About Contributor Brian Klais
- Number of posts contributed
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- BSK
- Email Brian
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- Official title: EVP Search, Netconcepts Unofficial title: Web entrepreneur and innovation geek Since 2001, I have focused on developing a high-growth, search marketing technology & consulting business division of web marketing firm, Netconcepts. We help millions of consumers who are searching for products online every month find leading US retail brand websites. I am a co-inventer of our patent-pending GravityStream natural search proxy technology platform. I lead a high caliber team of search professionals headquartered in Madison, and with others distributed across the globe. I present, write, and blog on the search metrics, management, and the future. In 1997, I founded an online book reading service, Novelon.com, where we developed the first completely searchable and readable browser-based book environment and virtual bookshelf for access to thousands of popular titles online.
Posts by Brian:
Amazon’s Secret to Dominating SERP Results
Many e-tailers have looked with envy at Amazon.com’s sheer omnipresence within the search results on Google. Search for any product ranging from new book titles, to new music releases, to home improvement products, to even products from their new grocery line, and you’ll find Amazon links garnering page 1 or 2 rankings on Google and other engines. Why does it seem like such an unfair advantage?
Can you keep a secret? There is an unfair advantage. Amazon is applying conditional 301 URL redirects through their massive affiliate marketing program.
Most online merchants outsource the management and administration of their affiliate program to a provider who tracks all affiliate activity, using special tracking URLs. These URLs typically break the link association between affiliate and merchant site pages. As a result, most natural search traffic comes from brand related keywords, as opposed to long tail keywords. Most merchants can only imagine the sudden natural search boost they’d get from their tens of thousands of existing affiliate sites deeply linking to their website pages with great anchor text. But not Amazon!
Amazon’s affiliate (”associate”) program is fully integrated into the website. So the URL that you get by clicking from Guy Kawasaki’s blog for example to buy one of his favorite books from Amazon doesn’t route you through a third party tracking URL, as would be the case with most merchant affilate programs. Instead, you’ll find it links to an Amazon.com URL (to be precise: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060521996/guykawasakico-20), with the notable associate’s name at the end of the URL so Guy can earn his commission.
However, refresh that page with your browser’s Googlebot User Agent detection turned on, and you’ll see what Googlebot (and others) get when they request that same URL: http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996 delivered via a 301 redirect script. That’s the same URL that shows up in Google when you search for this book title.
So if you are a human coming in from affiliate land, you get one URL used to track your referrer’s commission. If you are a bot visiting this URL, you are told these URLs now redirect to the keyword URLs. In this way, Amazon is able to have its cake and eat it too - provide an owned and operated affiliate management system while harvesting the PageRank from millions of deep affiliate backlinks to maximize their ranking visibility in your long tail search query.
(Note I’ve abstained from hyperlinking these URLs so bots crawling this content do not further entrench Amazon’s ranking on these URLs, although they are already #4 in the query above!).
So is this strategy ethical? Conditional redirects are a no-no because it sends mixed signals to the engine - is the URL permanently moved or not? If it is, but only for bots, then you are crossing the SEO line. But in Amazon’s case it appears searchers as well as general site users also get the keyword URL, so it is merely the affiliate users that get an “old” URL. If that’s the case across the board, it would be difficult to argue Amazon is abusing this concept, but rather have cleverly engineered a solution to a visibility problem that other merchants would replicate if they could. In fact, from a searcher perspective, were it not for Amazon, many long tail product queries consumers conduct would return zero recognizable retail brands to buy from, with all due respect to PriceGrabber, DealTime, BizRate, NexTag, and eBay.
As a result of this long tail strategy, I’d speculate that Amazon’s natural search keyword traffic distribution looks more like 40/60 brand to non-brand, rather than the typical 80/20 or 90/10 distribution curve most merchants (who lack affiliate search benefits) receive.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Brian Klais of BSK on 06/03/2008 | Permalink | 
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Trackback | Comments (3) | Comments RSS | Filed under: General, Google, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, Tracking and Reporting, URLs
Sneak Peek: Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search
Phew - After 7 long months slogging away, we will finally officially release the long awaited white paper “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search” next week Monday (Aug 7th) at SES San Jose and the Etail Philadelphia show.
One is always a little cautious about postulating grand theories into the wide world. But after studying over 1 million unique unbranded keywords across 25 major retailer search programs, we couldn’t resist - referring to the concept we outline as “Page Yield Theory.” This is an underpinning notion that the “long tail” of unbranded search keyword traffic is inextricably linked to the website’s number of uniquely indexable site pages. To those of us who subscribe to the “every-page-should-sing-its-own-song” philosophy, that seems like an obvious statement.
Yet the challenge behind it, and the impetus for the research, arose from the fact that many (unoptimized) well-branded multichannel retailers have 10’s/100’s of thousands of unique and indexed website pages. However most of their natural search traffic (usually over 90%) comes from searches related to their own company name. How could such strong brands and massive websites produce such little traffic for generic terms, terms other than the company name?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Brian Klais of BSK on 08/04/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Conferences, Keyword Research, Monetization of Search, SEO, Search Engine Optimization
The Keyword Index Is Out: $1.39, On Avg.
Interestinghttp://battellemedia.com/archives/002496.phpFathom’s quarterly index is out, and prices “eased� a bit (3%). Average keyword price is $1.39. From the release:
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Brian Klais of BSK on 04/21/2006 | Permalink | Email
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New Study - Importance of Rankings on Brand
36% of search engine users associate top rankings with brand leadership
In addition, 88% of users will change engines or search terms if they don’t find what they seek within the first three pages of search results, up from 78% in 2002.
Brian
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Brian Klais of BSK on 04/21/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Google Desktop: Total Search Recall
I find it humbling to remember that in an age of ultra-multi-tasking, that the human mind can still only concentrate on one thing at any given time. This limits our memories and what we can expect to retrieve from them. Photographic memory is one thing, but if you’re talking in class, rather than listening to the prof, you still risk being embarrased when he calls on you. After all, how can you expect to remember the lecture if you are busy yapping?
What a gift it would be to possess photographic “peripheral memory”. Imagine being able to “remember” and explore conversations in full detail that you weren’t actually paying attention to when they occured.
Welcome to desktop search — Google desktop search, in particular. This will be a game changer for natural search optimization. For retailers, desktop search means all of a sudden, you’re playing the search game - whether by purpose or by accident.
With Google Desktop installed, any web page that your visitors have accessed, or any email they have received in their Outlook inbox (or web-based email clients like Hotmail or Yahoo mail), is now fodder for ANY future Google search they do. More importantly, those pages are given top-position on the page for keyword matches that may be - and this is the critical point - completely unrelated to what the customer was looking for when they originally visited that web page. Forget photographic memory. Peripheral memory is here.
For Google desktop users, this means that whether you intend it or not, your site and emails are already “indexed” for them by virtue of their viewing those pages. This provides the unfair advantage, the ultimate shortcut to the top of the Google results pile. No site restructuring or bloody IT battles. Just leveraging your existing customer traffic! Your mission is to make sure your copy, links, headings and titles are appropriately keyworded, in order to show up as more relevant than the OTHER sites that are in Google Desktop’s cache.
Adoption is still low. But as it grows Google Desktop (and other desktop search engines), raise the stakes for search engine optimization to keep drawing traffic. It will affect not only your web site, but your email campaigns which will also need to be carefully constructed to target the right keywords. This will enable retailers to extend the shelf life of campaigns and maximize repeat-traffic potential of existing customer visitors for months after they have forgotten about you.
Customers have better things to do than think about you all day long. Google desktop helps them “remember” things about you — things that they never even knew.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted by Brian Klais of BSK on 12/13/2004 | Permalink | Email
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