site for the most common offenders:
Spam: does your site currently utilize tactics that may be causing ranking penalties?
Optimization: is your site properly optimized for your target phrase(s)?
Design: is your site using design techniques that may be limiting your ranking potential?
Content: does the site need more textual content or does it need to be stated better?
Structure: could your site be structured in a more effective manner?
Popularity: does Yahoo or Google see a healthy number of relevant backlinks to your site?
Over 90% of the time we find fundamental issues that when corrected will make all the difference in the world for your website. This service would usually cost no more than $600 to $800 in consulting time.
There are, however, occasions where we may have found some concerns but nothing that seems to indicate the type of poor results you are experiencing. In this situation we will need a few more hours to conduct the following research which could raise the cost to $1200:
Compile a Plan: recommendations will be made based on the competitor analysis.
The recommendations we provide you will be summarized at the end of the document in three levels. The first will be a list of the most important fixes to apply to your website for the best effect; these will be noted no matter how intense or potentially pricey they are. The second will be a list of the simplest fixes that you can apply immediately, in order of importance. We will also state the likely affect those changes will have in the scheme of things. The third level will be the list of the more technical and possibly costly fixes that you may need to prioritize when money becomes available.
Implement Recommended Changes: Cost $390+ Now that you have a list of our recommendations it is up to your skills and connections whether you can handle the implementation on your own or you would like a designer/consultant to apply them. If you decide only to apply the simplest fixes yourself you may just get the advantage you need to increase your rankings and turn your site around. Then the more advanced changes, if there are any, can be accounted for when the funds become available.
Note that for as little as $65 per hour you can usually hire a web design business to apply the changes. In my estimate the majority of changes I have encountered would only take 6 hours of work ($390) for a competent designer. Of course, that depends entirely on the flexibility and technology of your website.
The Waiting Game Now that your site has been updated you have to take a deep breath and sit back while the search engines reindex your site and process the updates. This is not necessarily a slow process since monsters like Google have a voracious indexing schedule but it can be. In any event, you will have to wait as long as 6 weeks to see a measurable difference in rankings.
Can You Guarantee #1 Rankings? I can certainly guarantee the quality of the work provided but I am sorry Sam, since we do not control the search engines we cannot guarantee rankings. The fact is that anyone who guarantees ranking results is not only unethical but misrepresents their abilities and Google firmly agrees.
I can tell you, however, that it is very common for websites that have undergone this process to experience dramatic increases in rankings under targeted keywords as well as a wider array of secondary rankings because the site is so well optimized.
Questions? If you have an SEO related question please send it over and we will take a crack at it: email me.
Google is preparing to announce a new offering specifically designed for the Open Source Community. All of the tongues are still at Google except for this posting by Greg Stein, an engineering manager in Google's Open Source Group.
I can't say I am exactly in the 'know' on this topic but I would take a cheap bet that Google is going to launch it's own version of SourceForge.net (touted as "The world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications").
Hmm, I wonder if the Open Source community would be interested in this? Would you post your open source project on a Google property?
Do you have feedback? Please leave a comment!
If such a creation were embraced by the OS community it would certainly solidify and diversify Google's advertising market.
We have all been there, “how the heck do they always get #1?” It is a constant frustration for many a client and, well, even myself occasionally. The fact is that much of the time there are a few solid reasons behind the search engine success of any website and it is important to learn what these reasons are before trying to compete. How is this done? Therein lies the subject of this article; how do you determine what your competitor has done to win the search engine war?
Demystifying your competitor’s success requires you to put on your detective garb because you are going to have to investigate all aspects of their website; even the deepest darkest corners. In the following instructional I will lead you through a hypothetical investigation of a competitor who is ranking for the phrase “voip services”. In each step I will choose the more popular result that I find when I do similar competitor analyses professionally. So please take note, the sample is only the most popular result; occasionally there are truly baffling cases of competitor success which have required heftier investigation leading to differing conclusions of what they did to succeed.
STEP 1: Start with the Basics: Is The Site Optimized? Visit your competitor’s website and look at the content on the page. Does the keyphrase they are ranking under appear often throughout the body text? Does the phrase appear in the headings, Meta Tags, Title and in their menu? If this is so it generally means they have focused completely on attaining the keyphrase they are ranking highly for. In other words it is quite possible, and even likely, that they have sacrificed other keyword goals in order to achieve this single goal.
