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Dear Google: Big Brands Aren’t Enough

Posted by Dr. Pete

Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google’s argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?

Unraveling Search Intent

One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It’s nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.

Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":

1. "itunes"
2. "facebook"
3. "youtube"
4. "apple"
5. "best buy"
6. "apple store"
7. "google"
8. "craigslist"
9. "itunes download"

Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn’t get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don’t succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there’s also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.

Bing Search Funnel

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:

Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:

1. "bestbuy"
2. "ebay"
3. "ipod"
4. "dell"
5. "appleipod"
6. "circuitcity"
7. "apple vacations"
8. "apple.com"
9. "sony"
10. "target"

Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.

The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown’s Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn’t want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

What Do We Want?

Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there’s a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it’s obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.

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10-Minute Missing Page Audit

Posted by Dr. Pete

Some of you know that I spend a lot of time behind the scenes here on Pro Q&A. One of the challenges of Q&A is that we often have to tackle complex problems in a very short amount of time – we might have 10-15 minutes to solve an issue like "Why isn’t my page showing up on Google?" with no access to internal data, server-side code, etc.

Of course, I’d never suggest you try to solve your own SEO problems in just 10 minutes, but it’s amazing what you can do when you’re forced to really make your time count. I’d like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a "missing" page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including:

• Finding out why a page isn’t getting indexed
• Discovering why a page isn’t ranking
• Determining if a page has been penalized
• Spotting duplicate content problems

I’ll break the 10 minutes down, minute by minute (give or take). The mini-clock on each item shows you the elapsed time, for real-time drama.

 0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexed

Always start at the beginning – is your page really missing? Although it sometimes gets a bad rap for accuracy (mainly, the total page counts), Google’s site: command is still the best tool for the job. It’s great for deep dives, since you can combine it with keyword searches, "keyword" searches (exact match), and other operators (intitle:, inurl:, etc.). Of course, the most basic format is just:

For this particular job, always use the root domain. You never know when Google is indexing multiple sub-domains (or the wrong sub-domain), and that information could come in handy later. Of course, for now you just want to see that Google knows you exist.

 0:30-1:00 – Confirm the page is not indexed

Assuming Google knows your site exists, it’s time to check the specific page in question. You can enter a full path behind the site: command or use a combination of site: and inurl:

If the page doesn’t seem to be on Google’s radar, narrow down the problem by testing out just "/folder" and see if anything on the same level is being indexed. If the page isn’t being indexed at all, you can skip the next step.

 1:00-1:30 – Confirm the page is not ranking

If the page is being indexed but you can’t seem to find it in the SERPs, pull out a snippet of the TITLE tag and do an exact-match search (in quotes) on Google. If you still can’t find it, combine a site:example.com with your page TITLE or a portion of it. If the page is indexed but not ranking, you can probably skip the next couple of steps (jump to the 4:00 mark).

 1:30-2:00 – Check for bad Robots.txt

For now, let’s assume your site is being partially indexed, but the page in question is missing from the index. Although bad Robots.txt files are, thankfully, getting rarer, it’s still worth taking a quick peek to make sure you’re not accidentally blocking search bots. Luckily, the file is almost always at:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

What you’re looking for is source code that looks something like this:

It could either be a directive blocking all user agents, or just one, like Googlebot. Likewise, check for any directives that disallow the specific folder or page in question.

 2:00-2:30 – Check for META Noindex

Another accidental blocking problem can occur with a bad META Noindex directive. In the header of the HTML source code (between <head> and </head>), you’re looking for something like this:

Although it might seem odd for someone to block a page they clearly want indexed, bad META tags and Rel=Canonical (see below) can easily be created by a bad CMS set-up.

 2:30-3:00 – Check for bad Rel=Canonical

This one’s a bit trickier. The Rel=Canonical tag is, by itself, often a good thing, helping to effectively canonicalize pages and remove duplicate content. The tag itself looks like this:

The problem comes when you canonicalize too narrowly. Let’s say for example, that every page on your site had a canonical tag with the URL "www.example.com" – Google would take that as an instruction to collapse your entire search index down to just ONE page.

Why would you do this? You probably wouldn’t, on purpose, but it’s easy for a bad CMS or plug-in to go wrong. Even if it’s not sitewide, it’s easy to canonicalize too narrowly and knock out important pages. This is a problem that seems to be on the rise.

 3:00-4:00 – Check for bad header/redirects

In some cases, a page may be returning a bad header, error code (404, for example) or poorly structured redirect (301/302) that’s preventing proper indexation. You’ll need a header checker for this – there are plenty of free ones online (try HTTP Web-Sniffer). You’re looking for a "200 OK" status code. If you receive a string of redirects, a 404, or any error code (4xx or 5xx series), you could have a problem. If you get a redirect (301 or 302), you’re sending the "missing" page to another page. Turns out, it’s not really missing at all.

 4:00-5:00 – Check for cross-site duplication

There are basically two potential buckets of duplicate content – duplicate pages within your site and duplicates between sites. The latter may happen due to sharing content with your own properties, legally repurposing contents (like an affiliate marketer might do), or flat-out scraping. The problem is that, once Google detects these duplicates, it’s probably going to pick one and ignore the rest.

If you suspect that content from your "missing" page has been either taken from another site or taken by another site, grab a unique-sounding sentence, and Google it with quotes (to do an exact match). If another site pops up, your page may have been flagged as a duplicate.

 5:00-7:00 – Check for internal duplication

Internal duplication usually happens when Google crawls multiple URL variations for the same page, such as CGI parameters in the URL. If Google reaches the same page by two URL paths, it sees two separate pages, and one of them is probably going to get ignored. Sometimes, that’s fine, but other times, Google ignores the wrong one.

For internal duplication, use a focused site: query with some unique title keywords from the page (again, in quotes), either stand-alone or using intitle:. URL-driven duplicates naturally have duplicate titles and META data, so the page title is one of the easiest places to find it. If you see either the same page pop up multiple times with different URLs, or one or two pages followed by this:

…then it’s entirely possible that your missing page was filtered out due to internal duplication.

 7:00-8:00 – Review anchor text quality

These last two are a bit tougher and more subjective, but I want to give a few quick tips for where to start if you suspect a page-specific penalty or devaluation. One pretty easy to spot problem is when you have a pattern of suspicious anchor text – usually, an uncommon keyword combination that dominates your inbound links. This could come from a very aggressive (and often low-quality) link-building campaign or from something like a widget that’s dominating your link profile.

