Petits fours in your search results

Recently we made a change to show more results from a domain for certain types of queries -- this helped searchers get to their desired result even faster. Today we’re expanding the feature so that, when appropriate, more queries show additional results from a domain. As a webmaster, you’ll appreciate the fact that these results may bring targeted visitors directly to the pages they’re interested in.Here’s an example: in the past, the query [moma] (the Museum of Modern Art), might have triggered two results from the official site:

With this iteration, our search results may show:
Up to four web results from each domain (i.e., several domains may have multiple results)
Single-line snippets for the additional results, to keep them compact
As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.

Like all the hundreds of changes we make a year, we’re trying to help users quickly reach their desired result. Even though we’re constantly improving our algorithms, our general advice still holds true: create compelling, search-engine friendly sites in order to attract users, buzz, and often targeted traffic!

Beyond Good and Evil in SEO

The National Association of Realtors is "real estate merely goes up." This financial fallacy fosters the belief in prospect price increases and the restricted risk of purchasing real estate. In 2006, prices in a lot of markets began to fall. By 2008, the rate of price refuse had greatly accelerated. This is staged proof so as to real estate does not forever go up. Despite this clear fact, the National friendship of Realtors still tries to entice greedy buyers with fantasies of limitless wealth in housing real estate.Buyers are by now prone to consider the fallacies of limitless riches in real estate, also these fallacious attitude lead to housing froth. Realtors should be banned from making representation about the investment possible of real estate. Since the narrow framework for this kind of rule and oversight is by now in place beneath the auspices of the Securities also Exchange charge, Congress would merely need to create Realtors subject to these system in order to solve the difficulty.

I recently heard a story about a local SEO shop whose customers, overnight, almost ALL lost ranking in Google. Apparently, the shop had been engaging in “black hat” techniques. I’m pretty sure the teller of the tale made a “tsk tsk” sound at the end to help emphasize this as another instance where people who do evil get their just desserts.

But I think there is a fundamental disjoint in even using the phrase “black hat” – as it does infer a big gap in morality. And ‘black hats’ aren’t going around stealing the life savings of pensioners, killing kittens, or committing other dastardly deeds. What they are doing is gaming the system.

In Italy, there is a word for when someone uses audacity to gain advantage: “Furbo”. And it is, in a way, considered a virtue. In many cultures, it isn’t a bad thing at all to be a “player”. So how is it, in my own circle of SEO experts, black hat is spoken of with such disdain? Mind you, I’m not advocating black hat seo tactics – as I’ll explain in more detail in a bit. But by framing the black/white hat discussion in terms of morality, we might be distorting the real meaning behind the concepts.

What IS happening in Black Hat

What IS happening in black hat is the gaming, or the attempt at gaming the system. And in this case, the system is usually Google. Now, Google, we hope, wants to present the best search results to its users. I’m not always sure about that, and not at all sure that the reality isn’t that Google wants to present the best results to its users that helps Google make the most money. If we’re going to discuss ethics, there is a whole topic for discussion in that.

In a way, as a professional SEO, what we want to do is get Google to see our page as being more relevant to a topic than our competitor’s page. And who is to say it isn’t? Google, as we know, has an algorithm, albeit a SECRET algorithm – and we can all find countless examples of where Google does not provide the best results. So, we’re asking, is Google a better arbiter of best results?

Let’s consider a black hat tactic I recently heard discussed at SMX East, the acquisition of an old well-indexed website, and then peppering it with back links to our web page. Those link’s were NOT part of the original content of the site – and perhaps not even relevant to the content of that old well-indexed site – so in essence, the black hat is using Google’s system to sort of cheat a little.

By the way; there are some interesting studies (http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/13/dan_ariely_offe/ ) that show that MOST people WILL cheat in small incremental ways if they believe that can go undetected. It’s just a little cheat. In game theory, this is an aspect of the “Tragedy of the Commons” – people will take a little bit from the group if their actions benefit themselves a lot, but only hurt the group a little. The problem is, of course, that all those little hurts to the group add up.

Now, isn’t it true that emphasizing a key phrase in meta tags, H1’s, links, etc, is ALSO gaming the system? Maybe it is gaming the system but in a lesser way than acquiring a mothballed site. But if we’re talking about ethics, can we really talk degrees of ethics, and where do we score the little measures?

