Understanding Google’s (Create search engine) Mindset on Classifying Spam
Understanding Google’s Mindset on Classifying Spam
If…
- people would not notice it when Google removes your site from the search results
- Google can clone your business model without paying writers to produce content or carrying physical inventory
… then your site is spam. Maybe not by today’s standards, but eventually.
As the web evolves, a once whitelisted site can become a site that is easy to penalize. Evolve with the web, or grow irrelevant by the day.
This could sound like a scaremongering post, or it could be taken as a sign of the importance of connecting with people on an emotional level, and offering an experience worth sharing.
Why SEOs Should Use the Meta Keywords Tag On Their Homepage
Should the MarketingSherpa’s guide to landing pages use an effective landing page? Should a company touting the value of statistics use statistically relevant datasets?
Every day someone is getting called out for being a liar, a thief, or a charlatan douchebag. You can’t track it all, but simply following your own guidelines and ideals lessens the odds that people will wrongfully call you out.
A few years back a friend of mine bolded one of the keywords in the content on the homepage of his SEO services site, and I told him I thought it made his homepage look slightly worse. He then replied “perhaps, but it looks optimized”. That line of thinking made sense to me.
Linkbait is the New Reciprocal Links Page
[Update: it appears a friend wrote a spot on article using the same title about 6 months ago. Here is some link love for him.]
I have been a big fan of linkbait, but for all its upsides it does have many potential risks that are rarely discussed by most marketers. Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.
The potential upside of a linkbait driven marketing campaign is growing smaller by the day. In the third video here, DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.
Given that Google hand edits some hyper-successful linkbaits, is it any surprise that they aim to minimize the upside potential of random one off linkbaits? A couple of my better friends who are a bit cynical went so far as stating that linkbait is only promoted by search engineers because it is so easy to detect and devalue. Linkbait is the new reciprocal links page.
Compare linkbait to developing a real brand. Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding. If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you. They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results. They can show at most a few ads before they list your site, or they degrade their user experience. And, as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases. Brand building is nothing they could ever really penalize, as they have no reason to want to penalize companies for creating real brands.
You don’t have to be a brand guru to learn how to build a brand. Simply discover a couple legitimate channels, track why people talk about them with Google alerts, and replicate the best ideas while ditching the bad ones.
The Value of Consumer Generated Media & Editorializing Commercial Offers
Looking for Christmas oriented keyword research? You would be hard press to find a better list of hot toys this year than to look at Amazon.com’s holiday toy list. Google also offers their Google Trends product, which will likely confirm the validity of Amazon’s list as the holiday season draws near. Both of these lists work to reinforce the market leading position of the associated companies, and editorialize their content based on user feedback.
Amazon.com not only offers stuff like the holiday toy list, but they
- offer video samples of products in use
- allow you to find out what is new, what recently got hot, and their best sellers by category
- list the highest rated consumer reviews near each product
- allow users to comment on the reviews
- tell you what other consumers who viewed the item you are looking at eventually bought
All of that editorialized information makes people more likely to talk about their site (free marketing), makes people more comfortable buying (higher conversion rates), and thus increases how much Amazon can afford to pay for traffic (through search or affiliate channels).
But you don’t have to have that sort of scale to editorialize your content. Many niche sites would do well to integrate user feedback. How hard is it for your content management system to create a most popular list which links to your highest traffic pages or most frequently sold items? After setting it up, it requires almost no effort to maintain, but provides social validation for what is already popular.
If you sell something expensive and want to avoid being replaced by improved technology and consumer feedback aggregation you should look to sell an experience instead of an object. One of the easiest ways to do that is by editorializing the offer and following up with the customer throughout the purchase process.
Manufacturers are going to foot the bill for some new types of product information packaging, but by the time they do everyone will have the same information and it will no longer be an advantage. Those who are quickest to adopt the new information formats and new types of interactivity will have fatter profit margins.
32 Important Search Marketing Acronyms (Search Engine Journal)
Being that we work in an industry defined by acronyms (SEO) and have trouble sometimes determiniming the difference between SEO and SEM, SEM and PPC, or PPC and CPC; over at DP, KP started a thread listing SEO acronyms which I feel are quite useful (espcially for newbies or prepping before a meeting) and worth […]
Google Checkout Makes Shopping Sites Undesirable
As Google Checkout ramps up, many thin arbitrage / shopping aggregator sites are going to see a significant love loss from Google. In September Andrew Goodman wrote a piece on how paid search and organic search quality criteria may play off each other, after coming across a post on Inside AdWords where Google stated that some types of sites are likely to merit a low quality score:
The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.
- eBook sites that show frequent ads
- ‘Get rich quick’ sites
- Comparison shopping sites
- Travel aggregators
- Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines
Market Saturation
It does not help any of the shopping aggregators that there are about a dozen competitors (BizRate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping, NextTag, Epinions, DealTime, Pricegrabber, Pricerunner, Yahoo! Shopping, etc.). From a marketing standpoint almost all of them offer near identical user experience, so few of them are remarkable or linkworthy. The whole field (including Yahoo!) compete based on renting large swaths of links.
Everyone MUST Rent Links to Compete
Given Google’s recent war cries against buying and selling links, and that there are so many shopping comparison sites, it is easy for Google to whack a few of them with it going unnoticed by anyone outside the companies. But if you are in the comparison shopping field and do not rent links, how can you compete with Yahoo! when they do? You can’t.
The Fall of BizRate.com
I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them. In fact, I didn’t even see the US site ranking for “biz rate”. For that term bizrate.co.uk ranks #1. When I visit the UK site from a Google search result for “biz rate” the site asks if I want to view the US site or the UK site.
Google’s Algorithmic Whitelists Are Not Carved in Stone
BizRate, which sold to the E.W. Scripps company for $525 million, used to be on Google’s editorial white list.
How Efficient is the Web at Selling High Priced Items?
I wanted to get my wife something cool for her birthday, but the gift I wanted to buy proved nearly impossible to find from a trustworthy source. I was going to get her a high end autographed item, but who should I buy it from?
- The not for profit site that is down, requiring you to buy through the payment link inside of Google’s cache
- The site with Google Checkout and Google AdSense on their home page
- The site with a sleazy Clickbank affiliate ad for how to steal stuff
- The site with no money back guarantee
- The site with a design that looks like I created it in January 2003 (my first month on the web)
- The eBay member with 0 reputation
- The eBay member that takes a month and a half to ship
- The eBay member selling authentic lithographs
- The eBay member selling the item used
While I listed the above faults as though each was a different site, many of the sites actually suffered from multiple trust eating offenses. I consider myself a savvy searcher and yet these were the best sites I could find for what I wanted to buy. Because of the price-point I was unwilling to trust any of them enough to buy.
At lower price points we are more likely to let little things slide, but almost every site undermines conversion rates. A year from now I will probably look back on this post and laugh at some of the things I was screwing up today.