Open Site Explorer allows you to pretty easily look at your anchor text in broad strokes. Just enter your URL, click on Anchor Text Distributions (the 4th tab), and select Phrases:

What you’re looking for is a pattern of unnatural repetition. Some repetition is fine – you’re naturally going to have anchor text to your domain name keywords and your exact brand name, for example. Let’s say, though, that 70% of our links pointing back to SEOmoz had the anchor text "Danny Dover Is Awesome." That would be unnatural. If Google thinks this is a sign of manipulative link building, you may see that target page penalized.

 8:00-10:00 – Review link profile quality

Link profile quality can be very subjective, and it’s not a task that you can do justice to in two minutes, but if you do have a penalty in play, it’s sometimes easy to spot some shady links quickly. Again, I’m going to use Open Site Explorer, and I’m going to select the following options: Followed + 301, External Pages Only, All Pages on The Root Domain:

You can export the links to Excel if you want to (great for deep analysis), but for now, just spot-check. If there’s something fishy on the first couple of pages, odds are pretty good that the weaker links are a mess. Click through to a few pages, looking out for issues such as:

• Suspicious anchor text (irrelevant, spammy, etc.)
• Sites with wildly irrelevant topics
• Links embedded in an obviously paid or exchanged block
• Links that are part of a multi-link page footer
• Advertising links that are followed (and shouldn’t be)

Also, look for any over-reliance on one kind of low-quality link (blog comments, article marketing, etc.). Although a full link-profile analysis can take hours, it’s often surprisingly easy to spot spammy link-building in just a few minutes. If you can spot it that fast, chances are pretty good that Google can, too.

(10:00) – Time’s Up

Ten minutes may not seem like much (it may have taken you that long just to read this post), but once you put a process in place, you can learn a lot about a site in just a few minutes. Of course, finding a problem and solving it are two entirely different things, but I hope this at least gives you the beginning of a process to try out yourself and refine for your own SEO issues.

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Confessions of A Conference Stalker

Posted by Dr. Pete

It’s officially August, and that means that the SEOmoz PRO Seminar is less than a month away! For a group of people so dedicated to the pursuit of living and working online, it’s amazing how important conferences are to the search marketing community (and to your career, if you’re a part of this community). That can be tough, since so many of us started working on the web specifically to AVOID human contact. Even if you work for a big company, you may only see people when your manager opens the cage door to throw in some Skittles and Red Bull. If you’re not sure how to relate to your fellow humans in person, then this post is for you.

White-hat Stalking

For legal reasons, let me start by making one thing perfectly clear. This post is NOT about Jerry-Springer, whose-my-baby’s-daddy, the-judge-says-you-can’t-get-within-500-feet-of-me stalking. The purpose of any conference, beyond the learning, is to meet new people – all I want to do is give you the tools to make that a little easier. Attending your first couple of conferences can feel a bit like a job interview, so why not prepare the same way?

Know People’s Real Names

Here’s a hint: "Randfish" and "Oilman" are not written on anyone’s birth certificate. While it’s true that most people in our industry won’t get bent out of shape if you call them by their handle, knowing their real names shows, bare minimum, that you’ve done your homework and have some clue about what’s going on out there. Oh, and don’t make the mistake of referring to Rand as "Randy" – that’s how I ended up with only one good eye.

Know People’s Real Faces

I don’t mean to pick on anyone, but it may surprise you to know that you will never see any of the following faces at a conference:

Now, I know you’re a savvy audience, and I don’t have to explain what an avatar is, but just because you know someone uses an avatar doesn’t mean you have any idea what they actually look like. This is where I’ll sound like a stalker, but frankly, you can’t introduce yourself to someone if you don’t recognize them. So, click on a few profiles, check out Facebook pics, and click around the friend’s lists of a few SEOs over on DailyBooth.

Know What People Do

If you walk up to an "A-lister" and, in the first 10 seconds, it’s clear that you only want to meet them because you heard they’re an A-lister and think that meeting them will benefit you somehow, don’t be surprised if you get the cold shoulder. On the other hand, almost everyone likes to talk about what they do. Be informed, know the kind of work people do, and most of all: try to meet the people who you sincerely want to meet. Don’t just shake hands and kiss babies because you think it will sell you a consulting gig.

Announce Yourself Early

The easiest way to meet people at a conference is if they know to look for you before you even arrive. How do you pull that off? Easy – tell them. In our industry, Twitter is a great place to announce yourself, and it can be as simple as this:

Bam! – conversation started. Odds are, if your online networking is any good at all, someone will notice, and you’ll have a few friendly faces to look out for before you even leave the house. Better yet, arrange to meet up for a pre-conference drink or dinner if you’re coming in early.

Keep One Eye on Twitter

Once you’re at the conference, always keep one eye on Twitter and monitor the hash-tag, if there is one. That way you’ll know where to be, who will be there, and most importantly, who’s buying the drinks. For example:

Ok, Will never actually said that, although I like to imagine that he would. Actually, he’s English, so he probably would say "pissed" instead of "smashed," as well as whatever word British people use in place of "totally." Of course, don’t just show up at other people’s semi-private events, but Twitter can be a great source for finding people you’d like to meet but keep missing.

Let Us Know You’re Coming

There’s no time like the present. If you’re a regular Moz reader or even just a comment stalker and are coming to the SEOmoz PRO training seminar, leave a comment and let us know. Don’t be afraid to say "hi" in person – I’ll be there and, sadly, that picture is really me, not some kind of Japanese cartoon character or CGI movie monster.

If you haven’t signed up for the PRO seminar yet, it’s not too late. It’s just $649 for SEOmoz PRO members. That not only buys you 2 days (August 30th and 31st) of amazing content, but the networking opportunities are built right in. Rand will probably break-dance or do a puppet show or something. You won’t know unless you show up!

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7 Types of SEO Evidence

Posted by Dr. Pete

We’ve had a lot of discussions recently about SEO as a Science. Unfortunately, these discussions sometimes devolve into arguments over semantics or which approach is the "best" in all situations. I’d like to step back for a few moments today and talk about the wider world of SEO evidence. While not all of these types of evidence are "science" in the technical sense, they are all important to our overall understanding. We need to use the best pieces of all of them if we ever hope to develop a mature science of SEO.

