Tag: links

SEO Factories Lose Their Edge

Even back in 2005, Stoney deGeyter had the following thoughts on Finding the Perfect SEO Firm:

SEO companies come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your solo SEOs that either

  1. do everything themselves and/or
  2. sub-contract out many aspects of each campaign while maintaining a tight control on the quality and results of the project.

Then you have your big SEO firms that employ 20+ employees that handle various aspects of your account. These firms can often turn into SEO factories and can lack the ability to treat each client individually, because everything is done in bulk.

Since then, Google has certainly made it even more difficult for that ‘bulk’ approach. In this guest post, Christine Adams gives a current view on how those SEO factories are making out.

Introduction

In the last five years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become better known among mainstream professionals across multiple industries. In its infancy, SEO was not widely understood, which allowed for dubious companies to take advantage of website owners who were flush with cash and desperate to increase traffic. Today, many more people who own websites are at least familiar with search engines like Google. They have a basic understanding that adding meta tags alone will not provide the rankings and traffic that a comprehensive SEO campaign can provide and are savvy enough to avoid scammers.

SEO service providers who offered legitimate services and could show results began to see real profits. In recent years, Fortune 500 companies like Reuters-Thompson / Findlaw and LexisNexis have launched Internet marketing divisions and picked up significant sales in the SEO and Internet marketing industry. These large firms are in a position of (nearly) unlimited resources, with sales reps all over the country soliciting the clients with the biggest pockets. With so much fresh meat, these companies have found themselves with a problem; how to fill more orders with a minimum increase in staffing.

Scaling SEO

In the attempt to make SEO scalable, large Internet marketing firms have had to rethink how they do SEO. Instead of assigning a number of clients to one SEO specialist – which would limit profitability by having to hire a new SEO specialist for every x number of new clients – the SEO client has become just another cog on the assembly line. Instead of qualified professionals, large firms have enough clients where they can hire less qualified workers and train them to do one task only – i.e. only doing meta tags, or only doing article writing. In theory, this seems much more efficient; in practice, SEO and “efficiency” don’t go hand in hand.

By giving the same links and the same exact treatment to each client, certain risks present themselves. Let’s look at two cases;

Closed-Network Reciprocal Links

One of these Fortune 500 companies has recently moved to reduce costs and increase efficiency by using web properties they already own; their sites and their clients’ sites. Links to other clients are placed on each client’s ‘resource’ page, essentially creating a closed network of reciprocal links. Should Google find some sites spammy, the entire network is ‘infected’.

Buying High PR Links

Another large firm that did over $17M in SEO sales in 2008 found traditional SEO means unscalable as well; their solution was to buy paid links in bulk on high PR sites from a third party service and outsource content writing. The obvious problem with this solution is that this isn’t really SEO, as you’re only providing temporary links, which result in temporary rankings. Once you stop paying for the text links, you lose all rankings. On the other hand, this firm might benefit from this effect, as it would keep customers paying!

In reality, both of these ‘solutions’ for scaling SEO are bad for the customer, as each company has put all its eggs in one basket. A good SEO campaign should contain a diverse array of white-hat (Google-approved) links and should be able to change strategy on the drop of a dime to keep up with ever changing search engine algorithms. Are workers with limited training on assembly lines able to change gears the day, week or month after search engines change algorithms? Me thinks not.

Christine Adams is a SEO specialist at Sequoia Marketing and a contributing writer to SEO blogs, including LawyerSEO.org.

Hanging / Dangling Web Pages Can Be PageRank Black Holes

Summary

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for blogs is often not done effectively and posts rank below where they should be in keyword searches.  One particular problem can be hanging/dangling web pages created by the blogging software coupled with inappropriate use of robots.txt files and tags.  Such hanging web pages can act as sinks or black holes for PageRank, a key factor in the Google search algorithm.  This article provides a simple explanation of the issues involved and appropriate solutions.

Introduction

"You are creating hanging/dangling pages", wrote Andy Beard in a recent comment on a post on Avoiding WordPress Duplicate Content. After an e-mail exchange, I could understand his concern.  It is a potential problem that robots.txt files could create.  As Andy wrote some time back, it is one of the SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make. 

