Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

Yesterday I was eavesdropping on a Twitter conversation between @alanbleiweiss and @omniturecare where they were talking about the use of Omniture tracking IDs and how they relate to SEO. It got interesting, and it reminded me of the solution we use on Ford.com for tackling this issue.

Any good SEO will tell you how much they despise tracking parameters on URLs. You know, things like ?utm_source= , ?bannerid= , ?intcmp= , etc…. Every good analytics package allows you to set up tracking IDs to track various things. They can be used to track campaigns, referring sites, affiliates, or even which link on the page somebody clicked on. In general, they’re very useful.

The problem with tracking IDs though is that they can really mess with a site’s SEO. Unless told otherwise (and we’ll get to that) when search engines encounter a URL with a parameter on it, they treat it as a separate URL than the version without it. Basically, by adding ?utm_source=feedburner to your URL, you’ve created 2 versions of the same page. In a word, duplicate content. That can be bad.

Fortunately, Google webmaster tools lets you specify specific parameters that you want Google to “ignore” – but that only works for Google.

Another solution is the canonical tag – but as Alan pointed out in his tweets, it’s only a suggestion and even though Google follows it, other search engines may not.

So webmaster tools and canonical may work for 90% of the cases and not cause problems, but sometimes that’s not good enough.

On Ford, we take an interesting approach. Take a look at this Truck Page and see if you can spot it. When you visit and hover over the name of a truck (like F-150) you see a clean URL. In this case it’s http://www.ford.com/trucks/F150/

When you click the button though you’ll notice that you actually visit http://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/?fmccmp=fvlp-tt-cons-f150 – a URL with a nice tracking code that tells us you clicked on F150 from the left column rather than the middle or right. We then use that to do other analytics and customizations that are beyond the scope of this post – but it’s a useful and required tracking code.

Why do we do that? Simple, because we don’t want to count search engines in our analytics and we don’t want them to index the URLs that have the tracking code in them – as that would also bias our data.

So how do we show you (and search engines) a clean URL without parameters but take you (and not search engines) to the one with parameters? Easy – we use the HTML/Javscript onClick event.

Essentially, the code looks like this:

<a href="http://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/" onclick="javascript:[Function that creates URL with parameter] return false;">F-150</a>

That extra “return false” in there isn’t an accident either. This technique won’t work without it.

This way search engines follow a nice clean href, but users who actually click get the tracking ID appended. This technique isn’t guaranteed by itself. It’s just one extra step we can take to try to keep the tracking parameters hidden. Combined with canonical and webmaster tools parameter exclusion it works pretty well to prevent those tracking IDs showing up in search engines.

If you’re like me and just upgraded your Mac to OSX Lion then you probably hate the reverse scrolling feature. Good news, you can turn it off!

To disable reverse scrolling just follow these simple steps:

1.) Click on the apple logo in the top left of your screen.
2.) Select System Preferences
3.) If you’re using a mouse, click on mouse If you’re using a trackpad, click on trackpad
4.) Uncheck the box labeled Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating

That’s all there is to it. Here’s a screenshot of the mouse preferences with the checkbox to turn off reverse scrolling highlighted just in case you can’t see it (it took me a few seconds to find it.)

Just wanted to post a recommendation that all my friends NOT shop at Art Van Furniture. I’ve had such a horrible experience there, that I felt I needed to share it.

Back in February I ordered an expensive Natuzzi Italian leather sofa, chair, and ottoman from the Art Van store in Taylor, Michigan. It was called the Natuzzi Bianca series and it was exclusive to Art Van. Before leaving the store I had to put down $250 and sign up for an Art Van credit card.

Before placing the order, the salesperson told me that I could have the furniture delivered in a few weeks. When I left the store though, I noticed that my receipt said delivery would be in 7 weeks. That’s more than a few but I understood that it takes time to order things.

