The harm SEOs do: Pride

Image by voss via Flickr

I really enjoy SEO and the SEO community. I can’t believe it’s been a double digit number of years since a few of us started to promote sites to the top of AltaVista – just for bragging rights on UseNet. It’s been nearly as long since that new search engine, Google, the one we all knew would be a huge success bought Deja.com’s Usenet Service.

At times, though, I get really annoyed by the SEO community. We are often our greatest enemies. One fault in particular brings us down – pride.

There was far less pride in the early days. When Google said it didn’t want to see white text on a white background or even light-grey text on a white background no one moaned that “Google had created a content economy and should expect – allow – people to hide text if they wanted to”. When Google said it wasn’t a fan of people dropping links into Guest Books no one significant moaned that the “search engine had created a link economy that people should be able to promote sites however they wanted to”.

Nevertheless, when Google further clarified its stance on buying links a whole chorus of complaints rose up.

I can see why. Some SEOs had built not just their career but their reputation on link buying and selling techniques and tactics. It wasn’t just about the money. It was also about the pride.

Money was important, sure. It wasn’t just that some agencies needed to buy links in order to move the SEO needle it was that some agencies took significant commission on link dealing and wanted to protect that income stream.

Compare that to the loss of the Best Practise Funding in the UK, though, which involved far larger figures. Sure the PPC community isn’t as vocal as the SEO community and some of the traditional media agencies simply didn’t know what to say – but, by and large, pride wasn’t harmed and so most people moved on.

Even today we have SEOs who try and argue that any advert that looks like a link is comparable to a bought link. It isn’t. These people know the difference between JavaScript and HTML. They know exactly what Google is objecting too and what the search engine isn’t objecting too. Nevertheless; they continue to muddy the waters in order to protect their pride.

It’s not just paid links that we see this intractable pride coming from too many SEOs, though. It’s all over the place.

Too many SEOs are in denial about the radical changes that have overhauled Google in recent months.

Personal search is now automatic and standard. It’s actually quite hard to opt out of personalised search. Nevertheless, too many SEOs push on with a “business as usual” message and haven’t updated their techniques since 2008 or before.

Social search is running, as a beta, but as a default. Once again you’ll be hard pressed to find an SEO strategy that accepts this, works with or even recognises this.

Real-time search means that we’re not far away from the situation where no two Google searches being identical. Are we seeing a flood of blog posts discussing this? No. It’s more business as usual.

Sure, some of this is an honest lack of understanding from some of the more junior players in the SEO industry, some of it is an unwillingness to change and adapt – protecting the old model – but I fear some of it is the belief that the old ways should continue unchallenged.

I believe that this unwillingness to admit the need to change will harm the SEO industry. I also fear it harms clients. Clients pay for best advice – they don’t pay to maintain egos and hubris.

I’ve made mistakes in the past. Rather than let them haunt me I find it more helpful to learn from them and make sure they never happen again.

I strongly believe that SEO needs to evolve in 2010 if it’s too survive, I don’t think it is a lack of skills that will hold the industry back; if fear it’ll be pride and protectionism.

Google Thailand drops bold, goes red

Just a quickie - and I don't mean to suggest this is anything new as I'm not often search Google Thailand.

Google normally uses bold/strong to indicate the keywords in the results that matched the searcher's query (which could be an an exact match or a synonym). Not in Thailand, in Thailand they use red.

FourSquare needs Fish and Chips

Mobile-social and location darling FourSquare have rolled out a sexy update to their history feature.

You can now put locations into better defined categories. People frustrated with the number of trains choking up the system must now content with the fact there's an official train type (which seems to make sense; you spend hours in trains). As you would expect there's also a food type.

Disaster! The Great British institution of The Chippy has been omitted. Users cannot classify locations as either "chippy" nor as "fish and chips". The best we can do is "Fast Food". Boo! Hiss!

I think we should all encourage FourSquare to add this stalwart of British tradition.

LiveJournal in spy tracking, affiliate cheating, ad scandal

Image via Wikipedia

Poor old LiveJournal. I fear the once popular blogging community is still fighting against the tide. The site is clearly desperate to raise some cash but the latest attempts look to be on the dark side and have, understandably, provoked a backlash.

LiveJournal were ambushing outbound links to about 150 e-commerce sites. In other words, if a LiveJournal blogger linked to one of these sites, that link was hijacked by LiveJournal and turned into an affiliate link.

