Search Theory Archives

At SEO Refugee, Skitzzo talks about how the SEO blogosphere is starting to shift drastically and people are giving their opinions as fact. Instead of using jargon like "in my experience" or "as far as I can tell," they think that their specific experiences mean that these statements hold true in all circumstances when in fact most of these experiences are circumstantial and they may not entirely hold true in all instances.

The discussion moves over to Sphinn, where Jill Whalen kicks things off by saying that 90% of what she's reading nowadays is BS. But Chris Boggs, who contests the post entirely, takes a different approach: we're not expected to find the secret recipe of SEO in blog posts nor are we supposed to find them in forum discussion.

It seems, though, that people are starting to take these theories as truth. For example, DazzlinDonna says that she learned of a new SEO firm that will be charging considerable amounts of money for "advanced SEO tactics." What, exactly? Using the meta tag. Apparently, he heard it from some SEO and now he's ready to start monetizing off of. This is something that people are starting to take for granted, and it's absolutely dangerous.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Hitwise post digs into the behavior of searchers and sees whether they prefer searching in the singular or plural. Using the term "laptop" versus "laptops," it is clear that "laptops" is the winner in search. When investigating nine other terms, the following was discovered:

...[W]hile the results are not conclusive, it does seem that plural terms are better at sending traffic to retailers than singular terms. Two thirds of the products tested performed better as plurals, with technology products in particular skewing in favour of an added ‘s’.

Of course, as one member on Sphinn notices, this is specific to traffic, not necessarily conversions. However, it's a good first stop. Now can someone compile a report on the conversions? ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Let's say you're ranking really well for a specific keyword. You also have a PPC campaign and your paid listings are on top. Is it too much? Should you curb your spending and focus on your organic links, since in the end, it is free?

In many cases, the answer is no. They complement each other. Awhile ago, I covered a webcast where link expert Eric Ward says the same thing: an appropriate mix is critical. Bill Hartzer says the same thing on Search Engine Guide. This still holds true. Reinforcement is always helpful, and if your results appear on both the organic and paid side, your users might be inclined to click on those links and increase your revenue.

Some very valid thoughts are voiced by member J. Clark:

1. I want the conversion no matter how we get it (as long as it is profitable)
2. If my company isn't visible in those sponsored spots, our competitors will gladly take the real estate.

If it costs more to rank in both areas, do it. Just keep tweaking to find the solution that converts best for you with the least amount of spend if budgeting is your concern.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This post was composed on October 2nd and was scheduled for publication on October 5th.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is such an exciting field, in my opinion, because it constantly changes. What works today may not work in six months or even three weeks. Practitioners of full time SEO can attest to the fact that they have to constantly keep up with algorithm changes as well as the way Internet sites are structured. This makes it very difficult for someone to rightfully claim to be an expert unless they have already accepted the fact that their world is one of constant education and re-education.

A thread at Cre8asite “calls out” so-called SEO experts, but does it in a manner that is slightly more abrasive than constructive. The poster claims that the only people that should be considered SEO experts are those that work within the actual engines. By that argument that would mean that the only expert airline pilots are the engineers that design airplanes.

For an interesting read, including one of the longest responses to a forum thread that I have seen in a while, check out Cre8asite’s discussion on “SEO Expertise.” (By the way I still cringe when someone introduces me as an SEO expert – because I know that I still have plenty to learn. Perhaps I am an expert in relation to some shady SEOs out there claiming to be experts, but I truly feel that only 5-10 people in the industry really deserve this title.)

Search engine optimization experts have for a long time equated user experience with SEO friendliness. As the search engines’ algorithms have evolved, one thing has remained fairly constant: sites that have useful content and links from relevant sites rank better for particular subject keyword phrases than sites that don’t. It really is that simple: better sites outrank worse ones, for the most part. Of course people could likely list in the comments below dozens of examples where various search engines have it wrong.

For anyone that has kids, they may know of Thomas the Tank Engine and the other trains on the island of Sodor. The main purpose of those engines is to be “useful,” and their feelings are hurt when they fail to satisfy that requirement. I personally feel that website owners should keep this to heart – either make a “useful” site or you are not helping the Internet become a better place. Apparently I am not alone…

Why should Website owners “care” about their visitors’ educational leads, asked a new member of the Cre8asite Forums recently. Kim covered the post briefly last week when she stated (facetiously) “I'm an SEO and I Don't Give a Flying Cow What Your Site Visitors Want.” As quoted, Ammon Johns took a particularly hard stance against “spammers” which cloud the Internet with worthless content.