The Fundamental Assumption

All science rests on a fundamental assumption, long before any hypothesis is proposed or tested. The fundamental assumption is that the universe is orderly and follows rules, and that through observation and experimentation we can determine those rules. Without an orderly universe, science would be impossible (as would existence, most likely). A related assumption is that these rules are relatively static – if they change, they change very slowly. Our view of the universe may change dramatically, resulting in paradigm shifts, but the underlying rules remain roughly the same.

The advantage we have as SEOs is that we know, for an absolute fact, that our universe is orderly. Like Neo, we have seen The Matrix. The Algorithm consists of lines of code written by humans and running on servers.

The disadvantage for SEO science is that the rules governing our universe are NOT static. The algorithm changes constantly – as often as 400 times per year. This means that any observation, any data, and even any controlled experiment could turn out to be irrelevant. The facts we built our SEO practices on 5 or 10 years ago are not always valid today.

(1) Anecdotal Evidence

All science begins with observation. In SEO, we make changes to sites every day and measure what happens. When rankings rise and fall, we naturally try to figure out why and to tie those changes to something we did in the past. Although it isn’t "science" in the technical sense, the evidence of our own experience is very important. Without observing the universe and creating stories to explain it, we would never learn anything from those experiences.

PROS – Anecdotal evidence is easy to collect and it’s the most abundant form of evidence any of us have. It’s the building block for just about any form of scientific inquiry.

CONS – Our own experiences are easily affected by our own biases. Also, no single experience can ever tell the whole story. Anecdotal evidence is just a starting point.

(2) Prophetic Evidence

SEOs have a unique type of available evidence. Every once in a while, a prophet will descend from the Mountain Top (or Mountain View), shave his head, and speak the words of the Google Gods. Whether or not we choose to believe these prophets, the fact remains that there are people who have seen and written the Algorithm, and those people have access to facts that the rest of us don’t. Their statements (and our ability to critically reconcile those statements) are an important part of the overall puzzle.

PROS – The prophets are as close to objective reality as we’re ever going to get. They have direct insight into the algorithm.

CONS – The prophets don’t have a vested interest in telling us the whole truth. Their messages can be cryptic and even misleading.

(3) Secondhand Evidence

When you hear "secondhand" evidence, you may naturally think of the extreme examples, like hearsay and urban legends:

My cousin’s neighbor’s stylist said that she once changed all of her META tags to "sex poker sex poker sex" and her site immediately jumped to #1 on Google!

To be fair, though, secondhand evidence also includes the legitimate science that came before us and the experiences of our peers. If we were forced to confirm and replicate every single conclusion for ourselves, we would never make any progress. Ultimately, we build on the reliable conclusions of other experts, past and present.

PROS – Secondhand evidence is the foundation for scientific progress.

CONS – Sometimes, experts are wrong, and you have to learn how to tell the difference, especially in a field as young as SEO.

(4) Experimental – "The Wild"

Experimentation is the heart of Capital-S Science. The most basic experiments happen something like this:

• You form a hypothesis ("Adding keywords to my title tag will improve rankings").
• You make a change to test that hypothesis.
• You measure the outcome and find out if you were right.

Most SEO experimentation, by its nature, occurs in the "wild". We have to put our sites out in the world, and we often have to use existing sites that are already complicated and changing.

PROS – By directly forming and testing a hypothesis, we can start to determine causality. We can also repeat the process, helping to validate what we’ve learned.

CONS – Using existing sites in the wild introduces a lot of extra noise. Often, our sites have to keep changing (even during the experiment), and Google is always changing. There’s also a fair amount of risk – if we change our bread-and-butter sites to test SEO theories, mistakes can be costly.

(5) Experimental – Controlled

This is the classic SEO experiment, where we register one or more new domain names and build sites from the ground up. We can even introduce a control group, by building both sites up to Step X and then only changing one of the sites after that point. Even then, it might be best to call these experiments "semi-controlled," since the Google algorithm can still change and we can’t always control outside influences (like someone accidentally linking to one of the sites).

PROS – This approach is about the best we can do, in terms of control, and it separates out a lot of confounding factors.

CONS – The artificial sites we set up in these experiments (often using nonsense words) aren’t always representative of real, complex sites. In addition, these experiments are usually conducted on a sample of just one or very few sites, to save time and money. Statistical significance can be very difficult to achieve.

(6) Correlational Evidence

Sometimes, either we can’t separate out the variables involved in a complex situation (like the 200+ factors Google uses in its ranking model) or direct experimentation would be impossible or unethical. For example, let’s say you want to understand how smoking affects mortality. You can’t take 1000 5-year-olds, force them to smoke for 70 years, and compare them to 1000 non-smoking 5-year-olds. In these cases, you take a very large data set and look at the correlations. In other words, if I look at 1000 smokers and 1000 non-smokers, how likely is each group to die at a certain age? Correlation can help you understood how changes in X (smoking, in this case) co-occur with changes in Y (mortality).

PROS – Correlation can help us mathematically find relationships when direct experimentation is impossible or impractical. These techniques can also help model complex situations where multiple variables are affecting the same outcome.

CONS – Correlation does not imply causation. We don’t know if changes in X cause changes in Y or if they just happen to co-occur (maybe even due to a Factor Z affecting them both).

(7) Large-scale Simulation

If we can collect enough data, we can build a model of the universe and test hypotheses against that model. Now that large-scale indexes are being built to mimic Google (including our own Linkscape and indexes like Majestic), it only stands to reason that we’ll eventually be able to run experiments directly against these models. Although the conclusions we draw from these simulations are only as good as the models themselves, simulation data can help us both improve models and conduct something closer to a laboratory test than is usually possible in SEO.

PROS – Simulations can be controlled. Unlike Google, we know whether we’ve changed the model or not. Experiments can also be run very quickly and on a very large-scale.

CONS – The result of any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and our models are still in their infancy.

Which One Is The Best?

Any type of evidence, including controlled experimentation, has limits. In a field like SEO, where the Google algorithm is constantly changing, relying too much on any one type of evidence can either stall progress or lead us to bad conclusions (or, in some cases, both). Understanding every available source of evidence not only helps us paint a broader, more comprehensive picture, but it also helps us cross-test our hypotheses and prevent mistakes. SEO science is a young and constantly changing field, and, at least for now, SEO scientists will need to adapt quickly.

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Matt Cutts Movie Marathon

Posted by Dr. Pete

This post is the culmination of two of my lifelong dreams: (1) To spend an entire day on YouTube and call it "work", and (2) To Photoshop Matt Cutts’ face on cartoon food. Early in 2009, Matt Cutts, Google’s most visible anti-spam engineer, began releasing a series of short Webmaster Help videos. You’ve probably seen some of these videos, but what you may not know is that there are currently over 200 of them, with more than 70 posted in 2010 alone.