Example Results of Step 1:
“ The competitor’s page has utilized the ‘voip services’ often but not in a spammy manner (not obvious overuse) throughout the body text on their home page. The page topic is clearly focused on this phrase because the Title tag states ‘VOIP Services – by VOIP Business Systems’ and the headings and menu items are clearly related. Conclusion, I have no doubt that this site has focused on this phrase and that a search engine spider will have no problem logically identifying the subject of this page as ‘voip services’.”
STEP 2: Is Site Structure Playing A Role In Their Success? Site structure is a fundamental reason for search engine success. I cannot stress enough just how important it is to have a website that can be freely and simply indexed by search engines. The fact is that the more legitimate and useful content that a search engine has access to on a website the better the environment for top rankings. To put this inquiry simply: “how well is the website indexed?” Each search engine may react slightly different to the technology used within a website so let’s tackle the 2 largest and most revealing engines:
Test Google and Yahoo:On each search engine use the following syntax replacing “competitor” with your competitor’s site: site:www.competitor.com . This search will reveal how many pages that each major engine has indexed within the competitor’s site. Now that you have a list of the pages indexed, look and see if each indexed page has its own title and description. The answer will determine whether each page within their site has been individually optimized.
It is also crucial to look at the URL’s for each link. Does each link appear to have many symbols such as “%&”? Often a website with a lot of extraneous code in their URL’s will not be 100% indexed because the search engines tend to shy away from pages that are created dynamically (by databases – which these characters state). If there are no extraneous characters it may be quite revealing if you know the site is far too big to be anything but driven by a database. In this situation it is apparent that the competitor’s website has been tweaked by a programmer to allow the search engines to index everything. This tweak is extremely common and highly recommended for anyone who has a database driven website with unfriendly URLs (contact me for more info).
Google Sitemap Another useful and revealing tactic is to determine whether your competitor is using Google Sitemap to improve the indexing of its website. To find this out with reasonable chances of success, try entering the following URL into your browser’s address bar: www.competitor.com/sitemap.xml. This is the default file name for Google sitemaps so if your competitor has one this will often provide you with a resulting page full of xml data. Here is an example of what you would see if your search were successful (from StepForth’s website). If you do find a sitemap then it is reasonable to assume that your competitor is relatively well informed on the latest search engine tactics and that Google Sitemaps may play a small role in their online success.
Comparing Actual Site Size Finally you need to know exactly how many pages your competitor actually has online. This way you can determine how well their website has been indexed. To do this there are a variety of software options but one simple and free option is to use Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu is a free site analysis tool available here; in the past I have found it very simple, small to install and unobtrusive. Install the program and select a new project where you just need to enter the address to spider and let it go to work. Ultimately you can ignore a lot of the information because you are not trying fix dead links. The key is the “Statistics for Managers” section located at the bottom of the report. The number of pages within the site can be found next to the “text/html” statistic.
Example Results of Step 2
“ I saw that Google had indexed about 9000 pages and Yahoo had indexed 138,000 pages. I am quite impressed with these indexing; obviously my competitor’s site is easily indexed by search engine spiders. To back this up I see that the URL’s do not have any extraneous characters yet they are also very long… this database-driven website must have been tweaked for search engines.
"Yahoo had more results than Google but that isn’t a surprise since Yahoo tends to be more forthcoming with its site-specific queries. A Google Sitemap does exist on the competitor’s site but because Yahoo has also indexed the site well I don’t suspect it has played a significant role. As for the ratio of actual pages to those indexed… it appears that Yahoo has actually indexed more pages than my software found. Overall I would say that this competitor has spent a lot of time making their site search engine friendly. I should compare these results with my own site… perhaps I need to follow suit!”
STEP 3: Where, Oh Where Do They Get Links? These days another fundamental issue are backlinks (links pointing to their site); just how many have your competitors got that you don’t have OR just how good are they? For example you may find that your competitor has thousands of links but when you research them they appear to be less than relevant to their site topic. Only relevant links offer any advantage. In other words, if your site is about VOIP and you have a link from a hair salon you are not likely to get an iota of benefit from this link. That said, if you have a link from a telephone sales website then there is an obvious correlation in relevance and your perceived search engine popularity will increase.
In order to discover this information you have two options. One, perform a manual search of your competitor’s backlinks where you can randomly review the quality of their links (time consuming but ok for small sites). The other option is to purchase a program like OptiLink which is designed specifically to simplify the investigation process; especially for large competitor sites. For the purposes of this article I will stick to the manual option but I do recommend checking out OptiLink because it also provides other amazing analysis tools that will help you get better rankings.
