Category Archives: search

Another one bites the dust.com?

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It’s spring and people in the travel sector are all buzzing about revamping their websites. In many cases this will happen with little regard to quality information or navigation and will wind up with the site losing traffic thanks to deep sixing pages that have been indexed for years. Even with 301 redirection it’s not clear you can recapture old page ranks easily after revamping sites. The best advice for travel sites? CHANGE little with your old indexed pages unless you are having problems within search indexes. Add NEW PAGES to the existing site with information in mind rather than “improving the look”.

For reasons I simply can’t understand people in travel cannot get beyond “image” and therefore almost completely misperceive the value of designing websites not for “looks”, but for info richness. Although nice looks are not totally incompatible with nice info, one sees few sites that blend them in ways that will optimize the intended result (more travel related business in the area).

Errors like flash introductions and splash pages are simply too dang common in the travel sector which ironically still has simply staggering potential for sites that are built to help users find usable information.

PPC campaigns are far more common at the mom and pop business level than at the higher level destination management level where they’d have ROIs of ten to ONE HUNDRED times that of TV and print campaigns where the travel ad spend is largely wasted. There is still a very common notion that you can drive people to a URL using print advertising as effectively as with online ads. In fact the cost to drive people online with print is about 10-100x the online cost (I know this from extensive experiments I did in my past life as webmaster for Southern Oregon Visitors Association).

I’m finally coming to understand that as human primates we have a tendency to be stubborn and hold old ideas dear until the consequences become so severe and negataive or the evidence so overwhelming we simply MUST change course. Combine this with most people’s mathematical illiteracy and you’ve got what we’ve got – a LOT of wasted advertising buys in the travel sector, not to mention waste, waste, and more waste in all areas where human stubborness prevails over reason.

Internet Report Card Gives Google A, Yahoo B+, MSN C-

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I think CNN's grades are realistic. However grades are a *trailing* measure of performance and the real question is what's in the future for these companies. This much is clear: All have really sharp folks working for them. All face challenges from their growth which can inhibit innovation and flexibility.

I think Google's done the best overcoming that challenge but I also think it's because the initial crowd is still pretty much in place and still excited about work. When kids start coming into the Google families, and mundane concerns start piling up, and the early GooglePeeps are sitting on millions in stock, the 9am to midnight work routine is going to get old…fast. I think Google's ability to keep their best and brightest may be the biggest challenge they face.  Working in their favor though is that Brin and Page are both young and brilliant.   They won't burn out anytime soon and certainly have an edge on the MSN folks who have made their mark already.  MSN's older leaders simply *cannot* understand the internet the way younger people do, and even bringing brilliant but "first generation" internet  people like Ray Ozzie on board is unlikely to solve this.     What would solve this?  Buying all/part of Yahoo as appears to be in the works right now.

Yahoo and MSN have already been through the "losing some of your best people" problems and I think have a more mature and somewhat stable workforce. This is good for maintaining status quo but also is clearly a factor in Yahoo and MSN's ability to overtake Google in most online endeavors.

The search market share numbers can be misleading in my opinion. People no longer move to Google due to superior search, they do it because as the average user becomes less sophisticated they are simply responding to the collective habit of most users which is to use Google. I predict this effect will wear off as search quality converges, people move more to vertical and user-generated search routines, and Microsoft exploits it's browser and OS advantages.

These grades are from the second quarter of a course that's lasting a lifetime. Anything can happen as this all heats up. The only certainty is …. change.

NMohwy.com Experiment update

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For the story so far click HERE

Interesting…site:nmohwy.com shows only 142 out of about 3000 pages, but NONE appear to be supplemental anymore. So after time and/or a few sitemap submissions the supps plus most pages seemed to be deleted from the Google index in favor of the 142 pages now showing. This happened over the past few days though it seemed that the supps were slowly disappearing over the last month or so.

This activity seems to have had NO effect on the low Google referrers which total only about 25 for the first few days of May vs 252 from Yahoo.

So…Experiment has so far failed to resurrect Google’s faith in these pages which used to get great traffic with pretty much identical content (though inferior link structure and they looked better organized before – these are just thrown together with the old data).

This leads me to think that perhaps OHWY’s good fortune in the past came in part from the many interlinked state domains. Although this practice would seem legitimate and normal, many have noted problems from this and/or sharing C block IPs as these state sites did.

Web comes full circle, developers doing better stuff but making less money?

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Pardon my somewhate randomized ramblings……

Significant changes keep swirling online as the internet becomes the key mainstream content vehicle, oceans of content continue to flow online, and mashups empower developers to flesh out even the most extravagant ideas with powerful tools reaching far into the rich data stores all over the web. Even market makers like Google, Yahoo, MSN don’t know how it’ll all shake out, and they are supporting many excellent mashups and APIs and developers to make sure bases are covered as the “real” battles for all that online spending heat up.

Where content was king it’s now just a pawn, and creating (large) communities in addition to a large content collection seems the best way to keep a web based company afloat in the stormy and rising online sea of sea changes.

*Unlike the gravy days of soaking up adsense revenues with auto-generated content, it appears online content providers need something “extra” es that will distinguish them from the other sites doing similar things.

The Internet in many ways, has done a partial circle back to quality stuff.

In early days it was non-competitive and fun and info focused.

Then came powerful commercial focus and info bias and heavy SEO for profitable terms.

I think the “new” transition is focusing on people/information, and rewarding those who create communities and bring *people* into contact with *people*. (e.g. Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, etc, etc). Increasingly, NON commerical sites like Wikipedia and DMOZ are taking on the roles that for a few years were provided by a plethora of auto generated, information poor – category rich sites that provided obscure topic details in a bland format.

Tipping point of choices leading to actions.

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Malcolm Gladwell, the clever author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point", spoke to Webmasterworld Boston. One observation was that having too many choices can inhibit our actions, as in the case where a company that offered FEWER retirement plans found this INCREASED participation.

Noting how many super applications Yahoo has been spinning out over the past few years I'm wondering if other users, like me, are simply overwhelmed with the choices and therefore NOT taking advantage of what appears to be the best suite of options in the online universe.

I stopped using Yahoo 360 not because of problems – it's excellent – but because there are only so many routines to absorb when they are not part of your core set of work tools or interests.  Also, unlike Myspace, 360 did not seem to be creating an "exploding community" and thus time spent setting it up might have been wasted if it fell off the map as a community place.

I think I'm like many users who are not yet ready to tie into highly personalized programs though I'm getting ready for that now that I want to tap more effectively into RSS and the power of online communities.

Yahoo 360 (and my Yahoo) are such good tools that I'm planning to go back and figure out how to use each more effectively, but the trick as a user is to pick the best combination of quality and community.   Good applications that have small or shrinking communities are problematic for social reasons.  Bad applications with big communities have problems as well, though for different reasons.

Yahoo! It’s time to buy YHOO.

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I've been waiting for a "sign" to buy Yahoo (well, some SHARES of Yahoo ) which seems due for a huge surge when their publisher network revenues kick in later this year. Yahoo has more traffic than Google but you sure wouldn't know it from the buzz, even among industry insiders. Capitalization lags Google big time for what appear to be no really good reasons.

My sign that Yahoo will do very well came last week as I signed up and used Flickr, which ranks among the most intuitive and brilliant applications I've ever used. Checking their Alexa stats Flickr is 85th most visited site and rising fast – proving that Yahoo can take a good idea, make it better, and expand a giant community almost overnight. A giant community that posts, for example, pictures from an Antarctica Science Voyage. Is Web 2.0 cool or what?

It's not that Flickr alone will increase YHOO profits.  What strikes me clearly is that Yahoo – far more than Google – is positioning itself as the front runner with big plans to grow and maintain the flexibility to fill many niche spaces created by the rapidly expanding Web 2.0 economy.

Yahoo's profit boost will come from online publisher revenues which now comprise about 43% of Google's revenue and will flow to Yahoo if they offer publishers a higher revenue share. Yahoo will be able to legally adjust profits upward very strategically using this technique and I'm guessing that they are now drooling at the thought of doing that.

Flickr is only one of many aquisitions of Web 2.0 companies by Yahoo, which is clearly the 2.0 leader.

