2006 Matt Cutts as the Zombie Jeeves

A while ago (and we are talking years) at SMX Advanced 2007, the Google Dance Northwest to be exact, I watched as the Ask PR Director worked through the launch of Ask 3D. A few friends and I got a private tour of the new features, and I knew immediately that they were years ahead of their time. But they went and threw it all away.

(Funny enough, that night was when I first met Matt Cutts, who is in this picture. )

Now, even though it was proven to work better with users within the first few months, Google finally accepted it and is using the three column approach. It took Microsoft and Yahoo 2 years to adopt it, and Google 3 years. What does Ask get out of it? Nothing.

So I will say again. The Microsoft/Yahoo deal should not have happened. Instead, had Yahoo been smart, they would have bought Ask and AOL. *sigh* They might have tried, I don’t know, but what I do know is AOL, Ask and Yahoo are now all but dead. To Microsoft and Google … do you see the opportunity here? If you haven’t already, pick off the Ask talent. It’s being so wasted.

</rant>

Ask from the Grave is a post from: Kate Morris

Folks in this room understand that the quality of a search engine depends heavily on the relevance of advertising, and the relevance of advertising relies on the volume of bids.

Steve Ballmer, MSFT

Sorry, Steve but I beg to differ. This was a quote from the SMX West show in March 2010. While I get his point, and he was speaking to a room of search marketers, there is something flawed about his logic.

When Google started its upward climb, it was not the leader in advertising. Overture (GoTo, Yahoo, whatever) was. People started using Google because the results were relevant, natural and paid. Trust was given to the brand, and that is when “google” became a verb. You don’t become a part of societal vocabulary by getting advertising right. Steve is missing a few vital parts of the puzzle, and that seems to always be the issue over at Microsoft.

The piece that is missing is the relevant results that bring in users. These results build trust in the brand. Returning users build the user base (traffic) which brings in advertisers, and advertisers bring in money and ads. Those ads do make the results more relevant, but it is not the ads that drive initial user trust and participation.

Disclaimer: I have not done research on this, and someone could easily prove me wrong. This post is from a marketing psychology point of view.

The quality of Google right now may be its ad network. Everyone knows that it is what makes Google so powerful. But any competitor to Google is going to have to understand that replacing that trust will have to occur to get users to switch.

I always hear advertisers say “I only use Google AdWords because, while it’s more expensive and the other networks convert better, the volume is just not there.” Remember that at higher volumes, generally, it is more difficult to convert. This is why you never just increase bids to be #1 in the ad line up. It’s not always profitable to be #1. There is a double meaning there MSFT.

Just something to think about.

Quality of a Search Engine is a post from: Kate Morris

Issue: In optimizing a client’s website, I came across some images that might seem unsuitable for children. Not vulgar or crude, and were there in a health care sense, but were still not suitable for children.

I wanted to find a tag that I could place in the image or on the page that would let the search engines, especially the adult filters of the images side, that the images were not suitable from the get go. The client had noted it on their site as well, but on the entry page, not on every page that the images appeared.

Short version: There were no tags that I could find, and no one knew the answer. So I emailed a friend of mine … Matt Cutts (no, I am NOT giving anyone his email address). See Matt, for those of you that don’t know, is one of the minds behind SafeSearch and is now the Head of the Web Spam team at Google. Who better to ask right?

Turns out there are meta tags that can be affixed to the page with ratings that are much like movie ratings. These ratings work with browser filters to ensure that kids do not see specific content on the web. Reading between the lines, I am thinking that this might also be a way to signal to the SEs that there are things on that page that should be behind the SafeSearch wall.

How to Tag Adult Content

The best resource for adult rating that Matt pointed me to had examples of how to use all the rating systems. Major downside: this means 4 additional meta tags on my page. This area of the world has not been condensed, so there are many way to rate pages. For my client, I added them all. Better safe than sorry in my opinion.

I won’t go over every one, but basically for most of them you place specific codes within the meta tag that let bots and browsers know exactly what type of content is on that page that might not be suitable. In my client’s instance, it was partial nudity on a woman that was health care based.

It might have taken some time and a little more work, but I know that parents and search engines will like that my client is trying to help protect children on the web. I just hope that the various organizations can come together on ONE rating system someday, but that might be as possible as all of the browsers rendering the same way (stupid IE …).

UPDATE: I had a question (PRO Membership Required) the other day in the SEOmoz Q&A that gave me another thought about how to use the adult content tagging. If your images have ever been placed behind the SafeSearch filter, and you think it isn’t warranted, you might TRY (read: hasn’t been tested) placing these meta tags on the page where the image is hosted, and use the tags for safe for children. Don’t use this to get around the filters, I don’t think that will work. If hand checked, and the images are in fact NOT kosher, you might get removed/banned. No bueno here people. Karma, remember karma. If you don’t want your kids, your nieces/nephews, or godchildren looking at those images, then other kids shouldn’t either.