From time to time, I’ve been amazed at the details that slip out during these videos, many of which don’t get much play in the blogosphere. So, I decided to watch all of the 2010 videos and report back on what I learned. This post contains my Top 10 picks along with a few interesting tidbits and one SHOCKING CONSPIRACY.

Obligatory Disclaimers

Let’s get this out of the way, as Matt seems to be a lightning rod for controversy. I’m a nice guy, but if you don’t read this section, don’t expect me to reply to your comments.

I don’t speak for Matt

Other than having played a couple of hands of Search Spam with Matt over the years (I think we’re 1-and-1), I don’t know him and I’m not trying to put words in his mouth. I’ve used the original video titles, for reference, but the rest is paraphrased. I strongly encourage you to watch the originals.

Don’t believe everything you hear

Matt, like everyone, has vested interests, and Google doesn’t have any motivation to tell us every detail about how the algorithm works.

Don’t disbelieve everything, either

I don’t think Matt stays up nights scheming about how to deceive SEOs. I think he’s a smart, decent guy who cares about search quality.

My Top 10 Picks

One quick note, before I reveal my picks (counting down from 10 to 1). If you want to get Matt to answer your questions, it apparently helps to have a cool-sounding name, like "Magico" or "Youser". From now on, I will have my Muppet Intern Yoozer submit all of my help questions.

10. Should I spend time on meta keywords tags? (Apr 19)

Matt says: "I wouldn’t spend even 0 minutes on it, personally".

I know most of you know this, but it’s good to hear it from the source. Google does not use the keywords meta tag for ranking. Meta description still has value for other reasons (Watch the video - 1:21).

9. How does URL structure affect PageRank (Apr 6)

Matt says: "Google doesn’t worry so much about how deep a set of directories is."

This post raises an important distinction – URL structure is not link structure. We get this confusion frequently in Q&A. Let’s say you have a URL like this:

http://www.example.com/year/month/day/topic/blog-post-title

That page isn’t 5 levels deep, just because it’s 5 /s behind the root domain in the URL. The depth of the page is determined by your internal architecture and link structure. URL length may affect the power of keywords in the URL and the click-through of the URL, but the crawlers don’t really care when it comes to finding your pages. What matters is if this page is one hop from the home-page or 10 hops away (Watch the video - 2:04).

Note: SEOmoz correlation data has shown that deeper folder structure may correlate with worse rankings. Deep folder structures can be an indication of other issues, including information architecture problems.

8. Can I make sure Google always uses my meta description tags? (Mar 24)

Matt says: "The short answer is ‘no’."

I hear this complaint a lot. Google will sometimes rewrite its own snippets for relevance. You can block the ODP and you can write relevant, unique meta descriptions, but you can’t completely control what Google does (Watch the video - 1:52).

7. Can having dofollow comments on my blog affect its reputation? (Feb 22)

This is an interesting two-parter. First off, outbound links to spammy sites can have a negative impact on your reputation. Manage your outbound links and nofollow if you have to. Individual, inbound spammy links will typically not harm you, on the other hand, because they’re beyond your control (although, in my experience, a pattern of inbound spammy links can be a different story). Matt has some great comments at the end about the value of commenting on dofollow blogs (Watch the video - 2:35).

6. Is cross-linking websites bad? (Jan 25)

Matt says: "I would ask yourself: are these websites really related in any kind of sense?"

When Matt wants to read cartoons, links to auto insurance and coffee tables make him sad. Cross-linking 3 sites probably isn’t a big deal, but 30 or 300 could likely get you into trouble. Relevance is the key, and footer cross-links are often low-value (Watch the video - 2:00).

5. How can I get Google to index more of my Sitemap URLS? (Mar 23)

Matt says: "I wouldn’t get hung up on just how many pages have been indexed…"

We hear this one from frustrated webmasters every day. Google does not guarantee that pages in your XML sitemap will be indexed. Indexation has a lot to do with your authority and trust – an authoritative site will get more love from the crawlers, plain and simple (Watch the video - 1:31). Check out Rand’s recent post diving deeper into Matt’s comments on the indexation cap.

4. Will changing hosts cause any SEO concerns? (Feb 9)

Matt says: "Most people can switch their IP address and never have any issue whatsoever."

This is a common fear that is usually unfounded. As long as your domain name and hosting country stay the same, switching from one reliable host to another should have no SEO impact. Matt gives a nice briefing on how to change DNS servers and set your TTL that’s worth watching (Watch the video - 1:53).

Note: Although I implied this in the recap, it deserves repeating. If you’re changing your domain name and/or hosting country, that can definitely affect your ranking and is a much more complex issue. Consider the risks and plan accordingly, in those cases.

3. Is Google Analytics data a factor in a page’s ranking? (Feb 2)

Matt says: "I promise you, my team will never ask the analytics team to use their data."

I don’t think you’ll hear a more direct answer from Matt than that. Conspiracy theories abound, but there are 3 separate videos in 2010 where Matt states that the quality team does not use Google Analytics data. Of course, that doesn’t mean that user metrics (click-through rate, etc.) aren’t a factor, but these are more likely coming from other sources, such as SERP tracking (Watch the video - 1:17).

2. Can you give us an update on rankings for long-tail searches? (May 30)

This is a discussion of the so-called "Mayday" update. Matt clearly states that Mayday is a deliberate, algorithmic change to improve the quality of long-tail searches, and it is not temporary. It is not related to Caffeine, although the roll-out timeline overlaps somewhat (Watch the video - 2:39).

1. Should I be obsessing about load times? (May 5)

Matt says: "We have considered in 2010 using page speed…"

There are a couple of important points here. First, Google hadn’t even finalized the decision to use page speed as a ranking factor until this spring*. Second, page speed is just one of over 200 ranking factors. All else being equal, a fast site is good for users and good for search, but an occasional server glitch isn’t going to kill your rankings. If you can speed up your site with a few simple changes, though, why not do it (Watch the video - 2:28)?

*Edit: As Lindsay points out below, Matt’s April 9th blog post does suggest that page speed was incorporated as a ranking factor. One of the issues with the dates on the videos is that they’re often recorded a bit before they’re released. On the May 5th video, Matt suggests that Google hadn’t made a final decision on using page speed, but the reality is that that decision was probably made in March or April.

