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August 30, 2006

Del.icio.us Leaves a Bad Taste

If this has been covered already, let me know. If so, I'll graciously provide attribution.

"Social tagging," the process of users sharing bookmarks and feedback about specific sites and pages, is near the top of the list of cornfields on which SEOs are trying to erect slick new subdivisions.

As social media sites have gained popularity, many SEOs have lamented the fact that Del.icio.us uses the robots meta tags nofollow, noindex, and noarchive as a way to avoid spam. If links don't pass popularity, then they won't be abused, so the theory goes. (Don't confuse this nofollow with link attribute nofollow.)

This has left many people wondering why a query for [site:del.icio.us] shows about a million and a half pages indexed, and why the site ranks for queries like [seo] and [popular]. Some people believe it's due to incoming linkage and Google's tendency to show URLs in results even though Google has been told not to index them.

For better or worse, the truth is much simpler. Google was never told to not index Del.icio.us pages. YOU were told that GOOGLE was told not to index pages. But Google? They never got the message, because Del.icio.us has been using user-agent delivery (yes, cloaking) to tell you one thing, and engines another.

Following is the famous meta tag from the Del.icio.us "SEO" tag page - the meta tag that makes everyone think the page won't be crawled:

But if you set your user-agent to Googlebot, here's what you see:

Where did those highlights go? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.

The robots.txt file for the site is no different. Here's the file for standard user-agents:

I left some extra whitespace in the screen shot to show that nothing follows the code lines.

User-agents Googlebot and Slurp each get additional lines in their versions of robots.txt. Following is what Google sees:

What annoys me about this process is not that Del.icio.us is trying to put one over on Google or Yahoo. (The latter would be especially odd, given that Yahoo owns Del.icio.us), but that Del.icio.us is trying to put one over on YOU. Certainly Google and Yahoo know what's going on. Millions of pages don't magically appear when valid noindex tags are in place. Del.icio.us wants to be a popular destination, wants its search engine rankings, but it doesn't want all the riff-raff that popularity brings. Old-school cloaking that a 10-year-old could detect isn't a way to achieve that.

Posted by erik at 04:52 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 29, 2006

Keywords In URLs - Not Just For Search Engines

Is it just me, or are you also paying more attention to the URL listed in search engine result pages?

Let's say you're searching for a new memory stick for your child's PSP. The top two results at Yahoo have equally compelling listings, however, the URLs displayed are:

www.seospeedwagon.com/psp_memory_stick.htm

and

www.seospeedwagon.com/store/Other_W0QQsacatZ21189QQsocmdZListingItemList

Which might you be more persuaded to click on?

Boy, that first one may be just what I'm looking for eh?

Apparently the first site refers to a PSP memory stick as "psp_memory_stick" whlie the second site calls it a "Other_W0QQsacatZ21189QQsocmdZListingItemList".

I think this is a good example of how URLs displayed in search engine results pages are becoming more and more valuable as CONTENT that may affect the clickability of the entire listing.

But what about you? How are the search engines displaying your URLs? How about the URLs of your competitors? Do they qualify as keyword-relevant or as keyword-jibberish?

I'm a firm believer in keyword-enhanced, logical URL structure because:

A. There is some (no one knows exactly how much) benefit in search engine performance when keywords are included in the names of your domain and/or pages.

B. From a usability (and common sense) aspect, a URL that displays my searched keyword or similar tells me a click will likely lead me where I want to go.

Posted by doug at 03:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 25, 2006

Conversions and Query Length - The Sequel

I was intrigued by a post a few weeks ago by my esteemed colleague Erik regarding Conversions and Query Length. (Disclaimer #1- yes, that is my comment at the bottom, and yes I did leave a comment at my own companies blog BUT it is there because I believe strongly in the correlation between metrics and decision making.)

The focus of this post is along a similar thread but it is related specifically Pay Per Click (PPC) and search Query Length. I did a study for a client of mine recently with the goal of finding what key phrases were converting the best, not just attracting the most clicks.

(Disclaimer #2- the names & labels etc have been changed to respect confidentiality, but the numbers are real.)

In this example our client Kramerica is selling their famous Muffin Tops. We have thousands of key phrases at our disposal but we want to know which terms to build on. Upon doing our research we get the following data:

This graph tells us that by far our best converting key phrases are either two or three words in length. Notice the dramatic drop off with longer key phrases, one’s that traditionally we would tend to view as ‘more qualified searchers’.