Manual Research Open two web browsers and then follow these instructions:
In one browser visit Google and type in the following:link:www.competitor.com
The resulting list will include a sampling of the backlinks that Google ‘sees’. Now I note “sampling” because Google is not very forthright with this information. For example I can state with little doubt that Google actually sees just as many backlinks that Yahoo does yet Google always shows fewer in their results.
In the other browser visit Yahoo and type in the following: linkdomain:www.competitor.com
The resulting list is likely a very realistic assessment of all the notable links your competitor has online.
Now that you have a list for each major search engine you can tackle randomly investigating the links within each.
Some Points to Look Out For:
Are the sites relevant to your competitor’s site? If they are not relevant you can consider them a low quality link with likely zero benefit.
Do the sites appear to be reputable? In other words do they have obvious Spam? If there is obvious Spam you can ignore this site.
Do the sites have decent PageRank? (use the Google Toolbar to deduce this) Low PR sites (>4) are generally less helpful. High PageRank sites (5>) often have better impact because they are considered reputable so most outgoing links will be votes of confidence for the destination site. Please note that this is a topic thick with opinions but these are fair general statements.
Do they appear to be link farms? If they are, this link can generally be discounted.
Are the links paid? If you notice that the links shown are paid links take note of the site and consider contacting them for their rates. Even if you decide not to proceed with their service it can be a revealing piece of information.
Example Results for Step 3:
“ I decided to review 50 different back links on each search engine and I discovered something very interesting. First of all, of the 100 links that I reviewed I noticed that my competitor actually owns the sites! I figured this out by reviewing the Whois of each site because they appeared to be so promotional. Each site is informational, well designed and obviously created to build traffic to his main site. This is not a tactic that I want to follow due to the time it takes and from an ethical standpoint so I chose to focus on the other links I found. Unfortunately it appears that the other links were not too revealing; none of them appeared to be of especially high quality and most appeared to be from an old link building campaign because they were link farms (an old and dangerous tactic).
"I did have one lucky hit! I found about 10 websites where my competitor is paying for links. These sites appear to be of very good quality and the number of outgoing links is very low. I am going to find out if advertising on them is affordable.”
STEP 4: Your Site – Compare and Contrast Now run all of the same analysis you just did for your competitor on your own site and record your discoveries.
STEP 4: The Resulting Conclusions Compare and contrast the information that you have compiled from your competitor and your own website and create a game plan.
Example Conclusions: The Game Plan
In point form this is what I believe I need to review on my own site in order to compete:
I must simplify the URL’s within my website. My research has shown that my site has several roadblocks because my site is only 20% indexed in both Google and Yahoo.
I need to optimize each major page within my website paying particular attention to the customization of each title tag. I noticed that each of my competitor’s top performing pages (despite being deep in their site) was well optimized.
It may not be the biggest help but I am going to add a Google Sitemap to my website once it has been optimized.
I need to attain more backlinks. I see how my competitor has gained backlinks but I have no interest in pursuing this angle. Instead I am going to hire a link building firm as well as start my own blog on VOIP emerging technology that I hope will produce enough interest to get some backlinks.
Other Forms of Competitor Analysis The analysis that I outlined above is used when you are trying to beat out a competitor under a particular keyphrase target. But this is only one form of competitor analysis.
For example, perhaps you know a competitor down the street from your office is doing exceptionally well online. In order to find out how they were doing well you would approach an analysis differently. You would first need to discover what keyphrases the competitor is targeting and what exactly they are doing to obtain rankings under them. Additionally you would need to discover if this competitor is profitable for reasons other than search engine rankings. For example, they may be acquiring traffic from another website through a paid advertisement or a mutual partnership. There are many ways that a business can profit online and once in a while I find a completely new and occasionally cool concept when I research competitors for my clientele.
Just a reminder, the steps noted above represent just the tip of an iceberg for researching your competitor’s success. If you are finding that significant pieces of the puzzle still remain unanswered after following these recommendations please do not hesitate to give me a call (250-385-1190).
Well I am researching topics for tomorrow's StepForth Weekly and I came across this unbelievable new search engine that uses Google's system to search for certain questionable files. I just had to share this with you!
Unbelievable? Yes it is definitely that... it is called "Malware" by Metasploit. Essentially it is a search engine for finding malware (aka. viruses, trojans, worms - all the bad out there). Here is the link http://metasploit.com/research/misc/mwsearch/index.html now you tell me if this is what you would call useful?