This discussion seems to have died down a little, but really drives to the heart of the matter when trying to define the difference between optimizing a site for search engines versus optimizing a site for humans in a manner that search engines appreciate. As one administrator suggested, the thread elevates the importance of considering “why” when adding content to a page, and should be featured as a part of the SEO Primer for beginners.

Add your thoughts to the discussion at Cre8asite forums.

SEO's from the early days eventually learned that no matter how often they submitted URL's to search engines, the rewards were questionable, if any existed at all. There are still some search engine marketing company rip-offs selling site submission services to "hundreds of search engines", promising rank (in them all?) and doing it for dirt cheap.

When someone asked about such a scam, he also wondered that if a search engine like Google follows links to find new web sites, why is there a URL submit form?

It's kinda like a Dentist insisting that you get fluoride treatments, even though you buy toothpaste that has it in there and many towns put it in the water and some research says it's bad for you.

Do you submit to search engines on a "just in case" basis or is there some worth to this practice that remains?

If you're curious, read How Many SE's Do You Submit To? at Cre8asiteforums.

A forums member wants to know who the boss is. In your work as an SEO, are you optimizing pages for the site owner, search engines or web site visitors?

The writer asks,

"Now wouldn't we all be out of a job if we did whatever is best for the people viewing the site? We do what is best for our customers. The people paying us to make their websites....Of course, we need to provide something for the viewers out there to 'view'. But really, isn't this secondary to delivering a product to them?"

Ammon Johns responds:

"All the searching on major search engines happened in the early phases - the pure research phases. By the time they were holding their credit card, they were using another means to find the best price, such as a price comparison site.

The SEM uses this knowledge to change the way he markets to this small but growing portion of the market. He makes sure he provides material for those early 'scouting' type searches. He provides impressive information to make a good experience for the user. He builds a brand.

Because later, when that person is shopping for prices, if his site is any one of the options, he's got that sale on the trust he built, and the positive experiences given.

That is why it is all about giving an excellent, remarkable, memorable user-experience to every visitor."

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Why Is The Answer In Seo Always "Think About Your Audience"

In the old days of the Pay Per Click management days, you used to hear the phrase - "set it and forget it." Meaning, you set up your pay per click campaign in Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and others. Then you watch it for a couple weeks, make some tweaks and when things are running smoothly, you just walk away and let it run itself.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if the "set it and forget it" practice still works? With Google AdWords changing their algorithms every 6 months or so. With Yahoo! recently upgrading to a new algorithm in Panama. With adCenter launching with more features to shake a stick at... Does the "set it and forget it" methodology still apply?

It appears not.

Everyone in the thread seems to agree that for the most part, that concept is long gone. You at least have to check in weekly for even the smallest campaigns. I like netmeg's response:

I have one client who has set a rather small (in my opinion, TOO small, considering the breadth of his product line) daily budget for what he wants to spend on AdWords, and he hired me a couple years ago to fix his existing AdWords account and kind of oversee it. I added as many phrases as I felt I could within the strictures of his low budget, and then I turned the Budget Optimizer on most of his campaigns, and just let it run. He absolutely will not raise the budget, so there was a limit to what I could do with it. Once a week I go in to see if anything looks weird, and anything that has gone inactive I might have to move off to a separate campaign (that's not on Budget Optimizer) in order to raise the CPC, but that's about it. It means a lot of his positions are down in the 5-8 range, or even lower - but it probably gets him more overall clicks for the money, and all I can do is hope that when people click on the ads, if they don't buy what they're clicking on, they'll see something else they're interested in. In any case, we do get conversions, and the client seems to be fairly satisfied with it. It's not the way I prefer to do it, but it's what I could do with what was handed me.

That's the closest to auto-pilot that I can get.

Would love to hear more on this from others.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ready for a laugh? A WebmasterWorld thread has someone asking if he is crazy that he is using Google's PageRank score as one of the factors in picking a business school for him to attend.

I am in the process of searching for a business school to take a masters program. I was looking around at various rankings, trying to work out where to go. Randomly, I wondered whether I should check the PageRank of the schools I'm interested in. Most of them are 9's, a couple are 8's. I'm thinking I should not go to a school with a PR of only 8... I should stick with the PR9's...