Honorable Mentions

3. How many bots does Google have? (Feb 30)

This is a nice review of what bots/spiders actually are. They aren’t real robots that come knocking on your door. It’s a good, short primer for new SEOs (Watch the video - 1:30).

2. State of the Index 2009 (Jan 20)

This is a long one, and it’s slightly out of date, but it’s a good review of some of what happened in 2009. It has a solid explanation of rel=canonical, as well as the parameter blocking and fetch as Googlebot features in Webmaster Tools. It ends with a brief explanation of what Caffeine is all about (Watch the video - 25:59).

1. How many search algorithm changes were made in 2009? (Apr 22)

Google makes a change to the algorithm on the order of ONCE PER DAY. These changes may be batched and rolled out in chunks, but another video confirmed a number of roughly 400 algorithm changes in 2009. If you think May-Day and Caffeine are the only things that have happened in 2010, think again. Google is constantly evolving. This video also includes a statement you don’t hear from Matt every day – Good content is necessary, but not sufficient (Watch the video - 1:53).

The Shocking Conspiracy

Of course, it wouldn’t be a post about Matt Cutts without a conspiracy. If you watch the 2010 videos, you’ll see a shocking transformation, where Matt goes from having hair to no hair back to hair again almost instantaneously. I’ve graphed this phenomenon below:

Matt claims this has something to do with the timing of the videos and filming them in batches, blah blah blah, but those of us who are savvy are forced to reach one of two conclusions:

1. Google has discovered the secret of re-growing hair and refuses to share it.
2. Matt is, as I’ve often suspected, a cybernetic extension of the Google algorithm.

So, there you have it. My Top 10 picks of 2010 (so far), a few highlight reels, and one shocking conspiracy, as promised. By the way, if you’re a beginner or are interested in general SEO tips like these, make sure to check out our completely revised, free Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

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A Natural Link Love Story

Posted by Dr. Pete

Low-quality links are like one-night stands – they’re easy to find and may be fun for a while, but you can’t expect to build anything lasting out of them. Real link-love takes a long-term view and a commitment that too many website owners seem unwilling to make.

I want to tell you a story to try to convince you that building strong, natural links is worth the effort. This is a story from my own blog. I’m not trying to be egotistical, but I want you to understand that this isn’t a story about how yet another post on SEOmoz’s 60,000+ subscriber blog went hot. This is something I made happen on a small blog with a niche audience, and I think anyone is capable of similar success.

How We First Met

It was late 2008, and I was struggling to find some focus for my consulting business and overall marketing strategy. I had a usability blog that was slowly gaining steam, averaging about 60 unique visitors/day and a couple-hundred subscribers, but traffic peaked when I posted and languished the rest of the month. Search-engine traffic was a trickle at best.

I started thinking hard about my process and how I could better package it. Over a month or so, I took some of my core experiences, combined them with industry best practices and came up with a 25-point usability checklist to use for new clients. This was so well-received by clients and peers that I started thinking about turning it into a blog post and free download. I was worried at first – was I giving away too much? I finally decided I needed to take a few marketing risks, so I bit the bullet and released my checklist on February 10, 2009.

Love at First Sight?

Hindsight is 20/20, but I want you to understand that this was hardly a movie love story. My post didn’t hit the home-page of Digg, crashing my servers in fiery glory. This isn’t a story about how I got a ton of traffic on one magical day – it’s about how natural linking has provided me with over a year of traffic and is still going strong.

Here’s a graph of monthly traffic to this blog post since its launch in February 2009:

More than a year after writing it, the post still averages over 100 unique views per day. As of April, it’s driven a total of more than 56,000 unique views.

The Link Love Grows

This is more than just a story about traffic. This single blog post has acquired almost 800 inbound links (according to Yahoo! Site Explorer), including a few heavy hitters like Smashing Magazine, Search Engine Journal, and Occam’s Razor. The post was a 2010 SEMMYs finalist and was mentioned in Avinash Kaushik’s latest book, "Web Analytics 2.0" (p. 171, if you have a copy ).

So, have these links translated into SEO value? Absolutely. To date, search-engine traffic has driven 9,632 visits to this page from 2,563 keyword variations. It’s also done wonders for my ranking – here are just a few examples from SEOmoz’s RankTracker tool:

It’s not shocking that this post might get me the top spot for "website usability checklist", but it has also propelled my overall site to the #7 spot for "website usability", a much more competitive query (Jakob Nielsen holds the top spot).

Some Relationship Advice

Of course, I don’t want this story to be all about me. My goal is to show you that building natural links not only has real business value, but that it’s achievable even for smaller sites in niche industries. This is my advice to you for achieving lasting link-love:

(1) Don’t Take Yourself for Granted

A while back, I heard George Wright speak about how he came up with the idea for the "Will It Blend?" videos. The short version is that he was touring the production facility when he came across a bunch of QA engineers running crazy things through Blendtec blenders. He was amazed by what he saw, but they took it for granted (blending two-by-fours was their job, after all). I love this story, because it’s so applicable to any business. There’s something about your product or service that is amazing, but because you see it every day, you take it for granted. Put down your mission statement and PowerPoint slides and see your product through your customers’ eyes. If you can’t, go find a fresh perspective.

You have a story worth telling, even if you don’t know it. If you think your industry is too "boring" for link-bait, then you’re not trying hard enough. As my Dad likes to say, only boring people get bored.

(2) Be Careful Who You Love

Low-quality links are attractive because they seem easy, but are they really? Let’s look at some hypothetical times to build one link based on common tactics:

• Directory Submissions – 15-30 minutes
• Article Marketing – 15-60 minutes
• Email Link Requests – 60-90 minutes

You might balk at that last one – finding and emailing one prospect should only take a couple of minutes, right? Ok, but what’s your conversion rate on those emails, maybe 1-2%? Let’s say it takes you 1 minute/email – you’re talking about 50-100 minutes to get one link back (I rounded down to be generous).

So, what would it take to build 800 links, even low-quality ones? At a very generous estimate of 15 minutes/link, you’re talking about 200 hours of work. Even counting research and testing on my target audience, I’d estimate that my checklist blog post took about 40 hours. My last e-book took 30 hours to research, write, and do layout. Do low-quality links still seem like a bargain?