My Word I think it is absolutely awesome that such experiments in search can take place; it is what makes the Internet so wonderous to me. The fact that anyone can create a search device that uses Google's own algorithm to search for a specific file signature (which is what this does) is pretty incredible. Now it has been done so shut it down or use it for good. If this system were to be used privately to inform sites or search engines that they had links to viruses that would be excellent. But in my opinion allowing the public access to something like this is asking for trouble.
That's my take and I hope you leave a comment or two with yours!
PS. The reason the title says "CENSORED" is because they originally had "MALWARE" written there using Google's colors; which undoubtedly prompted a legal 'response' from Google's Legal team.
A few weeks back MSN instituted a new Meta Tag that would allow website owners to force MSN to ignore their Open Directory Project (ODP) directory title and description when creating their search engine listing. For many this was a huge boon because their rankings were tied to the out of date, poorly edited or even false directory listings at the ODP.
Finally this same Meta Tag has been embraced by Google. As a result, you can now shed the chains of the ODP's inaccuracies and have your website placed using the actual Meta Description and Title Tags on your website.
Here is an excerpt from Google's Webmaster Help Center on this topic: (note that you need to add brackets < > on either side of the Meta statements - I couldn't do that in the blog without errors).
One source we use to generate snippets is the
Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.
To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following: meta content="NOODP" name="ROBOTS"
To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following: meta content="NOODP" name="GOOGLEBOT"
If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance: meta content="NOODP, NOFOLLOW" name="GOOGLEBOT"
Note that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index.
Well I promised to keep you up to date on whether the Google code that was stumbled upon was real or not. Matt Cutts (a senior Google engineer) has confirmed that this was real and that "steps have been taken" to ensure this kind of information does not reappear.
What is RedZee™? RedZee™ is a Meta Search Engine that opened its doors officially in July 2005. Now open just over a year it was recently brought to my attention that this search engine with a darn cute mascot (I love zebras, especially ones that grin!) along with some decent design concepts also have some significant caveats that I believe my valued readers and clientele should be made well aware of.
First, A Thank You Before I jump into this article I wish to sincerely thank Win Singleton of Summit Web Design. It was his dedication to his clients that brought this article to life. One of his valued clients was particularly unhappy with their choice to try RedZee’s™ services and it was Win’s extensive research to support his client’s rights provided me with the substance of this article.
My First Impression of RedZee™ To begin I would like to state that my first impression of RedZee™ was positive. For example, the layout of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is quite pleasing to the eye. Each page begins with a framed section called the RedZee™pedia; a clever definition and encyclopedic breakdown of the phrase and separate words searched. Immediately following this informative listing is the familiar left-side organic results and right side sponsored results. The left side shows screenshots of each organically ranked site and provides quick access to a “Quick Look” windowed preview of the site. In addition, and I really like this, the Meta search engine provides a quick access link to online archives of the associated site. These archives provide insight into the past of what might be a prospective vendor; and the more information we have when making vendor decisions the better! Lastly but not least I was impressed with RedZee’s™ commitment to kid-friendly searching. I can’t say that I conducted a serious review of the success of this kid-friendly policy but it seemed to work great by totally ignoring adult oriented keyword searches – a novel idea.
What has put a significant damper on my perception of this search engine is their TOP3 pay-per-click program. To more accurately explain I am going to use the following live sample as I want this to be a very systematic and clear illustration of what has me concerned.
The Sample: A Current PPC Program for “Fairfax County Real Estate” A client of Summit Web and StepForth’s agreed to commence with RedZee’s™ TOP3 program; unfortunately without either company’s prior counsel. The client chose to agree to a fixed price of a $0.10 per-click promotion whereby their website would be guaranteed to appear randomly within the top 3 results on RedZee™.com for the client’s chosen phrase(s). One of the phrases chosen by the client was “Fairfax County real estate”.
Step 1: I checked RedZee™ under “Fairfax County real estate” and indeed the client’s website is appearing in the top 3. Sounds ok so far, right? Not quite. To my surprise despite listing these paid results within the organic listings RedZee™ was not clearly identifying them as paid; i.e. there was no “sponsored link” in grey or anywhere around the paid top 3 rankings. This is a practice that I had thought was long gone in the world of reputable pay-per-click services.
Step 2: At the instruction of Win at Summit Web, I was told I needed to take a screenshot of Google’s results for “Fairfax County real estate” for future comparison. Intrigued, I followed his instructions and then upon his next direction I proceeded to install the RedZee™ toolbar on my machine. After installation I again navigated to Google.com and tried the same search. Much to my alarm, within a shade of a second, Google’s organic results were altered to include RedZee’s™ paid TOP3 rankings at the very top. Again, not only were these results pushing down legitimate organic rankings from Google but RedZee’s™ results were again not clearly distinguishing themselves as paid or anything other than Google’s actual results.
