Google Update Panda

Google tries to wrestle back index update naming from the pundits, naming the update "Panda". Named after one of their engineers, apparently.

The official Google line - and I'm paraphrasing here - is this:

Trust us. We're putting the bad guys on one side, and the good guys on the other

I like how Wired didn't let them off the hook.

Wired persisted:

Wired.com: Some people say you should be transparent, to prove that you aren’t making those algorithms to help your advertisers, something I know that you will deny.

Singhal: I can say categorically that money does not impact our decisions.

Wired.com: But people want the proof.

This answer, from Matt Cutts, was interesting:

Cutts: If someone has a specific question about, for example, why a site dropped, I think it’s fair and justifiable and defensible to tell them why that site dropped. But for example, our most recent algorithm does contain signals that can be gamed. If that one were 100 percent transparent, the bad guys would know how to optimize their way back into the rankings

Why Not Just Tell Us What You Want, Already!

Blekko makes a big deal about being transparent and open, but Google have always been secretive. After all, if Google want us to produce quality documents their users like and trust, then why not just tell us exactly what a quality document their users like and trust looks like?

Trouble is, Google's algorithmns clearly aren't that bulletproof, as Google admit they can still be gamed, hence the secrecy. Matt says he would like to think there would be a time they could open source the algorithms, but it's clear that time isn't now.

Do We Know Anything New?

So, what are we to conclude?

  • Google can be gamed. We kinda knew that....
  • Google still aren't telling us much. No change there....

Then again, there's this:

Google have filed a patent that sounds very similar to what Demand Media does i.e looks for serp areas that are under-served by content, and prompts writers to write for it.

The patent basically covers a system for identifying search queries which have low quality content and then asking either publishers or the people searching for that topic to create some better content themselves. The system takes into account the volume of searches when looking at the quality of the content so for bigger keywords the content would need to be better in order for Google to not need to suggest somebody else writes something

If Google do implement technology based on this patent, then it would appear they aren't down on the "Content Farm" model. They may even integrate it themselves.

Until then....

How To Avoid Getting Labelled A Content Farmer

The question remains: how do you prevent being labelled as a low-quality publisher, especially when sites like eHow remain untouched, yet Cult Of Mac gets taken out? Note: Cult Of Mac appears to have been reinstated, but one wonders if that was the result of the media attention, or an algo tweak.

Google want content their users find useful. As always, they're cagey about what "useful" means, so those who want to publish content, and want to rank well, but do not want be confused with a content farm, are left to guess. And do a little reverse-engineering.

Here's a stab, based on our investigations, the conference scene, Google's rhetoric, and pure conjecture thus far:

  • A useful document will pass a human inspection
  • A useful document is not ad heavy
  • A useful document is well linked externally
  • A useful document is not a copy of another document
  • A useful document is typically created by a brand or an entity which has a distribution channel outside of the search channel
  • A useful document does not have a 100% bounce rate followed by a click on a different search result for that same search query ;)

Kinda obvious. Are we off-base here? Something else? What is the difference, as far as algo is concerned, between e-How and Suite 101? Usage patterns?

Still doesn't explain YouTube, though, which brings us back to:

Wired.com: But people want the proof

YouTube, the domain, is incredibly useful, but some pages - not so much. Did YouTube get hammered by update Panda, too?

Many would say that's unlikely.

I guess "who you know" helps.

In the Panda update some websites got owned. Others are owned and operated by Google. :D

Tracking Offline Conversions for Local SEO

Google Penalized BeatThatQuote.com

Shortly after we found out that Google was to purchase Beat That Quote we highlighted how Google purchased a website that was deeply engaged in numerous nefarious black hat SEO practices. A friend just pinged me to confirm that Google has penalized the domain by removing it from the search results.

From a competition & market regulation perspective that was a smart move for Google. They couldn't leave it in the search results while justifying handing out penalties to any of its competitors. As an added bonus, the site is building up tons of authoritative links in the background from all the buzz about being bought by Google. Thus when Google allows it to rank again in 30 days it will rank better than ever.

Based on their web dominance which generates such a widespread media buzz, Google adds millions of Pounds worth of inbound links to any website they buy.

The message Google sends to the market with this purchase is that you should push to get the attention of Google's hungry biz dev folks before you get scrutiny from their search quality team. After the payday the penalty is irrelevant because you already have cash in hand & the added links from the press mentioning the transaction will more than offset any spam links you remove. Month 1 revenues might be slightly lower, but months 2 through x will be far higher.

Google Buys BeatThatQuote, a UK Comparison Site Violating Google's Guidelines

It looks like Money.co.uk was right on the money:

BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think

What is screwed up about this is that Google is engaging in *major* channel conflict. Not only is there some gray area background stuff:

BeatThatQuote.com's ad prompted 101 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority, with 65 objecting that the commercial "trivialised, condoned or encouraged bullying in the workplace".

But now they have to consider SEO as well. I highlighted how it was a bit unjust when Google arbitrarily chose to whack one site while letting another get away with worse just because the founder was good at public relations, but how can Google police Google's guidelines when Google is the one breaking them?

