Seo for your living

seo

Information Credibility at a Glance: Does Your Site Look Thin Affiliate?

Many Thin Affiliate Sites Look Real

Some of my friends publish fake review sites which organize product recommendations by using the following quality measurement and rating system (affiliate payout per conversion * conversion rate). If people buy it, it must be good.

I have other friends who do real in-depth reviews, but they use such poor formatting that their content looks less trustworthy and more advertisement-like than fake review websites.

Adding Signs of Trust

Smart affiliates know how to convey a sense of trust and look editorial to enhance conversion rates. Editorial rating systems, privacy policies, headings, subheadings, security symbols, pricing data, reviews, features, a clean site design, and consumer generated content increase conversion rates. Assume I am only skimming your page. Assume the little things matter.

A Well Done Affiliate Site

While I do not agree with all the reviews, I can appreciate how well done Mike’s Marketing Tools is. Most of the reviews look impartial. And some of the reviews, like the Optilink review, even link out to a thin affiliate site owned by Mike that passes as the official site after Google banned the official site!

A Poorly Done Official Site

Take a look at how spammy and thin affiliate AnnualCreditReport.com looks. It is the official site (required by law) but it looks like crap because Experian does not get paid if you use it. In fact, it even kicks you over to the Experian site before seeing results, requires you fill out identity verification surveys, and tries to upsell you on a paid reporting service before showing you your free report.

Compare its drab look and nasty conversion process to the look of FreeCreditReport.com. Which one looks more trustworthy? Yup, its the one that is charging your credit card recurring for something that is “free”.

Does Your Site Look Legit?

Thin slicing information credibility is often about evaluating appearance. Unfortunately many of the people creating real content don’t put as much effort into formatting and marketing as the people creating fake content do.

Why Many of the Best SEO Ideas Are Not Found on Popular SEO Blogs

Bad Dated Advice

People who are well established can trade on reputation and attract strong enough clients to not need to perform tests to learn the algorithms intimately well.

Recently another well known marketer put out a video saying domain names were irrelevant to SEO. Then they got feedback from viewers who said they thought that statement was wrong. And then their reply sent to thousands of members on their list included

It’s true that your domain name has no REAL effect on your SERPS.

That answer is intuitive, but it is also incorrect. The only way one would claim that as fact is if one has not done any testing recently.

It is one thing to be wrong, but it is another thing to be wrong, be called out on it, and stand by your incorrect claim. People are spending good money to read incorrect and/or outdated information. Unfortunate really, but if you are already doing well you don’t need to track and test every little thing to keep doing well. Very few gurus openly sharing information have thin affiliate and newly launched test sites that back up their claims. But it is getting harder to succeed with thin affiliate sites as Google becomes creative director of content development.

Share REALLY Good Tips & Die

Most established people are too lazy or too busy to do in depth testing. And if they are doing it, they probably do not want to share it publicly. Share a hole and watch it get plugged. After a search engineer reads your blog and destroys one of your sites you mentioned, it makes it much harder to want to reveal tips and algorithmic holes with hard evidence behind them. Show your proof and watch Google burn it to the ground. Even if you know what you are doing you can’t overcome a hand edit unless it was unjust AND they care enough about your site to let it rank again. You were right, but only until you opened your big mouth.

Much of the game of relevancy is a mind control exercise. The conversation revolves around debates including “should be” or “in an ideal world” rather than “how it is”.

The Endless Sea of Tests & Noise

People newer to the field have less to risk by being aggressive, place a lower value on their time, are generally more excited about the pursuit, are more willing to try things that established people may not, and are more willing to share their results. But many of them have limited exposure, limited confidence, and/or are drowned out by an endless sea of incorrect information. With so many people saturating the SEO market it is getting harder to be the person first with the scoop. Today blogs are a lot like forums were a few years back. There is no way you could ever get any work done if you subscribed to all the SEO blogs, so it is impossible to read all the information.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

If you create a public facing SEO brand, so much of your time goes into brand management and marketing that it is hard to have time to launch many new sites unless you have scaled out a staff. If you have scaled out a staff, you must keep more of your secrets to yourself, because getting a site burned or losing a competitive advantage not only hurts you, but also hurts everyone who works for you. This really hit home after Google killed a site that I had a team working on.

I Was Just Looking At Your Site!

Some of the people who introduced themselves on SEO Book recently mentioned that they were in fields or owned sites that directly competed with some of my sites. If I share all my best ideas with them for free on the blog and they share almost none of their best ideas with me that gets a bit hard to compete with them on my secondary sites, especially if I am competing with them and search engineers decide to pillage my sites.

More Work for Less $ = Bad Trend

The market is getting more competitive. So longer hours are required to achieve similar profits from thin sites. People who see and feel this trend are not only working extra to make up for it, but are also working extra to establish a firmer foothold for the future. 1 hour of work today may be more effective than 2 hours of work next year, or 3 hours of work the following year. But after you get that network effect behind a site the ball is rolling down hill. Gravity is on your side.

SEO as a Subset of Marketing

As it gets harder to fake it people make more legitimate sites offering more value. But as their sites become more embedded in the web doing SEO tests related to links become less and less relevant because it is harder to isolate variables. Dominating the search results becomes a game dominated by the people who are the best at spreading ideas. And so with each passing day SEO for most webmasters is more of a subset of marketing than an independent discipline.

Open Source Media Strategies

Nice Idea, Google!

About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn’t artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people’s sites, unless you are Google.

I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.

Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.

The Transition From Open to Close

Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.

Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else’s platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.

Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer…Pay: $0

All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas….and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else’s user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else’s product, you are wasting your time.

Google`s Dreams
You re reading the third and final part of The Dilemma of Defining Google series. Finally the time has come to chat about Google s anticipated long-term plans and contributions. We will finish up our search for finding those numerous ways in which they redefine the quality of our lives and make the world a better place….
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