SEO 2.0 Blog

Wiep is a cool blogger.  About a year ago he experiemented on his SEO blog with something I was intrigued by.  He linked to a Matt Cutts blog post that was playing with the spammy phrase buy cheap viagra online to make a point.  The post wasn’t exactly optimizing for this term - Matt was using it as a sample, and other commenters were having fun with it.  In the end, the phrase was repeated several times.  In Wiep’s post, Trust + keywords + link = Good ranking (or: How Matt Cutts got ranked for “Buy Cheap Viagra from a year ago, he noticed this, and decided to link to the page in his blogroll with that exact phrase as his anchor text.

Damned if Matt Cutts didn’t briefly rank third for buy cheap viagra online.  Briefly.

I remembered this post because Wiep followed up on this post - Viagra Link Test: One Year Later.  Looks like the ranking is back.

The basics of SEO sort of explain this.  Authoritative sites, with trust, reputation, etc., and PR from external sources gave Matt this ranking.  But where’s the relevancy?  What about those other 200+ factors that we webmasters/SEOs don’t know about?  They don’t seem to be in play here, unless there’s something about Matt Cutts and Viagra that we don’t know about either.

Maybe this is isolated to a small percentage of fringe cases, but with all the webspam out there still (even though it has gotten much better in my opinion), you’d think Google would have this sort of catch for this.  Something’s clearly not working.  In the original experiment, one link pushed this ranking to #3.  Now, with at least one current link still to this page, is this really enough PR to rank the term?  Does this mean external links might just have too much power?

I remember rumors of Page Rank being devalued even more.  I forget where I heard it.  It was months ago.  I thought it was a good idea, and this experiment reinforces it.  Trim back the external, and maybe turn up the internal.  Here’s why I think this:

1.  Link Spam, which is now out of hand with all the other spam , could drop.  So should bad link bait, comment spam, and pay-per-posts.  Ugh.  This won’t be going away as social media just gets bigger - nope, the reverse will happen.

2.  Engines would be forced to retune their overall algorithms, instead of putting thumbs in the dyke (hey, Microsoft - this isn’t working for Windows, either, by the way…).  I think a retuning could lead to a whole new property value.  I think the web is just about done with Google 1.0, and demanding Google 2.0.  It’s going to happen, so let’s get to it.

3.  Engines could get more semantic.  If they’re ever going to start serving human language outside of the box, they need to start reading human language.

4.  Speaking of human - the human element may come into play even more than before (c’mon Google, you can afford it… I’m not talking Mahalo, but kick up the hand-work a few more notches, if only to catch these kinds of algorithmic slip-ups).

5.  Not all webmasters are SEOs (most of them aren’t) - they’re trying to create sites that are user aimed, even if they’re not exceptionally good at it.  So giving extra attention to internal linking efforts in order to show the pages that webmasters think are good.  Aside from the splogs/trash affiliate sites, etc., most spam tactics are outside of internal linking.  Even if they start to spam internally, Google algorithiims should still be able to discount thin value.

With the surprise news that Adobe hooked Google and Yahoo up with a special reader for the spiders (which allows the engines to parse the .swf files and index/follow deeper content), does that mean the SEO’s PE special weapon can be abandoned?

I’m still going to stick with it for a while for my SEO blog and my clients’ sites. Google is adopting the reader first, and has technically been lightly reading some flash files already, but anyone who’s been in the game long enough knows that a lot of these properties launch with half-powered products all the time. Their track record isn’t stellar, so why not a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach?   I don’t think I would consider dropping PE until at least a few more months after MSN jumps aboard.  I’m not sure I would cease building products for the PE method (depending on the cost vs. value), and simple on-page coding is so easy - it seems like a no-brainer.

What about the other engines that will never be this advanced?  Do you care about them?  In preperation for vertical and social searching, I think it’s wise to consider what they could become.   I think this news is going to spark a huge influx of flash sites, but I’m thinking this still seems like a bad idea.

I’m a movie geek. I like the classics, I like arty flicks, and I like zombie movies. But one of my all-time favorites is Chinatown. It’s perfect fiction, perfect storytelling, and amazing cinematic atmosphere. Jake is a the original ‘persistent nebbish P.I.’ who gets into something pretty twisted. If I wasn’t doing SEO for a living, I would seriously consider being a private investigator.

I can’t complain too much. Keyword research is fun.  It’s the closest to private investigator I’ll ever get, and with so many avenues, the challenge never goes away.  Finding that one special keyword/keyphrase that kicks the barn doors open is pure joy.  Planting it and letting it sprout into other traffic strains is even more fun. I may not get to put a cheap stopwatch under a tire, but I do get to scout scout (or eavesdrop?) in social networks to learn what people are saying. Some of my greatest keywords have come from this “investigation”.