Google's equivalent in the photo space? Hello? Hello? What the HECKo? It may be a good application, but I'll probably never know and almost everybody's using Flickr now, pulling others in every day.

People are very, very unlikely to switch away from a great application like Flickr once they start using it. This EBAY effect is powerful in some niches like online auctions or photos where the main barrier to participation is signing up and learning to use the service.

Contrast this with NO barrier but the admittedly powerful "habituation" to search engine use where it's likely people will flow to the 'best search' over time rather than the one they started with.   Now that Yahoo is equal to Google in relevancy this will tend to work in their favor as well.

Time to buy Yahoo! 

WebmasterWorld Boston Site Reviews, part Deux

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More site reviews from WMW Boston, continued from HERE

6. eomega.com 

27 years teaching Tai Chi and other personal enrichment technniques. Want to rank better for terms like Tai Chi since they are a key resource.

Tim: Not clear from site what you actually do at the institute. Write more about your key focus which helps both people and SEs figure out the site. Put "Yoga" and "Tai chi" keywords on home pages!

Bruce: Look at competitors Static pages with more decriptions would be better. Send more NON volatile content to home page. [By Non Volatile he means less flash, dynamic, changing material which can confuse the indexing process]

Matt: A good site map is important. If you use java mouseover navigation FIND ANOTHER WAY.

"Treat Search Engines as dumb little kids with short attention spans"
(do a separate post on this concept which is important)

Change your huge URLs to more intuitive reading like /carol-anderson/. Weird or long URLs can fool the search engine and you have a lot of them.

Thomas: List of workshops is WAY too long – cut it up into sections with better categories which will spider better. (Matt nodded that this was a good idea).

Jake: All Title tags in the site appear to be the same! Bad.

7. Shopping.com [this is one of the largest shopping portals]. They appear to be having big ranking problems though they have a huge number of indexed pages. He said 80% of their server load is from SE crawling(!).

Matt: Mouseover problems? Always use DASHES as separators rather than underscores. Underscores will be treated as connecting the two words.

Jake: Load balancing at the servers can lead to duplicate content filtering.

[Shopping.com said they had som latency (slow loading page) issues. Matt indicated this is UNlikely to cause problems with Google but might with MSN.

Users have complained about empty epinions.com pages – get rid of them.
Use more user friendly URLs – more for users than for Search engines.

8. CorporateCasuals.com. Now in top 60 for most terms but can't rank for "embroidery".

Tim: More descriptive anchor text needed.

Matt: 3 parameter URLs are not good. DO NOT use ID=. Best to use NO parameters but keep to 1-2 if you must do it. Stop using nofollows on (internal?) links. These prevent the SE from following internal navigation and beefing up the site.
Think about attracting attention to the site to get more inbound links.

Bruce: Descriptions are NOT unique and that is bad.

9. Arcamax.com "We syndicate content. Site Tips wanted. Comics are top read at the site. They send out joke of the day. 30-40 subscribers per week from home page and position of subscription box on home page does NOT appear to affect this. 40-50% leave home page without going in to site.

Matt: I see irrelevant ads and a toolbar download that might scare people. Focus on other things like jokes and cartoons.

Tim: Leverage RSS power. Need content surfacing [more readily available?] Make more specific calls to action.

Matt’s mom’s blog

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When Matt Cutts mentioned that his Mom had been blogging longer than he has it set off a flurry of "Find Matt's Mom's blog" activity. She actually has three blogs! Betty is a great lady who is using the blogs to bring together people and ideas and help spread the wealth we enjoy here in the USA to those less fortunate in China. No wonder Matt's such a smart and clever fellow!

Matt's mom's blog

Blessing Hands Charity   Betty's great charity effort – send them some money!   In fact it looks like there is a matching grant in place now through another educational charity so this will double the effect of your contribution.   Especially for those at Webmasterworld Boston who enjoyed Matt's helpful sessions I recommend you pony up for his Mom's worthy efforts in China.

