The new features might also reveal some secrets of Google Maps ranking factors. It’s definitely a space that’s well worth watching for local search marketing experts.

Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites often have nearly as many constructs for title tags. Three things that a quick scan of our data will tell us:

• General constructs and patterns used
• Title tag duplication
• General sense of optimization quality (potentially)

Branding (or lack of) always jumps out quickly, of which we have a number of different examples:

• three quarter sleeve sweater | Coldwater Creek
• Apparel at Coldwater Creek
• Coldwater Creek misses clothing.
• Coldwater Creek

What about duplication? I expect to find some levels, especially on an ecommerce site or any site that features a pagination system. Most CMS or ecommerce systems don’t provide a way, or at least an easy way, to modify the title tags (or headings and body copy) of individual paginated pages like GravityStream can. However, I also want to see beyond the pagination to identify duplication across URLs/pages that really should be unique. In this case, these pages are cannibalizing and missing an opportunity to target additional phrases.

Best way to do that in this case is to sort by the title, rather than the URL, and then filter out those with a “page=” in them to clear out all the pagination and make reviewing easier (the specific sorting will vary depending on a site’s constructs).

I quickly find some examples of title duplication.

Title: Clearance apparel at Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-apparel.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-tops-and-tees.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-dresses.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/blue-jeans-in-pink.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Catalog/catalogRequest.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/cqo/cqo.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek offers a great selection of women’s denim jeans.

Used on these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/classic-waist-jeans.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/lower-waist-jeans.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/natural-waist-jeans.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/shop-by-fit.aspx

Not to mention the store locations, which appear to not have titles at all. Of course I would still want to verify this against the actual site, but Xenu has quickly jump started the audit process by pointing to areas of concern. It may not find the needle in the haystack, but it does move the hay from the field to the stack to begin, and sometimes cuts the stack down into manageable bales.

Some of the title tags above are okay and maybe are the most optimal … only keyword research combined with site analytics will reveal that. What we do know though is that duplicating the same title across different 4 pages means at least 3 of them are not optimal and we’ve created keyword cannibalization. Just based on the URLs, I can also tell that there are probably better, more targeted titles that could be used.

Whether a site’s title tags are manually or programmatically optimized doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the title tag is the strongest and easiest signal that a site owner has control over. This is the juiciest, ripest, most important low hanging fruit opportunity that many sites continue to miss.

A couple more interesting bits of information we can get from Xenu that also probably go mostly unnoticed, are the Level, Links Out and Links In columns. Level may not be exact, but we can get a quick idea of how deep, based on click and crawl path, content is. While purely site related, the links information can give us a quick view as to internal linking strength, identifying which pages or sections may undervalued or serving as internal hubs.

Hopefully this proved an interesting exercise. While I wouldn’t recommend doing a real SEO site audit blindfolded, I definitely recommend reviewing your site in new and different ways and removing some of the visual cues (and clutter) to see how the bots view some of the site’s most important signals. Remember that Xenu doesn’t provide the answers, but at least helps to identify areas that may be problematic and helps to better make sense of the foundation of a site … especially if that site consists of hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs.

This is also a great training tool and a way to further hone your skill set. I’ll liken it to Luke Skywalker’s blindfolded lightsaber training … one must move beyond seeing to feeling. May the SEO be with you.

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.

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?

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”

Yesterday I reviewed another major retailer website which had their brandname embedded in their page titles — and nothing else. Thousands of product pages all had identical TITLEs! This company could’ve had top three rankings on a great many competitive keyword phrases had they only customized their TITLE tags very slightly.

The W3C calls the <TITLE> tag “the most important element of a quality Web page.” Google has apparently paid attention to that, and all of the search engines have placed especial weighting upon the words found within page titles when evaluating the topics for which a webpage is associated.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A title should be a super-concentrated blurb that tells a user what a page is all about. In search engines, the title is often also displayed as the link text for each of the pages listed in the search engine results page listings. Informative titles appearing in SERP listings will get clicked upon more as users are reassured that the page they’re clicking upon is what they’re actually seeking. A page with an informative title will get clicked upon far more likely than a vague or unrelated page title.

I heard Googler Amanda Camp once mention that she’d recommended to a friend of hers to customized a page title, focusing it upon the main topic keywords for the webpage, and it immediately began ranking in the very first position for the keyword phrase.

And, I’ve seen it many times myself — engineer a good, simple, appropriate, keyword-rich title tag, and your page can  zoom its way above all the other nonoptimal page listings for the very same term.

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.  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 Techmeme  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.

(click to enlarge)

The result is a Google search results page with no listings and the message at the top states:

“Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”

But wait! This result page is actually a hoax, only pretending to be from Google! It’s actually produced by Arran Scholsberg. Arran is a student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is a web designer and photographer.

