I’ve just learnt from theRegister that the Times Newspaper in London, either knowingly or otherwise, has fallen victim to employing a link spammer to help their own website in the organic ranking within search engines. Allegedly, over 1000 links were posted on Social Networking sites causing uproar amongst the user fraternity. Of course, the outsourced SEO could have been mismanaged through either a rogue or inexperienced SEO employee, but nevertheless, still VERY embarrassing to all involved and just goes to show how decisions and protocols devised by Google et al have such a profound knock on effect/panic further down the food chain…
There’s a lot of talk and rumour floating around SEO circles at the moment regarding Google’s attitude and apparent clamp down on paid for links on websites. For those that don’t know the score: everyone seemingly wants a higher Google page rank (PR) because higher PR equals higher Search Engine positions (SERPs), right? So, using basic SEO methodology whereby sites with PR linking to other sites effectively pass a vote of confidence in the destination site, unscrupulous Webmasters have been buying up high PR links to point to their site using the Google bombing technique to strengthen SERP’s on specific key phrases.
So, what’s the problem? Well to be honest, it’s a bit rich coming from Google because at the end of the day, their paid for advertising business model is built on the fundamental principles of linking to sites through textual advertising. What’s annoyed the boys and girls at Google HQ is the apparent attempts to undermine their algorithm using these techniques.
But how do Google recognise a ‘paid for link’? Good question. How can they? We think it’s no coincidence that Google have actively increased their exposure and opportunities for webmasters to ‘grass’ on such sites either selling or benefiting from paid links, but is this all Google have? Having looked through Google best practice pages earlier today, we see that they don’t entirely want to destroy the paid link marketplace, but suggest this:
* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag * Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
Google go on to explain that a site with good unique quality content will naturally attract sites linking to it anyway but the problem is, not all of us have unique content sites (I’d say very few do) and even those that do, still need to attract the linking sites in the first place - a bit of chicken and egg scenario.
Where will it all end? Google now say they don’t approve of active reciprocal linking, they don’t approve of paid for text linking to manipulate their algorithms, and they don’t like Directories very much either. This begs the obvious question: How important is Page Rank nowadays? There is a definite kudos value but anything tangible? Sites with low or even zero PR are appearing above sites with high PR. We can honestly say, the latest PR assessment has made very little difference to sites we monitor either in terms of an increase in SERPs for those with PR improvement or a drop for those with a decrease.
At the end of the day, some elements of SEO can be so borderline between being ethical and unethical, that we feel many a good guy is going to get penalised through unintentionally annoying Google, and some of the unethical black hat guys will still benefit from PR manipulation.
Will PR still be around 2 years from now? There’s increased talk that possibly not…but time will surely tell.
I read an amusing magazine article that the boss of a rival local SEO company had written recently. Before I start, I should mention that this ‘SEO Specialist’ was actually working in a chemical plant in the UK 2 years ago and still maintains a couple of websites selling chemicals online even now. I’m constantly amazed how SEO experts qualify their occupational description…did they strike it lucky with a key phrase on one of their sites and now think they are in the position to advise others? There’s another ‘Specialist’ in our neighbourhood in the very competitive Costa Del Sol area of Southern Spain. This 2nd guy is a builder by day an an SEO expert by night! Seriously. You guys would roll around laughing if I showed you his own attempts at SEO on his template created website on a PR0. Hhhmmm. Maybe it’s me being bitter in my old age.
Anyway, in this article, the guy was basically spelling out to the audience what SEO was and what he considers the benefits over PPC or other forms of online marketing to be. There were some inaccuracies and a level of naivety but nevertheless, he wasn’t too far off the mark for a high level ‘heads up’. The guys argument was based on the fact that ‘it costs you money’ to be at the top of Google et al using a PPC advertising model, but SEO is ‘Free’. He also stated, quite proudly, that his site (which shall remain nameless) never advertises…he claims they don’t need to.
A day or so later, by coincidence, a client of mine (an estate agent) forwarded an email to me from this guy whereby this guy (the one who’d written the article) was offering his SEO Services. The email finished by stating his monthly ‘retainer’…around 100 Euros I think from memory ($125).
Now ok, $125 is not much, but this guy was offering services to a VERY small village community where SERPs were relatively easy to come by on targeted key phrases in all but the most competitive industry there…Real Estate. What the guy failed to realise is that most of the area’s Real Estate agents were using PPC and paying no more than around $150 or so a month in their PPC budget and with an average CPC of say $0.50, they were near enough assured 300 landed clicks, so a potentially good ROI (the area is rural Spain but 80% + buyers are from the UK, Denmark, Germany etc so an Internet presence is a no brainer). The SEO approach obviously guarantees nothing, but for a similar fee.
I’m all for SEO, I do afterall run an SEO and PPC agency, but the naivety of some people never fails to amaze me, neither does the pedigree of so called SEO experts coming out of the woodwork. Oh, I should finish by saying that I was playing around on google this morning and found this guys website listed under the brand term on Google Adwords. If a so called SEO Guru can’t optimise his own site for his own brand term, then what hope is there for his highly generic and competitive client terms and phrases?
Late on Friday/early Saturday morning of last week (26th/27th October) Google systematically reassessed virtually every known or indexed website for Page Rank (PR). It wasn’t unexpected and they’d been rumours for a few weeks that the assessment would actually come between 1-10 November, so perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to catch us all on the back foot, so to speak.
This assessment was perhaps one of the most severe for many webmasters. Many sites lost their page rank entirely, and others took a fall. Of course, others benefited very nicely.
Sites which we’ve witnessed first hand doing very nicely seemed to have been sites which have ethically utilised the page redirect (301) rule in mass numbers…entirely ethical but nevertheless possibly an exploitation opportunity for others in future. Sites which didn’t fare quite so well were definately sites with poorer content and page copy. We’ve seen sites with good quality numbers of backlinks but poor page layout suffer. It seems that ecommerce sites somehow need to find a way of utilising content as well as their product range. Backlinks certainly still count, but seemingly now only when marred with good volumes of matching content.
Other surprises included the diversity of page data Google’s spiders are able to see and index. iframes don’t seem to deter the Google spiders as we’ve seen some good results of late in indexed content with sites using these, and we all know that Flash is no longer entirely invisable, and meta tagging certainly isn’t dead either!
Perhaps, Google’s new approach is to again re-establish some real value for their fledgling PR system. To be honest, sites with decent SERPs still have them post assessment regardless of the PR fluctuation, so what does PR really now mean? We’re guessing that Google have become cheesed off over the last year or two of link farmers and speculators who buy a cheap domain, point a few links to it and then ride off the back of the PR until the next assessment.
When Google undertake such a HUGE mass exercise of reassessing seemingly every site in such a short space of time, there are going to be casualties and there are going to be those who have tried to exploit the algorithms coming through with a result. But on the whole, we think Google are looking to recreate a level of integrity around PR and hence why a simple site with minimal value will no longer be able to have a decent PR quite as easily as it perhaps once could…
If you haven’t heard, SEO.com was recently sold for $5 million to Web Targeted, a Utah Based Search Engine Optimization firm.
After the acquistion, Dave Bascom partnered up with Grassroots.org to launch a new project:
At SEO.Grassroots.org, you can find a free SEO Guide with topics on:
They also provide a great seo resource section for keywords, tools, and more.
Check it out.
(wb) Russ