Google has put less emphasis on “Blog Roll” links. Links which are the same on every page of your website, linking to another website. As a result more and more people are looking for other ways to get lots of inbound links. Links which they control the “Title Text” for, and the exact landing page for.
Several of my clients prior to me starting to work with them engaged in both buying and selling links via LinkExperts.com in order to solve this need, or monetize others need to solve this need. A well ranking site with hundred thousand pages can easily make an extra $250k a year selling links. In some cases they can make more than they would have selling actual ads.
Why was this only Prior to working with me? Because Link buying and selling is In the words of Matt Cutts "Very high-risk behavior.”
Every Conductor ad is search-friendly, meaning that it works behind the scenes to positively impact your rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo. The link acts as a signal to search engines, helping strengthen your position as a provider of products or services relevant to the content of the page the link appears on. For example, a site with content about coffee makers, which then links to a manufacturer of coffee makers, helps reinforce and confirm that the manufacturer’s site is indeed about coffee makers. This association is taken into account when search engine users look for providers of coffee makers – the manufacturer’s site is now more likely to appear.
But Matt Cutts of Google has said publicly:
As the head of Google’s webspam team, I would just like to point out that paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google’s quality guidelines, and we do take action on those violations. You can read more about our official policy on paid links here:
These two statements are clearly in opposition to each other. If Google will penalize you for buying or selling, then the ads can’t be “Search-Friendly”.
BlackWaterOps never engages in link buying and selling. If we work with a client to build links it is through PR, and through engaging netizens.
There are some “Greyer” areas of link building that may not be good journalism, but won’t get you banned from Google either. Sending product to bloggers to write about gets you good high quality inbound links that will last a life time. Which can be a lot cheaper than paying for inbound links on a monthly basis. While one could argue that in both cases you “paid” for the link so they should be equally bad, in the second case the author stakes his reputation on the endorsement, and provided education to the users.
This is also more acceptable because the link is relevant, so the Page Rank “Flow” as Google is calling it these days, is in fact related to the link, as opposed to a link for Herbal Viagra on a high ranking page about the latest Microsoft Search Engine.
Are there instances where Conductor.com’s LinkExperts make sense to use? Yes. If you have already managed to get delisted for Google. Paid links may help you with Microsoft Rankings.
Paid Links Generally take time to detect so if you have a “Fly by Night” domain, you have little to lose, and a lot to gain. This is a BlackHat/Calculated Risk Game to play if you want to capitalize on a trend that is only likely going to last a few months. Like being the top hit for the “Toy of the Year” at Christmas time on a site that only sells that toy.
I wouldn’t personally do this, but there are those of you who will, and I didn’t want to leave you with the impression buying an link never has its usefulness, because then some other SEO would write the “When to use Paid links” and I’d look like a stooge.
Also be aware one method BlackWaterOps uses to help our customers is to detect and report paid links by competitors to Google, and others.
As the result of conversation with prospective clients over the last few days I am making a change to BlackwaterOps new client policy (in the past there was not much of a formal policy).
BlackwaterOps will be putting in to all future client policies that we will discontinue servicing the client if they participate directly or engage a third party in any of the following practices:
Have an E-Mail policy that Violates the Can Spam Laws, is not with an approved e-mail partner, or obfuscates the domain the e-mail was sent from.
Engages in buying links.
Engages in Selling links.
Uses DMCA Takedown notices as a method of SEO, Counter SEO, or for any reason other than an actual DMCA violation they are prepared to take up in court.
Uses an Affiliate Program Partner that allows any of the above by its members.
With Bing.com from Microsoft launching next week a lot of people want to know Bing Vs Google, how does this change my site and how it ranks, for search and for ads.
The good news is it doesn’t change much. Bing is really just a front end for the Live.com Search Engine, so results won’t change much. What does change is that there is now more ad real estate on Microsoft Search Results. Expect that the change in demand, and supply is going to cause Bing.com to cause ads to be cheap for a while.
So what does one do differently to rank in Bing.com vs Google? Not much. Microsoft doesn’t have quite the same concept of authority that Google does so its results are a bit odd. Similar to Google Who links to you is important, but because Microsoft doesn’t index as much of the web you need more high quality links from places that Bing includes in its index. This means getting good links from places that are “PR5” or higher from the Google List are worth a lot more in Bing, than they are in Google.
Also because Bing doesn’t understand as many Canonical URL’s it’s important that you make your links easy to share and have good “reforming” code on your site.
Reforming code does things like take your SEO Friendly URL and make sure it exactly matches what your sitemap sent. So www.blackwaterops.com/frogs/reviews doesn’t get linked to blackwaterops.com/frogs/reviews and not get a 301 to the preffered domain when the bot arrives.