(3) Natural Link-Love Is Real

Low-quality links are superficial. What you get in return for them is a tiny bit of SEO value, driving people to content that usually isn’t strong enough to get any love on its own. Building strong content that attracts natural links does more than build SEO value. It builds a real audience and actual, in-person relationships.

In 2010, I’ve calculated that roughly 65% of my revenue can be traced back to either blogging or social media. Great content gets the attention of like-minded people and builds your brand. It almost magically makes every piece of content that comes after it stronger.

The flipside of this equation is that it takes real relationships to drive natural links. Take 50% of the time you spend building low-quality links and spend it participating – get to know the communities, blogs, and linkerati in your industry niche. Give back to those communities, and when the time comes that you have something really outstanding to share, you’ll already have an audience for it.

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Link Profiling with Open Site Explorer

Posted by Dr. Pete

We all know that links are good for SEO and good links are even better, but what does a “good” link profile really look like? It’s easy for even an average website to have hundreds of back-links, and sorting through them to get a sense of the overall quality is often more art than science. It’s also easy to get caught up in the outliers. Will 1 great link or 1 spammy link tip the balance? Probably not, but it’s easy to get distracted by those exceptions when you’re filtering through hundreds or thousands of links.

Here on SEOmoz, we’ve tried to distill (and by "we" I mean a bunch of other people who are smarter than me) the idea of link profile quality into metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority. These are incredibly useful concepts, but now we’re on the opposite extreme – just one number to represent something very complex. The problem is, we really don’t have much in between, a way to understand the quality of our link profile at a glance.

Link Profiling: The Experiment

This blog post really began when I wondered whether it would be possible to take our existing Moz metrics and chart what a link profile looks like. I went through a number of variations (subjecting Ben and Nick to harrowing emails loaded with dozens of graphs), until I finally landed on a process using Open Site Explorer. I’m going to outline that process, give a few examples, and then provide you a link to an Excel spreadsheet to download, so that you can play around with the idea yourself.

The basic process looks something like this:

1. Enter a site into Open Site Explorer (OSE)
2. Select “Show [Followed + 301]”
3. Select “from [External Pages Only]”
4. Select “to [All Pages on the Root Domain]”
5. Export results to CSV/Excel
6. Calculate the max Page Authority (PA) for each domain
7. Sort max PA into buckets: 1-10, 11-20, etc.
8. Graph the buckets

The result is a distribution of all of your linking domains by the highest-authority pages in those domains. This sounds a lot more complicated than it really is, so let’s see it in action.

Profile 1: High Quality

Let’s start with what a high quality domain might look like – I’ll make it easy and pick on SEOmoz. Using the process above, here’s one way you might graph the SEOmoz link profile. Since Open Site Explorer exports a maximum of 10,000 links, I’ve restricted this profile to just the home-page:

You may be surprised to realize that, even for a high-authority site, most of the Page Authority is still on the lower-half of the spectrum. The simple reality is that even on a strong site, most of the actual pages that link to it are much weaker than their parent domains. Most of the back-linked Moz pages land in the second bucket, with a gradual drop-off as PA increases.

Profile 2: Medium Quality

Now, let’s compare that with a solid but less authoritative site, my own blog. I’ve got solid back-links from some pretty good sources, but nothing like the Moz does. Here’s what my PA profile looks like (this is also the data used in the spreadsheet below):

Here, you see that most of my back-linking pages are sitting in the 0-10 bucket, a clear sign of my inferiority (sniff, sniff), but the curve still levels off gradually and I’ve got some solid representation up the PA chain.

Profile 3: Low Quality

Finally, let’s pick on a site that came to us in Q&A with some trouble (we’ll keep it anonymous, of course). This isn’t a site that was heinously blackhat, just one that suffered from enough low-quality links that we suspected a problem:

Look closely, and you’ll see a pronounced 0-10 bucket followed by a rapid drop-off, with little or no high-quality pages to take up the slack. It may seem like a subtle distinction at first, but look in the PA range of 20-70, and you’ll see the difference.

The Excel Spreadsheet

You can download the spreadsheet (1.9 MB) and try it for yourself. Just export your own data from Open Site Explorer (as described above) and paste it into the first worksheet ("OSE Data"). The second sheet ("Domains") will automatically strip out the subdomains, and the third sheet ("Max PA") is a pivot table that calculates the maximum Page Authority for each subdomain and then collapses that into the 10 buckets. 

One trick: You’ll need to refresh the Pivot Table (how to do this varies a bit with your version of Excel). The other pages and the final graph should refresh themselves automatically. I haven’t tested this on a Mac, so feel free to comment with helpful corrections.

This technique is a work in progress, and more of a way to explore your link profile than a hard analytical tactic at this point. If you try this out and find something interesting, please let us know in the comments. We’re always looking for useful ways to enhance the data visualizations on the SEOmoz tools.

Update - DA Profiles

A few people asked in the comments about what the Domain Authority (DA) profiles looked like. Since the SEOmoz team re-normalized some of the DA data last week, these curves are very similar in shape, but I’m including them below (I’ve matched them on height of the top bar):

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When Conversion Rate Isn’t Enough

Posted by Dr. Pete

The history of web analytics has read a bit like the quest for the Holy Grail. We’ve gone through a list of candidates searching for the one true metric: Hits, Page Views, Visitors, Unique Visitors… stopping at each one to admire its purity and virtue while denouncing the heresy of whatever metric it replaced (usually, one whose purity and virtue we were just praising the week before).

While drinking from the wrong Grail in analytics won’t melt your face like the bad guy in Indiana Jones 3, you may wish for some face-melting when you have to tell your boss how much money your bad conclusions just cost the company. This post will help you get control of your unhealthy obsession with Conversion Rate and avoid the most costly traps.

Conversion Rate Crash Course

Let’s start with some basics, both for the newcomers and because the industry doesn’t always agree on how to define terms:

There are many variations on conversion rate, and "Action" can mean just about anything – a click, a form submission, an RSS subscription, an actual sale – but let’s keep it simple for now. So, let’s say that for February your site received 10,000 visitors, and 450 of them took action:

Pretty simple, right? Don’t get me wrong – conversion rate is powerful, and it captures an important bottom-line measurement. Problem is, it’s just one number (well, ultimately, two numbers). So, what’s missing? To answer that question, I’d like you to consider three scenarios…

Scenario 1 – Sacrificing Traffic

This is a situation that comes up frequently in PPC management – cutting traffic to raise your conversion rate. Here are a few examples to illustrate the point:

All three of these cases have 5% CR, so they’re all the same, right? Of course not - all else being equal, anyone in their right mind would pick (C). Where people get into trouble is when they over-optimize for CR at the expense of traffic.