Is that crazy? Or is PR a good indication of brand/quality? How about Alexa rank?

Yea, that is a bit crazy, in my opinion.

One member says "Hmmm... guess that leaves out Wharton, probably one of the best business university's around." Wharton one of the top, if not the top, business schools in the world, has a toolbar PageRank score of 8.

Just to be clear, he posted again that he is not insane.

I am not going to make this decision based ONLY on the alexa/google rank of these pages, but certainly I would want to go to a school that is "top 10" by all rankings, including the google/alexa ranking. I think Google PR and Alexa rank are actually fairly good measures of how high profile the program is.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two days ago Loren Baker wrote Does Digg.com Belong in Google Results? He basically summarized two points of view, the first by Allen Stern who says that Digg adds no value to the story and should not be indexed (hence duplicate content). The second point was by William Burn, who argues that Digg's pages do provide value and give pages that may have never been read a chance. Skizzo adds that he doesn't like when commentators copy and paste the original content from the main site in the comments of the Digg post.

OK, having read all that. I also would like to see the original article found first in the Google results. I do believe that the Digg article should be indexed and found. Typically, a Digg title may differ from the original article's title and thus has doubled its chances of coming up in the results. If you are worried about article hi-jacking, then that is a different story - but I would say, just go with the flow.

As an SEM, I can understand why you don't want to be outranked by a commentary to your article. But often, commentary to one's article does provide greater value. Often, but not always - I must add. If the Digg article does add value and that value is greater then the original source, then it should outrank the source article.

Either way, people are reading your thoughts and you got a nice link from Digg. The value of the link from Digg, is discussed here.

Forum discussion at SEO Refugee & DigitalPoint Forums.

Search Engines are in the business of providing relevant results, whether paid or organic. In order to do this in a timely fashion, many major engines will ignore what are commonly known as “stop words,” such as “the,” “if,” “for,” “what,” etc… Thus if someone enters a search phrase such as “what are better mousetraps,” the “what are” is omitted from the search of the index, often yielding most of the same results as a search for “better mousetraps,” in this example. This can actually pose to be an interesting dilemma for search engine optimization managers.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch forums posed a question about the handling within MSN Live of search queries with and without stop words included. An interesting discussion sprouted, with member fulton savage asking “How many users know of/use search query operators?” This lead Ian McAnerin to state

That's really the problem... The vast majority of users don't use quotes or operators. Therefore the default behaviour of a search engine is a very important issue. It doesn't matter how they act when operators are used (they should all work the same), it matters how they act when explicit operators are not used. At this point, the search engine needs to go into "handholding" mode, basically trying to guess at the best methodology for the words typed in. Generally up until recently, this meant assuming the AND operator.

Please share your thoughts or opinions at the Search Engine Watch Forums.

As a side note: In the above example, in my results, “bettermousetraps.com” disappears from the top 5 when the words “what” and “are” are included. What makes this happen? The supposedly ignored words have affected the rankings slightly in this case, and it is likely the other “ignored” words would do the same. It is possible that "what" and "are" are included in more in-link anchor texts than some of the others that appear without that in the search, and it is also possible that "bettermousetraps.com” has over-optimized for the term "better mousetraps," getting trapped in a filter that does not pick up the flag when "what" and "are" are included...would love to hear more opinions on this idea in the comments.

Barry recently covered the NY Times Google Bombing article discussion, highlighting a campaign tactic of influencing rankings based on buzz phrases or even politician names. For the politicos that are scrambling to find SEO’s for next year’s election, we have found a little Halloween story told by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

Digital Point Forums points to an article at the Financial Times from earlier in October in which Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying that within five years, search engines such as Google will help the public decide who to vote for. Mr. Schmidt claims that search will allow people to evaluate the potential truth of statements uttered during the campaign season by candidates for office. A quote directly from the article explains:

He forecast that, within five years, “truth predictor” software would “hold politicians to account”. Voters would be able to check the probability that apparently factual statements by politicians were actually correct, using programs that automatically compared claims with historic data.