Mrs. Google

Imagine a classroom where the teacher up front is Mrs. Google, and all of the students are us SEO’s. Mrs. Google asks a question, “who is the most relevant student here to answer this question”? And we all raise our hands – each one of us wants her to notice ME, we want to her to pick ME! And sometimes, to get noticed, maybe we sort of bounce up and down in our seats, to help influence her choosing. But should the student doing the most bouncing up and down in their seat be chosen? Are they really the most relevant? Now, maybe one student not only bobs up and down in his seat, but emits a small chirping sound! Is the chirper a black hat? Isn’t he using a method of getting called-on that has nothing to do with the fairness of his being chosen?

So; what I’m suggesting is that black hats are simply taking their methods of being noticed FURTHER than white hats – and in comparison to most SEO professionals, is only doing what is done by everyone, just in greater degrees.

Beyond Good and Evil
As an SEO, I discourage the use of so-called black hat techniques. Simply put, they can result in a web site’s being perceived as deserving a Google purgatory. It would be irresponsible to put a website at risk in that way. It’s a risk management issue, not a moral issue.
The SERP has been dying a long and painful death. Every so often, a new Google enhancement causes SERP to be less relevant – instant search, local results, etc. In other words, DYNAMIC results based on the searcher’s demographics or behavior. Cool. And by focusing more on creating content that is rich in relevant clouds of words and phrases, we’re not simply trying to be perceived as being more relevant, we’re focusing on BEING more relevant. It takes the entire discussion outside of the black hat/white hat.

Increasing SEO Competition and Change: Survival Not Mandatory

It’s safe to say the way search engines work is changing; but then, it’s been safe to say that since the first engine rolled out. Is SEO changing, though? Think about it:
Since people first started using the Web to advertise their business, they’ve been hiring other people to figure out how to make sure their business gets visibility.
Search ranking, and thus, SEO, is becoming more competitive. But then – hasn’t it been “becoming” more competitive each year for several years?
Choosing the right keywords to target is essential – but hasn’t it always been?
So, then is SEO, as in the whole, encompassing “Search Engine Optimization”, changing or are the number of methods just growing?

Changing SEO Methods
The number one, never changing method of SEO is the three T’s (tracking, testing, tweaking). As far as I’m concerned, Alfred Edward Perlman perfectly described the mindset of optimization almost 60 years ago:
“After you’ve done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.” (New York Times, 3 July 1958)
In yesteryears, SEO might have been nothing more than a few reciprocal links and some on page optimization. Today, it could be a long list: article marketing, blogs and other content development, URL structures, back links, you name it. While methods may change, grow or depreciate, the same two truths hold firm. They are:
An SEO campaign cannot be thrown together. It has to be carefully planned – as any campaign should be.
An SEO campaign has to be revisited intermittently and adjusted as necessary – as any campaign should be.
This is not news. These are the basics.

A side note on SEO service providers…
If you’re starting a marketing campaign and know nothing about marketing, would you consult a professional before starting? More likely than not, you would – you’re pushing hundreds or thousands of dollars down the drain that way, and you know it.
Now consider this; how much is it costing you to keep your online business going? Hosting, website design, writing (whether you do it or hire someone, it costs time or money), marketing perhaps… Are you willing to see all that go down the drain as well? You don’t have to consult with an SEO professional, but there is a degree of risk without at least checking your campaign with someone in the industry. End of lecture.

Succeeding in a Continually More Competitive Marketplace
So what does it take to succeed nowadays? What steps can you take? Here are just a few:
1.Define your SEO strategy, content and site structure before beginning any of it. If you have a pre-existing site, define it anyway, and make necessary changes.
2.Make sure the company or person designing your website understands at least the basics of good on page SEO structure and uses it accordingly.
3.USE your analytics program. Most hosting providers have one and, if not, you can grab Google Analytics free. If you can’t see what’s happening on your site, how do you expect to know what to change and where?
4.Don’t automatically go for the high search, high competitive terms. Start with the lower ones (thusly called “low hanging fruit”) and build traffic gradually.
5.No matter what else you do, don’t ignore content. The search engines want and expect content. You have to provide it; it isn’t optional.

Lastly, understand the World Wide Web is the busiest place on Earth. Don’t believe me? In Africa, a continent full of third world countries,almost 111 million people use the Internet. In Asia, the last count was 825,094,396 Internet users. Worldwide, there’s almost 2 billion. (Statistics thanks to Internet World Stats )

It’s also the smallest place on Earth; companies in Germany can be your direct competition, even if you’re just a local online business shipping to three area codes. Be willing to change your strategy, your methods and your content to meet the needs of 1) your visitors and 2) the search engines. Survival isn’t mandatory, but it sure is nice.

In web analytics, everything is relative

What's a good bounce rate for my web site?
I get that kind of question a lot. What's a 'good' bounce rate? A 'good' time on site?
The answer, I'm afraid, is: Better than your current bounce rate. Better than your current time on site.
In web analytics, it's best to focus on your own data and on improving. Use yourself as the benchmark. This is your best strategy for two reasons:

Lack of accurate benchmarks
Accurate, internet- or industry-wide data on keyword searches, or competitors, or just about anything else, is scarce. Non-existent, really.
'Panel'-based statistics like Compete.com (which I love) and Alexa (which I'm starting to like again) sweep in an incredibly wide range of web sites. The bounce rate on your online bike shop won't compare to, say, the bounce rate on the New York Times web site.
Statistics within your own industry will include outliers at both end of the spectrum: At one end are the companies that have invested 100x your budget to become the shining pinnacle of conversion rate optimization. At the other, you'll be comparing yourself to the sites designed according to 1992 best practices. Even if you can narrow down the data in #1, it'll be inaccurate..
Keyword data from Google is about as trustworthy as a credit default swap.
Keyword data from other sources may be more trustworthy, but shows you a tiny sliver of total search traffic.

Numbers lie
Even if you could get accurate benchmarks, they still lie. Your business isn't like your competitors', no matter how similar they seem. Competitor A just fired his head of sales, so conversion rates tanked for a month. Competitor B happened to get on Channel 5 News. Her traffic tripled, lowering her conversion rate, too - but her sales skyrocketed.
Unless you've got the whole story, the numbers will lie. And you can't get the whole story.

Focus on improvement
So, if you're trying to figure out how many visitors you should be getting for 'slobber knocker', the answer is? More than you get right now.
If you're trying to figure out where your conversion rate should be? Yep. Better than what you're getting right now.That's what web analytics are for: Helping you improve. Which, as it happens, is also how you beat your competitors.

The Accidental Link Request Clinic

If you send me a link request, I’m going to go ahead and assume you want my feedback. What? You don’t? You just want the valuable back link that I can provide? Wow, I feel dirty and used. No not really, because unfortunately I’m used to it by now. Sure sometimes link requests are annoying, sometimes they make me giggle, and sometimes I just shake my head sadly with the knowledge that some poor soul spent time and money on these misguided tactics. I know I’ve ranted about terrible link requests but I still think there are…critiques… worth doing.
I’ve never directly responded to a bad link request. Perhaps someday I will, but in the mean time I’m going to do it here, as a sort of public service announcement. After all, knowledge is power right? So welcome to the link request clinic that you accidentally walked into. The names and sites have been changed to protect the unfortunate.

Email #1 – Bad Grammar, Bots and Outrageous Claims
Hi,
I run Random-site.com and I would like to exchange link with your website (mysite.com in parenthesis). I believe our sites are useful to our audience.
Please add your link to our directory at (Generic-link-directory.com) and once our link is up on your website, your listing will be activated and made available to public in our directory.
Our link directory was created two weeks ago so it has no pagerank at the moment. It will get a solid PR5 after next pagerank update.
Please reply with any questions you may have.
Greetings
Umm here’s a question…do you actually expect to get results from a request like this? Ok in the words of Connie D’ Amico, “prepare for itemized insults”. First the grammar is questionable, which is immediately off putting. Try using plurals and the word “the” occasionally, it makes you sound literate. Second, placing my site in parenthesis REEKS of an automated program. This tells me that your email is a bad template at best or at worst a bot scraped my domain and filled in the appropriate field.
Also, let me get this straight, you want me to add my site to your generic link list and in return you want a back link on the site I wrote page by page by hand? Yeah I don’t think so. I also highly doubt that “my audience” is in dire need on yet another pointless directory.
But my favorite part of this email about the world’s most amazing 2 week old directory is the claim that “after next PageRank update” this site will be a “solid” PR5.
Really Nostradamus? Exactly where did you get that info, your crystal ball or your tarot cards?
The fact is no one can ever legitimately make a claim like that. Toolbar PR is utterly unreliable and it’s impossible to predict what actual PageRank a new site will be assigned. True PR is about trust and value. And frankly with link building tactics like these I am highly skeptical that your entry-begging directory will be given much trust or value at all.

Email #2 – Aggressive Schizophrenia
My name is Random Female Name, Web Marketing Consultant. Ive greatly enjoyed looking through your site my-site.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website, which has a related subject. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back from my related website which is:
I-send-bad-link-requests.com PR5
If you are interested, please send me the following details of your site:
TITLE:
URL:
I’ll add your link as soon as possible, in the next 24 hours. As soon as it’s ready, I’ll send you a confirmation email along with the information (TITLE and URL) regarding my site to be placed at yours.
I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time.
Kindest regards,
….Four Days Later…

Hi,
My name is Another Random Female Name, Web Marketing Consultant. Ive greatly enjoyed looking through your site mysite.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website, which has a related subject. I can offer you a home page link back from my related website which is:
I-send-bad-link-requests.com PR5
Yada, yada, yada….
I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time.
Kindest regards,

Another Totally Different Random Female Name.
Web Marketing Consultant
Wow. Ok, if I didn’t respond your first request on Thursday, you really think that I’m going to be game on Monday? I suppose there is nothing wrong with persistence, except when you’re spamming me. Which in spite of a weak attempt to personalize using my domain name, you are.
Because I’m morbidly curious, I checked out this “related” subject offering me a home page link. It’s a blog, which is fine, I love blog links. But this particular blog, in spite of having a few posts which are relevant to my site, has a ton of posts which are not only completely UN-related to me, they are topics that I actually would prefer to distance myself from. Add to that, poor writing and the compete absence of educational value. Awesome, because the web needs more blogs like that. And I’ve been dying to link to a not-even-thinly veiled attempt at making money off of useless content about highly competitive niches.
Finally, I know it’s difficult for your bots to keep track of all their identities, but could we get the dissociative identity disorder under control please? Sending me duplicate emails, 4 days apart, from 2 supposedly different “Web Marketing Consultants” and failing to close the second one using the same fake name you opened with, is a real deterrent to gaining my trust. Oh and speaking of trust I’m not sure where you got PR5 from because as far as I can tell, your green bar is white, and even though that doesn’t matter to me, it does lead me to believe that your ACTUAL PageRank is probably closer to a -5.
There are several other bad link request offenders which perhaps I’ll cover in a future post someday, if the rest of you are having as much fun with this as I am. There’s the long talker, a.k.a TMI Guy, the Shameless Advertiser (whose honesty I almost respect) among others. But I couldn’t close this entry without covering this last one…

Email #3 – The Deceptively Almost Sincere Generic Link Request.
Subject: Quick Question About
I’m interested in placing a promotional link on your page:
http://mysite.com./specific-blog-post
The link would be for a website which is all about search engine optimization services. I don’t have the biggest budget, but hopefully there is a reasonable price we could arrange. Please let me know if you’re interested, and if not thanks for your time.
Thanks!
Lovely Female Name
Oooh … You are a tricky little vixen. First, you filled in my contact form and second your subject line sounded like you might genuinely be interested in my site or my services. Alas, you are not. You just want to exploit me. Le sigh.
When are bosses going to teach their link builders to take the time to look at who they are emailing and not put themselves in situations like this? Why are you emailing an SEO site about linking to an SEO site and offering to pay for it! A “promotional” link no less. You couldn’t even pretend that the link will somehow add value to my site? Listen sister, maybe you don’t know this, but I know that buying links is a dangerous practice. And the guy you work for probably knows it too.
But here you are offering to pay me for links. Even though if you read my site, which I suspect you didn’t, you’d recognize that as an SEO I understand the full value of what it is that you are asking. I know the risks that come along with buying and selling links and your budget which is “not the biggest” probably isn’t going to be enough for me to sell my site’s integrity. Not to mention that my name is all over my site, so if you had glanced at it you could have at least done me the courtesy of an actual greeting. The use of my name might help convince me you aren’t just another link spammer. Might.
Oh and with a quick read-though you might also realize that I am your client’s competitor and therefore without content enhancing information, forming a relationship and/ or a mutually beneficial partnership I’m very unlikely to give a competitor a link of any kind.

So what are the Take-aways from today’s clinic?
1. Learn to write well. Seriously. A little good grammar goes a long way.
2. Be consistent in the use of names, mine AND yours.
3. Try to keep track of the people you contact, so you don’t inadvertently harass people
4. Don’t bother writing me unless you have something of real value to offer my content and my users. And don’t lie to me about your site’s quality…when I look at it, I’ll figure out you don’t have any.
5. Read the site you are writing to. You don’t have to memorize every page or blog post, but at least know who you are pitching so you don’t make a fool of yourself.
If you have any of your own examples or other insults constructive criticism for these link requests I’d love to hear it!