Blog SEO from Matt Cutts

Posted on August 10, 2007 by JoeDuck

Matt Cutts, of Google fame, recently spoke at WordCamp gathering for WordPress blog enthusiasts (like Matt himself, who blogs with WordPress rather than Google’s excellent blogging product “Blogger”).

This blog post points to Matt’s PowerPoint and several other sources for summaries of this presentation.

Matt’s view on SEO is important because most experts would suggest that he’s probably the most knowlegeable search expert *in the world* and is one of the few search engineers who is privy to basically all of Google’s Algorithmic secrets. Also, in my opinion Matt is honest and straightforward with advice, and therefore if he’s suggesting an SEO approach you are well advised to take it. I should note though that this view is not shared by some of the elite SEO people who seem to think Matt will sometimes “misdirect” people to protect the precious Google Algorithm.

My comment over there was:

Excellent post and links here Matt.
However I have a “beef” with the emphasis on linkbaiting and basic SEO as good ways to rise in the ranks (they ARE, but should not be). I’d argue that in an ideal search environment SEO would have effectively *zero* effect on ranks (because it’s communicating with the bot not the user), and linkbaiting things would have only a minor effect unless they were highly relevant to the query.
We now see a lot of SERPS where you see a bunch of sites, all similar, ranked more according to how their SEO, history, links, structure match Google’s expectations rather than how a user would view them. Google generally argues that these are essentially the same but they are probably only roughly correlated.
The fix for this would be greater transparency in the ranking process combined with greater penalties for being deceptive. If Google is going to aggressively defend the integrity of the algorithm the ranking process should be more accessible, especially to mom and pops who will increasingly flirt with disaster as they try to find ranking advantages.

Chico the Wonder Dog

Posted on June 22, 2007 by JoeDuck

Christmas 2006

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
Chico the Wonder Dog is a fine fellow and deserves another post, partly because he’s fallen to number two in the Google rankings for “Chico the Wonder Dog” when clearly he deserves to be number ONE for “Chico the Wonder Dog“.

The bone was a Christmas present last year but had unintended consequences. He got all paranoid and weird about guarding, but not eating, the bone. Finally I just cut it up into a bunch of smaller treats.

Uzbekistan Travel and the Province of Djizak

Posted on June 14, 2007 by JoeDuck

Update – both this page and our Uzbekistan Travel “Province of Djizak” page are now ranked very high for “Province of Djizak” searches. Thank you Google for ranking us properly. Also note that my old experiments on this term were messed up by blog changes, so I think the great page I created was left hanging, and it’s to Google’s credit they wound up ranking the OHWY page (correctly) as fairly authoritative. Fairly clear to me now that our earlier troubles were a from a site-wide Google downrank penalty.

The old story:

Normally I would not be writing so much about Uzbekistan Travel. We already have a great guide to Uzbekistan over at Online Highways’ Uzbekistan Travel section that was put together for us by Marat, a magazine publisher over in Tashkent, Uzbekistan who visited Online Highways in Oregon a few years ago.

However, writing about the Province of Djizak has been an excellent way to get some information about why Google has been punishing OHWY.com for the past few years. I’ve created the world’s best Province of Djizak page at the OHWY blog and linked it up. Due to spelling irregularities for Province of Djizak clearly the new blog page is *a great page* that most users would probably want if they were searching for Province of Djizak.

However, it’s the blog posts here that seem to “stick” as the number one page for that term, with the better page going from rank of about 200 to rank of 3 to rank of about 200 again.

The conclusion? A sitewide penalty by Google that downranks even great, user friendly, advertising free, must see pages about Province of Djizak.

Hey Google, that’s arguably not a good approach if the goal is to give users the best information, especially when there is still no Google mechanism to tell a legitimate site why the Algorithm thinks that portions of the site suck so much that the computer is punishing the whole site.

Searches, Searches, get ya 1% of all searches for a billion dollars!

Posted on May 26, 2007 by JoeDuck

Don Dodge is always doing great, straightforward biz math over at his blog and today is no exception. He looks at Search biz and search revenues and concludes that one percent of the search market is worth about a billion bucks.

I think that the key concept in play right now is “advertising”. This is contrary to many silly protestations of the big players who claim that “user centric computing” is the key to success. I do think that many on the development teams actually believe their own hype, but it’s clear from the behaviors and allocations of resources that ads are the online king and will remain the key development driver for some time.

Can you have ads and good user stuff? Of course you can. Google has done the best job with this though I think they are now on a slippery slope with more ads, more ambiguous ads, and considerable collateral damage in the spam wars, but can you blame them when, as Don points out, there are billions on the table and a lot of potential players waiting for a piece of the search action.

Google Downrank Penalty

Posted on May 6, 2007 by JoeDuck

One is torn between respect owed to Google for all they’ve done with search and frustration with their insufficient help/info for downranked sites. I know a small number of folks on the web spam team work to keep “collateral damage” low, but I think what bugs me is the ongoing strong implication that there is very little collateral damage when in fact there is a lot.

