What Google knows about web spam
Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google who blogs. He specialises in preventing spam in the Google index. His recent presentation at Web 2.0 is a must see.
Key points
- Good content always wins
- Backlink quality is important
- Search engine optimization is not considered as spam - good companies using SEO are determined and valid in Google’s eyes.
- Spammers leave footprints by accident - <!– insert your hidden text here –> so Google knows its a spammed template website.
Moving to WordPress
I’ve been blogging at Blogger.com for nearly two years. In general, I’ve enjoyed using Blogger.com. Its template management is easy, and I’ve enjoyed reasonable Google visibility. However, when my friend, Gary Kelly, drew my attentions to the possibilities of WordPress and TypePad, I decided it would be worth giving WP a whirl.
Gary correctly points out that the problem with the free Blogger.com is its spam content has hindered its search engine value. Many pro-blog consumers use ‘-blogspot.com’ to remove spam from their results (click here if you’ve no idea what -search term means).
Moreover, a recent study showed that 75% of Blogspot blogs are spam. If you’ve paid for a domain and hosting, logically, the author is more likely to be publishing with intent. Interestingly, this is a nice little throwback to the offline publishing world, where the high marginal costs of production have acted as a quality filter.
Moving to WordPress couldn’t have been easier. Just choose a hosting company with CPanel and Fantastico. I used BlueHost. Within minutes of registering the domain Baldysblog.com, I had clicked Fantastico and installed WordPress. Minutes later I’d imported all of the blog entries, and comments from Baldyblog.blogspot.com using WordPress’s import tool. I couldn’t be more impressed with BlueHost. For $6.95 per month (£3.50), I can host up to 5 domains, and I can install anything I like from the Fantastico interface. The next evening, I registered a new domain with BlueHost, and assigned WordPress to the new domain (naturalhealthlibrary.org - a new e-zine traffic generator for HealthSpark).
WordPress as a blogging tool is infinitely better than Blogger.com. Not least because the WYSIWYG works so well on Safari and Firefox. Frankly the Mac support on Blogger.com is embarrassing. But for me the real winner on WordPress is Brian Gardner. Brian Gardner’s WordPress themes transform WP from a blogging tool to a seriously powerful web content engine. His templates are extremely versatile, and as naturalhealthlibrary.org demonstrates, very effective tools for content propagation and SEO visibility.
The SEO value of WP is self-evident. Take a look at the category listings in the right-hand side-bar, and then look at the tag system. Plus, WP produces really precise and relevant page titles. I’ve already seen a significant increase in traffic following the move. However, the Blogger.com legacy has left me with a few problems that I’ve only partially solved.
First off, if you do the move to WP you’ll be stuck with duplicate content in the old blog. Ideally, you don’t want to delete the old blog because of all the inbound linking. Also, the WP import routine doesn’t import images, it just maps to the old images at your old blogger.com site.
I’ve removed the front page content to a new blog advertising the move to Baldysblog.com, and I’ve truncated recent posts. Ideally, I should truncate all posts, and move all images to the new domain. Anyone who can do this programatically, will earn their place in OS heaven.
SEO goes mainstream
The Sunday Times published an article about SEO last weekend. By the time the Business Section of the Times covers anything, you know it’s mainstream (at probably at the top of its growth curve). Key points of interest covered:
- Industry growing at 60% a year
- Estimated to be worth £400m in UK alone
- Google developer advocate, Matthew Trewhella, reckons there are 200 signals that determine a page’s relevance
- SEO growing, but proportion of spend to PPC is still low (£250m SEO UK last year, versus PPC £1.97 billion)
“The vast majority of SEO firms are good,” said Trewhella at Google. “But it is a constant battle. They will do one thing; we will discover it; they will do something else.”
10 minute website testing
So you’ve got a stellar web idea, you know it will work, but will the market take it? In the old economy, in fact, even last year, you would have built your site, built your brand, built your logo, ordered your stock, labels. You’ve handed over hard-earned cash to your accountant, incorporating companies, set-up bank accounts. You’ve got your fulfilment agent ready to fulfill thousands of items per day, and now you’re best part of £30k down. Now, you can do it in a hair’s-breadth. You can test market the concept with a free site from Google, Squidoo (I like this one), or if you’ve got a bit of knowledge, you could buy a template from Template Monster, throw it in with os commerce and give it a whirl. I built a test platform for HealthSpark, a new vitamins and supplements uk healthstore, using the latter route. The build time was 30 minutes, and the site will be ready to receive test transactions next week. Once you’ve got your test site live, you can run a pilot Adword campaign, and get immediate data on likely cost-per-click, and if you’re ready to fulfill, you can get customer conversion costs. Nice work.