How does this manipulation happen? The RedZee™ toolbar includes adware that once installed quietly supplements Google’s results on your machine when any search phrase is typed in that RedZee™ is currently receiving bids for.
Step 3: I proceeded to test other search engines using the RedZee™ toolbar and discovered that the same manipulation occurs within Yahoo and MSN results.
Step 4: Still a bit shocked at the gall of this promotion tactic Win and I spoke about his client’s results within this TOP3 campaign; perhaps it was actually benefiting the client? According to him the ROI has been dismal to say the least. In fact he stated that although there has been a great deal of traffic sent to his client’s site the visitors didn’t go farther than the home page. We both found this alarming considering this is a real estate website where the listings are located past the home page. In addition the client’s visitor depth results on Google campaigns have been drastically more productive with (in most cases) less traffic.
More Research Needed The title of this section says it all; I needed to know if this was a story that had gotten ‘out there’ or if others were facing the same issues. With Win’s help and my own research I discovered that RedZee’s™ TOP3 promotion technique, although somewhat known, appears to be flying under the public awareness radar. To Rand Fishkin’s credit we were able to find a discussion post from 2005 on his informative SEOmoz Blog called “Investigating the RedZee™ Search Engine.” We also found a large thread that delves into the details of RedZee’s™ tactics on a Digitalpoint forum thread.
The next step was to see if RedZee™ had a parent or subsidiary company that may have been making similar headlines. This research paid off. In their privacy statement a “business partner” called “Link Positions” which is a subsidiary of Internet Shopping Enterprises (RedZee™’s parent company). Researching Link Positions revealed additional information that was more along the lines of what I was searching for. In this 2005 Search Engine Watch forum post Link Position’s suspicious sales pitch is discussed along with the exact adware tactic that RedZee™ is using.
Finally, Win pointed out an even more interesting BlogSpot posting called “Advertising Scam ‘Search Engine Data Merging’”. This post by Professional Web Services Inc. was exceedingly revealing as the writer describes exactly how this ‘scam’ as he calls it is sold and profited from. I highly recommend that everyone who is not aware of these techniques read this article because it truly shows the intricacy and premeditation involved with promoting this strategy.
Ross Dunn’s Final Word I am recommending that all of my clientele and readers think long and hard before they proceed with a RedZee™ TOP3 promotion service. I definitely do not consider it a worthwhile investment at this time.
Why Am I Against the TOP3 Service First, I find it ethically corrupt that any search engine would misrepresent what are supposed to be organic search results with paid results. Secondly, in my opinion the alteration of search engine results on a competing search engine is beyond reprehensible. Not only does this “data merging” misrepresent the confidence of supposedly sacred organic results on search engines like Google but it appears to be done without the foreknowledge of the installer of the toolbar. To be certain of this I reviewed the privacy policy and terms of use policy on RedZee™ and with my untrained eye I discovered nothing that would lead me to believe that the person installing the toolbar has any idea that 3rd party search engines results would be modified. The only loophole that did appear in my review of their policies was found within a portion of RedZee’s™ privacy policy shown below (last paragraph in section called ‘Search Engine’):
Certain search results may be "sponsored" results, which consist of websites who have paid for placement in the search results. These listings are provided by our business partner, Link Positions, which is a subsidiary of ISE. These premium results may contain tracking URLs provided by Link Positions to identify clicks from the search results page. Again, information gathered by these means will not personally identify you. Any information collected by Link Positions will be subject to Link Positions's privacy policy, and Link Positions and ISE may share information that either company gathers in connection with the use of ISE's search engine. (Author’s bolding.)
What I noted in the above copy was that there was no link to Link Position’s privacy policy anywhere within RedZee’s™ policy. I am no lawyer but not providing access to Link Position’s privacy policy may effectively make this agreement fair game for manipulating results (among other things). In addition I performed some quick research and had no luck finding Link Position’s website, never mind their privacy policy.