The site that these links are being pushed through is outboundclick.net and already it’s been added by thousands of people to the ad blocker plugins that the LiveJournal community are fond of. However, it was also possible to opt-out of the tracking.

This opt-out is obscure and unpublicised. LiveJournal didn’t tell anyone they’d add the link hijacking in the first place. Users had to find the rarely used admin console and use it to execute the command set opt_exclude_status 1.

LiveJournal seemed to have tried hard to keep this outbound link hijacking a secret. The links looked normal until they were clicked. At that point some obscure JavaScript hijacked the action. It also looked that the script stripped any of your own affiliate ID and replaced it with their own.

It’s against Amazon’s T&Cs to tamper with other affiliate links in this way.

Needless to say, once the scandal broke last night LiveJournal noticed. To their credit they were fast to act.

Kyle Cassidy, a blogger on the LJ Advisory Board (a non-paid role, I think, and an elected one) started to communicate.

LJ was indeed redirecting about 150 urls to advertisers, even for paid users. They are now aware how Not Good an Idea that was. They're pulling that code tonight.

It seems that LiveJournal have been good to their word. The code is gone.

The whole drama really highlights the challenges some social networks have around making money. There’s no easy way to turn UGC into cash. It’s often not where advertisers want to advertise either.

The lesson seems to be clear too – LiveJournal got it wrong by trying to hide the code. People also worried about the privacy implications of the third party tracker being used. The way forward? Do social networks need to use their own ad system – for trust, if nothing else? Perhaps so.

Clicky building a CDN that supports SSL with your domain name

Image via CrunchBase

I’m a fan of the analytics provider Clicky (aff link). Why? One reason stands out above all others – Clicky gives you real time stats. The spy mode lets you watch the traffic come in and if you’re blogging for real-time search reasons (which I do elsewhere) then this is vital.

Speed is also vital. Analytics tags slow sites down; just a little but it does happen. In order to speed Clicky up; they’re building a content delivery network.

Clicky have decided to build their own CDN for two important reasons;

1. They can’t find a CDN that supports SSL with your own domain name.
2. They want to deliver tags via JavaScript for backwards compatibility reasons.

Right now, all Clicky are asking for are recommendations on lease servers. You can pop over to their blog to leave a recommendation.

Not only is this a project worth watching; it’s a project worth supporting.

Affiliate Window buys buy.at

Image via CrunchBase

When I say “Affiliate Window” I actually mean their parent company “Digital Window”.

This is my Monday morning wow news. One reason this is “wow” news is because buy.at was only semi-recently bought by Aol. At a glance they seemed to be a good fit for Aol – even the new model Aol – as the affiliate network represented one clear way the content company could monetize content.

Now. There’s clearly been challenges in integrating buy.at into Aol. I’m an affiliate on buy.at and in my day job I also help merchants get the most out of buy.at and I’ve seen the branding roll back and forth between Aol strong and Aol weak. I didn’t see much in the way of international merchants coming on board and that would have been a factor for the international Aol too.

Perhaps more significantly this puts the spotlight on the “should affiliate networks also be affiliates?” question. This happens far more in the USA where in some instances you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference between an affiliate network and a performance agency.

If Aol was going to use buy.at to monetize its own content then this would mean that buy.at and Aol were closer to the latter model. I don’t think we can say “it didn’t work for them” because, as far as I know, they didn’t quite get around to giving it a good try.

This also means that there’s one great big family of affiliate networks. Buy.at is owned by Affiliate Window. Digital Window and Zanox have the same parents – the publishers Alex Springer. Yes; publishers! Perhaps we’ll see buy.at push into Europe and eastwards rather than westwards across the States.

I can only hope this is a good thing for affiliates – will we see Affiliate Window’s tech been rolled out to support buy.at’s merchants? Will we see single, bundled, payments and thresholds? Or will we just see the end of buy.at’s brand... but what about all the buy.at tracking scripts? What timeframe will affiliates have to upgrade?

If affiliates do have to upgrade their tracking moving from buy.at’s current redirects to the merged tech of buy.at and Affiliate Window – will that be disruptive to merchants? Will it be harder for a smaller site to get onto an affiliate network now as there’s less competition (and networks tend to only want merchants that will be profitable; not unsurprisingly).

