Browsing articles from "January, 2007"

The practicalities of buying and selling links

Jan 31, 2007   //   by Stephan Spencer   //   Search Engines  //  No Comments

If you are an SEO and you are not aware of Matt Cutts’ strong opposition to buying links, you must have been living under a rock. However, my hunch is that most businesspeople (at least those who don’t live and breathe SEO) are naive to Google’s tough stance — and to the risks!

My SEO How-To article in the January/February issue of Practical Ecommerce was meant to give ecommerce business professionals a (hopefully) balanced view of the risks and the opportunities of link buying. Before you have a go at link buying or selling you might want to give it a read.

What’s tricky, even for seasoned SEOs, is figuring out if a site that’s selling links has been made, and its voting power taken away by Google — particularly if you aren’t already advertising with the site. You can glean valuable clues by sizing up the existing advertisers and past advertisers (perusing previous versions of the site in The Wayback Machine). You can’t tell by the PageRank score, or from the link: SERPs — that would be too easy, and Google doesn’t want to be that easy.

Of course, just because Google is talking tough about link buying/selling, the tactic isn’t going to go away any time soon. It is a tactic that works. At least for as long as you stay under the radar!

And if you aren’t convinced how well it works on Google, have a look at my SEO Report Card of Freshpair.com in the current issue of Practical Ecommerce, where I critique some of the backlinks purchased by aggressive link buyer Freshpair.com. It is always fun to reverse engineer an aggressive link buying campaign and this one was no exception. Hopefully I won’t get too much hate mail from Freshpair for airing this in public! :-)

Bidvertiser SO does not belong in Google’s top 10 for “marketing”

Jan 29, 2007   //   by Stephan Spencer   //   Search Engines  //  4 Comments

The fact that the top spot for the term “marketing” in Google goes to Wikipedia is an appalling fact that I will rant on another day. For now I want to rant about Google’s “choice” of Bidvertiser.com as a top 10 site for the term “marketing”.

Clearly the Bidvertiser.com site is not one of the 10 most valuable resources for marketing information on the Internet. Their home page’s keyword focus doesn’t even seem to be about “marketing” — indeed the word isn’t in the title tag or in the page copy. Yet it’s currently #5 for marketing, at least according to the Google datacenter I’m being served results from.

So how did this happen?

A lot of it has to do with the clever (that’s a euphamism for “sneaky”) use of the NOSCRIPT tag. If you start analyzing the back links, the anchor text used in those links, and the placement of those inlinks, you will see that Bidvertiser has furnished their publishers with some HTML code and Javascript to place on their pages. And it just so happens that the HTML code comes with a text link hidden within a <noscript> container!

Any guesses on what one of those words in the hidden link might be? Yup. “Marketing”. Here is what the hidden link looks like (this taken from binodc.com):

<noscript><a href="http://www.bidvertiser.com">affiliate program marketing</a></noscript>
Now binodc.com on its own doesn’t have enough link importance to have much of an impact, but with all the publishers on Bidvertiser’s network including this hidden link, you could see how this would sway Google. Some of these publishers may even be authority sites with a lot of trust built up (not to mention PageRank) and part of really good neighborhoods. I am rather astounded that Bidvertiser could occupy a top 10 spot for such a competitive term as “marketing”, given that these links are hidden in noscripts and clearly not “earned” in the sense that a traditional link is. But there you have it, another Google loophole being exploited.

I haven’t done the research to find which links I think are the vital few (versus the trivial many) that are pushing Bidvertizer into the top of the SERPs. But I do wonder if the publishers realize the value they are giving away to Bidvertiser without compensation. I’d guess it’s without their knowledge or understanding.

I wonder how long it is going to take before Google discounts links wrapped within noscript completely. Until then, sites like Bidvertiser.com will be able to take advantage of their publishers and of the search engines, to the detriment of the user.

MySpace to Bebo – the great teen migration

Jan 25, 2007   //   by Stephan Spencer   //   Social Networking  //  1 Comment

There’s been a lot of talk about MySpace as of late, especially now that is the most popular site on the Internet, having overtaken Yahoo!. You might have seen my article on MarketingProfs from earlier this month about marketing on MySpace and some of my previous posts on the topic on my blog here and here.

I want to point out that there is a new social networking site in town — not really new, but possibly new to you. The site is important to know about because it could very well become the next MySpace. That site is Bebo.

Now that MySpace has become a hangout for adults (indeed over half of MySpace users are 35 and older), for kids and teens MySpace has lost some of its cachet. After all, what teenager would want to hang out with “a bunch of oldies”? So many of them have migrated… over to Bebo.

Bebo’s rise in popularity is also evidenced in the 2006 Year-end Google Zeitgeist published last month listing Bebo as their top mover, above MySpace. It doesn’t mean that Bebo was the most popular search on Google because, of course, they eliminated all the sex-related searches as well as the ones that show the level of rampant ignorance of the average Google user who searches for things such as “yahoo.com”, “google.com” and “” (in other words clicking on the search button without typing in a keyword). Those would certainly exceed the popularity of “bebo” searches in Google by a wide margin. But that doesn’t make for exciting reading in Google’s Zeitgeist. ;-) But anyways, I digress…

The point of this post is to alert you to this very important social network that you should begin infiltrating now with your online marketing. All hands on deck!

Hobnobbing with connectors the easy way: MyBlogLog

Jan 24, 2007   //   by Stephan Spencer   //   Blogging, Social Networking  //  No Comments

You’ve probably heard the old adage that “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. One contact that you have in your network could make the difference between fast-tracking your career path or spending five years in hard slog getting to the same opportunity.

There has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere in general about online social networks and how they can be leveraged for shortcutting those years off your career path. I recently discovered one social networking tool that I quite like: MyBlogLog. It’s been gaining a lot of momentum and I predict a meteoric rise in adoption in 2007.

It is easy to sign up for a MyBlogLog account. It takes just a few minutes. You upload a photo and create a profile. Then, as you visit blogs that participate in MyBlogLog, for a fleeting period of time, your photo and username are displayed under “Recent Readers” in the blog’s sidebar.

Of course, this has the potential to be gamed and spammed — as does anything. In fact spammers have already started creating profiles and continuously hammering popular blogs to keep their profile/mini-advertisement up on the Recent Readers board as long as possible. But that is not really a huge problem yet.

The opportunity for you to leverage this network is huge, because it gives you a way to dialogue and forge relationships with other bloggers, current blog readers, and potential readers. You can add people as contacts. You can add websites as communities that you belong to. You can hang out in communities where your target market is present and start making insightful comments which will likely attract those community members to check out your blog.

If you have a blog, your opportunities to network on MyBlogLog multiply. You can claim your own community and then cultivate a user base on it. You can see who is a fan of your blog or a fan of you. Then on your blog you can display the Recent Readers widget. And you can display the images of your readers alongside their comments using a plugin like MyAvatars.

MyBlogLog has legs. I am convinced of that and Yahoo! is apparently convinced too — having recently acquired the company.

I am not the only one who is convinced of Myblogblog’s power for networking. David Temple had a great post about how he MyBlogLogged his way up the social media ladder. Definitely check it out.

Best of the Blog Widgets

Jan 19, 2007   //   by Stephan Spencer   //   Blogging  //  3 Comments

Inspired by yesterday’s New York Times article “Some Bling for Your Blog”, I put together a list of my favorite blog widgets:

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

Many more widgets listed in the Widgetoko and Widgetbox directories.

Just remember when “blinging” out your blog, not to overdue it. Think critically about the value to your reader of each badge / widget that you add, because it adds download time to your pages, which detracts from the user experience.

Any important blog bling that I missed?

Inventing some new KPIs for SEO

Jan 5, 2007   //   by Stephan Spencer   //   Search Engines  //  4 Comments

It’s 2007, so it’s out with the OLD and in with the NEW.

What’s old, in terms of SEO? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalties”. Relying on Sitemaps XML files to fix your indexation problems (news flash: your rankings will still suck!). Exchanging links.

What’s “in” in SEO for 2007? Truly understanding and leveraging the power of Long Tail dynamics. Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit. Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll, and the blogosphere in general and then reaping the rewards of “network effects.” Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it. Link baiting.

So how the heck do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff?

These new paradigms call for some new KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Addressing Long Tail SEO specifically, we at Netconcepts came up with the following KPIs (props to my colleague Brian Klais for coming up with a lot of this!):

  1. Brand-to-Nonbrand Mix
  2. Unique Pages
  3. Pages Yielding Traffic
  4. Keywords per Page Yield
  5. Visitor per Keyword Yield
  6. Index-to-Crawl Ratios
  7. Engine Yield

For definitions and explanations of these seven new metrics, have a read of Brian’s article Beneath the Surface of Search, hot off the presses at Multichannel Merchant.