© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. The Pros and Cons of Personalised Search
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Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Let’s Kill the ?Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized? Myth
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/Op2h7B0-nCE/
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Source: http://www.getelastic.com/digital-distribution-revolutionizing-pc-gaming/
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I was just checking out the ongoing strategic meltdown in the value of the Dollar & noticed an AdWords ad with an extended headline & a 150 character ad description.
Currently I believe the above extended description is a limited beta test, but if Google starts mixing that in with Google Advisor ads & ad sitelinks there might not be a single organic result above the fold on commercial keywords.
The above image is even uglier when Google Instant is extended.
Using the 150 word ad descriptions would drive everything down one more row per ad. Adding another line to each of the AdWords ads would push the "organic" search results down another listing.
Of course one response is to operate in the tail of search, but just look at DMD to see how well that worked for them.
They are so desperate that they sent legal threats at a site flaming them. Humorously, that site also runs AdSense ads.
And that desperation is *before* Google has finalized a legal agreement on the book front & started aggressively pushing those ebooks in their search results with full force. In 12 months ebooks will be the new Youtube...a service that magically keeps growing over 10% a month "organically" in Google's search results.
Your content isn't good enough to compete, unless you post it to Youtube.
In addition to uploading spammy videos in bulk to Youtube, maybe SEOs should create a collective to invest in "an oversized monitor" in every home and on every desk. :D
Alternatively, switching the default search provider on every computer you touch to Bing doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/longer-google-adwords-ad-copy
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Is there such a thing as "passive" income? Generally no. A person can cash out existing brand equity and exposure, but if they cash out too aggressively and/or do not reinvest enough then they are ultimately cashing out their market position and will eventually fade.
Online there are some network effects that are hard to beat. MySpace had them over Facebook & only lost due to years of systematic incompetence & mismanagement. And even Google has to claw and fight for every percent of search marketshare.
A person could say "well Google makes passive income" and I would counter that with "not really."
So far this month Google has made about a dozen search interface changes or tests & the underlying relevancy algorithms have likely had at least 3x or 4x as much change.
The propaganda Google spreads include statements like: "users keep coming back to Google even though they have a choice of a search engine every time they open a browser"
While Google maintains that their monopolist marketshare is due to user appreciation of superior technology, a ton of their exposure is paid for. I was helping a friend set up a new laptop and the amount of Google added to the machine made me feel like Google is the new Norton or Symantec.
If you use the Internet Explorer browser to access the web it comes with a Google Toolbar.
That toolbar defaults to enhanced features enabled.
Google also pays for Chrome to be installed in the laptop.
If you are curious enough to click on the pinned Chrome logo then when it opens they try to set it as your default browser.
If you do use Chrome regularly you see Chrome store ads bundled right int he browser.
Even if you don't use Chrome or the Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer then whenever you use Google they suggest setting it to your home page.
And even if you don't change your homepage, Google paid to be the default search box on Toshiba's default start page!
If your default search provider isn't Google when you install Chrome they use an option screen to help you change it, with Google being the first choice
Either Google is fibbing when they state how much of their existing marketshare is due to superior quality service, or they are hedging a risk of losing marketshare to Bing by buying placement everywhere they can. And to me this really highlights one of the big issues with truly "passive" online income. In spite of Google's success (& the great network effects they enjoy), even Google feels the need to spend hundreds of millions of Dollars a year buying exposure for their own browser, buying default search provider exposure in 3rd party browsers, and ensuring new computers are filled with promotional Google crapware.
This sort of cross promotion is everywhere, from ads on Youtube promoting Chrome
to Gmail ads highlighting featured Youtube videos
and Google+ games having Chrome ads integrated as special items in the game
right on through to Google buying display ads promoting display ads.
Facebook realizes how powerful this cross-integration is & thus buys ads on Youtube as well.
But if you want to leave Google's ecosystem it takes a lot of effort, as Google is willing to advertise the Google alternative aggressively wherever they can.
Google recently extended their ecosystem of cross-referencing further by automatically adding Google Related to Google Chrome & the Google Toolbar, which recommends Google content within the browser no matter where you are on the web.