Ironically this opaque approach to downranking penalties is what spawns a lot of bad information at many forums and leads to the mistrust of Google that is increasingly common among many of the elite SEOs and webmasters.

The big part of my frustration comes from what I think is a lie, or at best a misleading thing that Google tells sites in the standard emails from Google support, which says that because your site is found in the Google index you have no penalty.

I now believe that by any reasonable definition of “penalty” this is a false and unreasonable statement.

What they really mean by this emails is that your site has no “manual penalty”. A manual penalty is invoked in extreme cases where sites are removed from the index. This is generally for things like hidden text, sneaky redirection, or other SEO tricks banned by the Google Webmaster Guidelines. However, if your site has a big downrank it probably has been penalized by the algorithm in a direct way, probably by a subtraction of points that leads to a much lower score for many/all of the pages in your site.

Here’s a good example of the downranking penalty at our Online Highways Travel site:

Searching Google for “Province of Djizak” it would be reasonable for a user to find this page somewhat high among the results: http://www.ohwy.com/uz/z/zdjizak.htm

Why would a user want this page? It’s highly relevant for the search, leads to more info about Uzbekistan, and our Uzbekistan section was created mostly by a leading travel expert from Uzbekistan who publishes the leading travel magazine for the Silk Road region of Asia.

So, why is this page relegated to obscurity, at position of approximately 190 of 193 results listed? Here it is on the last page of the Google results.

I wish I knew, though I’ve been assured by Google in several emails that we have no penalty when clearly … we do.

Google probably has a right to penalize and re-rank however they see fit, but along with this power and responsibility goes an obligation to tell an unvarnished truth about the status of sites. I used to believe that large sites with high advertising spends were not more likely to get special help than small sites, and to Google’s credit they have historically been good listeners/talkers at events like WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Strategies, but I now wonder if the lines are getting blurred between the advertising and ranking realms at Google. Google probably has the right to do things as they see fit, but please don’t tell me that thousands of small and medium-sized sites with relevant pages aren’t getting penalized and downranked when they … clearly are.

Update: Blogging about this has affected the results – on May 11 this blog post is number one for the term “Province of Djizak”! Our subject page remains very low – about 201 in rankings even though it is *referenced* by the number ONE page for the term (and of course is much more relevant to the search).

This, combined with the Chico the Wonder Dog experiments and a lot of reading and talking with SEO people, leads me to think that the downrank penalty really is site wide and that Google really is sacrificing a lot of good pages like our UZ section to punish us for what they see as undesirable cross linking / thin pages / failure in some cases to use nofollow on links / ?

Update 2: Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the rank? Our Djizzak Province page appears, after all, two places above this, um, highly relevant page for that query: Application of defecation lime from sugar industry in Uzbekistan

Update 3: OK, I have now created what I would argue is the world’s best “Province of Djizak” web page, located at the Online Highways blog. Unfortunately I had a problem changing the title but that page should *at least* rise higher than 200 for a query. Why? Because it is quite a bit more relevant than any others for that term and it now has TWO LINKS from this, the top page for the query “Province of Djizak“. If my hypothesis is correct it will not rise up because it will fall under OHWY’s site downranking penalty.

Update 4: Province of Djizak original OHWY page is now number one at Google for “Province of Djizak”. This is NOT at all consistent with my site penalty hypothesis above. It is consistent with the idea that we need to beef up incoming, new links to get pages re-ranked.

Update 5 (June 1). The original OHWY page is again heavily penalized – number 216 from number 1 yesterday. This, alas, is totally consistent with the sitewide penalty hypothesis I describe above.

Advertising as Snake Oil. Wanna buy a bottle?

Posted on April 23, 2007 by JoeDuck

Via Aaron Wall an excellent article post by John Andrews suggesting how difficult it is to find legitimate SEO people among the ocean of pretenders and deceivers. There is some irony here though. This point is not lost on many advertisers who now (correctly) view most SEO people like used car salesmen. However a far more important point has been lost in the SEO quality scandals, and that is the fact that in advertising almost all salespeople and agencies are *absolutely* not to be trusted and generally are misinterpreting flimsy research to their own ends. They are not lying to you, they are simply interpreting results to favor their needs rather than yours. You think not? How many times has your agency recommended they be fired in favor of better teams they know about, or made recommendations that cost your agency big money in favor of your success?

Here’s a good advertiser mantra, and it should be repeated with each campaign:

Trust no one.
Independently verify results.
Change spending according to results.

Incredibly, I think 90% of all advertisers don’t use this approach, preferring to treat advertising salespeople and agencies or magazine and TV research reporters as “marketing” experts which of course they are not. Salespeople make money selling their own stuff, not selling success. As long as advertisers fail to follow up with metrics and/or trust the salesperson/ Agency’s claims it’s impossible for them to appropriately adjust the spend and define failure vs success. I used to think this was a problem only in small business, but it’s clear that even the largest corporations often fail to properly test, preferring (I think bureaucratically) to go with comfortable approaches that can be justified to spending committees.

The extreme failures of print and TV advertising (and other forms) to deliver has fueled the PPC revolution, though even PPC often has a negative ROI and testing is needed. Fortunately for those fortunate advertisers who realize how much better PPC will likely be than other forms of advertising it’s easier and cheaper to measure online advertising successes.

I commented over at John’s:
A simply excellent post John, getting to the heart of the challenge facing SEO customers and providers as well as a possible solution – forms of success metrics that are fairly standardized and/or easy to digest.

But good metrics are a gaping void in advertising and have been for decades. I’m often floored by the ignorance of advertisers who think they can count on salespeople to advise them on the effectiveness of the campaigns, which in my sector of travel are often horrible.

I’d suggest that TV and print salespeople are the most conspicuous deceivers, even more than many SEO pretenders. Although I agree that the overwhelming majority of SEO claims are bogus or deceptive, it’s important for advertisers to realize that even a modest PPC campaign, run themselves, will often outperform *their best print or TV efforts*.

Advertising in all forms, for the most part, is a lie. It often fails and people are too mathematically ignorant to discover the problems and realign the spend.

Alexa – Beware the Satanic Statistics?

Posted on March 5, 2007 by JoeDuck

Peter Norvig over at Google has published a quick little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics are if you want to know about website traffic. Thank you Matt for pointing out this Peter paper, which is very intriguing as it demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

I’ve realized the problems with Alexa for some time based on Alexa comparisons to sites where I knew the real traffic, but 50x is a rather spectacular level of error. So great in fact, given that these sites are both read mostly by technology sector folks, it suggests that Alexa is effectively worthless as a comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A recent, larger, and simply superb comparison study by Rand over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons. Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Rand told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with log files. My experience with Analytics has been superficial but seems to line up with my log stats well.

Social networks = people, not technologies

Posted on March 3, 2007 by JoeDuck

The New York Times reports that Cisco has acquired Tribe Networks in what appears to be an effort to become a player in the social networking space. The article quotes Marc Andreeson of NING, another social network facilitator, suggesting that the social networking biz is harder than it looks and Cisco will have problems. I agree Cisco will probably fail to do much with this but not for the same reason, but for the opposite. As with most internet stuff the technology difficulties are much less of a challenge than the social barriers to success.

Even Yahoo and Google – now brilliant masterpieces of technological sophistication – did not start out that way. Rather they began as fairly modest “websites” with a handful of programming routines that grew in usefulness, traffic, and complexity to become the internet behemoths they are today. Sure there’s a lot of amazing technology behind these companies, but I still think there is a sort of “techno bias” that remains pervasive both inside and outside the industy that is both fooling and manipulating people into thinking that success is mostly a function of your technology when it should be clear to all that it’s a function of the way your online environments relate to people, and that in turn is art not science. Is expensive, complex technology required to create a hugely popular, high traffic website? Of course NOT. Myspace and Facebook now use slick stuff, but they didn’t start out that way. PlentyofFish.com, a hugely popular dating site, still uses a *single* server and very basic technology despite the fact that it competes with big players working on platforms that probably cost 100x that of PlentyofFish’s.

I think the future will be like the past – successful sites will cater to the needs of people and bend the technologies as needed. Cisco, Ning, and other social networking technology platforms are great but they won’t define things. People will do that. People are, after all, what social networking is all about.

My Enhance.com PPC advertising experiment reveals very questionable incoming clicks.

Posted on March 2, 2007 by JoeDuck

In 2005 I started experimenting with Enhance.com pay per click advertising. I deposited 1500 into an account, set the daily limits low, and directed all traffic to an affiliate travel site I set up for the experiment. RoadTripsUSA.net. I’m now analyzing the results which suggest almost all the activity from enhance was worthless, and some may have been fraudulent. This is especially frustrating because I’d had similar bad experiences with Enhance’s previous incarnation – “ah-ha.com” but thought I’d give the new Enhance a chance.

I can’t be sure yet of anything other than the extremely low return on the $500 spent, but I’ll be posting more over the next few weeks from my logs about the sites that sent traffic.

I just sent this to Enhance Customer Support:

PLEASE ESCALATE THIS IMMEDIATELY or REFUND MY MONEY IMMEDIATELY.

I’ve had no responses to my request to refund the 1500 I invested in Enhance advertising in 2005 as part of an experiment in using PPC to send traffic to a Travel affiliate website I set up for this purpose.

$1000 remains in my account.

I’ve been examining my log files and it appears that most of the clicks I’ve had from Enhance were from very questionable, possibly fraudulent sources. I’m happy to share this information with you.

What is *certain* is that I’ve had effectively no business come in from my $500 investment in Enhance Clicks.

This Washington Post Article explains the approach taken by “pay to click” schemes. I suspect much of my traffic came from this type of scam, though all that really matters is that the clicks were effectively worthless.

I’d also like your permission to publish your responses to me at my blog: https://joeduck.wordpress.com

Thank you. Please contact me immediately at 800-872-3266 or by email.

Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel. Vaccinate!

Category Archives: SEO