If there’s one thing people obsess about in the SEO (search engine optimization) realm, it’s PageRank. That number, whose formula is locked in a black box hidden deep within Google’s algorithmic cave, plagues website owners and operators with its importance and obscurity.
Kristina Weis, who works with AboutUs community editors, brings light to the PageRank mystery in her article, What PageRank Means for Your Website. She dispels the myths of PageRank while telling you how to improve pages on your site so they achieve better ranking in search results. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
You can learn a lot about making your website more prominent in our articles for business owners. Is there an online marketing topic you’d like us to cover? Do you have some online marketing expertise to share with other website owners? Contact me at Aliza@AboutUs.org.
I mentioned this in our last post but it probably deserves a post of its own. ;)
Google has long claimed that search results inside search results are a poor user experience. They also claim their use of your content is fair use because it is only for ranking and distribution purposes.
Take a look at Google's deskbar subdomain. Google has created MILLIONS of pages on this subdomain:
These pages ARE ranking in the search results:
Google's quest to become the web is leading them to produce a lot of half done products (is eHow's content written at a higher level than Matt Cutts writes) & an increasing variety of bugs. These of course create opportunity for some folks, but a whole lot of pain for many folks who have done nothing wrong other than trusting Google to be competent & fair.
I understand ready, fire, aim on on beta tests or things for start ups, but should Google be doing this sort of silliness with a search service millions depend on?
So much of their originality algorithms determine what is the true source on the internet; the moment bugs like this appear, that trustworthiness is tarnished, and the people who poured sweat blood and tears into a product can be wiped out with a flip of a deskbar.google.com launch.
Search engines are powerful because they are an editorial filter which encourages relevancy.
Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better
Frequently we are marketed to that any errors or omissions on the part of search engines are not due to bad algorithms, but rather do to unscrupulous spammers.
Webmaster guidelines are arbitrary & ever-shifting, and preached like gospel. The 'or else' fear mindset is a primary component of the algorithm.
And yet when some of the largest & most outrageous guideline violations are brought to light, they are quickly dismissed & swept under the rug.
In some cases search engineers conflate SEOs with hackers who are doing illegal activities, but if all marketers & advertisers were criminals then Google.com would top that list, given that ~ 99% of their revenues come from ads & fewer than 100 countries have a GDP greater than Google's revenues. :D
Are 'Spammers' Relevant?
Further claims against spammers include irrelevancy. That was true before I got into the search game (and in some edge cases might be true today), but most spammers try to be relevant. Back in the late 90's when "any page view will do" banner advertising ruled the web all one needed to profit was page views by any means. But as marketing has become more precise and more closely measured, it has become more relevant. With current online marketing being more driven by true conversion performance, relevancy is key. If you show up where you are not relevant you are simply wasting your time & money.
Search engines have a CPM higher than virtually any other type of media format precisely because their ads are so relevant.
Who Promotes Inferior Product?
Let's skip the fact that Google's ad system is set up to maximize yield, while ignoring that Google AdSense has a get rich quick ad category. Looking beyond those, the core argument against spammers is that they pollute the organic search results & leverage Google's distribution to bring inferior product to market.
You know who else does that?
Google.
Yelp Inc. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has complained about Google's use of Yelp content for Google Place pages and is negotiating with Google over the issue. He said Google "is trying to leverage its distribution power"—the search engine—"to take an inferior product and put it in front of the user."
In Google's ideal world they would build a media empire by scraping whoever's content they want, monetizing it however they like, and paying partners a prescribed share of the revenues, right up until Google finds another partner which is willing to accept less.
Here are MILLIONS of doorway pages Google created (and many of these are ranking in Google, even though users do not like 'search results in search results')
It reminds me a lot of Richard Nixon: "well when Google does it, that means it is not spam." Indeed!
Careful out there, the world is a spammy place. ;)
Business owners often ask us how to make sure search engines see all their important web pages. After all, if the search engines can’t see pages on your site, they can’t be found by your potential customers.
Learning how to use robots.txt is a core component of getting the search engines to index — or include in their databases — the pages on your site that you want people to find in search results. Martin Laetsch, chief strategy officer at AboutUs.org, offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to use this direction to search engine robots in his article, How to Use Robots.txt.
