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The Mechanics of Panda

6/23/2011 by 1 Comment

The Panda algorithm hit the SEO world in a big way back on February 23rd /24th. Here is the general update history of Panda:

  1. Panda 1.0: February 23/24, 2011 – The initial launch.
  2. Panda 2.0: April 11, 2011 – added Chrome Blocklist Extension data to impact eHow, plus global English coverage.
  3. Panda 2.1: May 10, 2011 – general algorithm tweaks.
  4. Panda 2.2: June 16, 2011 – improved scraper site detection, probably to reduce the incidence of scraper sites outranking source sites that got hit by Panda.
  5. Panda 2.3: July 23, 2011 – some sites recover due to algo changes in Panda.
  6. Panda 2.4: August 12, 2011 – Panda rolled out internationally.
  7. Panda 2.5: September 28, 2011 – Appears to have affected many sites, including sites with lower levels of traffic.
  8. Panda 2.5.1: October 9, 2011 – minor update.
  9. Panda 2.5.2: October 13, 2001 – minor update.
  10. Panda 3.0: October 19/20, 2011 – a major update that let many sites recover. Evidently, this was intended to help those who had been unfairly hit by Panda back in the game.
  11. Panda 3.1: minor update.

Today I will present a visualization of the basic structure of how this works. I am basing this on the many hours of reading I have done on the topic, Google’s statements that Panda is a document classifier, and the indications by Matt Cutts that it is a process that is run periodically.

First though, a disclaimer. I am not a machine learning expert, and this should be used as a basic conceptualization of the workflow. Major elements are likely to differ from what you see here. However, I believe that this visualization is accurate enough to help you develop a solid mental model for how the algorithm is being applied.

Possible Panda Workflow

As a first step, Google is likely to have defined an initial test set of sites. These sites would then have been classified manually by human raters. The process would look something like this:

Manual Site Classification

This would allow Google to have a strong test database of manually rated sites, which therefore is accurate with a very high degree of probability, perhaps with a 99% degree of accuracy. As you can see sites would have been separated into buckets, such as “Good Sites” and “Bad Sites”.

As a next step, Google may have then spent time analyzing these sites to profile the characteristics of the Good Sites, and also of the Bad Sites, as follows:

Extracting Ranking Parameters

The idea is to develop a model for both types of sites. Of course, you can also have a continuous scale of Goodness, from Bad, Not so Bad, OK, Pretty Good, Very Good, and so forth. Once you have a model for Goodness vs. Badness, you can then step back and analyze what types of parameters you can evaluate algorithimically to get the same results as your human raters did during their evalation.

One key factor in this is the noisiness of the signal. In other words, is there enough data available on all the sites you want to test for the data to be statistically significant? In addition, is it possible that the signal can be ambiguous? For example, does a high bounce rate always mean it is a bad site? Or are there scenarios where a high bounce rate is an indicator of quality? Consider a reference site where a faster bounce might mean that the person got their answer faster.

There are lots of signals you could consider. Here are just a few examples:

User Behavior Content Attributes Searcher Ratings
Brand Searches Reading Level Chrome Blocklist Extension
Site Preview Editing Level +1
Ad CTR Misspellings/Grammar Blocked Search results
Bounce Rate Something new to say
Time on Site Large Globs of Text
Page Views Per Visitor High Ad Density
Return Visitor Rate Keyword Stuffing
Scroll Bar Usage Lack of Synonyms
Pages Printed

Of course, the correlations between good sites and bad sites may use even more obscure signals. A machine learning algorithm may determine that articles that use the word “oxymoron” more than 5 times are inherently poor quality (note to algorithm, this article uses oxymoron only once … oops twice). I personally think that Google would try to constrain the breadth of signals used, but it is certainly possible that the algorithm came up with some unusual correlations.

Once the signals have been decided upon, the algorithm can then set out to test the performance of those parameters with a variety of weights, and can also vary the signals used:

Running the Panda Algorithm

That is the first step. But how did the algorithm do? The next step is to score the results:

Scoring Panda

Once you have your score, the algo can try to figure out what tweaks to make to the parameters used and the weighting of each one to create a better match between the manual classification they did of sites and the algorithmic output. You can also test the results on a larger data set using your validating signals. This allows you to look beyond the limited test set you worked on manually. Together, these comparisons lead to a feedback loop:

Tuning Panda

To finish the process, the machine learning engine would simply repeat the tuning loop until the results were of acceptable quality.

Summary

As mentioned above, this is just my mental model for what took place, and it is likely that the exact course of events was somewhat different.

Ultimately, the key lesson is that publishers need to focus the great majority of their efforts on building sites which offer deep, unique, rich user experiences. The search engines want to offer these types of experiences to their users, and Google and Bing are battling for market share. Focus on giving them what they want in the long run because this battle for market share will surely make roadkill of those that don’t.

The algorithm will certainly be tuned more and more over time, so don’t get too wrapped up in trying to find out the specific factors in use by Google. Even if you succeed in finding it and artificially manipulate your site to score well on those factors, the next set of factors that will get applied may be entirely different. It is simpler to just focus on producing high quality content that is not only non-duplicate, but also differentiated, and then promoting that effectively through a variety of channels.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

Stephan Spencer on E-Commerce and SEO

6/20/2011 by 2 Comments

photo of Stephan SpencerStephan is co-author of “The Art of SEO” published by O’Reilly. He founded the SEO firm Netconcepts, acquired by Covario in 2010. He is the inventor of the SEO technology platform GravityStream. Stephan is a contributor to Practical Ecommerce, MarketingProfs, Multichannel Merchant, and SearchEngineLand, and a sought-after speaker for the DMA, AMA, Shop.org, Internet Retailer, SMX, SES, O’Reilly/TechWeb, PubCon, IQPC and IIR, among others. Stephan blogs at StephanSpencer.com, NaturalSearchBlog.com, BusinessBlogConsulting.com ChangesForGood.org and Google, I Suggest.

Key Points

As always, Stephan makes a number of key points. Here is the short summary of the major points made in the interview:

  1. E-Commerce sites often use product descriptions provided by the manufacturer and this leads to major problems. Many other sites will use those same descriptions, making the pages essentially duplicates of one another.
  2. User reviews is a great way to differentiate your site. Third party review solutions include Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews.
  3. The default solutions for implementing reviews traps the content in Javascript. To get the benefit you need to implement code that extracts the comments and places it on your site in search engine crawler visible HTML text.
  4. If needed, find a way to incent reviews on your site to build up review content volume.
  5. Zappos believes that a well written bad review provides more sales benefit than a poorly written good review.
  6. Many E-Commerce platforms remain weak at SEO, and the more you spend, it seems, the worse they are.
  7. Get an experienced SEO to help you evaluate E-Commerce platforms to make sure you start with a good one, and that it is properly configured.
  8. Pagination remains one of the big issues on E-Commerce sites. If you have many pages, show more pagination links to get content closer to the home page, but without going overboard.
  9. Breadcrumb navigation is important too, and helps establish relevance and context for users and search engines.
  10. Minimize use of parameters on your URLs, and use hyphens between words.
  11. Link building is a critical activity, and try to get links to your deep pages.
  12. Creative video is one great strategy for link building. Remember YouTube is the #2 search engine, and is also the #2 social media site.
  13. If you change E-Commerce platforms, make sure to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you talk a little about what the typical ecommerce issues are from an SEO perspective?