For example, let’s say you have a classic PPC scenario: (A) a campaign targeting branded keywords with low traffic and high CR, and (B) a campaign targeting product keywords with high traffic and low CR. Your client starts complaining about low CR, so what do you do? You cut spending in Campaign (B). CR goes up, but the unfortunate side effect is that traffic goes down and overall Actions (read that "sales") go down with it.

SOLUTION:
Pay attention to both conversion rate and overall leads or visitors. Once you collapse down to CR, you’ve lost the top and bottom numbers and are left with just a ratio. If you’re a PPC manager, set an acceptable Cost-Per-Action (CPA). Traffic within your CPA limit may be worth going after, even if CR isn’t ideal – traffic that costs more than your acceptable CPA may have to be sacrificed. Don’t just start chopping visitors to see CR go up.

Scenario 2 – Dropping Prices

Want the secret to increasing conversion? Cut your prices in half. What’s that? You say you’ll make a lot less money that way? Yes, you probably will. Of course, you’d never do anything that radical, but many people create sales, price pressures, and information architectures that drive people to the cheapest product. This can boost CR but cost you money.

Let’s look at an example – say you get 1,000 visitors per day, and experiment with pushing a cheaper product ($29) over a more expensive product ($99) to boost CR:

Looking at the CR, it’s great news: you doubled conversion. Unfortunately, your revenue also dropped 40%. There may be times when you’re willing to make this trade-off to draw in new customers, but make sure you have all of the information you need to make that business decision.

SOLUTION:
If you make a change that could drive visitors to lower-priced items, make sure you track not only CR but also changes in the average purchase amount. If you’re running an A/B testing scenario, consider tracking the mean or median purchase for both groups (use the median if your products span a wide price-range).

Scenario 3 – Losing Loyalty

An aggressive push to drive short-term conversion, including the pricing scenario above, could also lead to a drop in long-term revenue and customer loyalty.  If you offer a sweetheart deal that pulls in new customers, it’s possible that they’ll take advantage of that deal and disappear forever. Today’s Conversion Rate gain, if it’s driven by bargain hunters or impulse buyers, could be next month’s Conversion disaster.

That’s not to say that sales and short-term incentives are never a good idea. Driving traffic in the front door is essential to building long-term relationships. The core point is that, whenever you take an action that may change the quality of your customers (and not just the quantity), you need to look at the big picture.

SOLUTION:
These metrics are a bit beyond the scope of this post, but there are a number of Key Performance Indicators built around repeat buying and the lifetime value of a customer.  Whenever you pursue a short-term strategy, don’t just measure CR, measure whether those new buyers are one-hit wonders or have real staying power.

It’s Still Pretty Good

I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing Conversion Rate. I use it every day and have driven real, bottom-line improvements for clients based on CR metrics. We just have to remember to never get so enamored with one metric that we neglect the big picture. Every web metric that has ever existed or ever will exist is missing some critical piece of information for some set of situations and has the potential to lead us astray. Think about your objectives, think about the possible outcomes, and most of all, think about all of the analytics tools you need to see that big picture.

Special Offer – SEOmoz has just released our new Advanced SEO Training DVD series, "Tips, Tricks and Tactics 2". Buy it before April 3rd to Save $150 and get Free shipping!

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Is Google Getting Too Personal?

Posted by Dr. Pete

Late last year, Google announced that they would be rolling out personalized search even for visitors who weren’t logged into a Google account. There’s been a lot of talk in the SEO community about how this affects the already dubious future of rankings, but it seems to boil down to one simple fear: does my client (or boss) see the same rankings that I do? I decided to put this to the test – take one client’s real-world keywords and see how much rankings changed depending on how I measured them.

Experiment I – 4 Keywords, 5 Methods

In Experiment I, I took 4 of my client’s most sought after keyphrases (from a popular 1-word query to a long-tail 4-word query) and measured rankings for a week using 5 different methods:

1. Default – Standard, logged-in query
2. PWS=0 – Adding the &pws=0 query parameter
3. Logged out – Standard query, but logged out of Google
4. Rank Tracker – Data from SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker tool
5. GWT – Data from Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools data was only measured once, after the fact, using the "Last 7 Days" option. All queries were limited to web search on Google.com (US). The mean ranking for each keyword by method appears below:

Practically speaking, rankings for this particular set of keywords didn’t vary much across methods. Keyword 1 tends to bounce between the #1 and #2 spot, which the Logged out ranking showed, and there was some disagreement about Keyword 3, but the differences were mild at best. All methods correlated strongly with the default search (r = 0.97 to r = 1.00).

Experiment II – 20 Keywords, 6 Methods

Of course, this was one set of data and only 4 keywords/phrases, so I figured I should up the ante. I pulled the Top 20 search queries (by impressions) from Google Webmaster Tools and did a second round of one-day measurements. I also added a 6th method, "Caribou". No, it’s not a secret codename – I took the laptop to Caribou Coffee to pull a new IP and tried a logged out search from there. Experiment II’s numbers turned out a bit more interesting:

This one takes a bit of explaining. Graphing 20 keywords x 6 methods is ugly at best, so Figure II shows the number of times each method’s ranking varied from default across 5 levels, from ±0 (same ranking) to ±4 spots. The PWS=0 and Logged out groups showed the least variation from default searches, with the Rank Tracker, GWT, and Caribou groups showing more variation (especially at ranking differences of 1-2 spots). Correlations ranged from a perfect 1.00 for the PWS=0 group down to r = 0.71 for Caribou and r = 0.69 for Rank Tracker.

What Does This Mean, Exactly?

I’m glad you asked. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Rank Tracker and Caribou measures are unreliable. On the contrary, both correlated strongly (r = 0.90) with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) rankings. What it does suggest is that, given enough keywords, rankings do vary a fair amount depending on how you measure them. There are a couple of general conclusions I think we can draw:

1. PWS=0 Is Unreliable
I’d welcome more data on the subject, but it looks like the "pws=0" parameter does little or nothing for many queries. If you’re using the de-personalization parameter and taking the result at face value, I’d strongly suggest you reconsider. It does appear that turning off personalization may affect some geo-targeted personalization, but the query parameter doesn’t make Google completely ignore your search history.