Here’s my favorite moves:

1. Analytics - Analytics is so much more valuable than most companies know.  It’s more than just recording data and providing reports.  It’s an absolute goldmine of insight, and is my number one starting point for most creative SEO excursions.  In this case, tracking your inbound links from social networks, and really getting into the traffic-sending conversations, can be a major eye-opener.  Don’t be afraid to jump in and stimulate replies.
2. Social Alerter - A great new program, Social Alerter, does for a few social properties as Google Alerts does for the whole web.  For Digg, Del.Icio.Us, Mixx, and Propeller comments and posts, this tool works nicely.
3. Google Alerts - Speaking of Google Alerts, it’s a classic tool to track site / brand messages.  Look for some keywords (or inspiration) with this.
4. Tweet Volume - If you have some keywords that could be unique, and want to see how they are passed around int Twitter, try Tweet Volume.

Also, just searching and browsing in social networks for your brand or topic, and paying special attention to the tags as inspiration, will do more than just collect keywords.  It will help you collect opinions, get inspired, and really connect with your visitors/customers, so you don’t get your nose cut.

Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog posted an article recently called The Top Of The Page . Granted, this is a blog mostly about paid search (not so much an SEO blog), and thus, promotes spending money. This article was written by iProspect, and was very basic in SEO, but this paragraph just bugged me.  It reminds me of many, many SEM posts I’ve read from agencies and search engines:

In organic search results you may be competing with competitors that have several years’ head start, thousands of pages of optimized content, thousands of incoming links, and thousands of digital assets that they’ve distributed all over the Internet. But paid search (like Yahoo! Sponsored Search), using compelling ads and strong calls to action, can be used as a great equalizer to overcome any advantages they have in the algorithmic results.

Let’s read into the questions and comments these kinds of statements project to readers:  “So give up on SEO! “, “Buy your way to the top! “, “You can’t beat competitors who are years ahead”, etc. Really?  Is this good advice?  Uh, no. I think this paragraph is a little over-targeted, but then again, look at the source. The truth is, good SEO can beat these aged sites by creating authority. Engines care about new, timely information dissemination. Engines care about user value. Engines are adapting to the idea of sorting out the stale, trusted content from the new and pertinent content.

Don’t get me wrong - paid search has its place and power. I would never knock it.  But in my opinion, SEO, when done right and constantly tag-teaming with paid search, is the only attack plan. Monitoring the ebb and flow is key, but so is recognizing the full capacity of SEO as it really is today, and not necessarily believing the impressions the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog is providing.

I use image search often, mainly with Google. I use it to find inspiration in design or better clipart for this SEO blog, but occasionally as a content searching feature. If I’m looking to find info about a new guitar, I might use the image search, then once located, continue on to the content around that picture.

If you use image search, you probably already realized that it fails compared to text search. The first handful of results are often in the ballpark, but it quickly goes extremely south from there. Unlike text search, where a few content-rich sites can often suffice (depending on specifics of your search), in image search a much larger set of like-results is usually desired. I can almost guarantee, though, that without the ‘adult content’ filter on, you’re going to get some kind of completely unrelated adult picture a third of the time. When using image search at work, be careful that nobody is standing behind you. Those pictures can be freaky!

Obviously, it’s hard to favor image search and really back it if it’s so wonky.

But the future of image search always sounded interesting. The idea of engines using apps to map the parts of a picture even better, determining the shapes (i.e., faces), and using it more confidently as part of the algorithm sounds pretty darn groovy to me. Imagine - no matter what the image file was named, or the content around the image file on websites, by image searching for “Frank Zappa”, the maestro might show up consistently, instead of unrelated R-rated images.

Or what about giving an engine a picture and asking it to return similar pictures? This technology is being used commercially with Like.com (like that red shirt on your friend’s myspace page? Just show it to Like.com and they’ll present similar items you can buy). In my opinion, this would really improve search for the better. Describing things in the present state doesn’t typically fine tune the search the way it should, in part because of blended search; ultimately, I find it making the search process longer. But if I could show the engine what I was looking for, well, that would be swell.

Google can read. Google can listen (1-800-GOOG411). So why not see?

Today a colleague emailed me with the subject “Google Loves Spam”. To be totally transparent, I’m a Google fan, and ocassional Google apologist (if you read my old SEO blog, you’d know what I mean). I know the engine makes tons of mistakes algorithmically - but to defend, it’s a huge internet; a search engine can’t really be expected to truly be efficient.  Of course the Google spin and back-patting would have one think otherwise. Although I think Google does the best job of all the engines, I can still see where my colleague was coming from.  Despite the constant talk about Google’s spam fighting initiatives, they frankly tend to look pretty inefficient sometimes.

However, in any case, the spam you’re seeing may not be doing what you think.

So what prompted my colleague’s email? He was calling out a site called Moosejaw (I really don’t want to give them a link… just add a ‘.com’, and you’ll get there). This ecommerce site seems pretty legit initially; decent products, good enough design, and a feeling of order security. Scrolling to the bottom, though, displays a lot of obvious SEO influence in the form of huge amounts of keywords and anchor text.

The site has healthy backlinks, a good internal structure, and other legit factors that I believe offset any negative judgement this anchor text stuffing might have caused, even though it is an obvious SEO effort. Upon seeing this site, my first thought was, “eh… fine, I’m sure it’s only ranking for some really long-tail, obscure queries”. Nope - it ranks pretty well for some popular product queries, too. It looks like a quality retailer, but Google’s whole stance is that they don’t want to serve sites that are obviously manipulating the algos. If this site was adding user value instead of SE value, then I’d be all for its high rankings. But really, what customer on the planet is going to even spend 1 millisecond on the bottom text? Are they going to follow any one of 50 links there? No. Hell no.

Google has cleaned up the index a lot since I was posting to my last blog. I remember writing a post calling out lots of front page results for simple queries, like “photoshop tricks”, “mixed drink recipes”, and “video game cheats”. There were lots of affiliate trash and ‘made-for-Adsense-sites’. Recently there was an illness in my family, and I found of my results were pretty fulfilling, unlike previous years where I just became frustrated. The webspam still shows, but I find it’s for more obscure longer-tailed keywords most often. I still believe that engines know when a page has been excessively SEO’d, and may flag certain heavy-handed techniques (the amount of these flags, based against the determined value of the page makes it hard to figure out exactly what heavy-handed actions were too much). In the past, when I’ve tried to break semantic markup and put header tags around keywords on my smaller sites, or get crazy with nofollows, I didn’t get a gain - in fact, I think I lost a step or two. When Overstock.com does it (they even put an <h2> on their breadcrumb trail), it’s clear it doesn’t negatively affect their rankings.

I’ve had discussions with other colleagues about keyword density. The SEO community generally agrees that it doesn’t exist, at least to an absolute level across all pages. A particular conversation I remember having is when a colleague Googled a keyword, and the snippet showed a handful of these terms bolded. Clearly, the snippet was just trying to show keyword relation to a user - in fact, all the SERP results had bolded keywords - but it does not necessarily suggest that these bolded words had an effect of the serving. Again, it seems obvious, but based on what SEO’s have learned, just doesn’t appear to be the case. In reviewing some of these served pages, as exemplified from the snippet, there was definitely some keyword stuffing in these authoritative pages. Was this enough to punish the page? Apparently not. They ranked great.  Did it help them? Probably not - it was more likely due to all the other things the site was doing right, and the page authority. So it looks like Google ignored it and judged the page overall as valuable.  All part of the spam score, I imagine.

Is this what is happenening for Moosejaw? Are they flagged for the heavy handed links? Yeah, possibly.  But maybe the overall value of the site offsets that spam. I’m more in agreement with that theory. Ultimately, I don’t think Google loves spam - I just think you get away with SPAM a little more if you’re doing everything else right. I believe this is what’s giving you the rankings even though it’s easy to call out the obvious spam techniques.

I love SEO blog posts where SEO’s talk about their findings. This industry is full of testers that still can’t provide empirical data, no matter how much they try. For every tester, there’s always someone who has a reason to bust the results with their own tests or philosophy (these ‘busters’ are most often the same SEO personalities, unfortunately). Sometimes, though, despite the ‘busters’, these SEO’s can make a compelling case. I thought Branko Rihtman did a great post called Anatomy of a Google Filter/Penalty over at SEO Scientist. I’ve often speculated about NoFollows, since they’ve recently become one of the new “SEO flavors of the year”. I do believe engines - mainly Google - do try to recognize SEO efforts, and have thresholds. Do ill-timed or excessive NoFollows trip this scrutiny?

I read a great post from David Snyder at Snyder Sense about digging into new mines for keyword research. Check it out - Beyond Keyword Research - Utilizing Analytics. If your read my defunct blog, you know that I really discount the exclusive reliance on the typical keyword generation tools. I think depending on these tools is really short-sighted, and I often talked about using offline sources, junk mail, natural language, and your own creativity in conjunction with traditional app recommendations. I’ll hopefully repost those soon (once I dig them out), because I believe they’re still very relevant.

David brings up some other tracks for keyword generation, including Analytics, Google Trends, and more. I really like these tactics. You can never have too much keyword research - after all, it’s the canvas your website is painted on.

I use image search often, mainly with Google. I use it to find inspiration in design or better clipart, and occasionally as a content searching feature. If I’m looking to find info about a new Fender guitar or Corvette, I might use the image search; then once located, I may continue on to the content related to that picture. That content, after all, is the main ranking factor for images.

If you use image search, you probably already realized that it, well, sucks eggs compared to text search. The first handful of results are often in the ballpark, but it quickly goes extremely south from there. Unlike text search, where a few websites full of content can often suffice, in image a much larger set of results is usually desired. I can almost guarantee that without the ‘adult content’ filter on, you’re going to get some kind of completely unrelated nude picture a third of the time. When using image search at work, be careful that nobody is standing behind you. Those pictures can be freaky!

Obviously, it’s hard to favor image search and really back it if it’s so wonky.

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I was asked by my therapist to draw my nightmares…

A little home-made SEO humor. But here’s are more SEO comics from Blaugh.com that are actually good!