Stephan Spencer: Yes. We have a number of SEO issues that ecommerce sites face. One is duplicate content because they use the same manufacturer supplied product copy that many other sites use. They need to differentiate their copy from their competitors. They either need to paraphrase that copy, rewrite it, significantly augment it, or use a mash-up to incorporate additional content such as product reviews.

User-generated content is a great way to differentiate your pages from your competitors, especially if they have thin pages and not much more than a product description and pricing. You can add additional user-generated content to pages in the form of product reviews or incorporate content from forums, if you have a discussion forum as part of your site.

The power of product reviews

Eric Enge: Can reviews play a role?

Stephan Spencer: Yes, but one thing ecommerce sites and online retailers do not realize is that third party review services such as Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews won’t necessarily provide a search engine friendly solution for them. The review services offer an easy to implement JavaScript based solution that the publisher can add into their product page template, and the publisher thinks they are done.

that wonderful user-generated content … is trapped within JavaScript and not getting picked up by the search engines.

Power ReviewsHowever, that wonderful user-generated content that’s being contributed to the site by their customers is trapped within JavaScript and not getting picked up by the search engine. I should mention that these services are coming up with their own search engine friendly solutions. For instance, I know PowerReviews now offers a service where you pay extra fees and they give you a feed which you can then add to your pages as HTML code.

Bazaarvoice If you don’t want to pay the extra money you can do your own home-grown solution where you continue to use Bazaarvoice or PowerReviews. You execute the JavaScript and pull out the user-generated content and put it back into the page as HTML code. We did this with our GravityStream proxy-based SEO solution at NetConcepts (now part of Covario). We executed the JavaScript, pulled out the UGC, and then put it back into the page as HTML.

Stephan Spencer: There is another way product reviews can help your site. Suppose customers use different terminology than the retailer. For example, the retailer might use “hooded sweatshirts” as their product name, but the customer’s market speaks in terms of “hoodies.” Another possibility is customers are abbreviating or misspelling these words. “Under Armour” might be in the product copy, but the consumer is typing in the abbreviation “UA.”

So, if customers are using the terminology “hoodies” and “UA” in the product reviews, that gets picked up by the search engines and makes a page relevant to those additional words as well.

Eric Enge: The challenge with product reviews, is you must have enough traffic to draw the reviews.

Stephan Spencer: If you don’t have a lot of traffic then you need to get creative and incentivize your customer base to submit reviews. It’s not that different from a restaurant on Yelp who pushes their customer base persistently to submit a review.

Eric Enge: What type of strategies would you recommend for incentives and what are some creative ideas for people?

Stephan Spencer: You could do some sort of gift card or a special order code that gives a discount. You could do a contest where they might have the possibility of getting something or winning something. I think monetary incentives, or the potential for monetary incentives, work well.

Extra Points for Spelling!

Eric Enge: Did you see recently that Zappos is fixing typos in their reviews?

Stephan Spencer: No, I didn’t know that.

Eric Enge: Yes, they do and it stirred up controversy because, of course, it’s no longer the “pure review,” it’s getting some editing. There is some data that suggests typos and bad grammar in reviews may be more important than whether it’s a positive review or a negative review.

Amazon Stephan Spencer: So, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Eric Enge: Typos and bad grammar are bad things. So, you can have a well-written review that’s negative, and it will help you sell more than a poorly written review that’s positive. Amazon and Zappos are both doing different things in this area and it is pretty entertaining.

SEO issues with ecommerce platforms

Eric Enge: What about the ecommerce platform itself? Are there still issues with ecommerce platforms doing nasty things that makes SEO more difficult?

It’s rare for an ecommerce platform to be really sophisticated at SEO.

Stephan Spencer: For sure. It’s rare for an ecommerce platform to be really sophisticated at SEO. It seems the more money you spend on an ecommerce platform the less SEO friendly the solution is, which is counter intuitive. An open-source solution such as Magento Commerce or OS Commerce tends to be better optimized out of the box than WebSphere, GSI, or one of the other pricy solutions. It’s kind of funny. There is always opportunity with a very expensive, yet not fully optimized, solution to fine tune it and make it optimal.

There are a number of different areas to optimize the platform. They include everything from the internal linking structure, to the URL structure, to the HTML templates. Those are a few examples of areas to optimize.

With regards to the internal linking structure, there is the navigation. The main sort of navigation structure is breadcrumb navigation and pagination. All of these need to be optimized. With pagination, for example, it is suboptimal to have only a few products per page, let’s say ten products per page, and have a great many pages of pagination and not have many links to get to those pages.

You have to go many clicks away from the home page to get to a particular page of pagination and to get to that product which is featured on that page. That is really bad for SEO. Whereas, if you had a great many products per page, let’s say ninety-nine products per page, and you had pagination that allowed you to jump back and forward and to a certain page number, that would be better. If it gave you a group of pages to select from, for example five or ten, as well as previous and next, that would be a better solution for pagination in terms of SEO.

Evaluating an ecommerce platform for SEO friendliness

Eric Enge: If someone is evaluating an ecommerce platform, or simply starting to decide, what tips would you give them on how they should make that decision? Not everybody is going to have a way to get under the covers and find out what’s there.

Art of SEOStephan Spencer: In the Art of SEO, which is a book we coauthored, with Rand Fishkin and Jessie Stricchiola, there is a section on CMS issues and how to judge whether that potential solution is going to be good, or not good, in terms of SEO. There is a list of requirements which are the must haves, and there are also nice to haves which are not essential but highly desirable.

An example is the URL structure. For example, you don’t want too many parameters in the query string portion of the URL or, ideally, no query string, you want keywords with hyphens separating the keywords rather than underscores, and not too many hyphens. That’s the ideal scenario. You don’t want ten hyphens, you only want to a few. Reviewing those best practices is a good basis for your decision-making on the ecommerce platform.

Eric Enge: How would the average publisher be able to answer those questions, or have this table of things to look for? Do they ask a salesperson? What ideas do you have for how they would track that?

Stephan Spencer: The ideal scenario would be to work with an SEO consultant and have the consultant advise you as you go through the selection process and say, “these are the issues I have with these five different platforms that you are looking at, that you are considering for your new platform.”

They’ll be able to help not only with the selection process, but once you’ve selected the ecommerce platform. They can work with you as you are implementing the platform. They can help, for example, with defining the functional requirements of the ecommerce platform because there will be a lot of capability for customization with many of these platforms.

Let’s consider two sites with the same platform. One site is suboptimal and the other is well-optimized. The difference with these sites is that one was implemented with SEO in mind, and the experts where engaged in the process to make sure it came out search engine optimized.

