Mar 06
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 6, 2008
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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Mar 06
Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First
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by Stoney deGeyter

Over the past ten years the mindset of SEO has evolved significantly. In the early years, website optimization was considered more of an IT expense handled by computer geeks. But over the years, businesses (and SEOs) began to change their frame of mind, realizing that search engine optimization was much closer to traditional marketing than they had thought.

After all, SEO is about getting exposure. Whether that is through on-page optimization, link building, social media, etc., the idea is to get as many targeted eyeballs on a site as possible. But that itself isn’t enough, because once the eyeballs are on the site the website has to make some money too. So now SEOs focus on usability (enhancing the visitor/shopper’s experience on the site) and conversions (getting sales, leads, subscribers, etc.). Exposure only brings traffic, usability allows the visitors to find the information they need, but ultimately it’s the conversions that matter most.

SEO is marketing but isn’t just marketing

It has taken many years for SEO to be considered a marketing expense both within the SEO community as well as the business community that seeks out SEO. I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has now swung too far away from SEO being a function of the IT department. SEO is very different from traditional marketing.

Marketing has always been about two things: creativity and analytics. The creativity creates the ads that work, but the analytics prove that the creative elements work. Analytics also can determine where the creativity will most effective (TV, radio, demographics, etc., etc.). But SEO marketing has introduced an entirely new element into the mix, and that is the need for several dozen computer related skills.

This, of course, creates a new wrinkle in the whole concept of marketing. SEO is marketing that can break things. When Marketing was just creative or analytical, there really wasn’t much to break. A marketing campaign either worked or it didn’t. (Of course, there was always the potential to damage company reputation, but that’s a different kind of damage than I’m referring to.)

With SEO, you can break a website so it doesn’t work, and you can break search engine rankings. You can break contact forms, shopping carts, links, and a whole lot more, that all effect the ability of a site to make any kind of money, despite the quality of other marketing efforts. These breaks can, and often do, make a site unusable or unrankable. Sometimes the damage is temporary, other times it can last longer. Much of that depends on how quickly the problem is discovered and a solution is implemented. Sometimes, however, breaking a website is necessary in order to make it work better.

One step back to get two steps forward

There are many analogies I can pull from to illustrate this point. Sometimes doctors have to re-break a bone in order to set it for a proper healing. When you take a car in for a tune-up, you drive it in, but for several hours or days, the car is undrivable until the tune-up process is complete as old engine parts are removed and replaced with new parts.

Another good analogy is a body with cancer. In the early stages, the person often feels just as healthy as they always have, but the doctors know that unless the cancer is treated things will only get worse. A person with severe cancer may go in for chemotherapy which essentially makes someone who may feel healthy feel very, very sick. But this is designed to rid the body of the cancer, and set the stage for what will hopefully be a cancer-free and healthy body.

Implementing search engine marketing can often do the same thing to a website. Sometimes you have to break it in order to help move the site to the next level of success.

Break it to heal it

It would be great if every time a change was made to a site that the result was positive. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. Sometimes in SEO you make a change hoping to help, but it ends up hurting. What worked somewhere else won’t necessarily work everywhere.

We find this to be true of PPC just as much as SEO. Sometimes a new ad performs worse than the old one. Or a change to a landing page reduces conversions instead of improving them. But these “setbacks” are an important part of moving toward more success. With each change, you learn from what doesn’t work just as much as you learn from what does.

That’s the wonderful thing about testing, which is an important element to both online and offline marketing. Testing changes helps you improve upon previous successes, even if it creates minor set-backs along the way.

But there are other times when breaking a site is absolutely necessary for its success. Any site that grows from a few products which are easily manually added to HTML pages, to hundreds of products, needs a content management system. This, of course, will cause all new URLs to be created. Similarly, a site moving from standard HTML to a php framework, may also find that URLs will have to change.

I recently encountered an issue on a site that produced two duplicate pages for every one legitimate page. The only solution here was to re-develop how the site generated its pages. This, too, caused a complete change in the URL structure, leaving hundreds of pages indexed in the search engines, no longer available. Even with redirects in place, it would never be a seamless transition.

Situations like this require that you break things before you can fix them. But in the end, the result more than compensates for the temporary downtime, hiccups and losses that happen as you move through the changes.

