BlackWaterOps

Many CEO’s and CFO’s look at outsourcing anything that is ongoing as a bad thing. If someone is going to pay a guy to work 40 hours a week on a task it might as well be your company, rather than a company that is going to mark that guy up. This would be true, if you only needed A GUY, but in many cases you need tools, software, and relationships which might not come with an employee.

SEO

In most cases you will want to outsource SEO, make a decision on SEM, and insource most of your social media interaction. SEO is the hardest of the three to insource. SEO is not just a skill set it is a collection of tools. Much like your doctor is a guy, and he can do a lot when he is in your home to treat small things, it is unlikely that he will diagnose your cancer at your bedside.

A good SEO brings tools like a Google Search Engine Appliance for assessing page quality scores; analytics software for tracking not only your site but your competitors; relationships with hundreds if not thousands of sites; account reps at search engines to expedite questions problems and complaints; and monitoring tools to give early detection to problems with rank, reputation or uptime. A good SEO is also benefitting from working with multiple sites so they can see trends across sites.

These are difficult to insource. A Google Search Appliance approaches $100,000 the first year, competitive analytics software is expensive to build and require constant tweaks to maintain accuracy. Working with a smaller set of sites changes in search engine behavior may be detected too late to make changes to prevent lower rankings. SEO has almost no insourcing advantages. The few that you have are that by having an onsite SEO you can include them in more decisions and embed SEO in the corporate culture. Even this can be done with an outsourced SEO who benefits from the tools of their company.

SEM

SEM can go either way with equal success and is often more a function of who is going to have more buying power and how many hours a week do you need. SEMs success or failure is most dependent on the copy used, the landing pages created, and the cost of the ads. Insourced or outsource the first two will likely be the same if you hire the right person. The cost of the ads through Google and Microsoft are likely going to be the same unless your ad budget exceeds $500k a year. If your SEM brings buying power to the table, either through bulk, or through relationships with websites where your ads could run, then outsourcing makes sense. If you hire the right person who can bring those relationships, then insourcing makes sense.

Social Media Marketing

NEVER Trust interacting with your customers to a contractor. For this reason you should insource at least that portion of your social media. Event planning, site building, social network infrastructure planning, and seeding, however you can in or outsource. Likely there will be portions of this that you need help with from time to time which makes it worthwhile to partially outsource this. Even as a consultant I routinely subcontract to event planners for many of the logistics of my social events. Building a FaceBook Apps, integrating with twitter, are all social media marketing tasks, that are likely not aligned with your core business, and make a lot of sense to outsource.

Follows is a sample section on Social Media Metrics from my book which will be available October 1st.

Social Media consultants are often very friendly, eager to please, people. You have to be to be popular with everyone. This type of individual tends to not be enthusiastic about hard metrics, instead they will often prefer to report soft metrics. Unlike all other statistics and metrics many social media consultants are calling these cold metrics and warm metrics. Cold metrics being the “unfeeling” raw numbers and warm metrics being the “tough to quantify” measure of good will.

As the manager of a campaign you will often have to translate between the qualitative and quantitative metrics provided by your consultants. It is also your responsibility to make sure that your marketing spend is in the demographics that make sense. Not all demographics are represented in all social mediums. Very few body building enthusiasts are on Twitter, and Oprah fans aren’t on MySpace.

Social media metrics should always include the following hard metrics:

· Fan/Follower Count

· Active Fan Percentage

· Friend of a Fan Growth

· Traffic from Social Media

· Product/Services Conversion from Social Media

· Percent of Network(s) Engaged

· Cost Per Fan

Social media metrics should always include the following soft metrics:

· Positive to Negative Feedback Ratio

· Support to Marketing Interaction Ratio

· Press/Blogger/Media Response

Be prepared to be told that your Social Media Consultant can’t, won’t, or doesn’t need to provide these metrics. There are a lot of Social Media “Experts” who feel that Social Media is about “building good karma” and that has “incalculable value”. These consultants will often talk in terms or ROI as Return on Influence rather than Return on Investment. Much like the section on avoiding SEO/SEM scams, if you hear anything that indicates that you can’t calculate hard statistics RUN!

Social Media is EXPENSIVE for the ROI in the short term. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t do it, just have realistic expectations. Building those expectations requires the metrics.

Fan/Follower Count is an easy metric to gather. This is simply the number of Fans, Followers, or Friends you have on each social network you have engaged in. Typically you want to break this down by network, but having an aggregate is also useful, and is easy to calculate.