Tagging Adult-ish Pictures is a post from: Kate Morris

The question centered around dayparting in Google but based on the specific industry their client was in, so after I guessed (educated guess, really …), I told them to look at the company’s analytics and see where their clients were visiting and buying. The retort was “Google Analytics doesn’t tell me that.”

Poppycock.

But I understood the confusion. Information by hour isn’t readily available but it is there. And I am going to show you how to pull the data. But to start, let’s review why dayparting might be important to you.

Dayparting

We get this term from traditional marketing. I first learned it in Introduction to Media Buying at The University of Texas. It had to do with radio and TV time purchasing. Imagine my delight when PPC started using it too. And it’s about the same. Dayparting is molding your spend to specific days and hours of the day to match when your best customers are looking.

Dayparting is not for every company. If you are a consumer based company, people are probably searching for your products at any hour of the day. Business-to-business firms are going to be more open to specifying a time of day. Consider business software – you might have some hard core people searching at night, or small business owners, but if your product is not focused to them, you probably don’t want to be running at 2am. Right? Good. Moving on.

When are your Customers Online?

Your analytics package should be able to tell you when customers are on your site. Above that, you should be tracking what time of the day people are purchasing if you are ecommerce. Google Analytics does provide this information to you, you just have to know where to look. Custom Reports FTW.

1. Get into your Google Analytics Account and find the “Custom Reporting” button on the left side navigation.

2. Click and get the bigger menu. At the bottom click on “Manage Custom Reports.”

3. In the upper right side, click on “Create new custom report.”

4. Title it (you’ll forget later) – hit edit next to the “Custom Report blah blah blah” up at the top.

5. First pick the metrics you want to see (in blue, see below). I am a fan of the metrics below, it’s a good place to start when you aren’t sure what to look at.

• Unique Visitors
• Unique Pageviews
• Total Goal Completions (you have to have goals set up to get data here)
• Avg. Time on Site
• Unique Purchases (must be e-commerce to use this)
• Bounce Rate

Sample Google Analytics Dayparting Report Setup

6. Once you get those, move to the green aka dimensions. This is where you pick what you are looking at. You can do one of three things here, or I recommend one of three.

1. Use one dimension - Time of Day – this is the minimal report and will help you see overall trends for time of day.
2. Use two dimensions – (1) Day (2) Time of Day – this gets down to each day and how things worked out each hour. More detailed but maybe too detailed for some.
3. Make both. Two separate reports. You can play with more dimensions of course, but I am just talking dayparting remember?

Once you’ve done that, preview the report and test away until you get it like you want it. If it’s that good and you have more than one client that can use it, you can save it to all of them. Nice huh? Yay for time saving! The rest … you should know what to do with. Pick the best hours, see if there are some major drop offs in traffic and purchasing, and review the data with the client (or executives).

For more information on dayparting check out these resources:

• Google Dayparting
• Yahoo Dayparting
• AdCenter Dayparting (aka Bing/MSN) (note that Brad covers Google here too, I <3 Brad)

So that was the quick and dirty – please comment with any questions and I’ll do my best to answer or point you to a resource with the answer.

PPC Tip: Dayparting using Google Analytics is a post from: Kate Morris

Thanks to Kristy Bolsinger for her help!

You are an SEO’s Parent If … is a post from: Kate Morris

But now there seems to be a trend (and it could be because I live in my little hole called SEO) recently where good SEOs are being suspended on Social Media sites.

Case #1: Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen) was suspended on Twitter on September 22 at about 1pm CDT and reinstated a few hours later. No reason, nothing. Community support and twitter contacts helped.

Case #2: Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) has been suspended as of September 22 at 3:34pm London time and not yet reinstated was reinstated later that day. A twitter search for rishil shows the large amount of support for his reinstatement. Update: We got the story of why, written up by SEOptimise.

Case #3: My own Yahoo! Answers account has been suspended for “spammy” activity. None of which has ever happened. I have appealed three times, and gotten nothing. Yahoo seems to just not want to hear it. So my efforts to remove spam on Answers, and my support of that site are all for nothing. I am still not sure if I will ever return.

So what is the deal here? Are we being identified and purged no matter what? Yes, this is taking three small cases and making a HUGE assumption. But why are these accounts being marked and taken down? All have been in good standing and done nothing wrong.

Anyone else seen this happen? I’ll update as I learn more.

Fake Spamming by SEOs? is a post from: Kate Morris

My main issue after Google answered some questions was that these searches are not the keywords that the advertiser specified. How were we to know when our ads were showing?

I came across something recently that makes things a little better. After some research, others (cough Brian Cater cough) have noticed the same thing. Read more on this topic by Brian over at Search Engine Journal.

When running a search query report (that’s your how to right there, pull a search query report) for a client (sorry I had to fuzz out the keywords), I noticed some really weird entries. Sure enough, it noted that they queries were session-based. The person had changed their search, and when they did, the ad showed for their next query … in this case (the one that doesn’t identify my client) “richard session austin texas”. This had nothing to do with my client!

Sure enough, right after that it shows (Session-Based) in the query type column. I see these for only broad matched keywords across my clients, but I am not saying that this is all that happens. I am hoping that this is the only match type this happens in, but we’ll see.

Now for my wishlist. Google … can we get the option to filter for session-based searches? We can filter the Search Query report for a number of things but not match type. It would be awesome to be able to pull a report of just these keywords. It would be an interesting insight to what our searchers are looking for after they put in a key phrase we target. Thanks.

Finding Session-Based Ad Clicks is a post from: Kate Morris

Now … that really isn’t what this post is about. Sorry.

Google Caffeine Update

Google’s caffeine push (nothing to do with coffee, unless the engineers named it for the mass amounts they consumed when programming) is all over the news. SEOs are running to find the differences, and clients are freaking out about any changes to their rankings. This wasn’t helped by a CIO article (which sparked a question from one of my clients).

So what is the big deal? Nothing. Yet.

Caffeine changes things, yes. But Google changes things all the time. This is just another attempt on their part to make search results better. You can see Google’s Matt Cutts talking about it on WebProNews. John Battelle suggests it has more to do with Real Time search than anything. I am personally holding back and waiting. But what it comes down to is:

If you have a good site, architecture, links, and content, you are fine. Stop running around trying to change things. Nothing about your site is going to have to be changed if you have a smart SEO running your site. The foundations of good SEO have not shifted.

In time, we will figure out what is different, what aspects might be a little more powerful in the algorithm, but that is a ways away. Need another reason to not worry? It’s not live yet. Google is allowing power users to point out any boo-boos. When this does go live, it’ll be in stages.

Keep creating good sites with great products, services, and linking portfolios, and you will be fine in the long run. Take short cuts … and this or another update might really affect you. If your SEO is really worried right now, ask them why. You might find out some things that you need to address for the health and safety of your own business years down the road.

Caffeine is Good is a post from: Kate Morris

How will I know if Microsoft made Bing work?

When my mom asks about it and starts using it.

I have always known that no matter what I think has hit the main stream, it hasn’t really until I see real people using it without prompting. Time will tell. And no, she hasn’t asked yet. I can’t wait for the day she does. It’ll be testing time then.

What you don’t use your family as guinea pigs?

Did Bing Work? is a post from: Kate Morris

I have come to my own conclusion about Google and their policies. Paid linking and other is much like speeding and Google like the cop on the side of the road. I am not calling Google the Internet Police, but they are enforcers of their own guidelines.

We all speed, not one of my readers can say they never have. Is it against the law? Yep. Dangerous? Sometimes.

Speeding is against the law because of the potential impact it might have on someone else’s life. This is why fines are bigger in school zones. Speeding laws are not there to make the city money (though there are cops that have quotas, etc.), they are there to protect people. Now, haven’t you ever flown by a cop that had the radar gun out, but didn’t come after you? Why not? You weren’t being dangerous. Five miles per hour over usually isn’t enough to get you pulled over. Going 30 MPH over while swerving in and out of traffic will get you noticed though, fined, and perhaps thrown in jail (in Texas you can be). You had a higher potential of colliding with someone else.

So how does this all related to Google and their “policing” of guidelines, namely paid links?

Can’t get everyone: Google isn’t going to pull everyone over for violating guidelines. Just as the police all over the US can’t see every speeder, Google can’t “see” every website. Yes, there is a robot that can flag some things, but much link buying will go on under the radar.

Not every instance is dangerous: There are good paid links (sponsoring a non-profit), just as sometimes speeders are just going with the flow of traffic. Google isn’t and doesn’t really have the resources to slap everyone that MIGHT be buying links.

Don’t stand out: Just as on the roads, and even when doing taxes, try to do the right thing. When you’re doing that, flags don’t get raised. Buying links from brokers and en masse is a big flag. Might as well be driving a red sports car. Google will traditionally go after the link seller, you’ll just lose the value of the link and money you paid. Buy enough, Google will slap your wrist.

Realize the Truth: Google knows that some links will only happen when money changes hands, but sometimes those are really good links. The lesson here is that these two tactics work. Speeding will get you there faster. Paid linking works. It’s a matter of if you are impacting other people and if you get caught. It’s a risk you have to be willing to take.

Final takeaways:

• Keep these links on topic and good for the end user and Google will just let you fly by, right under that radar.
• Maintain industry relationships for great links, and to ensure you aren’t unjustly reported by competitors.
• Don’t violate guidelines unless you can deal with the consequences. As I said before, it’s a risk.

Speeding Tickets & Google Guidelines is a post from: Kate Morris