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March 29, 2007

A Tale of Two Link Counts

The following doesn't tell the whole story, but I think it's an important chapter. The image at right shows a section of an inbound link report from Google Webmaster Tools.

This is the "external" link report -- that is, measuring links from outside domains. I've highlighted the inbound link counts for two deep URLs. On first glance, you might expect the first one (638) to be a dominant force in driving traffic, but you'd be wrong. Here's some deeper data on both URLs:

URL 1: 638 inbound links

• The 638 inbound links represent 14 total domains. (For the purposes of this analysis, I'm saying that foo.blogspot.com and bar.blogspot.com are distinct domains.)
  
• 615 of the links come from an ROS (run-of-site) blogroll link on one personal blog (blogspot.com).
  
• Of the remaining 23 links, 14 come from eight other blogs at sites like blogspot, livejournal, or blogsome.
  
• Of the remaining nine links, four come from social bookmarking-type sites, most of which "nofollow" their outbound links. (Remember that Google reports nofollowed links too.)
  
• The final five links come from a total of three separate blogs on unique domains.

When you break down the links, there's not a great deal of substance there. The page is a poor traffic driver, although it's premature to blame that entirely on the quality of the incoming links.

URL 2: 38 inbound links

• The 38 inbound links represent 33 unique domains.
  
• Only one domain in the list of 33 is easily identifiable as a blog host (livejournal.com)
  
• About half of the remaining 32 are low-quality and/or scrapers.
  
• The other half of the remaining 32 are decent sites whose foci match the point of the page on my client's site.

Week in, week out, URL 2 is the site's top entry page, outperforming even the home page. Again -- not necessarily because of the quality of the links. But this reinforces the point that quantity of inbound links cannot make up for lack of quality.

Posted by erik at 9:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Google Gives More Space to Wikipedia, Philosophically

Beseech Google as to the meaning of life, and thrice shall Wiki retort.

Posted by tom at 2:47 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

March 27, 2007

Did You Know WWW and Non-WWW are Two Different Sites?

If you're an SEO you certainly do lest you are malpracticing. And if you're a Cutlett, you've likely concurred here just a little while ago but more likely immediately.

Yet in spite of immediate pick-ups of everything Matt posts and that fact that this is a day later, Good God, I want to highlight his explanation of why, if only to be able to link to this portion of it when I am asked why and do a poor job explaining why:

Some people ask “Why don’t you just assume www.example.com and example.com are the same?� The answer is that they don’t have to be, and for some websites they are different. For example, http://phpicalendar.net/ is a different page than http://www.phpicalendar.net/. This happens more often than you might think; FindWhat has different www vs. non-www pages, for example.

Best and simplest it's ever been put.

Am I now a Cutlett, too?

Posted by john at 12:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 23, 2007

NBC to Give Internet Domination a Second Try

Search Engine Land has the story about NBC and News Corp. (aka Fox) and their joint plans to create "the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled with the most sought-after content from television and film" (their words, not mine).

In addition,

AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! will be the new site’s initial distribution partners. Their users, who represent 96 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet, will have unlimited access to the site’s vast library of content.

Notice anyone missing from the list of initial distribution partners?

At launch, full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef, plus hits from the studios' vast television libraries, will be available free, on an ad-supported basis.

You might think that NBC and Fox are crazy to go after YouTube, but then you realize that Jeff Foxworthy is the secret weapon. I'm no online video expert, but is the popularity of YouTube due to its ability to show things like copyrighted clips of the Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Isn't it more due to showing things like the guy who takes a picture of himself each day for 6 years, or would-be Norwegian beatboxers with too much time (and electronic equipment) on their hands?

At any rate, I'm glad NBC is giving it another shot. You might recall NBC's "other" venture into online dominance. In late 1999, the media giant launched NBCi, the, ahem, "Yahoo killer" of the day -- a portal/search engine that quickly shot out of the gate and in less than a year accrued exactly 0.0% of search engine market share.

One wonders whether the new NBC/Fox video site will offer all episodes of Emeril's short-lived NBC sitcom for free, or whether those will reside in the premium section. Regardless, those with a diet heavy in schadenfreude will be watching the launch closely.

Posted by erik at 4:46 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 22, 2007

Perfect for 2007 March Madness for Some of the Games!

I'll borrow from a good friend, Brian Fantana, to describe our Wiki NCAA Tournament experiment thus far.

They've done studies, you know. 44% of the time, it works every time.

