Archive for November, 2009
Will SEO Ever Be An Exact Science?
Newcomers to the world of Internet marketing might be surprised to hear and SEO Consultant suggesting that SEO isn’t an exact science. So what is it? How does it work? And what will it take to get to the bottom of how it all works?
Well, expert or not, it’s very unlikely that anybody can truly [...]
2010: The Year Information Pollution Takes Off
Google’s relevancy algorithms have largely been driven by taking the “authority” shortcut. Have lots of other domains linking to your site? It must be good. Here is a golden ticket…your site ranks for everything.
That curbed some types of spam (by increasing the sunk cost needed to rank a new site), but it has taken brands only a few years to adjust to that hole in the algorithm. Witness the rise of answer spam, scraper re-purposing spam, social media recycling tools, freelance articles for a nickel spam, machine spun articles that are textually unique, etc etc etc
Increasingly, the biggest role of brand in search publishing is to legitimize stuff which might otherwise seem illegitimate and give them enough scale that it hopefully kicks off enough AdSense revenue that it matters to Google.
Demand Media recently highlighted their business model in Wired magazine:
To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
The article (unlike most eHow articles) is well worth a read, but a quick summary…
- buy up some aged well linked to sites (that were perhaps linked to when it was easier to get links with watered down content and before the web graph was as corrupted by $ as it is today)
- create algorithms to mine their analytics data and Google’s tools to estimate the earnings potential of any piece of content
- pay freelancers crumbs to write write write based on whatever the algorithm spits out
- run the content through a tool like Copyscape to verify it is unique
- pay a reviewer ~ $1 to verify the article is (nearly) legible
- keep refining and optimizing the above components based on feedback from earlier tests
- create sister websites that are heavily cross-linked which host a second page about the highest earning topics
And in opening up their playbook to Wired, Demand Media likely created dozens of additional competitors who will aim to monetize the longtail of search via freelance articles of varying quality. Aol, headed by former Google executive Tim Armstrong, has been talking up a revolutionary media model to the media, which reads exactly like the Demand Media playbook:
The predictions, it says, are based on a wide swath of data AOL collects, from the Web searches people make on its site to the sites visited by subscribers to its Internet services.
The system is designed to track breaking news and trends and identify the best times to write about seasonal events, such as Halloween or Monday Night Football.
Based on these recommendations, the company’s editorial staff, which totals about 500, will assign articles to a network of free-lancers across the country via a new Web site called Seed.com. AOL says it now works with about 3,000 free-lancers, but it is hoping to sharply increase that number through the Web site, which is open to anyone looking to submit a story. To cut costs ahead of its spinoff, AOL recently said it was cutting about a third of its total staff, or 2,500 employees.
If authors are going to get paid for performance on a freelance basis to churn out junk then they may as well spend a few months learning internet marketing, blogging, and Wordpress…if publishing is algorithm driven you don’t really need to work for someone else to make a few Dollars per article. It is VERY easy to beat that, so long as you are willing to wait 3 to 6 months for your payout.
And the process of scaling automated low quality content generation is only going to make existing media channels reliant on search feel more pain. Dollars become dimes. Dimes become pennies. As traditional media companies go bankrupt companies like Demand Media and AOL will buy up the brands and fill the sites with more good content.
This not only will further harm traditional media models, but it will also pollute up the search results so much that…
- it makes it hard to find quality information via search
- private membership sites and paid niche content will become more popular
- Google will either be forced to change their relevancy algorithms or make an example of a big company in the search (g)arbitrage game, or else searchers are going to have an awful experience over the next half-decade or so
I wish there was an Exchange Traded Fund which allowed me to place a bet on information pollution…until Google stops it, the profit potential will be too great for opportunistic “publishers” to ignore. It is a rare sure bet. And it is entirely up to Google to decide how big they want to let the bubble get before they deflate it.
Here is what the content revolution Tim Armstrong speaks of looks like:
Imagine 8 of the top 10 search results for every longtail query looking like THAT. And yet, it is about to become reality.