Martin’s article is the newest addition to our library of web marketing articles for business owners at AboutUs.org. If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, please contact me at Aliza@AboutUs.org. Got some online marketing expertise to share? Email me with your article idea.
Page x can rank based primarily on the criteria for page y from that same site. So if you analyze the data behind the page which is showing up in the search results, in some cases you will be looking at the wrong data sets!
Google has aggressively pushed into regionalization and localization, but sometimes they miscategorize a website's target market or a user's location ... delivering irrelevant search results.
Sometimes Google pulls data from 3rd party data sources and lists that next to your listing. I mean, sure they have used DMOZ historically, but why exactly are they showing my site as having Russian text on it?
As Google grows in complexity, the number of bugs in their system multiply. Sometimes you don't rank because you screwed up. But sometimes you don't rank because Google screwed up. Typically Google sees minimal difference either way, as there will always be another website to fill up the search results. But as a business owner, when Google gets it wrong you can be screwed pretty bad, particularly if you stock physical inventory and have to tightly manage your supply chain & cash flow.
Consider Google's webmaster verification tags. One of our customers had an outing with an old webmaster who in turn did a sneaky change of location inside of Google Webmaster Tools over the weekend. After seeing traffic fall off a cliff, we figured out what happened & registered the site in Google webmaster tools. There are instructions on how to remove the former registered user, however the option does not appear in my client's account. The redirect will allegedly be in place for 180 days! The only way to get around it is to ask for a review by the Google engineering team.
A big part of brand building in terms of SEO is not only to help you build up passive organic links (and to be able to charge a premium for your product), but it is also something which helps establish a bit of a competitive moat from algorithmic errors & makes it harder for Google to accidentally dump you. Further, if you have brand & catch a Google bug there is little risk to asking for a review. But if you do not have brand then even asking for a review could be risky.
Anyone who tells you that 'SEO is easy' across the board is either ignorant or exceptionally ignorant.
You need to be from the United States (or have access to a US IP address) to see this ad, but Yahoo! is testing monetizing their organic search results.
An ad in the "organic" results? A sponsored shortcut? Say it ain't so.
And that is *before* Google releases their vouchers program & other ad options which will frequently extend AdWords ads and further push down the organic search results.
A bit of home cooking for the fellow IAC company.
Not that long ago I highlighted how exact match domains are often over-stated as an SEO strategy. The above is another dimension as to why. When you have 3 or 4 ads above the organics AND in some cases the organic results are monetized too, then if you rank #2 algorithmically you might be below the fold.
If that ranking for that 1 keyword is your strategy for building your unique competitive advantage, then of course you are going to lose badly to those who are investing into building solid brand equity. They will be able to outbid you for the clicks, so you are toast.
Domainers are already getting killed by parking revenue drops, browsers that turn the address bar into a search box, and now resell values are further being diminished by search engines which are deciding to eat the 'organic' search results with more ads.
The golden rule: If you don't have something nice to say... don't say anything at all.
What the Golden Rule Misses
That is a guiding rule which generally helps people prevent themselves from wasting time and/or causing an issue by offending someone. But there are a couple things that are missed by that rule:
It is easy to tell someone not to internalize stuff, but the truth is if you don't respond at all then over time those sorts of people can start to wear you down
If you do not respond to someone they may think they are correct & then spread their misinformation further, as some of them attribute a lack of response to "the smoking gun"
Some businesses deserve it, however others have done nothing wrong other than being in front of an overly important individual. I am having trouble finding it right now, but a couple times people have threatened to smear my name and brand if I didn't give them a refund for some scammy crap they bought from someone else! They acknowledged that I wasn't associated with it, but they wanted their money back from someone & were willing to take it out of my brand if I wouldn't give it to them. And so I spoke French.
What Caused the Freetardation of the Web?
One time The Conumerist said they wouldn't link to our website because some other sites using infographics are spam, but then they ran our infographic (sans the attribution to the person who spend thousands of Dollars creating it and marketing it) and they got tons of awareness and exposure from our content. Sites like the Huffington Post do that sort of stuff all the time, and often become the canonical source for YOUR content.
Not only are there business models built on paying users to steal other's valuable content, stripping attribution & make it free (like Youtube), but the model is so acceptable online now that you can simply program bots to do it (see Ask or Mahalo). And if you search on Google they will recommend looking for torrents, cracks, keygens, and serial numbers. A friend of mine even showed me a YouTube video which shared a DreamWeaver serial code in it. As a person who has bought their software 4 or 5 times now I think that is just awful!
The penny gap is a concept where by charging *anything* for what you do you have to make it exceptionally better than anything which is freely accessible. Free is such a powerful psychological motivator that people will do irrational things for free. Such moves are largely driven by the fear of loss. If you turn down free you potentially lose out on something, but if you accept it there is no risk (that you are aware of, anyway) since it is "free." Anything that is paid not only has the risk of you being wrong, but it also has the risk of fine print.
The fine print isn't the only reason people get screwed though. The people who do the screw jobs via fine print techniques often pay a lot for exposure. And since the web (as a network) is optimized for generating maximum revenues it means that the people who eventually find you will likely become distrusting by the time they do, as they will already have got conned by someone else who is great at sales, but nothing else!
That will only reinforce the penny gap
Profitably Publishing in a World Dominated by the Penny Gap
Since so many people chase free, a lot of publishing business models are built around tricking people to click ads rather than selling something. In some circles you are viewed as sleazy for having an affiliate link in your content even if you buy and use what you are promoting & spend hours writing in-depth reviews and tutorials. Many of the same folks who view any affiliate link as sleazy carpet bomb their own websites with AdSense ads. And lets not forget that AdSense even has an ad category for "get rich quick."
do biased reviews of hyped junk that rip people off
encourage negative reviews and extort businesses (illegal, and the model of some sites like RipOffReport)
honestly review and promote the best products and services available and monetize some of those efforts with affiliate links (I include networks like OpenTable in this category)
add enough value yourself that you can offer a product or service for sale
Anyone can easily do the first 3 models, but the last 2 are more challenging. The 4th one is hard because its easier to convince naive people to buy products that are built around the sales letters than it is to convince people to buy things where the sales letter was built around the product.
The tricky part with the last category...actually adding enough value to be able to charge...is that it is far harder than most people realize. The minute you publish anything publicly there are forces pushing to commoditize it (most open source software is a remake of an existing paid software solution rather than an entirely new category unto itself). Also, if someone buys something from you and gets a great return they may not want to mention it to others precisely because they rely so heavily on you and they are getting such great returns from your product or service. And even if you sell physical products, Google selling CPA ads to the likes of Wal-Mart can still drive you under unless you turn it from a product into a service (like Zappos has done).
Aggressive Sales Techniques Yield Bad Customers
If you are aggressive in your sales tactics you get customers you do not even want. The guy who created the Product Launch Formula stuff highlighted how he saw 30% refund rates on it. If you are not aggressive in your sales tactics then you will find affiliates tend to promote the stuff that is more aggressive, typically optimizing for yield rather than promoting what is best. That is how self-interested economics works.
Why You Should Give Something Away
The way to get around with having to compete with that sort of stuff is to rely on a freemium model.
In spite of the negative impacts of freetards, giving something away is almost a requirement of online marketing today in many competitive markets, particularly if you do not want to scam people & you are not sitting on an established brand and a mountain of cash.
You give some stuff away and set up a sales funnel, while hoping to eventually sell something else. This, in turn, is the tricky part. As soon as you set up *any* barriers you will get tons of complaints. If you optimize for minimizing complaints you would have to stop selling anything and just get a job working at Wal-Mart being paid just enough to live on (after you add in your food stamp income).
What Are You Optimizing?
Ultimately you are not optimizing for the 99% of people who come across your website and never spend a Dollar. You are instead optimizing for the people who are considering purchasing. This gives you a diametric view of the market, where the same content receives a wide range of responses, which range from...
... right on through to ...
If you optimize to make that first person happy it means you lack internal respect and are throwing away over half of your income, because the second person won't have a sales funnel to build trust in you.
You can put an unsubscribe link in every email (we do), allow people to opt into the auto-responder or choose not to (we do), but you can't stop a person from taking steroids and/or missing their medication. A marketer who sets up a free email subscription on a site about marketing and then is angry about receiving free marketing tips is a complete idiot.
When people are polite (like the second example) I respond right back and try to help them as best I can. When someone acts like a steroid addicted enraged freetard who missed this morning's medications (like the first message, from Ken Boostrom) I either ignore them or tell them to screw off. I usually ignore them, but when they provide curse words AND threats then they typically get a response. ;)
What constructive advice can you glean from
Because media and many software products have no cost to consumers people think that everything online (except whatever they sell) should be free. Not only should products be free, but so should services. Look at this lovely email from France
Note that it starts off with the obligatory insult, then complains about all the free stuff we offer AND the free content we give away. They then suggest I should SPEND my time and my money to give them a free consult. He also wants me to schedule my life around him being half-way around the world. The flip side of that is I have received numerous 3am wake up calls from people who looked up my phone number from our whois and decided I would like to have a chat about how incompetent they are.
I wish I could tell you that the above was a remarkable outlier, but sadly, such interactions are becoming more common. Hence using private registration.
The web is a great economic force. It makes information more accessible and for free. Many millionaires and billion Dollar companies are built on free open source software. But the reason open source software is free is that there are other means of monetization:
support is not free and/or
the site is a PageRank funnel to another monetized website (see Wikipedia/Wikia & Wordpress.org/Wordpress.com/Foodpress) and/or
the software builds network effects and/or awareness that builds stature, which can be monetized in other ways
the software acts as a recruitment tool to attract employees
etc etc etc
Help Wanted: Millionaire Seeking Free SEO Consultant
Some people might say that "well the freetards are just staring out, so you need to give them the benefit of the doubt." And part of why we offer so much for free is that I do remember where I came from and we do try to help people out. A lot!
But some of the freetards are anything but poor. Case in point:
Freetard vs Customer
How does Wordnet define a client?
Client:
a person who seeks the advice of a lawyer
customer: someone who pays for goods or services
Prospective customers can make absurd claims and announce desires that will clearly lose you money but they are NOT your customer until they pay you. And even then, if they are abusive you have the right to terminate the relationship.
Freetards ACT like they have paid you and want the benefits of your services without paying a cent.
In the years to come these trends mentioned above will only accelerate. And that means that you have to make a choice on who you want to work for and what you want your work life to be like. You can choose your customers or let them choose you. But part of the process needs to be filtering what you don't want, lest you end up with freetards threatening to give your paying customers a beat down.
Selling cheap knockoffs of brand name items on the world market?
You got it right if you answered #3. The web was abuzz last weekend over the ICE takedown of 82 websites that were allegedly selling counterfeit goods. Oddly, even some Torrent search engines that sell nothing – and host nothing – were also taken down. No danger here, except perhaps to revenue opportunities for name-brand companies…
After reading about this website takedown by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), I found out that last week Senator Ron Wyden became the hero of cyberspace and stopped what would have been the first blacklist on the internet. That didn’t stop ICE from taking down sites on its own blacklist, though.
Two points of interest for AboutUs wiki editors: one of the website owners that was quoted in NYT article has edited AboutUs.org before (yay Waleed!), additionally several of the websites have already re-established their websites under different names, e.g. RapGodfathers.info. Maybe it would help if they all came to their AboutUs community page and let folks know where their new website is!
Bonus points if you think this was possibly a diversion after the U.S. government had its ___ handed to it with the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic records.
Video marketing is big – sometimes it feels like everyone with a camera and a business is doing it. A visitor to our blog asked yesterday for some guidance on how to do video marketing, so we’ve responded with a new article in the Learn section of AboutUs.org.
Our advice can be summed up quickly: Keep It Short and Simple. Lengthy videos are rarely watched all the way through, and people don’t share a video with friends unless they’ve really enjoyed it. You definitely do want people to share your video!
Thanks to the person known as Fort Meyers, who asked for ahow-to on video marketing. I hope this article helps you. And to everyone else: Keep the requests coming. We want to create articles that will help you. Email me at Aliza@AboutUs.org, and tell me what you want to read about next.
