Home / 2007 / Archives for August 2007

Some Clarity on Paid Links

8/30/2007 by 3 Comments

Hoo boy, with that title, this better be good …

The paid links discussion raged hot and heavy at Search Engine Strategies San Jose last week. Whenever the debate comes up again, there is a lot of confusion and misinformation that gets put out there. Keeping in mind (here is the ritual disclaimer) that while I do not work for Google, and do not represent Google, this post will outline just a few components of how I believe this works.

What the Issue Is

Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, had a thesis (a Stanford University thesis to be exact) that you could measure the quality of a web page by the number of links it receives. More precisely, some links would count more than others, as sites that had more links pointing to them would have more “link juice” to vote for other sites, and that link juice would be voted on a mathematical basis (if you linked to 100 other pages, this means each page gets 1/100 votes of your page rank).

To work in a reasonable manner, this algorithm assumes that the people providing the links are not aware of the algorithm.

This is the essential point that we all need to understand. The base algorithm works best if people don’t try to manipulate it. It’s just like what happens with tests that show how rats find cheese in a maze. Once the rat figures out it’s being observed, the behavior changes dramatically.

This is the algorithm which launched a company that currently has a $158B market cap, and which is the most important search engine on the planet. For purposes of clarity, Microsoft has a market cap of $262B, and they are scared to death of Google, because it is currently dominating the market space that represents the future.

As soon as a link is compensated (paid for or bartered for) this model starts to break down. We can demand that Google come up with another model, but replacing this model is just not simple. You can bet that Google is working on alternative or supplemental algorithms as hard as they can. For example, the recent moves towards personalization are one step in this direction.

Ultimately, relevance is king for Google (and the other search engines). This is the fundamental fact of their business. Higher relevance scores equates to changes in market share, and is what drives Google’s algorithms, and how they choose to modify them. At this point in time, a model that relies heavily (but not solely) on link analysis is still the best model, even with its flaws.

Of course, there are people who buy links for the purposes of increasing branding and traffic. Simply put, this is not wrong. I will go further than this, and say that people buying links for purposes of influencing their search engine rankings is not wrong, either. These people are simply trying to win at a game where the rules are defined by Google.

Google has stated that they are not out to punish people who buy links for innocent purposes, and that they have no issue with people who buy links for branding and traffic reasons. However, Google will try to detect these links, and discount them, because it does not fit into the model of counting links as editorial quality votes.

Ultimately, we need to understand that Google, and the other search engines, will process the links they find as they see fit, as a part of determining which web site ranks higher than another in their search engines. We can’t fault them for that, even though they make mistakes from time to time. This is their business. Best relevance wins.

Some Examples

In a recent post on link buying on Search Engine Watch, I wrote about what I believe the Google policy is. The first thing to realize is that Google is not saying you shouldn’t buy links. They just don’t want people to do it for the purpose of influencing search engine rankings. They will do whatever they can to keep their algorithm in balance, by trying to detect paid links and remove them from the equation. If they succeeded in removing all paid links from the equation, then the original logic of the Brin-Page thesis still works and applies.

With this in mind, let’s look a bit deeper at some observations about link buying:

  1. PPC ads sold by the major search engines are not considered paid links. They have never conveyed any link juice at any time, and never will. They are very easily detected by the search engines, and are ignored for organic ranking purposes.
  2. Buying a listing in the Yahoo! directory is not considered purchasing a link. The reason why it’s not considered a purchased link is because of the following:
    1. Yahoo! actually does not sell links. They sell an editorial review service. What you are pay for is to have a human editor review the listing.
    2. They reserve the right to change your proposed listing, if they think your categorization, and/or description are not optimal.
    3. They reserve the right to reject your listing altogether, and note that Yahoo! does reject many proposed listings.
    4. If they do reject your listing, they keep the money you paid. In other words, once you have paid, they keep the money no matter what.

    3. The cumulative result of all these things is that a Yahoo! directory link still gets placed based on editorial judgement that Google respects. To put this in other words, Google has found that crediting Yahoo! directory links is something that helps increase their algorithm’s overall relevance. Another example of a directory that I believe passes link juice is Best of the Web. There are probably many directories that pass link juice, but beware, there are far more directories that don’t pass any link juice at all.