Those who know the least yell loudest. And Google is colluding with the likes of Demand Media and Aol to ENSURE every idiot has a megaphone. Ignorance is powerful.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth - More Than Just A Broken Links Finder
Posted by Tom_C
There are literally a bazillion SEO tools on the internet (literally!), this post discusses just one such tool; Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Many people in the SEO industry are already aware of this tool but many people I’ve spoken to only treat the tool as a broken link finder. It’s so much more than that.
This post is aimed at those who haven’t heard of it before and those who do use it regularly - there are lots of nifty features that solve all kinds of SEO-problems and hopefully beginners and advanced alike will learn something from this post.
What is Xenu?
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a FREE download (everyone loves free) that runs on all versions of Windows (but not quite on Macs unfortunately). It’s a lightweight download and I’ve never had issues with it crashing or hanging. In a nutshell it’s a site crawler and once you point it at a URL it will crawl around the site and spit out a report at the end. It’s main focus and branding is all about finding broken links on your site (so where you link internally to a 404 error) but I’ve found that I use it to solve a whole host of different SEO-related issues which I will explain below.
Problem - How do I find broken links on my site?
This is the most basic use of Xenu in my opinion, but also the most common use. Simply point the program at the homepage of your site, check ’skip external’ to avoid it crawling the entire web, and set it going!
Click here to view a sample report provided by Xenu for the Distilled site (note that this is a sample report only, not run across the whole site).
You can see that there is a handy section which reports any broken links that it finds, though in this case I’ve chosen a rather poor example since there are no broken links on the homepage of Distilled 
Problem - How do I get a crawl of my site into microsoft Excel?
The answer to this one, as you may have guessed is also Xenu! Simply choose the following menu option once the report is run:
- The status code of all pages crawled
- The type of page crawled
- The title tag of each page crawled
Problem - How do I check the length of my title tags across my whole site?
Looking at the above data sheet - simply filter for html pages and then check the length of the column titled "Title" - this will give you the length of the title tag. Filter for any above 65 and bingo - there’s your to-do list!
Problem - How do I analyse my site’s information architecture?
Yep, you guessed it - Xenu will do this too. This one requires a little more explaining however. Firstly, you see that in the spreadsheet above there is a column for "level" - what this column tells you is the number of links away from the initial link that you entered the crawled page is. So in the example sheet all the pages have a level of 1 since I restricted the crawl to just those pages 1 link away from the homepage.
Of course, the beauty of pivot tables is that I can double click each of those rows and see which pages are contained within each level. This is of course, a pretty basic application of the data. But you see that once you start getting more data you can do more powerful things.
The second application of the very same data is the useful links in/links out column which looks like this:
Taking this data to the next level - here’s a glimpse at what’s possible, an analysis of type of page vs number of internal links shows you that for this site (not the distilled site) the money pages are getting very few internal links compared to top level pages and something is broken in the information architecture:
Problem - How do I find any 302 redirects on my site?
Xenu to the rescue! In order to catch redirects on your site you need to modify one of the settings on the crawl preferences to "treat redirects as errors":
Then, when you run the report and export to excel redirects will no longer get the status code 200 but will get the true status code, be it 301 or 302! Perfect.
Problem - How do I check the indexing of a test version of my site?
Xenu of course! If your test version lies at a public URL such as testsite.distilled.co.uk then you can just point Xenu at that URL. However, if that’s not an option then you can even run Xenu off a local HTML file which is pretty nifty:
Problem - How do I generate an XML sitemap for my site?
Although there are many many ways of generating an XML sitemap for your site, Xenu does this in a quite nice (if not particularly customisable) way. This is perfect for small site owners with limited technical knowledge I think:
Problem - How do I find images missing alt text?
If only Xenu would do such a thing…. Wait, it does! Simply filter your excel download to image files, then the "Title" column is the alt text of the image:
Well that’s just a few of the many many applications of the Xenu tool - hopefully it’s inspired you to go out and give it a try - I know I use it a lot for all kinds of things. I mean, once you get your data into Excel the world is literally your oyster. Mmmmmm data oysters.
But wait! That’s not all - I reached out to Rich Baxter as I know he’s a very knowledgeable and smart SEO and he uses Xenu a lot. I asked him if he had any killer tips and here’s his killer tip. Thanks a lot Rich for getting me this at short notice:
Crawling web directories, looking for errors (By Rich Baxter)
Xenu’s not just a great tool to look inside your own site, it’s also pretty powerful for crawling external resources like directories, particularly if you’re looking for a domain to buy.
Try crawling dmoz.org, being sure to restrict Xenu’s access to “editors.dmoz.org”, but allow the crawler to “check external links”.
Quite quickly you’ll start finding “not found” URL errors from directory entries that might have been forgotten, on domains that may not yet have expired. Just sort by “status” in the crawl results table in Xenu. Here’s one I found earlier. I’m pretty sure that with the right offer via SEDO, the owner of fridgemagnet.org.uk (with its 634 sub domain links) might be interested in selling before the domain expires.
I’ve always found the “Copy URL”, Google cache and Wayback Machine links invaluable on a right mouse click on the results you’re interested in:
As a side note: If you are crawling external resources, try to be a good citizen and crawl slowly. Set your maximum threads to a very low level, so as not to get your IP banned by your target host.
Thanks Rich! Great tips. Let’s get link sleuthing! If anyone has any other creative/useful uses for Xenu please share them in the comments.
In other news, there’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! (If Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010). SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal
You’ve also still got 7 days left to get super-low release pricing on the brand-new SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics six-disk DVD set! Until December 6th, you can get this killer new series for 20% off and Free Shipping anywhere in the world. Hundreds of people have already ordered and supplies are limited, so take advantage while the price is low, and this limited-edition set is still available.
SEOmoz’s First Ever PRO Webinar Dec. 10th: We Need Your Feedback & Suggestions
Posted by randfish
First off, I hope everyone among our US (and expat) readers had a great holiday weekend, filled with tryptophan and football (I know mine was). Second, I’m very excited to announce that SEOmoz PRO is launching our first ever webinar on Thursday Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London/UK). We’ve heard from a number of our members that they’d like to do some live reviewing of strategies and recommendations and get questions tackled in this format. I’ll be running the webinar personally, but I haven’t quite decided on a topic, and that’s one thing I need your help with.
Below is an embedded Google form (they’re pretty spiffy) with three short questions. We’ll use your feedback to help determine the content and format for the webinar, as well as gauge interest level.
We’ll have another blog post in the next few days announcing details (based on your requests + votes), as well as an email to all PRO members with a registration link.
Of course, if you have anything to add in the comments or any recommendations, we’d love to hear from you there, too. If this webinar goes well, we’re certainly planning to make it a monthly event for PRO members, and possibly offer some free webinars to the entire community. A future subject that folks have been asking about is training on the SEOmoz toolset - that’s something we want to do, but we have some changes + additions coming in January, so we’ll get those released first, then follow up.
Thanks for your feedback and happy holiday season!
Preparing For an E-commerce Christmas Bonanza
Christmas is a special time of year for everyone. Children look forward to Santa bringing lots of presents, adults look forward to some time off work and the party season, whilst etailers prepare for their busiest time of year.
According to the latest statistics from Econsultancy, up to 93% of consumers will be doing some of [...]
Whiteboard Friday - Analytics for SEO
Posted by great scott!
Happy belated Thanksgiving my American moz-Comrades, and welcome to Black Whiteboard Friday (and just Friday to everyone else)!
This week we’re looking at analytics. No, not the normal stuff you probably pay attention to, but a few sneaky little metrics that can give you some great SEO insight. Since it’s now officially the "Holidays," I’m not going to reveal too much; rather, I’ll let the video serve as an early gift, ready to be opened! Suffice to say, prepare to start looking at your referral traffic, abandonment rates, browse rates, and more in a whole new light
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Analytics for SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Since it is Black Friday, I want to remind you of some killer deals that are still available for you or your favorite SEO!
There’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! We’ve only got about a dozen passes left, so you should probably hurry. SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal (and if Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010).
You’ve also still got 10 days left to get super-low release pricing on the brand-new SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics six-disk DVD set! Until December 6th, you can get this killer new series for 20% off and Free Shipping anywhere in the world. Hundreds of people have already ordered and supplies are limited, so take advantage while the price is low, and this limited-edition set is still available.
Why Should You Consider Professional SEO Services?