It’s also important to remember that not all search engines parse HTML and XHTML and their variations the same way, so it is important to have a web designer, or SEO that can help you identify code that is not being parsed by the search engines correctly. Google has by far the best HTML/XHTML parser of any of the search engines and as a result can read malformed HTML with ease. But Live/Bing chokes on poorly nested Div’s Comments in Scripts and other similar common errors, and even non-errors in your sites source.
BlackWaterOps can help you increase your ranking in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other Search Engines through best practices in page structure, analysis tools to parse your pages, and through maximizing your inbound links from credible real world sites.
Tech Crunch asked How Much Is Microsoft spending on Google Ads for bing. A lot. As much as $2 a click.
This is a screen shot from my adwords campaing. Notice the $2.00 Minimum first page bid for Bing Search? And Microsoft has the Top of the page position rather than the side bar which ups the price. Based on 85k searches on the 28th for “Bing” and “Bing Search” at 1% click thru, Microsoft could easily have spent $1,700 with Google that day. And I expect the 29th to be bigger, and June 3rd when it launches to be the biggest yet.
Will Microsoft get its money out of this?
Possibly. TwitNit is seeing about $15 cpms far from what I’d like to see considering I’m buying traffic at $50 CPM, but Microsoft should be able to get twice what I do, which would be $30 CPM, on $2,000 CPM buys that seems like a bad deal, but when you look at the life of a user if you convert them.. That is easy to recoup.
Tech Crunch asked how much of the $80M would be spent with Google. Very little. Spending $100k a month would buy all the traffic there is on the related terms. Even if they bought all the ads for Ask.com, Yahoo, and others it is unlikely they could spend a Million dollars a year with Google.
Google has a great HTML Parser in its crawler, this is probably it’s single largest advantage in understanding what a web page is about.
If your website has less than perfect HTML Yahoo indexes your HTML code rather than you text creating pages that get less than stellar results in search.
Think of HTML code as you would any other Language. Just because You understand the English that is not grammatically perfect your browser renders it well enough. If it didn’t people wouldn’t use the browser, because web pages wouldn’t render correctly. Google has the same opinion of search, if the engine doesn’t work people won’t use it.
Because web designers check their pages in browsers they are often aware of what a page will look like in several browsers, but few designers are aware of what their pages “look” look like in search.
BlackWaterOps uses several tools to analyze what your page looks like to Yahoo, Google, Ask, Live.com, and others, so we can help you make sure that you are getting indexed correctly in each.
Using Jason Calacanis’s Mahalo as my old stand by of what you don’t know about SEO can kill you…
Mahalo’s page about Jon Huntsman currently indexes like this to Yahoo.
[0] => jon huntsman
[1] => form onsubmit
[2] => mahalo
[3] => huntsman
[4] => search id
[5] => cdata
[6] => search type
[7] => greenhouse
[8] => skins
While a few of the words are correct, if Mahalo would clean up its HTML it would look like this:
[0] => president ronald reagan
[1] => john huntsman
[2] => salt lake tribune
[3] => huntsman corporation
[4] => jon huntsman sr
[5] => reagan republican
[6] => kathleen sebelius
[7] => jesus christ of latter day saints
[8] => latter day saints
[9] => united states trade representative
[10] => mandarin chinese
[11] => jesus christ of latter day
[12] => republican leaders
[13] => congressional leadership
[14] => church of jesus christ
[15] => church of jesus christ of latter day saints
[16] => governor of utah
[17] => ronald reagan
[18] => huntsman
[19] => republican party
Not only are the keywords more relevant there are more of them.
BlackWaterOps customers get access to this tool and others. While we may make this tool available for licensing we do not currently.
BlackWaterOps offers “real” SEO not just link building. Our very scientific approach to SEO gives us a huge advantage in keeping your costs affordable, and making sure you aren’t going to wake up one day delisted, de-ranked, or experiencing other huge swings in your traffic.
Christine Lu is a Top China Expert when it comes to how to take an American business to China. Converting your business to work in the Chinese economy and market is not just a matter of translating your existing ad copy to Mandarin and Cantonese, it takes an understanding of the culture, politics, and business models of China to achieve Success.
Success in China is not just a function of having the best product, but is also about having the right relationships to get your product in the market. It is also about having the understanding of how meetings, politics, and sales channels work in China.
Christine Lu brings experience of being born in Taiwan, but having grown up in Los Angeles. Her years in China working with her parents China based clothing brand gave her the experience needed to become Home Shopping Network’s head of marketing for TVSN.
Christine is currently advising companies such as M1NT Shanghai and Go Green Initiative, the world’s largest environmental education program reaching over 2 million kids worldwide.
