With merely a bad service or product, we might push for a discount or refund, and write some negative reviews about a company at various ratings sites like Yelp. But, when it’s an actual scam artist, it becomes a question of how to reach them in the first place, and then how to do anything that they’d even feel.

In the local search marketing world, many of us have noticed a spate of bad actors who are setting up fraudulent business listings (perhaps even operating under bogus names), and once they’ve lured people into doing business with them, they abscond with fees in return for shoddy service or no service/product whatsoever. So, there are some basic issues around how they are operating with impunity, promoting themselves online (sometimes out-ranking bona fide established local businesses), and then taking consumers’ money with zero accountability.

So, here are some tips we’ve made to help you REACH LOCAL SCAM ARTISTS and even thwack ‘em!  You may not be able to get your lost time and money back, but you may get a little justice or you might be able to declaw these bad guys just a bit so they can’t prey on other consumers as easily.

Tips To Reach Local Scam Artists & Thwack ‘Em:

• Get them de-listed! Is it a bogus local listing in a directory or search engine? In other words, if you drove up to the street address they’re listed under, is there an actual company office there where you can talk to an employee of the business? Bogus listings have been a dire problem where some services like locksmiths are concerned. If there’s no business representative at the place where their online address is listed in Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc — then, that is a bogus listing. For these cases, contact the search engine or directory site and inform them that it’s a bogus listing.
• Narc on ‘em! If someone is dishonest in one thing, chances are they may be doing other bad stuff, too! Look critically at their website — are they using someone else’s copyrighted text or images? If so, inform the people they’ve lifted content from, and this could get their sites delisted from search engines like Google if it’s reported properly.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or “DMCA” law) allows owners of copyrighted material to demand that sites take down content which has been taken from them.
• Reveal who they are! In times past, all sorts of conmen would set up websites pretending to be someone they weren’t. But, people can’t always hide behind a webpage any more — you should familiarize yourself with looking up domain name registration information. The URL domain name of the website of a scam company might, just might, let you discover the name of the person who set up the business. You can look the URL domain name owner information up at many different “WHOIS” services out there, although I prefer the Domain Dossier provided at Hexillion’s Central Ops. Go there, type the domain name (“example.com”) of the bad company into the search box, then hit return. Under the Domain Whois record, see who it is that is listed under the Registrant information. In some cases, the bad guys will have obscured the info by using some front company to hide who they are. Even so, you can see who is providing the domain registration service for them, and you could use that info to contact them through an attorney’s note and demand that they tell you who is behind a site so that you know who you’re dealing with.
• Complain to their website host! The Domain Dossier also reveals where the website is being hosted. Using this, you can figure out who their ISP (“Internet Service Provider”) is, and you can call them up and complain that the website is fraudulent/criminal. Some ISPs may then determine that the scam company has broken their terms and conditions, and this might result in them pulling the plug on the scam website.
• Check out the IP address of their website’s domain, too! Websites are often co-hosted on a server along with many other websites, so if you search to find out what other domain names may be associated with the same IP address, you might discover other sites and other businesses that the scam artist may be using as a front. Tread carefully with this, though, because they could just be using cheap hosting, and other domains on the same IP address may be completely unrelated to your bad guy.
• Reverse search on the web and in local search engines by the company’s phone number. This may further reveal other businesses that the bad actor is using to take advantage of people.
• Discover the business owner through the local tax office. In many localities, con men obscure their identities through using “doing business as” or “DBA” names, and these may be required to be registered with local tax offices in order for bank accounts to be set up. Contact local tax offices to see what they have filed on business names in order to help you reveal the persons responsible.
• Thwack ‘em with negative reviews! Be sure to rate them negatively in Google Maps, online yellow pages, Yelp, and at the Better Business Bureau. When searching for their type of business or by their business name, carefully look at what pages and sites are ranking. Any page which lists this business might be an opportunity for you to go in and disclose how they treated you and what your experience with them was. In one widely-reported, egregious case, a reprehensible online merchant received numerous bad reviews online, resulting in coverage in an article on the New York Times, and ultimately the owner was arrested and will likely face criminal charges.
• Blog about ‘em! If you already have a blog, write a post with the title begining with the bad business’s name and describe your interactions with them. Honest description of what they did to you could really hurt their bottom line! There are many cases out there of how individual bloggers have taken even major corporations to task, resulting in serious impacts to a company’s business.
• Report them to the authorities! If what they did to you was illegal, report the company to your local district attorney’s office, and to the state attorney general. Ask your local police for suggestions, and report the company wherever they may be operating.
• Take away their phones! In some cases we know of, locals complained to the phone company about a local scam artist that set up multiple, bogus online listings for their business, and the consumer complaints resulted in the bad guys losing their phone numbers. The phone company might be a good resource for getting info on the real names of owners behind the scam company, too.
• Take ‘em to small claims court! Assuming your total dollar amount isn’t too big, file suit against them in small claims court. You might not be able to get them to show up, or even pay, but it can be useful to you if you go through the process to get a judgement against them. You’ll need to’ve found a way to indentify the true company or individual’s name behind the scam company already, though.
• Form a mob! Know others targeted by the same scam artists? Get them to join you in reporting the offenses. There’s not only safety in numbers, but believability and priority. If enough people report the same company, it becomes progressively harder for the complaints to be ignored or neglected.