Below are the results from our first round NCAA Tourney Predictions.

Prediction: Davidson wins big over Maryland! You heard it here first.
Outcome: Really Wrong

Prediction: All BC over Texas Tech!
Outcome Right

Prediction: Louisville dares to be slightly greater than Stanford in Google? These numbers might change.
Outcome: Right . . . but still . . . these numbers might change.

Prediction: Oral Roberts in an organic landslide over Washington State.
Outcome: Really Wrong

Prediction: Butler, in a close one over Old Dominion.
Outcome: Right

Prediction: Belmont has the tournament's best optimized title at the TLD. This is a sure thing over Georgetown.
Outcome: Wrong

Prediction: it's a blow out - Pennsylvania over Texas A&M.
Outcome: Wrong

Prediction: Close, but GW takes it over Vandy.
Outcome:Wrong

Prediction: Could it actually be a tie? Boy, I did not see that coming. Which article has more wiki links? Duke wins over VCU.
Outcome: Wrong! Round 1's best and/or only upset.

Prediction: The Ohio State University overcomes the tournament's worst looking serp to barely scrape by Central Connecticut.
Outcome:Right

Prediction: Marquette wins big over MSU.
Outcome: Wrong

Prediction: All UCLA over Weber State.
Outcome: Right

Prediction: Pitt over Wright State.
Outcome: Right

Prediction:BYU beats Xavier.
Outcome: Wrong

Prediction: North Carolina over Eastern Kentucky.
Outcome:Right

Prediction: Gonzaga beats IU.
Outcome: Wrong

Stay tuned for more NCAA Tourney Predictions from the Wagon, your home for the NCAA Tourney, if you really don't know where home is for the NCAA Tourney.

Posted by tom at 3:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 19, 2007

Google's Supplemental Index: Questions and Inconsistencies

What I want to discuss in this post is Google's unreliable method of showing which pages are and are not in the Supplemental index.

What I don't want to get into with this post, beyond a very superficial level:

• Whether pages being in the Supplemental index is bad (or merely not good)
  
• How pages end up in the Supplemental index

Let's just say that all things being equal, I'd rather have 10,000 pages in Google's main index as opposed to its Supplemental index.

Using the method (that is fairly commonly accepted, in my opinion) of determining which pages from a site are in Google's Supplemental index (site:yoursite.com *** -view -- first read at SEOBook -- see References), I decided to pick a random URL -- in this case, our blog's article archives in the "Crawling and Indexing" category:

So clearly -- at least according to Google (who should be the authority) -- this page does sit in Google's Supplemental index. Right?

But let's refine the query to be a mere listing of the site contents -- site:yourdomain.com. To find the URL I discussed before, I needed to scroll to page 37 of the results:

This time, it doesn't show the "Supplemental" label. But is this a contradiction? Maybe in a straight-up site: query, the Supplemental label doesn't appear.

No, that's not it either, because if you click over to one more page of results -- page 38 in this case -- Supplemental results DO start to show up with the Supplemental label. Here (some on page 38, and all on page 39 and beyond), most of our pages are labeled as Supplemental:

So there's an irrefutable contradiction. Some Google results call this page Supplemental, and some don't. Why is that? Is it a data-center thing? Have some machines in the server farm not yet received the proper memo?

But let's cut to performance. For the query [crawling and indexing], the page ranks #1 at Google (even with no account sign-in). It doesn't bring a ton of traffic, but it does bring some:

So some would say, "There's your answer. It doesn't matter, because it shows up in SERPs and brings traffic. Quit overthinking it."

That's true -- IF the page is truly a Supplemental page. But because we have mixed signals, it's not so clear. Is this a Supplemental page that performs well despite its Supplemental status, or a Main index page that performs well and happens to be sometimes mislabeled as "Supplemental"? That's an important question I can't answer right now.

To follow up this post, I'll try to hit another angle: When a URL that is consistently labeled as Supplemental does not show up in search results, despite the fact that it's the most relevant post for that query.

Resources, Notes:

• Barry Schwartz first (to my knowledge) cracks the issue with this post last September. The technique worked briefly and sporadically.
  
• Adam Lasnik clarifies some Supplemental concepts at Google Webmaster Help (Google Groups).
  
• SE Roundtable brings up more questions.
  
• Aaron Wall brings it up again, with the added refinement of subtracting a nonsense string, which is more or less its current form.
  
