Question: I have recently launched a new site and got it a few authoritative links. For my search queries related to my brand Google is ranking an internal page instead of the home page. Why?
Answer: When a site is new and has few inbound links the PageRank computations tend to be rough estimations. It is common for a page linked to sitewide, like an about us page, to outrank the homepage until they better understand the internal site structure and PageRank flow.
What if My Site is Older?
Filtered Page
Some pages get filtered out of the search results for being too focused on a keyword or keyword phrase. Make sure you mix up your inbound anchor text, page title, meta description, page headings, and page content. If you see a women's volleyball page outranking your core volleyball page and your core volleyball page used to rank really well but is now nowhere to be found then likely it got filtered out.
Poor Internal Site Link Structure
If the wrong page style ranks and gets linked to then that advantage sorta builds on itself and the wrong pages continue to rank. If you have printer friendly pages or other duplicate content pages ranking you may want to look into demoting their role in your internal link structure.
Information & Sales Pages
Informational pages tend to outrank most sales / conversion oriented pages because typically they have more relevant on page content and deliver greater value to common web users, which makes people more likely to link to them. If you have an informational page ranking where you would like your sales page to rank you have numerous options.
Advertise your product or service aggressively on the information page. This allows you to maintain rankings, maintain forward link momentum, and increase conversion rates. This is a low risk approach. If the idea of advertising too overtly scares you then you may want to consider using smaller ads and working the advertisement into the content with a text link.
Switch the contents of the two URLs. This carries some risks, as some people who linked to the information page may remove their link if they see the advertisement page, though most old links stick. The other big risk is that competitors may eventually catch up because your ranking page may not gain links as quickly as their informational pages do, so the day you switch to an ad page you help them catch up.
Change internal link weights. If you are placing a lot of link weight on the informational page but little on the sales page you can try to increase your internal link weight to the sales page while lowering the link weight to the informational page.
Market both pages aggressively. It is typically better to have two listings in the search result than one. If one of your documents is a self reinforcing authority and your other document is within striking range of the top results you can market both of them. Ensure you make the descriptions and titles for each of them appealing to the right searchers. For example, the listing for the sales page can use commercial words like buy and best, whereas the informational page can use words like free, tips, reviews, etc.
Many of the most useful publishing formats and many of the most widely used sites are hard to effectively monetize. The solution is to use targeting technology and blend ads and content so closely that they appear to be one and the same. Many people have pushed this from many different angles.
This is somewhat of a rambling post about the merging of content and advertising.
Offline Ad Integration
I recently went to a hospital with a friend. While I was there I flipped open some magazine published by WebMD and read what was perhaps the most basic article on bipolar disorder ever written. The page long article had pictures added to make it two pages long, so the content wrapped around an advertisement for a bipolar drug, and there was even a quiz in there, which was not quite as overt as this Effexor one, but still pretty bad.
How Bad Does Google AdSense Suck at Monetizing Contextual Ads?
Many months ago as an experiment I created a backfill AdSense ad group where I bid a dime a click. Many of those ads appeared on Digg and MySpace and lots of blogs. The overall group had a 2 cent CPM. 19,083,546 ad views cost me $338.01.
Individual publishers can focus their content on expensive topics, but they still can't push the ads too aggressively in their content to their regular audience without losing some of their credibility and exposure.
Bloggers & Smaller Independent Publishers
There are many different takes on how individuals publishers can profit:
Sell products or services, like I do here. The easiest thing to sell is something associated with your brand. Nobody is going to get mad at Discovery.com for promoting a Discovery toy store.
sell ads: contextual, brand ads, keep your main channel clean while creating an associated offers section on your site, or some combination
In many verticals advertising is overtaking the other monetization models. You only need to think back to the Wordpress Mesothelioma fiasco to remember how much people are willing to trade in their brand for a few dollars, and as long as Google puts a $0 value on your content then advertising is going to beat out paid content in most fields.
In Content Ads
With the flood of content in an endless number of formats advertisers are asking for more value than they did in the past. They want to be able to track the results, and they want ads delivered right in the content.
networks like ReviewMe pay publishers for their attention, feedback, and reach - asking publishers to write honest reviews of interesting products and services
Get enough exposure, traffic, and leverage and you can sell what you once gave away. This philosophy was core to Google's success, and also helped make Facebook wildly profitable. Facebook has done a good job of selling custom sponsorships. Valleywag found their rate card, and noticed that they are likely making up to $90 million on Facebook community sponsorships. There are many clever elements that make FaceBook's sponsorship program work so well
there is only one sponsored ad on the page at a time
the ad is put in content and formatted like content
their ad unit format is so new that people have not yet learned to ignore it
when someone clicks on an ad they still stay on the Facebook site
after enough people join a Facebook group that brand gets free follow up advertising by having their brand located on other spots throughout the site, which leads to more sign-ups, which is similar to StumbleUpon ads, social media marketing, or buying organic SEO exposure with PPC ads. You buy enough exposure, mindshare, and traffic that people believe your brand to be credible and they vote for it too.
Facebook is getting some blowback from advertisers about having their ads appear next to some sketchy groups. Of course even if they don't advertise next to those groups they still support their existence by advertising on Facebook. But Facebook, like Google, has so much exposure that many brands feel they need to be seen there.
Yahoo! and Microsoft promote behaviorally targeted ads. Google claims they are against the idea of behavioral targeting, but already use it, displaying ads based on past searches. Both Microsoft and Google have bought in game advertising targeting companies as well.
Unmarked Ads
Having a large audience makes it easier to enter new markets. Last year Google spent $58 million buying marketshare giving away Google Checkout. Not only are they promoting themselves by carpet-bombing their SERPs with checkout ads, but they also rewrote their relevancy algorithms to boost the relevancy and exposure of any content on Google owned video websites. Many of these videos will eventually carry ads.
Google also leveraged the video interactivity to do cross promotional advertisements that were completely unmarked, and only labeled as promotions after people complained.
Anywhere there is a believable story and an arbitrage opportunity someone is putting the pieces together to create profitable content. Colleges are hiring student bloggers, many sites grant a brief moment of exposure for contributing your content, Google is paying college students for gathering local business information, and there are a near unlimited number of business review sites.
How Does All This Relate to Me?
You can look at how these various networks are blending and targeting ads to think of types of sites you could buy or types of content that you can make today that will be more profitable as the ad networks evolve.
Some of these sites do an excellent job of ad integration to make the ads look like content. Emulate that on the profitable portions of your site.
As the market gets saturated with free content sorting through it becomes more than most would desire to do. Central editors will be paid nicely, and the value of a strong brand goes up.
If a market has few real competitors in it you can leverage wealth stratification, the desire to be important, and improving social software to take advantage of consumer generated content to create a backfill of information, knowing you can display ads differently to site members and non-members.
Question: You recently mentioned 301 redirecting one of your sites. How do you tell if 301 redirects count?
Answer: This is very similar to testing if a link pointing at your website is passing link juice. Before 301 redirecting your site, find at least one navigational type search query that can be created out of the inbound anchor text of the site you are redirecting, which you would still expect to rank for even if you had no page content.
When the new site ranks well for that query you know the search engine is following your 301 redirect, though it might take a bit longer for the trust to propagate through the new website and get your contents fully indexed. As time passes you will see the new site replace the old site for more and more search queries. If it ever stops ranking you know there is a technical error with the redirect (such as accidentally writing over your .htaccess file) or they are no longer trusting or following the redirect.
If you are a large corporation or large Google advertiser then Google will go out of their way to work with you to ensure the redirect counts and the transfer is smooth. Here is an example post Matt Cutts made about helping migrate Microsoft Live Spaces:
By the way, it looks like the primary issue with the Windows Live Writer blog was the large-scale migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com about a month ago. We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.
If you are an SEO working on a smaller mom and pop type website and rank better than search engines feel you deserve to they may manually penalize your site. Some search engineers might decide to kill the redirect because they generally think of SEOs as being manipulative scum (even if they are unwilling to admit that publicly).
Having seen friends move many sites, the only 301 redirect penalties I have come across have been manual ones. From my experimentation Google is not very good at algorithmically detecting search relevancy manipulation based on 301 redirects, but they may flag and review some of the higher authority cross site 301 redirects.
If the site you are redirecting has anything shady going on with it, or if you are a well known SEO, make sure you do not discuss the redirect publicly or register your sites with Google Webmaster Central, otherwise Google might kill the redirect out of their distaste and hatred for the field of SEO. A better way to use the old trusted site might be just to try to make it look legitimate and use it as a link source for your more profitable websites.
If you are a smaller webmaster and still want to risk redirecting your site you want to have press pages, an about us page, and give lots of other signals that you are larger than you are, in order to help minimize the chances that a Google engineer will try to destroy your rankings.
One of the easiest ways to get your message across is to be different and denounce a currently popular meme. Dan Thies recently referenced a person who is launching their marketing brand by calling the long tail crap. Even if they know what they are talking about with some forms of marketing it undermines their credibility to talk about search marketing with no appreciation for the tail.
This is a growing trend with information in general online. Marketers with a for profit agenda, a reason to create spin, or no knowledge of a field create ratings, reviews, or half compiled resource list at a market and get people to talk about them
for being useful (to those naive and new to the market, or those featured in the compilation) and
for being inaccurate (for those who know the market and realize that the lists are marketing garbage)
As marketers like you and I fill industries with information pollution it gets harder and harder for the novice web user to know truth from fiction.
The net effect is that we all buy more lies and garbage, become less trusting and more cynical, and small businesses end up having more similar externalities to large businesses, where the profiting company does not take into account any of the downsides to the pollution they created to generate profit.
Some publishers feel absolved of any wrongdoing when they rely on a third party ad network for ad targeting, but profit driven ad network are amoral. Why would someone pay $3 a click for free ringtones if there wasn't some sort of reverse billing fraud on the backend?
A private company based in White Plains is suing Bankrate Inc., saying it has unlawfully suppressed its competition in order to build a monopoly. ...
BanxCorp aggregates, publishes and distributes bank-rate data from financial institutions nationwide through its BanxQuote.com Web site. Bankrate, a much larger, public company based in Florida, owns and operates Bankrate.com.
Bankrate's informational name adds credibility and trust to their offering, as does their slogan Comprehensive. Objective. Free. The distribution deals also help build their brand and aid that image. All of these likely increase trust and conversion rate, and may make some consumers go so far as to think they are a non profit industry body or an extension of the government.
Bankrate may be a near monopoly, but having a misspelled domain name and letting the media describe your field of service using the competitor's business name isn't going to help you dethrone the champ. Not only is BanxQuote.com a bad domain name, but it is only a PageRank 4. How serious can these guys be about suing the competition when they haven't even tried marketing their business?
I just grabbed Quantcast's free rankings of the top 1,000,000 sites. Currently Seobook.com comes in at 112,095, which is 5 spots below PornHater.com, which is apparently a PageRank 3 porn blog stuck in an industry with an endless supply of traffic. Based on some of the SEO sites that were missing from the Quantcast top sites database I don't think you can fully trust their data as being exceptionally accurate, but if you search through it you should be able to come up with at least a few cool ideas, especially if you combine it with other free and cheap data sources.
The last couple days I have been planning a fun project and feel like a kid in a candy store with competitive research and Internet marketing tools. Now hopefully some of the ideas I came up with will work. :)
To attract better students colleges are paying current students to blog about their experiences on campus. When old institutions like those are already embracing the web (and using refer a friend type marketing techniques) that has to hint at the raw untapped marketing power and strong growth potential of the web. It also makes me appreciate how cluttered the web will be with information.
Most everything related to information outside of marketing is moving toward free. Marketing is often the only thing that separates what is perceived as valuable and what is not. Perception is reality.
If you have sites you have not looked at in years you might be missing out on a lot of profit. After drafting a post about things that will hurt your Google rankings I talked to my mom. Her site does not make as much as I think it should given it's age, so I looked for common SEO errors.
Getting a Baseline for Trust
In Google her site ranks about #70 for weight loss and #1 for weight loss blog. Those two data points tell me the site is well trusted, and their might be some old gold waiting to be leveraged. I also saw she was getting about 10% of the traffic I would have expected her to given her quantity of content, site age, and link profile.
Building Easy Links
Some of her pages were stuck in the supplemental results, so I got her a few more links. Now that Google killed the supplemental results tag it is much harder to check for supplemental results, though Jim Boykin offered some free tips.
Her site is aged, is fairly well trusted (based on the above rankings), and had acquired some high quality editorial links as it aged, so I didn't feel it was much a risk to go to some second tier directories to get a few more links. I also submitted her site to a couple of the better directories that I didn't submit to when I built the site a few links back in 2004. I mixed up the anchor text where I could (weightloss vs weight loss, use diet sometimes, weblog vs blog, etc).
Improving Page Titles
The page titles were not relevant. They all placed the site name at the start of the page title, which reduces rankings and CTR. This was a two fold fault: back in early 2004 I was less of a search marketer and I think Blogger was a weaker platform. I didn't realize one could customize the page titles in Blogger to make it modularized.
Customizing Blogger Blog Page Titles
The following code works for creating different page titles for the homepage, archives, and individual entries
A good practice to ensure page titles are unique make sure to search your site and the web in general for your title before you use it. This prevents excessive duplication of topics and titles. One can also look at free keyword research tools to add some of those words to the page title or post content.
Some titles should be written for human response more than search engines, especially if they are emotionally charged posts. You can get a near endless dose of headline ideas, tips, and tricks at Copyblogger.
Category & Date Based Archives
Ideally I should also help my mom set up blog categories, and use those to structure the site instead of having the archives organized by date. If we had enough time to go through and categorize all the old posts, integrated those categories into our template, and saw those category pages got indexed in the major search engines, it would be best to block Googlebot from indexing the date based archives using robots.txt.
If you create categories it is best not to go crazy with them. Depending on your blog size, link authority, and content breadth, anywhere from a half dozen to a few dozen main categories can be aligned with core key phrases and help structure your site. It may also make sense to highlight key categories site-wide, and promote less popular categories on fewer pages. Notice that Copyblogger link I just referenced above pointed at a category page. Category based archives are much easier to reference than date based archives.
Readability & Formatting
Many of my mom's posts ran all the text together in one imposing block of text. I showed her an example edited post, which spread the text out, used sub-headers and lists, and had much better readability.
Blogger was already syndicating her feed as a full feed. As long as she has decent link equity that is fine. If her site was new it might make sense to use partial feeds until some link equity is built up.
Canonicalization & Duplicate Content
Originally the site's logo linked to the index.shtml version of the home page. I changed that to link to the root URL (http://www.fattyweightloss.com/).
The internal linking structure all uses www in the URLs. The non www version of the site automatically redirects to the www version of the site. If it did not I would have changed the .htaccess file to 301 redirect one version to the other more popular version.
Feature Content
People want to be inspired and to see that you are proud of your site. But after a blog is online long enough it resembles a forum, where everything is too hard to find. Who knew my mom had a good post about using a grocery cart as a work out tool? The lack of categorization is one of the big things that hurt my mom's blog, but another is that we have not yet singled out featured posts that should be promoted site-wide. Some bloggers do this manually, while others rely on plug-ins to place extra weight on popular articles.
Promoting your best posts sends a disproportionate number of readers toward them, which should lead to more subscribers. It also pushes a disproportionate amount of link equity toward them, which should help them rank better. I added free weight loss calculators to her site as one type of featured content, but we should highlight some of her other featured posts. Another thing that would help make the site more search friendly would be more in content referencing of older high quality posts when they relate to newer posts, as that would help those posts get seen by more people and help search engines understand which blog posts are the most important.
I think the idea of breaking SEO down to the white hat and black hat camps really misses where the real divisions are. I believe that the biggest differences between SEOs are in their levels of experience, their honesty, their creativity, and how aggressive we are.
After search engines stop ranking brands that you worked hard to build it is easy to lose a bit of respect for them, especially if they promote what they would otherwise call spam if it wasn't in their network, and they rank a few of your sites that are so bad that you are a bit embarrassed to admit you own them. With that, I present the the SEO Learning Life-cycle, and things we might say as we progress along it :)
The Newbie SEO
Here is a person new to the market.
follow search engine guidelines
you don't want to get banned for spamming
spammers get banned forever, and will never rank!!!
I have been creating 10 high quality articles a day
the best site ranks at the top
everything is overpriced, you can learn everything you need from forums
the search engine representative said ____ so it must be true
I make $3 to $30 a day off AdSense!
A Search Optimizer With a Few Rankings
The excitement of a few top rankings is just setting in! Google has yet to burn down any of your websites.
list your site in directories and submit articles and trade links
make sure you submit to my high PageRank directory!!!! submissions are now 50% off
you can learn most everything you need from forums
AdSense is a great business model...I love AdSense
keep creating content and building links it is only a matter of time until it ranks
BTW...here is another high PageRank directory you can submit to
A Person With Many Top Search Engine Rankings
At this level you can afford to go to many conferences. After attending a few of them, you no longer care about rankings, you want results. You start patterning your actions after those who are making money, not those who are giving the same speech they gave 6 years ago, and not those who are popular but can't figure how to make money from their popularity.
wow most of these rankings amount to nothing
search is not as good as people claim it to be
I better start tracking results a bit better
wow these few pages make a lot...maybe i should make a few more pages targeting these terms, and rewrite these other pages to make them more conversion oriented
The Arrogant (Semi)Professional SEO
Here you start getting full of yourself a bit prematurely, but are profitable enough to get away with it, and ignorant enough that you don't know any better. Google has not burned down any of your sites yet, and if they did you figure those sites deserved what they got because they are low quality.
The sites you care about are of high quality though, and they will grow almost every month until one of them gets toasted.
I am a professional SEO. I know this stuff. These are the rules
We are better than everyone. We have the best content
We don't buy links because we are white hat SEOs
People link to us because we have the best content, as do our clients
We don't make much from our rankings, but that is because we chose not to, because we are ethical
The Seasoned Pragmatic SEO
At this stage you are making more in a month than most people make in a year, spend most of your time working on your own sites, rarely do client work, are rather selective with the client work you are willing to take on. If you do much client work you created a business model that sells a product or a bulk low value services.
Google has helped you build at least one 6 figure a year income stream, and has also probably burned down at least one of them. Even if you think it was unfair, unjust, or unreasonable they taught you the value of paranoia, anonymity, and make you become much more aggressive and much more quiet about the projects you are working on.
You likely have partners, and the questions you ask at this level are no longer black and white, but are colored in shades of gray, and often framed from the perspective of how others will react to what you are doing.
Quality content once again becomes a myth, after you see some of your best information go nowhere, and some of your worst referenced all over the web. The realization that creating garbage that strokes someone's ego is more important than the quality of your content smacks you in the face. You become results oriented. Your marketing is better targeted than ad agencies or public relations firms could dream of creating. Some of your marketing is so effective that your sites get penalized because you got too many links too quick.
It doesn't look like spam if everyone is talking about me.
If something didn't work before, it probably isn't going to work again, but here is a quick test site I don't mind losing. If it does work how do I scale this idea commercially?
What can I bolt onto this thin affiliate site to get it links? Here is our first feature article: 43 ways to get and use a credit card without actually having it registered to your real name
How do I add enough value (without harming the conversion rate) to get this to pass a hand check?
Some of those links from _____ pack more of a punch than you would think, but if everyone has too much information to act on any of it I am best off if I don't say anything. :)
Does this bought link look like a bought link?
Wow I can't believe how many links yahoo are buying, is my brand strong enough to get away with that?
If my brand is not strong enough to buy links, then I will buy a few high ranking websites, just like all the big players are doing.
Wow I can't believe my friend just cloned my site. And so did Google! Attacked from every angle!
Why is that spammy site ranking? How can I leverage that exploit on someone else's authoritative domain, or if I use it on my own site, how can I do it without looking as spammiy as that did?
Question: How do you determine how much value there is in the head of a keyword space compared to the tail of the same marketplace?
Answer: The best way to know is to have an authoritative site that ranks across a wide swath of related keywords in your marketplace and track conversions. Of course, it is expensive to create a lot of high quality content, so there are are shortcuts you can take to understanding the depth and breadth of a keyword market.
Search Auto-Completion &: Related Searches
Many of the major search engines show related searches and try to auto-complete your search queries. This should give you a list of additional popular search phrases that are a bit deeper than the core head keywords.
Competitive Research Tools
Some keyword tools, like KeyCompete, allow you to buy a list of keywords that competitors are bidding on.
If a site is focused on your vertical you can grab all the words from their KeyCompete bid campaign.
If the site is broad you can search KeyCompete for TheirDomain.com?keyword
You can also use competitive research tools like Compete.com Search Analytics to see what terms a competitor ranks for in the organic search results, and what percent of their site traffic comes from each keyword. Some keyword research tools like WordZe also allow you to download up to 10,000 keywords at a time.
Use Google to Filter Keywords by Value
After grabbing a list of competitive keywords you can upload them to the Google Traffic Estimator tool to see which terms are the most valuable. Also, you can submit the words to the traffic estimator tool using broad, phrase, and exact match. Comparing the ratios of the values of the different match types should give you a good idea as to the depth of each keyword.
Use Google to Organize Your Keywords
Some keyword tools end up generating more keywords than you can easily organize. You can use the Google AdWords Editor's Keyword Grouper to help organize keywords into more manageable and targeted groups.
Track Your Google AdWords Results & Refine Your Keyword Strategy
As you bid on keywords, if you leave them broad match, your ad will be displayed for many related keywords. You can see what additional terms triggered your ads using the Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report.
Reinvesting in the Tail of Search
If you create content for your most valuable phrases and use the profits to create more content for related ideas your content will rank for keywords you never even thought to target.
When you create a new page of content in a valuable space make sure you optimize it for a basket of related keywords, by posting your URL to Google's keyword suggestion tool to see what they think the page is about. If they suggest terms that are not on your page, either insert those keywords in your content or create addition pages targeting those keyword phrases.
Track Your Organic Search Results
Use your server logs to discover high value phrases that are not too competitive and do not show up in the paid keyword research tools. If you find yourself ranking #7 for a page that does not target a specific term, perhaps you can rank #1 or #2 for it and for related phrases if you make pages that are focused on a tighter niche and are more tailored to those specific queries.
If you monetize via AdSense set custom channels for different parts of your site, and if you are monetizing via other techniques make sure you track your conversions.
