How Natural is Your Site's Growth? Check Your Google Indexing Profile

Michael Jenson from Solo SEO recently emailed me about a cool new free SEO tool he created called Index Rank. After seeing my post about Google date based filters, Michael created the Index Rank tool, which allows you to see the growth of a site's profile in Google based on the number of pages indexed over different periods of time. The tool also allows you to compare multiple sites against each other.

Why is this data useful?

  • Since Google removed the supplemental results label, the next best thing we have to test site trust for lower end longtail pages is how quickly new pages are getting indexed.
  • If you see a rapid increase in indexing you know that is caused by an increase in domain trust due to better inlinks, an increase in content creation that leveraged unused authority the site was sitting on, solving a crawling issue, improving internal site architecture, or some technical issue that might be associated with creating duplicate content pages.
  • If everything you create is getting indexed you may consider creating content at a faster rate, perhaps using sub-brands off subdomains.
  • If you keep pumping out content but are not seeing your indexing stats go up, that is a cue to build links.

[Video] Intro. to PPC Marketing Using Google AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft

This 9 minute and 37 second video offers basic tips for starting with pay per click marketing.

General Tips for Starting With PPC Advertising

  • Start advertising on the major search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN give you faster feedback and better traffic quality than smaller search engines typically do. The size and scope of the large ad networks means that the #5 market is going to have almost no clean syndication partners because 60% of Google is more than 90% of smaller networks. Yahoo and MSN often have cheaper clicks than Google due to fewer competitors and less sophisticated price gouging ad quality algorithms.
  • Use different match types. Understand the differences between broad, phrase, and exact match. If you use broad or phrase match, make sure to use search query performance reports to find more keywords you should be advertising on and keywords you should be blocking via negative keywords tools.
  • Should you use ad syndication? Off the start, opt out of contextual ad syndication and test your campaigns via Google search ads, such that you can get a clean signal of click value, ad position, and ad CTR. After you know what it takes to compete in search you may want to re-enable ad syndication. If you enable ad syndication, set it up with its own ad groups or bid differently for contextual ads than you do for search.
  • Track conversion. This will teach you what keywords actually lead to commercial events. Sometimes if you are priced out of common market related keywords you can still find some high value lower search volume keywords that other competitors have not yet found. If you are managing large and complex campaigns you may want to use a third party conversion tracking tool, but if you only sell one product and/or run smaller accounts then you can use the free conversion tracking tools built into the search ad networks.
  • Use PPC to guide SEO. It is cheaper to use keyword research tools and use PPC to find out what terms convert right when you start an SEO campaign than it is to spend months targeting the wrong keywords.
  • A/B split test. Use the built in Google AdWords a/b split test tool to test different ad copy, and use their Website Optimizer tool to test different landing pages.
  • Be relevant. Use tight ad groups and send traffic to a landing page catered toward that basket of keywords. These tips increase ad clickthrough rate, ad quality scores, and conversion rates while lowering cost per click. Set brand related keywords in their own ad group. Dynamic keyword insertion can help improve your perceived ad relevancy by matching the ads up against keywords from the search query. Google's offline AdWords editor can help you create tight ad groups.
  • Set advertising goals. Some advertisers are looking for direct ROI, while others are looking to build their brand while making meager profits. If your brand related keywords are highly profitable, you might want to use those profits to help subsidize the cost of keywords earlier in the sales cycle or keywords that help increase brand awareness. If you have no search advertising experience and no brand awareness you can't be afraid of losing money off the start.
  • Use PPC to build links. If you create linkworthy content and buy the related keywords you can get mainstream media exposure for next to nothing.
  • Learn from the search engines. Google AdWords offers free online training videos which teach you how to use their ad network. One note of caution is that when they talk about Google tools that optimize something, many of those tools optimize eating your ad budget and increasing Google's revenues at your expense.

[Video] How to Spam Google Without Being Viewed as a Spammer

This 7 minute and 50 second video is one of the first SEO videos I made. After reviewing it I realize I could have moved the screen around to show a few more examples of the stuff I was talking about. Rather than discussing one topic this video moves around to offer a wide array of marketing optimization ideas.