One week after My furniture was supposed to be delivered, I called to inquire why it wasn’t delivered. My date had changed to June but nobody had notified me. I asked to cancel the order because I needed furniture sooner than that, but I was told that they would have to keep my $250 as a restocking fee. That didn’t make sense since the furniture wasn’t in stock, but they wouldn’t let me cancel.

In June I still didn’t get the furniture so I called Art Van and was told that my delivery date was now July. Again nobody had notified me so I asked Art Van to cancel it one more time. Same story, I’d have to pay the $250.

The next week I noticed that the same set I bought was 20% off on the front page of the sale paper. I’m not sure if it’s legal for Art Van to advertise something that they clearly don’t have in stock, but I called anyway and asked for the 20% to be applied to my order. I was told they’d have to wait until it came in to do it.

In July, I got a call from Art Van that my furniture was in. I set up a delivery for the next day and took the day off work. I also arranged to give my current living room set away to an older couple in need. Then I paid to have my carpet cleaned. After all of that I got another call from Art Van – they lost part of my order.

I called Art Van the next day and again asked that they just cancel the order and refund my money. They obviously sold my furniture that they don’t have in stock and don’t have the capacity to produce. The manager begged me for more time to “find” the lost piece – meanwhile they tried to deliver a chair and ottoman without the sofa. The delivery guy was pissed, but I made him put the chair back on the truck and refused delivery. What good is a chair if it’s clear that there’s no way to make a sofa to match?

I called Art Van back and told the manager that the only way I’m accepting delivery now is if the couch is free. Otherwise, I don’t want anything please refund my $250 to my credit card. He didn’t hang up on me, but his curt “I’ll call you back” might as well have been a hang up. 2 days later, I haven’t gotten a call back.

So that’s where we stand. Art Van Furniture in Taylor, MI sold me something that they not only didn’t have, but they also didn’t have the ability to acquire. They won’t refund my money and they won’t fix the situation – despite the fact that I type this from a folding chair in an empty living room. To make matters worse, they’re still advertising the same set that I bought in their weekly flyers. How many more people like me have had a similar terrible experience from Art Van? Please share your story below.

Update: After another 2 days of me complaining, I finally got my initial deposit refunded to my credit card. That doesn’t fix the fact that I wasted a day off work or have an empty living room, but at least it’s a start.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about regulation in the SEO industry. It seems every time the New York Times or some other old media runs an SEO related story twitter starts buzzing about regulation. One group calls on the need for SEO certification and regulation. The other group says “no fucking way” and a third group goes off on paranoia rants. Let’s clear all that right now.

You can forget about SEO regulation. It will never happen.

Dont’ believe me? Let’s look at how we would regulate the SEO industry.

First, who would get to regulate it?
Google? Bing? Yahoo? No way. Why would they want to get into that business? I can see the lawsuits starting now. Besides, what would they regulate? Their guidelines say create good content, write good HTML, and tell people about it. They won’t go above and beyond that because it’s not in their interests.

The government? do we really want government regulation? Plus, the govt usually only gets involved when dealing with legalities. We’ll cover that in the next section.

Other SEOs? Right. Let’s put a group of people in charge of determining whether or not their own competitors can be certified. Nothing can go wrong here. Just look at what happened when SEOs took all of the DMOZ editor positions. Not to mention the fact that many prominent SEOs still believe some pretty crazy shit. Just look at how many conference speakers continued to sell and preach page rank sculpting with nofollow even though it never worked to begin with. And what would even qualify somebody to be a regulator? There’s no better way to turn our profession into even more of a hand job network than it already is.

What exactly would you regulate anyway?
Thinking about it further, what is there to regulate? From Google’s point of view they already have set of best practices. Do you really need Google to say “this person knows our best practices and promised he’d follow them?” What value does that provide to anybody?

Do we really want to say “here’s a list of what you must do and how you must do it when optimizing your website?” There’d be no competitive advantage. Well, actually there would be. The un-certified people would dominate everybody else in the results.

