Natural Search Blog » Blog Optimization

Speaking at Dallas WordCamp 2009

Chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:19:52 +0000

I’m speaking at this year’s WordCamp in Dallas again later this week.

WordCamp is a mini-convention for Wordpress and blogging enthusiasts. Some of the content is Wordpress-centric, but other content is applicable to bloggers in general, such as how to promote your blog and other stuff.

I’ll be speaking on how to use social image sharing services for promotion. Social media sites such as Flickr allow people to publish and share their photos with many other people, and the site is well-constructed in terms of search engine optimization, so posting images there helps get media distributed all over. Using Flickr can help one gain more attention, inbound links, and overall search rankings.

I’ve spoken on using Flickr for promotion and optimization before, and I’ve written on details of image optimization here a number of times.

I’d further recommend blogging to everyone - I first started blogging here on the Natural Search Blog as a guest, after Stephan Spencer invited me, and it eventually changed my overall career path. Be sure to check out Stephan’s articles on blog optimization, btw, since he’s pretty much the top authority out there on the subject.

There’s still a few seats left for Dallas WordCamp - sign up before they’re all gone!

Yellow Pages & Blog Payola

Chris — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:05:56 +0000

Ed Kohler, outspoken critic of YP industry, “outed” DexKnows.com for using Pay-Per-Post to increase links and associated PageRank for their site.

As you may know, Pay-Per-Post involves paying bloggers to write articles endorsing products, services or companies, and in this flavor it also involves using those posts to link back to the company’s site in order to help build PageRank.

The blog post is very thinly disguised payola - as Kohler points out, the blog is purportedly belonging to someone in Arkansas, while this post appears to be all oriented around providing keyworded links involving Pizza in Minneapolis through DexKnows. The blog has a large “payperpost” ad badge on it, too, and if you read through the articles, every single one seems to be engineered to sound like someone writing about random daily life incidents, but always with a couple of injected keyword links.

In context, it’s glaringly obvious that the blog is a paid posting. Kohler posts a comment below it, asking if it’s a paid post for Dex, and the author replies that she doesn’t “know who’s Dex”.

Kohler further pokes fun at Ken Clark, a yellow pages industry advocate, for also linking to that blog post and citing it as a golden example of how valuable the general public finds print yellow pages. Again, Kohler posts a comment below Clark’s blog post, challenging him for linking to it while while calling it an example of a consumer’s “actual experience”.

Clark responds back defensively, saying that there’s no reason to think it’s a pay-per-post piece!

While trying to insist that the original post isn’t payola is pretty laughable, it seems obvious that Clark was just innocently duped by the faux blog. The YP industry has been in a very defensive mode lately due to bad press about print YP viability versus online ad competition, and it’s unfortunate when the legacy industry advocates display this sort of naïveté with new media — it really tends to undermine their case to some degree when they demonstrate a lack of savviness in the new marketplace.

Here are some of the other pages I found linking to DexKnows which also appear dubious:

www.livelaughblogg.com/2008/08/find-dentist-in-minneapolis.html

www.productivus.com/blog/2008/07/phone-directory/

www.joy32-joy.com/2008/08/dexknows-las-vegas.html

www.obstaclesandglories.com/2008/08/dexknows-flagstaff.html

www.langging.com/2008/08/minneapolis-directory.html

Once you visit a few of these, the types of blogs they are posted upon all begin to seem to be faux, and the posts themselves begin to all appear fraudulent.

This whole interchange illustrates what sort of problems there are with pay-for-post done badly, and DexKnows is likely now to reap some considerable Google penalty for getting involved in this sort of thing.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with pay-per-post, so long as it’s clearly labeled as a paid sponsorship message of some sort. When it’s not clearly labeled, it fools people into thinking it’s an objective endorsement.

Google and the other search engines take a dim view of paid links which seek to manipulate natural search rankings. Google penalizes pay-per-post blogs when they detect them for this reason.

In fact, I heard Matt Cutts state at SMX Advanced a few months ago that Google is likely to devalue links obtained through any duplicitous means, including viral link bait (such as shocking ficticious stories engineered for the purpose of rapidly building up PageRank).

Link-building is one common component of search engine optimization, so it’s not all that surprising that R.H. Donnelley would be doing it in some fashion for their DexKnows.com site. However, link-building is also an extremely sensitive area where the search engines are concerned, and using really aggressive tactics like this are very dangerous. Here in this case, some amount of money has been expended to obtain paid blog postings, but now it’s likely that all that money has been wasted as these sites will undoubtedly get any PR yanked, if they had any to begin with.

It’s quite possible that DexKnows.com didn’t know that this sort of thing was being done. They may have provided some link-building budget to an agency or external contractor, and they may not’ve been aware of what was being done in their name. If this is the case, it would likely be worthwhile for them to clean up what was done, discontinue contract with that agency, and send Google an apology note.