Using these tips should help you to actually reach the local scam artists, and thwack ‘em where it hurts!

If you have additional ideas for thwacking the bad guys, please add them below in the comments.

The rating service and talk about it reminded me that I actually did a sort of rating via a blog post here back in 2007 entitled “Some Top In-House SEOs“. In that post I sought to list out the cream-of-the-crop of search engine optimization experts working within major companies.

The main difficulty of attempting to rate SEOs is that it’s quite hard to know precisely what they’ve recommended or done to optimize a company’s websites. For instance, you could be an absolute genius at SEO, but if the company is lethargic or incompetent programmers oversee their sites, none of the SEO expert’s talent might be reflected in the actual site. That’s an extreme example, and in most cases some degree of the expert’s recommendations will be properly implemented. But the point is that site configuration may not really be used to reflect an expert’s actual ability, particularly if compared with other colleagues.

Back when I wrote “Some Top In-House SEOs”, I wasn’t really prepared for the large amount of attention it received. I was immediately pressured by a lot of people who wanted to be added to the list, but didn’t meet the criteria I was using. Quite a few people asked me to update the list over time as well, and I quickly saw that it would be necessary if this was done ongoing to be open about the rating criteria I was using — else people would question why so-and-so was listed while so-and-so was not.

The criteria I used back then was very basic. I wanted to list only people who were employees of top companies that performed organic search optimization of one sort or another for those company’s websites. I wanted companies which were readily-identifiable by a majority of people in the U.S., so they had to be MAJOR brand names: top-50 websites, Fortune 500 companies, and Internet Retailer 500 companies. Finally, I had to be able to find/identify the SEOs who worked for those companies, which usually meant that they’d have to self-disclose what they did (many SEOs operated somewhat anonymously behind corporate walls). So, the SEO needed to blog or speak at conferences, and disclose who they worked for. In one or two cases, I discovered individual’s names through news interviews or press releases. I also mined the list of top-linked SEOs from LinkedIn (apparently no longer in operation? formerly: http://www.linkedseo.com/).

I made a number of mistakes, of course. I didn’t feel I had time to write to and receive confirmation from each person. In some cases I just “outed” people from behind the corporate curtain for the first time!

For the most part, people loved the attention and recognition! I felt a bit stressed from those who clamored to get in, and I pretty much stated that I wouldn’t add any until I updated a year down the road. In quite a lot of cases, I think that headhunters mined the list in order to lure people away to other companies, so many benefited from the exposure.

Here it is, about three years after the fact, and I thought it’d be interesting to see where are they all now? So, here’s the list once again, with individual’s former companies listed from back then, and who they work for now. Nothing scientific – I merely base this on what their LinkedIn resume or website states. It’s been neat for me to revisit this list! So many of these folks became friends and close acquaintances since I wrote this up! It’s also fascinating to see how many of them have moved on to advanced titles and to owning their own companies.

Some Top In-House SEOs – Where They Are Now:

Amr Awadallah:
Then: Director Product/Business Intelligence at Yahoo! Inc.
Now: Founder, CTO, VP Engineering. at Cloudera, Inc.

Aidan Beanland:
Then: Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo
Now: Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo

Jennifer Blamy:
Then: SEO Manager at LendingTree.com
Now: VP – Digital Marketing at Bank of America

Jessica Bowman:
Then: Director of SEO for Business.com
Now: Principal at SEMinhouse.com SEO Consulting

Michael Brito:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at HP
Now: Vice President at Edelman Digital

David Carberry:
Then: Director of Search Marketing for Advertising.com
Now: Director of Digital Sales Baltimore-Washington at Radio One, Co-Founder at Local Roll Call

Steve Carrod:
Then: Search Marketing Manager (EMEA) at Hewlett-Packard
Now: Website Marketing Manager at Snapfish

Gene Chan:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at Imaging & Printing Group – HP
Now: Senior Account Executive at MySpace

Michael Cheung:
Then: Search Marketing Lead at Marchex
Now: AVP of Business Development at PT Kreatip Komunikacitra

Kathleen Coughlan:
Then: Strategic Alliances & Search Marketing at Lexis Nexis
Now: Director, Global Brand Marketing at LexisNexis

Terry Cox:
Then: SEO/SEM Manager for Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online
Now: Search Engine Marketing Director at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online

Christopher Curtis:
Then: Associate Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com
Now: Senior Director, Traffic Operations at Shopzilla.com

Darren Dalasta:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at WhitePages.com
Now: Search Engine Marketing Manager at WhitePages.com

Rudy DeDominicis:
Then: Search Marketing Specialist at Time Inc Interactive
Now: Associate Director Audience Development- Search Marketing Specialist @ Time Inc

John Ellis :
Then: Online Marketing Manager, Search for ResortQuest / Gaylord Entertainment
Now: Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant (SEO & PPC)

Matt Evans:
Then: SEO Manager at Monster.com
Now: SEO Manager at Monster.com

Duane Forrester:
Then: Manager, Search Marketing at Sports Direct Inc.
Now: Senior Program Manager of SEO at Microsoft

Derek Fulford:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at The Weather Channel Interactive
Now: Search Marketing Manager at The Weather Channel Interactive

Jason Hall:
Then: Director, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com
Now: Search expert w/ international experience, currently exploring Brazilian Internet market

Seth Hammac:
Then: Search Engine Marketing Media Manager at CNET Networks
Now: Sales Engineer at Microsoft

Julie Handleman-Baerwald:
Then: SEO/SEM Manager at Citysearch
Now: SEO & SEM Director, Citysearch

Liz Keller:
Then: Manager of SEO Strategy at iVillage, Inc.
Now: Head of Search Engine Optimisation (UK) at Razorfish

Mia Kemp:
Then: SEO and Sr. Project Manger – Marketing at Kaplan University
Now: Manager, Marketing Analytics & Strategy at Sapient

Imran Khan:
Then: Chief Marketing Officer at E-Loan
Now: VP, Worldwide eCommerce Marketing at Symantec

Vic Kuzmovich:
Then: Director Online Marketing at Expert Realty
Now: VP Search Marketing at BodyLogicMD

Rob Lenderman:
Then: SEO Architect at LendingTree.com
Now: AVP Interactive Product Development at Interval International – IAC

Jeff Leong:
Then: Sr. Online Marketing Specialist at Symantec Corporation.
Now: Web Consultant

Laura Lippay:
Then: SEO for Yahoo!
Now: Online Visibility (Social Media & Search/SEO) Consultant

Paul Low:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at JCPenney.com
Now: Account Director at Camelot Communications

Bill Macaitis:
Then: VP of Traffic Generation and SEM / SEO for Fox Interactive Medi
Now: VP of Online Marketing at Salesforce.com

Philip Maher:
Then: Director of SEO at LocalLaunch
Now: Founder at Intuitive Investments

Matt McGee:
Then: SEO for Marchex
Now: Self-employed Marketing Consultant

Sean McGinnis:
Then: Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Findlaw
Now: Director, Online Bar Review at Micromash

Andy Mihalop:
Then: Head of Search Marketing at Reed Business Information
Now: Search & Performance Media Director – Global Clients at Aegis Media

Melanie Mitchell:
Then: Director, SEO/SEM at AOL
Now: SVP, Search Marketing Strategy at Digitas

Mike Moran:
Then: Distinguished Engineer / Product Manager of IBM’s OmniFind Search Product
Now: Chief Strategist at Converseon

Iestyn Mullins:
Then: SEM Manager at SHOP.COM
Now: Director Managed Services at Logic361.com

Michael Nguyen:
Then: SEO Strategist at Shopzilla
Now: SEO Strategist at Shopzilla

Paul O’Brien:
Then: SEO for HP
Now: VP Marketing at Outright

Giovanna O’Grady:
Then: SEM/SEO Manager at Intuit
Now: Consultant, Customer Acquisition & Retention at AboutAirportParking.com

Paul Pedersen:
Then: Manager Search Engine Marketing at E W Scripps
Now: Manager Search Engine Marketing at E W Scripps

Dan Perry:
Then: SEO Producer, Cars.com
Now: SEO Director at Turner Broadcasting

David Perez:
Then: SEO/PPC Manager for eHarmony
Now: Cofounder at Convertro

Robert Pettee:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at LendingTree, LLC
Now: Director, Search Marketing at LendingTree, LLC

Amy Pickwick:
Then: Web Communications Manager at USinternetworking, an AT&T company
Now: Senior Project Manager, Go Forward Media

Antonella Pisani Vernier:
Then: Director of Search Engine Marketing & Optimization at ProFlowers
Now: VP, Acquisition Marketing at Provide Commerce (ProFlowers / RedEnvelope)

Roni Raulwing:
Then: International Program Manager – Mobile & Devices at Adobe, Inc.
Now: Web Project and Globalization Manager & Int’l SEO/SEM at a Silicon Valley Company

Greg Reitman:
Then: Manager, Search Marketing at Barnes & Noble .com
Now: Director of Marketing at [x+1]

Jennifer Wood (Rodriguez):
Then: Online Marketing Manager at The Seattle Times
Now: Online Marketing Manager at The Seattle Times

Thomas Shaffer:
Then: Sr. Search Media Analyst at Microsoft
Now: Product Manager – Analytic Services at Microsoft

Aaron Shear:
Then: Global Director of SEO for Shopping.com
Now: Partner at Boost Search Marketing

Marshall D. Simmonds:
Then: Chief Search Strategist for New York Times
Now: Chief Search Strategist for New York Times

Scott Skurnick:
Then: Director SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at Edmunds.com
Now: Executive Director of Search Engine Optimization & User Insight at Edmunds.com

Chris Silver Smith: (Huh! I listed myself in this list! Narcissistic much?!?)
Then: Head of the Technology & Development Department, Idearc Superpages.com
Now: Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance

Jenn Mathews:
Then: SEO Manager at Classmates.com
Now: VP of Interactive Marketing at Obvio.us

Julie Sun:
Then: Senior Manager, SEO at MTV Networks
Now: Director, Digital Marketing at MTV Networks

David Temple:
Then: Search Marketing Consultant at FindLaw
Now: Regional Digital Director at OgilvyOne Worldwide/Soho Square

Patrick Terrell:
Then: Affiliate and Search Marketing Manager at PETCO
Now: Director, Marketing at SurfStitch

Mike Banks Valentine:
Then: Senior SEO Manager at Fox Interactive Media
Now: Director of SEO at Demand Media

Julie Kosbab:
Then: Team Lead, Search Marketing at FindLaw
Now: Online Marketing/Strategy at Plaudit Design

Tanya Vaughan:
Then: Search Engine Marketing & Optimization, Web Marketing Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Now: VP Internet Marketing at Bodybuilding.com

Alfonso Veggetti:
Then: Senior Marketing Analyst at Washington Mutual
Now: Senior Marketing Analyst – Washington Mutual

Meg Walker:
Then: Online Marketing Manager at Network Solutions
Now: Online Marketing – PRWeb at Vocus

Frank Watson:
Then: SEM Manager at FXCM (Forex Capital Markets)
Now: CEO Kangamurra Media

Anthony Ziehmke:
Then: Search Marketing Strategist at Microsoft
Now: Manager – ASG Search at Microsoft

Sandra Zoratti:
Then: Director, Marketing and Strategy at IBM
Now: Vice President, Global Solutions Marketing at Ricoh IBM InfoPrint Solutions

If I’ve made some error as of the date of this blog post, or if you don’t wish me to list your name, feel free to contact me.

* See also my commentary about this post and rating methods at my personal blog: “Top In-House SEOs Reprised“.

In its inaugural post, I describe how I first came to do blogging here at Natural Search Blog at the invite of Stephan Spencer, and how I believe blogging is likely more important than a resume in this day and age – at least, it is for a great many industries.

Will I continue to blog here at Natural Search Blog? Well, I intend to do so. I further intent to step up my pace again in posts everywhere I publish.

As some of you know, for the past five years I’ve worked with Stephan Spencer building up the Netconcepts‘ search marketing and SEO technology business. Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a very special event: Netconcepts is merging, through acquisition, with the leading search marketing software company – Covario!

As part of Covario, I’m very excited for our people and our clients to be part of what is the leading search marketing software and services organization. Together, we have nearly 100 combined clients in key industries, including high-tech, ecommerce, consumer electronics, financial services, media and consumer packages goods, with many Fortune 500 brands.

Our combined SEO technologies, which include Organic Search Insight and GravityStream, promise advertisers the first end-to-end industry solution that spans the entire search optimization process: keyword research, recommendations, execution, and ongoing reporting. GravityStream is a pioneering technology for automating the execution piece. And now even more is possible.

Analysts expect marketers to increase their SEO spend by 100% over the next 5 years, to $5.0 billion by 2014. By leveraging our leading technologies and world-class SEO expertise, we will continue to improve performance and ROI for leading brands across organic and paid search, on a global scale.

(And on balmy, single-digit temperature days like today in Madison, I’m also excited to spend a bit more time out at the new San Diego headquarters)

As the world of search continues to evolve, these are exciting times indeed!

Brian Klais
Chief Operating Officer
Netconcepts

Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.

1) On page optimisation:
The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present.

With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent.

All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site.

2) Top Quality Content:
Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around.

Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial.

All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time.

The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems.

What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service.

The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords.

Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end.

You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem.

In the case of scrapers stealing your content and getting indexed first where they appear to be the original creator of content, I am sure Google would be able to find out over time as backlinks to your site’s content would be a strong signal for it to recognise the true owner.

If you post on your blog, the blog and ping feature should alert the bots straightaway. You would be well off tweeting the post/article on Twitter. Google scours the Twitter landscape for new content and is sure to pick up your tweet thus confirming the ownership of the content.

In my experience, I have found that personal experiences invoving trials and experiments in a particular niche that lead to well defined results seem to be quite popular and have a good chance of getting great link love. Readers on the web are discerning and can easily separate the chaff from the wheat. I have dwelt at length on unique content and its seo implications in a previous post.

3) Social Media:
Let us be honest about this. Social media is not suitable to all businesses selling products/services. It is very powerful tool to leverage in businesses like travel sites, music and video sites etc. Twitter is the darling of the cybermasses today and undoubtedly has captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide.

The general belief is that to sell products or services on Twitter, one must have lots of followers. This means the same person has to follow others in order to make the others follow her. She ends up with thousands of followers and in turn follows thousands. When she has a critical mass of followers, then she can promote her services/products. I totally disagree with this.

I bet you will agree with me that when you have thousands of followers, you will not have the time to read all the tweets and follow links. Your twitter screen will be utter pandemonium with messages trickling in every minute or so. If you are struggling to keep up with your tweets, imagine the plight of your followers. They are in the same boat as well. There is no focus and it is a virtual free for all. It is well nigh impossible to get any message through to your followers in this scenario.

Judicious use of social media involves building relationships. If you are in the field of manufacturing baby nappies, then there must be like minded people out there in the hundreds (and not millions) who will be interested in your product. You would be well off building a good laser focused community on Twitter or Facebook or any other popular social media platform to leverage your position as a domain leader in the baby nappies industry and then disseminate information and/or sell products/services to an interested community.

4) Backlink Profile:
At this point of time, links are a singular source of authoritative signals to the search engines. If your site has an impressive backlink profile as a result of hard work put in over the years by you, the website owner or due to outsourced link building efforts of an industrious SEO professional, it has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on the SERPs of all the major search engines as it is not easy for a site owner to manipulate this.

Again. all links created are not equal. This may sound cliche but it is very much true. The key today to a successful link building campaign is the the number of unique domains linking to your site. The higher the domain diversity, the more powerful is your site’s influence in the rankings on the SERPs.

It is equally important for a site to link to its other authoritative peer sites as this strengthens the notion of the site’s good neighborhood aspect. It is also natural to invite some spammy links in the process as a site owner does not have control over who links to her site.

Some of the other important factors to consider are:

• Variation in anchor text of incoming links
• Smattering of domains ranging from strong to weak provides for a natural linking landscape
• Synergy in topicality of linking domains

In conclusion, the real time response of the web through social media and instantaneous response from users by way of blog comments etc gives anyone the opportunity to streamline the operations of their domain of buisness (niche) and helps them understand what their specific market is demanding which makes provision of what is required all the more easier.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both natural search and paid search to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Like any skill though, it takes continual honing and refining, along with the education. This is part of the concept behind the 60-Second Website Audit and training the eye to quickly identify key SEO issues and potential issues.

I’ve joked that, after so many audits, SEO consultants could probably do them blindfolded. So, whip out the blindfold and let’s put that to a test.

Okay, so maybe not really blindfolded, but how about auditing a site without actually seeing the site? Hmm, that might be interesting. This is more than gimmick. In fact, though I might normally take a quick look around a site, ala 60-Second Audit, I generally start the deep dive of an audit exactly as I’m going to show you.

So how do I start auditing a site without looking at the actual site? Just like a search engine, I start at the crawl, which is what we are going to do today. SEO is about so much more than just keywords, and while the title tag is one of the most important signals a site can send to a search engine, a title tag that can’t be found is of little value.

Let’s Audit, Blindfolded

I needed a website I haven’t seen before for this experiment. To pick a site randomly that I haven’t seen, I started by picking a word and searching in Google for it. Being mid-October and feeling the quick approach of winter, the word “sweater” seemed aptly appropriate. I then jumped to the 5th page of results and selected the 2nd result, which was ColdWaterCreek.com. While I know of Cold Water Creek, I don’t recall ever seeing their site, so this is perfect.

Let me introduce you to Xenu. Xenu Link Sleuth™ is a free crawler program that you can download and use to crawl your own site (highly recommend) or other sites. Xenu is one of the most powerful (and perhaps underrated) tools an SEO can have. The amount of information from this tool is priceless, and in this case, will be how we’ll start to audit ColdWaterCreek.com “blindfolded.” That said, if you want to try this at home, I’d recommend doing so on your own site, rather than everyone running out and crawling Cold Water Creek’s site!

Since I prefer to work with the data within Excel, the first thing I do after running it is to export it out to a tab separated format that can be imported into Excel. The details of using Xenu are beyond the scope of this post, so if you are new to Xenu, I highly recommend spending a little time reading first.

After moving the external URLs/links, which in this case also includes the images to another tab, I’m left with 5,161 rows of data, or in other words, 5,161 URLs. When I do a site:www.coldwatercreek.com search in Google (appending &filter=0&start=990 to the URL), I see Google returns 820 results. Quite a difference … what’s the true number?

No idea, but most clients feel that the Google number is often far less than the number of URLs (pages) they have and Xenu seems like a lot more than they expect. I certainly don’t expect Google (or any other search engine) to index 100% of a site’s URLs, but seeing less than 16% indexed based on the Xenu number tells me there may be some issues. Remember though, I haven’t even looked at the site so I don’t really have any idea what those issues are yet.

More importantly, and I see this time after time, we don’t know whether the “true” number should be closer to the Google number or the Xenu number. Too often, people view indexation numbers as something that needs to be increased, that more is better. But more could just as well be indicative of problems.

Next, I note that the server is running Windows IIS as the server platform. I see this in part by the .aspx file extension, but confirmed by the “Server” column of the Xenu report, which lists the URLs as Microsoft-IIS/6.0. In a normal audit, this would clue me in on two things, the first being that I want to be aware of possible case issues. Since IIS doesn’t distinguish case differences, this means that we might see somewhat “sloppy” or inconsistent linking references, such as default.aspx vs. Default.aspx, or blue-jeans.aspx, Blue-Jeans.aspx, Blue-jeans.aspx or even blue-Jeans.aspx. While the server may gladly serve up the appropriate content for these variations, search engine spiders recognize that these could be different pages on other serves, such as Linux, which means that each of these URLs are unique.

Second, this also alerts us to proper redirection challenges. Setting up 301 permanent redirects vs. 302 redirects in IIS seems to trip up many IT departments. So now, we know that this may be a roadblock to any recommendations we make, or that we really need to double check that they have been done in the past and that they are done correctly going forward.

A quick scan is all that is needed to find examples of the case issue:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146

See the differences above? One version uses an upper case “L” while the other version uses a lower case “l” within StoreLocator. This means that there are likely duplicates of all of the stores for the details and events pages. Fortunately, the rest of the URLs are pretty clean and consistent, which isn’t always the case (no pun intended).

After sorting by URL, we quickly see some other common issues. Ironically, this issue is less about the content that is there and more about what isn’t there. Toward the top of the list, we find these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/%2f404.htm
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm?aspxerrorpath=/MyAccount/MyAccount/MyAcctLogin.aspx

First, the %2f is the encoding for the “/” which tells me that there is probably a malformed URL here. The real issue though is that all of these represent a 404 file not found page, yet all return a 200 ok header status. This means that these, and likely any malformed URLs or URLs that no longer exist, will continue to live on and bloat the index rather than drop out. It also means that the site isn’t sending the highest quality signal to search engines by appearing to return ok statuses for URLs that don’t exist. However, we can also see by the following example that some URLs are returning a proper 404 header status:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fEGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d01GC006%26ensembleid%3d10756

Along with additional examples of possible encoding issues, this is a good reminder that we need to check for issues in different areas of the site and in different ways. This is especially true with complex sites that might appear seamless visually, but may be powered by a number of different scripts, such as a content management system, ecommerce cart, blog, forum and FAQ … all of which might be powered separately.

While we are on that note, my guess is that the following URL probably isn’t of much value either:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Blank.htm

Other examples of possible duplication or diluted content may be seen in the following:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/default.aspx (because I still haven’t viewed the site, I don’t know for certain, but experience and my gut tells me that this may be a duplication of the homepage URL, http://www.coldwatercreek.com/).

Another challenging area for duplication is in presentation, and my guess is that:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx

is probably being duplicated by:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=false

Which is prevalent for all products that have pagination, and to some extent, duplicated further by the counter URL variation:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=true

At this point, we don’t know if these are being dealt with in other ways, such as robots handling, nofollow link attributes or the canonical link element. Nor can we determine how these should be handled, but at least we have a better understanding of what is going on and what we need to dig into.

Related to that, we also have a quick view into the pagination URL construct:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=1

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=2

In addition, some other URLs that are probably low value for search (as well as possible encoding issues again) that we’ll want to check to see whether they are being excluded from the bots:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d44130%26ensembleid%3d50183

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/EGiftCard.aspx?productid=01GC001&ensembleid=10756

While we are looking at URLs, we can quickly scan our Excel file and identify key URL constructs being used.

Such as parameter-based product detail pages, including perhaps low-value duplication:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281&Skn=outlet

Some lengthy, a little parameter heavy and generally ugly URLs that may be challenging to bots:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/prodList.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czcategory&cat=All+Products////Apparel////Dresses////UserSearch=Dept.Channel+ID=1&ShowAllProducts=false

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Sale/default.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czNewPage&path=All+Products////UserSearch=RedTag////UserSearch=Misses&page=18

Especially in comparison to the cleaner, keyword friendly category pages (though I’d still want to review these around the pagination construct mentioned earlier):

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/knit-dresses.aspx

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/misses.aspx

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-jackets.aspx

Seem like a lot of focus on URLs? You bet. URLs are at the foundation of a site’s SEO. Get these wrong and little else matters. Xenu is excellent at seeing the URLs that exist that may not ever make it into a search engine index … which may be quite telling. So remember that a “site:domain.com” advanced query only reveals what is “above water.”

The Cold Water Creek site is actually quite small with only a few variations of URLs. The real power and beauty of Xenu is when you find yourself reviewing 300,000+ URLs from highly complex sites with several URL constructs and variants.

In part 2 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we’ll start out by seeing what Xenu can show us about the most important search signal a site has.

Berman states that while the market in 2006 may’ve allowed Verizon to take billions in the deal divesting itself of its directories corporation, Idearc, he further states:

“It took too much.”

Will there be any consequences for Verizon’s throwing off these companies with unserviceably high debt loads? Burman reports:

“These things matter greatly to how state and federal regulators perceive the company. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Hawaii each are in an uproar over the FairPoint divestiture, with much of the ire directed at Verizon.”

In a brief video piece, David Berman debates the issue with Evan Newmark, who takes the opposite viewpoint that Verizon should not be held responsible for the performance of its divested companies.

I find part of Newmark’s argument in the vid segment to be facile. He initially argues that Verizon’s CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, did a clever/good thing because “…he unloaded these companies before they could go under within Verizon!” This is just plain dumb, because they wouldn’t have failed within Verizon. In the case of Idearc, the business unit was too small to cause the great corporate mother ship to founder, and it’s the Verizon spin-off debt load it was saddled with that caused it to be unable to function in the first place. He misses the point that Verizon took too much money out of the spinoff deals. Those weren’t existing debts associated with those business units prior to their divestment.

These companies wouldn’t have “gone under” within Verizon. It’s possible that if a business unit starts to lose money for a quarter or two, the board would naturally require it to correct itself in some way. But, arguably these companies experienced a much higher degree of financial problems due to the extremely high debt they were required to service subsequent to spinoff. These spinoffs funded Verizon’s FiOS expansion — a gigantic project that was paid for by Verizon offloading the investment costs to the companies it spunoff.

So, this was not at all a normal case of companies failing to survive in the competitive marketplace: they were sandbagged at the outset.

In the video, Berman cogently states that “…it raises the question of what responsibility does a seller have to the health of a buyer’s target afterwards…”.

To this, Newmark responds, “Caveat emptor” (well-known Latin phrase meaning “Let the buyer beware.”). One wonders if Mr. Newmark would be quite so glib if he were on the receiving end of a lemon the next time he purchases an automobile. I think not. This is essentially what I’m stating has happened to stockholders of these Verizon spinoff companies.

Newmark finally, grudgingly, states that because it’s a heavily-regulated company, “…Verizon cannot be doing deals which appear to rip people off…”.

I’d go a bit further and say that if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, it’s a rat.

It will be interesting to see if the Securities and Exchange Commission gives Verizon a pass on their spinoffs of bankrupt companies as Newmark seems to think reasonable, or if they don’t respond in some way to consumer and state government complaints.

Organic search is still the biggest driver of search traffic at a whopping 88%. Unlike paid search where results are measurable accurately and instantly, the organic SEO process is a long term strategy with measurable results becoming clearer over time. Yet, the big question in every online marketer’s mind is – Which results do users trust more on search engines – the organic or paid results?

Evgenii Prussakov is a renowned affiliate marketing specialist and he delves into the minds of the average Joe/Jane online consumers by asking 107 questions in his book titled “Online Shopping Through Consumers Eyes: A Study Of Online Users’ Responses To 107 QUestions” (found on Amazon).

The topics are wide ranging covering areas of general online advertising, B2C marketing, website usability and modern day online consumer behavior. This research provides a wealth of information to online marketers doing affiliate marketing, web analytics, SEO and web design.

The graphic below summarises the query which this post endeavors to answer.

I will discuss a few of the questions and their responses which make really interesting reading. The questions and their answers are as follows:

The main question is about users trusting either natural results or sponsored results more on search engines. This question is preceded by another basic questions which reads:

Q: Do people know the difference between natural results and sponsored ads in search engines?

A: 18% say No and 82% say Yes

Now to the main question again:

Q: Do users have more trust in natural results than sponsored results?

A: Definitely not – 1.75%
Probably not – 6.55%
Maybe – 19.65%
Probably so – 36.68%
Definitely – 35.37%

Clearly, the results show that over 71% of the shoppers trust organic results over sponsored results. A majority state that they know the difference between natural and paid results and they trust the natural results more.

The results prove that organic SEO efforts lead to more traffic which in turn is more likely to trust your site and buy from your site. A result for your site (especially in the top 3) on page 1 of the SERPs delivers results big time. It would be well worth your time and effort to work hard and get your site ranked in the top pages of the SERPs.

Evgenii does not study factors related to the user’s intention to shop online. He questions people who have shopped online and gleans their experience while going through the different stages of pre-purchase research, making the purchase and post-purchase interaction with the online business.

Some of the other unrelated questions deal with the situation of the customer clearing her web cookies, the amount of emails she has to process on a daily basis etc. These are of considerable interest to online marketers though. A good video on which this post is based can be informative.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland SEO firm specialising in organic search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.

This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable – it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.

But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.

Is my contention outrageous?

Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start – clearly set up to fail.

So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon – they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.

Okay, you aren’t going to fully understand the intricate details and you’d obviously spend far, far more time (closer to hours than seconds) on a true site audit, but I’d venture that 60 seconds is enough for a good gut check and for identifying areas that need deep exploration.  What may make this most interesting is to compare results that your “team” gets from this exercise since we all have our own approaches, hot buttons, etc.

Ultimately, I’d recommend all SEO practitioners go through this exercise, even randomly on any old site, at least once or twice a week. I say this because like most skills, true mastery comes when it transcends thought…it becomes instinctive and our minds take in and process more naturally without conscious thought.

Of course, every one of these 60-second site audits will also be different based on initial perceptions and where the path leads us. Some elements we identify will be revealing in and of themselves, while others will merely be stepping-stones to other elements or footnotes toward criteria for our eventual recommendations.

Here is just a quick list of the things that I might look for in undertaking a 60-second SEO audit:

• Canonicalization (www vs. non-www)
• Title tag formatting pattern
• Title tag duplication (quicker via search engine with a “site:domain.com” search at 100 results per page)
• Indexation (via the “site:” search in Google and appending &filter=0&num=990 to the URL string from the initial results page)
• URL insight: construction parameters, keyword usage, length, tracking parameter usage, etc. (via site navigation as well as site: search)
• Meta description usage and duplication (via site: search)
• Heading usage (navigating site with Outline Headings and Show Element Names When Outlining via the Web Developer Toolbar)
• Nofollow usage (via SearchStatus plugin with highlighting while navigating site)
• JavaScript/Flash usage in navigation or links (combination of hovering over links in the simplest, but more accurate via disabling JavaScript with and disabling CSS, and view source)
• Hidden text or links (combination of ctrl-A to select everything on the page, disabling JavaScript and CSS, viewing text-only cache pages, review list of links on a page)
• Pagination, guided / faceted navigation constructs, sorting constructs
• Site structure (via sitemap)
• Robots.txt file and XML sitemap usage
• Server platform (Apache, IIS, WebSphere, etc.)
• 404 Handling

That’s just a sampling, but a very powerful sampling that can provide a considerable amount of insight into a site. What you might have found surprising is the amount of information learned about a site without even looking at the site, but through the search engine results pages. For the daring souls, try this exercise without even looking at the site itself — how much can you learn just through analyzing SERPs?

And this isn’t just for work. Feel free to amaze your friends and family at your next party — then again, perhaps reserve that for parties with other SEOs.

So, what cues would you look for in your 60-second audits?