Google's bundling not only follows users around the web & personalizes ads, but it also bakes right into the core of their relevancy algorithms. Eric Schmidt stated "the internet would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward."
Either you sign up for a Google Profile or you suffer the consequences! Forbes published (then quickly pulled) an alarming article titled ?Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Dies.? Wired followed up spreading a similar message & a new Google trusted stores rating system for merchants was also spotted.
With so many attempts at lock-in there is no surprise that some other browsers which have partnered with Google are considering moving on.
This is not to say that Bing doesn't do marketing as well. They just are not as slick about it.
In addition to evolving their core relevancy algorithm, Google has to police advertisers who are willing to be deceptive, market counterfeit goods & use the lowest common denominator. When Google is too loose that can cost them a pretty penny: they just paid a $500 million fine to the US government for ads from Canadian pharmacies. The DOJ claimed Mr. Page knew what was going on:
Mr. Neronha said those efforts amounted to "window-dressing," allowing Google to continue earning revenues from the allegedly illicit ad sales even as it professed to be taking action against them. Google employees helped undercover Justice Department agents in the sting operation evade controls designed to stop companies from advertising illegally, he said.
"Suffice it to say that this is not two or three rogue employees at the customer service level doing this on their own," Mr. Neronha said in an interview. "This was a corporate decision to engage in this conduct."
Likewise, it costs Google a lot of money to deal with lawsuits that arise due to their business practices & lack of respect for copyright with photos, books & videos. They eventually had to develop an expensive video footprinting technology to adopt DRM features on Youtube.
And building the partnerships Google has to run Youtube isn't easy. They pay something like a half-cent per video view & if you create a site with a "no soup for you" message (like the above Google page) for markets where the finances do not work out then you are violating their search guidelines by cloaking, whereas Google overly-promotes YouTube in the search results and is free to count ad views as video views (once again, against Google's guidelines).
Eric Schmidt highlighted how the lobbyists write the laws & then Google went out and hired over a dozen lobbyist firms. Anything that disintermediates search costs Google a cut of revenues.
While Groupon is still unproven as a business model, Google was willing to spend $6 billion to buy it in order to avoid the risk of missing out on a new form of local ads.
Mobile search now represents 12% of the search market. To look in their dominant search position onto the new devices Google:
What is worse for Google, is in spite their default status, their huge ad budget, and being large enough to be sued regularly, even all that isn't enough to keep all the traffic they pay for, as there is widespread hijacking of search traffic by ISP providers.
Google may have bit off more than they could chew & are certainly doing anything but being passive. But maybe some other companies that make great money are doing so passively. Offline that is certainly true in many instances, but online passive companies tend to disappear.
Look at all the work Yahoo! has done with their news box & their sports vertical, yet when you back out the cash on the books & the foreign investments the company isn't valued at much above $0. AOL has also cratered. In spite of their huge traffic streams they are not growing with the market due to search bypassing them & niche players picking them apart one vertical at a time. Running a portal profitably & sustainably is anything but passive.
Even deep into the long tail at the other end of the equation the profits may be every bit as scarce. Demand Media's accounting techniques show that they were far better at growing revenues than growing profits & the company may never be profitable.
Google & Bing keep eating more of the value chain through content scraping & a more interactive search experience that include new ad formats, like coupons & product ads with pictures.
In addition, search companies are challenging the boundaries of search by creating vertical media & ad networks that compete against a wide array of publisher websites.
The Huffington Post
Autonomy / Fast Search
Groupon
BankRate
MapQuest + TomTom
The Yellow Pages
Dell / HP
When Google talks about "protecting users" one of the case studies / angles they push is the health angle:
The paid post at the top happens to be about brain tumors, which is a really serious subject. If you are searching for information about brain cancer or radiosurgery, you probably don?t want a company buying links in an attempt to show up higher in search engines. Other paid posts might not be as starkly life-or-death, but they can still pollute the ecology of the web.
While Google was using the life-or-death approach to policing link buying outside of their AdWords ad network, Google was knowingly selling search ads to Canadian "pharmacies" providing illicit drugs in the US. The official settlement document lists how Google insiders knew work-arounds to the automated systems & were working directly on managing the ad accounts associated with the illegal activities. Google had done so for over a half-decade & only changed their approach *after* they knew a sting operation was underway.
