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New Google Patent Review

8/25/2006 by 1 Comment

There is a New Google Patent that has surfaced. As always, it makes for fascinating reading.

It makes reference to editorial and automated detection of favored and non-favored sources, and methods for ranking sites based on this. One of the key phrases in the document has Google improving search results “by providing a mechanism that enhances the ranking of search results by integrating editorial opinion”.

Fundamentally, this is no surprise at all. We have been through a couple of major generations of search already. The first was the Yahoo! directory – a completely manually put together directory of the web. A great idea, but not scalable. Then came Google – a completely algorithmic solution. Highly scalable algorithms that greatly improved overall search. However, this was shown to have limitations as well (for one thing, the determination of spammers to find the limits of the algorithms).

Google has been using human editors to review search result quality for some time. As far as we know, this has been limited to verifying search result quality using editors in Asia. And, recently Google released the Google Co-Op program, a program that allows users to personalize search by a number of methods. This program certainly enables users to express opinions (in an indirect manner) about content quality.

An integrated result makes sense. Leveraging the scalability of algorithms, and finding scalable ways to leverage human input, simply makes sense. This is where end user search nirvana lies. It’s also where nirvana lies for the non-spamming publisher. Improving search quality is like motherhood and apple pie.

An example of leveraging human input might be via the measurement of popular opinion. This is specifically referenced in the patent. One concept for measuring popular opionion might me measuring the click through rate on existing search results (i.e. if you are in the #1 position and do not get enough click through rates related to a particular search query, you could be moved down – of course, the opposite would apply too).

An example of dynamically determining favored v.s. non-favored status would be in the case of a search query such as “free downloads”. In the event that the site coming up for the search query after the first pass analysis was determined to not actually offer a free download, it could be downgraded. Similarly, a site that was not ranked that highly that actually does offer a free download could be upgraded.

Of course, there are lots of ways to use human and machine input. It remains to be seen how Google’s use of this patent will materialize. But it’s exciting stuff. It’s where the next frontier in search will unfold.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

SEO and the Social Web

8/24/2006 by 1 Comment

The social web is about relationships and trust. Hell, at this point, the entire web is about relationships and trust. Gone are the days of trickery, and the day of the charlatans is fading fast. It’s so critical to your business on the web that you have the right mind set. How am I going to earn the customer’s business? What am I going to do to get them to come back to me over and over again? What am I going to do to get them to recommend me to their friends?

In some ways, it sounds an awful lot like traditional brick and mortar marketing. However, there’s a twist. The smart consumer on the web has so many more tools to find out about your business. Anyone can search on your company name and see what the forums are saying about your business. It’s easy, and it takes seconds. More and more people are learning how to do this. The empowered consumer will rule the web.

On the new web, people communicate actively with one another. Smart companies are embracing this notion actively. Lisa Baron at BruceClay.com has a nice post about embracing transparency. Lisa talks about open communication with your customers, and making it a true dialogue. She makes some key points about the value your business can extract from this approach.

Of course, this type of open communication is an excellent way to build trust. Customers love to provide feedback. There are many other things you can do to build trust. Here are just a few ideas:

  1. Have an easily accessible, and easy to understand privacy policy.
  2. Proudly display your Better Business Bureau and/or TRUSTe logos (make sure you have earned them).
  3. Provide easy to access contact information.
  4. Put up open forums on your site, and allow all comments (that are relevant), including negative ones.
  5. Enable comments in your blogs. Allow users to put in relevant links (rel=”nofollow” is fine). Once again, allow negative comments.
  6. Respond to the emails and forum posts you get, both positive and negative.
  7. Think like “the customer is always right”. It will show in your day to day behavior. Customers will notice.
  8. Share valuable information and ideas on your site, or on your blog. Customers like people who help them.
  9. Provide the users with valuable tools, such as calculators that solve problems for them.
  10. Link to other valuable content freely. Don’t even think about “hoarding page rank” or “trapping your visitors”.
  11. Inform other users about valuable resources that can help them.
  12. Publish a clean and easy to navigate web site.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, just a few ideas. It’s the attitude and approach that matters most. Once you have that part down you will find it easy to come up with the ideas that suit your business.

For those of you who worry about allowing the negative comments on the site – It’s better that this discussion is taking place in an area where you can participate. The naysayers will talk. Where do you want that to happen? Where you can respond, or where you can’t? Also, allowing this type of discussion to take place openly shows other consumers that you have a great deal of confidence.

So build the trust. Assume that you need to earn it. Show your confidence with your openness. These are the key tools to success in today’s (and tomorrow’s) social web.

Filed Under: SEO, Social Web

Robots.txt and Robots Metatags

8/23/2006 by Leave a Comment

Telling a search engine to not index a page sounds relatively easy. According to the specs, all you need to do is implement the NOINDEX parameter in your Robots Metatag. Sounds like you’re all set. But you might not be.

Why? It turns out that if you have also used your Robots.txt file to tell Google to not crawl the pages you have “NOINDEX”ed that Google will ignore the metatags. This is because in Google’s algorithms Robots.txt takes precedence over the Robots metatag. Translation: the Robots Metatag is ignored if you exclude the crawling of the page via Robots.txt.

So even if the page is not crawled, your page can still be indexed if other pages link to it. So if you want to prevent a page from being indexed, use only the Robots Metatag, and you should be off to the races.

Filed Under: Metatags, SEO

Affiliate Programs and Duplicate Content

8/22/2006 by Leave a Comment

Not too long ago I was working on a site that had a pretty active affiliate program. A very strange thing happened – One of the affiliates unintentionally hijacked the search results of the source site. Let me illustrate what I mean with an example.

The site used to come up very highly in Google for a particular term, let’s call is “discount blue widgets”. The page that Google was listing was “http://www.yourdomain.com”. One day I went back to Google and looked at the current rankings for “discount blue widgets”, and lo and behold, the page listed by Google had changed to “http://www.yourdomain.com?affid=12″ (for example).

Now all of a sudden my client was going to have to pay an affiliate commission for all business that resulted from organic Google search engine traffic. Certainly not what anyone intended.

How could this happen? Evidently, the affiliate who was benefiting from this occurrence had a site that was so authoritative that the one link from this affiliate’s home page caused this affiliate’s version of the home page to be seen as more important than the actual home page of the site.

Note that Google sees the http://www.yourdomain.com?affid=12 as a different page than http://www.yourdomain.com, even though the content is clearly identical. In fact, this creates a duplicate content situation, where Google must choose between one version of the page v.s. the other.

So the one link from this affiliate carried more weight in Google than all the other links this client’s site had (the client had not yet gathered many links). Ouch!

So what to do? The fix actually turned out to be quite easy. We added a “rel=nofollow” tag to the link from this affiliate’s site to our client’s site. It took 90 days for it to ripple through to the Google index, but it did, and the problem was solved. By telling Google to not follow the link, it was no longer placing any value on the http://www.yourdomain.com?affid=12 page, so the original home page became the most important version of the content, and got listed again.

When you implement an affiliate program, make sure you retain the right to require your affiliate to add a rel=”nofollow” tag in their links to your site. You should also retain the right to 301 all their links to your site to the page of your choice in the event that they don’t comply with the request to add the nofollow tag. An interesting example of duplicate content and creative uses of the rel=”nofollow” tag.

Filed Under: Duplicate Content, SEO

Google Co-Op – A Misunderstood Opportunity

8/21/2006 by 1 Comment

There are some SEO opportunities out there that are being missed by the general SEO population. An example of one of these is the Google Co-Op program. What if I told you that you could get a PR8 link (that does not have a Nofollow on it) from Google.com? Well its true, and the SEO world is passing it by.

First, there is a problem. I have talked to many SEOs and webmasters about Google Co-Op. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about what the program is about. Most people think about the Google Co-Op Topics portion of the program, which allows subject matter experts to label web sites. Their reaction is that this is Google trying to get people to work for them for free. I think that this is not a fair characterization of this part of the program, but discussing that is not the point of this post.

To me, the juice of Google Co-Op is in the Subscribed Links portion of the program. Before we even take a look at how you get a PR8 link from Google.com, let’s talk about basic program structure and how it can work for you. Let me show you search result nirvana:

Yep, that green area above the organic search results is us (sorry for the poor quality image, we are working on our technique for that just yet). How did we do that? Simple, we implemented Subscribed Links from the Google Co-Op program. Granted, these preferential search placements only show up for people who have subscribed to our feed. But wouldn’t you like to turn your visitors into repeat visitors. Subscribed Links are an excellent way to do that.

In addition, if you build such a feed, and it becomes sufficiently popular, it will get included in the Google Co-Op directory. Here is the URL where your feed will land, the Latest Page in the Google Co-Op Directory.

Getting into the directory does require that you do put together a decent quality feed that your users appreciate and use. This is not a place for Spam (obviously). You need to create a feed, promote it, and get users to sign up and use it. If their is sufficient interest, Google editors review the site and include it in the directory if it’s of sufficient quality.

In our view the Subscribed Links portion of the Google Co-Op program is worth much more than the value of the link itself. Its really about building trust with your users, and cashing in on that trust to create repeat visitors and earn advantaged placements from Google as a result.

At the recent Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, Google made it clear that in addition to getting in to the Google Co-Op directory, highly successful feeds would potentially be made available for users who did not subscribe to your feed. This means getting placed above the organic search results for all users. Wow. These seem like stakes worth playing for.

We have already succeeded in getting a feed in the Google Co-Op Directory. It is the CityTownInfo feed on this page. Success requires high quality content and a feed that adds value, but it can be done. And the upside is tremendous.

Filed Under: SEO

Washington Post Blogroll Links

8/20/2006 by Leave a Comment

The Washington Post made news in the SEO crowd on Friday, as Barry Schwartz reported that they are selling links in their blogroll. This caused a bit of a stir as people tried to figure out if this would help them improve their page rank, and rankings, by purchasing these links. Here is where you can see the discussion thread at SearchEngineWatch.

You can see our post on the matter (under the name Stone Cold) in the SEW forums. The basics are this: Google does not want you to buy links for Page Rank purposes. So when they discover a situation where someone is selling links, and is not using “nofollow” tags on the links, they record the location of the links in a database of some sort.

Whammo! The link has no value. You can buy the link, but make sure you are buying it exclusively for the value of the traffic it brings you, because it has no other value.

So what is behind this thinking? All search engines, including Google, want links to represent legitimate endorsements of the value of your site. This is the basis on which ranking algorithms are built, with the intent of creating a search index with the highest possible relevance. A purchased link is not an endorsement, its a commercial transaction. Purchased links hurt search engine index relevance.

In our view, the pursuit of purchased links, whose value can be squashed at any time, results in short term gains at best. Better to focus your time and energy on great content and high value links that show that your site deserves those high rankings. Do this and there is very little risk of waking up in the morning and finding out that your site got banned last night …

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO
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