It’s not always an easy to decision to make. Perhaps you’ve got a website that is underperforming or are just starting out and have no clue about the technical aspects of SEO; either way you need help, but where can you get it from?
Well, there’s two things that you can do: 1) go and learn [...]
Just a quick post to announce I am on twitter now: http://twitter.com/BlackHatDomain
This Week in Search for 11/26/09
Posted by Sam Niccolls
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- Google Displaying Site Hierarchies in SERPs:
Google provides yet another reason to have sound site architecture.
- Google Displaying Movie Times in SERPs:
In addition to the many other things Google is testing, movie showtimes are being shown in the SERPs.
- ACC Approves Microsoft Yahoo Deal in Canada & Australia:
After a 40 day review the ACC approved the deal which will allow Bing to power Yahoo search results in Canada & Australia.
- Michael Gray - How Bing & WSJ Could Team Up on Google:
Whether you agree with Gray or not, his post aggregates some of the most relevant articles following Rupert Murdoch’s announcement several weeks ago.
- SEOmoz Advanced Training Series on DVD:
The latest release of the training series has arrived. And if you order the 6-disc DVD set before December 6th you will get 20% off, plus free shipping.
- Avinash Kaushik - Measuring Social Media:
How should you track success on sites like Twitter? In a forward-thinking post on social media analytics Avinash offers several suggestions. On a related note, Econsultancy also has a list of 35 Social Media KPIs worth looking over.
- How Web Analytics Helped the Obama Campaign Win:
Dan Siroker left Google to become the Director of Analytics for the Obama Campaign. In his hour long presentation he shares some amazing statistics & interesting tactics they used to help Obama win the election.
- Cuil Theory Poster:
Licenseplate’s tongue and cheek poster captures the essence of Cuil.
- Link Builders Share Advanced Queries:
You’ve probably used the Advanced Search Operator Guide (it’s a useful resource if you haven’t), but Garrett French’s compilation includes 21 advanced queries used by expert link builders to identify link opportunities.
- 69 Sexy Portfolio Designs:
The designs are not all conversion focused, but Smashing Magazine’s list of 69 portfolio designs has some elegant layouts that’ll provide idea inspiration.
- Google News - Eric Enge Interviews Josh Cohen:
Maile Ohye talked about Google News SEO and best practices a number of months back, but Enge’s interview with Google News’ Senior Business Product Manager offers some useful Google News insights.
- Get Elastic - Increase Average Order Value:
GoDaddy might be the extreme when it comes to upsells during their checkout process, but if you have an e-commerce site, testing the location of your "continue shopping" button on your checkout pages might lead to increases in average order value.
- Online Dating Trends:
How much do looks matter on dating sites? OK Cupid helps answer the question with interesting user behavior data.
- 21 Tools for Spying on Your Competitors:
Bryan Eisenberg’s compilation of competitive analysis tools is a useful one. Although admittedly, if it were my list I might add a few other SEO tools, too.
- Feedburner Integration with Google Analytics:
Google Analytics users now have better campaign tracking and subscriber consumption statistics for their Feedburner feeds.
- Page Load Times & AdWords Quality Score:
Matt Cutts recently talked about how page load times will play an even bigger role in organic search, but ROI Revolution shares a few other reasons to identify and fix long page load times.
- e-Marketer - Cautious Optimism for Holiday Sales:
Good news for e-commerce sites from e-marker. The holiday season could yield big online wins for retailers.
- Google Analytics API - Development Growth Continues:
Juice Analytics’ flow visualization is yet another creative extension of the rapidly growing Google Analytics API.
- Linkbait - Mint Aggregates Finance Related Twitter Streams:
Mint has great design and their blog has it’s fair share of great linkbait, but their new Twitter aggregation is also intriguing.
- Luna Metrics - GA Plugin for Copying Goals & Filters Across Multiple Profiles:
If you’re a GA user and you have to set up 20 profiles with the exact same goals, the Luna Metrics plugin is a great time saver.
Top YOUmoz entries:
Can a Website Recover from Toxic Links?
If you have added toxic links to your site, deliberately or inadvertently, the consequences can be dire. Search engines may dock you numerous rankings across the board and could even have you removed entirely; this is the very definition of an SEO disaster.
So if you have these links coming into your site and it is [...]