Hurry up and wait to move forward

It would be great if we could get a tune-up without ever having our car taken out of commission. Even better, to be able to heal cancer without every having to go in for an operation or devastating chemotherapy. It would also be great if sometimes SEO created a perfect transition from mediocre to resounding success. But the nature of the world applies equally to search engine optimization.

Not every week is going to be more successful than the previous, but the idea is to make sure that the long-term trends favor improvement. But that’s the funny thing about long-term trends. You can’t analyze them in the short-term. It’s very hard to patiently sit through a negative downturn, hoping that all things turn out rosy. But that patience can often be just the thing you need to move forward successfully.

Panicking in face of set-backs is rarely a successful approach to anything. Panicking leads to hasty decisions that are rarely in your own best interest. But having an understanding that set-backs happen and are, at times, necessary in a successful search engine marketing campaign, can certainly help one think rationally when not everything comes up rosy. Sometimes you have to take a step back, just to move forward around the obstacles in your way. Other times you have to break something in order to fix it.

Learn something from this post?
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Mar 06
Coming to SMX Advanced? Register Now for the Best Deal
in Search Engine Land
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Registration is now open for Search Marketing Expo - SMX Advanced, which is taking place June 3-4 back at the incredible Bell Harbor International Conference Center on the waterfront in Seattle.

SMX Advanced is for experienced search marketers who want to enjoy sessions conducted at a high-level. If you’re fluent in SEM, come to Advanced and converse with others who speak your native language. Last year’s edition was a smash hit; read what participants said about it here. Keep reading to learn about the special SMX Advanced rate.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 06
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 6, 2008
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:


  • Yahoo Maps Adds More Data, Other Improvements
    Yahoo Maps has announced a range of improvements. These include expanded global coverage, including better data and coverage of Eastern Europe; and, in the US, more “granular” neighborhood data for 300 cities and 12,000 neighborhoods. Functionality has been improved as well. Tiles are “lighter” for faster load times, colors and…

  • You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice
    For the past few months, I have been listening to some of my colleagues talk about the nofollow attribute and how to use it to sculpt a page’s PageRank. I heard this SEO advice first at SMX in Stockholm and most recently at SMX in Santa Clara. Stephan Spencer…

  • Online Video Advertising + Search Engines = Opportunity For Small Businesses
    Much is being written and said these days about the rising future of online video advertising. Recent articles like one in the NY Times reporting Google’s move to test video ads in search results pages shows that the once abstract promise of online video advertising is now upon us….

  • Google Debuts “Search Within A Site” Search Box Feature
    Yesterday Barry blogged about Google testing a search box for site search within general search results. Today the feature is being fully rolled out for selected queries. It’s really an extension and elaboration of Google Sitelinks. The Google Blog explains: [O]ver the past few days we have been testing, and…

  • Oops! Google’s SSL Certificate Throwing Out Scary Warnings
    Everyone is noticing that when they go to their Google Account through AdWords, AdSense, Analytics, or any Google page that requires SSL, they are being prompted with a security warning. Typically, not a major deal, right? Well, not if you are trying to get customers to buy on your site….

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Microhoo

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

Mar 06
What Do An English Pub and Social Media Have in Common?
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Quite a bit! After a trek across the pond and some time spent in a pub in Northeastern England, Site Logic Marketing’s Matt Bailey offers up an excellent article this week that draws a poignant analogy between social media marketing and the traditional English Pub.

Matt writes:

I recently came back from an extended trip to England, where my wife and I spent some time in Northern England with Mike Grehan. Mike is incredibly passionate about living in Newcastle, and should be knighted as an evangelist for Northeastern England. Visiting Mike’s pub was probably the most enjoyable experience I had. Not in the least of which was the glorious fish ‘n chips and sticky pudding. It was one of the best meals I had that week.

The English pub is nothing as it is imagined in the States. Many of my observations about the pub were remarkably similar to the concept of Social Media. Of course, this could just be the nerd in me, contrasting every “real” experience with online behavior.

Focusing in on issues like personal ownership, an environment built for conversation and a lack of distraction; Matt explains why social media marketers need to think like Pub owners to make sure they’re building the type of environment that leaves consumers open to new ideas.

He makes some great points. Among them:

3. Sense of Ownership
Mike kept saying, “my pub.” Mike’s son, Joe, explained the three priorities in life: “football, the pub, the wife. In that order.” The pub is a local meeting house and is located near your home. Everyone who lives near it calls it “their pub.” What’s interesting is we also passed by his brother’s pub and his mother’s pub. Everyone knows where THEIR pub is.

Observation: Ownership is vital to a sense of community. Unless you feel a sense of pride in what is being built and a sense of participation in the success, then you don’t have a true investment in the community.

Of course in reading Matt’s full list, I can’t help but think he missed one key point.

So I’ll add point number 9 myself.

9. Respect the Locals or Risk Starting a Brawl

Any time you have a spot like a pub with “locals” who feel a sense of ownership of the gathering place and each other, you have to show a little respect for the established community. While it’s perfectly fine to visit new pubs, having a little tact and not insulting the locals is generally a good idea. Not respecting the community by popping in to sell insurance or vacuum cleaners is an insult to the purpose of the pub.

Observation: Don’t go storming into an established community and spout off about things you don’t understand. Also understand the need for a super, SUPER soft sell when it comes to social media. Barging in to the conversation to hock your wares is not going to go over well. It’s a good way to make a bad impression and you could find yourself in a brawl.

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 06
Google Analytics Releases Benchmarking Tools, Data Sharing, and More
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Yesterday, Barry blogged at Search Engine Land about some new features in Google Analytics. The features include industry benchmarking which compares your site to other sites in your industry, data sharing settings which ties in with industry benchmarking and lets you opt-in to share your information with Google and its users, and audio ad integration which highlights when your Google audio ads have gone live — all within Google Analytics. Google has released a benchmarking FAQ and data sharing FAQ for those interested in trying out the new features.

Here’s a screenshot of the Google Analytics Benchmarking data:

Google Analytics Benchmarking Data

The full size is on Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Mar 06
Yahoo Maps Adds More Data, Other Improvements
in Search Engine Land
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Yahoo Maps has announced a range of improvements. These include expanded global coverage, including better data and coverage of Eastern Europe; and, in the US, more “granular” neighborhood data for 300 cities and 12,000 neighborhoods. Functionality has been improved as well. Tiles are “lighter” for faster load times, colors and styles have been adjusted and there are several other visual improvements.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 06
You Should Attend the Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference Because….
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Jennifer Laycock made a super cool video showing you why you should attend the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference:

Looks fun, right? Jennifer discusses on Search Engine Guide the planning behind the video too: it required no editing and cost $148 over 18 hours.

Was it worth it? The coverage on different blogs was vast, and you just got yourself a mention on Search Engine Roundtable, Jenn! ;)

By the way, if anyone will be attending the event and wants to liveblog it for our readers, please email us.

Forum discussion continues at Small Business Brief Forums.

Mar 06
How Does Google Handle 301 Redirects?
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A post from Strategic Marketing Montreal discusses the implications of using a 301 redirect within Google. Apparently, a specific domain changed, but fortunately, the 301 redirect worked so well that there was no drop in rankings.

This blog has just moved and the good news is that the move was done in such a way that the Google visibility was maintained unchanged throughout the move.

Interestingly, though, the site 2 results in the SERPs. One shows the old URL and the other indexes the new URL. Of course, if you click on the old URL, it immediately shows you the new site, but it’s still being indexed for the time being. At Sphinn, Barry Welford suspects that this observation will change as Google fully acknowledges the 301 redirect.

The more intriguing thing is that, despite the 301 permanent redirect, both the old URL and the new URL show in the SERPs. The redirect was put in place 6 days ago. My working hypothesis is that the old one is not de-indexed but eventually will sink without trace.

Ian aka g1smd expounds on this idea and says that 301s can hang out in the SERPs for a good period of time:

The old URL will take up to a year to drop out (though that time scale seems to be reducing with each new Google advance). It will likely languish in Supplemental for most of that time. That is NOT a problem, as your on-site redirect will deliver the visitor to the correct content at the correct URL anyway.

Either way, it’s not a problem, and it’s interesting to see how 301 redirects work with Google.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Mar 06
You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice
in Search Engine Land
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100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land For the past few months, I have been listening to some of my colleagues talk about the nofollow attribute and how to use it to sculpt a page’s PageRank. I heard this SEO advice first at SMX in Stockholm and most recently at SMX in Santa Clara. Stephan Spencer wrote about it in a recent Search Engine Land article, Sculpting Your PageRank for Maximum SEO Impact.

My reaction? My jaw hit the floor. In a nutshell, if you want a site to have an effective information architecture for both end users and search engine spiders, then create a good information architecture. Search usability professionals have been doing this for years, creating web pages that rank and convert, and continuing to evolve their interfaces. Now I see SEO professionals moving back to a familiar strategy: building one thing for software spiders and another for site visitors. Honestly, I believe this dubious SEO advice is an accident waiting to happen.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 06
Conference Controversy: Paying Speakers & Sponsor Paid Sessions
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Two threads erupted yesterday all on conference controversy in the search industry. We have a thread on the controversy of paying speakers at Cre8asite Forums and a thread on the controversy of sponsor paid and run sessions at Sphinn.

Should Search Conferences Pay All Speakers?
This is far from a new question, this question is on the minds of all speakers and those who have been in the conference circuit forever. There is knowledge that some speakers are compensated for their flights, hotel and food and sometimes even more. Some smaller conferences actually cover speaker costs and pay a hefty fee to them for speaking. But conferences like SES and SMX typically do not pay speakers and if they do pay speakers, they typically don’t cover anything outside of covering flight, hotel, food and miscellaneous fees. But yes, some speakers are compensated at SES and SMX for their costs.

Let’s start with keynote speakers. People like Barry Diller, Eric Schmidt, Louis Monier, Jerry Yang and so on are likely not compensated. Think about it, these guys are well off, how much money would a person like Diller, Schmidt, Yang accept to speak at a conference? I doubt any real money an SES or SMX can afford would entice them. So these guys, in my opinion, are not compensated in any way.

How about company representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and so on? Their companies pay for them to fly to conferences, book their hotels, pay for their meals and so on. Why do they do this? For webmaster and advertiser relation. I doubt the conferences pay them, because in a sense - you, the advertisers are already paying for them to come with your PPC spend.

Mostly everyone else who speak do it for the face time and potential business they might get out of it. So the air time and business cards they get from speaking, covers their costs in the long run.

But there are some who don’t get business out of going to these conferences. If they are invited and attendees love to hear them, they are paid. Danny Sullivan did twit that the conference do cover some speakers who are “small consultants doing solo stuff,” and adds “say you’re doing a session where you’re not likely to get much client work but you kick ass on a regular basis. that’s one example.”

The forum thread at Cre8asite Forums is neutral on the concept of paying some speakers. I suspect if one speaker doesn’t get paid, while another one does - it may be possibly insulting or upsetting to the one not getting paid.

How about us? The press who cover the sessions? No, we don’t get paid to cover sessions. I mean, we do have ads on the page, but those aren’t from session coverage, they are from posts like theses. Our live blog volunteers pay their own way, we don’t cover their hotel, food, travel but we do provide a press pass that comes from the conferences (which do cost the conferences money). We pay our own way. The only person I compensate completely is Tamar, since she is a RustyBrick employee. But everyone else shells out a ton of money on travel, hotel and so on for the conference experience, to network, see old friends, learn stuff and also to give back to the community by sharing for those who cannot be there.

So that covers paying speakers and others to come to these events. Forum discussion on that topic at Cre8asite Forums.

Sponsor Paid & Run Sessions?
The second debate is taking place at Sphinn on the topic of sessions designed to enable the sponsors to speak and promote their products. This debate is much more heated and lively then the previous one. There are two sides of the story:

(1) The attendee is paying very good money and they don’t want to pay for a speaker to give them a sales pitch. Most attendees can get the sales pitch for free by calling the company’s 800 number and expressing interest in their services.

(2) The sponsors who pay big money want to be given the opportunity to pitch their products. They want the attendees to have a way to learn about what they can offer. They feel, if the attendee is interested, they will go to the session.

SMX & SES conference have been having these sponsored paid and run sessions for a while now. The main concern, and I noticed this when I began working on the session coverage for SES, was that SES is having a whole time slot to only session paid presentations. If you look at the SES NY Day two agenda, and scroll down to the 3:15pm-4:30pm time slot, you will notice that the only sessions being offered are classified as “Sponsored Sessions.” That gives the attendee no choice but to either skip the whole time slot or visit a sponsored session. Typically, a conference will have a single session that is sponsored amongst three or four additional sessions that are not sponsored - giving the attendee the choice. Here, attendees may feel they have no choice.

The debate on that topic is pretty lively but civilized, so check it out at Sphinn.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and Sphinn.

Mar 06
March 2008 Google AdWords "Slap": Minimum Bids Surge
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There seems to be a ton of discussion going on at DigitalPoint Forums and some at WebmasterWorld about a recent Google AdWords Quality Score update where many AdWords advertisers saw their minimum bids spike up.

The reports all come from advertisers noticing a major change in their minimum bids as of yesterday, March 5, 2008.

When major price changes occur in AdWords, it has been coined a Google Slap. People say Google is forcing them to pay more for the same quality traffic. Some PPC professionals just say these advertisers are complaining and they should make higher quality sites. Some of those professionals have actually been hit by the increased prices and are likely no longer saying that, while some can still boast success.

I am not one to judge but there are many reports of a Google AdWords Quality Score update, impacting the minimum bid of many advertisers - all starting March 5th.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Mar 06
Google Forgets To Renew SSL Certificate For Conversion Tracking
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Last night at Search Engine Land, I reported Google Forgot To Renew Their SSL Certificate.

A WebmasterWorld thread reported the issue with https://www.googleadservices.com SSL certificate at noon (EST). What that meant was that from between noon time and about 8pm (EST) last night, customers who clicked from your AdWords ads might have been issued a security warning on your site. This would only happen if you used Google’s conversion tracking script. But for those that did, a security warning popping up on your site, due to Google, can cause a potential buyer or prospect to quickly leave your site, even though you paid your CPC to Google for that user.

When I wrote the story, at about 4:30pm (EST), I think Google was already working on the issue. Because I was not receiving the error for the googleadservices.com SSL certificate anymore, but instead I was receiving a different error for the Google.com SSL certificate. The error was a “host name mismatch” issue, possibly Google trying to utilize the valid certificate with the expired one? I don’t know but here is a screen capture:

Google Secure Cert Expired

AdWordsAdvisor at 8:20pm (EST) told the forum that he/she “just IM’d now with those same tech folks and before I could even send my second sentence, they wrote back ‘resolved’.” So they likely fixed it before 8pm. AdWordsAdvisor said it is now on his/her calendar for March 1st, so they remember to renew it every year. Some of these certificates have to be renewed annually, there is no way to renew for 10 years (I wish there were for all).

About a month ago, Yahoo Publisher Network also forgot to renew their SSL certificate. And I believe it took Microsoft adCenter about a a month to fix their conversion tracking script issue, which also included signs of SSL issues.

Every year I need to renew my wild card SSL certificate for my servers. I honestly start the process one month in advance because for some reason, Verisign is incredibly slow in reissuing the “wild card” versions.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Mar 06
Online Video Advertising + Search Engines = Opportunity For Small Businesses
in Search Engine Land
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Much is being written and said these days about the rising future of online video advertising. Recent articles like one in the NY Times reporting Google’s move to test video ads in search results pages shows that the once abstract promise of online video advertising is now upon us.

But what are the repercussions for small businesses from online video advertising, and how will it impact their presence in search results?

Click to continue reading…

Mar 06
Google Confirms Page Load Time As Future Factor in AdWords Quality Score
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Yesterday we reported that Landing Page Load Time Will Impact Google AdWords Quality Score. We finally received confirmation of that from AdWordsAdvisor in both WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Here are the details:

  • This factor is not yet live yet.
  • There is no official date as to when it will go live.
  • Google thought they would launch it, so they put it in the FAQs but did pulled back and forgot to remove it from the full dump FAQs.
  • Google planned an Inside AdWords blog post to announce this in advance.
  • We will probably see a blog post on this within a week at Google’s blog.
  • Google confirmed the page load time grade will be displayed on the Keyword Analysis Page.
  • “Several weeks” after you see your page load time grade, the page load time metric will be used in the overall AdWords quality score.

I still have several questions in with Google that were not yet answered. Those questions include what happens if a site is having temporary server issues, does that advertiser have to suffer for a whole month until Google checks the page load time again? How many seconds is considered a bad page load time? And so on… I assume these questions will be addressed in the AdWords blog post that is likely coming within a week, said AdWordsAdvisor.

Forum discussion continued WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.