Here’s a video about SEO regulation:

By the way, let’s drop this whole black hat white hat stuff too
Every time we talk about SEO certification or regulation somebody brings up black hat SEO and protecting clients. Clients need to ask what their SEO is doing, and SEOs need to tell them. That’s it. If you pay somebody to do something and don’t care enough to find out what exactly they’re doing that’s on you – not them. SEO services in Thailand were the best I’ve tried so far. Do SEOs need to stop selling their services as if they’re some magic dust? Yes. But there’s no need for regulation.

Come to think of it, what does Black Hat actually mean? Contrary to how some act, most black hat SEO is NOT illegal. There’s nothing illegal about paid links, cloaking, hidden text, comment spamming, etc. These are just techniques that Google and Bing don’t like. That doesn’t mean they don’t work (some of them still do) or that you shouldn’t do them. There’s tons of valid reasons one might want to buy links or cloak a website. I’ve done things in the past that have purposely hurt the SEO value of pages (in Google’s eyes) – because I knew what I was doing and the business value for doing it outweighed the SEO value. Would that cost me certification?

Too often we like to lump in hacking, cookie stuffing and other techniques with “black hat SEO” – but these things aren’t SEO.

When it comes to SEO regulation we only need to look at things and judge whether or not they are legal or illegal and be honest with clients about the services we sell. That’s a key staple of any business and it doesn’t require regulation or certification at all.

I was talking with a co-worker this week about how to better integrate paid and natural search when she brought up a good point: you can’t even begin to achieve SEO/SEM synergy until all parties understand the basic difference between search keywords and search queries.

If you’re like most SEOs, you probably use these words hundreds of times per week – but do you actually know what they mean? One of my pet peeves is when people use them interchangeably – and it can cause great confusion both internally and with clients.

When I think of keywords and queries here’s what I think of:

A query is what a user actually types into a search box.

A keyword is something you are bidding on or optimizing for.

That second part is key. As SEOs we tend to think of the word keyword as what the user typed in, but that only causes confusion when talking to paid search teams and clients (who no doubt receive various definitions from various other teams. Let’s not even talk about on-site-search.)

This may not be a problem for smaller SEO firms, but anybody whose agency/company offers full scale services can easily see how referring to natural search, paid search, on-site search, and catalog search all as search from various departments who interchange keyword and query can cause tremendous confusion.

So why does it matter?

One of my initiatives at work is to un-silo paid search, natural search, and on-site search. I have a report I call the rebidulator (revised bid calculator) as well as various dashboards that attempt to look at search as a whole. We also recently upgraded our web reporting software with https://www.inetsoft.com/company/web_reporting_software/ and have been delighted with the results, so definitely have a look into that if you offer web-based reporting. Shortly in to the project I realized that “keyword” means very different things to very different departments.

ok great, different terms. got it. Now what?

The next step is to evaluate what you’re looking at. If you’re doing paid search, are you looking at keyword performance or query performance? If you’re only looking at keyword performance (the words you bid on) and not the actual words your customers typed, you could be leaving a lot on the table.

Here’s a made-up example that relates to my work with Ford. Suppose you have a broad match on the word mercury. With something like 20% of all queries typed into google being “virgin queries” (never having been seen by Google before) it only makes sense.

Now, you want to compare your natural search data and paid search data at the keyword level. Adwords/Dart/whatever you use most likely shows performance by keyword not query – so it’s easier to pull. But now you’ve got problems. Natural search is way out-performing paid search for the keyword mercury. Especially when it comes to bounce rate. Why?

Well, with the Mercury car brand being shut down, the top searches by volume in google are things like “mercury mercrusier” and “mercury outboard motor.” Both of these are boat terms that Ford probably isn’t interested in bidding on (and we don’t bid on thanks to negative match, but I’m making up this example so bear with me.)

If you only looked at keywords and not queries you might not alert yourself to this. And that’s just one example.

If you only look at keyword performance, you’ll never find out which queries are dragging down your numbers (or which queries are propping up your numbers.)