Google and Yahoo review websites at WebmasterWorld Boston

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The best session at WebmasterWorld Boston had site reviews of nine websites by Matt Cutts of Google, Tim Mayer of Yahoo, and SEOs Thomas Bindl and Bruce Clay. Jake Baille did a fine job moderating, keeping the reviews fast. Here's a summary which I'll add to during the day as I recover from the conference here in Concord, MA.

1) Britannica.com Problem: Brittanica's subscription content is behind the pay firewall and therefore not crawlable. They don't want to change this model too much. They rank poorly for many terms for which they think they are authoritative. What should they do?

Matt Cutts: Wikipedia gives people all the information they are looking for and therefore ranks above Brittanica. Paid firewall snips are NOT enough information to attract inbound links. Consider picking a few articles in highly searched areas and making 100% of that content crawlable. It's tough to rank a page with just a paragraph of text and even tougher to get links to that content.

Bruce Clay: Check your "Expertness" by analyzing inbound links, outbound links. Check technical factors related to weighting and content rankings. Check server issues including accidental replication of content which can lead to duplicate content filters.

Tim Mayer: Consider a more colloquial writing style (I understood this to mean that that SE's are looking for natural conversational styles over formal or automated content though I don't think Tim said that specifically). Talk to the Search Engines about an information feed program.

ResumeRabbit.com He wanted optimization comments on a new home page here: edirectpublishing.com/newlandingpage/ BUT in a fun moment at the start of this review Matt said he'd gotten a LOT of unsolicited emails from ResumeRabbit and felt that may have "tainted" the brand. "how about ResumeAardvark?" suggested Matt in perhaps his *worst* piece of advice during the conference.

Matt: Links look good, you've made the site crawlable.
Thomas: Links, links, links (I think he meant one always needs more quality inbound links)
Tim: Use keyword tags! They matter in some SEs
Bruce: Drop id= which is in the source code for some/all pages.

InternationalLiving.com Problem: We are one of the best sites in the niche, but don't rank high.
Tim: Lose the flash download at home page. You are losing people immediately by forcing them to download stuff to see the whole site.

Bruce: Put the postcard thing in an IFRAME, consider more consistent home page text rather than regular changes.

Thomas: Consider CSS style sheets for better look. Use of H tag is good.

Matt: The site feels "thinner" than it really is. Emphasize the detailed content and the fact the project predates the web and has been online for a LONG time. Try to buy Internationaliving.com, a similar URL that could be taking some traffic away due to spelling confusion. If you do this use 301 redirect to send them to the real [canonical] site. People make weird queries you can't predict so cast a wider net [using emphasis on more keywords] to pull in long tailed searches.

Cherokee-NC.com

As the big flash home page …. slowly ….loaded …. the crowd erupted into laughter. [Note to all my friends in Travel and tourism STOP HIRING PRINT AGENCIES TO BUILD YOUR WEBSITES and STOP USING FLASH as a key component of any part of the site – it does NOT index well and often confuses the search engines!]

Problem – they get 80% of the traffic from terms "Cherokee" and "Cherokee NC"? and want more long tail searches to deliver traffic. How to optimize.

Tim: Build another site that is static and optimized for search. Flash is a BIG disadvantage.

Matt: Do not build a separate website but do a text version of this one. Note that if you select a text blurb on your site and can find it elsewhere you may be under a duplicate content penalty/filter. [he mentioned tripod.com because I think he found some duplicatation of this site there?]. Flash: You are not getting link credit in the index for [the flash based links?] but duplicate content is probably more important.

Separate navigation links from Flash. Matt: I turn off Flash. You may be losing 5% of traffic just by using Flash.

BigMouthMedia.com

I don't think Big Mouth asked for this, rather somebody wanted Matt to explain why and how they got dropped and then back in the index so fast.

Matt: Turn off CSS to see if hidden text is a problem. Look at internet Archive (or Alexa Wayback Machine) for page history [?] They had 13,000 characters stuffed into a small box, this was considered hidden text and they were banned. They cleaned it up and filed for reinclusion and are now back. Matt indicated they are not "out to get you" and this was a simple case where he did not go back in to fine every possible violation, rather when they removed the offending hidden text he felt they deserved back in. PR7 indicates a "robust" site.

Continued HERE