BlackWaterOps

Many SEO’s check your page quality score by looking at the code of the page by hand.

BlackwaterOps has a Google Appliance, along with access to other tools which come directly from Google.  This means you get quantifiable results.  Knowing that your Page Quality has been improved and for which keywords.

You can have the world’s greatest page about Pet Food, but if Google thinks it is a page about Grocery, Cans, Rice and Chicken, people are unlikely to find the page, even if those are key features of the product.

You need to rank for what people search for, not necessarily what the product is about.

Google expects certain words to appear on a page about “Pet Food”.  BlackwaterOps has these lists of expected words, and combined with knowledge about what makes a well constructed page, and our tools to then check that the changes we have made have the best possible Quality Score. 

We can show you before you make changes to your site how those changes will be received by Google. Which can prevent you from hurting your score, or drastically changing (for the worse) the traffic you are already getting.

Jason Calcanis asked today why Mahalo’s rankings in MSN are so different than the rankings in Google.

I could give the Snarky Answer that if they both ranked about the same Google wouldn’t have so much more market share, but there are some real differences in the way the two engines treat content.

Google has a less strict content duplication detection, and I would say a better method of detecting which site is the “source”.

Mahalo, is almost never the “source” of anything. It doesn’t employ Journalists, it employs “archivists” for lack of a better word.  Its writers take articles from Wikipedia, AP, Reuters and other sources and create “Readers Digest” versions of them.

The result to Google, or Live.com is that often the stories look like the same post as the source page.  Which in truth they should. Consider the following text:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill cam tumbling after.

To Live.com (MSN) this block of text reads as just a set of keyword roots.

JACK JILL HILL FETCH PAIL WATER JACK FELL BROKE CROWN JILL TUMBLE

Because of that, what would appear to be “Unique Text” often isn’t.

JACK and JILL were at the HILL looking to FETCH a PAIL filled with WATER when JACK had a fall ( FELL ) and BROKE  the CROWN of his head. JILL then tumbled ( TUMBLE ) after.

Google looks at blocks of text in about 300 word chunks.  Live.com looks at them in about 20 word chunks.

This makes Live a lot more sensitive to Duplicate content.

As a “bonus” Live.com really runs up the Duplicate content penalty if a page you link to contains the same content as the page doing the linking.  The assumption is that if you quote a page and link to it, that page is the source.

That is probably a correct assumption, though often what a user is looking for is the site that converts that link to “An equation for the calculation of the gravimetric forces exerted between subatomic particles” in to a brief analogy of how string theory works, not the work itself.

This is where Google really shines.

Google looks at the Authority of the site pretty heavily.  If Mahalo gives “good enough” results 90% of the time, then it is a safe bet that when given the choice between them, or a random strangers site which may talk about “Prince Seragu of Nigeria” then Mahalo is a safe bet, even if the other site contains very similar keywords.

Live.com has a concept of authority, but it looks at your category authority too.  This is where the world gets infinitely complex, and in most cases complex = erratic.

So Mahalo is a bit erratic to begin with, they cover everything, to the same level of mediocrity. (no offense Jason, but all of your pages are under 2000 words you aren’t a source of deep knowledge).  This means that Mahalo only ever is “OK” as a result, so Live.com starts scoring the obscure things that Mahalo covers better than most sites start to gain category authority for, and the things they cover “less good” end up not gaining category authority for.

Lastly is a difference between Google and Live which is just plain stupid on Live’s part.  Live’s Splog/Spam detection thinks that if you link to a page on your site more than about 300 times that you are spamming.  Google only counts the first 200 times you link to a page internally, or 200 links from another domain to a single page on your site, but Live.com starts to penalize you when you get over a number.  So if you have too many pages which “side link” or incidental link to Britney Spears, Live.com penalizes you.

So this is why Mahalo ranks so erratically. 

UPDATE:

To that end, I spoke with Tyler over at Mahalo, and have made some suggestions.  The problem Mahalo has to wrestle with, is which of the things which I suggested can be fixed in old content.  Changing your writing style in 60k posts is hard, which is why it is important to speak with someone ( BlackWaterOPS ) before your copy hits the web, so that your website doesn’t have to be redone.  This wasn’t an option for Mahalo, but what they now know can help them with new posts, or posts they update.

Most SEO’s just preach link building.  Some will tell you about ALT tags, and Pretty URL’s, but most don’t really know how to improve your page quality score, nor do they know how to quantify to you that your page is scoring better.