  3. Paying a third party firm to work on obtaining links for you is not buying links. This presumes that they don’t turn around and pay web sites to link to you. There are many link building services that perform a PR like function of going out and spreading the message about your site, and getting people to link to it simply because they like the site.
  4. Getting links by syndicating quality content is not purchasing a link. This is because the site taking the content is in fact endorsing your content by taking it. There are other issues to watch here though, such as that of creating duplicate content on the web. At STC, when we push out syndicated content we send out only original content that is not on our site (or our client’s site) to help deal with that issue.
  5. Swapped links are likely to be treated as compensated links. This is one of those gray areas where I am sure there are lots of exceptions to the rule, but straight up link swaps are barter, not an editorial endorsement.
  6. The standard response to finding a paid link is to discount it, so it passes no link juice.
  7. The way to become exposed to more severe penalties is to engage in deception. If Google sees deceptive practices at work, such as a clear case of manipulative link buying, then they may penalize the site. Ultimately, really severe cases can result in banning. You don’t want to go there, because once you have engaged in deception, it’s going to be hard to persuade anyone to let you back in, even after you stop engaging in the deceptive practices. Simply put, your credibility is shot.

Summary

The biggest gray areas occur when people buy links for traffic and branding purposes (although I believe that it’s a minority of people who buy links solely for this reason), and in the handling of the various types of reciprocal links. The gray area for swapped links comes in when the link provided to your site was in fact an editorial endorsement, and your link back was also in fact an editorial endorsement. I would think both of those links should pass link juice, but it’s a scenario that is hard to detect.

The lack of clarity on what works, and what doesn’t is frustrating, but I don’t think that this will get clarified in the near future. Too much clarity on these policies makes the job of people who engage in deceptive practices much, much easier. The best we can hope for is that Google (and the other engines) will come up with supplemental algorithms that make the whole thing less of an issue.

As this unfolds, expect the emphasis to grow on sites with deep content quality and a superior user experience. Ultimately, this is where all the search engines want us to invest our time.

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO

Final Report of the 2007 Analytics Shoot Out Now Available!

8/26/2007 by 8 Comments

The 2007 Analytics Shoot Out Final Report is now available. This report is the final report in our study of 7 different analytics packages running across 4 different web sites simultaneously. Here are the sections you will find in this new report:

  1. Section 1. An executive summary of the report, findings, and key takeaways.
  2. Section 2. Overview of study methodology.
  3. Section 3. First party v.s. third party cookie updated analysis.
  4. Section 4. Detailed analysis of the traffic data – this has been updated extensively from the Interim Report.
  5. Section 5. A brand new section on “Why Accuracy Matters”
  6. Section 6. Our first look at why JavaScript placement is a BIG issue in analytics – much bigger than anyone has thought to date.
  7. Section 7. A detailed review of the strengths and weaknesses of 5 of the packages we worked with during the study.

Ulitmately, our goal with the report was to provide readers with more insight into what analytics packages are good at, what they are not good at, as well as to better understand which analytics package is more suited to which types of web sites.

We also welcome any comments you want to make on the report, which you can make by commenting on this blog post below.

Filed Under: Analytics, SEO

Two Golden Rules of Blogging

8/23/2007 by 2 Comments

Our blog is now more than 1 year old. In fact, our first post took place on August 5th, 2006, just before last year’s SES San Jose. This post represents the 181st post on the blog. So to commemorate the anniversary of the blog, I thought I’d share a few metrics on how it’s worked out for us, and then the why of it all. First, the metrics:

  1. On the day we opened the blog, our site showed 34 links in Yahoo!. You got it. 34.
  2. Today, we show 26,300 on Yahoo!. This is a pretty substantial growth over 34.
  3. We also have a very popular interview series which includes recent interviews with Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Vanessa Fox, Seth Godin, and Adam Lasnik, and many other outstanding people.
  4. I now blog regularly on the Search Engine Watch Blog
  5. I also have a weekly column on Search Engine Watch called By The Numbers.
  6. New client growth has enabled us to expand from 1 SEO consultant (me) to 5.
  7. I spoke today for the first time at a Search Engine Strategies Conference.

This is all very cool, but let’s focus on why it has happened.

As a prelude to that, I have heard people say don’t start blogging about a highly competitive topic, where all the A-listers are established. Many people will tell you that. I can assure you that in August of 2006, the SEO blogging space was already really crowded. It did not prevent me from “joining the conversation”.

This is the great thing about the blogosphere. As long as you follow these two (golden) rules, you can start blogging about almost anything:

  1. Bring unique expertise OR a unique viewpoint into the market place you are targeting.
  2. Join the conversation and give AT LEAST as much as you get.