Pretty cool, and it’s highly likely that people with advanced search skills are already performing this type of research, if they care to. I am sure that Gary Price could help find all kinds of voting records and transcripts to support the decision-making process. Politicians better realize that as the power of search grows, so does the power of the voter. When in a hot zone, Marines are always reminded to “keep an eye out for CNN.” Politicians are used to looking for microphones, but Internet databases may be a little harder to avoid.

The short discussion can be found at Digital Point Forums.

Search engines use automated crawlers, also known as robots or spiders, to scour the Internet's content and add it to their indices. Once pages of a website are in an index that is used to provide search results, sites are revisited on a regular basis to determine if any new content has been added, or if there has been significant updates to currently indexed content. Since there is so much information available on the Internet, sites generally get re-crawled based on a variety of factors, including the frequency of content updates or even the command in a page's code that asks the spider to return every "X" days. However, except on occasion, spiders will not re-crawl the entire website.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums starts with a member asking "How do they do that?" He describes that he on occasion examines his log files to find varying degrees of robot activity, and asks how they determine how deep to dig. An initial answer by Moderator softplus offers some good ideas, and finishes with the thought that:

In the end, the main element I have seen for crawl frequency is page "value"; a page with good value is crawled more frequently than a page with little value... Even a static high-value page is crawled frequently, it doesn't make that much sense to me, but there must be reasoning behind it. Perhaps the frequency would be even higher if the content were to change frequently?

The member that asks the original question then poses the theory that the Google toolbar could be involved, with the crawl somehow directed towards pages with higher time spent by a visitor. The thread then diverges slightly into an interesting conversation about how Google Sitemaps works to help get pages crawled and indexed (now Google Webmaster Tools). Do you think you know why some pages are crawled and others not? Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Bill Slawski has an excellent post at Cre8asite Forums he named It's all about the signals, What the Search Engines Look For. You can tell by this thread that he was really inspired by the SES San Jose event just a couple weeks ago. What is Bill telling us?

I do think that search engines still place a lot of reliance on links, but am convinced that understanding user queries - like seen in our thread on the AOL data, is playing a larger and more important role in determining relevance. There have been a number of mentions in recent white papers and patents which mention search engines collecting information from ISPs about user behavior.

Bill explains what he believes is the tracking and understanding the search engines grasp from a users click pattern and "traffic flow." It "shows how some sites are more popular than others and are attracting traffic in response to searches and other methods of getting people to a site."

In discussion forum class, Bill ends his post prompting more discussion. He asks,

What signals do you think are becoming more important, and how are you taking advantage of being within an information stream?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yesterday, Barry covered that Yahoo was "doctorin' up" the results for a search at Yahoo! for the term "google.com." There is a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums covering the topic.

Well Andy the engineer at AA|RF and I were chatting, and he came up with a possible response by Google, within a Google search result for "good search engine." (The following image is a joke and was not taken from actual results!)

Search Engine Optimization often involves creating relevant content and adding it to your site on a regular basis. If the site is properly coded and spiders can get around easily - or even if you use Google Sitemaps properly - you should be able to count on the number of pages of your websites in the Google index increasing. So what happens if Google comes to town and your server has crashed? Will they immediately drop a bunch of your pages from the index? All of them? Obviously the answer to the last question is no, but could they hit your total pages indexed for this?

A recent thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums has a member asking if a server crash could be responsible for a dramatic dip in the number of pages indexed when he checked the next day. He says:

the number of indexed pages drastically dropped to 100+ (from 2000+) and for certain sub domains started appearing supplemental results. Even after 3 weeks, Google doesn't seem to pick these pages again.

Now this post was written about 3 weeks ago, so it is time for an update, but a couple of good answers followed the question.

Vayapues, a newer member who is very active and seems quite knowledgeable, immediately brings a calmer tone to the topic when he says:

Google understands that your server goes down from time to time, and will not penalize you for it, unless it is down for a few crawls in a row.

Then another member Fathom hints that this could have had something to do with Big Daddy, saying:

As many websites lost many pages recently you quite possibly suffered the same fate, and the crash merely occurring in and around the same time provided a convenient camouflage.

I have asked DinSurf for an update...hopefully the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums will pick back up...

I know I have (so has the world) been picking on Google issues recently, but Yahoo! has their share of problems. A WebmasterWorld thread named Spamming Blogs for Top Yahoo Rankings shows that certain spam tactics are working fairly well on Yahoo! also.