  • Domain name & site design: using a strong domain name helps you look more credible and helps you rank better. An original high quality site design also makes content appear more trustworthy.
  • Logo & homepage page title: place your keywords in your logo. Instead of using Paypal as your logo, use something like Paypal payment solutions or Paypal online payments. You can still emphasize the Paypal name while benefiting from enhanced inbound anchor text due to keyword proximity, and some people perceiving your official name as containing the associated keywords.
  • Title of articles & filenames: use at least one keyword phrase in your page title and make your filenames descriptive. Doing so will help you build descriptive inbound links. Some people link using your page title as the anchor text, this is especially true if your page title is short and memorable. Many authoritative websites cite sources using the full URL with filename in the anchor text.
  • Minimize duplication: mixing up your on page seo, page titles, and meta descriptions helps you rank for a wider net of keywords and makes your rankings more stable
  • Leverage your authority: add useful descriptive background text below the fold on high authority pages. Also consider adding more internal links on high authority pages.
  • Buying links: when buying them, consider buying links indirectly through payment schemes involving community participation and discussion, such as contests and affiliate programs.
  • Syndication: if your content is published on other sites, make sure to reference older posts on your site to drive that traffic stream and link equity back to your site.
  • Drunken spelling: if you have a community aspect to your site, don't correct misspellings. In fact, some publishers might even place fake reviews and comments on their sites to help capture misspelled keywords without raising their risk profiles.
  • Spammy examples: find reasons to discuss spammy high margin topics on high authority websites by relating them to your core business. If your relation is a bit of a stretch, consider backdating it or finding another way to place the story on a part of your site that does not have thousands of people reading every word.

[Video] An Example of What Not to do if Your Site Ranks Well

This 3 minutes and 29 second video was one of my first. It is not as clear and fluid as some of the more recent videos. It talks about how many websites ranking for years got killed by a Google engineer within days of being mentioned on a popular SEO blog.

The Role of Editorial Decisions at Google in Determining Relevancy

  • Almost every commercial site ranking for a wide array of commercial terms is doing something outside Google's ever-changing webmaster guidelines. SEO guidelines are set up such that you are not allowed to rank for anything worth ranking for.
  • Dictating search relevancy is as much about mind control as it is about determining what is considered relevant.
  • Some really spammy stuff gets a free pass because it is owned by a major corporation, or an expert that is actually misleading people and giving advice that sets up obvious footprints that are easy to detect and discount. Relevancy and hand edits are not applied justly or evenly.
  • When sites are new they tend to have less natural link profiles because push marketing is not as clean as pull marketing. After sites get significant exposure they can rely more on pull marketing and pretend that they were always clean. If a search engineer wants to they can start your site at 0 because years ago you did something they did not like, or simply because the site is associated with you. Relevancy and hand edits are not applied justly or evenly.
  • If an SEO blog provides information that is too good with specific examples of how to apply the techniques someone at a search engine might hand edit the site on principal.

Too Smart For Your Own Good

A few days ago Andy Hagans sent me a link to a 1924 article titled Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men, which has a couple killer quotes in it. The first is how to succeed in business:
That criticism may be justifiable, fo I am mediocre. But the point I have in mind is this: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.
And the second killer quote covers how some people fail to live in reality:
You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent. You think everybody else's mind ought to function as swiftly as your own, so you are alternately overenthusiastic and over-depressed. One day you carry some poor devil up into a high mountain and make him think he has a chance to become general manager. The next day you blow him up for not doing something which you think you told him, but which you actually forgot. You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead.

That second quote applies to anyone in publishing. Businesses may not need many employees to have reach, but as marketing gets more insidious you need your customers to do your selling for you.

Without clearly communicating ideas designed to spread, few common people will talk about a business, and that business will stay stuck in a niche. That is unfortunate for those business owners, because in many fields the perceived topical authority (and person getting paid well) is determined outside of the niche. Creating value is not about writing knowledge on a page. Value is determined by the actual transfer of knowledge to others.

The web is speeding up communications. As companies and politicians continue to get caught lying and abusing language, we will be more willing to forgive those who make small errors while clarifying topics and making them more accessible to us.

Even if you are a doctor or scientist you can still communicate clearly using small words. Fields dominated by complex words and prose are full of opportunity for common folks to learn them, simplify them, and share them with other common folk. Most people are common in most ways.

[Video] Creating Your Site's Internal Link Structure for Google and Searchers

This video is a bit longer than some of the earlier videos, clocking in at 9 minutes and 39 seconds.

  • The Dual Roles of Navigation: Navigation needs to be user friendly and search engine friendly. If you want a user to pay attention to an offer you have to link to it with a call to action in the content area of the page. If you want search engines to pay attention to a page you have to link to it on important pages and/or from many pages. In general it is also better usability and better for your rankings to use descriptive (or keyword rich) text links over image links for your primary navigation, and in most in content links on your site.
  • Navigation Should Parallel Keyword Strategy: Your primary site navigation should be aligned with keyword categories, structured in related groups that capture keywords along the entire purchase cycle. If you have navigation that is not aligned with your keywords (like date based archives or an about page) you can use nofollow on it to prevent passing link equity through that portion of your site. You may also want to demote sections of your site that convert exceptionally poor relative to the better performing options.
  • Examples of Channeling Link Equity: Some websites, such as Target.com, show Google more navigation than they show end users to promote seasonally hot items. Other sites, like Chocolate.com, chose to use nofollow on unimportant internal links to de-emphasize unimportant options. You can view the nofollowed links on Chocolate.com by viewing their site with SEO for Firefox turned on. In some cases it also makes sense to use nofollow on user generated content to lessen the incentive for driveby spamming.
  • Clean & Clear Structure: If you author many pages about the same topic it is important to link to the most important articles in order to emphasize them, and use breadcrumb navigation to help structure the site and show what pages are most important.
  • Duplicate content: Google likes webmasters to believe that Google has duplicate content figured out, but if they have multiple similar pages indexed you are splitting your PageRank and they may rank the wrong version. Make sure you do not place the same (or exceptionally similar) content on multiple pages. Stuntdubl has a good list of resources for dealing with duplicate content.
  • Subdomains: If you have logical breaks in your content you may want to use subdomains to create smaller focused mini sites. If you have a strong brand you can get a bit more aggressive with subdomains, like eBay is.
  • More: Here are some more internal linking tips from a prior post on the topic.

The SEOBook Free SEO & SEM Job Boards

The Excessive Demand Problem

About 5 people a day ask me to recommend an SEO or link builder or site designer, but many of the people I have traditionally recommended

  • have either quit providing services to work exclusively on their own sites, or
  • have long wait lists.

Add that to the increasing complexity of SEO and increasing rates commanded by top experts, and it is hard for me to recommend any specific service provider to readers of this site. There are people offering to pay me good money to do some jobs and I simply do not have enough time to do everything I want...to the point where I probably even accidentally come off as rude to some people, just because it is so hard to keep up with 100 emails every day.

Job Boards Are Your Friend

I recently hired a blogger from the ProBlogger job boards. I was shocked by the quality of worker I was able to find (and some of the potentially great ones that I had to turn away). I also started placing help wanted ads in the SEO Book feed for things like gadget developers and link builders and got great results, but placing job ads in the main feed is a bit selfish.

With that in mind I decided to place an SEO jobs board on SEO Book.com. Currently I am not looking for people to submit advertisements offering services (the web is already full of that) but I am hoping to help people in need find someone to help them out with SEO, link building, site design, PPC, programming, etc.

Warnings

Of course due diligence is necessary when choosing who to work with, but sometimes good things start with a hello, and some of the newer hungry workers do sell their services for less than what they are worth. Don't take risks you can't afford to and never bet against your gut.

Currently the job boards here do not have a feedback module in them, but if the feature becomes popular you can expect me to add many features to help the marketplace get more efficient.

A True Story About Me

I met my second SEO customer ever on a jobs board at an SEO forum. I only charged him $300 back then to rank his site. That customer ranked #1 in Google, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise, sent me a large Christmas bonus, became a great friend, and was the first person to review the first copy of SEO Book. He has since sold that top ranked website, but he and I have started working together on other projects. Hopefully others meet and have cool stories to share from the job boards on this site.

[Video] Keyword Research 101: Basic Keyword Strategy & Tips

Keyword Research Tips

  • If you have an old site you should use analytics to track what keywords you are getting traffic for. For most webmasters it is easier to rank for more related keywords than it is to discover and dominate new areas.
  • When you start a new site make sure you use keyword modifiers in your page titles, meta descriptions, and page copy. It is easier to rank for long tail terms than shorter search queries.
  • You can find many keyword modifier types in this free XLS spreadsheet.
  • When you start doing keyword research, you can start with a seed list of broad keywords to power a keyword tool and keep digging deeper. Then repeat the process with related keywords and other keyword tools. No tool is perfect. Think of them more as qualitative than quantitative. I like Wordtracker and my keyword tool.
  • Organize your keywords into relevant baskets of keywords and modifiers that should be covered in different sections of your site and on different pages from your site.
  • I listed many bonus keyword research ideas in a recent Wordtracker article.
  • Some of my favorite follow up keyword tools to use when optimizing a page are

Selling Commodity Services: Controlling Cost vs Adding Value

One theory of web marketing starts off with controlling cost. Where you try to find what works right now, and do exactly what is needed to get to the level of success you want to reach. The theory sounds valid, but...

  • By the time something is common knowledge, its value and effectiveness has decreased and is heading lower.
  • The markets are shifting. Tomorrow's marketplace is uglier and more competitive than today's marketplace. And it has lower margins for average players too!
  • Those who invest in building real assets are going to eventually beat you. And their success is self reinforcing.

Investing & Adding Value is Better Than Being Cheap

Rather than thinking of how to control costs while growing a web business, it is better to spend that same time, energy, and focus learning how to create value and how to get people talking about how valuable your widget is. When I was new to the web I kept my reported income far lower than it should have been because I kept reinvesting in learning and marketing, even when I was heavily in debt. Some of the spend was a waste, but I know enough to compete in many markets with minimal investment.

How to be Cheap

Two months ago my mom told me she wanted to create a new blog about Diverticulitis, a topic effecting my grandma. With no warning, that afternoon I...