So I am really pleased with the progress in the first year. During this coming year, look to have the amount of the content we produce increase, and to have additional contributors. I’ll continue to write for Search Engine Watch, do more interviews, and post on the Stone Temple blog as well.

The basic message of this post is that you can start blogging in a really competitive space. Just follow the two golden rules and be patient.

Filed Under: Blog, linkbuilding, SEO

Content Development for Large Web Sites

8/16/2007 by 1 Comment

This is the second in our series about building multi-million dollar web sites. In the first article we provided a general overview of the major elements of the process. In this article, we are going to take one of the concepts discussed, and expand upon it. Today, we talk about content.

Content for Users

Good content is at the heart of any commercially successful web site, even small ones. You need it to convince your visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do. Sometimes, this is a long process, where the user becomes used to coming to your site to get expert information on a topic, and after many visits, finally decides to buy something.

Effectively speaking, it’s brand building. They come to your site, they like the content, they leave. They come back another time, and still like the content (this time they read some different articles). Then they may come back again. By now, in their eyes you are a recognized authority on the topic. So who are they going to go to when they are ready to buy? You, of course.

Content for SEO

But if you are planning to build a brand new web site from scratch, and you want to make it worth millions of dollars, content means a lot more to you than this. Content will help you do two major things:

  1. Provide spider food for search engine crawlers. When a search engine responds to a search query, it attempts to match up the words in the search query with the content on your site. If the query is “rectangular blue widgets” and the word “rectangular” does not show up on your page, your chances for showing up for that query are smaller.For each popular search term, there are hundreds of additional modifiers (such as rectangular in our example) that get included in various search terms that people use. You can’t put them all in your title tag, or a couple of sentences at the top of the page. To go after them, you need content – ideally several paragraphs or more of it.

    In addition, search engines attempt to evaluate the quality and depth of content on a site. Lots of pages with not much text does not communicate value to the search engine, and such pages may be seen as low quality pages. This is also something that can really hurt your rankings.

  2. Give people a reason to link to you. Buying links comes with risks, and even if it’s done really, really well, you will have difficulty in buying authoritative links. In addition, swapping links to advance search engine rankings is fundamentally a waste of time.So you need to get people to give you a link, without having to give anything in return. Does this sound like getting something for nothing? It does, but in fact you are giving the linker something in return – a good experience for the visitors they send to your site. There are people out there that care a lot about the quality of their user’s web experience, and who will link to great content or tools. In fact, the high quality authoritative sites (the ones whose links help you the most) are more often than not run by people like this.

    This also includes the related notion of writing great articles and then publishing them on other (high authority) sites, in return for a link back to your site. Having great content makes this possible.

How Much Content?

In all probability, lots of it. If your strategy relies on winning on really competitive terms, you will need to persuade hordes of people with related sites to link to your site. Even if you use a brilliant social media strategy, and get Dugg on a regular basis, you will still need lots of content. Also, link baiting for social media sites is a powerful tool, but it’s not a cure all. In addition, many of the sites you want to target won’t be on those sites.

Either way, you need to be thinking about hundreds, or thousands, of quality articles. Remember, we are building a multi-million dollar web site here. There are few major ways we have seen for doing this:

  1. Leverage User Generated Content – If you can come up with a way to build a site that becomes a hot spot for people to provide you with content, you are in great shape.
  2. Write Them by Hand – This obviously requires a substantial investment of time and resources, but it works. You need to have a really clear content plan in mind if you are going to develop a large body of articles to ensure that you understand how to make each article unique and valuable.
  3. Create content by cross referencing large data bases – Simply publishing public domain databases of information would be a risky strategy, but taking a variety of databases and creating new content through analysis and cross referencing is cool stuff.

All three of these strategies can result in a large number of pages about a wide variety of topics. You may want to combine more than one of these strategies in your plan. Of course, they are all hard work. But, if you are an entrepreneur looking to make millions by building a web site, it can still be done.

Filed Under: Content Development, SEO

Danny Sullivan Interview

8/13/2007 by 1 Comment

Danny Sullivan and I recently spoke about a variety of search industry related topics. We started by talking about Search Engine Land, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Marketing Now, and Sphinn.

Then we spent time covering the state of the search marketing industry and whether or not any player out there can hope to challenge Google’s dominance in the near future. This included a discussion of the types of things that Yahoo! and Microsoft should consider doing to improve their positions in the market.

Check out the interview for the details!