It can bake in all the customization that will make the site sing to the search engines in terms of pagination, URL structure, breadcrumb navigation, and so forth. Other stages in the process where the SEO consultant can assist are the sitemap, the wireframes, the visual mockups, and the development site as it is being worked on. During these various stages they can weigh in with their input and guidance to say “this needs to be fixed or this is gone off on the wrong track.”

Of course, they stay involved through to launch and ideally post-launch as well. You need to make sure things aren’t broken once the site is finally presented to the search engine spiders and you need to continually optimize. Your web site is never finished and SEO is never finished.

Linkbuilding to ecommerce sites

Eric Enge: Link building to ecommerce sites can be somewhat challenging.

You need to look at building deep links to the content, and products, and categories rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the links to come.

Stephan Spencer: Absolutely. You need to look at building deep links to the content, and products, and categories rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the links to come. You also need to try and get links that aren’t just coming to the homepage of the ecommerce site, but also to the category-level pages and product pages.

Gummy Bear If you have someone who is creative on your site who can help make that page sexy, I think that’s critical. A great example of an ecommerce site that’s done a fantastic job with creating product content that’s quite viral in nature is a site called Vat19. They have this $5 gummy bear and they leverage YouTube effectively with regards to their online marketing.

It’s quite an entertaining video. They have a series of these videos on YouTube that they’ve done fantastically well with and have quite a following.

I don’t know if everybody reading this interview realizes this, but when you include a URL in a YouTube video’s description it will turn into a clickable link. It will be a no-followed link, but it will be a clickable link so you get direct click through traffic from that.

If you have a micro site with a collection of all your videos on it then you will inevitably end up getting people linking to you – bloggers, journalists, and so forth. And, the linkerati will opt to link to your site, not just the YouTube video or YouTube channel.

Eric Enge: So, one strategy is to put the first hit video on YouTube and all the sequels on your site.

YouTube is the #2 search engine and it’s a very powerful social network.

Stephan Spencer: You could do it like that, but I wouldn’t advise it for a few reasons. First, YouTube is the #2 search engine and, second, it’s a very powerful social network and has capabilities such as Favorite-ing, and Likes, and Dislikes, and Most Viewed, and all those things that help a video go viral (note from Eric: It is the #2 social site).

If you only do the first video on YouTube, you miss out because all the other videos won’t show up in the YouTube search results. So, you are missing out on getting some visibility from the #2 search engine. Also, you won’t have the opportunity to take advantage of the social capabilities that are present in YouTube but are typically not present on your own site.

You are not going to have that same potential for people to Favorite, and Like the videos. There are other capabilities of YouTube, like captioning, that you want to take advantage of as well.

I would work hard to promote your site, or sites, in YouTube so that in addition to people linking to the YouTube videos or your YouTube channel, you also get them to link to your commerce site or micro site.

E-commerce Platform Recommendations

Eric Enge: Are there platforms you recommend that are strong for SEO and for ecommerce platforms?

Magento Stephan Spencer: Magento Commerce is quite strong from an SEO standpoint. Also, it is open-source which I like. I am also big on WordPress, for example, an open-source blogging platform that can be used for a range of different types of sites, not just for a blog.

ATG is an expensive platform. You can get it to be optimized in terms of the final product by working with an implementation company and an SEO consultant who work in concert to build out a custom, well-optimized implementation of ATG.

Eric Enge: If someone has an old legacy platform with problems, there really isn’t much they can do other than get an SEO consultant to dig in and help them work through it.

it’s crucially important that you properly redirect all the old URLs to the new ones so that you don’t end up squandering hard earned Page Rank.

Stephan Spencer: Correct, and if you are going to transition from one platform to another, it’s likely to change all the URLs where the content of your site is located. If that happens, it’s crucially important that you properly redirect all the old URLs to the new ones so that you don’t end up squandering hard earned PageRank. People are linking to deeper level pages and those end up returning 404 errors that are going to zero out that PageRank from those links.

Eric Enge: Thanks Stephan!

Other Recent Interviews

SEO by the Sea’s Bill Slawski, June 7, 2011
Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Matt Mickiewicz, January 8, 2011
ex-Googler Adam Lewis, October 10, 2010
Wordtracker’s Ken McGaffin, August 16, 2010
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Majestic SEO Briefing, June 14, 2010
SEOmoz Briefing, June 9, 2010
Localeze Briefing, June 2, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
InfoGroup’s Pankaj Mathur, April 5, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: interviews, SEO

Search Engine Patents and Panda

6/7/2011 by 5 Comments

photo of Bill SlawskiBill Slawski is the president and founder of SEO by the Sea, and has been engaging in professional SEO and internet marketing consulting since 1996. With a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Delaware, and a Juris Doctor Degree from Widener University School of Law, Bill worked for the highest level trial Court in Delaware for 14 years as a court manager and administrator, and as a technologist/management analyst. While working for the Court, Bill also began to build and promote web pages, and became a full time SEO in 2005. Working on a wide range of sites, from Fortune 500 to small business pages, Bill also blogs about search engine patents and white papers on his seobythesea.com blog.

What are the Most Likely Signals Used by Panda?

Semaphore Victor Eric Enge: Let’s chat about some of the patents that might be playing a role in Panda 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and beyond. I would like to get your thoughts on what signals are used for measuring either content quality or user engagement.

Bill Slawski: I’ve been looking at sites impacted by Panda. I started from the beginning with remedial SEO. I went through the sites, crawled through them, looked for duplicate content issues within the same domain, looked for things that shouldn’t be indexed that were, and went through the basic list that Google provides in their Webmaster Tools area.

In the Wired interview with Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts regarding this update, they mentioned an engineer named Panda. I found his name on the list of papers written by Googlers and read through his material. I also found three other tool and systems engineers named Panda, and another engineer who writes about information retrieval and architecture. I concluded that the Panda in question was the person who worked on the PLANET paper (more on this below).

For signals regarding quality, we can look to the lists of questions from Google. For example, Does your web site read like a magazine? Would people trust you with their credit card? There are many things on a web site that might indicate quality and make the page seem more credible and trustworthy and lead the search engine to believe it was written by someone who has more expertise.

The way things tend to be presented on pages, for instance where eight blocks are shown, may or may not be signals. If we look at the PLANET whitepaper “Massively Parallel Learning of Tree Ensembles with MapReduce” its focus isn’t so much on reviewing signals with quality or even user feedback but, rather, how Google is able to take a machine learning process dealing with decision trees and scale it up to use multiple computers at the same time. They could put many things in memory and compare one page against another to see if certain features and signals appear upon those pages.

Eric Enge: So, the PLANET whitepaper described how to take a process, which before was constrained to a one computer machine learning process, and put it into a distributed environment to gain substantially more power. Is that a fair assessment?

Bill Slawski: That would be a fair assessment. It would use the Google file system and Google’s MapReduce. It would enable them to draw many things into memory to compare to each other and change multiple variables at the same time. For example, a regression model type approach.

Something that may have been extremely hard to use on a very large dataset becomes much easier when it can scale. It’s important to think about what shows up on your web page as a signal of quality.