The next thing we notice from our research is how many key phrases we have that are giving us the conversions listed above:

Wow! From this we can see that out of 35 key phrases providing conversions 5 are dominating the conversion ratio’s (good fodder for a post about the 80/20 rule). Can you guess how many words are in each of the 5 key phrases that are providing all of the results. (If you need help refer to the first graph)

Finally we want to look and see if there are any trends in the actual words themselves that make up the key phrases.

This is a bit more challenging to the eye but let me cut to the chase. This chart is telling us that our ‘Top Converters’ also specifically begin with the word ‘Free’. Notice how poorly the phrases do that just contain the word ‘Free’.

So, all of our research and data crunching tells us the following:

1) We should expand on key phrases that contain two or three words.
2) We should begin them with the word ‘Free’

Now this is just a portion of the campaign strategy, but I’d say it’s a good place to start.

Okay, cool charts you say, but what is my point? My point is that metrics are important. Keyword discovery tools are great, Google Zeitgeist is great, Technorati is great, but the best data lies in your own campaigns. It may sound redundant but make sure you or your campaign manager looks at the wealth of data you already have compiled.

Posted by brent at 11:59 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 24, 2006

Google is Not Relevant, Relatively Speaking

I doubt there could be more of a connection between the words Google and Relevance. Google talks constantly about relevance, and we respond by talking more about Google’s relevance. It is their aim to deliver the most relevant results, and they do it for the most part.

We have almost too many examples of Google products and features that are so much better than anything the competition offers. That being said, it is not too difficult to come up with a product or feature that hasn’t exactly come to Google fruition just yet. The one that always leaves me scratching my head is the related: search operator.

Isn’t there some type of connection between the words relevant and related? If a search engine prides itself on relevance, shouldn’t its related: query provide relevant results? Couldn’t Google use its “sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search� to provide better related: query results. This should be one of their strongest queries, yet it is such a glaring weakness. Some examples follow this rant.

Are any sites related to Google? Apparently, just other Google sites.

Are any sites related to Yahoo? Apparently, just other Yahoo sites.

Are any sites related to MSN? I guess not.

Posted by tom at 02:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

When User Behavior Strays from Query Volume

It's important but often overlooked: User behavior is rarely as steady and predictable as keyword research might lead us to believe. Eye-tracking studies, statistics about SERP clicks ("the first result gets X% of all clicks"), etc. are helpful if you understand that they're aggregates and not absolutes.

If you rank in the top slot for two phrases, and one of them is three times more searched-for than the other, you might assume that, all things being equal, the more popular term will deliver three times the traffic.

That's rarely the case, especially when those two queries straddle the border between branded and non-branded.

Following are some examples that we've noticed in multiple industries, for multiple clients. The companies and queries are fictitious; it's the types of queries, however, that matter - [product type] vs. [brand + product type]. The raw numbers - queries per day and monthly traffic - are irrelevant. Instead, it's the ratios we're watching.

Note that in the first example, [conflators] is searched for about 4.5x as often as [merrick conflators] (despite the fact that in the conflator world, Merrick is tops). At Google, Merrick ranks #1 for both terms. Yet [merrick conflators] delivers about twice the traffic of [conflators]:

In our second example, Simonaire is well known in the flot scram industry, but probably not as well known as Merrick is in the conflator biz. Still, Simonaire ranks #1 for both [simonaire flot scrams] as well as [flot scrams]. The non-branded term has about 30 times the query volume, but again, delivers only about half the traffic of the branded term.

Note: The query volume figures were pulled from Keyword Discovery. Wordtracker data varies slightly but is similar.

The conclusions of this non-scientific study aren't so easily drawn, but here are some observations and speculations:

• The point of this analysis is not to dissuade brands from going after single-word product queries. They should, however, realize that the percentage of clicks they receive from a top slot might not be what they expect.
• These results imply that people searching for [conflators] are not very far along the information cycle yet and might actually want to avoid a specific brand at this stage in their research, opting instead for a comparison site, wiki-style information site, consumer-focused FAQ site, etc.
• It's tempting to tweak titles, descriptions, and content to try to appear more cross-brand informational and capture more of the [conflators] traffic. But I don't recommend doing it at the expense of your branded traffic, because click for click, I believe a branded click is more valuable than a non-branded click.
• The traffic from the product-only searches sticks around 50-60% of the duration of the branded visitors, and they view about 75% as many pages in a visit. So we're gaining mind share a few at a time, and we certainly don't mind that their first look at the industry comes from our clients.