For those scoring at home, this has been Google's approach to the health vertical:
Given the above investigation, it is not surprising that they shut down their health records initiative. They had already spent all their credibility.
Google may protect you from some third parties, but Google can not protect you from Google. :D
Not only can Google hardcode the algorithms toward promoting certain websites (while editorially discriminating against other webmasters for doing the exact same thing), but Google also actively invests in the publishing ecosystem, which pits them directly against anyone who doesn't receive their largesse.
Webmasters are told that having networks of similar websites is spammy. And yet, Google invests is a company that owns about 7 copies of the exact same business model in the exact same niche as a roll up.
As we saw with BeatThatQuote, Google owned-and-operated websites get penalized for a shorter duration of time for the same offense that other websites get penalized for longer periods of time for. It was only through *repeated* exposure of the absurdity on SEO blogs that Google decided to treat their own property like they treat a typical webmaster.
You can also do nothing wrong, but have your model undermined by looking too similar to a company that is exploiting Google's relevancy weaknesses & forces Google to apply retribution. A lot of small ecommerce sites were purged in the content farm update. What is so sad about that is that if not for accounting games & selling stock as a business model a lot of the biggest "success" stories in the content farm might not even exist.
While the above section focuses on Google, it could be about any competing business that touches the web...a bank which uses bogus accounting driving smaller banks out of business, a company that receives no bid government contracts associated with bribes & uses those "profits" to price dump in related fields, an ISP redirecting your traffic, etc. No matter how clean a business model looks at a glace, there is some gray area where businesses meet & exceed the numbers quarter after quarter.
Look, for example, at the sorts of links NetZero puts in some of their customer emails
And those links point at the illegal "fake news" styled $1 trials (with endless unstoppable recurring billing).
Look closely at any mainstream media site & you will run into those ads.
It really comes down to how you define passive.
If your site doesn't evolve & isn't aggressively marketed then eventually a search engine or another competitor will pick away at your advantages until you are soon found ranking #2 then #3 then #7 then #20 then invisible. Or you might get clipped by an algorithm all at once in a sudden stop torch job that makes your site essentially invisible, or it may be a slow & painful debt by a thousand cuts.
This is one of the reasons I generally prefer to have a site with a 30% or 50% profit margin over one with a 90% or 95% profit margin. Sure high margins are great while they last, but if you don't reinvest enough over time an algorithm or a competitor will eventually torch some of those high margin projects.
When it comes to online income, passive and reliable are not synonyms.
If you saved the margins you made while they were there then you are lucky, whereas if you adjust your lifestyle to that level of income & don't save anything then dark times have appeared.
It turns out having passive frugal spending habits & active savings habits are crucial if your lifestyle relies on "passive" income. ;)
Source: http://www.seobook.com/passive-income
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Yay!!! It's there. After almost a year of coding, I dare say that my WordPress SEO plugin is finally to be called stable. That doesn't mean there are no more bugs left to squash: I wish. It does mean though that I now strongly believe that it's safe to run on smaller and bigger sites [...]
WordPress SEO by Yoast, version 1.0 is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/oym4enusIT0/
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You might recall that I've written a Link Building 101 article not so long ago. Since then, I've had quite a few people asking me for link building tips, advice, tricks, etc. I'll tell you now: I'm not the one to ask. I have ideas about it, of course, but my methods don't work for [...]
Link Building Tips that Work is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/E4_BY2W0F88/
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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
August ’11: Best Search/Marketing Posts
Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/august-11-best-searchmarketing-posts/4670/
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Bing's Webmaster Tools recently got a nice refresh and update. There is a lot you can do inside of the tools so we figured you'd want to know all about it :)
Also, we've included some free advertising coupons at the end of this guide to help get you started.
Bing's webmaster tools are fairly easy to use and the interface is quite clean. On the main account dashboard page you can select whatever site you want, in your account, and see quick stats on:
The percentages account for the net gain or loss from the week. For more specific site data, and more historical numbers, you would want to get into the site's dashboard which we will cover in the next section.
This initial account dashboard shows all the sites you have in your account and the associated metrics. The data is from a test site I created awhile back and kind of forgot about until they updated the tools over at Bing.