2. "Logged out" Probably Isn’t
Google’s announcement last year as much as admitted this – if you think being logged out will de-personalize your searches, think again. The open question is: just how much different is it? This data suggests that being logged out has very little impact on rankings, assuming that you’re on the same machine with the same IP. Move to a new machine/IP, and the difference is much more substantial.

3. Second Opinions Are Gold
There really is no gold standard. The rankings in Google Webmaster Tools are the closest we can get to being inside Fort Knox, but these numbers are completely opaque and many SEOs have reported occasional rankings that differ wildly from observed searches. If you rely on rankings as a primary metric, get a second opinion, preferably either a fully logged-out ranking on a browser/IP with no history, or by using a 3rd-party tool like SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker.

4. Skepticism Is Healthy
It always makes sense to check your facts, and search rankings are no different. Rankings vary – you can occasionally type the same query twice in a row and see two different results. Smart SEOs have already diversified, considering metrics like search traffic and conversions. On the other hand, even across these test cases, rankings don’t vary a huge amount. So, don’t panic, but as always, the key is not to put too much trust in any single number.

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It’s Only A Clique If You’re Not In It

Posted by Dr. Pete

This post started as a reaction to accusations in the SEO industry that Top X lists, awards, etc. are only going to people’s friends. As I was writing it over what ended up being 2 weeks, I realized just how broad this issue really is, from personal to professional to political. I hope you’ll indulge me as I try to do justice to a topic that goes well beyond SEO.

We all know how it feels to be on the outside looking in. You start out feeling awkward and a little envious, but slowly it turns into something worse – depression, resentment, even rage. Eventually, we find a group to belong to, and the tables turn. No matter how often we were excluded (and maybe because of it), we eventually start to exclude others. It’s a vicious, if all too human, cycle, and it extends to every corner of our social interactions.

My Friends Are The Best

Just ask them; I’m sure they’ll agree. Do we prefer our friends? Do we give them the best opportunities and accolades? Absolutely. This is more than bias, though; it’s the simple reality of relevance. If you ask me who the "best" expert is in some niche of my own field or what the best article is on Topic X, I’m going to immediately draw from what I already know. Stating the obvious, I can’t recommend someone or something that I don’t even know exists.

Of course, there are times when we have a responsibility to dig deeper and look for the best candidates outside of our own limited realm of experience. When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, I had the opportunity to be the first student in my department to serve on a faculty search committee. One aspect of that experience that stuck with me was Iowa’s affirmative action policy. It wasn’t about numbers and quotas so much as a core philosophy that we had a professional obligation to search far and wide for the best candidate. We had the duty to leave our comfortable world of people just like us and venture into the world of "them".

Confirmation Bias

Beyond simple relevance is something more powerful, and sometimes more insidious. We all have a natural tendency to take sides, and, once we do, to find reasons why our side is right and the other side is wrong. Psychologists call this "confirmation bias," the often unconscious need to find data that confirms what we already believe. If we like someone, we’ll find reasons to support them and give them the benefit of the doubt. If we dislike someone, we’ll find reasons to be suspicious of everything they say and do. If you think confirmation bias is something only other people have, you’re fooling yourself.

Choosing Sides

Beyond our friends, confirmation bias quickly begins to apply to all of our cliques and teams. If you’re a sports fan, then that team mentality is usually just harmless fun – associating with your team provides a shared emotional experience. I’m a Cubs fan – believe me when I say that I understand the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, although not in quite the ratio I’d like. What happens, though, when that team mentality starts to apply to things like politics, as we’ve seen far too often over the past couple of decades (on both sides of the fence)? Suddenly, our clique is 50% of the population, and our enemies are the other 50%. At best, it’s divisive. At worst, it breeds hate, violence, and bigotry.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Of course, we all like to think that we’re free from bias, but the power of bias is that the flaws that are obvious in others are often hidden and unconscious in ourselves. If I mention that I do SEO, do you picture a savvy internet guru or spam-spewing snake-oil salesman? If you’re an SEO, and you hear that I work with SEOmoz, do you think I’m a paragon of white-hat virtue or part of Rand’s evil conspiracy to take over the industry? Reality is probably somewhere in between. If I tell you that I voted for Obama, do you see a beacon of liberal hope or a Communist bent on destroying our nation? I can assure you that I am neither. So, how do we get past these labels and start to understand people, whether personally or professionally?

Get to Know People

Social media has given us a difficult dichotomy. On the one hand, it’s never been easier to "friend" people in shallow and meaningless ways. On the other hand, we have the tools to get to know our peers and friends of friends in ways that were never before possible. The next time you friend someone, take a moment and find out something about them. Where are they from? What do they do? What kind of music do they like? Do they blog? If they do, read a post. If you see a label ("liberal", "conservative", "Twilight fan"), don’t jump to conclusions. Give that person a chance to speak for themselves.

Play In a Different Park

It’s easy to be self-righteous when you’re surrounded by your fan-boys and girls. It’s easy to get a standing ovation at your campaign rally when you only invite the people who gave you the most money. If you want perspective, you have to give up the home-field advantage. If you disagree with someone, comment on their post instead of running back home to write a rant. Try guest-blogging – even better, guest-blog in a different industry. Try to explain why SEO is worthwhile to an audience of small business owners, designers or UX professionals. It’ll be a tough sell, but you’ll learn a lot in the process.

When In Doubt, Ask

Social media is a mine field of misunderstanding – if you’re not sure what someone means in that 140-character Tweet, ask them. If they write a blog post that seems like a personal attack, call them. It’s not just about being nice – bad blood runs deep, and today’s simple misunderstanding could destroy relationships and opportunities tomorrow.

Open Your Circle

We all remember the people who excluded us, and we too often hold that fact against the universe. Let it go. When you finally get into that circle, especially your professional circle, try to remember that someone else is still outside looking in. Here are a few ways to give someone else a chance, because we can all use a little good karma:

• Promote other people’s links and awards, even the competition.
• If you’re at a conference talking to a group and you see someone standing outside the circle with that awkward look of faux participation, invite them in.
• Make an introduction to help someone’s career along.
• If someone is new to blogging, comment, subscribe, or even link to them.
• When someone challenges you publicly, listen and think before you counterattack.
• Don’t envy other people’s success – learn from it and improve.
• Every once in a while, shut up and listen.

At the end of the day, those of us who have attained some measure of success need to remember that we all had a little help along the way. Try to return the favor once in a while.

Photo licensed from iStockPhoto.com (Photographer: Hélène Vallée)

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