Honestly, right now, there is not one engine that I am particularly in love with.

I always had a fall back. For example, Google is going through an update but Yahoo! recently did an update and the results look nice, I would use Yahoo!. Or Yahoo! stunk but Google was solid. MSN, well, that is MSN. Ask.com is just always a bit too slow to update but they do have features that encouraged me to make them my home page. But now what? Google, Yahoo and MSN all pretty much are not doing too well. Sad...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Suppose you are creating multiple websites based on particular countries and languages. Should you choose a .com and use subdomains to classify the variations? Use different sites completely? Use Top level Domains tied to the country you are targeting? Not much credible research has been posted on this topic, and as is often the case, it seems that Matt Cutts is speaking most clearly about this subject.

Highly respected (and deservedly-so) Search Engine Watch member Robert Charlton recently posted a couple of excellent comments in response to a thread about TLD's, their ability to affect ranking in foreign searches, and possible issues with duplicate content. Robert carefully explains the concept of mirror sites and localized markets, linking to some other topical threads. He then prescribes a good dose of 301 redirect. In a follow up post he points to the Mike Grehan interview of Matt Cutts, during which Matt suggested that keeping to the country TLD is very helpful for ranking within that country, although you can rank if your .com is hosted locally.

Robert also points to his practice of using country and language specific links in helping to rank sites in International versions of Google (and I assume other search engines when applicable). In any case, even if you don't comment, the thread is worth the read in order to get an understanding of this important topic, as well as for some good links to other related threads that tie it all together.

See the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Should search engines introduce a tag of some sort that enables you to tell the spider not to index and not to use the content for ranking or relevancy purposes? Similar to the nofollow attribute for not counting links, and similar to AdSense Section Targeting, that enables you to specific which content is the relevant content for the AdSense spider to serve up relevant ads.

So why not a tag to tell the Web search spider what content is the content that should be indexed?

Well, right away, you can see how people may abuse it. But besides for that, there may be a way for search engines to deploy it safely.

Danny Sullivan says that Yahoo! had plans on introducing such a tag. But for some reason, has yet to do so. I believe they had plans on introducing something like it about a year ago.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

One practice used by search engine optimization companies that has remained relatively below the radar is the purchase of expired domains with good inbound links that are still active. The general theory is that the Google PageRank is still "alive," meaning that it is not only visible through the toolbar representation but actually still counting in the Google ranking algorithm results of that particular URL. Of course, with Google becoming an approved Domain Registrar (see recent discussion here), who's to say they can't set up a system where domains lose PageRank upon expiration?

The topic comes up occasionally in forums, and yesterday at Cre8asite, someone asked if buying domains can help for link building. Some good discussion so far, including Administrator Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) who points to a recent patent which actually supports the Registrar theory above and says:

I'm not sure how much value there will be to doing something like this in the future, but I wouldn't rely upon it for much for too long.

It would seem that this method may work for now, but all signs are pointing towards the SE's tackling this "loophole" head-on. Please ad your thoughts to the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Forums and blogs have become a very important part of the Internet landscape. I personally have learned almost as much about Internet marketing by diligently reading as I have from actual hands-on experience. With every positive experience, however, I have seen people trying to abuse the system. Forum and blog spammers, as Barry pointed out a couple weeks ago, can make the whole community experience a little less satisfying.

A couple of threads recently started at Search Engine Watch Forums has the same member asking about "Using Forums for SEO" and "Can I use someone else's blog to link to my site? " A few weeks ago, another poster detailed what he seemed to think was a new idea, saying "I was wondering if forums spam is something illegal with regarding to SEs?" he went on to describe his plan, but was a little worried about the Search Engines.

In my opinion, what they should really worry about is their status/reputation within their industry. In order to effectively do such a task and hope to get any SEO value from the links, they would have to be spamming a forum or blog somewhat relevant to their own industry. Imagine being known as "the guy/gal that's a spammer." Trust me, as a moderator at SEW, I have seen the reputation of seemingly very nice people go down the drain because of obvious link drops.

Not to mention many links that are placed within forums signatures and blog comments are blocked from being spidered by the site owner, and there ends up being no return on the time invested in spamming. Please give your thoughts or share your spamming success stories at any of the threads linked-to above.

I also dug up an older thread at Cre8asite Forums that has some good thoughts on this subject.