I’m this girl with a highly functional form of self-diagnosed adult ADD standing at the intersection of east and west. In particular, where China business intersects the world is where you’ll find me hanging out these days.
Follow me on Twitter: @christinelu
Christine Lu is the Top China Expert, if for no other reason than she understands there is no one approach to business in China that will work for all business, and that the little things like “do the Chinese use that type of product” or “is your logo offensive for some reason” or “to be competitive you have to be 80% cheaper” are all balls that need to be juggled, and so you can’t get an hour of someone’s time and have all the answers, you have to engage, research and test potential strategies.
That said if you would like to schedule a call with Christine Lu, you can book a 2 hour conference call or face to face with her through BlackwaterOps for $1,000.
A typical call involves getting background on your company, your strategy, and then Christine providing insight in to opportunities and pitfalls related to your business strategy in China.
Following the call Christine will provide a potential plan of how her team can help you go to market in China, and potential relationships she can help you leverage to make your entry easier and better received.
Think you have read up on 301’s and how to do a Domain Name change with out losing your rank in the search engine?
Ready to make the move? For sure?
Have you checked that the new domain doesn’t have penalties attached to it? Are you sure you sure?
Got your 301 redirects set up correctly? Are you sure?
Google has an official “Step list” for making the move, which Matt Cutts wrote.
Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.
Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.
If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.
Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).
To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.
Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.
If you follow these directions, and don’t have any domain penalties your domain "*SHOULD* go smoothly, but what Matt doesn’t tell you is the time line, or how to check that each step was done correctly.
BlackwaterOps can help you make the move, and verify that each step is going smoothly. Yes you can do this yourself, but be aware that if you mess it up, there is no “redo” if this goes horribly wrong, so if your site is small, follow Matt’s advice, if your business depends on it get help from a professional.
The Analogy I like to use, is that I am more than capable of doing my on brake shoe replacements, but if I screw it up bad things will happen so I pay the money to a pro, so that nothing goes wrong.
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.
In addition to our customized service, BlackWaterOps is now offering service bundles. These services are ideal for companies looking for simple solutions for basic SEO and SEM.
While many of our customers have thousands of pages to their website which require deep analysis to figure out where they can get the most return on their investment in SEO and SEM, Small Business and Start up customers often have small sites that we can easily assess what work is to be performed and begin. Hence we are happy to announce our Small Business and Start-up packages.
Ad Pack: $1,500 You can’t rank #1 for every keyword you might want to get traffic for. This is why Google Adwords make sense for businesses of all sizes. We can help you create: Ad copy that will get only well qualified leads; Landing pages that will lower your Cost per Click; and track which keywords give you the best return on investment. Monthly budgets vary after the initial spend.
Get Ranked Pack: $1,000 Get your new domain listed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Most domains have to wait months to get listed in Google, and Yahoo. We will get your site in to the index much of the time the same day, but certainly within 5 days. Yahoo will generally take a week, and MSN can take up to a month. This package meant for professionally designed sites which have had some amount of SEO consulting done during their creation. Our team will analyze your site, make suggestions to improve its overall quality score, and help make sure when Google indexes your site that you will score well for many of the terms you are looking to capture. This service includes configuration of several analytics tools.
Out Rank Pack: $4,500 Our team will work with you to figure out what keywords your competitors rank for, and work with your to take the necessary steps to be on the same page as they are for many of those keyword searches. This is not a comprehensive SEO Package, but it is suitable for Small business competing in local markets. This package includes all of the services from the Ad Pack and Get Ranked Pack.
Getting Serious Pack: $30,000 Our Team will take your existing Website up to 30 pages, and re-work it to score as high as possible with Google. Adding additional text copy where necessary, creating additional inbound links to increase the sites over all rank. We will also set up accounts for your business in over 30 social media services which can be used to drive links and visibility to your site.
Thrive Pack: $100,000: This package includes all of the services of the getting serious pack, includes a blog post per week about the happenings in your industry on your “corporate” blog, includes a “Girl in Corporate Tee” video for inbound links and marketing on 12 Video sites, Adwords services and Press Release services to boost the buzz of your corporate brand. This package is recommended for companies looking to launch new products, rebrand their existing company, or companies changing markets.
VC and Entrepreneur Pack: $2500 Using our metric tools we can predict the size of a market based on current consumer demand. We can also predict the cost of customer acquisition at various price and market points. Because of the way the online ad auctions work we can tell you the price differences between buying 10 leads a day, and buying 10,000 so you can forecast your costs and your potential for growth. We will also give you data on the scope of the competition, their online traffic, and their current ad spends. This is a great package for those looking to invest in a market, or start a new business.
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.