From this page you can:
A snapshot of all your sites in one place is a good way to immediately spot any recent issues with ranking, indexing, or crawling on your sites.
Once you are ready to move on into a specific site, just click on the site name under the heading "Site". When you click the site's name, you'll be brought to the site's dashboard.
Each site you have in Bing's webmaster tools has its own dashboard (not to be confused with the account dashboard). Once you get into a site's dashboard you see the data we talked about above at the top of the dashboard and then a 30 glimpse of the following metrics for the selected site:
Here is what my test site's dashboard looks like:
For established sites with steady traffic (if for tracking ongoing campaigns) these 30 day snapshots are good ways for you to get a read on recent site activity and/or issues with traffic, crawling, indexing.
These types of reports can also be very helpful to watch when you are doing site re-structuring or complete site overhauls (changing CMS, url structure, and so on).
Each section has its own place within your site's webmaster tool profile. You can get more information on traffic, indexing, and crawling just by clicking the approriate link and we'll discuss each of these sections below.
Inside the Traffic Summary tab you have 2 options:
On this page the second chart listed is one that you can slide back and forth to shorten or lengthen the history of the data you are looking at.
The lines are color coded to show overall impressions versus clicks. Bing does present the data in a clean and easy to understand way inside of their webmaster tool reports.
The second chart on the traffic summary page shows search query performance. You'll see keywords you received traffic for as well as ones that you gained impressions (but no clicks) for:
This report is in conjunction with the first report of overall traffic/impressions from a time view. If you shorten the report this report will adjust as well.
You'll see the following data points in this report (all sortable and exportable):
This is a good way to evaluate how you might be able to increase your CTR. By showing you impressions versus clicks (the average positions) you can guesstimate on which keywords could use a bit of freshening up on the title tag and meta description front.
The Page Traffic report shows the same charts as the Traffic Summary page with the exception of the bottom chart, which shows page level metrics. Here's a snippet from yesterday:
You can click whatever page you want and get the following keyword summary, similar to the initial chart on the Traffic Summary page but on a per page level on whatever time frame you selected (the above was a day so when you click through, that date carries into this report):
You can do the same thing here with average impression and average click position (and CTR) to evaluate pages which can use a refresh on title tags and meta descriptions for possible CTR upswings.
Another tip here would be to export the queries and see if there is potential to build out the page's category further with content targeted to specific queries.
So if a query is "chocolate truffles" and you are seeing some data for "white chocolate truffles" you might want to consider building out this section to include content specifically for those related but separate queries (if you haven't already)
The index summary page shows the index rate of your selected site, in Bing, over (roughly) the last 6 months.
The index summary chart is similar to the other charts in Bing's webmaster tools, which all the interactive sliding parameters that let you expand the report out over 6 months or drill down into a really tight, specific time frame.
Bing's index explorer is a helpful tool that can alert you to HTTP code problems or confirm correct implementation of things like 301 directs.
The interface is easy to use:
With the index explorer you can check the following HTTP status codes that Bing has discovered over your selected time period (all time, last week, last month) and over your selected crawl range (all time, last week, last 2 weeks, last 3 weeks):
You can also search for pages where the Bing bot has identified malware as being present as well as choose to show pages that you've excluded in your robots.txt file:
Below the options listed above, are where the pages that meet your filter requirements will show. It breaks the site down into categories and pages. When you hover over a page you'll see the following details:
If you click on a page you can also see a couple of additional data points:
Using this in conjunction with internal link checking tools like Xenu Link Sleuth (win) or Integrity (mac) can really help you get a good peek into the potential on-page technical issues of your site.
A couple of tools that give you valuable data about your on-page optimization are our Website Health Check tool (web based) and Screaming Frog's SEO Spider (mac/win).
I hope Bing adds some export functionality here, as they do in other areas of their webmaster tools, but the filtering options are solid enough to drill down into key issues for now.
So this is a pretty straightforward option. Bing gives you the option to submit URLs (can be ones that are or are not in their index now) that you would like to request a recrawl or an initial crawl on.
The URL allowance is pretty limited so it's best to save these requests for more important pages on your site (their crawl section has a spot for sitemaps).
You can also select pages, directories, or an entire site to block from indexing and/or Bing's cache:
One area for improvement here, I think, is to be able to input or upload individual pages. As of now, you can only input 1 page per click, or select a directory to block (site.com/directory/), or block the entire site.
They do offer export functionality which is helpful when doing site audits, but a way to mass upload or input URLs would be nice (though you can tackle some of this with their URL normalization feature that will cover below).
Bing will also show you the links they know about (in their index) that point to specific pages on your site.
Much like the charts above, you are presented with a historical chart which you can adjust with the slider below it (just like the Rank and Traffic stats shown prior).
Below those charts Bing will show you the pages on your site which have external inlinks and how many links they know of per page.
Once you click on a page, you'll see the linking URLs and the corresponding anchor text:
You can export page-specific links as well as the overall breakdown of pages with links and how many links those pages have. The export functions offer a nice way to get a high-level view of the overall link depth of your site.
While it's still a recommend practice to invest in a paid link research tool, supplementing your paid research by getting free link data from search engines is a no-brainer :)
Bing's Deep links are basically the same as Google Sitelinks. If you have been blessed by Bing, you'll see them in the Deep Links section of your site.
Bing's official statement on Deep Links is:
These Deep Links are assigned to websites which are seen by Bing to be ?authoritative? on the topic which they target. The best way to influence whether you are chosen to have Deep Links displayed for your website is to create unique, compelling content that pleases searchers. Sites receiving this feature do an excellent job of delivering what visitors want, and keep visitors coming back time and again.
If your URLs encounter parameter issues that can lead to duplicate content (e-commerce sites, CMS functionality, etc) then you might want to take a look at Bing's URL normalization feature.
Google offers a similar tool called Parameter Handling (great write up on this from Vanessa Fox)
This is a section where you need to be really careful as to not unintentionally boot out relevant URLs and content from the site.
Combining this with use of the canonical tag (which Bing uses as a hint) is your best bet to ensure that there are as few duplicate content, link juice splitting issues on your site (with Bing).
Again, make sure you or your programmer(s) know what you or they are doing so you do not do more harm than good.
With Bing, you basically just add whatever parameter you want to ignore so make sure that parameter or parameters do not crossover to other areas of your site that you would rather not have Bing ignore:
You can export all your inputted parameters as well.
The Crawl Summary section shows similar charts to other category charts inside Bing's Webmaster Tools on the landing page (6 month charting with interactive timeframe filtering).
You can check total number of pages crawled as well as pages with crawl errors off the landing page for this category (no exporting unfortunately) and dig into specific sections like:
Bing let's you set up custom crawl rates on a per site basis:
You may have situations where a custom crawl rate might make sense:
You can use the timeframes given to line up with your server's location to make sure you are hitting the hours correctly (base time on the chart is GMT time).
You can also allow for crawling of AJAX crawlable URLs if so you choose. They recently rolled this out and their help section is weak on this topic so it's unclear on exactly how they'll handle it (outside of #!) but it's an option nonetheless.
Bing's Crawl Details page gives you an updated overview of what's covered in the Crawl Summary. This feature doesn't require you to do any filtering to find issues, you can simply see if any of your pages have notable HTTP information, might be infected with Malware, and which ones are excluded by robots.txt.
If you have any pages pop up, just click on the corresponding link to the left and a list of exportable pages will pop up.
Another helpful, exportable report for site auditing purposes.
This is where you'd submit your sitemap to Bing. For XML sitemaps, double check your submission with the Sitemaps.Org protocol
For a site that's going to be a fairly static site (like this one) I'd pay more attention to proper site architecture rather than relying on a sitemap, I might even skip the sitemap unless I was using Wordpress where you could just have it auto-generate and update with new posts and such.
You can add, remove, and resubmit site maps as well as see the last date crawled, last date submitted, and URLs submitted.
Bing's recent update to their Webmaster Tools added a good amount of value to their reporting. Here are some additional resources to help you get acquainted to Bing.
While you are over at Bing, signing up for Webmaster Tools, feel free to use these Microsoft AdCenter coupons for your advertising account :)
Source: http://www.seobook.com/bings-webmaster-tools
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