Active Fan Percentage is sometimes difficult to gather, but it is the percentage of your fans/followers who logon to the service at least once a week. Where this metric is most useful is in preventing consultants from using nefarious practices to gain followers/fans.

Friend of a Fan growth is the number of users acquired through word of mouth rather than direct engagement. This is an important indicator, as the purpose of Social Media is to have word of mouth advertising spread your brand “virally”.

Traffic from Social Media is easy to gather from your web analytics. Checking how many people are landing at your website from FaceBook, Twitter, and via your URL shortening service allows you to track how many of the people you are engaging are actually following through to your site.

Product/Services Conversion from Social Media uses the Traffic from Social Media along with the conversion rate from links posted to your fans to track how much you are earning from the engagement of your followers.

Percent of Network Engaged is similar to Alexa’s Percent Reach. This is your fan/follower count divided by the total number of users of the service. As FaceBook has over 300 Million users this will be a very small number, but a very useful one. Your growth should match if not exceed the growth of the network. This will be easy getting started. Growing from 5 fans to 6 yeilds 20% growth in a week, but as you start to hit the middle of your growth you will plateau for a bit. If you have a well built network of followers when you hit critical mass your growth should nearly exactly match that of the network.

Cost Per Fan is another scary number, or possibly THE scary number. Building your first 1000 fans will cost a lot, and maintaining them will be expensive on a cost per user basis, but if you can get to the economy of scale the returns can be worth it.

The Soft Metrics require a lot of time to monitor, but as you are evaluating your success you should be mindful of them. The soft metrics are really a measure of how good your evangelists are. If they are combative with people who say bad things about your brand your positive to negative feedback ratio will tank.

Support to marketing engagement is easier to track if you are using a Customer Relationship Management Solution, but the very short version is, are you answering questions in response to products presales, post sales, or in response to product operation. This is my favorite of the soft metrics, because it really is about answering “what does your customer need” and “why did they use that medium to get it.” If you are getting technical support questions via FaceBook, you may need to ask why didn’t they call? Or use one of the official mechanisms for support? This type of engagement is hard to calculate the ROI on but can help your other customer engagement methodologies improve which can often increase your revenue and lower support costs.

Press/Blog/Media Response is not always relevant, but ideally your social media campaign is going to allow you to monitor bloggers, press, and other media personalities questions before they write articles or immediately following them, this gives you the best chance to add additional good press to articles and have a heads up on bad press.

Several fake stories attempting to capitalize on the bad economy with an almost plausible story about Google offering thousands of work from home jobs to anyone who fills out a form and gets their $2 adpack.

While many of the details are false, the program wasn’t set up by Google, and Google doesn’t have a “Google Adwork” program, but Google doesn’t seem to be doing much to stop the scam either.  Normally Google is amazingly tenacious about the use of their trademark, I know several Gadget related sites that got some fairly harsh cease and desists sent to them for the use of the word gadget in ways that Google thought was too close to GoogleGadgets.  But after several of our sites were plagued with ads reading “Work from home SEO” and “Earn money with Search Engine Ads” we attempted to get a hold of Google to notify them that scam ads were plaguing our sites.

No response.  We have our suspicions why.  While Google may enforce their brand pretty heavily they look the other way when something is good for the bottom line.  The work from home scams are buying 100’s of thousands of keyword phrases through a lot of accounts and buying all of the penny click ad inventory.  This drives the ad price up on all of the legitimate ads. 

Our Client’s’ Adwords spends that were also capitalizing on cheap penny clicks are getting undercut, which many of our clients were willing to up from a penny to two cents.  While this sounds like an insignificant amount of money, if you are buying 100k ads a day at 1 cent per click and you change to 2 cents you doubled your spend.  Google does hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on these ads at less than 5 cents a click and so much like penny trader stocks small increases can be big money for them.

Blocking too many advertisers in your Adsense account that Google doesn’t think are competitors to your content can get you kicked out of the Adsense program.  Putting verbiage on your site not to click work from home ads can also get you kicked out of the program. Since Google provides no method to report ads which are inappropriate, fraudulent, or violate their trademarks on their landing page as a publisher you are “stuck” with them.