All-in-all I definitely feel a bit sheepish because I have to admit that I had no idea result hi-jacking was taking place on such a wide scale. I guess this is partly because as a search engine optimization and placement company these salesmen know better than to call… at least I would like to think that. In addition, I am frankly curious if anyone knows of other lower-tier search engines that use similar techniques. Please let me know if you do because I would like to bring them to the attention of my clientele and other readers: email ross@stepforth.com
Care to Reply RedZee™? I invite RedZee™ to respond to this article on the record. I am hopeful that a search engine with such a promising overall appearance will either choose to abandon the use of such technology or at least make it better known to their users that they are agreeing to the manipulation of other search engines’ results by installing the toolbar. In addition I would love to hear how they argue the ethics of such tactics. Unfortunately I have heard through several discussions that the arguments posed to other inquiring minds have so far have been less than impressive.
My take? Well I believe this is a perfect fit for Google's inexorable path towards making the world's information searchable. The privacy and security concerns of such an undertaking will be intense and I am sure they are aware of that. That said, I believe this will take off and will be a free service (to a certain space limit) financially upheld by what else but Google Adwords. The additional venues for Google Adwords clientele cannot hurt either.
In closing, I find Google's endless line of cool utilities extremely fun to review and play with. Some, like Google Desktop and Google Mail (GMail), I have fully embraced in my corporate and personal life. Until more info surfaces I bid you adieu!
Now that you have seen the definition you may have spotted what made me laugh... Webster uses Adsense both below and to the right of all definitions within its site. I guess that quells any dissenters to this literary addition; Google really is everywhere.
Google shareholders must dance up a storm when they realize how ridiculous it has become to ask a question like this. Google has become an unavoidable fact of life for anyone with the intention of having their website found online. It is the 'big daddy' of search engines with very nearly 50% of the search market in its pocket (49.1% this May to be exact - Nielsen/Netratings). For this reason alone I get pumped up when I am given new opportunities to peek into Google's treasure trove of stats. Today I would like to share with you a relatively new offering from Google's lab; Google Trends.
Now, to many SEO's there is nothing new here because we are all fanatical about keeping up on Google's offerings; in our fast-paced world this was released decades ago in SEO time (kind of like dog years). But to clients, this may very well be an interesting new tool in their marketing arsenal and I bet that many of your competitors haven't grasped the potential that this tool has for increasing your bottom line. So take heed and you just might find that piece of marketing information you have always wanted.
So what is Google Trends? It offers a genuine but prototype (beta) peek into Google's search history so that you can better understand search trends. The best way for me to describe how this might help you in your battle for rankings is by example.
Imagine that you are an adventure tour operator running your business in the Rocky Mountains. Your winter season has just started and you think it would beneficial to know when prospective clients start searching for Spring/Summer holiday activities so that you can get a jump on your competitors. Unfortunately most keyword analysis tools do not provide historical data to determine this information and the only one that does is called Keyword Discovery ; a great keyword tool but it does not get data direct from Google. Fortunately you now have Google Trends; information direct from the source!
In this case you are interested in determining when you should begin promoting your lucrative river rafting tours. You also want to know what people are searching for; "river rafting" or "white water rafting". As it turns out you can discover both of these answers in a single Google Trends query. Go to Google Trends and in the search bar type the following: "white water rafting","river rafting". The quotation marks will act like quotes in any Google search by restricting "your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you've entered them" (About Google Trends ). Now, you want to see a fixed term so that monthly trends are obvious so choose a full year; 2005 (a selection in the top right of your screen). Click enter and watch Google Trend magic. The following chart will appear as well as the answers you were looking for.
The Answers:
#1: It is immediately obvious that "white water rafting" is searched considerably more often than "river rafting".
#2: Just after April 2005 you can see that there is a gradual increase in searches for these terms. In this regard you may want to begin pay-per-click promotions for these terms in early May. At the same time you need to ensure the rafting section of your site has attained top 10 natural rankings by mid-April to ensure you are ready for prime time.
Now, as a result of your research you are left with a better understanding of when you need to get moving on your organic and paid SEO programs to ensure the best results for your upcoming tour year.
Some Caveats: This tool is definitely in beta so if you are weary of the results you get I would recommend vetting the data from other tools such as Keyword Discovery (which offers historical data) or free tools like Overture's suggestion tool. In addition, keep in mind that the data you get isn't always positive. For example, in mid-july there was a significant spike in search traffic for both keywords. With a little research (just remove the quotes and try the search) it became clear that this spike may have been a result of a big news event where a 'raft' was linked with a terrorist incident (see the article ). In other words, beware of big spikes because it is likely a result of news - and not necessarily good news.
In summary I find this tool to be a great asset and I will be using it regularly to get another window into the world of search trends. That said, it is like any Internet tool; it has its benefits but must be used with a dollop of common sense.
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