It’s possible that their approach is to manually identify pages that have quality, content quality, presentation, and so on and use those as a seed set to use with the machine learning process. To identify other pages, and how well they may rank in terms of these different features, makes it harder for us to determine expressly which signals the search engines are looking for.

If they are following this PLANET-type approach in Panda with the machine learning, there may be other things mixed in. It is hard to tell. Google may not have solely used this approach. They may have tightened up phrase-based indexing and made that stronger in a way that helps rank and re-rank search results.

Panda may be a filter on top of those where some web sites are promoted and other web sites are demoted based upon some type of quality signal score.

It appears that Panda is a re-ranking approach. It’s not a replacement for relevance and Page Rank and the two hundred plus signals we are used to hearing about from Google. It may be a filter on top of those where some web sites are promoted and other web sites are demoted based upon some type of quality signal score.

Eric Enge: That’s my sense of it also. Google uses the term classifier so you could imagine, either before running the basic algorithm or after, it is similar to a scale or a factor up or down.

Bill Slawski: Right. That’s what it seems like.

Page Features as an Indicator of Quality

Eric Enge: You shared another whitepaper with me which dealt with sponsored search. Does that whitepaper add any insight into Panda? The PLANET paper followed up on an earlier paper on sponsored search which covered predicting bounce rates on ads. It Looked at the landing pages those ads brought you to based upon features found on the landing pages.

They used this approach to identify those features and then determined which ones were higher quality based upon their feature collection. Then they could look at user feedback, such as bounce rates, to see how well they succeeded or failed. This may lead to metrics such as the percentage of the page above the fold which has advertising on it.

Bill Slawski: Now you are talking about landing pages so many advertisers may direct someone to an actual page where they can conduct a transaction. They may bring them to an informational page, or an informational light page, that may not be as concerned with SEO as it is with calls to action, signals of reassurance using different logos, and symbols that you would get from the security statistical agencies.

That set of signals is most likely different from what you would find on a page that was built for the general public or for search engines. However, if you go back to the original PLANET page they said, “this is sort of our proof of concept, this sponsored search thing. If it works with that it can work well with other very large datasets in places like organic search.”

Eric Enge: So, you may use bounce rate directly as a ranking signal but when you have newer information to deal with why not predict it instead?

Bill Slawski: Right. If you can take a number of features out of a page and use them in a way that gives them a score, and if the score can match up with bounce rate and other user engagement signals, chances are a feature-based approach isn’t a bad one to take. Also, you can use the user behavior data as a feedback mechanism to make sure you are doing well.

Eric Enge: So, you are using the actual user data as a validator rather than a signal. That’s interesting.

Bill Slawski: Right. You could do the same thing with organic search which, to a degree, they did that with blocked pages signal. This is where 85% of pages that were blocked were also pages that had lower quality scores. You can also look at other signals, for example, long clicks.

Eric Enge: Long clicks, what’s that?

Bill Slawski: I dislike the term bounce rate because it, by itself, doesn’t conclusively infer that someone visits the page and then leaves in under a few seconds. It implies that someone goes to a page, looks at it, spends time on it, and then leaves without going somewhere else. A long click is when you go to a page and you actually spend time there.

Eric Enge: Although, you don’t know whether or not they spent time there because they had to deal with a phone call.

Bill Slawski: Or, they opened something else up in a new tab and didn’t look at it for a while. There are other things that could measure this and ways to confirm agreement with it, such as how far someone scrolls that page.

Eric Enge: Or, if they print the page.

Bill Slawski: And clicks at the bottom of the page.

Mouse Pointer Eric Enge: Or clicks on some other element. Could you track cursor movements?

There have been a couple of patents, even some from Google, on tracking cursor movements that they may possibly use someday.

Bill Slawski: There have been a couple patents, even some from Google, on tracking cursor movements that they may possibly use someday. These could give them an indication of how relevant something may, or may not, be to a particular query.

One patent is described as being used on a search results page, and it shows where someone hovers for a certain amount of time. If it’s a search result, you see if they hover over a one-box result which may give them an incentive to continue showing particular types of one-box results. That’s a possibility, mouse pointer tracking.

Bounce Rates and Other User Behavior Signals

Eric Enge: Getting back to the second whitepaper, what about using the actual ad bounce rate directly as a signal because that’s also potentially validating a signal either way?

Bill Slawski: It’s not necessarily a bad idea.

Eric Enge: Or low click through rates, right?

Bill Slawski: As we said, user signals sometimes tend to be noisy. We don’t know why someone might stay on one page longer than others. We don’t know if they received a phone call, if they opened it up in a new tab, if they are showing someone else and have to wait for the person, or there are plenty of other reasons.

You could possibly collect different user behavior signals even though they may be noisy and may not be an accurate reflection of someone’s interest. You could also take another approach and use the user behavior signals as feedback. To see how your methods are working, you have the option to have a wider range of different types of data to check against each other.

Rather than having noisy user data be the main driver for your ranking… you look at the way content is presented on the page.

Bill Slawski: That’s not a bad approach. Rather than have noisy user data be the main driver for your rankings, you find another method that looks at the way content is presented on a page. One area is segmentation of a page which identifies different sections of a page by looking at features that appear within those sections or blocks, and which area is the main content part of a page. It’s the part that uses full sentences, or sometimes sentence fragments, uses periods and traumas, capital letters at the beginning of lines or text. You use a Visual Gap Segmentation (White Space) type process to identify what might be an ad, what might be navigation, where things might be such as main content areas or a footer section. You look for features in sections.

For instance, a footer section is going to contain a copyright notice and being able to segment a page like that will help you look for other signals of quality. For example, if an advertisement appears immediately after the first paragraph of the main content area you may say, “well, that’s sort of intrusive.” If one or two ads take up much of the main space, that aspect of the page may lead to a lower quality score.

How the Search Engines Look at a Page

Patent Office Eric Enge: I understand how features may impact the search engine’s perception of a page’s quality, but that presumes they can unravel the CSS to figure out where things are really appearing.

Bill Slawski: Microsoft has been writing white papers and patents on the topic of Visual Gaps Segmentation since 2003. Google had a patent called “Determining semantically distinct regions of a document” involving local search where they could identify blocks of text reviews for restaurants or other places that may be separated.

For example, you have New York, a village voice article about restaurants in Greenwich Village, and it has ten paragraphs about ten different restaurants, starts with the name of the restaurant in each paragraph, and ends with the address, and in between is review.

This patent said, “we can take that page, segment those reviews, and identify them with each of the individual restaurants,” and then two or three paragraphs sets they say, “we can also use the segmentation process in other ways like identifying different sections of a page, main content, a header, a footer, or so on.” Google was granted a patent on a more detailed page segmentation process about a month ago.

Bill Slawski: Segmentation is probably part of this quality review, being able to identify and understand different parts of pages. They don’t just look at CSS. In the days where tables were used a lot you had the old table trick.