• In pre-emptive response to one of my favorite audience niches (the beside-the-point nitpickers), I have adapted our robots.txt file in response to the third screen shot above. It now excludes search results and and stray comment previews.

Posted by erik at 3:20 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 16, 2007

Google Webmaster Tools Beefs Up Anchor Text Report

As if you needed another reason to verify your site within Google Webmaster Tools, that specific team announced early this morning that they've improved the report that shows incoming anchor phrases that point to your site. Get to the report in the Webmaster Tools area in the Statistics tab, then by clicking Page analysis:

Previously, the report showed only individual words that made up anchor text phrases. Now, the reports shows up to 100 specific phrases themselves, which is significantly more helpful:

Data like this ranges from interesting to very helpful. It offers great insight to the behavior of people who link to you, since many people probably think incoming anchor text focuses mainly on company or site names. In addition, it might lend some guidance about some strange referring keywords you've seen in your analytics reports - as well as why you might not be seeing some specific referring phrases that you want.

Posted by erik at 9:55 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 15, 2007

2007 NCAA March Madness Decided by Wiki

As seen on ESPN 8, The "OCHO"

Last year, the Wagon based its NCAA basketball picks purely on Link Building. Could we get any more arbitrary? The answer is yes. As a warm up for the 2008 Election and its impending battle on the wiki field, we will base this year's NCAA picks on who has the biggest wiki.

The below predictions are based entirely on whose wiki article performs best at Google for its school's title.

(13)Davidson College Wiki Article is #6
(4)The University of Maryland Wiki Article is #39
Prediction: Davidson wins big! You heard it here first.

(10)Texas Tech University Wiki Article is #46
(7)Boston College Wiki Article is #5
Prediction: All BC!

(11)Stanford University Wiki Article is #9
(6)University of Louisville Wiki Article is #6
Prediction: Louisville dares to be slightly greater than Stanford in Google? These numbers might change.

(14)Oral Roberts University Wiki Article is #4
(3)Washington State University Wiki Article is #37
Prediction: Oral Roberts in an organic landslide.

(12)Old Dominion University Wiki Article is #16
(5)Butler University Wiki Article is #7
Prediction: Butler, in a close one.

(15)Belmont University Wiki Article is #6
(2)Georgetown University Wiki Article is #8
Prediction: Others will call it an upset, but Belmont has the tournament's best optimized title at the TLD. This is a sure thing.

(14)University of Pennsylvania Wiki Article is #7
(3)Texas A&M University Wiki Article is #71
Prediction: If we chose the winner by most subdomains, it would be Aggies. Instead, it's a blow out.

(11)The George Washington University Wiki Article is #6
(6)Vanderbilt University Wiki Article is #14
Prediction: Close, but GW takes it.

(11)Virginia Commonwealth University Wiki Article is #10
(6)Duke University Wiki Article is #10
Prediction: Could it actually be a tie? Boy, I did not see that coming. Which article has more wiki links? Duke wins.

(16)Central Connecticut State University Wiki Article is #31
(1)The Ohio State University Wiki Article is #30
Prediction: The Ohio State University overcomes the tournament's worst looking serp to barely scrape by the other Blue Devils. I would change that meta tag before the next round.

(9)Michigan State University Wiki Article is #71
(8)Marquette University Wiki Article is #6
Prediction: Marquette wins big.

(15)Weber State University Wiki Article is #46
(2)UCLA Wiki Article is #8
Prediction: All UCLA

(14)Wright State University Wiki Article is #20
(3)University of Pittsburgh Wiki Article is #14
Prediction: Pitt.

(9)Xavier University - Cincinnati, Ohio Wiki Article is #10
(8)Brigham Young University Wiki Article is #10
Prediction: Another tie? The BYU article has more wiki links. BYU wins.

(16)Eastern Kentucky University Wiki Article is #56
(1)The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Wiki Article is #53
Prediction: North Carolina in a really sloppy game.

(10)Gonzaga University Wiki Article is #7
(7)Indiana University Wiki Article is #21
Prediction: Gonzaga wins, even with the worst #2 result in the tournament. Come on Bulldogs, you have to 301 http://www.gonzaga.edu/default.htm .

Posted by tom at 9:31 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Goes Primetime

It's one of the most mythical numbers in all of SEM, rarely published, seldom spoken; yet most industry insiders nod and agree, even if furtively, that the organic search share of total search clicks, meaning the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, is somewhere in the 70% - 85% region.