More recently, Rand Fishkin has pointed out that you should not Accidentally Block Link Juice with Robots.txt.  Rand advised doing the following:

  1. Conserve link juice by using nofollow when linking to a URL that is robots.txt disallowed
  2. If you know that disallowed pages have acquired link juice (particularly from external links), consider using meta noindex, follow instead so they can pass their link juice on to places on your site that need it.

Link juice is just another term for PageRank.  This PageRank value for any web page is an important element in how well it will rank in any keyword search.  It may be one of over 100 factors but it probably is the most important in the Google keyword search process. Avoiding losing PageRank that a web page could amass is an important function that SEOs should pursue.

After doing some research, it turns out to be a somewhat more complex issue requiring an understanding of some weighty articles.  Anyone involved in doing SEO or hiring an SEO consultant should be aware of the potential problem to ensure things are done correctly.  I also realized that there was no simple explanation of the issues so this post will attempt to rectify that omission.

Research on Hanging / Dangling Web Pages

If you want to do some of your own research, before checking out the later explanations, I found the following useful:

  • Dangling Pages – WebProWorld SEO Forum
  • What Do SEO/SEM People Put In Robots.txt Files? – Shaun Anderson
  • WordPress robots.txt SEO – AskApache Web Development
  • Internal Linking – META nofollow, rel nofollow, robots.txt Confusion thereon – Josh Spaulding

Of course with search engine algorithms, things are always in evolution.  The official word on the Google website gives the following information on rel="nofollow".

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

That lead to the practice of PageRank sculpting, whereby people try to manage how PageRank is distributed among the web pages in a website.  More recently Matt Cutts of Google in a Q&A session at SMX Advanced 2009 in Seattle, WA, provided the current thinking on nofollow as recorded by Lisa Barone:

Q: It seems like you supported PageRank sculpting a year ago and now it seems like you don’t support it anymore. Why is that and will it become a negative indicator?

A: No, it won’t hurt your site. You can do your links however you want. You can use it to eliminate links to sign in forms and whatnot, but it is a better use of your time to fix your site architecture and fix the problem from the core. Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There is this assumption that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”, says Matt.). You can’t shunt your PageRank where you want it to go. It’s not a penalty. It’s not going to get you in trouble. However, it’s not as effective. It’s a better use of your time to go make new content and do all the other things. If you’re using nofollow to change how PageRank flows, it’s like a band-aid. It’s better to build your site how you want PageRank to flow from the beginning.

Let us now try to pull all that together in a short number of simple explanations covering the important issues involved.

How PageRank is calculated

Google is not always completely open on what is involved in its search algorithms for obvious reasons.  The algorithms also evolve as the Q&A quote above shows.  The following is a best judgment on what is involved, but if anyone has corrections or modifications to what is shown, they are encouraged to add a comment.

The following diagram illustrates how PageRank is calculated for any web page and how fractions of the PageRank flow to and from linked web pages.  PageRank here is not the value that appears in the ‘thermometer’ in the Google Toolbar, and which goes from 0 to 10.  Instead this PageRank is the mathematical value used in the Google keyword search algorithm.  It is calculated for any web page and represents the probability that a random visitor would visit the given web page as opposed to visiting other web pages.

Here we have multiplied this mathematical value by a huge multiplier to give values that are easier to talk about.  We will use the term, PageRank factor, for this derived number.  The resulting number would normally be a value like 5.6 or 16.2 but here we have simplified yet again to round off to whole numbers.  This illustrates a typical web page (but with very few links).  Some links are external links involving other web pages on other websites (domains).  Some are internal links from web pages on the same website (domain).  The inlinks are hyperlinks on other web pages leading to this web page.  The outlinks are hyperlinks on the given web page to other web pages.

PageRank Illustration

What the image illustrates is that the PageRank factor of this web page (16) is determined by the sum of the PageRank factor contributions flowing through the inlinks.  This PageRank factor then flows out via the 4 outlinks with an equal PageRank factor contribution (4) on each link.

You can imagine this particular web page as being only one among the whole set of web pages on the Internet.  For the technically inclined, we should mention that these PageRank values all are interdependent so they are developed by a process of iteration starting with starting values and repeatedly recalculating to determine what the values are. That goes beyond the scope of this article.