Posted by erik at 04:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 21, 2006

More Link Exchange Madness?

If I am missing something here, please call foul.

But if you're trying to get bloggers to join your ad network by offering front page blogroll links to their blogs from your outrageously popular and influential domain, should you then publicize it to the point that an algorthm might get wise to the pay-for-link placements? Wouldn't you at once be undoing what you are trying to do?

I have a hard time interpretting Jeff Burkett, head of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive's sales development team, any other way:

"Some bloggers are open to putting advertising on their site, so why not strike deals with them and help them do that," he wrote last week on his own blog, "Media Landscaping." "The revenue gets shared (in the bloggers favor of course) and we throw in one additional component...A link to their blog on the homepage of washingtonpost.com."

Unless Jeff is planing on throwing in the free condoms, he might be wise to rethink his pitch lest he sully the Washington Post link juice. From the mountainview top at Google, via Matt Cutts himself:

Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

Scroll all the way down to the bottom and have a gander. At least the folly is honest.

UPDATE: No rel="nofollow� as of 9pm EST this evening...

UPDATE II: Ominpresent Google is on the scene, and they are trotting out a javascript link blinding precept surprising quite a few in the forums...

Posted by john at 09:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 18, 2006

Motion Control At Yahoo! Results

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Yahoo! providing "Also Try" suggestions to the phrase "Motion Control". Back then, Yahoo! felt that I should "Also Try" searching for "Motion Control Shoes" & "Motion Control Running Shoes". What was interesting was that not a single top 30 position had anything to do with running shoes at all in both organic & PPC search results.

It comes to pass today that Yahoo! is now serving up a suggestion for "motion control systems" & "motion control shoes" as "Also Try" options for the phrase "motion control". What happened since two weeks ago that caused Yahoo! to have a change of heart on their also try suggestions? Not sure, but perhaps they have altered their search phrase suggestions to be more in-line with their organic & PPC search results.

It’s nice to see Yahoo! making little tweaks like this to be more focused on relevancy-type keyword phrase suggestions and ultimately creating a better end-user environment for their searchers.

Posted by sean at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 17, 2006

Google Says Index This!

Recently, the Wagon has noticed a new option at play over at Google Sitemaps. Next time you're in the area, click on Preferred Domain.

Google is giving you the opportunity to choose whether you would like your urls listed with or without the www (http://www.yoursite.com or http://yoursite.com). Google follows this opportunity with the following note:

Once you specify your preference here, it may take some time for changes to be reflected in our index. While Google doesn't guarantee that we'll show your URLs in the form that you prefer, we will use your choice as a suggestion to improve our indexing.

We think this is important for a few simple reasons. Google is trying to improve its index of your site, and they are allowing you to help them. Further, Google is acknowledging that the www vs. non-www indexation issue is causing duplicate pages to appear in its index. And finally, and most importantly, Google is telling us that sites can improve their indexation by clearing up the www. vs. non-www issue.

Click over there to learn how to 301 redirect non-www pages to their www equivalent, or vice versa.

Posted by tom at 04:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 11, 2006

When oh When is Yahoo Search Marketing going to be Upgraded?

This short and not so sweet post is the direct result of countless hours spent uploading hundreds of new entries BY HAND so any comments should be taken with a grain of salt

Place: Not somewhere exotic
Time: 11:30pm
My job should I choose to accept it, the uploading of over 800 key phrase listings and their respective categories.

My first question is what’s the fastest way to get these uploaded? Answer: Bulk upload. Now I just need to find it.

Time: 12:30am
I’ve just spent an hour trying to find the bulk upload tool for YSM and have not had any luck. The best thing I could find is a blog posting talking about it. (Seems to be a nice blog btw). Other than that, I’ve searched my own records and found an old template but Yahoo’s site has no instructions on how to send it in to the right department. I suppose I could wait until morning but I need this done now. I’ll keep trying……

Time: 1:00am
I’ve realized that there is no other way to get them in right away other than putting them in by hand. One by one…….Where’s the coffee…….

Time: 3:00am
Almost done. I’ve actually had to place pillows under my arms to reduce my “copy and paste because Yahoo is so far behind the times� fatigue. I wonder if Jackie Chiles would take my case…….

Time: 4:00am
Finally finished. At this point I might as well stay up. Maybe there’s a re-run of Real Genius on.

Time: 4:15am
No re-run on, must get sleep, rant about Yahoo later………

Time: Later
Well, well, well, some time has passed and I’m not so ticked off anymore. But I am still pretty ticked off. I could start any number of places but it all ends in the same place so I’ll just mention the ending and spare you anymore details of my life. The end is simple, where is the promised upgrade? I keep hearing about it. I keep seeing sneak previews of it. But the latest scuttlebutt that I hear is that it isn’t coming out until the 4th quarter of this year (that means October at the earliest). All I can say is this. When I promise a clients something, they expect it and hold be accountable for it. I’d like to let Yahoo know the same thing. You’ve promised it, You’ve set the date, You’ve kept bugging me with your representatives phone calls to go over the ‘exciting new details’, You’ve emailed me about……….SO WHERE IS IT? Please, just deliver on your promise, it will make the world a better place.

Posted by brent at 11:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

Yahoo Redirects Site: Queries to YSE

Sometime in the last 10 hours or so, Yahoo started redirecting users (this user, at least) from search.yahoo.com to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com when used on conjunction with a site: query at the search box:

One possible reason for this is that as I mentioned yesterday, Yahoo has really been beefing up its Site Explorer area, and it's the ideal place to run such queries.

Another reason might be to help balance the server load, although I doubt that site: queries are a serious threat to the Yahoo server farm.

In a somewhat related move, Yahoo seems to have phased out the sitedomain: command - both from a regular search box and from YSE. Is this new? I typically use site: at Yahoo, so this could have happened some time ago.

UPDATE: It looks like others (including SEW) noticed this in testing a few weeks ago. It does appear, however, that today marks more widespread implementation, as the Yahoo Search Blog has just posted a description of what sorts of queries do and do not get redirected.

Posted by erik at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 09, 2006

SEO Quick Hits: NYT Mocks AOL, Inaccessibility Turns 10

Everyone's either at SES this week or too busy to attend (I fall into the latter camp), so I wanted to give you a fast, dim sum-style post today. If the first bite doesn't taste good, just move on to the next plate.

NYT + AOL = FUBAR
Gotta love the New York Times. While you might have heard about the fiasco involving AOL releasing the search queries of over 600,000 "anonymous" searchers, here's the kicker: In less than a day, the Times looked at the search queries of one particular searcher and identified her.

Perhaps next, the Wall St. Journal will both identify another user and decry the anti-privacy implications of identifying users.

(thanks to WMW and Battelle)

Flash Turns 10

In a Wired article today, the tenth anniversary of the release of Flash, Michael Calore interviews Robert Tatsumi, one of the program's two inventors. Personally, I love Flash, in sort of the same way that exterminators love termites: job security.

Yahoo Expands Site Explorer

I've said again and again how much I love YSE. Yesterday, the team announced upgrades to the service, including the ability to "claim" your site to find additional information, upload sitemap feeds, and see when those feeds were last accessed. It's a lot like Google's new "Webmaster Central" area (formerly known simply as Google Sitemaps), which is a nice indication that Yahoo is equally committed to good webmaster relations. And it's pretty fast too; it authenticated me instantly and fetched my sitemap feed in under an hour.

I'll keep an eye on its reporting and see if there's any effect on indexing and let you know anything I find.

Posted by erik at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 08, 2006

The Google Portal?

Has anyone seen the the Google homepage today? It certainly looks like the beginning of a portal for ol' Google. I'm hoping this is just another one of Google's "tests" and isn't a permanent thing for their home page. Even while not signed in, I'm being redirected to Google's "personalized" home page:

For some time now, Google has been slowly becoming what many have feared...a portal that will inevitably allow anyone to do anything for their day-to-day needs and wants from a single source. Today's new home page indicates a possible swing to the portal-like platform.

Yahoo! has and continues to have success in the portal market, but does Google have what it takes and does Google have enough experience and savvy to compete in the portal industry? I have a feeling the answer is yes.

The jury is still out on the home page interface. At least the search results pages haven’t changed...yet.

Posted by sean at 08:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 04, 2006

Motion Control At Yahoo! = Running Shoes?

I Don't get it. I went to Yahoo! to check on a position for a client involved in Motion Control . What did I find you ask? Yahoo! thinks I should also try looking for Motion Control Running Shoes? Are you kidding me? The entire first page of results (PPC included) doesn't have one search engine result dealing with running shoes in any way, shape or form. As a matter of fact, the entire first 3 SERPs have no indication of dealing with shoes or running shoes at all.

The question is; why does Yahoo! think an end-user that types in "motion control" is more than likely to be actually looking for "motion control shoes" or "motion control running shoes"? Well, not sure what the answer to this question is other than motion control running shoes is pretty popular these days?

Heres a solution for Yahoo! and perhaps other search engines as well- Before you recommend long-tail keyword phrases to semi-broad keyword phrases, check your own top 30 positions in both Organic search and PPC search results prior to giving "Also Try:" suggestions. The organic search results and PPC ads will say a lot in terms of relative keyword phrase extensions that would truly be relevant for end-users to also try searching with at your engine. It makes perfectly good sense to me.

Thoughts, anyone?

Posted by sean at 09:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 02, 2006

More SEO Tips for Domain Management

If you work in online marketing for a medium to large company - and you joined the company sometime after, say, 1996, here's a quick quiz: Do you know how many domains your company owns? If you're directly involved in your company's current domain strategy sessions, you might, but my guess is that you don't.

Many of our client contacts have no idea how many domains their companies own, and what's worse, frequent inquiries across their organization often lead nowhere. If you fit the profile of someone who should know more about your company's domains but doesn't, it certainly doesn't mean you're doing your job poorly. Keep in mind that securing domains for business purposes (such as copyright protection and basic phonetic variance) predates search engine optimization - not to mention search engines - by several years. The web dev mercenaries who built your site and went on a dot-com shopping spree in 1994 are long gone, and bills from the registrar come sporadically, representing a gradual increase in domain ownership.

If you're curious about whether you have multiple domains diluting your search engine presense, a fast diagnostic is to search for a specific string of text that should appear only on your site. Copy about 7-10 consecutive words from a page on your site, then search for that exact string - in quotation marks - at various engines. Traditionally, this has been a great way to find sites that steal your content. But it's also equally effective at detecting your crimes against yourself - and your SE visibility potential.

Despite a glamorous Hollywood visual metaphor, Googlebot and duplicate sites aren't a good mix.

I talked with a business owner this week who had a decent idea how many domains he owned, but he had no idea that having each one mirror his "main" site was a bad idea. Google had partially indexed about nine different domains. Yahoo knows about two. MSN knows about one. All engines show at least two variations of canonical problems, including home page (index.asp vs. root) and subdomain (www vs. non-www) duplicate indexing. This is always one of the very first things we look for when we're starting a comprehensive site evaluation, and very, very few companies have all their domains wrangled correctly, down to the last 301. So the lessons bear repreating: Give the engines what they want, but give it to them only once, or else you risk looking suspicious - even if you're old-school innocent.

(Note: Last December, I touched on a few points of search engine-friendly domain management, including wildcard subdomains and relative vs. absolute links in a nav scheme.)

Posted by erik at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Microsoft adCenter Goodwill Tour

Kudos are due when kudos are earned so here's just a quick update on my previous post about Xenophobia at MSN.

It seems that MS adCenter is now adding, among other things, support for Firefox!

Make sure you let them know how pleased you are by adding to their comment list and hopefully we can get more changes/updates in the future.

Cheers!

Posted by brent at 03:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 01, 2006

NOODP: Should Google Have Kept Greasing Wheezer?

One of my favorite Little Rascals episodes is called Bear Shooters where Spud can’t join the gang on their hunting trip because he has to stay home and grease his little brother Wheezer. It’s rumored that the band Weezer took it’s name from this classic episode.

"I can't come out," whines Spud. "I've got to stay home and grease Wheezer!"

It all works out for Spud in the end. But, I’m wondering if Google should have stayed inside and greased Wheezer a while longer before adding support for the NOODP tag. Did we celebrate prematurely?

We’ve read several site owner reports that allege their rankings have dropped significantly since implementing the tag on their sites. A few of these also report that they removed the tag and their placements returned to their former positions.

The only Intrapromote client so far that has implemented the tag has also experienced a drop in placement for their most important and competitive search phrase at Google. About the same time, they’ve also seen a major drop in the number of pages indexed by Google.

Coincidence?

Poor Wheezer was better off with the croup?

Hmmmmm . . . . . . . . . .

Our client plans to yank the NOODP tag to see if normalcy resumes. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know what happens.

Posted by doug at 05:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack