Dangerous Thinking

SEObook made me smile today with this Spam-munching Matt Cutts.

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How different would my business be without Google?

Google’s Matt Cutts is quite unequivocal in this presentation about Web Spam. “Search Engine Optimization isn’t spam,” he explains. He’s also clear about what makes a site spammy.

It’s definitely worth 10 minutes of your time.

You’ll also be able to see why SEO and great content should be one and the same thing.

I’ve been hugely busy in the run-up to Christmas, and almost missed this very important admission by Google. Somehow, it seems to have attracted less comment in the blogosphere than it deserves.

mad.co.uk in PPC shot down by SEO experts reports:

Stuart Small, industry leader, business and industrial markets at Google, backed up the argument and said that with 85% of all B2B purchases starting in a search engine, paid search ads were vital to any business. He added that Google sees 80% of searchers clicking on organic results, with 20% clicking on search ads. (my italics)

That’s a pretty commercially sensitive piece of information, and one that anyone in SEO or who owns a Web site needs to take on board.

The inference is quite clearly that one should do as much Organically as possible, a piece of advice Paul and I have been trotting out regularly since we founded Web Positioning Centre.

A few weeks ago I asked Is localisation affecting your search engine performance? Obviously, moving a site with a .com domain to a UK-based server will solve the problem of getting the google.co.uk UK rankings.

But my colleague Paul Silver wondered if we we could find another way of establishing this blog’s UK provenance. We ended up registering Dangerous Thinking on Google Local, so Google knew that the blog had a real physical UK location.

We sat back and waited to see if Google Search picked up on the Google Local registration. Some six weeks later, it hadn’t, so we’ve concluded Google Search does not reference Google Local.

Whether Google will join up the two services in the future, I don’t know – it seems very logical to. But they don’t appear to work together now.

Edit (20 November 2007): Burrowing back into my RSS feeds (I always read the most up-to-date ones first), I found Google’s answer to search localisation in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog back in August called Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts.

Here we go:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

So, there we are. IP and top-level domain.

As Google tries to make its search results more relevant, we’re seeing how content, TLD (eg .com, .co.uk etc) and host location are interacting to influence natural search results.

I’m not going to give any secrets away about our clients, but we’ve seen unexpected results for a number of sites and for this blog.

Let’s concentrate on Dangerous Thinking, because I’m happy to discuss what’s happening here. I live and work in the UK, but back when dinosaurs roamed the blogosphere, I registered dangerous-thinking.com, thinking that was more desirable than dangerous-thinking.co.uk.

This blog is hosted at A Small Orange in the States, as they came very highly recommended as a host for WordPress-based blogs. I have no arguments against ASO; how they can supply such excellent support for such a small hosting fee, I’ll never know.

But Google now looks at the .com and hosting arrangements and feels that the content here is relevant to a US-based audience, and will tend to list it on Google.com, rather than Google.co.uk.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I welcome US readers – in fact, anyone, from anywhere – here, but this blog has the ultimate purpose of attracting business to myself and Web Positioning Centre, and even our clients based abroad all have links to the UK. So I want this blog to rank well on Google.co.uk, as the UK is where our business comes from.

Now, as you may have seen on a previous post, I discovered that it is the top UK blog for ‘SEO Copywriting’, so things are obviously not as straightforward as I outlined above.

Let’s get the easy bit out of the way. The reason that this blog shows up on Google.co.uk searches is that it has a lot of content from the past that talks about where I live and the area we do business in – there are a huge number of references to Sussex, as well as some to London.

I dug a bit deeper by running a report on a whole bundle of key phrases to see how Dangerous Thinking performs on Google.com, Google.co.uk (Web) and Google.co.uk (UK). While it performs adequately on Google.com, its performance on Google.co.uk was a surprise. It performs very well on ‘Web’, but does not feature in the top 50 places on ‘UK’.

I conclude that the .com domain and US hosting is ruling it out of the most focused UK searches. I’ve run two tests now, some weeks apart, with the same result. So I’m planning to move Dangerous Thinking back to the UK. I hope that I don’t lose my US traffic, but the scientist in me wants to see what happens anyway.

I wonder who can recommend a reliable, reasonably-priced UK hosting outfit that runs cPanel? I want to transfer the blog in one easy hit.

Edit, 25 September 2007: My colleague, Paul Silver just made a very valid point. There are rather a lot of Dangerous Thinkings in bold in this piece. Now, for me, that’s just house style – I use bolds much as a traditional print publication would use italics, to highlight names and titles. The search engines might just think I was trying to spam them. So I’ve taken 50% or so of the DTs out.

We always advise our clients that reciprocal linking (”I’ll link to you, if you link to me”) is a waste of effort. Yet earlier today a friend of mine challenged that point of view by saying that Google explicitly contradicts our advice.

Off to Google to see what they say about linking these days. I found this page on Linking Schemes. Here’s the meat of what Google says you shouldn’t do:

…some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

Links intended to manipulate PageRank

Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Buying or selling links

I think that’s pretty clear – by stressing excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging, Google is ruling out you basing your link campaign on link exchange or plugging into link farms or other kind of mass reciprocal link generating scheme.

And on what you should do, Google has this advice:

Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest. In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

The key sentence, in my opinion, is Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

Now that Google Adwords is so picky about the quality of your advertising – from key phrase, through advertisement to landing page – wouldn’t it be good to know what Google thinks of your advertising without waiting for the results from running your campaign?

There’s actually a hidden column in Adwords that tells you just this. If you haven’t discovered it – and many people I’ve talked to haven’t – log in to your Adwords account and drill down to open an Ad Group. Click on the Keywords tab and look towards the middle of the screen for a link that says Customise columns. Click on the link, then on the pull-down menu, and choose Show Quality Score.

A new Quality Score column will appear. It’ll tell you how good your advertising is, key phrase by key phrase, and the minimum you need to bid on that key phrase. If you’re not showing mostly Greats, with the occasional OK, you’re probably spending too much on your AdWords click-through.

You’ll need to do some work on your campaign to get those Great ratings.

And don’t forget to switch on the Quality Score column for every one of your Ad Groups.

Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo Tops Google in Customer Satisfaction Ranking. The data comes from ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index), whose Q2 2007 ACSI Scores show Yahoo up 3.9% to 79% satisfaction and Google down 3.7% to 78% satisfaction.

SEJ suggests the following as drivers for the results:

What could have influenced the rise in customer satisfaction with Yahoo (opinion)?

* Implementation of targeted Yahoo Shortcuts
* Serving Yahoo Answers in Selected Results
* Consolidation of various services into one package (Yahoo Photos/Flickr)
* Cutting back on fluffy Weather or News shortcuts where they are not needed
* Better ad targeting via Yahoo Search Marketing Panama
* Better Image Search with live Flickr photos

Why may have customer satisfaction at Google fallen (opinion)?

* Confusing Google Universal Results inserting video & news into content
* Changing of AdWords Background Colors
* Outdated homepage
* Personalized search results
* Dropping of Froogle

I wonder if we’re seeing some simple anti-Google backlash, too, as it dominates the Web.

It’ll be interesting to see if the commonly-perceived failing Yahoo maintains its challenge to Google in other surveys in the coming months.

ComScore reports top UK sites for June:

Google Continues to Lead Ranking of Top Sites

Mozilla Organization is Fastest Growing Site Due to Uptake of and Updates to Firefox Browser

The table is worth a scan, if only to confirm the pre-eminence of the usual suspects.