  • learned how to spell the word Diverticulitis (2 minutes)
  • used WordTracker's free keyword research tool (2 minutes)
  • bought my mom a $6 domain at GoDaddy (2 minutes)
  • spent 5 minutes aligning the DNS, hosting her site at Dreamhost, which allows unlimited sites to a $7 a month account. I recently created a 5 year account for a friend and only spent $300 for 5 years of hosting!
  • set my mom up with a default Blogger template (5 minutes)
  • created a cheesy logo (that took me 5 minutes to make using low end $50 logo design software I bought years ago)
  • modified the CSS file to match the logo (5 minutes)

My mom wrote 10 blog posts that took her ~ 5 to 10 minutes each, and a week later I spent 5 minutes and ~ $80 submitting it to a couple directories.

A few months ago I bought a domain name for $2,500. Last month I was offered $17,500 for the domain, and not too long ago the same guy paid over twice that for a similar but worse name. If he offered me that much I might have sold, but unsolicited offers are typically on the low side.

Today I was sent an unsolicited $500 offer for my mom's new site. Why? Because the site already ranks in Yahoo and Microsoft. If I spend a few hundred more the site will likely compete in Google too. My marketing knowledge was expensive to acquire, but everything else was good enough to compete for cheap or free (at least in that market at this moment in time).

The reason this story is remarkable is because people were willing to buy such a small site when it was so new. In two months the site was conceived, created, competing, ranked, and someone already made an offer on it. Two months ago that same domain name was $6.

Everything is Becoming a Commodity

It started with the average travel broker, then it hit classified ads and regional monopolies like newspapers, and it is working its way toward your industry. Just look at all the above web industries listed that are free or nearly free. Due to more efficient markets, automation, outsourcing, and the need to compete on an open marketplace, the margins for almost everything needed to compete on the web are heading toward zero.

My mom's new site competes on about $100 of investment, but in a year or two that domain name might have cost $500, and a couple more competitors entering the field might have pushed the marketing costs to $1,000. A year or two later the domain name might have been $2,000 and the marketing costs might be $10,000.

Don't Become a Commodity

The three solutions to the commodity issue are

  • use new technologies to create and publish the DIY tools and information that will commoditize other businesses competing in your space
  • build your knowledge in related fields that interest you, such that you can add value to multiple points on the value chain. Google is search + ads + documents + hosting + syndication + etc etc etc. I know a bit about SEO + SEM + marketing + branding + conversion + domaining + etc etc etc.
  • Invest to build your awareness and brand (build mindshare and distribution) to where you are not considered a commodity. Create enough of an abundance of demand that you chose who you work with.

Unless somebody is talking about you or consuming your stuff right now you are becoming a commodity, although you may not realize it yet.

Research: Long Tail of Google's Search Results Dominated by Doorway Pages & Other Spam

The people from SEO Digger recently put together some research on search spam. Some of the terminology they use (like using the word illicit) is inaccurate, but the trends they discovered align well with what one would expect.

Spam Dominates Longtail Adult & Pill Search Queries

In high money niches, spam sites tended to dominate longer search queries while having less exposure in search results for shorter queries. View the below graph with adult, pills, dating, cars, gifts, and casinos. It shows the normalized density of spam sites ranking in Google by 1, 2, and 3 word queries.
spam breakdown.

Why is Casino an Anomaly?

I believe the reasons casinos appear so tight nit are

  • US advertising laws and gaming laws prohibit some of the common spam related revenue streams
  • leading online gaming sites have heavily embraced both offline advertising and SEO
  • people who gamble tend to be quite passionate about gambling

That passion means gamers are more active to participate in community sites in that niche, which further consolidates traffic streams due to network effects and creates a lot of free on topic content for some of the major community driven sites.

Effective Search Spamming Business Models

Given this research, if you were to create a business model revolving around spamming, it makes sense to focus on the long tail of search. Get enough PageRank to get your pages indexed, but do not worry about accumulating enough PageRank to try to rank for core keywords in the spammy niches. Plus, staying away from the core keywords makes your sites less likely to get booted from a manual review and/or a competitor snitching on you.

Spam & Ranking Low Trust New Sites

The exact same trend that is seen between real sites vs spam sites is paralleled when considering new websites vs older websites.

  • Older websites that are heavily linked at and heavily trusted dominate the core category related keywords.
  • Longer search queries have less matches in the search database, and are thus more reliant on the on the page aspects of SEO.
  • Older sites can not possibly adequately cover all the related longtail search phrases, so newer sites with less authority rank for many of the more accessible long tail keywords.

If you create a new site you can set your goals on ranking for core category keywords, but realize that longtail traffic will come first. If Google lets entire categories get dominated by spam pages then there has to be an associated opportunity to rank real pages.

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