A Cre8asite Forum thread named Will SERPS be pointless in the future?, Will SERPS be pointless in the future? really gets folks thinking again about the future of search. Most people look at Google's 4 product announcement as Google moving away from search and focusing on non search related items. Heck, I even made that comment here yesterday. But then you take a step back and look at what companies like Google, Yahoo (specifically) and Ask.com are doing. They are all expanding.

Let's take a look at Google specifically, and limit it to those four new products. Google Trends, ok that doesn't tell us that much, but it does show Google keeps data over time and breaks it down by demographic criteria (we all knew this). Google Gadgets with Google Desktop, well duh, they are on your desktop, serving you real time information on what you are interested in. Google Notebook, well we don't know that much about it yet, but it will supposedly allow friends to share content and notes - um, again, content, private, details about registered users. Finally we have Google Coop where I can change the SERPs that you, yes you, see on your Google results page, simply if you subscribe. Now that is in your face.

Personalized search, trusted sites, trusted sources, tracking user preferences, always signed in registered users and then tailored search results. Is SEO the same today then it was yesterday. No, it has already changed. What will happen in a year? Wow, I can't even imagine how far this will be taken. But, seriously, step back, look around you at this present time, see what the SERPs look like.

Now, go discuss over at Cre8asite Forums. :)

Interesting thread on DigitalPoint where people are posting there SearchBot ROI's. This stems from my blog post on the subject:

Each time a bot spiders your page it costs you money. It may be a small amount but it does cost you money. I did some number crunching on one of my larger websites. Kind of a ROI on the bots if you will. Basically what kind of return hits am I getting for each time my page is spidered ?

People are reporting some pretty neat results.

Personally my results were as follows:

#1 GoogleBot .78 Search referals per spider.
#2 Yahoo Slurp! .14 Search referals per spider.
#3 MSN .01 Search referals per spider.
#4 Ask.com 0.00 Search referals per spider.

Will be interesting to see how many people take part in this thread over the next few days.

Recently, there has been a lot of popular concern over search technologies and terrorism. Danny just blogged last week on Terrorists & Extremists Worry About Their Search Privacy and there is a Cre8asite Forum thread named Google Earth Suspected to Have Helped Terrorists from this weekend. Basically, people are now exploring that these technologies are out there and available.

With Google Earth, you can get satellite images of remote locations, even of your home. Well, Google Earth just made it popular to the end users, but there were many services out there, prior to Google Earth that enabled the same thing. And trust me, terrorists knew about them prior to Google Earth.

Times have changed, tools are more easily accessible, these tools are both useful and powerful. Do we worry? Do we stop using them? Do we fight them? I don't have the energy to go into a post on my thoughts on this. Here is one comment from the Cre8asite Forum thread;

Next thing you know the terrorists will have used email or cell phones...

Let's take it to the forums; forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I started a thread last week at our forums named Answer --> Question Search Engine :: Jeopardy. In that thread, I asked, wouldn't it be cool to have a search engine that worked backwards? For example, you submit an answer, instead of a question, and the returned results would be questions. Kind of like how the game Jeopardy works.

I would love your thoughts, I don't see how useful it is, on a day to day basis. But I am sure SEOs can figure it out.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

There has been a discussion going on for well over a year about "Google Bowling." This is a theory that discusses the potential to negatively impact competitor search engine rankings by creating "unsavory" links to said competitor's pages. Google publicly denies this is possible, yet many in the industry feel that it is very possible. I have always been in the camp that feels that there is nothing that a competitor could do to affect my rankings negatively. Yet recently I have had to think seriously about this, because of the undeniably bad effects experienced by many websites that have been linked-to from so called "bad neighborhoods" ("PPC's"-Pills, Porn, and Casino sites being the unfortunate majority in this Internet community).

A thread started at Search Engine Roundtable Forums on March 16 leads to an interesting case study presented by an anonymous competitor in a recent SEO Contest. He feels that he was inadvertently "Google bowled" because his site solicited links in order to win the contest, and promised the winnings would be donated to a charity. Thus:

LOTS of people thought that donating the prize money to a good cause was a great thing, and so added links on their web sites to mine ... and in several situations, site-wide links.

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I don't feel that sitewides can hurt, but that they could be discounted. The case study goes on to support a few more interesting theories, in my opinion, including:

What is new/unique about Google Bowling is the concept of negative weighting. If Google detects unnatural linking patterns, instead of devaluing or discarding that link weight, it may count against you…

I personally still don't buy this. One question I would have about the case study is the behavior of the rest of the top 10/15. Where they still the same or did he drop with a bunch of others?

The current discussion is at the Rountable Forum as well as Cre8asite

Rand actually started a discussion about this topic last November that Barry covered. Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl listed it as one of his top twenty contradictions earlier in the year at SEW Forum (before he was saving all his good stuff for his blog :). (**Added: I wanted to mention that I found another recently published and interesting viewpoint on this topic at ISEDB by Tinu Abayomi-Paul)

One more thing: at first I was a bit apprehensive about posting about this, thinking it may tip off even more tricksters. However, if this is an issue, perhaps it should be more in the open so that maybe a new subject line for Google's SPAM complaint center and for the Cuttlets (just added to my spellchecker) could be "I've been bowled." A site owner could identify specifically which links he felt were hurting him and G could come back with a vague answer.

Danny Sullivan started a thread named Who Cares If Google's A Portal. In that thread he posts five consecutive times, so demonstrate the conversation he had with a reader. The posts include a dialog between himself and a reader, who is upset with Danny's tone on his podcast, The Daily SearchCast. Specifically, how Danny was being a tad sarcastic about Google's play on Google Finance and being a portal and not a search engine.

The deal is, Google has for such a long time, repeated that they are not a portal. The word portal, in Google's eyes, seems to be taboo. Danny, as do many in the industry, feel that this is just downright funny. Either say you are a portal or don't do portal like things... Or is it not that simple?

Danny's thread goes deeper into this long standing conceptual debate.

You can read it over at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Many SEO's, when just starting to analyze a site for search engine friendliness, will look for Frames as one of the first things that could signal a problem. Often, the immediate diagnosis is "search engines cannot index content within frames." The two aspirin perscribed are site rebuild and a dose of SEO.

In many cases, this is the most simple of problems and the rebuild will "fix things." A thread over at High Rankings Forum starts with a member asking about their framed site, and how it could actually be ranking at Yahoo, MSN, and even Google?

Some good discussion is following at High Rankings Forum.

Another discussion on this topic has been going on at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I had a meeting with a non-prospect this Friday. That means, a family member asked if I meet with a friend of hers and offer advice on his Web strategy. So I did that, as a favor, but it turned out to help me better understand, what I think, is the difference between Search Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. Let me explain...

After sitting with this individual, discussing how his new, non-profit organization is looking for fund-raisers, it hit me. Before I get to that, let me guide you through some of the conversation. I go over many of the basics of SEO. I tell him he doesn't want to rank number one for the keyword term "philanthropy" or the like and I explain why. Basically, as we all know, he is looking for the donors that are sensitive to what his organization caters to. I explain that someone looking to give a sizable donation to an organization will not type into Google, "philanthropy". Instead, they may type in "support [cause] in [location]" or "supporting poverty in America" as one example. There are tons of these examples and the person I was meeting with immediately understood, which was nice. Then I go through how to optimize for those types of keywords on each page.

Finally, I explain that he won't realize top rankings in Google right away. I explain what the "sandbox" is, without using the term "sandbox" in the explanation. And trust me, he understood and excepted the reasoning for some new sites not ranking well. He understood that he is a new kid to the block and will have to earn some respect, respect from his patrons, respect from his industry, respect from the world and respect from Google. He totally got it, and I was really enjoying this meeting.

But then he hit me, he asked. "Is RustyBrick overkill for his needs?" Meaning, should he go with a low cost design shop and ensure that they comply with the basic SEO tactics and save a bundle. I said, at this point, yes. He asked me why.

The reason was "Search Marketing" versus "Search Engine Marketing". It has been what Mike Grehan has been saying in his articles, attacking the sandbox theory for what it is.

The bottom line with this individual that I was meeting with was that he did not have enough money to add a "wow factor" to his organization. I explained that we need to think up of an idea that makes you better then the rest. You need some type of marketing strategy, be it online or offline, that makes you worthy in the eyes of everyone, that your organization is simply WOW.

I explained that you can hire a room full of marketing people to sit there and think up unique ideas. It is done all the time with large companies. But if you can not afford that and most companies cannot, then you need to come up with the idea yourself. And guess what, he got it.

Marketing is discovering the Wow Factor. Search Marketing is utilizing the Wow Factor in the search world. Search Engine Marketing is implementing your SEO tactics off of that wow factor.

I told the individual, to come back to me, when he realizes his wow factor.

Sunday morning rant, hope it makes sense.

A new thread stated by Ian (mcanerin), an SEW Moderator, may be the thread of the coming week. He titled the thread SERP Overflow and Butterfly SEO where he describes what he calls "butterfly SEO."

Basically he says for many of the competitive terms (and the number of competitive terms grows daily), the top 30, 50 etc. results are pretty much equally relevant for their keyword phrase. Meaning, Result number five can be flip flopped with result number twenty-five and the end user would be just as satisfied with that result. Based on this theory, Ian is concerned that the search engines will have the "good-enough" approach and give up. But he also understands that engineers are not the type to leave "good-enough" alone. :)

So how does Ian define the butterfly SEO?

This could result in what I'll call "Butterfly SEO", where, once you get to a certain level of optimization, the things that affect your rankings are things that are less and less obvious, and more and more technical. I know for a fact that in certain SERPs you can see this effect, where something that traditionally isn't an problem, suddenly makes or breaks your rankings.

Legendary Bob Massa pulls out Ian's outstanding thread and some up Ian's concerns into one line.

How do I optimize for YOU when you go to Google?

Because that is what is going to set apart the "overflow" of the top fifty results. You and me, our personal preferences. And as an SEO, you need to start thinking about, how to optimize for the individual searching at Google and not for the keyword searching at Google.

Don't these types of threads make you just tingle. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Nacho has started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that deserves some more respect. He named it Reasons Why Search is Not Perfect Today and asks;

Mention at least 1 reason why search technology in general or search engines in general is not perfect today. Not that it will ever be perfect, but you know.

Currently, the answers we have are few;

• Because of Spammers
• Programming Limitations
• and They'll be in the bar at SES NY.

Does that cover it all?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Barry Welford started a Cre8asite Forum thread where he asks, Does the Internet level the playing field? Barry W. believes that "The Internet has levelled the competitive playing field." But has it really? DianeV said that "First, the Internet made it more level. Then, SEO made it more level."

kensplace tries to break down the pros and cons:

The big boys with money have a few advantages over the little guy.

They can advertise more
They can devote more resources to a problem
They can devote resources to support
They can (and this is a biggy) just purchase a little guys hard work outright.
They have more money for better hardware.

The little guys have a couple of advantages.
They are more flexible.
They are usually more inventive and produce better quality work/ideas.

Nadir rightly points out that the "big guys can buy the little guys." Which Ammon Johns answers that it was that which resulted in "the first web bubble." Ammon continues to explain that the big guys are now being smarter, they are hiring employees and consultants that have this expertise.

What I have noticed reading this thread is that it is the same story. The big guy versus the little guy. Be it Internet marketing, be it generic marketing, be it a war (David vs. Goliath). The little guys are more flexible and they can be smarter - but brut force can over power the little guy in due time. Egol summed it up nicely; "1) Being the first mover in your field and getting the jump on them. In a showdown the fastest draw wins if you can hit your challenger. 2) A person working on a "passion" will generally defeat someone working on a "profit"."

As Ammon closes;

There are still niches that either are not profitable enough for the big companies to develop, or that the big companies haven't seen yet. That too will always be true. That is where the little guys of today can become the big guys of tomorrow.

Welcome to the basics of marketing.

Eat it up while it lasts and hope you catch the wave. Keep finding those niches!

But in my opinion, I do not think the little guys are on the same level as the big guys.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Danny broke up a thread to create a new one named Bad Reasons To Want A Top Ranking on the 3rd of this month. Mikkel posted that a client of his wanted to increase the value of a company before it is sold, and one way to do that was to increase the client's ranking. Although the thread did not list many other bad reasons to want top rankings, it did discuss this one reason.

Ammon Johns tells a story of one of his clients looking to buy a company based on rank. To make a long story short, that company they were looking to buy was ranking well due to a single seo tactic. A few months later, that company's rankings dropped. Good thing they did not buy them. Ammon continues to explain that you should not look at rankings alone, but rather the traffic over time of a site.

Interesting thread, check it out at Search Engine Watch Forums.