Affiliate Window have blogged it.

Haven’t we seen quite a lot of digital marketing news in the last few days? The writing, I think, is on the wall.

Real-Time SEO: Newspapers come to SES London (#seslondon)

Image by birdfarm via Flickr

This session as moderated expertly by Greg Jarboe. It featured three newspapers; the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Chicago Tribune.

Paul Roach, Technical Lead for SEO, guardian.co.uk

On a presentation entitled "Pushing the Crawlers Around" Paul asks by checking if the "woman from Google" is in the room. No? Good, he says, we'll get the full story!

We begin by looking at the Guardian's CMS. This was designed for users but also for search. The CMS makes use of "keyword pages". These aren't pages of automated content. These are automatically built pages from editorial content. How do the fair in Google's crawling; these pages are crawled every 30m by Google and this compares to 3m crawls of the Section pages.

Articles ping Google immediately on publication. These keyword pages help build links to these pages; in fact, hot topic pages, network front pages, section pages and a lot more all point back to article pages.

The goal isn't just to get the article pages indexed but to create intended pages.

During the Mumbai Terror attacks the Guardian created a keyword page and they rose to the top of the onebox and were outranking the BBC and Wikipedia for related search terms. Once created these keyword pages need to more human intervention.

Paul suggest the Huffington Post is another example of a publisher who does uses this technique.

A tip for publishers: establish your crawl rate, create tagging between these pages and then automate this process.

Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph

When it comes to the Telegraph's priorities: number one is the core content, number two is the staff and number three is adaptability.

Preaching SEO as "hygiene" factor the Telegraph have made the effort to teach their technical staff and journalists about search, social and real-time. The core message is that online is very different from offline. There's a finite amount of space and a controlled flow in a printed newspaper. That's not the case online. The web is infinite and the points of entry different.

People are driven to search by other channels. This could be a TV program, breaking news or an advert. The Telegraph understand this. It means that entry to the website isn't always by the "front door".

The Telegraph have invested in making their stories stand out. "Up Yours Delors" "Gotcha" make for great offline headlines. This isn't the case for online. An important rule for the Telegraph is to avoid keyword stuffing. They won't, for example, mix Kate Winslet keywords with a stock market story. The journalists are trained on SEO and then they're in charge. It's the journalists, not the online marketing team, that get to headline the stories.

The best way to deal with real-time search is to train the newspaper's staff. This means they don't need to ask for help; they can just get on with publishing the story.

Brent Payne, SEO Director, Tribube

The Tribune optimises for Google, Google and Google. Perhaps a little bit of Bing. The rest are not worth it.

There are now more content ways to get into Google; images, music, maps, etc.

There are lots of specialised Googlebots, says Brent, these bots pick up small changes on the page. There's one, for example, to pick up title changes.

There are factors other than PageRank and links that help determine ranking. If you're a local site you may rank better for local stories, for example, or a link-free citation may also boost your position.

He discusses some of the recent Google News changes; re-visiting pages, coping with new URLs for updates, working out the originator of the story and expecting stories to be updated. Are Google actually living up to these changes, though? Brent's research shows that between 35% and 45% of Tribune content is re-crawled. Hot topics, based on searches, are more likely to be re-crawled by Google.

Google has slowed down how quickly a 301 redirect will pass the relevance from a changed news URL. Brent suspects this is to combat Google Trends spamming. This hinders the ability to publish stories and then 301 to an updated story later on.

The Tribune has also seen poor performance in Google's ability to find the original source of a story. Across the Tribune's newspapers, when they mention the paper that published the story first, they rarely see Google acting on this.

Publishers without a Google News Sitemaps are at a huge disadvantage. It's all about speed; getting Google News to detect the new story. The Tribune spends time watching Google Trends in order to see what people are searching for.

For any Celebrity news Microsoft's xRank is recommended.

Social and search are moving closer together. Brent suggests Google's found a crazy amount of secondary connections for social relevance. This raises privacy concerns but it is the future.

Is SEO dead? SES London takes a look (#seslondon)

Image by magerleagues via Flickr

The intro to this Search Engine Strategies panel asks whether SEO might be dead. Some experts think it might be. Others call this BS. The lunch time keynote panel discusses this. It should be lively. We've got Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google, Dan Cohen Global SEO Lead MSN at Microsoft, Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development at the Telegraph and Lisa Myers the CEO of Verve to discuss this. Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO has the honour of trying to moderate.

