BlackWaterOps

If you can’t rank for your own name, send a nasty letter, and call me to tell me you’ll take me to court, because that is a great way to improve your online reputation.  That’s what Budget Van Lines did.  

If you arrived here unexpectedly because you were at Instameme.com I apologize that you aren’t getting a useful result, or maybe you are because I think this is more telling than the video from Youtube which was on the Instameme page. (included below)

Previously when you tried to view a topic page on Instameme.com for "BudgetVanLines" you would get back a single item, a YouTube Video of a somewhat unhappy Youtube content creator, (Rev. Drew Johnson) who wasn’t happy with his Budget Van Rental, or the packing of his items during his move.

Rather than Contacting the Reverend making things right with him and getting him to take down the offending Youtube Video, Budget Van Lines contacted me.   Theodore Clapp called me to tell me wanted to email me a C&D.

The letter appears below, but let me sum it up for you.   "Brandon, your site contains the words Budget Van And Lines" we have a trademark on these words, please remove the page, you probably are only making a few bucks on it, so if you could take that down, it would be great".   To which my answers was "So you want me to gimp the functionality of my site, so your potential customers can’t find out about your shitty moving service?"

Anyone who has met me, read me, or casually Googled my name is probably aware that if you threaten me I don’t respond well, and tend to do something like this post.   Which will likely be the top hit for "Shitty Moving Service" in a few days.  After all I rank for most everything I write.   So rather than having a page that featured a video from a disgruntled customer, which in all honesty didn’t paint Budget that badly in my opinion, and a few ads for random things provided by Google Adsense,  BudgetVanLines resolves to this page which speaks to how Budget and Insterstate Moves does business.

Last thing before the letter I received…  here are a few parting thoughts using the words Budget, Van, Lines, Interstate and  Moves in ways which don’t violate trademarks.

Whenever I make an interstate move I use Uhaul, to be honest there may be better solutions out there for your budget, van lines do vary wildly from place to place, but Uhaul has locations everywhere so if anything goes wrong you aren’t far from a replacement van.  They don’t do full service moving, but as you can see from the YouTube video on this page, that isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

Follows is the C&D Letter.

May 10, 2010

RE: TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT—ACTION REQUIRED

To Whom It May Concern:

Please be advised that it has been recently brought to our attention that our trademark name of Budget Van Lines, USPTO number 438734, is being used on your website www.instameme.com.  It brings visitors who are searching for our trademark name to your site and potentially presenting a trademark infringement issue when income is being generated by your site.  Case law supports this theory and we have prevailed in court on this issue in the past. While that is definitely a concern of ours, what is more of concern are the negative reviews posted regarding Budget Van Lines.  Based on the information on your site we currently have no way to locate the customer’s work order in our database. We value our customers’ opinion and intend to correct any issues regarding customer service. 

We would ask that you either provide us with sufficient information so we can locate the customers in our database so we can resolve the issues or remove the postings as soon as possible as they are causing us significant economic damages on a daily basis. Furthermore, it should be noted that based on past experience we have found that many of such posting are actually placed by competitors.

We look forward to hearing from you and resolving these issues on an informal basis.

Very truly yours,

Theodore A. Clapp, J.D.
VICE PRESIDENT, LEGAL DEPARTMENT

(212) 380-1812 Ext-799
Budget Van Lines, Inc.

ZillionTV sent me what wouldn’t qualify as a cease and desist, but more like a “please leave my client alone they have enough self esteem issues with out you disparaging them” letter.

I should disclose that for a brief period of time I worked at ZillionTV.  I was lured there by false promises of their technology, the state of their contracts with the studios, and the pedigree of the “Managerial Staff.”

Having your lawyer send a note to someone who has said less than flattering things about you is roughly the equivalent of taking the kick me sign off of your back and pinning it to your teeth instead.  I’ll demonstrate why.

Step One:  The party you sent the note to posts it to his or her website. (see below)

Step Two: The party then makes fun of you, and your law firm.  ShawValenza didn’t even care enough about the tone, and accuracy of this letter to grab a template of LexusNexus so that they wouldn’t sound like idiots.

If you are going to send a letter to a party who has said something untrue about you, as opposed to simply pointed out publicly documented facts about your goings on, you are not looking for defamation, but libel.  I can defame you all I want as long as the statements are true.  It is only false defamatory statements that are illegal.  The absolute defense to defamation is truth.

While many of my blog posts may not be of the highest standard of eloquence, because I am a firm believer in the first amendment I do my best to verify, and fact check anything I publish.

Step Three: The party then tells the world about the injustice of being sent a certified letter telling you to stop “prattling on the internet”.  See the nice thing about having a site in the top 100k of Alexa, and having the ear of several rags in the IPTV and Hollywood space is that even things I casually post to my blog, are news.  Which is why I don’t “Casually post” things to my blog.

Which brings me to the rules about using C&D for SEO.

Rule 1: Don’t.

Rule 2: Don’t.

Rule 3: If rule 1 and 2 have to be broken, don’t send a warning letter, send a court order, include in it that the party you are serving is given a gag order so that they can’t talk about you or post the court order.

Rule 4: Know your enemy.  Don’t send a C&D letter to someone who has a bigger hammer than you.  The general rule is don’t send a C&D to anyone with a better Alexa rank than you, or someone with more press mentions in the past year than you.

Rule 5: Be right.  The last thing you want is to stick your foot in your mouth, a recent prospect sent a C&D to a competitor only to have the competitor serve them an even bigger C&D.

XYHD.tv has a post related to this one about my history with ZillionTV.

Sometimes called "SEO via Legal" or C&D SEO, this to me is the scum-baggiest way to do SEO.  And if you send a letter like this to one of my clients, I’ll make sure that everyone knows what a scumbag you (Snap-On) are.

C&D SEO works by eliminating pages that compete with you for a given keyword.  Rather than Snap-On Tools ranking for its own name legitimately through good press about their company, and what great tools they make, they instead look for everyone who has said anything about them and send them a C&D.  This doesn’t work well for SEO, because anyone with half a brain knows that you can’t use Trademark laws to force the removal of your name, unless they are attempting to use your name as their own.  I can say "I drank a Coke and it was good" and Coke can’t stop me.  Snap-On already has issues with a weak trademark because it is only a trade mark in certain contexts.  "Let me Snap on my coat and I’ll be ready to go skiing" or

Like in this photo:

"Dudes, that turtle really has his Snap on. Tools don’t let him bite you"

So here is the C&D Letter from SnapOn.com’s Goons.

Dear Registrant,

Snap-on Incorporated is the owner of the well-known trademark and trade name Snap-on. As you are no doubt aware, Snap-on is a trademark used to identify products, services, activities and events related to Snap-on Incorporated.

It has come to our attention that our trademark Snap-on appears as a metatag, keyword, visible or hidden text on the web site(s) located at:

Multiple Addresses Removed

without having obtained prior written authorization from Snap-on Incorporated.

In view of Snap-on Incorporated’s rights to the trademark Snap-on, we ask that you immediately remove all metatags, keywords, visible or hidden texts including trademark presently appearing on the above-cited web site(s) and any other web site(s).

Should you require additional information or wish to further discuss this issue, please do not hesitate to contact the undersigned.

Sincerely,

Snap-on Incorporated

Brand Protection

ChannelProtection@snapon.com

Technically we are complying because the pages are coming down so that they end up here.  Which I’m certain will be much better for Snap-On than the situation before they hired the corporate tools. (watched Dr. Horrible last night and couldn’t resist).

(Gee look at Dr. Horrible he has a Snap On his lab coat, as he get’s beat up by Captain Hammer Corporate Tool)

The Moral of the story.  Do good SEO through good PR and good will.  Using Legal to do your SEO for you will almost always end up damaging your brand, and creating more problems for you than you had in the first place, like being on the front page for the search "ScumBag".  And then you have to hire a reputation management company, and it becomes a downward spiral of expense that finally escalates to having to order a mob hit on the guys who have better lawyers, bigger brains, or more search authority than you do.

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

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.

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.

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.