Google is currently plagued with ads which hurt publishers, but Google looks the other way on because they’d rather have the money.  Some of the most famous being for Evony, an online game which runs ads from multiple domains featuring a barely clad woman with a knife at her throat, which is entirely unrelated to the game, and not likely appropriate in most workplace environments.

evony.com
evonygame.com
evonyhome.com
evonyminiclip.com
evonyonline.com
evonyy8.com
playevony.com
evonyfreeonlinegames.com
evony-game.com
evonymyspace.com
evony-game.com
evonygamezer.com
sweetgameonline.com
playnowmelord.com
comeplaymylord.com
evony.net

BlackWater Clients have seen anti-competitive practices happening via adsense as well.  A competitor creates an image ad which is very unlikely to get clicked, something ugly with poor syntax and grammar selling something unrelated to the keywords it is bought against.  These ads drive the target sites income way down, but also makes the quality of the site look low, as the lack of quality ads implies a lower quality of content.  Again all a site can do is block the ads, but we were running in to 2-3 new domains being used a day making it a task clients had to perform 2-3 times a day, and because the sites would use Geo filtering often the bay area would not be included in the ad targets nor would the home state of the target site, making them all but impossible to track down.

And again with no means to report this behavior.  We came to a conclusion, Microsoft PubCenter.  Our headaches are far less and we can get someone on the phone in minutes to answer our questions, complain about an ad, or get something explained, or even get answers to questions like, why does your code not show any ads to this guy on the other side of the Bay, but does for me.  The best part, the earnings are competitive, running neck and neck with Google on Google’s good days, but the ads look nicer, and the reports are more detailed.  The only “down side” Microsoft has a higher standard for the quality of site they will accept so a few of our online stores don’t meet that thresh hold.  One might say even that was a win for Microsoft.

My soon to be released book “Online Marketing Strategies Volume 1:Analytics, Strategies, and Terminology for Site Managers” is now available for pre-order at 50% off the cover price, or even better it is temporarily free to members of the BlackWaterOps “Professional Marketers” listserve.

This book is targeted towards anyone who manage online marketing campaigns.  This is not limited to SEO, and SEM, but deals with Reputation Management, Site construction, Affiliate Marketing and more.  Whether you are managing an online store, political campaign, charitable organization, online journalism site, or blog there are strategies for keeping on top of online marketing.

Clear explanations of common terms, tricks for finding the right people to work with you, and how to measure your success are included in this first Volume of Online Marketing Strategies.  This book won’t teach you how to be an SEO, or SEM but it will teach you the necessary metrics for measuring their success, and verifying that the analytics they are providing you are accurate.

Just the Book: $34.95

“Professional Marketers” is a community which offers feedback, advice, and potential insight to online marketing. Professional Marketers focuses on Optimizing your online marketing.  As a community member you get the benefit of being able to find out about industry trends, experiences and traps before the rest of the world.  Being part of a discussion in real time rather than when it is reported.  And you can do so in a small  close knit group of like minded professional.

Free Book + Subscription First Month $24.95

There are a TON of free Short URL services out there, Bit.LY, Is.GD, Tr.IM and it is nice that they provide integration with Tweet Deck and other software, and offer you some statistics, but they are a BAD idea.  Why?  One day a change in the Terms of Service makes them go from Forwarding service to being a “Link Bar” (like Digg did).

Trying to focus on the positives.  Having your own URL Shortening allows your own branding.  If you run a website called Daves Discount Emporium you might register DDE.IN  or Daves.GS. This lets users know that they aren’t about to get “Rick Rolled” by the link they have been sent. Having your own URL Service lets you do useful things.  Forwarding URLs when you change where you want them to go.  For example you might have a the latest version of your software download be Daves.GS/Download. 

If those aren’t enough reasons, how about some of the negatives.

Short URL services can link to anything, as a result many of them trip Spam Filters in eMail, are often filtered by proxies.  While “Reputable” services are unlikely to do it, you also risk that the service will forward only 90% of your traffic, or will present a different URL to Google’s bots when they ask where the link goes.

Short URL’s don’t always use a 301 redirect, which means they don’t pass authority, this means that you aren’t gaining authority from all the discussion around your URL

Because a Short URL can link to anywhere many of them actually can cause negative effects in search engines.  There is what is called a “Bad Neighborhood” penalty for having 301s from a domain that has linked to Spam, Illegal Material, or sites that broke Google’s rules.

So how do you set up a Short URL?  There are a lot of ways ranging from a few lines of code, to a commercial product that runs about $100.  It all depends on your needs and how you are going to use it.  And if you are a client, of course BlackwaterOps can help.

We all get the spam, “GET FOUND IN GOOGLE IN 24 HOURS!  we’LL get you 1500 links today!” Does it work? Or is it like the Herbal Pills to increase the size of your penis?  Like anything else there wouldn’t be a market if there wasn’t demand, but not all consultants and techniques have the same level of results.

There are two major ways to drive traffic via Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  SEO is all about moving your site up the ranks in search results.  SEM is all about putting ads along search results to get viewers to your site.  Both of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, which is why typically you need to balance the approach.

SEO takes time, there is nothing most sites can do that will overnight double their traffic.  SEO requires that you build web pages that look good to the search engines not just to your users.  This requires more than just a good graphics designer, but a good HTML Coder.  “Cleaning up” after Web design programs can take hours or days depending on how many page templates your site has and so it can be expensive, but the result is worth it.  Pages that render correctly in more browsers, that Search engines can read and understand, and often pages that load faster.  These result in more traffic, that is better targeted and more likely to have a better experience.  SEO is also about “Link building” but not all links are equal, and getting links through “Link Buying” can result in your site being de-listed from Google or others.  Being De-Listed will mean you get no traffic from Google, which can put a site out of business.

SEM is nearly instantaneous.  You can buy ads that run every time someone searches for “hotdog” and with in an hour your Ad will be up on Google.  The downside to SEM is that you will pay for every visitor who comes to your site through your ad.  Ad prices vary in price based on the keyword you are buying against, how relevant Google thinks the contents of the page you are linking to is to the keyword.  This why working with an expert makes such a big difference.  If Google scores your page a 1 out of 10 your ad click price will be up to 40x the price of an ad with a quality score of 10.  In addition getting the text of your ad optimized can make sure that only people actually interested in your site click on your ad.  Because you pay for every click you don’t want copy that when a user searches iPod says “Free stuff for everyone” might get clicks but if when they get there they find out the free stuff is a travel sized tooth paste you will have paid for that traffic and not likely have gotten many good leads from the ad.

So how do you know if the company you are working with is “Good” at what they do?  Bait them.  There are some common things that Scam SEO sites routinely do that many will almost brag about, so rather than asking if they do anything “black hat” ask if they do any of the following things in a “coy” way. 

“How much of what you are quoting will be spent on buying links”

“What directory sites will I expect to see my site in”

Most SEO’s who do bad things are going to fall for one of these two traps.  Unless the answer is we don’t do either of these things RUN! Once you get into negotiations you will want to have some metrics which you will use to evaluate their work.  Often SEO Scammers will buy cheap traffic to demonstrate how they have helped their clients.  Using Google Analytics or even just Alexa you can check what percentage of your traffic is from each country.  While the Alexa Numbers are not “perfect” by any stretch of the imagination they will tell you if things change.  Typically if Alexa says your traffic is 1% from India, and after you hire an SEO it is 10% india, you know that the traffic you are receiving isn’t from the US.  Similarly if Google says your traffic is up 30% but Alexa shows no change, likely your SEO is using robots to run your page views up, if Alexa is up 90% but Google is only up 10% they are using a different set of robots.

And how much should this cost?  Prepare to be shocked.  SEO is not cheap.  Anyone who is any good at it is making money on affiliate programs, creating “Google Bait” and doing other things to pay the rent.  As a result most Legit SEO’s are going to quote $300-$500 an hour, but you need to make sure you are getting billed for hours that make sense to be billed for. Not “Lawyer Style” where your SEO was thinking about you driving in the car and billed you for 20 minutes.  When working with clients I typically quote in advance this is what we are going to do this is how long it will take, and if I can do it 20% faster great for me, if it takes 20% longer you don’t pay any extra.

Some clients want weekly or monthly reports on how their website is doing, we provide those, but I would tell most people shopping for an SEO that you make sure that you know what you are going to get in value from these reports, that you can’t get from the dashboard of Google.  So look for things like:

“Reputation Monitoring” where an SEO will let you know when good or bad news about your site hits the blogosphere or press. 

“Search Ranking” Monitoring key traffic drivers for to your site and where you Rank in Search for them.

“Page Two’s” these are terms which your site is on the second page of results for and could likely see significant increases in traffic from by moving those results to the first page.

The most important thing to remember when looking for an SEO is to find someone who makes you feel comfortable.  There are a lot of used car salesman selling snake oil, so if it sounds to good to be true it probably is, and if an SEO can’t tell you how or why something works it probably doesn’t.

The BlackWaterOps Site Health tool, provides a LOT of information in a dozen lines, and that can be overwhelming, if you are new to Web Site Analytics, so here is a Line by Line of what each of those statistics mean and why they matter.

We’ll be using our favorite Dog Food example of Purina.com

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/purina.com

Known Pages: 4229
Known Inlinks: 120033
Root Inlinks: 63185
Google Inlinks: 780
Google Indexed Pages: 1960
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.000044
Daily Page Views: 2904
Spam Likelihood:59%
Site Health: 96%
Desirability: 137%
Linkworthiness: 1%
Longevity 150%

Known Pages is how many pages we are aware of at your web site which are not blocked from being indexed.  If you run an online store this could be Millions of pages, if you run a blog this should be your number of posts, plus the number of comment pages plus the number of tag pages. 

If you have more pages you have more opportunity to rank for more search terms.  A single page about Dog Food will only get hits for Dog Food.  If you also want to rank for Pet Food, Canned Dog Food, Dry Dog Food, Large Breed Dog Food, and other Dog Food Related terms you would want have pages built specifically for those search phrases.

Known Inlinks This is the number of links to the pages on your website. If you were linked to by the New York Times that would be 1 inbound link.  If you were linked to by 60 bloggers that would be 60 InLinks.  Not all InLinks have the same weigh with Google, so more is not always going to win over your competition.  A link from the New York Times is worth 100 links from most blogs.  But is worth less than a Link from the far less heard of W3.org

Root InLinks This is the number of InLinks to your Root Domain.  A link to Purina.com rather than Purina.com/dogfood.  Google and other Search Engines assign site authority partially based on the number of Root InLinks you have.  The idea is that if a site links to your root they are endorsing “Everything you say” rather than just this “one thing” you said.  Think of it like the difference between some one agreeing with a statement you made vs. you as a person.  "Dave is a Smart Guy” is different than “Dave is Right about McDonald’s being good for breakfast” because Dave might be the name of the local stoner, and all he really knows is food.

Google InLinks: Google only shares InLinks with us that it thinks are of a certain value.  As a result you get a sense of Good InLinks, vs Bad or unvalued InLinks.  Like our example with Dave, if a random blogger links to you his authority is likely low and Google doesn’t put much value on that link.  If you get a link which Google assumes is a Spam Link, Paid Link, or part of a Link Exchange it will also not show these links.  So if you have a High Number of Known Links to Google Links ratio it likely means your links are from Low Quality sources or that you are buying or spamming links.  Which Google may penalize you for.

Google Indexed Pages This is the number of your pages Google has included in search results. You can look at this as pages Google MIGHT send traffic to.  Google doesn’t index every page on the Internet.  Most of our clients have about 25%  of their pages indexed we strive to get this to 50%.  There are several reasons this might be lower, like you have two pages that are very similar, like the page for your Kansas City location and your St. Louis location.  Google won’t include two pages that it deems of the same content.

% of Internet users who visit site: Sure you have heard of Purina, you might even use their product, but when was the last time you were at their site?  This number is the percent of people on the Internet who visit this site once a month.  This tends to be a very small number.  No one has 10%, you would be HUGE if you had 1%  so expect a lot of 0’s between the decimal and the start of your number.

Daily Page Views: This is how many pages are viewed on your Site each day.  This number is partially a lie in our tool right now as we average a few numbers to get to this number so if you have more than 8 views per visitor this will be low, and if you have less than 1.5 it will be high, but it is generally a pretty close average of your past 3 months of traffic.

Spam Likelihood: We use a formula to look at several of your numbers to determine if it is likely you are buying links, participating in a link exchange, or have pages created for the express purpose of building link authority.  If this number is over 85% you are likely doing something “Blackhat”. There are exceptions.  Disney.com does a lot of promoting of links as Disney.com/something and then routes that to another domain.  This creates a false positive in our system.

Site Health:Site Health is the average of the three scores below. Each of these scores is 0-150%.  It is possible to score more than 100% in site health, but we haven’t found many sites that do, and they don’t maintain it for more than a month or two, so we normalized to 100% for the site health, and let each of the other scores possibly “make up” for a low score in one of the 3 legs.

Desirability: This is based primarily on your views per page.  If you have 100k pages and get 1 page view a day you have Zero desirability.

LinkWorthiness: This is based primarily on InLinks to Pages ratio.  If everything you write gets 10 inbound links from fans who hang on your every word this will go UP if you write to an audience who never links to you, likely you aren’t breaking any news and this score will go down.

Longevity: This score is based on how much of your traffic is the result of new vs. old content.  If you only write about Gossip this will be low as it doesn’t have a long life.  If you run a store it is about longtail vs breaking trends in products.  While it is good to have fresh content, long term you need balance.

To help you understand how your site could improve its traffic over all (not just in search) Blackwater has released the Beta of its Site Health Calculator. It is a tool which we have used for sales pitches, site monitoring and just general scoping of the competition.

SEO is as much about knowing your size, and where you should rank organically as it is getting there. Blackwater will never tell a client who doesn’t make dog food that we can make them the top hit… (Though it is a space with less than stiff competition so we probably could beat Purina) because even if we did Google would likely “hand job” the results to put Purina back at number one.

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/purina.com

Known Pages: 4229
Known Inlinks: 120033
Root Inlinks: 63185
Google Inlinks:
Google Indexed Pages: 1960
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.000044
Daily Page Views: 2904
Spam Likelihood:59%
Site Health: 96%
Desirability: 137%
Linkworthiness: 1%
Longevity 150%

Using several metrics we look at your traffic in terms of Views per Page, indexed vs unindexed pages, percent of pages getting traffic, and other metrics to assign your site values for Desirability, Linkworthiness, and Longevity of your content. Each of these scores can be 0-150% and we average those 3 Scores to get your current site health. While it is possible to get a 150% we rarely see a site excelling in all of these metrics.

SEO should help you get to your peak or a little above of where you should be organically, which is why Blackwater doesn’t JUST do SEO. By improving your user experience helping with Press/Public Relations, and helping you manage your marketing dollars we can build buzz which will increase your traffic both through search and referral traffic.

This week during the course of some discussions I was told “We do the same things eBay, and Amazon do” and I was too polite to say what I was thinking, but here’s why any SEO who tells you to do those things is not your friend.

In addition to eBay and Amazon being destination sites, not Search Landing sites by design, there are a lot of reasons you don’t want to be like them, at least not in the eyes of Google.

Starting with eBay as an example. Ebay is the largest Auto Auction Company in the United States on or offline. So you’ d think that if you did a quick search for Car Auction, Car Auction Online, Auto Auction, or some variant of that Ebay would be towards the top of results.

You’d be wrong.

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/ebay.com

Known Pages: 230126702
Known Inlinks: 131748167
Root Inlinks: 25670473
Google Inlinks: 1120
Google Indexed Pages: 108000000
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.43491
Daily Page Views: 28704060
Spam Likelihood:14%
Site Health: 38%
Desirability: 24%
Linkworthiness: 69%
Longevity 22%

Because of the Link Scheme used by e-bay’s affiliate program detects to Google as Paid Links, eBay pretty much only ranks for searches for items which are an rare and only found in ebay’s auctions, user profiles which are unique to eBay, and searches which include the word eBay.

Amazon used to have these same problems with their affiliate program, but 3 years ago they sat down with Google to discuss how to undo that. The result was a change in their link scheme.

http://www.blackwaterops.com/site-health/amazon.com

Known Pages: 477186698
Known Inlinks: 342864639
Root Inlinks: 101787104
Google Inlinks: 6090
Google Indexed Pages: 107000000
% of Internet users who visit site: 0.20609
Daily Page Views: 13601940
Spam Likelihood:3%
Site Health: 62%
Desirability: 5%
Linkworthiness: 55%
Longevity 126%

One of the primary changes they made was converting most affiliates to using iframes for linking to them. This drastically decreased the number of duplicate links to their site. They also changed the onsite link structure to use Amazon.com/SOMEPRODUCTNAME/dp/AMAZONID where as links from outside Amazon go to Amazon.com/gp/product/AMAZONID?SOMSTRINGS

As to SEOing like Amazon… Anyone who has ever done a view source on Amazon’s pages would never consider doing this. Amazon has 60 of more lines of white space before the <html> tag, embeds their style sheets in every page, and doesn’t specify a document type. All basics of SEO best practices.

Feel free to play with this tool… It’s beta so it crashes every so often, or fails to parse results it is scraping from data sources and includes junk on the page… but it works 95% of the time with pretty good likelihood.

Spam likelihood is still being tweaked if you are below 75% you are likely safe. Sites that do a lot of Domain redirects may have a false positive like VE3d.com , Disney.com, and a few others.

Enjoy,

Brandon Wirtz

CEO BlackWaterOPs.com

510-992-6548