There are plenty of ways of doing link development that do not run against the search engines’ guidelines.

I employed a number of best-practice style link-building strategies when I worked at Superpages.com. One of the most basic strategies is to build valuable, useful content which people will want to link to. For instance, links from .EDU sites are some of the most valuable in terms of ranking power, but very hard to achieve since universities and schools are generally not open to being paid to link to commercial interests. So, we built campus yellow pages for hundreds of universities and colleges across the U.S., and this resulted in many of those schools linking back to Superpages.com.

For the same amount of resource time and expense, you can build something that’s bona fide as opposed to something intended to fool the search engines.

Google Pushes Reading Lists of Politicians & Pundits

Chris — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:19:52 +0000

Google announced today that they’re introducing reading lists from major politicians like Barack Obama and John McClain along with reading lists from political commentators like Ariana Huffington and Mark Halperin. Google promoted the new service today on their homepage by touting the ability to read what Obama and McCain are reading, with a link line just below the search form:

(click to enlarge)

The Google Reader blog states that you’ll now be able to “read what they read” and here their commentary as they share and discuss news.

If this gains sufficient adoption, I could easily see Google adding reading lists from many other influential people. It’s very interesting to see Google sort of promoting the blogging and commentary from a small set of users. It raises questions about who gets to be one of the lucky few — what about third parties and other commentators? Perhaps this is just the introduction of a service of this sort, and many more “read what they read” authors will be represented later on down the line as well…

Syndicate Your Articles and Blog Posts Without Getting Burned

stephan — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:37:22 +0000

Have you ever been really impressed with an article or a blog post you’ve read online? Did you link to the article? Or did you copy and paste the content into your own blog, blockquote it, then add your own commentary?

Syndicated content can be a nightmare for SEO, for several reasons. First, there are so many different ways to give author attribution. Some may pass link juice to the author, some may not. Many times, it’s the home page of the author’s blog or company site that receives the juice, rather than the source article. Secondly, multiple copies of the same article can result in duplicate content which, in turn, may confuse the spiders and disperse the ability for an author’s article to rank well. In my interview with Matt Cutts, I asked the famed Google engineer and head of the Webspam team at Google whether it is better to have the syndicated copies linked to the original article on the author’s site, or is it just as good if it links to the home page of the author? Matt answers…

I would recommend the linking to the original article on the authorâ€™s site. The reason is: imagine if you have written a good article and it is so nice that you have decided to syndicate it out. Well, there is a slight chance that the syndicated article could get a few links as well, and could get some PageRank. And so, whenever Google bot or Googleâ€™s crawl and indexing system see two copies of that article, a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank.

So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: “You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that.”

Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? Well, in this case, it’s a little more than that. By intentionally linking to the author’s source article (rather than the generic home page), you are telling the bots that that is the “true” original author of the article. So, like Matt Cutts suggested, if other articles pop up elsewhere, the bots can easily determine what the “authoritative” source is, passing the authority on to the author and helping them get the credit they deserve.

For more great tips from my interview, you can listen to the audio podcast with Matt Cutts. The interview is a little over thirty minutes long.

Happy syndicating!

Dallas Wordcamp 2008 Followup

Chris — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:48:39 +0000

I spoke at Wordcamp here in the Dallas area (in Frisco, actually) this past weekend, and had a great time meeting the participants. I spoke on SEO for Bloggers, and provided a number of tips on building a blog’s traffic and promotion of blogs. Many of the tips were material that I’ve learned from Netconcepts’ company president, Stephan Spencer, and others in our company.

Wordpress is probably the best blogging platform around in terms of search engine optimization features, both built-in and available through plug-ins. Netconcepts sets up highly-optimized blogs for many of our clients and we even recommend setting up entire websites on Wordpress due to the ability to easily delegate editing functions among many employees as well as for the SEO potential. Our Netconcepts and GravityStream websites are both set up on Wordpress, for example.

One question someone asked during my session which I didn’t know the answer to was whether our SEO Title Tag Plug-in works on the new version of Wordpress (with built in wp tags) and the answer is yes - it has been updated to work with wp built in tags and tested on 2.3- not tested on 2.5 yet. (Thanks to Kerry Mann for helping me answer this one.)

Finally, here is a copy of the presentation I gave that a number of attendees have requested.

Blog SEO Tip: Hop On A Media Feeding Frenzy

Chris — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:06:15 +0000

For bloggers wishing to improve their traffic, hopping onto a media feeding frenzy can give a nice burst in traffic which can translate into increases in longterm traffic.

A media feeding frenzy is when a subject or thing that’s happened suddenly becomes a top headliner story for journalists. News organizations have a well-developed radar for which stories of the day are going to be the most interesting for their audience, and they avidly push to provide articles quickly to satisfy the public’s sudden thirst. As more journalists glom onto the subject, it suddenly seems that everyone is reporting on some variation of the same subject, and this is a media feeding frenzy.

Bloggers can hop onto these feeding frenzies, and ride the wave of traffic associated with them.

If you see a news story that you may have a unique take on, write a blog post about it. Interested readers sometimes seek out commentary and more information about the day’s news articles, and often reporters are also looking for more information or a unique spin for further articles on the subject. If you provide what people are looking for, chances are very good that they’ll beat a path to your blog.

I’ve accomplished this a number of times. Just this past year, a subject that I’d previously written about, the swastika-shaped building on a US Naval base, made it into the top news on CNN as the government bowed to pressure and decided to renovate the building to change its profile when viewed from above. I blogged a new post about the subject and how Google Maps had played a big part in the Navy’s decision, and a number of bloggers and news journalists mentioned it also and linked over, giving us a large spike in traffic. You can see this in the September spike in traffic shown by the above graph.

Just a few weeks later, the big headline was about all the fires raging in Southern Calnifornia. I was struck sympathy for the Californians, and intrigued by a Google Map created by the Los Angeles Times, so I quickly blogged about it.Â I knew that people who were fearful of the status of their property were likely looking for this very sort of information, and I wanted to help them to find it. So, I took a screen-grab of the Google Map to illustrate my article, and optimized it through tagging and linkin it up with the LA Times site and with my blog post.

This second example didn’t result in as much traffic as the first, but I wasn’t really trying to get traffic with these pieces so much as to help promote the information resource for fire victims. I’m really pleased that this succeded in helping connect people up with info — the traffic burst on the blog here was a little bit of a surprise.

A few suggestions for how to hop on a wave:

Hop on it early. The earlier you are, the more likely your post is to get links from others who wish to comment about it.
Add something significant to the conversation. If you don’t have something interesting to say about it, keep silent. Aim to provide a unique twist of some sort to the subject matter.
Link over to the other top blog posts or main news story about the subject.
For technology subjects, watch the top stories mentioned by TechmemeÂ and consider commenting on those. Techmeme is really great for providing a “pulse” of what’s hot today in the tech sector (Slashdot is pretty good for this, too). Cool thing about linking to the top originator of any story on Techmeme is that it may automatically give you a small discussion link in return. Some blogs and news sites may give you a “trackback” link in return for you commenting and linking to their stories, so this can help you, too. (If you want your post to have a chance of getting appearing on Techmeme, I’d suggest that you set up automatic pings through Technorati — this will automatically get your latest posts spidered and available.)
If at first you don’t succeed, keep trying! Not all of your “newsbait” stories will catch interest, so don’t give up.

This tactic can give you anywhere from 10 to 20 times the traffic you normally get over a few days around the time of the feeding frenzy, if you hop on the wave effectively. Over the longterm, this also helps gradually build your traffic up as the more links to your blog give you more incremental PageRank, and as future readers seek out information on the subject.

Biz Profile Article Awarded the SEMMY for Local Search

Chris — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:14:34 +0000

My article, “Anatomy & Optimization of a Local Business Profile” was just awarded a SEMMY in the Local Search category for 2008.

Many thanks to all of you who voted for it!

The article very nearly wrote itself, being a list of some of the more common elements found in the business profiles that are commonly associated with listing information found in yellow pages and other local search directory sites.

I was really pleased with the article after I wrote it as I recall, and it turned out being a little more meaty than I expected when I started it. Even so, it was one of the “looser” written articles I did last year on Search Engine Land, and much easier for me to write than some of the other ones that I spent days researching and writing. I was short on time during the holiday month, so I selected the topic from my ideas list as one of the easier subjects to cover since I didn’t have much time. Having less time to write seems to reduce my bad habit of being too verbose.

I had at least one critic last year refer to one of those over-researched, exhaustingly-long articles as being “convoluted”, and a number of my friends and colleagues have also privately told me that I tend to be a bit too wordy or overly complex. It’s all the more apparent when one of my simpler articles like this one gets an award — simple, easier-to-digest articles tend to be preferable in this internet age. This is one of the reasons that blogs have become such a successful medium.

I find it really challenging to present complex subjects simply and elegantly, since my IT background generated habits of writing instructions or descriptions with extremely neurotic attention to detail. Writing tech requirements is quite different from writing informational articles, though, and I hope to take simplicity in writing as one of my new year’s resolutions.

Even this article was a bit too long in many respects — Chris Sherman actually improved its legibility a bit before publication when he lightly edited it by formating each of the listed profile elements a bit more like dictionary definition entries. I’d like to thank him for his editing work and writing advice over time — much appreciated along with his suggestions for compelling headlines.

Also, just a quick acknowledgment of some of my former coworkers at Superpages.com who taught me a lot about business profiles while I was there: Denise DeArmond, Mohan Medepalli, Jennifer Stelling, and Sharon Walker.

Finally, some thanks go to Matt McGee for organizing this — not to mention a tip of the hat for developing something that’s pretty effective linkbait!

Google Takes RSS & Atom Feeds out of Web Search Results

Chris — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:53:14 +0000

Google just announced this week that they have started reducing RSS & Atom feeds out of their search engine results pages (”SERPs”) - something that makes a lot of sense in terms of improving quality/usability in their results. (They also describe why they aren’t doing that for podcast feeds.)

This might confuse search marketers about the value of providing RSS feeds on one’s site for the purposes of natural search marketing. Here at Netconcepts, we’ve recommended using RSS for retail sites and blogs for quite some time, and we continue to do so. Webmasters often take syndicated feeds in order to provide helpful content and utilities on their sites, and so providing feeds can help you to gain external links pointing back to your site when webmasters display your feed content on their pages.

Google has removed RSS feed content from their regular SERPs, but they haven’t necessarily reduced any of the benefit of the links produced when those feeds are adopted and displayed on other sites. When RSS and Atom feeds are used by developers, they pull in the feed content and then typically redisplay it on their site pages in regular HTML formatting. When those pages link back to you as many feed-displayed pages do, the links transfer PageRank back to the site originating the feeds, and this results in building up ranking values.

So, don’t stop using RSS or Atom feeds!

Build Your Own Local Search Engine

Chris — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:58:38 +0000

Quite a few bloggers out there have clued-in to how using Eurekster’s Swickis on their blogs can be a cool feature enhancement, providing custom thematic search engines for their users. If you have a blog that focuses on particular subject matter, inclusion of useful links and other features like these custom search engines can help to build loyalty and return visits. But, for webmasters who build local guides for small communities, Swickis are also an ideal way to rapidly provide robust, location-specific search functionality.

Over time, I’ve looked at a lot of small community guides, and many of the people who create them are masters of finding free widgets to provide functionality for things like weather forecasts, news headlines, and local events. But, many of these sites are missing even simple search functionality to help users find the local info on their site as well as elsewhere on the internet.

For instance, check out these small town websites for: Milan, Tennessee; Monterey, California; and Fredericksburg, Texas. Each one of these sites seem to be something less than comprehensive guides for their areas, and each could benefit from having a search engine to provide a route into more info about their areas.

Eurekster is perfect for this sort of thing — check out the search engine portal I whipped-up there for Milan, Tennessee in just about five minutes:

The rectangular widget that the service provides includes a search form box along with a “buzzcloud” of keyword links to top items you select to hot-link right into the search results. The interfaces are easily customizable in look and feel, and you can set up a few different search ads to run in the results pages, if you’ve signed up with those services to do so.

Here’s another cool example local swicki that someone created as a Seattle search engine.

So, if you need a quick, local search engine, Eurekster is definitely the way to go.

Technorati Authority Number Now Decides Blog Rankings

Chris — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:33:57 +0000

On Friday, I noticed that Technorati instituted a new change in how they report info about blogs they track. Previously, they displayed the total number of inlinks from the total number of blogs linking to a blog. For example, they’d state “__ blogs link here” and “X links from Y blogs”. They now only state the total number of blogs that link to a blog, and they’re calling that measure the “Technorati Authority” number.

Technorati only counts the total number of blogs which link to another blog for the Authority number, not the total number of links - which is good, since various blog features like categorization pages, preview snippets, and other pagination and navigation schemes common to blogs can cause a link from a single posting to reappear multiple times from a blog’s site.

The “Technorati Authority” label is appropriate, because in the blogosphere, the blogs which have the most citations by other bloggers are likely the most “authoritative” or most-popular. It’s a unique, blogocentric rating system, very similar to Google’s PageRank concept.

Blogs which have the highest Authority numbers are ranked highest. The Technorati Top 100 page lists the most-popular blogs.

These are the top 10 blogs they list currently:

Engadget

Boing Boing

Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

Techcrunch

The Huffington Post Breaking News & Opinion

Lifehacker, The Productivity and Software Guide

Ars Technica

PostSecret

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Michelle Malkin

I should note that Technorati does not count links that are tagged with the NOFOLLOW attribute, nor do they count the links found in comments, nor links generated from Trackback comment (I’ve previously advised against use of Trackback Submitter for the use of deploying spamlinks, though I think restrained use of it to hook up related articles is not a bad thing).

If you’ve got a blog, you should register it with Technorati, since it’s one of the many ways that people can search and find blog postings about subjects they’re interested in. Also, it’s pretty cool for quickly seeing how many people are linking to you or commenting about your postings.