Coverage of SES San Jose: Search Algorithms, The Patent Files

I attended the “Search Algorithms: The Patent Files” session first thing this morning. The panelists were Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind, Dr. E. Garcia of Mi Islita.com, and Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search, Become.com. My favorite presentation was from Jon. He was not overly technical (Dr. Garcia lost me at the advanced mathematics talking about calculating dot products of vectors) yet he gave solid advice. Here’s what he had to say, in summary:

Take these patents with a grain of salt, because…
- patent applicants don’t need to use all the stuff they include in a patent application.
- patent applicants don’t have to disclose all of its features in a patent application.
- and they recognize that SEOs and their competitors are pouring over their patent apps.

With that said, there are some valuable learnings from the 2003 Google patent. Search engines may take into account: CTR on your page in SERPs, rapid changes in content, rapid growth of in-links, and length of time users spend on your site.

So which of these actually impact your rankings? Some are red herrings, such as:
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): it’s too easy to distort (e.g. through clickbotting, which is evil and likely to get you penalized). Probably CTR is used for demotion only. In other words, high CTR won’t help your organic rankings, but low CTR may lower your rankings.
- Time spent on a site: when users hit the back button almost immediately, it can signify an irrelevant page or 404 error. However, if this was used then this would in effect reward black hat tactics like mousetrapping and endless pop-ups — tactics that trap users within a site.
- Rate of change in content: Most recent crawl date, last time the content changed, registration date, and first crawl date mostly impacts crawl frequency, not ranking. Duplicate detection technologies are used to find meaningful changes in site content. Meaningful changes in site content do not include putting today’s date or today’s weather on the page — it doesn’t help rankings. When a site changes its IP address, it is often re-evaluated because it is possibly under new ownership.

According to Jon, what’s not a red herring is:
- Rate of change in links: Most Search Engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandboxing, link aging). A sudden jump in in-links (e.g. from link farming and interlinking and triangle linking lots of domains) can draw scrutiny. There are exceptions for “spike” sites (editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blog posts, lots of web searches).

Google and the freshness factor

It makes intuitive sense that stale web pages that haven’t been updated in a long time and haven’t garnered any new inbound links of note in a long time will not be looked on as favorably by Google. Indeed, Lawrence Deon makes a case for this in his analysis of a Google patent (filed 12/31/03) that has recently come to light. Yet, somehow, I’m not convinced. In fact, I see evidence to the contrary. I will elucidate, but first, let’s read what Leon has to say about the role of “freshness” in determining placement in Google search results:

In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. What’s new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page.

For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn’t changed and the content is not updated or “stale”.

According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.

• The frequency of all web page changes
• The actual amount of the change itself… whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
• Changes in keyword distribution or density
• The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
• The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
• The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page).

Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.

Leon’s points sound quite plausible, yet I have anecdotal evidence showing that freshness apparently has no bearing on rankings. Here’s a specific example: a cobweb of a website that we (Netconcepts) built on a shoestring budget over 3 years ago but haven’t hardly touched since then, Stepbystepwebmarketing.com, is still maintaining top positions in Google. For many months in 2002 and 2003, the site maintained Google rankings of:

• #1 for web marketing conferences
• #1 for web marketing workshops
• #1 for email marketing conferences
• #1 for email marketing workshops
• #1 for web site marketing conferences
• #1 for web site marketing workshops
• #1 for marketing workshops

Then, all of a sudden during one of Google’s famous algorithm shifts over a year ago, the site’s rankings dropped dramatically. However, “never say die”, as they say…. the site ended up coming back, nearly as strong as in 2002! Currently the site’s Google rankings are:

• #1 for web marketing conferences
• #2 for web marketing workshops
• #1 for email marketing conferences
• #1 for email marketing workshops
• #4 for web site marketing conferences
• #4 for web site marketing workshops
• #5 for marketing workshops

Pretty impressive rankings for an old cobweb promoting a conference from 2002, eh? Looks to me like you can throw a site up and then abandon it for years and still dominate top positions in Google (assuming of course that the site you “throw” up is search engine optimal and has good inbound links). Hmm… Go figure!

Remember, just because some technology is detailed in a patent application doesn’t mean that they’re using it!

Synopsis of key findings from the CyberSource study on online fraud

Some interesting findings in the CyberSource 2006 Online Fraud Report:

• Chargebacks accounted for less than half of fraud losses
• The rate of fraud associated with international orders is twice as high as the overall average
• Merchants reject international orders at a rate three times higher than the overall average
• An estimated $2.8 billion in online revenues was lost to online fraud in 2005; up from $2.6 billion in 2004
• 73% of merchants are engaging in manual order review
• Merchants with less than $5 million in annual online orders have the highest review rate (average 28% of orders)
• Medium and large merchants (merchants selling more than $5 million online) review 15-25% of orders
• Medium and large merchants tend to employ two times the number of screening tools as compared to smaller merchants and are two times as likely to utilize automated decision systems
• 44% of orders reviewed require contacting the customer, 29% require contacting the customer’s bank, and 18% of the orders require contacting third party data sources (such as credit bureaus)
• The most popular forms of automated fraud screening for merchants surveyed included, in order of popularity (also see chart below):
  1. Address Verification Service (AVS): Compares numeric address data with information on file from the cardholder’s card issuing bank. Generally available for US cardholders and for limited numbers of cardholders in Canada and the UK. Subject to a significant rate of “false positives”.
  2. Card Verification Number (CVN; also known as CVV2 for Visa, CVC2 for MasterCard, CID for American Express and Discover): Attempts to verify that the person placing the order has the card in their possession in order to provide the additional security digits.
  3. Address Point Verification
  4. Card association payer authentication services: Includes “Verified by Visa” and “MasterCard SecureCode”
  5. Fraud Screens – Company Specific
  6. Negative Lists
  7. Automated Order Decisioning / Screening: Helps merchants automate order screening by applying a merchant’s business rules in the real-time evaluation of incoming orders to detect the probability of fraud.
  8. IP Geolocation Info
  9. Fraud Screens – General Industry Models
  10. Order Velocity Monitoring
  11. External Databases
  12. Positive Lists
• Merchants surveyed indicated that they ultimately accepted over two-thirds of the orders they manually reviewed
• Merchants rejected 3.9% of orders due to suspicion of fraud
• 21% of merchants reported experiencing a fraudulent order rate exceeding 1% (accepted orders that later turn out to be fraudulent)
• 51% of merchants spend more than 0.5% of their online revenues to manage online payment fraud, while 49% spend less than 0.5%. This cost doesn’t include direct fraud loss (chargebacks, lost goods and associated shipping costs) or the opportunity cost associated with valid order rejection.
• On average, order review staff costs consume 48% of the fraud mitigation budget, followed by 28% for third party tools or services and 24% for internally developed tools and systems.

The full report is available as a free download.

Web 2.0 Isn’t Friendly to the Search Engines

Two of the most popular Web 2.0 interactive elements, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Flash, might be great for customers and a fresh experience on many sites, but they are inherently unfriendly to the major search engine spiders. In my article on Search Engine Land entitled, “The Search Engine Unfriendliness Of Web 2.0” I cover AJAX and Flash in detail, to show you how to prevent these new technologies from harming your ability to get the most out of Web 2.0.

Here are a few quotes from the article that might help those of you who employ AJAX and Flash into your blogs or websites. This next quote covers a great tip about Flash:

Google isn’t likely to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon. So, it’s in your hands to either replace those Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or to employ a Web design approach known as “progressive enhancement,” whereby designs are layered in a concatenated manner to provide an alternative experience for non-Flash users. This way, all users, including search engine spiders, will be able to access your content and functionality.

In this quote, I talk about progressive enhancement’s alternative to work with AJAX:

Here, progressive enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the AJAX application for spiders and JavaScript-incapable browsers. A low-tech alternative to progressive enhancement is to place an HTML version of your AJAX application within noscript tags (see TheCleanerMovie.com for an example).

For more tips about how you can incorporate progressive enhancement, feel free to visit my article.

Are You Spending Your PageRank Wisely?

On Thursday, my article Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact was published in Search Engine Land. In it, I describe the SEO technique of distributing the PageRank you have garnered in a strategic manner, so that the most important pages on your site get a larger slice of PageRank than your inconsequential pages (e.g. Legal Notices, Privacy Policy, Order Status, Customer Help Center, Testimonials, Email Us, View Shopping Cart, My Account, FAQ, About Us, and Shipping Info). This technique is valid for low-value outbound links too, such as “Click to Verify” VeriSign and HackerSafe seals. Doing so will save a larger share of PageRank for the remaining links to your more important pages (e.g. category pages and top-selling product pages).

I consider “sculpting” the flow of PageRank through one’s site through the use of nofollows to be one of the more untapped SEO opportunities. Indeed, in my impromptu analysis of the home pages of the Internet Retailer “Hot 100 Retail Websites,” I found only one retailer of the 100 to be sculpting PageRank with rel=nofollow to any serious degree.

For more tips about PageRank sculpting, check out my full article.

Video Tutorial: Balancedlifeproducts.com

Early, in January of 2006, I had given a site called “Balancedlifeproducts.com” an in-depth web critique at their request. Through the critique, I found that they had a number of issues ranging from no attention to inbound links and PageRank to poor keyword choices and title tags. I decided to revisit their progress, by reporting their findings in a video tutorial.

To see the tutorial, click on Balanced Life Products: SEO video tutorial. You will need Flash Player 8 or above to view the presentation hosted on Practical eCommerce. Enjoy!

Microsites: SEO Pros and Cons

In my article on Search Engine Land, I talk about how microsites can help your company. To give you a good example, I address a microsite that my company, Netconcepts, built for Countrywide called Credit Demystified implementing a tag cloud and tag pages that boosted the Google page count to 1,100. In this quote, I talk about how content and intent are both really important if you are considering a microsite:

There’s a time and place for creating a microsite, versus further building out your main web site. If your site is likely to gain more traction and interest with webmasters and bloggers by being at an arm’s length from your main site, then by all means consider it. For example, CreditDemystified.com is a microsite on improving one’s credit which contains not only articles, but also podcasts and RSS feeds. Given how “bloggy” the site is, it’s more likely to get link love from bloggers than a series of articles hosted on Countrywide’s site will.

To read more about this article, feel free to read The Pros & Cons of Microsites As An SEO Option.

Website Critique: Beachaudio.com

One of the types of articles I write is a website critique, or SEO Report Card, on Practical eCommerce. In a recent SEO report card, I talked about an IR 500 site called “Beachaudio.com.”

Here’s a little bit about what I had to say for this critique:

Ranked 359 in the Internet Retailer 500, and boasting over 45,000 products in its catalog and 151,000 pages in Google, Beach Audio has a lot of grunt. According to Troy McKinnon, their director of ecommerce, Beach Audio did a complete search engine optimization overhaul using in-house staff in April, and ever since, the search-generated sales have been rising steadily. Currently, organic search from Google accounts for about 10 percent of website sales, and the outlook continues to look good, especially with the holidays and their peak season right around the corner. Nonetheless, I see a lot of unrealized potential here. So let’s dig in…

Their overhaul helped them to do a number of things right. Between optimizing their URLs, adding crawlable consumer reviews, and great indexation and rankings on their internal search pages, you can definitely see an impact from their efforts. Unfortunately, they do have a lot of barriers because their page count (151,000 mentioned in the quote) is inflated due to duplication and throw-a-way pages. Among the other things that they could improve site-wide? Title tags.

To read this article, please go to “SEO Report Card: Beachaudio.com,” appropriate subtitled, ” Write handcrafted title tags for all category pages and for product pages of best sellers.” Enjoy!

Video Tutorial: Discountflies.com

Sometimes, I get the chance to update my website critiques through video presentations. Last February, I had devoted some time to Discountflies.com. Over a year and a half later, I was able to revisit their site through a video tutorial.

You will need Flash Player 9 or above to view the video, hosted on Practical eCommerce. To see it, please click on Video Tutorial: Discountflies.com.

SEO is the new first job for teens; flipping burgers is so last century

Last weekend in Chicago at the BlogHer conference, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe got to give her very first conference presentation. The topic: professional blogging. Chloe got to share her story of “making money while she sleeps” — through the creation of a blog about the popular virtual pets site Neopets.com.

Attending and speaking at BlogHer really inspired Chloe to start more blogs, to do more speaking, and to do more face-to-face networking with other bloggers. Her plans also include adding a forum to her blog using bbPress, WordPress’ sister project. What a great experience it was for her — at only 16 years of age — to present in front of an audience, to receive kudos from so many bloggers afterwards, and to get interviewed by BusinessWeek. To top it off, Danny Sullivan says he wants to have Chloe on a panel at an upcoming conference!

Here are some highlights of Chloe on her panel at BlogHer…

It all began when my daughter was 15… she turned to SEO and blogging instead of babysitting or running a paper route as her part-time job and turned her love for the Neopets into a profitable venture — with the help of a few smart SEO decisions. For one, Chloe used the keyword research tools Google Suggest and WordTracker to select both the name of her blog and its categories. The name became “The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site” because it included the highly popular search term “neopets cheats.” She set up her blog through WordPress.com, and within a couple weeks it appeared on Page 1 in Google for “neopet cheats”. Chloe also devoted a bit of time to link building, through trusted blogs like Blogger Stories.

Wanting to turn her blog’s popularity into dollars, Chloe was excited to add Google ads onto her blog, but found out the hard way that this wasn’t possible due to WordPress.com’s restrictive terms of service that forbids the use of AdSense or other third-party ads. Chloe soon moved her entire blog to the domain neopets fanatic.com.

Now, I’m pleased to say, Chloe’s site currently ranks #6 for “neopets” (out of 6.2 million results). Her blog’s traffic has grown to produce $20 to $30 per day in AdSense revenue. Best of all, Chloe only spends a few hours a month blogging and maintaining the site. Not a bad ROI!

That equates to somewhere around $700 to $900 a month. If Chloe wanted to earn something comparable through a typical minimum-wage first job — at her age, this typically means flipping burgers, babysitting or operating a paper route — she’d have to work somewhere around 25 to 30 hrs per week. Because she’s built an income-generating asset (versus working dollars-for-hours for “The Man”), Chloe can take a paid vacation whenever she wants without affecting her take-home pay.

One of the key things to keep in mind about Chloe’s story, is that she’s proven that SEO is not “rocket science.” Heck, a kid can do it! (Note that I’ve only given her a few hours of guidance, she has done this all herself.) So if you have a solid foundation of SEO knowledge, why work for a living when you can create assets that work for you?