The session began with an interesting and important disclaimer; Dan Cohen, the SEO guru from MSN (Microsoft) points out that he and his team has no special insight/unfair advantage on how the Bing algorithm works.

Dixon kicks off by asking the panel what aspects of SEO will be important in 2010. Dan talks about the issues around content freshness and the challenge MSN faces by importing content in from third parties. Content is still king, he says, it will always be the most important thing.

The Telegraph has no such problem; Julian explains that the Telegraph stands for quality content and that they've started to train their journalists to work with social media and search. He talks about Norman Tebbit's new blog on their site and that it's the quality of writing that helps to generate the content.

CEO of Verve, Lisa Myers, says that gaining quality links has become so much harder. Looking ahead to 2010 Lisa notes how important Local and Maps has become.

Maile Ohye encourages the SEOs in the room to dig deep in 2010; it's about all your content and even smartphone apps. She talks about the importance of social media in search for 2010 and a tip-like-question; does your CEO tweet?

The importance of social and search union is not lost of MSN either. Dan explains that MSN actually is starting to look at the keywords in referring URL so their page can be updated with recommendations of related content from Bing. It's about showing the user information relevant to their needs and improving the journey. There are challenges with this approach though; does the keyword "David Beckham" belong to sport or entertainment, for example?

Perhaps sparked by the football mention, Julian talks about the importance of planning for events you know are coming - like the World Cup. This is easier than having to be reactive all of the time.

The Telegraph also look at what people read when they visit the site, so the content can be personalised and the user journey improved.

But could this be a problem for Google? Maile says that is very important that sites show Googlebot the very same content that the 'generic' user would see. Personalisation, done wrongly, could be a problem - Google doesn't say that; that's the implication.

Dixon asks Maile, "Does Google like SEOs?" As you can imagine this generates some titters from the audience. "No sponsorship of SES from Google. Has the money stopped?" he asks.

Maile responds, "SEO is a partnership with Google. SEO are part of the communication with site owners." The Google rep, rather put on the spot by Dixon's question, gives the example of how feedback from SEOs and webmasters was the reason why Google Webmaster Console includes site speed stats.

Julian says, as a publisher, they have good relationships with the search engines. No special attention but a good relationship. The Telegraph delivers good content, SEO'd content that helps drive traffic. This is a symbiotic relationship with Google.

Microsoft's Dan says Google has not been evil with Google News. MSN news content appears in Google News. He's pleased with that but also notes MSN followed the Google News guidelines.

Turning to SEO 101, Dixon asks whether basic concepts like h1 tags are an example of dead SEO.

Dan, MSN's SEO, points out that relevancy is still important. This needs to be verified with a trust factor later; but relevancy still matters.

Lisa thinks these core concepts are still part of but reminds us Google doesn't pay as much attention to h1 tags as they did a few years ago. She gets angry at SEOs who still push outdated concepts like keyword density.

Julian agrees. These tags might be less important but they still have some weight and relevancy still needs to be considered.

Google's Maile chimes in; the barrier to entry on these SEO 101 factors has dropped. You can achieve it with WordPress plugins, for example. That's why SEOs need to try harder to add value these days and why Google is keen to continue to communicate with website owners.

Maile, like MSN's Cohen before her, finds the time to discuss Twitter while talking about the continued importance of Relevancy for SEO. In fact, unlike panels earlier in the day, %100 of the speakers have their own Twitter accounts.

How have things changed? Maile discusses how a lot of Googlers view the web. A few years ago you'd double click on an icon on your desktop to start an application or access the web. These days you can access applications from the web. This creates a big playground of apps. It's not just about mobile apps; it's about web apps. THs is why Google has a huge stake in HTML5. Google are betting on the web. That's why SEOs are part of Google's communication plan. SEOs can help site owners navigate this playground of apps.

"How does Microsoft feel about Google using AP content to create pages?" Dan is asked. Dan points out that Google have also recently appointed a director of ecommerce before passing the question on to the Telegraph's Julian Sambles. Julian describes this as a new challenge but very much part of the nature of the web. Things change and digital marketers have their jobs because of this; they provide the solution to these new challenges.

Another question from the audience talks about the challenges of keeping up with all the changes Google makes to their algorithms - believed to be over 400 a year. The answer, the panel suggests, is to discuss with other SEOs. Many of the panelists use "social media" type techniques to stay abreast of the news. A much harder issue, identified by Dan Cohen, is how to prioritise changes sites should make due to SEO reasons. It's not possible to tell how much money a canonical link resolution, for example, will make - so even MSN struggle to make the business case.

When the audience tries to lure Google onto the subject of paid links Maile Ohye successfully teases back before going on to note that many paid links are easy to spot. Once Google finds one paid link they can often use that point to find more and signals that suggest even more. Google can decide to discount a link if it doesn't look right. They can be fairly atomic with their precision and take action against links or pages before targeting a whole site.

So, is SEO dead?

Google insists; having a strong website is very important.

... and we're out of time!

Reflections on Bryan Eisenberg's keynote at Search Engine Strategies, London, 2010 (#seslondon)

Image by LexnGer via Flickr

Day #2 of SES London kicked off with industry expert Bryan Eisenberg sharing more than 20 tips to help improve website conversion. The 9am session was standing room only. This year SES feels far busier than it did last year.

This was actually Bryan's second presentation at SES this year. On day #1 he gave a talk to introduce the audience to the concept of conversion optimisation. There were some common themes across both presentations.

There's clearly growing frustration at client-side IT departments. Bryan calls them BPUs - Business Prevention Units. He's not the only speaker to express annoyance with how hard it can be to move from recommending best practise to clients to actually getting that practise implemented.

Thankfully his presentation included a number of stats/mini-case studies which we might be able to use to help build a business case. Here's just a few:

• Amazon had re-jigged their MP3 homepage within 2 hours of Michael Jackson's death. Fast execution is important. (I couldn't agree more)
• Amazon may be running up to 200 conversion tests on their site at any one time. They've got the traffic to do this.
• A lead looses its effectiveness by up to a factor of 6 within the first hour.
• Figleaves improved their conversion rate by more than 35% by adding reviews to their website
• Eisenberg suggests that $25m in sales can be attributed to a change in graphic at Overstock.com
• Overstock doubles conversions when they drop their shipping fee (which is never more than $2)
• VitaCost manages to maintain a >15% conversion rate

Eisenberg has a set of powerful case studies he tends to use in most of his presentations. There's how carefully Amazon test their buy now button; something he's been tracking for years. Right now they're making the "Buy" button for used books more prominent and that's no surprise as they make more money from selling used books.

Another common favourite is a banner for US insurance provider Geico. It starts well. The banner has a good call to action, an easy point of entry and cute little lizard critter - Eisenberg is keen to remind the audience that the marketing department designed this. Things go from good to bad when the user hits the mess of the data entry form. This was designed by the BPU. Not only have Geico lost the cute lizard but the previously consistent message - or the scent as Eisenberg calls it -has vanished.

A similar example is Victoria's Secret. Eisenberg is highly complentary of their marketing department; they do well. One ad in particular appeals well to a user segement - Eisenberg recommends to the audience that conversion optimisation is done with visitor segmentation in mind - and he ad mentions a $20 deal. Things go wrong later on, perhaps when we're back under BPU control, when the website itself now talks about the $29 deal.

Many of the tips Eisenberg shares with the audience are practical ones. It's easier to double your conversion rate than your traffic, right? He argues that advertisers need to find a budget for improving the user experience - even if this comes from some of the traffic generating budget.

How did Google Buzz cope with Search Engine Strategies London - day 1

I thought it would be interesting to see how well Google Buzz has kept up with the buzz around SES London.

Twitter is being used a lot (despite weaker than ideal wifi) and there's a lovely widget showing correctly tagged tweets being projected on the wall.

Turns out Google Buzz's search option isn't the best way to see what's been said. The caveat I need to rollout here is that I've not had much chance to poke Buzz's search functionality. I've not attempted to peer into the algorithm yet.

The first thing to note is that Google Buzz's search does not do in-word phrase matches. Searching for #ses does not bring back buzzes for #ses1.

As it turns out (and as many people will say 'told you so') Google Buzz is a great way to find the lifestreams of people at the same event as you (ie; stalk).

Here's #ses1



and #ses2



finally; #ses3


As it happens a new Google Buzz search engine called Buzzzy made the spot light today. It doesn't do very well here - and doesn't even find any of my flood of tweets. It is new, though.


or