This is a really clever piece of linkbait – a trick to get lots of people to link to your site by making particularly compelling or humorous content that people will inevitably want to send to their friends. As you may be aware, there’s a really funny internet phenomenon called “Chuck Norris facts” wherein people will list out all sorts of preposterous, hyperbolic statements about Norris, mainly emphasizing his macho-ness. There’s a large amount of traffic built around Chuck Norris facts, with loads of people vying for top positioning in search results pages for the keyword phrase, and lots of people emailing each other links and quotes to some of the funniest stuff. It’s been a pretty viral phenomenon.

Arran’s seemless integration into this is a really great bit of subtlety, directly hotwiring Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” searches to go directly to his webpage that pretends to be a judgment made by the Google algorithm or by some humorous programmers at Google.

How many other search marketers out there would love to hotwire Google’s search form for a particular keyword to go directly to the webpage of their choice, making users bypass all other competitor pages in the process?!? Arran has accomplished it. Someone should hire this guy as a linkbait designer.

Software security company Sunbelt blogged about how the attack was generated: a network of spambots apparently added links into blog comments and forums pointing to the bad sites over a period of months in some cases, enabling those sites to achieve fair rankings in search engine result pages for a great many potential keyword search combinations. The pages either contained iframes which attempted to load malware onto visitors machines or perhaps they began redirecting to the sites containing malware at some point after achieving rankings. Sunbelt provided interesting screenshots of the SERPs in Google:

(click to enlarge)

And also showed some screenshots of some of the keyword-stuffed pages which apparently got indexed:

(click to enlarge)

I think it’s not at all a coincidence that the attack was timed to occur right on the first weekend of the holiday shopping season and Cyber Monday when more people are likely conducting keyword searches than any other time of year. Deploying the malware now was likely intended to infect as many computers as possible before the malware was detected and the sites deleted from listings.

The methods these unethical developers used are pretty “classic” black-hat tactics. For many years now, blackhat optimizers have used automated agents to insert keyworded textlinks into blog and forum comment areas and online guestbooks, pointing back to their sites in an effort to built PageRank. In addition, really old and crusty black hat techniques include keyword stuffing — adding tons of keywords on a page in an effort to make the page relevant for words and phrases. Also, the bait-and-switch technique of allowing one page to get indexed by search engines while redirecting human users to a different URL is pretty well known.

In recent months, Google has apparently been working particularly industriously to penalize more sites that may be buying/selling links or which may be involved in various linking schemes. So much so, that there’s been considerable talk about how some of the affected sites may’ve been unfairly red-flagged by bad assumptions made by their algorithmic policing software. So, it’s disappointing that a network of egregious malware sites were able to effectively employ legacy black-hat tactics which ought to’ve been detectable earlier.

It feels a bit like having the police devote all their time to writing minor speeding tickets while violent murders are happening!

Now, to be fair, any site which appears on the level could suddenly start redirecting to a bad location, and there’d naturally be a period of time before the search engine bots re-spider the page and realize that there’s malware on it. During that window of time between when it was first spidered while appearing alright and the time later when it starts launching evil, it could naturally continue to appear in the SERPs where innocent people could click on it and get infected. Also, the term combinations that Sunbelt cited were moderately arcane in some cases, so average users might not’ve been impacted by any significant numbers. It could also be that Sunbelt might well be hyping-up the issue in order to get attention for themselves, so you have to consider their assessment as possibly non-objective.

Even so, just the fact that this rather pedestrian combination of black-hat tactics could be used to effectively poison search results with malware listings is significant and disturbing.

Why wasn’t the comment spam detected early on? One assumes that the slow accretion of links over months may not’ve set off alarms, or perhaps the comment text added was made to be cleverly relevant.

And, the spam-laden content of the pages looks blatantly unnatural to me — that should’ve also been detectable.

And how about perhaps being suspicious of gobbledy-gook domain names? And, domains ending in “.CN”? I know gobbledy-gook in of itself might be hard to detect (particularly considering all the gobbledy-gook that still slips past spam filters on email) and unclear in of itself if it represents a bad content site, but you’d perhaps expect that one could tell whether the character strings contained patterns which match names/words by some percentage of fuzziness, and red-flag those that don’t match more normal naming patterns — associate lower trust scores or quality scores with them.

Even sadder, some of the domain names involved were so new they should’ve easily been detectable and flagged as suspicious just on that basis alone. For instance, I just looked up registration info for one of the sites IDed by SunBelt, luewusxrijke.cn, and found that it’d only been registered on November 24th! Why didn’t registrar status provide enough distrust to “sandbox” these sites?

However, I think there’s still a case where Google may be using the Meta Keywords tag…

If you’re unfamiliar, the Meta Keywords tag is placed within the <HEAD> of webpage code, and it was originally intended to inform software agents as to what the subject matter of the document was. For instance, a page about football could have a meta keywords tag like this:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”football, sports, NFL”>

Just as Danny outlined, this hidden keyword content with webpages was rapidly abused by many webmasters, as they added in terms unrelated to their page’s content, and stuffed repetitions of keywords into the tag in hopes of ranking higher.

Many search engines stopped using it altogether for keyword relevancy assessment and ranking, and even those search engines using it today may have considerable checks and balances in place to try to detect attempts to abuse through the tag.

I actually think that Google may still be using it as a factor for detecting spammish pages. As Danny’s testing shows, they’re not using it at all for relevancy nor ranking on content in the tag. But, it could still be useful to them as an indicator of sites which are attempting to use black-hat methods to manipulate search rankings.

It’s seemed very clear that Google is computing a quality score in association with web-pages, and meta tags that are stuffed full of words that are highly unrelated to the content on their respective pages would be a prime indicator that a site may be attempting to use black-hat methods. It could be used as a strike against a page, but not as a factor that would help a page.

Danny reported that Google engineers have confused people to some degree by inconsistently communicating about the tags. Danny says that the engineers will answer the question of whether they “use” or “read” the keywords metatag literally, by saying that Google “reads” the tag, which leads people to think that Google uses the tag contents. Danny’s interpretation is that engineers like Evan Roseman are only stating that Google takes and caches the entire page code (which would require that their Googlebot spider “read” the page), but that they don’t use that part of the page for ranking/relevancy – they ignore it as a direct ranking factor. True, but another interpretation could be that Google is using it only as an indirect, negative factor as I’m suggesting. Google doesn’t want to expose all of their criteria for building quality scores, and that could explain the slight inconsistency in messaging over this topic.

So, Danny’s article shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to begin resurrecting meta keyword tags in a big way, with all the traditional abuses which destroyed the intended function to begin with. As he points out, it could be useful to use for misspellings, but use of it should be extremely conservative or not at all. I vote for avoiding it entirely.

I’ve been thinking that an unpublished problem with Google’s pay-per-action product is that Google itself is likely to become more a victim of fraud with these types of ads. Read on and I’ll describe…

I haven’t signed up for Google’s pay-per-action ads, so I’m basing this on what I know about how CPA ads would be integrated with an advertiser in general. As I understand it, Google needs to be able to detect when a particular action such as a sale in an online catalog has been completed. In order to do this, Google likely has the advertiser install a little bug onto an exit page in their shopping cart. So, when a person who has clicked through an ad completes an order, this bug would detect when the customer passes through the “Thank you for your Purchase” page or something similar at the end of the advertiser’s shopping cart process.

So, Google and the publishers of Google’s ads, depend on that reporting bug in the shopping cart exit page to be present in order for them to account for each billable “action” to be completed. If the advertiser leaves that bug off the page, Google and thead publishers would not be paid for all the customer referrals they’re sending to the advertiser.

Now, Google likely has some sort of validation process at the beginning to ensure that the bugs are installed at the beginning of pay-per-action ad campaigns. But, after initial validation, how would they tell if the bugs are present? Naturally, it would be questionable if Google is sending lots of click-throughs/referrals to the advertiser’s site and none of those converted. But, what if the advertiser is randomly displaying the tracking bug on their checkout pages only half the time, or one-third, or one-fourth? Google surely couldn’t always detect the lack of the tracking bug.

If an advertiser did this sort of an exploit, they could get a lot of free advertising at the expense of Google and AdSense publishers.

Now, I posed this exploit theory to my colleague, Alan Rimm-Kaufman who is an expert in the paid search industry, and it only took him about five seconds to find a major flaw in my thinking. According to him, this could indeed potentially give an advertiser some free advertising exposure, but it would eventually bite them, since their apparent conversion rate would be lower than Google’s threshold, which would ding the advertisement’s Quality Score. Once this happened, the ranking of the ads would start dropping and their cost to the advertiser would increase, counteracting the value of cheating.

Alan’s surely right, but I don’t think this entirely discounts my concern. There will surely be other people who would realize the same chain of reasoning I had: if the tracking bug isn’t present at checkout, an advertiser won’t get charged anything. There are likely to be some number of advertisers who are unethical enough to do this while also being so unsophisticated as to not realize that they may eventually end up getting charged more. Some of them might even not care about the eventual impact, and be entirely happy with getting loads of advertising at half-cost, third-cost, or quarter-cost.

If I’m right, pay-for-action ads appears to turn the big fraud problem with internet advertising completely on it’s head – advertisers wouldn’t need to be concerned so much with paying for invalid clicks, but Google and AdSense publishers now have to worry about being cheated by advertisers!

If you’d like a great overview of the older pay-per-click problem, check out the BusinessWeek article on Click Fraud from last year: