BlackWaterOps

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

You hear people talk about moving their content and applications ino “the cloud” but it has never been simple.  Cloud Computing has required you to re-write your applications, often fighting through differences in API’s and limitations, often seemingly arbitrary.

BlackwaterOps has taken the work out of moving to the cloud. 

The premiere version of the BlackwaterOps Content Accelerator doesn’t “port” your applications, it proxies them so that you can take the bandwidth, and CPU load off of your server.  Because Google AppEngine has Points of Presence (PoPs) all over the world your content will load faster, and more reliably.

Unlike using S3 for hosting Images which requires you to upload your images manually to Amazon, Blackwater Content Accelerator automatically offloads your images to the cloud when they are requested.  This allows your existing CMS solution such as Movable Type, WordPress, Joomla, Media Wiki, to benefit from cloud hosting.

What really sets BlackwaterOps Content Accelerator apart is that you can off load large portions of the traffic to your servers with only 2 lines of code in your .htaccess file if you are on Apache, and it is no more than 4 lines on most other servers.

This is the single easiest way to dip your toe in the Cloud waters. To get an understanding in a safe easy to use environment of uptime, reliability, and scalability of cloud apps, and the price associated with them.

For $99 and about 30 minutes you can reduce the load on your server, and drastically increase the number of users you can serve.  Often also speeding up the load time of your pages.  Or opt to have us do the install, and you will be able to “upgrade” your site to run in the cloud in less than 5 minutes.

The BlackWater GAE  Content Accelerator is licensed per domain.  You will be provided with instructions for installation and a customized version of the GoogleApp for your domain. You can launch on an AppSpot.com domain and then use GoogleApps to map to a subdomain of your primary domain.  At this time you need one App Id Per Domain.

Content Delivery is billed by Google.  We are typically seeing the price of delivery at about $.15 a gig, but your price may vary based on size of your images. Up to 30 Gigabytes a month are delivered by Google for free (1 gigabyte a day), which is enough for many small sites. Large sites can often cut their bandwith costs by 60% when compared to CDN delivery from Akamai, LimeLight, or others. Unlike other CDN’s you only pay for what you use, and there is not an increased price for “overages”. We have tested Content Accelerator up to 500 served images a second. Higher rates can be achieved but require an override from Google.

The BlackWater GAE Content Accelerator v1 includes all bug fixes as they are released.

Item Type

Just Software $99.00 Software Plus Install $249.00

Please allow 48 hours to receive your software as we have to modify it for your domain. We will contact you for details to complete your order.

Due to limitations of Google AppEngine, Images must be smaller than 1meg to be accelerated.

United breaks guitars. Just ask Dave Carrol a Canadian Musician who created a viral video to exact his revenge on United Airlines. The song was watched over 500 thousand times a day the first 3 days it was on YouTube. At the time of writing, it had surpassed 1.6M views.

Once something like this gets out, their is very little a company can do about it.  The Genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

In addition to the YouTube hits on this song, it is being played by country stations in both the US and Canada.  The first time I hear this song was early this morning  being talked about on a Top 40 stations morning talk show.

Social Media is making for a lot of pages which Google will never index, or will only index for a short period of time.

Diz explains the difference between using blog farms, and getting good inbound links from sites with authority.

In my house Bing, is the sound of something that is done.  Bing! Time to take the Pizza, laundry, TV Dinner, what ever out, it’s done.  For Microsoft Bing has a lot of growing to do.

Microsoft has unintentionally built the ultimate tool for finding videos of naked people, and even in the strict setting, nudity abounds.

Google’s “Safe” search works pretty well, and even when you search for racy pictures you won’t get them for the most part.

For the purpose of demonstration.  Take a look at “Upskirt”.  In Google Image Search if you search for just this word you get 0 results with safe search on strict.  “The Upskirt” returns the following images.

Nothing that would offend your mother from across the room.

Try the same “The Upskirt” on Bing.com’s Video search…

That’s quite a bit of butt going on there.  and if you hover over the images you get more than just butt.

Microsoft’s Bing will warn you if you put in a “Naughty” word, but if you attach a word it ignores like “the” your query goes through uninterrupted.

Worse you get some pretty raunchy results with out really trying.

Doing a search for Sharks? You see the suggest for “Sharking” (that’s fishing for sharks right?).

So what does Sharking return?  Videos of girls having their tops pulled down. These video have full on nudity in them.

These aren’t even the worst of the results I was able to find.  I opted not to post any thing that would actually return things which might be illegal.  But with the right query, even with safe search on you can find the infamous “2 Girl 1 Cup” video.  All sorts of violent videos, plenty of young likely underage girls on web cams.  And because Microsoft is creating their own “mini” versions of these clips even when YouTube has pulled an offending video the mini video may play. 

And you can’t filter the results with a proxy or firewall with out filtering all of Bing.com.  I’m recommending to schools, that they block Bing.com for the time being because of this. The site actually works better than most “proxy sites” like proxy.org for Unblocking your access to adult content, if you don’t mind that the video is small.  The blazingly loud audio can often be fun if your mouse is in the center of the screen when a NSFW video comes on the screen.

Microsoft may get this right at some point, but until they learn that MySpace, and YouTube aren’t “safe” results, or that the word “tits” anywhere in my search should be blocked, they will have issues.  It seems like they just asked everyone in the office to name 20 dirty words and they filtered those.  There are a LOT of holes in their search filter.  I’ll leave you with some BIG ones.  “torbehighclass”, “kissmyflix” are porn sites, they only have adult results.

Oh, and Christopher Dawson is off his rocker.

Chloe is the glue of BlackWaterOps, or the Grease?  She keeps us stuck together but also ensures we move smoothly.  Chloe is breather of fire, and knitter of things.  It would seem her life revolves around all things warm and wondrous.

Chloe manages the day to day operations of BlackWaterOps, and makes sure that the staff remembers to eat, shower, and get some sunshine from time to time.  She also organizes, arranges, schedules, and serves as Brandon’s personal Mary Poppins.

Brandon has been using SEO for fun and profit for nearly 10 years.  Brandon was an early adopter of blogging and social media.  He was one of the pioneers of Internet Video, and was part of several IPTV start-ups.  Through all of it he continued to make money online through monetizing his content and helping other with monetizing theirs.

In May of 2007 while working at Microsoft, Brandon tested his SEO metal for the first time against other SEO’s.  Jonah Stein created a race to be the Greatest Living American while visiting the Colbert Show.  Brandon quickly rose to the top and beat out 100’s of other SEO’s competing to make themselves, a client, or Steven Colbert the top hit for the term.

Brandon was a voting member on the SMPTE committee to ratify H.264 and VC-1. He was Microsoft’s first and only Windows Media Server MVP/User Evangelist. His background is varied by technology but has always been at the fore front of new media.

Brandon was also a Teacher at Stone Hebrew Academy, and a Director at Kimball Camp YMCA, these positions gave him strong background in education, and story telling.  This has made him a strong speaker, and an excellent presenter.