Doorway Pages / Gateway Sites

Remember how Overstock.com was recently penalized for offering discounts in exchange for links? BeatThatQuote partnered with Oxfam to create CompareForGood.com. The homepage consists of a bunch of links into BeatThatQuote.com. If you look at those links using our server header checker you will see some 301 redirects. Of course doorway pages are considered spam & we know that Google has torched some other affiliate programs for using 301 redirects.

Such links are doing 301 redirects

Sure that is fairly vanilla...a bit gray area. Certainly not straight up black hat.

....unlike...

Buying Links That Pass PageRank

Raise your hand if you have read a post by Matt Cutts on the dangers of buying links that flow PageRank?

Ok. Now keep your hand up if you have read a dozen of them.

Remember how Matt Cutts stated that some bloggers got torched for selling a single link? Remember the long NYT article about how Google is cracking down on link buying & they penalized JC Penny for it?

With that in mind, can anyone explain why Google's newest purchase buying links like

Not so much a categorized listing with an editorial review...just a paid link for the sake of buying links to flow PageRank.

That one is only totally flagrant.

A bit off color. Like comment spamming.

Sorta like the link exchanges in German.

But some are even more outrageous. Consider that BeatThatQuote is buying links from pages with ad sections like

Paid Blog Reviews

Remember those "evil" paid reviews Matt Cutts wrote of? Plenty of those to go around ;)

In fact, some of the paid blog links were in place so long that BeatThatQuote got thank you's for advertising for over a year straight.

I don't have a decade of spam fighting experience like Google does. But is it too much to suggest that before Google buys *any* website they should do a basic compliance audit to verify that the site is operating within Google's TOS. I am an independent SEO and it took me all of 2 minutes to find numerous FLAGRANT violations.

What sort of message does Google send the market with the above behavior?

How Can Google Police Anyone?

Google has on multiple occasions penalized other UK based finance sites for SEO issues & link buying. But now that Google owns one of the horses in the race, and that horse has been found to be using anabolic steroids, can they legitimately penalize any of their new competitors?

If I had a UK finance site I would go on a link buying binge right now. Google can't penalize you for it because they are doing the same damn thing. And if they do penalize it for DOING THE EXACT SAME THING GOOGLE IS DOING then you know you have a legitimate gripe for the media, and I have no doubt Microsoft would be willing to help pick up the legal tab.

Google Eats Microsoft's Lunch Again!

Ultimately this is a body blow to Microsoft. Microsoft started to gain momentum in search through verticalization, but has since backed off. Meanwhile Google took Microsoft's ball and ran it in for a touchdown (acquiring MetaWebs, trying to buy ITA Software, and buying BeatThatQuote). And now one of MSN's portal ad partners is owned by Google:

Head of partnerships at MSN, Phil Coxon said, “At Microsoft Advertising, we’re passionate about collaborating with brands to create compelling advertising campaigns. By providing new and exclusive content that appeals to consumers, this partnership both enhances the overall MSN user experience as well as providing a great platform for BeatThatQuote to engage with their target audience on a meaningful level. This deal builds on our previous partnership with BeatThatQuote, which led to a 400% increase in revenue generated from insurance products. We’re delighted to continue to build on this relationship with this new campaign.”

Oooops.

Update

After a Googler read this blog post, it appears that Beat That Quote has been penalized.

Almost Everything is Unprofitable

Clowning Around

There is a saying in the bond trading market that if you don't know who the clown in a deal is then look in the mirror because it is probably you. Business is the same way. Almost everyone gets taken for a ride at least once.

What is Ignorance?

Ignorance is often viewed as a condescending word, but it is how we are all born. It is only through learning and experience we are able to do much more than survive. Any time you enter a new market or use a new strategy you start out from behind. You are the sucker who is losing money. Rarely does the new guy win just by showing up, or just by copying someone else's existing strategy. There has to be some point of differentiation.

A Brutal Uphill Climb

The leader has more data, more connections, more links, more capital, higher visitor value, and the algorithms have another layer of karma built over the top of them as well. Matt Cutts described part of the Panda update as "we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side."

Roadblocks & Pot Holes Are Everywhere

Based on those sorts of disadvantages, why would anyone want to try SEO? Well in almost any other business model similar roadblocks and pain points exist, and SEO allows one to build momentum over time without it being an all or nothing risk. The slow buildup can lead you toward success in ways you may not have anticipated. And the cost of failure is often little more than time. Plus you gain knowledge even when something fails.

Is SEO Really Any Different?

I think Chris Dixon is one of the smarter entrepreneurs and angle investors out there, but was disappointed to see him write a post titled SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups:

I talk to lots of startups and almost none that I know of post-2008 have gained significant traction through SEO (the rare exceptions tend to be focused on content areas that were previously un-monetizable). Google keeps its ranking algorithms secret, but it is widely believed that inbound links are the preeminent ranking factor. This ends up rewarding sites that are 1) older and have built up years of inbound links 2) willing to engage in aggressive link building, or what is known as black-hat SEO.

A similar blog headline flipped around might read like "Most VC funded companies fail & founders get hosed on equity dilution, so getting funded is no longer a viable company formation strategy for startups." Of course something like that would be laughable, but it is no less absurd than saying SEO is no longer viable.

Sure coming from behind is hard, but the above misses that

  • Google has grown more aggressive in monetizing their search results through increased verticalization and navigational aids
  • many of the most profitable SEO plays are reinvesting into growth
  • most people who are successful with SEO do not like to attribute their success to it because doing so creates additional risks & more competition

Unique Market Approaches

Even treading water in a market where competitors are reinvesting profits & the market maker is tilting the table is quite respectable. If you want to come from behind and exactly clone someone else's business model, it won't likely be profitable. But that is why people attack markets from different perspectives. This is no different than why there are many different graphs. Chris isn't trying to beat Google in creating another link graph, but is looking at different signals.

Tectonic Shifts in Relevancy

Likewise marketing strategies can be vastly different between different companies and different projects within a company. Certain types of pages & certain types of websites rise and fall as the algorithms are adjusted to close down opportunistic loopholes. But as they make certain things harder they make other things easier. The whole content farm model was only enabled by an excessive weighting on domain authority & the introduction of rel=nofollow.

That opportunity may have fallen by the wayside. Many content mills just got hit pretty hard.

Was The Pain Really That Bad?

But for all the bluster about how it was one of the biggest changes in years, most of the content farms are only down maybe 20% to 50% in terms of traffic & revenues.

Sure that is a lot of revenue to disappear, but when you are operating at 80% net margins you can do that without it destroying your company. And this doesn't even take into account that many of these sites had a clean double over the past year. So if you grow 100% then lose 50% you are still even year on year, in spite of being penalized. Not bad in an environment where tons of businesses are going bankrupt offline.

And of course those sites getting whacked create opportunity for other folks, who build sites using different strategies.

A Cautionary Tale

About a half-decade ago a CEO of a start up contacted me & had us build a few links for them. Then they had to get their VCs approval for doing a full in-depth strategic review because it was going to cost well into 5 figures. Their VC investors didn't believe in SEO!

So that killed the project.

This company had a multi-lingual site where their leading market's content was only accessible through a drop down form where the URLs did not change. Fixing that issue to make the site crawlable would have produced more revenues in the first few months than the cost of our contract. But the VC didn't think SEO was valuable. They never got that tip. And for businesses which have network effects built in, losing $x today can easily be $10x or $20x a few years out.

Current Market Leaders Were Yesterday's Gray Area Marketers

Mr. Dixon also highlights how established TripAdvisor is, but when they were founded they were once the small dog just starting out. His article also fails to mention that TripAdvisor was Text-Link-Ads largest customer. In other words, they came from behind, took a calculated risk, and won. They backed off from the risks when the risks started to exceed the opportunity.

Not long after TripAdvisor started collecting consumer reviews, eHow was sold for $100,000. That turned out to be quite profitable for the buyers! And eHow was also known for aggressive & spammy link building against Google's guidelines. In fact, one of their largest competitors highlighted the lack of this information in their S1 filing:

The entire 250+ page document is devoid of any discussion of incoming links which is the cornerstone of search engine optimization. By reading through the lines, it appears that they have two primary sources for link development for their owned and operated sites: (1) from their “undeveloped websites” and (2) from their content partner sites. Although these two initiatives alone are generally not financially profitable, they are successful approaches to maximizing the incoming link equity in their owned and operated properties.

The point is that start ups shouldn't avoid all risk, but they should pick and choose their spots. The above sites are billion Dollar enterprises because they worked in the gray area to catch up & build a lead, and then pulled away from risk after they had a strong market position.

As time passes the opportunities change, but they don't really disappear.

The Cloud and Your SEO Data

The cloud is all the rage these days and with good reason, it certainly can make life easier for a roving SEO, freelancer, or anyone really. I am a big fan of the cloud and consistently utilize services like:

Dropbox
Evernote
37Signals suite of products
SEO tools like the ones here at SEO Book, toolsets like Raven & SEO Moz as well

Most of the mission critical data for a web marketer would be stuff like:

Keyword information
Link building info
Rankings
Analytics
Marketing plans for a site
And so on....

HOSTED SOLUTIONS AND EASE OF USE

Many hosted solutions in the SEO & PPC toolspace offer you the ability to conduct those areas of your business on their servers. I'm leaving out Google Apps, Gmail, and Google docs because I don't really use them much these days and because they are kind of the angry elephants in the room.

For an increasingly mobile worker, access to data at all times is a big benefit to being able to run a smooth and effective business. Not only are workers more mobile in the space these days but many folks also have multiple computers and devices to work off of.

Some folks have the slew of Apple devices (maybe an Air, an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad) while some have a mashed up set of devices based on their personal preferences or their company's requirements.

Trying to sync desktop stuff to so many different platforms is a real PIA as you know, so more and more folks are begin to use cloud based solutions for everything.

WHO HAS YOUR DATA

Sit back and think about who has your data and where it is. You probably see these folks at conferences, watch webinars, follow them on Twitter, etc. You've probably gotten recommendations from people you trust with respect to using that company's services.

It's not about trusting one person or a couple people you know at the company, you have to be able to trust the company. Sometimes it can be a difficult thing to think about because you feel a personal connection to a particular group and you might feel like you are attacking their personal character by questioning whether you can trust the safekeeping of your data.

In any event, you have a right to question whether or not having your mission critical data hosted by anyone (not to mention another SEO company) is a good idea.

IS THERE A RECORD OF TRUST

Some of these products are newer but there's no evidence of any wrongdoing or snooping going on behind the scenes. To be fair though, how would you know :)

The value is probably in the aggregation of such data (oh wow those links work, oh look at how well these keywords convert...etc) rather than something specific to a single campaign.

You really have to ask yourself if hosting SEO or PPC data with a company that operates in that space is a good business practice. Personally speaking, I have accounts at the two spots I mentioned above (Raven and SeoMoz). So I feel comfortable with those accounts mostly, but I still think it's important to revisit the thought process from time to time.

I like to peruse the privacy policy of these places prior to stockpiling data with them. Here's an excerpt from SEO Moz's privacy policy

**SEOmoz offers a variety of online tools and software. These include, but are not limited to, our free SEO tools, our paid SEO tools, our API, and our tools on OpenSiteExplorer.org. These tools require you to enter a variety of information, such as URLs, domains, keywords, or other items relevant to Internet marketing and link research. We associate this information with your account in order to provide useful features, identify and terminate accounts that violate our Terms of Service, to improve our products, and to provide customer service. We never use this information for the provision of SEO consulting services so you do not need to worry that entering your information will be used against you or your clients by SEOmoz.

We take appropriate physical, electronic, and other security measures to help safeguard personal information from unauthorized access, alteration, or disclosure.***

DATA IS THE NEW GOLD

Knowledge is power and as SEO becomes more and more difficult, or at least more and more gray, your data becomes exponentially more important. What do you think your competitor(s) would give to know exactly what keywords were bringing you traffic and conversions, as well as which links you noted were more valuable than others?

Some of this data can (roughly) be gleaned from the use of competitive research tools but the pieces of information you are storing on other companies (sometimes other SEO businesses) servers are full of hard, actual data rather than estimated or scraped data.

Occasionally I'll hear about people storing all sorts of sensitive SEO data in Google products, I personally think that is a bit cavalier (yes, yes I know that risk reward is not in Google's favor at all there, at least on an individual basis..but the cynic in me puts nothing past them :D )

Most places use heavy-duty security to lock down your accounts and restrict access to key employees but if you've ever worked in an office setting you know that it usually isn't terribly difficult to take a peek at a key account or two.

Skyrocket Your Productivity by Trimming the Fat

If the Google Farmer update doesn't show you the unfortunate amount of low-quality noise in the SEO industry then there is no hope for you young jedi. :)

It's not unlike the unbelievable noise that surrounds an upcoming Apple product launch. In the interest of full disclosure I happen to be an Apple-ite but the coverage is even nauseating to me.

My poor RSS reader and my Twitter stream came under siege these last few days with the ramp up to the iPad 2 launch and the Google algo update.

This inspired me, after hitting the delete button about 432 times in my RSS and scrubbing the Twitter list, to sit back and review how I consume information, where I consume it from, and who is really worth "my time".

Repeat, Re-tweet, Rinse

Technology blogs and SEO blogs are much different in terms of the availability of content that can be churned out on a daily basis, as you know. There is so much more to choose from with tech but there still is this herd mentality which leads to someone saying "The iPad 2 will have a camera" 15 different ways.

With SEO, it is pretty tough to churn out daily content that is:

  • without a lot of conjecture
  • accurate
  • thought-provoking
  • worthy of your time

Sure, SEO changes like any other industry but sometimes you read some of these blogs and you have to wonder how much factual, data-driven information goes into the content? Or is the point stretched to a level where any independent analysis would torch the theory in a matter of minutes?

Show Me The Money!

Something I starting doing a bit before this wake up call which is now helping me whittle down what I am consuming, was to make notes of techniques or tips that were mentioned (noting the source) then implementing those tips while watching to see whether they made any difference (positive or negative).

Also, try and pay attention to trend predictions and industry predictions.

The ones that are usually spot on are probably worth more of your time

One thing I noticed while doing that was some of the information was simply being either re-tweeted, or republished with thin commentary, or referenced with essentially the same content but spun a different way with different industry language.

The problem was that many of the blogs or sites occasionally had a good point or three but the vast majority were just kind of "meh". I don't mean that in a disparaging way but I think if the goal of the writer is to publish frequently then so be it, but it isn't a necessity in my opinion and it can actually hurt the quality of the content if the writer feels like daily or semi-hourly publishing is required of them.

I figure that if you are going to spend time reading or paying attention to someone, you ought to pay attention to how often you skim over their stuff versus how often you actually read it and benefit from it.

Authors That Branch Out

As SEO becomes more and more a part of a holistic view of marketing your business or site, it might be a good move to look at people who can write intelligently about SEO as well as what else goes into web marketing. Things like:

  • tool reviews
  • web design and/or development
  • using popular cms frameworks
  • domain buying, selling, and domain names
  • social media
  • and the many other things a typical SEO or webmaster might be interested in

I'll give you one of my favorite blogs to read (outside of SeoBook of course :D ), Michael Gray AKA Graywolf over at Wolf-Howl.Com. His blog covers many aspects of the web marketing industry and has provided me with some extremely useful advice and tips.

Looking at the homepage of the site today he's covering Raven SEO Tools, How to Choose a Domain Name, a review of a Social Media tool, some Facebook tips for small and local businesses, and a couple of posts on SEO factors.

It's a solid example of a really well-rounded blog which gives actionable information, tips, and strong opinions.

A site that I like as sort of an all in one solution is Search Engine Land. Solid news round ups, excellent guest writers, and a group in tune to what's going on in the world of search marketing.

Many of you might subscribe to these ones already, but if not you should take a peek. :)

Do They Have Something (of value) to Say?

Twitter is probably the worst in terms of noise if you don't engage in some strategic filtering or unfollowing. A stream can quickly get littered with a bunch of RT's with posts about how nice the weather is outside.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the personal or non-work tweets (in fact sometimes they are a nice break from the monotony of the day as a webmaster) but if you notice that the person you are following is basically a re-tweet machine then it might be time to move on.

The nature of the web and social media present a way for you to interact with other folks in your industry in a way which makes it seem like you are bosom buddies with your (fill in a number) followers on Twitter, or people you interact within a community.

The hard, sobering fact is that quite a few people have nothing to say professionally that really is of any true business value to you (and why would you care what they are doing over the weekend?).

There are thought leaders in every space who consistently put out good stuff, but thought leaders are few and far in between. We live in a superficial, ME ME ME, celebrity world.

People want to be heard, seen, adored, revered, etc. It's really easy to spot thought leaders but you also have to be able to weed through people who look like thought leaders just because they have a high Twitter follower count.

It's easy to separate out noise though. Pay attention to who you are reading and following and really look at how much you are learning from that person or group.

A Cleansed List & a Productive Day

I ended up cutting my RSS feeds by quite a bit, probably around 70% if I quickly look at the numbers. I follow a few SEO-centric blogs as well as some PPC blogs, a few Local SEO blogs, Google & Bing blogs, blogs specific to tools that I use, and some general business blogs/feeds.

I'm not a big Twitter user, because after the celebs/corporations/internet marketers/bots there is little left. Diversity is good, overwhelming noise is not.

You could spend all day reading theories or re-spun posts instead of getting the information from the cream of the crop and putting that data into action for your business. Some of the spots I no longer read weren't re-publishing houses but they simply didn't bring enough to the table consistently to warrant an investment of *my* time.

What about your time? Are you giving it away to places that do not deserve it?

When Best Practices Lead to Miserable Failures

How often do you ever hear the phrase worst practices? Probably never.

Everything is a best practice approach, right up until things change.

Consider AdSense websites.

Hey Look, a Case Study!

When you look at some of the biggest losers in the Google content farm update, many of them happened to be premium AdSense publishers which were even used by Google as case studies! For instance, Hub Pages or EzineArticles.

Everyone thinks that their content is the cream of the crop & that they will bounce back:

We are confident that over time the proven quality of our writers' content will be attractive to users. We have faith in Google's ability to tune results post major updates and are optimistic that the cream will rise back to the top in the coming weeks, which has been our experience with past updates - Paul Edmondson

The problem is that for many businesses there will be no bounce back. Some are simply over. The web has evolved & the algorithm has moved beyond them.

Where is the Much Needed Disclaimer?

What makes this worse is that when Google gives a site their premium AdSense feed & sets something up as a case study others will see that as an explicit endorsement.

THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD DO IT.

Even after Google torches the companies that follow Google suggested best practices those case studies live on, offering what now amounts to maps to Google hell.

Adding Insult to Injury

What makes such filters/penalties even more infuriating is that in some cases when your site is slapped with a negative karma penalty, others who steal your content & wrap it in AdSense will outrank you, since their site does not yet have a negative karma penalty against it. :)

Individually the splog sites may not live long, but collectively they can keep outranking you to ensure you are invisible for your own words, even if you poured years of your life into creating something beautiful & important.

As Cult of Mac reports:

As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.

But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.

That part in bold is the most outrageous part of this new "algorithmic" approach. When Google whacks your site then someone who steals your content will outrank you. And most sites stealing content *are* monetized via Google's DoubleClick & AdSense ads.

That whooshing sound you just heard was MFA sploggers making a mad dash to steal content from the list of currently penalized sites.

Cult of Mac is lucky they had enough pull with the press to get reconsidered. Most webmasters who got hit did not & anyone who has contracts based on set traffic levels or tight margins which just turned negative are in a pretty crappy situation. Yet another example of the importance of not fueling growth with debt & the importance of profit margins and a cash-on-hand safety net.

Who Are the Opportunistic Maximizers?

The problem with such an approach of maximizing everything you do to suck peak revenue out of the pageview is that things can change on a whim. I have seen some of Google's 1 on 1 AdSense optimization advice they sent to a friend of mine. I told my friend that the optimization advise was at best short-term opportunism that would end up crushing them in the long run if they actually implemented it.

Google doesn't care if following their advice torches your site if it makes them a bit more money, because ultimately there is another person standing in line waiting to follow.

My friend is lucky that they realized my advice was more trustworthy than the advice they were getting direct from Google. If they listened to Google back then their business might be destroyed today.

Google likes to position SEOs as exploiters out for the quick buck, but what honest analysis shows is that it is Google which is pushing the boundaries in terms of:

Google AdSense has a "get rich quick" ad category. That is something you won't find on our website (and one of the reasons we will never put AdSense ads on this site)!

AdSense Heatmaps? Look Out Below!

One of the worst hit sites in the AdSense farm update was WiseGeek. Sure WiseGeek must have had something like a 20% ad clickthrough rate. But with traffic falling 75%, maybe they would have been better off building a cleaner experience with a 5% CTR.

That said, they were simply following Google AdSense best practices:

Collateral Damage

What was the most profitable best practices based approach suddenly falls short. And the results are not always predictable. When Google decided to attack content farms who honestly knew that:

  1. somehow eHow.com would survive
  2. yet somehow Google's "algorithmic" approach would punt 10,000's of smaller websites that have far higher content quality

In advance of the solution I was fairly certain eHow would survive, but what I underestimated was the Google engineers. Or rather the ignorance of same. I simply couldn't imagine such a content farm algorithm going live that missed eHow and decimated the lives of so many independent webmasters.

I guess we can simply view this as an extension of Google's you can have any web you want so long as it is corporate TM policy. I think Brett Tabke said it best in a recent AdSense thread:

When the rules and the enforcements are made up by monopolies in a make believe world - there is no cheating.

The only "cheatings" is when it gets outside the lines of the law. - Brett Tabke

After the farmer update layoffs are already happening. Not only for monolithic useless content mill websites, but even in organizations where the content is pure as the driven snow.

AskTheBuilder is yet another Google AdSense case study. In spite of being a niche player well regarded in his community, Sistrix data shows the site off 87% after the most recent Google update!

Who Caused the Content Farm Problem?

Everyone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it) but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising.

Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The technology to more accurately measure a viewer's exposure to an ad are there, it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by both users and advertisers.

Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it made them what they are now. It's time to get away from it. - po

Smokescreen & Misdirection

I have long highlighted that Google's algorithmic-centric approach was blindingly hypocritical & that I felt the approach was nothing more than a scammy cover though which they can selectively exercise editorial discretion while claiming that "the algorithm did it."

Consider the following scenario:

  • roll in an algorithm that aggressively penalizes tons of borderline edge cases
  • see who complains to the media & has connections with the media
  • fix the rankings of those who you like & those with sway, while ignoring the rest

Can You Trust Google?

All of this leads to the obvious question: can you trust Google?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is you can *always* expect Google to do what is in the best interest of Google. As they plow into field after field (payments, local, mobile, ecommerce, mortgage, credit cards, travel, weddings, fashion, etc.) & use their search dominance to manipulate other markets one would have to be blind to view Google as anything other than a competitor.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But some day they will come. And it is never fun when it happens to you. :(

Until that day may come, if you always follow their best practices, just remember ... ;)

Don't say you were not warned!

Google: The Risk And The Opportunity

It feels like old times.

Google makes a big algorithm change, and all hell breaks loose. Well, some hell, and some jumping for joy, depending on which direction a webmasters rankings went.

As I wrote in Content Farms Vs... at the beginning of last month:

Put it this way. Any algorithm that takes out Demand Media content is going to take out a lot of SEO content, too. SEO copy-writing? What is that? That's what Demand Media do. As I outlined in the first paragraph, a lot of SEO content in not that different, and any algorithm that targets Demand Media's content isn't going to see any difference. Keyword traffic stream identical to title tag? Yep. A couple of hundred words? Yep. SEO format? Yep. Repeats keywords and keyword phrases a few times? Yep. Contributes to the betterment of mankind? Nope. SEO's need to be careful what they wish for....

There were a lot sites following the SEO model of "writing for the keyword term" taken out, not just sites pejoratively labelled as "Content Farms". Ironicly, the pinup example I used, Demand Media, got off lightly.

If you want more detail about what happened, and why, check out Aaron's post Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up, and, if you're a forum member, this very detailed and insightful thread.

Collateral Damage

Some people have suggested there has been much collateral damage. Google have taken out legitimate pages, too.

What happened is that the pages that were taken out shared enough similarity to pages on Content Farms and the algorithm simply did what it was designed to do, although Google have admitted - kinda - that the change still needs work. The ultimate judgement of whether this is a good or a bad thing comes down to what Google's users think. Does Google deliver higher quality results, or doesn't it?

This Guardian article outlines the frustration experienced by many:

I'm pissed because we've worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We're a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I'm the only full timer. We're busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.We were just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After two years of uncertainty, the site finally looks like it will be able to stand on its two feet. But this is a major setback. Anyone got Larry's cell number?

Scroll down, as there's also some very interesting comments in reply to that post.

This is nothing new, of course, It's been going on since search began. The search engines shrug, and send businesses that depend on them flying, whilst elevating others.

What can be done?

Spread The Risk

"Be less reliant on Google!", people say.

It's an easy thing to say, right, but what do you do when Google is the only search game in town? We know any business strategy that relies on an entity over which we have no control is high risk, but what choice is there? Wait for Bing to get their act together? Hope Blekko becomes the next big thing?

None of us can wait.

Sometimes, no matter how closely we stick to Google's Guidelines, Google are going to change the game. Whether it is fair or not is beside the point, it's going to happen.

So, we need to adopt web marketing strategies that help lessen this risk.

The best way to lessen this risk, of course, is to not rely on Google at all. Design your site strategy in such a way as that it wouldn't grind to a halt if you blocked all spiders with a robots.txt. Treat any traffic from Google as a bonus. Such a strategy might involve PPC, brand building, offline advertising, social media, email marketing and the wealth of other channels open to you.

Try the above as an academic exercise. If you had to operate without natural traffic, does your business still stand up? Are you filling a niche with high demand, a demand you can see in other channels? Is there sufficient margin to advertise, or does your entire model rely on free search traffic? Are there viral elements which could be better exploited? Are there social elements which could be better exploited?

Academic exercises aside, we can also look to mitigate risk. Think about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Instead of running one site, run multiple sites using different SEO strategies on each. Aaron talks about running auxiliary sites in the forum.

Try to get pages (articles, advertising) on other sites in your niche. If your site is taken out, at least you still have a presence in your niche, albeit on someone else's site. A kindly webmaster may even agree to repoint links to any new site you devise.

Do you have other ideas that help mitigate the risk? Add them to the comments.

It's An Advantage Being An SEO

Finally, be pleased you're an SEO.

SEO just got that much harder, and the harder it gets, the more your services are required, and the higher the barrier to entry for new publishers. Every day search is getting more complex. At the end of the day, it's an algorithm change. It can be reverse engineered, and new strategies will be adopted to maximize the opportunity it presents.

Until such a time as Google tells us exactly what they want to see, and rewards such content, SEO's will just keep doing what they do. And thank goodness Google isn't entirely transparent. If they were the value of your SEO knowledge as a competitive advantage would plunge. For many of us, wages would quickly follow.

Sure a short-term hit is painful, but the best SEOs will recover.

As they do, other content producers will be left scratching their heads.

Small Business SEO Services

I’m going to tell you why an SEO Book subscription, for many small businesses, is a much better investment than just hiring a firm or a freelancer.

We, as business owners, all realize that we need an online presence and the backbone of that presence is a top-notch SEO campaign.

Whether it be straight out SEO services, or help with Google Places, or help with reputation management, most small business owners realize they need to be “there” but aren’t quite sure how to do that properly.

You’re a small business owner, so am I and so are many members of our community & industry. Our work lives as small business owners are typically filled with parts of various roles like:

  • CEO
  • customer service representative
  • accountant
  • IT manager
  • marketing manager
  • janitor

The problem is that SEO can be an abstract thing or idea for small business owners outside of the web marketing industry to grasp, learn, and implement correctly.

This problem leads to small businesses getting taken to the cleaners by either woefully inadequate (and expensive!) SEO firms, competing business models (like YellowPages & YellowBook) selling their version of SEO services due to the significant decrease in revenue from the phonebook model, or just plain snake oil salespeople.

There are many qualified SEO providers out there, tons actually. There's a lot of noise as well and when you don't have a clear understanding of the business it can be hard to discern one from the other.

Finding a Worthy SEO Provider

So if a small business owner is able to carefully avoid those situations and find a reputable SEO firm, chances are that the price for those services will be out of reach or just not economical from an ROI standpoint for some small businesses (unless the firm is hurting for business or it's a new firm starting out).

There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just simple economics. If a service provider can sell their services for 6 or 5 figure contracts consistently, then it doesn’t behoove their business interest to sell services for 4 or 3 figure contracts.

A Better Option

Even if we stipulate that a business can afford to hire a firm to handle their SEO campaign, where it makes sense for both the provider and the buyer, we’d like to present another option.

That option would be an SEO Book subscription :) Compared to hiring an SEO company, your SEO Book subscription:

  • is less expensive, resulting an in much higher ROI for your business
  • is more direct and hands on, you get unbiased feedback from hundreds of SEO professionals
  • gives the owner the ability to learn the ins and outs so they can manage things themselves
  • trains the business owner about the industry and best practices so they can intelligently outsource services themselves if they so choose

SeoBook Subscription Options

There are 2 types of SeoBook subscriptions, with different levels of access. The first option is for access to our (over 100) training modules and our premium SEO tool set. The cost of that option is just $69 per month.

The second option is for access to those same training modules and tools, in addition to our community forums. Our community is the cornerstone of our subscription-based membership service.

Inside the forums you have instant access to the most up-to-date, cutting edge information where you will learn from some of the best minds in SEO.

For the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on the option which includes everything.

How Much Would You Invest in You?

When you started your small business you probably thought (correctly) that it was a good idea to at least have a solid understanding of the key concepts related to your business prior to hiring staff to handle day to day tasks.

You probably learned how to operate and troubleshoot equipment, customer service software, the phone system, the coffee pot :) and so on. You likely know who your target market is and you know what type of message you want to convey via print and web design as well as sales copy.

Those are all things that you had to learn in order to grow your business and for your business to function properly.

You Are Your Business

By investing the time in yourself, and by extension to your business, you were able to confidently hire and train staff as well as put together a traditional marketing campaign with the help of local print vendors and maybe your local web design person.

When it comes to something like SEO, where there is no formal education or “certification” (thank goodness), you might have a tough time hiring something to do something you know very little about.

If you don’t know what works and what doesn’t how will you know if the provider is selling you a bag of smoke versus providing an actual quality service? You won’t know, and with what a good SEO campaign from a reputable provider can cost that can cause significant damage to your business.

You Are No Stranger to Hard Work

Investing time, practicing patience, and being willing to learn will reward you and your business many, many, many times over when it comes to the SEO industry. The fact is many people fail because they are lazy and unwilling to learn in addition to having a poor attitude.

You have probably perservered through that and are running a solid business so why not get even more ahead of your competition, lazy or otherwise.

Breaking Down the Costs

Most SEO campaigns can expect to see results in or around 6 months, so we’ll look at the 12 month costs because you should consider SEO (just like traditional marketing) as an ongoing effort to produce results for your business.

From experience I can tell you that a full-on SEO campaign from an experienced SEO or SEO firm for small businesses will likely start at $5,000 per month here in the states. Probably higher for a firm and that amount can flucuate depending on your needs but anything less than thousands per month is unlikely.

When I say full-on I mean the whole deal:

  • keyword research
  • competitive analysis
  • analytics reviews and implementation for testing, tracking, tweaking
  • site structure
  • on-page SEO (title tags, page copy, and so on)
  • off-page SEO, like link building
  • adjusting tactics based on rankings growth or decline (and competitor watching)

If you are new to the SEO space you may not know what some of that means, but you know its important (or else you wouldn't be reading this). You know that your visibility on the web is probably a crucial component of your small business’s long-term success.

Would you really want to outsource that for what it might cost you for an employee or two, without knowing exactly what it is the provider is/should be doing?

Don’t Pay 17x More Than You Need To!

So even being conservative in my estimate, you are talking about around $60k per year and that probably doesn’t include additional money you may need for getting links to your site via branding and such.

Meanwhile, you could be investing just $3,600 per *year* in yourself and your business while learning from quite a few of the thought leaders in the SEO space. Perhaps not the biggest self-promoters in the space but certainly some of the best minds.

My dad always told me to be very wary of someone constantly telling you they are the best at XYZ, usually they aren’t. The ones who are the best are doing the job everyday and doing it well, not telling YOU how great THEY are.

It’s important to keep in mind that an SEO book subscription is going to give you the tools you need, the training you need, and more importantly the knowledge you need to be successful. Have a question?

Just ask it in the community forums and we’ll answer it. In fact, many people will answer it and you’ll get wide range of tips from folks with loads of experience and success.

Membership Format

Now, the membership doesn’t mean that we’ll execute the plan for you but you’ll have a step by step guide on what to do, how to do it, why you’re doing it, and the tools you need to do it.

Plus, you have 24/7 access to the community forum which has hundreds of members and is quite active at all hours as we have members from all over the world.

But I Can Do it For Le$$....

There’s probably someone out there that will say “hey I can do that and do it well for like $2k a month”...ok, but even at that price point it’s $24k versus $3,600 per year!!

If you know what to do with your campaign you can easily outsource the “grunt” work for much cheaper dollars + become educated in a field that is very important now, and will be for the foreseeable future. I not only write this as an employee of SEO Book, but also as a person who was a customer for about a year before joining the site. During that time I helped get our company website squared away and learned how to automate or outsource many aspects of our business: from content, to promotion, to additional link development. And if you need help with any of that stuff, there is a requests forum where you can work with some of our members.

Heck, let's even say someone would run a full-service SEO campaign for you at the absurdly low price point of $500/mo! (not likely, given that some quality links cost $299 per year each). Even before link development that's still approaching *double* the cost of an SEO Book subscription while giving you insight from only one person versus hundreds, no premium tools or training modules, and no access to the latest information in the field as well as you not learning SEO from independent, unbiased sources.

In our community you can not only find out what is working right now, but you can also find someone who can help you get the job done without paying for the markup associated with high pressure salesmen or large bureaucratic firms where 50 folks are taking home weekly paychecks for the work done by 5 people.

Discounts on SEO-Related Products

Your SEO Book subscription also comes with tons of discounts on everything from link management software, rank checking applications, SEO conferences, Pay Per Click communities like PpcBlog.Com, web directories which can help with getting exposure/links to your site, social media monitoring services, and many more solid services.

There’s literally *thousands* of dollars in discounts available to our members.

Time is Money, Money is Time

The benefit in outsourcing anything is the time saved and/or the low cost. However, there are typically significant costs (and sometimes irreparable harm) associated with outsourcing any important part of your business to unqualified providers.

Without having the knowledge of what it is you are actually hiring for, you cannot be certain what exactly you are paying for.

Save yourself a lot of money and headaches, learn from the best, and beat your competition in the search engines.

When and if the time comes to hire an SEO firm, you will be fully prepared to make the right decision for your small business. What else could you ask for?

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