How a robots.txt file changes the picture

PageRank with robots.txt file Illustration

If a robots.txt file disallows this web page for crawl visits by the search engine spiders, then provided they obey the robots.txt file, they would record the values and links shown in this image. These PageRank values are the same, whether or not the web page is blocked to crawlers by the robots.txt file. The record is indexed because there is an external inlink that the Google robots are crawling and they would also note the outlink going to another domain.  The outlinks to other web pages on the same domain (internal links) would not be recorded so these PageRank contributions are lost.  In this sense the web page has become a sink or black hole for these PageRank contributions.  They can no longer contribute to the PageRank of these other web pages.

Note that the PageRank factor values on the remaining links are the same as they were when the other links were being included. Merely saying the links should not be crawled, does not necessarily mean they should be assumed not to exist. This is in line with Matt Cutt’s most recent pronouncements.

How nofollow changes the calculation

Even if this web page was not excluded by a robots.txt file, a similar effect is created if all outlinks from the web page carry an attribute, rel=nofollow.  Again this assumes that the search engine correctly observes this attribute.  If on the other hand the links are assigned a follow attribute, then the PageRank contribution would flow through to all such links.

How to get only one web page that counts for any specific content

As Rand Fishkin suggested above, if more than one web page contains the same content, you can use a meta tag on all the secondary ones to signal noindex.  Then only the primary web page is in the search database, provided the meta tags are being observed.  Coupling this with a follow attribute in the meta tag, then assures that the PageRank contributions still flow out to the other web pages.

A better approach according to John Mueller, a Google representative, is to use a Rel=Canonical Tag rather than NoIndex.  Here is how Google describes this canonical tag.

We now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Apparently Google treats this as a hint rather than a standard so it is not fool-proof. Others see Reasons to use rel=canonical, and reasons not to.

Best Practices

As Matt Cutts recommended, given the wooliness in some of the above, the preferred approach is to develop the website architecture so that duplicate web pages do not arise.  Then one does not have to rely on the canonical tag or the noindex follow combination.  In this way one avoids the hanging / dangling web pages problem.

The exact methods will depend on the architecture. One very useful approach is to show only an initial excerpt on the blog Home Page with a … more link to the full post as a single web page. For category or tag archive pages, you can show only the titles of items so this again avoids the duplicate content problem. The important thing is to be vigilant and look out for essentially duplicate web pages as revealed by a full website scan using the equivalent of a search engine robot such as Xenu.

Visitors Bounce

Bounce may be a word that you have not used much in the past.  It is likely to become a hot word in 2009.  We are talking here particularly about the way visitors to online web pages eventually move off elsewhere.  The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the website from that web page.

If they move off to another web page in the same website, then that is normally a confirmation that they are finding something of interest.  It is the very best indicator.  It may well be far less open to manipulation than the emphasis on hyperlinks that is at the heart of the Google PageRank approach.  That is why I believe the answer to Eric Enge’s question, Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor, must be in the affirmative.  Google has all the data needed to use this approach and it must only be a matter of time. 

The proportion of visitors who bounce away from any website is a critical measure of performance.  Having sticky websites that hold visitors as they move from page to page gives the best opportunity to achieve whatever objectives the website may have. The one major exception is all those web pages where someone clicks away and the website gains revenues by the move.  Google is a major partner for such web pages since the major part of its revenues comes from AdWords ads.  Provided they move away via the AdWords ad, a high bounce rate here is not a problem.

For all other websites it is best to be considering how to lower that bounce rate.  It is not just a matter of opening links in a new tab as one person suggested. 

Nor is it just a matter of only including links to other web pages within the same website.  As Matthew Ingram pointed out, even the New York Times has now realized that including links to other websites may be the smart thing to do.

There have been hints for a while now that the New York Times was going to start adding links to third-party content on its front page, and now it appears to have finally happened, with the launch of something called Times Extra. The paper has been doing this for some time now on its technology front page, using links aggregated by BlogRunner — the meme-tracker the company acquired a couple of years ago — as well as through content-syndication agreements with blog networks like GigaOm, VentureBeat and Read/Write Web.

The very best way to make a website sticky is to give visitors what they are looking for.  That is what will bring them back again and again.  Even the New York Times is showing the way.

Ten Commandments For Google Links

Some website owners seem to feel that there are three steps in creating a successful website. These are:

  1. Design the website
  2. Do on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the Web pages
  3. Get links to the website from others.