I was quite stunned, then, when by happenstance I came across this line in Macworld, of all places:

Site owners are eager to get their hands on the 75 percent of free Google traffic that is not affected by AdSense and AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click programs.

Still within that magical, mythical margin. Still unattributed. Damn nice to see as a given in a non-industry mag.

Posted by john at 7:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 12, 2007

Consumer Privacy Can Be SOOOOOO Annoying!

Perhaps it's simply a matter of having worked so long in a marketing niche that outputs only upon user-initiated input -- and questions seeking answers at that -- individuated down even to the syllable level, transmitted from the mind to the fingertips, each single atomic instance of the exchange a mutual handshake, rather than a phone-ringing, paper-flinging, desktop-hijacking raid.

Perhaps not. Perhaps I value privacy at some hermit-level degree and just haven't left my cave enough to yet realize it. But I find some of the assumptions inherent in this whining blurb about the fictional consumer "Katy" from Do-Not-Mail Movement Gains Traction in State Legislatures to be a particularly offensive note in the bittersweet AdAge symphony of interruption marketing rationalization:

Having clearly established her ability to bad-mouth your brand on her blog, TiVo your TV commercials, stop your phone calls and filter out your pop-ups, now-with the help of the government-she's trying to stop you getting access to her mailbox.

Is this blistering self-parody or have they finally jumped the shark into totalitarianism?

Consumer rights? Let them eat cake!

Posted by john at 9:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 9, 2007

Therapy Products Search Gets Therapy From Google...Finally

Back in June, I uncovered a rather odd search results page for the keyword phrase "therapy products" in Google that pulled up a "see results for Yahoo!" mid-page. Links to Tom and Erik's previous posts about this subject can be found here.

Well, word spread about this lil' bug in Google and was brought to the attention of Matt Cutts who said that he would pass it along.

After months of seeing this annoying SERP, it has finally cleaned itself of any Yahoo! reference! Ahhhh...what a relief!

One bug down, thousands to go!!!

Happy Friday Y'all!!!

Posted by sean at 3:21 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Apple Falls Far from the Search Tree

About a month ago, I did a quick review of Midomi, the audio search engine that accepts singing or humming as a search query.

The results were good. I hummed a tune, and Midomi recognized it immediately. It was "Love is Blue."

So here's the thing: When Midomi picked the tune, it gave me the option of purchasing Al Martino's version for 99 cents. But what if Al Martino's version wasn't the one I wanted?

You can probably guess the next thing I did. I booted up iTunes and punched in [love is blue], which turned up 150 results - no fewer than 45 of which had the exact title I was looking for:

Listening to a few clips, it was obvious that Al Martino's version was not the one I wanted. Instead, I wanted the version from Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, and iTunes, not Midomi, promptly got my $.99.

While it's true that iTunes got my money, it had to work for it. I booted up the iTunes music store because I knew that querying any search engine for [love is blue] would not bring up any iTunes search results. And even it if had, I'd have to jump-start the ten-ton beast to buy it anyway. (Let's be honest. It has some nice features, but running iTunes simply to buy and play your music files is like using a Buick Roadmaster to get from the kitchen to the living room.)

Right now, iTunes (the data warehouse/ecommerce portion - not the front-end music player) is a little bit like AOL was in 1994 - an isolated island of content, cut off from the rest of the world with proprietary technology and firewalls. And for the good of humanity, you really want to smack people who constantly rave about how good it is.

Still, there's been a meager attempt to have the iTunes Store inventory live on the web. And I mean meager. Apple has set up a sort of web-based parallel universe to tie its iTunes database to the web. Let's say it falls short of its potential.

While you won't find it simply for [grease soundtrack], you can find these Apple URLs painfully limping along the HTTP turnpike if you filter your searches by site, such as [grease soundtrack site:apple.com]:

A couple tiny problems with that approach:

• The pages currently rest on the soft, red velour divan of the Supplemental index
• Nobody filters queries by site anyway
• The on-page widget fails at its raison d'etre - it's an iTunes detector that cannot detect iTunes:

(At least it doesn't work with Firefox. The Apple page had better luck sniffing iTunes when I ran it through IE. But that still doesn't change the fact that the iTunes library is almost totally invisible in search engines.)

Here's the bottom line. Apple engineers, if you're reading, hit "pause" on your Nano and read the rest intently:

Steve Jobs thinks only 3% of the songs on the average iPod come from iTunes. Understandably, he wants more. Joe Wikert believes that Jobs wants to increase his market share by abolishing DRM. He might be right, but come on, Steve - there's a much easier way:

Start showing up at the top when people search for [grease soundtrack]. Or [foreigner 4]. Or [green day american idiot]. Or [pink floyd meddle]. Get real and understand that DRM isn't your biggest problem. Neither is Sony, BMG, Warner, or EMI. (Maybe you've been fighting Microsoft so long you have some David/Goliath issues, but you need to get over them.) Your biggest problem - and ironically, the easiest to overcome - is Amazon.

Here's what you need to do:

• Port your entire iTunes database - songs, artists, reviews, everything - to the web with a REAL crawlable architecture. And while you're at it, publish the lyrics too.
• Get in bed with the browsers. Not your iTunes pseudo-browser evangelists. Real browsers. IE and FF.
• Get those browsers to help you build an extension, plugin, widget - whatever you want to call it - just like Flash or Quicktime. But this plugin serves as a bridge between your data store and the web. This plugin makes it possible to purchase songs from the iTunes database without requiring iTunes to run. If you're on the same machine as your music library, it will download songs also. If you're not on the same machine as your library, the song will download to that machine the next time you start iTunes on that machine. Make sure this plugin works.
• Give each track a REAL URL devoted to that track only. Give it content - not just cover art and an iTunes sniffer.
• Build that content by ensuring that every comment and review posted on iTunes gets written onto the web-based page too.
• Leverage the existing enthusiast base by getting links from sites that already rank for band names, music genres, and lyrical content. You can drive links to every song, tv show, movie, and podcast in your catalog by creating an affiliate program similar to Amazon Associates, which pays up to 10% commissions. (By the way, this will help you sell a few billion songs in the process.)
• Create and actively promote an API that lets other sites feature your 30-second music clips. (This will help you sell a few million more.)
• Have iTunes spit out indexable URLs on demand (those same URLs you created in bullet 4) so bloggers and journalists can link to them easily.

Apple's iTunes is the envy of the music database world. It has more content and more popularity than just about anyone. When Apple realizes that these two ingredients can spell total search domination, the company will have a real issue on its hands - where to keep all that money.

Posted by erik at 2:38 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

March 7, 2007

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name

Here and there The Wagon has been known to get political in its analysis, often to illustrate pols know not what they do on the internet. Today we have a new honey of a rankings scandal courtesy of techPresident:

In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans.

Now first, lest the uninitiated, casual SEO observer not fully grasp the above search incompetence, it is quite difficult for a major brand not to rank first for its own brand name. You almost have to be doing something wrong at the site level, and most competent SEOs will be able to discover the reason for the glitch and remedy the error fairly quickly. The higher the brand recognition the greater the ease, if for no other reason than Google understands that a pure brand search will almost always signal an intent to find the brand site itself. Google's product is relevancy, as we like to say here.

Is there a more recognized brand on the techPresident list than America's Mayor, [Rudy Giuliani]? Yet at second he languishes, behind the Wikipedia entry replete with detailed analysis of the controversies not broached on the site he would like for you to rather visit instead.

The difference between these first and second positions? We know from the massive AOL search data leak that on that engine, at least, about half of all searchers click on #1 and south of 15% on #2, at least for the 20 million searches performed by 658,000 subscribers in that data sample.

If you are losing half of all searches on your brand that should be visiting your site uncontested, you should try and do something about it. Let's keep an eye on Rudy and see if he does.

Posted by john at 5:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 2, 2007

Matt Cutts Concurrence Committee Part Deux

A year after our inaugural ode to Matt Cutts sycophantism, the Concurrence Committee continues to raise the bar to unimaginable heights of fawning flattery. From the mouth of Mr. Cutts today comes the manna of eight (8) words brilliantly crafted into an iambic pentameter gift to the Committee:

I want to play some roller hockey today.

For the poetic purists among us this would actually have to be read as follows to achieve that vaunted meter, though:

i WANT to PLAY some ROL ler HOCKEY to DAY

We're betting the Committee will concur with such a reading.

To be sure, the generous giftiness of the souring gift of phrase did not go unnoticed by the Committee. To date, the eight (8) word throwaway line, albeit beautiful, has received 39 comments!

Our favorite by far:

Hi Matt, as a frequent reader, I was wondering if you could help me out. I know you’re insanely busy, but could you shoot me an email?

Suggested Refrain:

All glory, laud, and honor,
to thee, Redeemer, King,
to whom the lips of children
made sweet hosannas ring.

Posted by john at 3:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack