BlackWaterOps

As the result of conversation with prospective clients over the last few days I am making a change to BlackwaterOps new client policy (in the past there was not much of a formal policy).

BlackwaterOps will be putting in to all future client policies that we will discontinue servicing the client if they participate directly or engage a third party in any of the following practices:

Have an E-Mail policy that Violates the Can Spam Laws, is not with an approved e-mail partner, or obfuscates the domain the e-mail was sent from.

Engages in buying links.

Engages in Selling links.

Uses DMCA Takedown notices as a method of SEO, Counter SEO, or for any reason other than an actual DMCA violation they are prepared to take up in court.

Uses an Affiliate Program Partner that allows any of the above by its members.

With Bing.com from Microsoft launching next week a lot of people want to know Bing Vs Google, how does this change my site and how it ranks, for search and for ads.

The good news is it doesn’t change much.  Bing is really just a front end for the Live.com Search Engine, so results won’t change much.  What does change is that there is now more ad real estate on Microsoft Search Results.  Expect that the change in demand, and supply is going to cause Bing.com to cause ads to be cheap for a while. 

So what does one do differently to rank in Bing.com vs Google?  Not much.  Microsoft doesn’t have quite the same concept of authority that Google does so its results are a bit odd.  Similar to Google Who links to you is important, but because Microsoft doesn’t index as much of the web you need more high quality links from places that Bing includes in its index.  This means getting good links from places that are “PR5” or higher from the Google List are worth a lot more in Bing, than they are in Google.

Also because Bing doesn’t understand as many Canonical URL’s it’s important that you make your links easy to share and have good “reforming” code on your site. 

Reforming code does things like take your SEO Friendly URL and make sure it exactly matches what your sitemap sent.  So www.blackwaterops.com/frogs/reviews doesn’t get linked to blackwaterops.com/frogs/reviews and not get a 301 to the preffered domain when the bot arrives.

It’s also important to remember that not all search engines parse HTML and XHTML and their variations the same way, so it is important to have a web designer, or SEO that can help you identify code that is not being parsed by the search engines correctly.  Google has by far the best HTML/XHTML parser of any of the search engines and as a result can read malformed HTML with ease.  But Live/Bing chokes on poorly nested Div’s Comments in Scripts and other similar common errors, and even non-errors in your sites source.

BlackWaterOps can help you increase your ranking in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other Search Engines through best practices in page structure, analysis tools to parse your pages, and through maximizing your inbound links from credible real world sites.

Tech Crunch asked How Much Is Microsoft spending on Google Ads for bing. A lot.  As much as $2 a click. 

This is a screen shot from my adwords campaing.  Notice the $2.00 Minimum first page bid for Bing Search?  And Microsoft has the Top of the page position rather than the side bar which ups the price.  Based on 85k searches on the 28th for “Bing” and “Bing Search” at 1% click thru, Microsoft could easily have spent $1,700 with Google that day.  And I expect the 29th to be bigger, and June 3rd when it launches to be the biggest yet.

Will Microsoft get its money out of this?

Possibly.  TwitNit is seeing about $15 cpms far from what I’d like to see considering I’m buying traffic at $50 CPM, but Microsoft should be able to get twice what I do, which would be $30 CPM, on $2,000 CPM buys that seems like a bad deal, but when you look at the life of a user if you convert them.. That is easy to recoup.

Tech Crunch asked how much of the $80M would be spent with Google.  Very little.  Spending $100k a month would buy all the traffic there is on the related terms.  Even if they bought all the ads for Ask.com, Yahoo, and others it is unlikely they could spend a Million dollars a year with Google.

Google has a great HTML Parser in its crawler, this is probably it’s single largest advantage in understanding what a web page is about.

If your website has less than perfect HTML Yahoo indexes your HTML code rather than you text creating pages that get less than stellar results in search.

Think of HTML code as you would any other Language.  Just because You understand the English that is not grammatically perfect your browser renders it well enough.  If it didn’t people wouldn’t use the browser, because web pages wouldn’t render correctly.  Google has the same opinion of search, if the engine doesn’t work people won’t use it.

Because web designers check their pages in browsers they are often aware of what a page will look like in several browsers, but few designers are aware of what their pages “look” look like in search.

BlackWaterOps uses several tools to analyze what your page looks like to Yahoo, Google, Ask, Live.com, and others, so we can help you make sure that you are getting indexed correctly in each.

Using Jason Calacanis’s Mahalo as my old stand by of what you don’t know about SEO can kill you…

Mahalo’s page about Jon Huntsman currently indexes like this to Yahoo.

[0] => jon huntsman

[1] => form onsubmit

[2] => mahalo

[3] => huntsman

[4] => search id

[5] => cdata

[6] => search type

[7] => greenhouse

[8] => skins

While a few of the words are correct, if Mahalo would clean up its HTML it would look like this:

[0] => president ronald reagan

[1] => john huntsman

[2] => salt lake tribune

[3] => huntsman corporation

[4] => jon huntsman sr

[5] => reagan republican

[6] => kathleen sebelius

[7] => jesus christ of latter day saints

[8] => latter day saints

[9] => united states trade representative

[10] => mandarin chinese

[11] => jesus christ of latter day

[12] => republican leaders

[13] => congressional leadership

[14] => church of jesus christ

[15] => church of jesus christ of latter day saints

[16] => governor of utah

[17] => ronald reagan

[18] => huntsman

[19] => republican party

Not only are the keywords more relevant there are more of them.

BlackWaterOps customers get access to this tool and others.  While we may make this tool available for licensing we do not currently.

BlackWaterOps offers “real” SEO not just link building.  Our very scientific approach to SEO gives us a huge advantage in keeping your costs affordable, and making sure you aren’t going to wake up one day delisted, de-ranked, or experiencing other huge swings in your traffic.