You moved the content up and, depending on how you arranged a table, you could use absolute positioning. With CSS you can do the same type of thing, but the search engine is going to use some type of simulated browser. It doesn’t render a page completely, but it helps them give an idea if they look at the DOM (Document Object Model) model of a page.

They look at some simulation of how the page will render, like an idea of where white space is, where HR tags might be throwing lines on the page, and so on. They can get a sense of what appears where, how they are separated, and then try to understand what each of those blocks does based upon linguistic-based features involving those blocks.

Is it a set of multiple single word things that have links attached to them? For instance, each one is capitalized that might be main navigation. So, you can break up a page like that, you can look at where things appear. That could be a signal, a quality signal. You can see how they are arranged.

The Search Engines Understand That There Are Different Types of Sites

Eric Enge: Does the type of site matter?

Bill Slawski: Most likely there is some categorization of types of sites so you are not looking at the same type of quality signals on the front page of a newspaper as you are on the front page of a blog or an ecommerce site.

You can have different types of things printed on those different places. You are not going to get a TRUSTe badge on a blog, but you might on an ecommerce site. You look at the different features and realize that different genres, different types of sites, may have different ones associated with them.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Bill Slawski: That may have been derived when these seed quality sites were selected. There may have been some preprocessing to identify different aspects such as ecommerce site, labels, blog labels, and other things so whatever machine learning system they used could make distinctions between types of pages and see different types of features with them.

It’s called a Decision Tree Process, and this process would look at a page and say, “is this a blog, yes or no? Is this a new site, yes or no?” It crawls along different pathways and asks questions to go crawl over that vital score.

Eric Enge: Other things you can look at are markers of quality, such as spelling errors on the page. I think Zappos, if I remember correctly, is currently editing all their reviews because they’ve learned that spelling errors and grammar affect conversion. So, that’s a clear signal they could potentially use, and the number of broken links is another.

Another area that’s interesting is when you come to a page and it is long block of text. There may be a picture on top, but that’s probably a good predictor of a high bounce rate. If it is a research paper, that’s one thing, but if it is a news article that is something else.

Bill Slawski: Or, if it’s the Declaration of Independence.

Scroll Eric Enge: Right, but they can handle that segmentation. If someone is looking for a new pair of shoes, and they come to a page with ten paragraphs of text and a couple of buttons to buy shoes, that’s a good predictor of a high bounce rate.

Bill Slawski: On the other hand, if you have a page where there is a H1 header and a main heading at the top of the page, a couple of subheadings, a list, and some pictures that all appear to be meaningful to the content of the page, that would be a well-constructed article. It’s readable for the web, it’s easy to scan and it’s easy to locate different sections of the page that identify different concepts. This may make the page more interesting, more engaging, and keep people on a page longer.

So, do these features translate to the type of user behavior where someone will be more engaged with the page and spend more time on it? Chances are, in many cases, they will.

User Engagment Signals as a Validator

Eric Enge: Another concept is user engagement signals standing by themselves may be noisy but ten of them collectively probably won’t be noisy. You could take ten noisy signals and if eight of them point in the same direction, then you’ve got a signal.

Bill Slawski: They reinforce each other in a positive manner.

Eric Enge: Then you are beginning to get something which is no longer a noisy signal.

Bill Slawski: Right. For example, if you have a warehouse full of people, in an isolated area, printing out multiple copies of the same document over and over and over, because they think printing a document is a user behavior signal that the search engine might notice, you are wasting a lot of paper and a lot of time.

In isolation that is going to look odd, it’s going to be an unusual pattern. The search engine is going to say, “someone is trying to do something they shouldn’t be doing.”

Eric Enge: Yes. That can become a direct negative flag, and you must be careful because your competitor could do it to you. So, the ballgame seems to go on. What about misleading information which was covered by a Microsoft white paper?

Bill Slawski: That was about concepts involving web credibility that Microsoft attempted to identify. It involved both on-site factors and off-site factors, and a third category, called aggregated information, which was the user behavior data they collected about pages. If you had on-site factors such as security certificates, logos, and certain other features, that would tend to make you look more credible. The emphasis is more on credibility than quality. It seems that the search engines are equating credibility with quality to a degree.

Bill Slawski: The AIRWeb Conference, which was held five years in a row but not held last year, was held again this year. It covered adversarial information retrieval on the web in conjunction with another workshop on credibility. They called it the 2010 Web Quality Conference and it was shared by people from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and a number of academic participants.

Design actually plays a very important part, maybe bigger than most people would assume when it comes to people assessing whether or not this site is credible or not.

You can go back a number of years to the Stanford persuasive technologies laboratory’s research and work on credibility. One of the findings stated, on a study of five thousand web sites or so, that design plays an important part, maybe bigger than most people would assume, when it comes to people assessing whether or not this site is credible or not.

They also came out with a series of guidelines that said certain things that will make your web site appear more credible to people. It included photographs of people behind the site, explicitly showing an address, having privacy policy or ‘about us’ page, or terms of service. These are on-page signals you could look at.

There are many off-page signals you could look at such as winning a Webby Award, being recognized in other places, being cited on authoritative type sites, or even page rank which they said they would consider as a signal to determine whether or not a page was a quality page. In the Microsoft paper they said they will look at page rank, which was interesting.

Populating Useful Information Among Related Web Pages

Eric Enge: Then you have the notion of brand searchers. If people are searching for your brand, that’s a clear signal. If you have a no-name web site and there are no searches for the web site name or the owner’s company name.

Bill Slawski: That stirs up a whole different kettle of fish, and it leads to how do you determine whether or not a page is an authority page. For instance, Google decides, when somebody types ESPN into their search box on the toolbar, the ESPN web site should be the first one to come up. It doesn’t matter much what follows it. If they type Hilton but it goes into the topic of data the search engines identify as named entities, or specific people, and places ; how do they then associate those with particular query terms, and if those query terms are searched for how do they treat them?

Do they look at it as a navigational query and ensure the site they associated with it comes up? Do they imply site search and show four, five, six, seven different results from that web site in the top ten which Google had been doing for a good amount of time?

Zappos Eric Enge: Even for a non-brand search, for instance, Google surely associates Zappos with shoes. Right? So, in the presence of the authority, compared to some other new shoe site, you could reference the fact that the brand name Zappos is searched a bunch and that could be a direct authority signal for any search on the topic of shoes.

Bill Slawski: Right. Let us discuss a different patent from Google that explores that and goes into it in more detail. There was one published in 2007 that I wrote about called “Populating useful information among related web pages.” It talks about how Google determines which web site might be associated with a particular query and might be identified as authoritative of it.

In some ways, it echoes some of the things in the Microsoft paper about misinformation about authority. It not only looks at things it may see on the web, such as links to the pages using anchor text with those terms, but it may also look to see whether or not the term is a registered trademark that belongs to the company that owns a particular web site. It may also look at the domain name or yellow page entries.

One of the authors of this patent also wrote a number of the local search patterns which, in some parts, say that citations are just as good as links. The mention of a particular business at a particular location will more likely rank higher if somebody does a search for businesses of that type in that location . So, this patent from Google expands beyond local search to find authoritative web pages for particular queries.

Rejecting Annoying Documents

Eric Enge: Excellent. Since we are getting towards the end I’d like your thoughts on annoying advertisements.

Bill Slawski: Google came up with a patent a few years ago which, in some ways, seems a bit similar to Panda. It focused upon features on landing pages and the aspects of advertisements. It was called “Detecting and rejecting annoying documents”.

It provided a list of the types of things they may look at in ads, on landing pages, the subject matter, characteristics rating, what type of language it uses, geographically where is it from, and who is the owner of the content.

Eric Enge: It may even detect content in images using OCR or other kinds of analysis to understand what is in an image.

Bill Slawski: Right, and also locate Flash associated with an ad, locate the audio that might be played, look at the quality of images, and the fact that they are animated or not. It was a big list. I do not know if we will see a patent anytime soon from Google that gives us the same type of list involving organic search and the Panda approach. Something might be published two, three or four years from now.

Eric Enge: It’s interesting. Obviously, what patents they are using and not using is something you don’t get visibility to unless you are in the right particular building at the right time at the Googleplex.

It seems to me the underlying lesson is that you need to be aware of search engines and, obviously, make search engine savvy web sites. The point is you need to focus on what people should have focused on all along which is: What do my users want? How do I give it to them? How do I engage them? How do I keep them interested? Then create a great user experience because that’s what they are trying to model.

My perspective is search engines are another visitor to your web site like anybody else.

Bill Slawski: Right. My perspective is that search engines are another visitor to your web site like anybody else. They may have different requirements. There may be some additional technical steps you have to take for your site to cater to them, but they are a visitor and they want what other visitors to your site want. They want to fulfill some type of informational or situational need. They want to find information they are looking for. They want to buy what you offer if, in the snippets that show up in search results, that’s what you do offer.

If you are a web site that’s copying everybody else and not adding anything new or meaningful, not presenting it in a way that makes it easier to read and easier to find, and there is nothing that differentiates you or sets you apart, then you are not treating potential visitors the best way you can.

When you do SEO, even in the age of Panda, you should be doing all the basics. It’s a re-ranking approach. You need to get rid of the same content with multiple different URLs, get rid of pages that are primarily keyword insertion pages where a phrase or two or three changes but the rest of everything stays the same.

When you write about something, if you are paying attention to phrase-based indexing, make sure you include related information that most people would include on that page, related terms and so on. Those basics don’t go away and they may be more important now than they were in the past.

Yes. As a searcher, as someone who helps people with web sites, and as someone who may present my own stuff on web sites, I want to know how it works. When I do a search, I want to make sure I am finding the things that are out on the web.

Get some sweat equity going and make sure your stuff is stuff people want to see, learn about the search space as much as you can.

Bill Slawski: The things I need, or want, or hope to see, and anything Google can do to make this better, I think everybody wins. That may be more work for people putting content on the web, but the cost of sweat is fairly cheap. Get some sweat equity going and make sure your stuff is stuff people want to see, learn about the search space as much as you can.

As a ranking signal we have relevance, we have importance and, increasingly, we have content quality.

Eric Enge: How is life for you otherwise?

Bill Slawski: I have been trying to keep things local, get more involved in my local community, and do things with the local Chamber of Commerce. I now live in an area that’s much more rural in Northwestern Virginia and some of these local business people need the help.

HorseI am really close to DC and have been trying to work more with nonprofits. Instead of traveling, I am meeting many people locally, helping people learn more about what they can do with their web sites and that’s pretty fulfilling.

Bill Slawski: I live in horse country now; there might actually be more horses in my county then there are people.

Eric Enge: Thanks Bill!

Other Recent Interviews

Elastic Path’s Linda Bustos, June 1, 2011
SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Matt Mickiewicz, January 8, 2011
ex-Googler Adam Lewis, October 10, 2010
Wordtracker’s Ken McGaffin, August 16, 2010
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Majestic SEO Briefing, June 14, 2010
SEOmoz Briefing, June 9, 2010
Localeze Briefing, June 2, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
InfoGroup’s Pankaj Mathur, April 5, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: SEO

Linda Bustos on E-Commerce and SEO

6/1/2011 by Leave a Comment

photo of Linda BustosLinda is the Director of Ecommerce Research at Elastic Path, author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog, and conversion consultant to some of the Net’s largest companies. Find her on Twitter @Roxyyo and @Getelastic, or on Etsy.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Welcome Linda, can you provide some background on yourself to start?

Linda Bustos: Sure. I work for Elastic Path and am Director of Ecommerce Research. My primary role is focused on the company’s blog, Get Elastic. I also provide ecommerce consulting services to Elastic Path customers on issues such as online marketing, conversion, usability, and other similar topics. Prior to working at EP, I provided SEO and web usability consulting with a web design company. It is ironic how I fell into blogging because I didn’t like writing, so I hired contractors to do copywriting for our clients.

Then, one contractor brought me to a Social Media Club event, which was around the time social media was becoming popular, and businesses were starting to take note. Also, SEOs were ready to start using social media to enhance marketing and SEO. So, I started a blog about the ethical use of SEO for business and, through the blog, I was noticed by Elastic Path. I then started contributing to their blog and eventually joined Elastic Path full-time and adopted the blog.

Eric Enge: Right. But, you started with a statement that you hate writing. So, does that make you suicidal on your job every day, or have you learned to like it?

Linda Bustos: I’ve learned to like it. What I learned is there is a difference between formal writing and blogging. Blogging is simply wording out all of your ideas, it’s conversational, it’s in a sense informal, and it’s instructional. Whereas before; copywriting was writing formal documents and essays, which is not where my passion lies. So, I believe you don’t have to be a formal writer to be able to publish a blog.

Another piece of irony is that I was going to be an artist if I followed the path I was on when I was in high-school. However, I didn’t continue with it because I hated computers – and to be a graphic designer you need them. And here I am working at a computer about ten hours a day now, and loving it!

Eric Enge: It’s amazing how what you do in school or what you think you are going to do early on changes so dramatically once you get out there.

Linda Bustos: Yes.

Eric Enge: When was it you joined Elastic Path?

Linda Bustos: I started contributing to the blog in 2007, and within a couple of months, by September, I was writing full-time for Elastic.

Eric Enge: Give us an overview of what Elastic Path does.

Linda Bustos: We are traditionally an ecommerce software platform, but we also provide professional services. We’re focused on clients that have unique needs, and that need a very flexible platform rather than software as a service where you simply buy a package of standard features. We’ve embraced the fringe of ecommerce needs, companies with very specialized features that need to be built. Also, in the last couple of years we’ve narrowed our focus to tech verticals such as digital goods, publishing, software, and telecommunications.

We find with the explosion of consumption in digital goods that this is where we “see the puck going” (hockey fans will recognize this as a takeoff on a Wayne Gretzky quote “I skate to where I see the puck going”) in ecommerce, and we want to build our product to serve the needs of those customers. Also, more recently, we’ve extended our consulting practice as well, so I have coworkers on the team, and we are now able to offer a full meal deal, whereas a couple of years ago we just offered software.

E-Commerce Platforms and SEO

Eric Enge: I assume the platform is designed to take into account SEO issues?

Linda Bustos: I think most ecommerce platforms out there are designed to handle SEO these days, especially enterprise platforms from mid-market up. I think they have to have SEO nailed down or else they won’t be able to sell. They have evolved to a place where they give the user control to fix, for example, messy URL strings caused by older ecommerce platforms. So I believe most reputable platforms now provide the tools to make a site SEO-friendly, but I think that the real key is for the client to actually utilize those features. Sometimes you go in and evaluate a site and there are many problems, and then you look at the ecommerce platform. Sometimes it is a limitation of the platform, but sometimes it’s just a really bad implementation of the platform.

Eric Enge: Right. But, don’t you also run into situations where the platform is capable of being SEO-friendly, but you need to configure it properly.

Linda Bustos: Yes, absolutely. For example, let’s take software like X-Cart or Magento that is being adapted by a web development company, or something like Drupal.

X-cart logo

The developers may not be thinking of SEO. It may not be that the platform can’t do it, but it’s been customized by somebody.

The developers may not be thinking of SEO. It may not be that the platform can’t do it, but it’s been customized by somebody. And, certainly I’ve come across some CMS systems that have been brutal for SEO, and I can imagine that some of those are still floating out there.

Also, there are a lot of ecommerce sites that have been running on the same platform for five or ten years. It’s quite costly and can be really messy to move from one to another, or to do an upgrade, or to extend features (depending on how the platform is built). So, sometimes you have that kind of a situation where you could fix an SEO problem, but to do that you would have to completely rebuild.

E-Commerce Site Implementation Mistakes

Eric Enge: You may have a publisher who gets an ecommerce platform that is SEO-friendly, but they go into implementation and there are a lot of common mistakes that they make. Do you have some thoughts on that?

Linda Bustos:The biggest problem I see is duplicate content and that’s because the dynamic pages are generated for every single category, or for every single search query with session IDs showing up in the URLs.

session ID example

You can use your robots.txt file to block Google from crawling URLs with session IDs. Or, you can use canonical tags. You also can use rewrites and redirects. For example, if you have the same product under multiple categories, like “Top Sellers”, “Running Shoes”, and “Men’s” you have one product under three different categories.

The search engine will follow each URL, and unless there is a proper redirect or a canonical tag applied to a global alias, you’ll face an internal duplicate content issue that could even affect how many products get indexed. Not taking care of URLs to make them keyword friendly is another problem. Though we’ve been talking about these issues for years, there are still some people not taking advantage of that.

Eric Enge: I’ve seen that with many sites. There is also the problem with pages that have products on them, but they do little to put unique text on those pages. They have here’s the price, pick the color, pick the size if those things apply and then add to cart and not much else.

Even with manufacturer descriptions, having customer reviews can help add unique text and more keywords on the page.

Linda Bustos: Yes, I think that is still quite common. And, it’s tough. If you have a very large catalog, as in the case of electronics retailers, you may want to get the products up on the site quickly and not take the time to craft custom descriptions. With consumer electronics, for example, there are many technical specs, and it can be hard to jazz that up. It’s easier to just use the manufacturer description. But that’s not good for SEO. Even with manufacturer descriptions, having customer reviews can help add unique text and more keywords on the page. But custom descriptions are even more important now in light of Google’s Panda/Farmer updates. Sites that haven’t invested in unique content, though it has been a best practice for so many years, are going to feel the pinch even more than before.

Eric Enge: Using content from other people, such as the manufacturer’s description is definitely a big issue. Do you have any thoughts on good ways to inexpensively generate content? If you had a couple of thousand pages you needed something written for, any tips on how to go about doing that?

I don’t recommend using anything automated. Product description copy needs a human touch. There are many ways you can generate content.

Linda Bustos: I don’t recommend using anything automated. Product description copy needs a human touch. There are many ways you can generate content. If you are a very large site, you most likely will need to outsource it. You can outsource overseas, though language may be a factor because a person’s command of English can vary and the same term could describe different things in different countries (for example a tank top in the US is a vest in the UK).

However, if you hire a reputable company you should get something that is readable and grammatically correct, but always have a native speaker proof-read them. You also want to ensure that the proper keywords are used by the copywriters, and this may be specific to a region (as in the “vest/tank top” example). Another option is to take interns, if you are a smaller company, or hire someone at an entry level – perhaps have an entry level copywriting and merchandising staff.

Eric Enge: College students can be a good source too.

Linda Bustos: You bet. And work at home moms.

E-Commerce and Mobile

Eric Enge: So, there are a few options. Do you see more ecommerce applications going towards mobile devices at this point?

I don’t believe it’s going to be a mobile phone evolution; rather a tablet takeover.

Linda Bustos: Yes, absolutely. I think mobile commerce is still fairly small compared to what it’s going to be. But, I don’t believe it’s going to be a mobile phone evolution; rather a tablet takeover. In Q4 of last year, for the first time more tablets were shipped than PCs, and it’s not just tablets that people are going to be shopping from, but gaming consoles, televisions and devices that we haven’t even dreamed of, which will be Internet enabled and therefore ecommerce enabled. The iPhone is great, but I don’t believe it will drive mobile commerce. Users want to be able to read product descriptions in their entirety and be able to zoom in and navigate the site, which can be tedious on a phone, even on the best designed site. Shopping is much more enjoyable on larger devices.

However, this may introduce a nightmare. We used to complain about testing a site in Firefox and in Internet Explorer, and maybe if we had time left over, looking at Safari. Now, we have thousands of devices with different specs, screen sizes, operating systems, browsers, and features. These devices don’t just have the mobile Web, but also applications. This introduces a lot of complexity. Businesses need to decide whether they will develop one site for all devices, optimize for the major ones with different style sheets, how many devices they will optimize for, and whether they will create companion applications – and for which platforms. We talk about long tail of keywords, but there is a long tail of devices to develop for.

Mobile commerce is important because eyeballs are shifting from the computer screen to these devices. Every ecommerce business will need a mobile strategy, with mobile resources, mobile testing, QA and mobile analytics.

Eric Enge: Have you dug into the mobile analytics picture at all?

Linda Bustos: Traditional analytics tools are all offering features where you can see mobile stats on there. But, there are new vendors popping up, like BangoMobile Analytics that can offer deeper insights. For example, whether the user is on a Wifi connection or whether they are on the 3G connection. Another biggie is in-application behavior, where Javascript tagging doesn’t fly. I predict these companies are either going to get acquired by Adobe (Omniture), Google, and the like, or they are going to become a bolt-on that everybody needs to have.

Eric Enge: Right. One of the nice things about the mobile environment is the process of telling where the user is located is a lot more precise than doing geo IP lookup. It is more precise, so if you have physical stores you can tell how far the user is from them. Let’s chat a little bit about social media. Do you have some thoughts on how that plays for ecommerce sites?