BlackWaterOps will walk you through changes you can make to your pages that can improve your page quality score, which can make a huge difference in your search rank.

Search Rank is computed based on a lot of factors, one of the major components is the Page Quality score for the search term.  You can have a page which is perfect in every way for “Search Engine Optimization” and that page will only be a 5 of 10 for “SEO” or 2 of 10 for “Search Engine Marketing” and 0 of 10 for “Social Media Monetization”

Which is why BlackWater encourages clients to build specific landing pages for each of the sets of result they want. This doesn’t mean one page per term, it means pages built for groups of terms.  The page quality score for terms that include “Search Engine” can likely all be one landing page, while all the pages that have a high quality score for “Social Media” should be another page.

More than “JUST” SEO, a page quality score can cut your Adwords budget by up to 95%.  Throw in that the age of your Adwords account can reduce your price, and the age of your domain can lower the price and you can see significant increases in profitability with the right SEM consultant.

So what makes a page have a great quality score?  Become a client and I’ll tell you.

Ok, here it is, everything you need to know to be better at SEO than me.  Google will flat out tell you how their search engines work, and how page ranking works, and if you follow along you can be better at my job than I am, because I’ll be truthful I have only read about 30% of these, but I’ll bet that is more than any of the other SEO’s you will talk to.

Google’s Patent Portfolio

Nearly 200 Patents, not all related to search, but a good deal are.  This is more information than most Google employees could tell you about Search Optimization.

EntireWeb.com sent me spam today telling me no one, but a few key people at Google, knows how Google Search results work.  The truth is most people are not technical enough to read what Google publishes on the topic.

There are other search Engines, it is not just Google… Here is Yahoo’s , and Ask’s.

So ask your SEO how many Search Engine patents he or she has read.  I am guessing it is less than 2. 

Your competition is outranking you for some of the best keywords, your adwords campaign is being put to shame by companies bidding to keep you out of the top spots?  We can help.

Counter SEO/SEM spends time looking at your competitors pages, analyzing them and creating pages that contain all of the relevant keywords, but have a significantly higher Page Quality Score.  We then Optimize those pages and do the necessary seeding to get them to rank better than that of your competitor’s.

This strategy can be amazingly powerful.  Not only are you increasing your traffic you are reducing your competitors.  This means your message is heard, and competing messages are not.  Given choices many customers will take time to consider their options, but when presented only one option, they are more likely to make a purchase, or order services.

Counter SEO is mildly controversial.  In some markets it does create escalations, your company spends money to out rank its competitors, they pay to out rank you, you pay to out rank them, and it goes back and forth.  This is of course what every SEO lusts after, its an arms war.  Well BlackwaterOps was born for arms wars.  Because Blackwater can create pages that have near perfect Page Quality Scores we can get your site up the rankings, but also because we have nearly 1 million indexed pages in our various sites we can also drastically boost your inbound links from relevant pages.  Combine this with BlackwaterOps Social Media Seeding, and we can create inbound links from sites with lots of authority.  Lastly, BlackwaterOps controls pages on Yahoo.com, Live.com, even Google.com which means we can get you links from some of the most authoritative domains according to Google.

Most SEO’s don’t control any pages on Yahoo, or Google.  So who do you want on your side?

It is hard to know how great the guy selling SEO really is.  Especially since SEO companies don’t typically disclose their client list, because of confidentiality agreements with our clients.  So what should you ask?

What is the most impressive search you currently rank for?

Greatest Living American

Now this doesn’t have to be the Top hit for.  If you are number 2 for Diamond Engagement Ring you will still do a few hundred grand a day in sales.  Greatest Living American isn’t a great money maker, but the competition was stiff, and I had to beat out the likes of all of the famous SEO’s so it is impressive.

What is the most money any of your Landing Pages has made in a single day?
Emily Sander AKA Zoey Zane Myspace and YouTube Video

This page was the top hit for the one of the most popular trends of the year, and made $35,000 the first day, and $25,000 the second.  It would have made more, but my server melted down from the traffic which was truly insane, as that was all made on advertising not sales, or affiliate links.  Pure CPC/CPM ads.

Avoid SEO’s that tell you they are going to buy cheap traffic, or links.  You don’t care about traffic you care about conversions, and buying links can get you de-listed from Google.  I have discussions with my clients during the optimization process about how “risky” of methods we will use.  But I will never do anything that could get them delisted.  Potentially annoy forum moderators, or get their account banned on Digg, but never delisted from Google.