That approach could certainly explain the following e-mail message I just received:

We are interested in the link building services you provide. We’ve got on-page optimization done in house.

What kind of link building services do you provide? We are interested in ALL types of link building services, the more the better.

  • Do you provide forum link building services?
  • Do you provide one-way link building services from high PR pages?
  • Do you provide any other link building services?

Since I offer a more holistic approach to making websites perform, I suggested a Google search might bring up names of people who could better meet their needs for this more limited service. I wondered at the time whether I could have offered some further advice to help the writer in his search. There are a lot of somewhat shady characters offering link creation services just as there similar individuals offering SEO services. Perhaps if I had been able to offer a simple 10 Commandments for Links, that might have been more helpful. A simple one page document with a list of things to avoid. Something like the Biblical 10 Commandments that gave unequivocal advice on what was not acceptable.

I looked around and thought perhaps The Ten Commandments of Link Building by Jai Nischal Verma might do the trick. However it’s not a list of things to avoid doing but rather some suggestions on possible ways of creating links.

  1. Link Exchange
  2. Social Bookmarking Websites
  3. Link Baiting
  4. Web Directory Submissions
  5. Article Submissions
  6. Press Releases
  7. Blog Commenting
  8. Forum Posts
  9. Link Programs
  10. Creating Contests

On further reading, I did not feel this was the solution I was looking for.

By chance I noticed a reference in Sphinn to a post on Defining Link Building Best Practices. The author’s nickname in the Sphinn discussion was LinkMoses. Surely he might have run across a suitable 10 Commandments if anyone has. The nickname is that of Eric Ward, who has been involved in Content Publicity & Link Building Strategies since 1994. Regrettably it seemed from his post that he was even reluctant to nominate Best Practices.

That’s hardly surprising. If everyone is made aware of Best Practices then everyone can use them and no one can stand out from the crowd. Perhaps defining 10 Commandments is easier. It’s a list of things to avoid doing, since they may almost guarantee failure. It’s a way of avoiding being grouped with the goats rather than the sheep. Perhaps just as for Moses, such a list is only available from on high.

As it happens, Google (Mountain View, CA) has almost developed this list for us. Just check out their Webmaster Guidelines. Most of the following are directly taken from those Guidelines with one or two additions. Some of these are more ‘evil’ than others.

Ten Commandments For Google Links

  1. Avoid Me-too or irrelevant content that gives users no reason to visit your site.
  2. Avoid broken links and incorrect HTML.
  3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
  4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
  5. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
  6. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
  7. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
  8. Avoid valueless links from unrelated websites
  9. Avoid links from low PageRank pages with many outgoing links
  10. Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web.

Obeying these 10 Commandments should keep you out of trouble, although Google does add the following:

Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

This is only a personal interpretation of the 10 Commandments and could undoubtedly be improved. If you think the list should be amended in any way then your comments would be most appreciated. Please add them below. Based on such feedback a more polished version of the 10 Commandments will be produced.

Footnote: Thomas Schmitz (SOEinSeattle) has pointed out to me that Link Moses has produced his version of the Ten Commandments in a slightly less serious vein. Jim Boykin has also recounted how The Google Gods (in our heads) Speak to Us about Link Building. I did not find these when I searched. Apologies. Perhaps the best of these can be combined.

Three Golden Rules For Writing "Three Golden Rules" Articles For SEO

Three Golden Rules Beats
Five Basics

I have just become acquainted with the johnon.com blog. It deals with Competitive Webmastering & SEO. It often has thought-provoking entries and today is no exception. How could you resist reading an article entitled “Five Basics of Writing ‘Five Basics’ Articles for SEO“. It’s written with tongue-in-cheek and clearly is concerned with developing links.

Perhaps it’s missing the point to comment on the content of the post. However I’ve always found the most effective efforts for SEO come from thinking about both links and content. I’ve always preferred to stick to the Rule of Three. If you really want people to remember and act on your advice, I think it is better to try to limit it to Three Golden Rules. This also helps to achieve two of johnon.com’s basics: namely be brief and be specific.

Without further ado, here are Three Golden Rules for SEO:

  1. Choose something topical: in other words, write about something that people may well be searching for.
  2. Check what others have said: make yours more search visible.
  3. Link out to others: particularly authoritative sources.

So if you are inclined to write your own “Three Golden Rules” article, do yourself a favor and link back here.