Don’t compare apples to oranges

It doesn’t make sense to compare actual queries from SEO to keywords from paid search, yet I see countless companies do it. If you truly want to achieve paid and natural search synergy you’ve got to make sure your metrics enable you to collect and compare the right data.

Are you integrating paid and natural search at your company? If so, how? Hopefully I can discuss some better integration techniques in a later post.

Everybody’s doing a live blog of SMX advanced Seattle. Since I’m not at the conference though, I figured I’d do something else: A Live Critique of SMX Advanced.

See, even though I’m not at the conference I’ve been following along via others who are live blogging SMX at Search Engine Land and the Outspoken Media Blog.

It seems like the first session dealt with the Periodic Table of SEO Factors so that’s a good place to start. I’ve noticed TONS of people here at work (many who have nothing to do with SEO) are printing out copies. That’s good, but it can be dangerous.

I really like this table, but I think there’s a couple of errors on the table that could lead people astray. For starters, Page Speed is listed at +1 – the same as Keywords in URLs. That just doesn’t make mathematical sense. According to Google, Page Speed is a factor in less than 1% of all search results. No reasonable SEO can believe that URLs are of similar insignificance. I’d rate URLs at +2 and put them above speed.

Another one I take issue with is that Description gets a +2 while headers get a +1. Experience tells that page headers have much more weight in ranking than meta descriptions do. These should be switched.

The other one is freshness. No way this should be a +1 – on the same level as number of links. Let’s face it, for many types of queries freshness just doesn’t matter. Freshness is great for news and blogs and other types of sites, but not a factor on all types of queries.

Ok, now let’s talk correlation again.

I couldn’t help but cringe when I saw twitter filling up with tweets about Rand Fishkin’s correlation values again. I know he starts out every year trying to explain the difference between correlation and causation, but every year about half the room fails to understand and goes off spouting things that don’t make sense. This year’s non-ranking factor that everybody will obsess about is facebook shares.

Rand noticed that Facebook shares are highly correlated to ranking, but what many seemed to miss is that Matt Cutts came out and said that Facebook shares are NOT a ranking factor. Sadly, I think many SEOs are going to overlook that and keep talking about Facebook sharing. In reality, it’s probably that the high rankings are causing the Facebook shares, not the other way around. (that, or the simple fact that good sites rank well and people share good sites.)

Update 1: panda

First, I’d like to say that I love how Alan Bleiweiss scheduled tweets to go off during his presentation. Bravo.

Somebody made a comment that Google didn’t target big brands with Panda. I don’t think that’s accurate. Perhaps it’s simply that big brands didn’t engage in the thin content techniques that other sites did. Doing SEO for a big brand myself, I know I’d never be able to put thin content or tons of ads out there on our sites.

Alan made a great point: “When you go about things the right way, you have to be less concerned with Google updates.” That’s so true. Somebody once said all good SEOs get hit by an algorithm change. I’d agree with that, and add that all Great SEOs anticipate where the search engines are going and never have to worry about algorithm updates.

So far, that’s all I’ve noticed on twitter that I thought needed further discussion. I’ll keep my ear to the ground and update this post if I notice anything else interesting.

40 is the new 30, green is the new black, pale is the new tan, hipster is the new homeless, & helpful is the new viral – but when it comes to search engines and ranking algorithms Likes are the new Links.

Unless you’ve been too busy actually doing work to read the latest SEO blogs, you know that Google recently announced their plus one initiative while Bing was busy inking a deal with facebook.

While these are two huge undertakings in their own right, I think they’re just the start of a new trend in search engine algorithms – a trend that you most assuredly want to be in on from the beginning.

The paradigm of the web is shifting. Search engines are starting to move away from links and more toward other signals; and you know what? It makes perfect sense.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (if you don’t care about the history of Pagerank and how it works, you can skip this part)

Think back to the late 90’s when Google first came about. They turned search sideways by revolutionizing the paradigm. Instead of looking at meta tags and page content alone, Google used links. The original Pagerank algorithm was based on the model of academic citation, or what some of us computer scientists call the wandering drunk algorithm*

When Page and Brin noticed that the most important academic papers often get cited the most by other research papers they quickly realized that the same model could apply to links on the web. The most linked to sites (like the most cited papers) must be the most important. Suddenly, Google’s search results became much more useful and the web was a better place.

So if links are so awesome, why change?
Because the web is evolving. It may not seem like it, but when Google launched there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Myspace, no Linkedin, no Foursquare, hell there wasn’t even a Friendster. Links were the signal back then. Now, we’ve got a whole lot more signals.

Not only that, but links have become very easy to manipulate. You can buy links pretty easily, and it’s trivial for anybody with a week’s worth of PHP knowledge to write a script to start automatically building them. (trust me on this one!) Quite simply, It’s very easy to manipulate links with hardly any repercussions.

So how are likes and pluses different? Can’t you buy them too?
I guess you could, theoretically, but likes and pluses are different from links in one key area: they involve your friends. See, if somebody pays me to put a link on my website it doesn’t really affect anybody. Most of my visitors will never see it. That’s not the case with likes or pluses.

If you pay me to like or +1 something, my friends see that. If it’s a page about buying pills online while refinancing my house and playing poker you can bet my friends will not only see it, but they’ll probably be very annoyed at me for posting it. How many links like that do you think I could share on Facebook or twitter before people started unfriending and unfollowing me? My guess: not many.

In fact, I tried it with sponsored tweets a few months ago. It only took 2 sponsored tweets per day to start losing a significant number of followers. (strangely, when I had it at 2 per week or less, nobody noticed)

In math terms: the Limit of Friends as paid posts goes to infinity is 0. In layman’s terms: the more sponsored posts I make the less friends I’ll retain, thus the less valuable my sponsored posts become. That’s a key difference between links and likes: The opportunity cost of spamming my friends is too high. The more I do it, the less valuable it becomes

And that’s why likes and plus ones are going to be more valuable than links. Sure, links will never die. They’ll probably always be a part of ranking algorithms, but likes and plus ones have so much more potential for making search more relevant.

The next level of search
It’s no secret that Google and Bing have been taking search in a personal, customized direction. We’ve seen results catered to location, click history, preferences, and even to my twitter feed. +1 and likes are just the next level.

Likes and pluses will never completely replace on-page relevancy, but they can certainly add to it and help refine my results in a way that links can’t. If I’m searching for something, what’s more relevant to me? The page with the most links, or the page that 20 of my friends have shared?

And that’s just a start. Imagine the possibilities of search results if we add in other signals like facebook and foursquare check ins. Say I’m in Seattle for business and am looking for a good bar. I’m in the mood for a Guinness so I pull up Google local and search “Irish pub.” What’s more useful? The closest bar to me, the one several of my friends “like” on Facebook, or the one where several of my friends have actually checked into (or gasp, left a review for!) in the past month? I’m going to want the bar where my friends actually went when they were in town (assuming they liked it)

That’s the future of search: It’s going to be a lot like dating. Pretty soon, having on-page content and links won’t be good enough. Just like having good looks or lots of tattoos, content and links will get you an invite to the party, but that’s all they’ll get you. What happens once you’re there all depends on how likable you are and what your friends have to say about you – and that might leave several sites (and SEOs) standing alone by themselves at 1:50 wondering “where do I go now?”

You probably know by now that Google recently announced the release of their +1 button. (pronounced Google Plus One)

Danny Sullivan has a very thorough writeup of plus one, but it can take lots of time to read. Chances are, people are asking you for the details now.

So here’s what you need to know about Google plus one, in 1 minute or less:

What is plus one? It’s a little button next to search results that when clicked tells your social network you “liked” that page. +1 is very similar to Facebook’s like button. You need to have a Google Profile set up to use it properly.

Here’s some other quick facts:

1. You can opt in over at Google.com/experimental
2. Yes, it will probably affect your SEO rankings AND paid search ads
3. You can sign up to get a +1 button on your site over here
4. For advertisers, there’s no way to opt out.
5. +1 stats will be available in adwords and (soon) in webmaster tools

There you go. There’s the major takeaways of Google’s plus one. For more, check out Danny Sullivan’s article linked to above.

It’s been an exciting week concerning paid links and SEO. Last weekend the NY Times broke the story about JC Penney selling links and how Google responded with a ban.

Today, securing high-quality ‘do-follow’ links is no easy task. However, it stands to reason that things will be difficult because every company is trying to find and secure the best links for themselves; the difference is that some do it better than others. That’s where a good service provider like SEO Melbourne comes in!

Shortly thereafter we had Forbes posting about similar Google actions in the Google webmater help forums. Looks like they had a penalty for their links too – which they kind of sort of but not really cleaned up.

Now we’ve got Barry Schwartz admitting that he sells links to SEO companies. Combine all of these events and you’ve got a perfect shit storm of SEO arguments just ripe for a flame war to break out. Somebody call the fire department, a backdraft scenario is imminent.

First I just want to say kudos to Barry for doing whatever the hell he wants to do regardless of whether or not Google advises it, but that’s not what impresses me. What impresses me is that Barry is willfully violating Google guidelines and NOT bitching up a storm about how evil Google is. He’s accepting his penalty. I wish more webmasters would do that. Barry’s living out the advice I gave in my SEO Columbus post: Own Up To Your Shit.

What annoys me are all the SEOs in the comments of Barry’s Article who are trying to defend paid links. It’s even getting kind of personal with one calling me an SEO Noob after I stated that paid links shouldn’t be part of most sound SEO strategies. He goes on to further (incorrectly) label me, but none of that matters. This isn’t an argument about ego, clients, or e-penis size. It’s an argument about the validity of paid links and whether they’re a viable SEO method. (plus, for the record, my E Penis is huge!)

Instead of entering a virtual measuring contest, I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I say paid links should not be a part of most sound SEO strategies. Since I hate how wonky Disqus comments can sometimes be, I decided to do that here.

The simple answer is all about risk/reward – for both the SEO agency and the client. If your site is penalized for paid links the results can be devastating. Not only will you lose traffic, you’ll also have an ORM nightmare on your hands. For a major client that means hundreds and hundreds of man hours being dedicated. For an SEO agency it means potentially losing a client, and lowering the chances of getting future clients. To me, none of these risks are acceptable.

Even if you do put on the short-term success blinders and accept the risks, I still feel that there’s better methods than paid links. Let’s take JC Penney for example:

Not counting their paid links, they still had around 2 Million earned, high-quality, anchor text diverse links pointing to the site. As Alan Bleiweiss points out they also had much bigger problems than linking. Their site is ripe with canonical issues, duplicate content problems, faceting nightmares, a terrible URL structure, and title tags that look like they’re all auto-generated based upon what you last clicked on. That’s a lot of problems, and I only spent 3 minutes looking at the site.

If you ask me those issues, and not the lack of links, are why natural search only makes up 7% of JC Penney’s traffic. They needed those paid links with the anchor text to rank because they weren’t getting the true value out of their 2 million earned links. They weren’t getting the value out of them because the search engines were (and still are) having trouble crawling the site and finding relevant, optimized content. Who knows what would happen to that 7% number if they spent that paid links budget actually fixing the issues on their site.

And that’s why paid links aren’t a viable SEO strategy. They’re a band-aid. They work great for short term success but the risks just aren’t worth it.

In my opinion there’s only 3 reasons to use paid links:

1. You’re short sighted and only care about quick, unsustainable results
2. You’re spamming or don’t care if your domain is banned from Google
3. You’ve suck so much at SEO that you have no choice

Disclaimer:The views in this post are mine and mine alone. They in no way reflect the views of my employer or clients. With that said I have never recommended nor have I bought links for any clients nor do I intend to. I have both bought and sold links for personal sites in the past, mostly just to test things out.