Landing Page revisited
Time and time again I click on Adwords to find myself on a generalised page with little or no relevance to the keyword I searched for on Google. Not only will these advertisers find themselves spending more on Cost per Click (CPC, because Google rewards relevancy), they’re chances of conversion are greatly reduced. You’ve got less than 10 seconds to ensure the user can complete the desired action (e.g. sign-up, or add to basket) immediately.The key elements you need to consider on your landing page are:
My friend and colleague Mark Evans, gives us a perfect example in his Exercise Equipment site.
To achieve this level of precision, Google recommends multi-variate testing. Adwords gives such granular detail, that you can measure yield on small changes to your landing page layout and copy. At Webreality we’ve seen multi-variate testing yield an increase from 6% to 10% conversion rates for our customers, so it’s definitely worth the effort.
7 handy tips from Google
Saw this on Google blog recently, and it will be useful for those of you under the hood of your sites…Googlebot can’t access my websiteWeb hosters seem to be getting more aggressive about blocking spam bots and aggressive crawlers from their servers, which is generally a good thing; however, sometimes they also block Googlebot without knowing it. If you or your hoster are “allowing” Googlebot through by whitelisting Googlebot IP addresses, you may still be blocking some of our IPs without knowing it (since our full IP list isn’t public, for reasons explained in the post). In order to be sure you’re allowing Googlebot access to your site, use the method in this blog post to verify whether a crawler is Googlebot. URL blocked by robots.txtSometimes the web crawl section of Webmaster Tools reports a URL as “blocked by robots.txt”, but your robots.txt file doesn’t seem to block crawling of that URL. Check out this list of troubleshooting tips, especially the part about redirects. This thread from Google’s Help Group also explains why you may see discrepancies between our web crawl error reports and our robots.txt analysis tool.Why was my URL removal request denied?(Okay, I’m cheating a little: this one is a Help Center article and not a blog post.) In order to remove a URL from Google search results you need to first put something in place that will prevent Googlebot from simply picking that URL up again the next time it crawls your site. This may be a 404 (or 410) status code, a noindex meta tag, or a robots.txt file, depending on what type of removal request you’re submitting. Follow the directions in this article and you should be good to go.Flash best practicesFlash continues to be a hot topic for webmasters interested in making visually complex content accessible to search engines. In this post Bergy, our resident Flash expert, outlines best practices for working with Flash.The supplemental indexThe “supplemental index” was a big topic of conversation in 2007, and it seems some webmasters are still worried about it. Instead of worrying, point your browser to this post on how we now search our entire index for every query.Duplicate contentDuplicate content—another perennial concern of webmasters. This post talks in detail about duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and also references Adam’s previous post on deftly dealing with duplicate content, which gives lots of good suggestions on how to avoid or mitigate problems caused by duplicate content.Sitemaps FAQsThis post answers the most frequent questions Google get about Sitemaps.
Google and Yahoo win for Duke of Normandie
Mark Evans at Webreality SEO is delighted with the recent SEO work he has carried out for the Duke of Normandie in Guernsey.When Webreality created the site, the Duke had zero search engine visibility. After two months of Mark’s efforts, the Duke is now page 2 on Google for ‘hotels in Guernsey’, and page 1, position 1, on yahoo.co.uk.
Google to kill off PPC?
Google has recently launched a new CPA (cost per action/acquisition) bidding tool. The Conversion Optimizer follows the roll-out of the beta programme for CPA on the Adsense network, and is the strongest indicator yet that Google is looking to move wholesale from PPC to CPA.Currently, as you know Adwords runs on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. Advertisers bid in real time for their position on the page, and pay for each click that delivers traffic to their sites. The model has several drawbacks. As many advertisers will know its easy to burn cash if you don’t optimize and track your traffic like a hawk, but the real dark side of PPC is click fraud. The CPA model removes clickfraud, because you only pay for traffic that yields. This is, of course, the bedrock of affiliate marketing.Google, however, is different from affiliate marketing, which is dependent more on relationships than technology (so, I don’t see Google’s move into this space as spelling the end of Commission Junction et al). Google’s different because it knows exactly what your site’s yielding in traffic and conversion data, and it knows what your competitors are doing. Users of Googly Analytics and Adwords will have noticed that Google’s anxious to educate you in its conversion tools, especially the monetary value of each action yielded from Google search or Adwords . I like the Adwords tracking tool, but I’d never recommend a client to add the value of a conversion into the tool. Google doesn’t need to know this data. My fear is that once Google moves wholesale in the CPA model, its effective monopoly will allow it to charge as much as it thinks you can afford, it will in effect be an international levy on ecommerce activity. Let’s hope Google can ‘do no evil’. In the meantime, I’d recommend third party tracking and bid management tools (like Webreality ATM …).