Filed Under: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Marketing, Search Marketing Expo, SEO

How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Website

8/9/2007 by 3 Comments

Interested in building a web site that can sell for millions of dollars? Who wouldn’t be? Of course, the catch is that it’s a lot of work, especially in today’s search engine environment. A few years back, it was much easier. Two things have made this a more difficult task. One is that the search engines are doing a better job of fighting SPAM, and the second is that potential acquirers are getting smarter about the sites that they buy. This post is the first of a series on how to achieve this goal. This first post provides 5 high level tips on what you need to do:

1. Find a Competitive Market

The first thing you need to realize is that you must be in a competitive market to build a site that can sell for millions of dollars. The most important reason is that it’s where the acquirers are. Companies in competitive markets are always looking for a way to get an edge. Buying a web site that accelerates their sales is smart business for them.

There are lots of markets that are very competitive. Here are a few examples (there are many more than listed here):

  1. Education
  2. Insurance
  3. Mortgages
  4. Shoes
  5. Travel

These markets have four factors in common:

  1. Lots of search volume
  2. Search volume spread over thousands of terms
  3. High value to conversions
  4. People are willing to become a conversion online in volume

The combination of these 4 factors is critical to success. No – Mesothelioma is not going to work for you. Even though is pays more than $50.00 per click, there just is not enough volume.

2. Embrace the Organic Movement

No, I am not referring to the movement towards more and more organic foods in our diet. You need to realize that acquirers pay for organic traffic and conversions, and not for PPC based conversions. PPC conversions are nice, but any acquirer who is willing to spend millions of dollars on a web site probably knows the PPC game for their space better than (or at least as well as) you do.

If they wanted more sites to send PPC clicks to, they would simply throw them up themselves. They don’t need you for that. But organic leads? Ah, those are gold. Any site that is raking in lots of organic traffic, and converting that into leads/sales in a competitive market, is a true addition to their business. Because of simple shelf space reasons, the PPC market is just not as additive to their business.

3. You’ll need a great link profile

Your acquirer may or may not know the importance of a great link profile in valuing a site, but you are not going to win in a competitive market without getting some great, authoritative links. While there are people out there who will disagree with me, I maintain you can’t buy these links. Yes, poeple managed to fool Forbes into selling links off of their domain on added Spam pages, but this was a temporary abherration.

While you can find these temporary opportunities by looking hard for them, the key problem here is that they are indeed temporary. If you are embarking on a strategy to build a site that you are going to sell for millions of dollars, finding temporary wins is not going to help you. You need to figure out how to get authoritative links without buying them, and that leads us to the next point.

4. You’ll need great content

Since you need to get authoritative links without paying for them, you may think that your task is to get something for nothing. Actually, this is not at all true. Authoritative sites will link to your site in return for the user experience you offer to the people they send to it. This is an essential thing to understand. When you create great content, you create a great user experience for visitors, and authoritative sites will begin to link to you once they discover it.

So you need to create great content. As you look at these types of markets, you need to figure out how you are going to create truly killer content. I don’t mean tons of words with little values for bots to chew on. I mean kick ass articles or tools on your site that will draw lots of users. Before you embark on a project of this size, you need to develop a clear idea as to how you are going to produce this great content and tools.

Note that a social media strategy can be an important component of this stragegy, but I would not rely solely on a social media strategy. The biggest challenge with social media is how you leverage it to get authoritative links. It can be done, but of course, you can also get these types of links by asking the authoritative sites for them once you have the great content, and eliminate the social media site as a middleman. We like to do both.

5. Expect this process to take years

Be patient. This is going to take a while. Search engines are slow to reward you with deep riches these days. You could try to focus heavily on getting quality traffic from social media sites to get going faster, but many of these sites produce notoriously low quality traffic. If you have a strong enough content plan to succeed in getting steady high volume quality traffic quickly after launching a new site via social media, you aren’t reading this post to find tips any way.

The great majority of us are not going to be able to do it that way. We are going to have to build up our content depth, links, and search engine rankings over time. I’d say that it will take 2 – 3 years to get there.

Summary

This is a process I really enjoy – figuring out how to create these kinds of sites and then getting them there. It remains a great market environment. Web sites are being acquired all the time, and the activity should continue for the forseeable future. Build a great web property, with great content, great links, and lots of conversions, and you should be able to find a buyer. If you have such a site, and are having trouble finding a buyer, let me know and I will be glad to help!

As I mentioned above, I am going to write about this topic on an ongoing basis, and take various aspects of the above points and go into each of them in more detail.

Filed Under: SEO
«Older Posts