E-Commerce Sites and Social Media

I tend to be more on the pessimistic side of social media marketing, not so much because I don’t think it has value, but because I don’t think that it’s a major revenue driver.

Linda Bustos: I tend to be more on the pessimistic side of social media marketing, not so much because I don’t think it has value, but because I don’t think that it’s a major revenue driver. However, I am all for having user generated content on your site, or even hosting community on your site. And, I am all for taking your brand presence into the place where people are normally hanging out.

So, Twitter, Facebook, and niche social networks can work for retail, and so can social shopping and sharing sites like Polyvore and Kaboodle because you can seed your own products into them. Just being there is good, and that can be an extra result that shows up in search engines as well, get you some more exposure, and people can “Favorite” your items through these shopping portals as well.

Facebook commerce is making advances, and a lot of big brands are actually building stores to shop within Facebook. A common question is, are people going to be using Facebook Credits to purchase? And will people prefer to actually shop within Facebook, without leaving Facebook? I’m not convinced we are there yet, and I don’t think the development time to bring a presence into Facebook is necessarily worth it right now. Porting in your store means you are managing another channel. It may need its own customer service, web analytics and site optimization. So, unless you have a lot of money to spend, I am not bullish on the Facebook shopping.

I do think that having Facebook Like buttons, and Twitter Tweet This, and Google Plus One buttons on a site is a quick win, and everybody should use them. It’s good passive word of mouth to allow visitors to be evangelists for you, and it’s also good for SEO. We know these social links have value now.

However, I’ve seen some social fads rise up and then fade. Around 2007, retail blogs were the big thing. That year I went through the Internet Retailer 500 list, and I found that there were only seventy-five that had retail blogs in 2007. And, more than half of those have been abandoned or taken down now.

It really didn’t turn out to be the magic bullet for social media marketing. Another “hopeful” was co-shopping, where you would put in a tool and somebody could invite their friend to come search the site the same time as you. It never really got off the ground. And, while that seems cool and novel, it’s just not the way that people want to shop online. I believe we are going to see many new things pop up, they may or may not prove effective.

Eric Enge: One of the problems with blogs is that people found out that if they were to make a go of that then it’s a lot of work. It’s not something you can dip your toe in the water, and this is something that I advise people who are looking at social media strategies. You can do some really interesting things if you put your mind to it in social media, but you have to be committed; it’s an awful lot of work. And, one thing I like Twitter or Facebook for is that it’s certainly a way to get feedback from people, from real customers. You can get interesting feedback by putting questions out to people and conducting polls. You can announce new products and get a little buzz going. I agree with you, I just don’t see it so much for direct commerce.

Linda Bustos: Yes. Even for customer service, I think a lot of people are actually just going straight to Twitter and adding the @ sign. They are actually using that channel directly as a shortcut to asking customer service questions or complaining.

Unique Selling Propositions

Eric Enge: Your most recent post was about PPC value propositions or selling propositions. I would like to get your take on the kinds of mistakes people typically make or often make in regard to how they position their pages when people get to them, and how they can fail to express a value proposition.

Every page needs to have the value proposition, not just the landing pages or homepage.

Linda Bustos: Every page needs to have the value proposition, not just the landing pages or homepage. I often see on retailer sites that they actually do have a unique value proposition, but they put it on the about us page. Often times, coming up with a unique and compelling value prop is the hardest thing for a marketing department to do, especially if you sell things that other people sell. Free shipping offers are not a unique value proposition. They are not compelling, it’s just common place now. So, it’s hard to find something that’s really unique. It also doesn’t mean we have the best customer service, because you must be able to backup and quantify what your value proposition is.

And, usually retailers are just average; and this is not putting anyone down, but it’s hard to do something that nobody else can copy. If you don’t have one unique value proposition, then even a collection of value propositions — three or four things, which in combination nobody else does — may suffice. Or, perhaps you are the only one business clearly communicating it – so it becomes a unique value prop perceptually.

Every single page needs to have value props clearly presented in a persuasive way – especially your shopping cart page. A recent Forrester Shopping Cart Abandonment Survey found that sticker shock is the #1 reason for abandonment. Of all of the top reasons that carts were abandoned, none of them had to do with web usability or site design or anything that’s on the page.

They all had to do with whether the customer was ready to buy, and whether they were willing to accept the actual price of the product. We are sometimes all-too-focused on big red buttons and big green buttons, or reducing checkout steps when really we should be addressing the real question that the customer has to deal with, do I want to checkout today? You must reinforce the reason why they shouldn’t abandon and start looking at other sites to see if they can get a better deal. If you are a manufacturer selling direct, you should reinforce that they should checkout from you today instead of going down the street to the local Best Buy to do some comparison shopping.

Offer them a compelling reason why they should buy today, a sense of urgency, and value propositions for owning the item today. Not next week. Not thirty days from now.

Eric Enge: One of the things that Amazon does that’s nice is you get a certain amount of the way down the pipe, and they tell you when you can receive delivery by. It’s not the selling proposition of the product, but it’s giving you an incentive to close the deal now. So, there are those kind of value propositions too that I think you can play into it, or there is the principle of scarcity right too, where it’s only four left, so, buy now before it’s out of stock. Do you have any interesting examples of value proposition problems you want to mention?

Linda Bustos: Definitely. One example is mistaking a mission or vision statement as the value proposition. Avoid “We want to be the #1 seller in widgets” or, “we believe in this and we believe in that”, which should be internal stuff you present to your investors, not customers. You really need to focus it around customer needs and what they care about. And, keep it in context of the purchase and why they should choose you. You are not converting them to want to join your team or to believe in what you believe in.

Another problem is burying a good value prop behind About Us or other footer links. It’s also important to maintain consistent offers and value propositions between all your advertising, email campaigns, pay per click, and offline promotions. Re-state on the landing pages the exact offer and value proposition that that person is going to expect. I think that maintaining that scent and context is important.

Eric Enge: Yes, if someone sees an ad, clicks on a Google AdWords ad, they get to a landing page, and the thing they were enticed within the ad doesn’t actually show up on the page they land on, and they say must have shown up in the wrong place, I am out of here.

Linda Bustos: Exactly.

Eric Enge: Thanks Linda!

Other Recent Interviews

SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin, May 23, 2011
Bing’s Stefan Weitz, May 16, 2011
Matt Mickiewicz, January 8, 2011
ex-Googler Adam Lewis, October 10, 2010
Wordtracker’s Ken McGaffin, August 16, 2010
Bing’s Mikko Ollila, June 27, 2010
Yahoo’s Shashi Seth, June 20, 2010
Majestic SEO Briefing, June 14, 2010
SEOmoz Briefing, June 9, 2010
Localeze Briefing, June 2, 2010
Google’s Carter Maslan, May 6, 2010
Google’s Frederick Vallaeys, April 27, 2010
InfoGroup’s Pankaj Mathur, April 5, 2010
Matt Cutts, March 14, 2010

Filed Under: interviews, SEO