Dangerous Thinking

Web Positioning Centre’s Paul Silver – our linking guru – has always been against buying links. Indeed, I can’t think of an occasion when we’ve done that for a client.

Recently, Google’s Matt Cutts has commented at length on paid-for links, and there has been much debate in the blogosphere.

If you want a more concise statement on Google’s view, there’s a great paragraph from Vanessa Fox on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren’t useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines. (my italics)

I think that’s clear enough – if you’re interested in natural search engine results, don’t buy links.

The Google Webmaster Blog summarises them:

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I think they can be summarised by saying ‘don’t be dishonest, and don’t load your site with junk’. I’d say they were excellent principles to get your site to perform well on just about any major search engine.

We’ve all been looking at the effects of the algorithm tweaks going on at Google. Then, earlier this week, we noticed some strange stuff happening with Yahoo results. Here’s why (from the Yahoo Search Blog):

We rolled out some changes to our index and ranking algorithm last night. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages included in the index. This update should be complete very soon.

In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web – more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites – it even largely ignores new sites by ’sandboxing’ them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They’re the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Read the full article Only pick a fight you can win – the first rule of successful Web marketing at Web Positioning Centre.

The role of landing pages continues to be a bit of a mystery to many people who run PPC campaigns.

Until recently, I hadn’t realised quite how much of a gotcha they can become for some people. You see, as someone trained as a direct marketing copywriter, I naturally think in terms of how a person will make their way from initial contact through to sale.

When you use PPC, the route looks something like this:

SEARCH ON KEY PHRASE -> CLICK ON PPC AD -> LANDING PAGE -> BASKET/ORDERING SCREENS -> CHECKOUT

The landing page can be the home page, but it’s just as likely not to be. If you’ve developed enough content to properly match up with the interests of your visitors – sell to your prospects – you should have some copy that matches with the key phrases you’re buying traffic on. If you find yourself directing traffic from all your ads to the home page (or any other catch-all page), you should be asking yourself why there isn’t any copy to satisfy those specific interests.

Without that fit between search and landing page, you’ll be causing yourself two problems. Firstly you’ll be failing to manage your visitors’ expectations effectively, and they’ll be very likely to just go back to the search page because they cannot see what they’re looking for. You’ll have paid for a click and not done anything profitable with it, so pushing up your cost per conversion and having a disastrous impact on your ROI.

Secondly, you’ll be running the risk of attracting the wrath of the Google Adwords system (and if my reading of Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest rules is correct, most of these points also apply to advertising on YSM). If Adwords believes the landing page is not relevant to the key phrase traffic being bought, it will just refuse to run your ad; if it believes the landing page content is marginally relevant, then you’ll end up paying more for your clicks. So you may be blocked from buying the traffic you need, or your ROI may end up being affected through paying more for clicks – even if you do manage to move the visitor on from a less-than-relevant landing page through to purchase.

Another implication is that PPC has become less of a standalone add-on, something you can just fire up and point at your home page. Many of the marketplaces I look at are getting more and more difficult to make good margins in because costs per click (CPCs) are regularly hitting £1 plus. So that means you have to do everything you possibly can to buy traffic at as low a CPC as you can, and then engage with your visitors as effectively as you can.

Proper landing pages can help with both these issues.

Last week, Google announced it is to unify its search results into a single search, called Web. The news made the mainstream media.

On its blog, Google said:

Here’s the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we’ve only been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the top of the page, like this example for [trends in education]. But it’s a tall order to earn placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on the page when they don’t quite deserve the top, we could share the benefits of these great Google features with people much more often.

and concluded:

This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making improvements so you get the most relevant information from our varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we’re especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place where we can get big things done!

At Web Positioning Centre, we’ve seen some shuffling and inconsistency in Google results for some of our clients recently. Internally, we predicted some upcoming changes in the Google algorithm. I guess we were right.

It’s difficult to know exactly what implications Google’s unified search will have. One immediate response is that with more results competing for each search, you may have to invest more in SEO to get on that first page. Google takes a positive spin on its Webmaster Blog and makes some suggestions on how to take advantage of universal search.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the effect of the changes following the launch on Wednesday. It’ll almost certainly take a few weeks for things to settle down and it should start becoming clear what kind of sites and content Google is giving highest weightings to.

On Tuesday, Google announced a New Version of Google Analytics (henceforth Analytics).

We will be activating this new version on all current Analytics accounts over the next few weeks, so please be on the lookout for an email from us and keep an eye on your settings page.

Well, our main account has been upgraded, and my look around the new version this afternoon put a huge smile on my face. Google must have been listening to my grumblings and finally put its house in order!

Google summarises the upgrades as follows:

Here are some of the improvements:

* Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
* Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
* Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
* Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

At first glance, the most exciting thing is the ability to e-mail and export personalized reports. So Analytics is not now dragging its feet behind Adwords – always very frustrating when trying to sell the benefits of Analytics to a client, and having to point out that, by the way, they can’t have those reports e-mailed.

I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the new Analytics. It looks as if I won’t be saying ‘Google Analytics is good for the price’ any more.

I had a conversation earlier in the week with someone who insisted that what his chosen SEO company was doing was correct and he was spending his company’s money correctly. I told him it wasn’t what Web Positioning Centre either did or recommended. To cut a long story short, we agreed to differ and went our separate ways.

I was reminded of the conversation while I was catching up with Matt Cutts’ blog at lunchtime. He responds to The Forbes article, Condemned to Google Hell that has been been referenced all over the place. Basically, some poor site owner complains how they’ve been so hard done-by Google, and how much business they’ve lost consequentially.

There’s something familiar about the story Matt pitches in Google Hell? For some reason, it seems the company featured in the article has employed an SEO company that in turn employs, er, questionable practices.

The guy I talked to earlier in the week could be headed into very similar waters.

The Google Sandbox is the part of the Google algorithm that keeps new sites out of the top pages for popular natural search results. If you have a new site, you’re potentially sandboxed for up to 12 months – we give 9-12 months as a rule of thumb. That’s maybe up to a year of investment in Organic SEO, with little immediate to show for it.

But, like most things on the Web, you’re not 100% certain of being sandboxed. It’s only for the really high traffic key phrases that the sandbox operates. Somewhere, there’s a line, below which Google will be happy to list you up there on the first page.

In fact, we’ve discovered that as we dig deeper and deeper in key phrase research for our clients, we have found ourselves recommending key phrases that it later turns out they have not been sandboxed for – in some cases to our great surprise. So we find ourselves recommending a mix of high-traffic key phrases as an investment for the future – they’ll kick in when the site emerges from the sandbox – and some that we might just get some immediate results for.

If we do succeed, then maybe we can save our client some PPC click-through budget.

Like all start-up businesses, it’s tough enough for start-up sites. Then Google sandboxes them as well. And that’s just one end of the stick. Google actually prefers older, established sites with mature links.

While Cynical Dave says pushing new sites into using Adwords does no harm to its profits, my realistic side gives Google the benefit of the doubt – webmasters have been working at a huge number of ways of gaming the search engines, so it’s hardly surprising that new sites have to prove themselves before being let out on to the natural search results fairway.

But that means your new site has to work hard. As I often find myself saying to clients, the big hitters have been there for a decade or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. And with the current algorithm they can be just about impossible to dislodge within realistic budgets.

What worries me is what this bias towards older sites is doing to the Internet. Is Google’s innate conservatism strangling some new sites before they even have a chance? Are the odds being stacked unfairly against 2007’s online businesses?

I’d personally like Google to evolve its algorithm so that it can tell which of new sites are spam and which aren’t. And stop weighting the Net in favour of the old war horses.