There’s something of a buzz right now with MSN supposedly banning people for reciprocal linking. True or not I feel this is typical of why MSN is stuck in third place, you can’t be a leader playing catchup.

At this stage MSN is still having a really hard time dealing with spam issues Google solved 2 or 3 years ago. You can see by looking at searches for viagra, cialis, or phentermine you can see MSN has areal problem separating the link wheat from the chaff. Now one could make the point that the cat and mouse game between Google and SEO’s created this problem, but that’s casting blame and not addressing the problem. MSN needs to sit down and figure out a way to give links their proper editorial weight. They also need to realize the linking world isn’t a walk in the park, it’s filled with intrigue, sabotage, and subterfuge. MSN needs to focus on being better than Google not trying to catch-up to where Google is. However looking at MSN research papers (pdf) pointed out by the digitalghost we can see MSN is focusing more on finding the bad instead of highlighting the good:

Link spam is a particular form of web spam, where the
SEO attempts to boost the PageRank of a web page p by
creating many pages referring to p. However, given that the
PageRank of p is a function of both the number of pages
endorsing p as well as their quality, and given that SEOs
typically do not control many high-quality pages, they must
resort to using a very large number of low-quality pages
to endorse p. This is best done by generating these pages
automatically; a technique commonly known as “link spam”.

and

Most if not all of the SEO-generated pages exist solely to
(mis)lead a search engine into directing traffic towards the
“optimized” site; in other words, the SEO-generated pages
are intended only for the search engine, and are completely
useless to human visitors.

Now while I have created a fair bit of spam in my time, I’ve also created relevant and interesting information that has value to people. In those cases I’m just using optimization to draw attention to it and make sure the search engines find it and understand what it’s about. If search engines and not just MSN did a better job at figuring out and assigning value to the unique and original content, we might be in a better place.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

MSN Won’t Win Playing Catchup

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I know you search engine folks got together a while ago and agreed on a standard to help fight blog spam. Problem is it didn’t work and it only satisfied whiney cat bloggers. Now if you had involved some of the people who were in the industry things might have turned out differently (see classic old school Nick W Threadwatch post The solution to blog spam) you might have had a little more success. I know some of you googlers read my blog, and because I’ve got a head full of crazy genius ideas I’m going to make the case for the adoption of a new parameter.

The way search engines currently work the three URL’s below are usually considered distincltly different:

example.com/foo/
example.com/foo/?loc=top
example.com/foo/?loc=top&a=1

In actual practice I know if Google sees all three of them have substantially similar content they choose 1 and it gets a snippet and if you’re lucky the other(s) may get indexed just a s single line with no snippet. It works that way if you’re on a nice “high power” or “well crawled site”, if you’re a little guy … well I’d recommend not creating something that might be a problem down the road. I purchased my new log analysis software a few days ago and have been playing with it when I had a “light bulb moment” (you know you get a great idea and a cartoon light bulb goes off over your head). What if we had the ability to mark things so site owners could tell what’s being clicked without it throwing search engines a curve ball?

For example many sites have a navigation banner under the header with links to the main sections of the site. They also feature links to the same pages on the side navigation. Now as a site owner/publisher I want to know are people using the links up top or am I giving up valuable screen real estate? Are people clicking the graphical images or the text under the images? Does the buy button at the top or the bottom get clicked more? Now someone is going to say why don’t you use javascript, CGI or some other script based click tracking method. Well if you do it destroys the value of on site anchor text (with Google’s over reliance on authority/trust sites can rank for all sorts of stuff with good internal anchor text and linking structures). So if I could tag the top navigation bar links with a parameter that lets me know it’s the top, and the side with the something that tells me it’s on the side, everything would be groovy. As site owners, publishers, and designers gain more information about how users actually use their sites they can make improvements and make the web a better place.

Still with me … good … OK now the naysayers will say C’mon Gray you can’t be serious, I mean people use all sorts of stupid-crazy parameter naming schemes how are you going to find something that won’t bork the web? Well because I believe simple things work best how about the ignoreparameter? For example:

example.com/foo/?ignoreparameter=topnav
example.com/foo/?ignoreparameter=sidenav
example.com/foo/?ignoreparameter=logoclick
example.com/foo/?ignoreparameter=topbutton
example.com/foo/?ignoreparameter=image

Search engines will see the “ignore parameter” ignore it and remove it from the URL. What’s in it for them, eventually a few years down the road we’ll start having websites that work better and are designed to match the way people use the web, not the way we think they do or should. Some of you are saying c’mon that’s a big job do you know how much time/money/effort that will take? To that I shamelessly steal a quote from one of those inspirational posters you see in the mall …

You’ll never make a shot that you don’t take …

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Making a Case for the Ignore Parameter

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Since my experiment in reputation management is actually getting much more interesting than I planned I thought I should go back and do a proper writeup.

The goal of my reputation management experiment was to try and come as close to the ‘perfect serp’ for a particular company’s listing. My plan was to use external websites that allow free content, press releases, and possibly some internal subdomains if necessary (see Tips for Controlling the Top 10 for more details).

The Background: The domain was registered in 2003, went live with content somewhere in the second half of 2003. It’s a PR4 with some backlinks, nothing too spammy, but nothing too powerful or authoritative either. While there were some minor updates over the years no major content changes or additions happened during that time. Some pages are supplemental and the site is definitely “lightly crawled”

On Site Cleanup: The design was OK although the template was table based (ugh) and needed some TLC. The directory structure was a little disorganized, there were about 30 pages that were “.html”. I moved the site into wordpress and set it up to work in static CMS configuration (A tutorial on this is in the works). I did this to make the site easier to maintain and add content to for it’s owner, plus it would now have “news” or “blog” functionality. The fix-up was completed on or about May 1st with 301 redirects set up for the old HTML pages. This site isn’t high risk so was perfect candidate for Google sitemaps which was implemented through the Google Sitemaps Plugin for Wordpress.

The SERPS
Day 0:
Google: Position 1 (no indents)
Yahoo: Position 1 (no Indents)
MSN: Position 1 (no indents)

OffSite Reputation Management:
At this point I created information on the following offsite services (wordpress, blogger, squidoo, newsvine, goglebase, MSN spaces and Myspace). Links from the main site went to each of the supplementary websites, and I interlinked 2 of the sites to all the other sites. I visited each of them in internet explorer with the toolbar enabled (don’t know that that still does anything, but since it also let’s me check to makes sure site isn’t broken no harm done). Searched directly for the URL’s in each of the three engines, and clicked on the results. I also submitted each of the URL’s to MSN with the URL submission tool.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Reputation Management – Case Study, Part I

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So I did a little test of some domain spamming reputation management for a friends company. I used the MSN URL submission tool and in less than 30 days I “owned” the 9 of the top 10 spots. There are only 250,000 other pages listed so it’s not really competitive by any measurement, but man sure made him happy. So far only 2 have grabbed hold in Google and only 1 in Yahoo.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

MSN Easy Lover

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Ok if you’re looking for an invite to get into the MSN Adcenter drop something in the comments I still have about 6 left to go around. First come, first served.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

MSN AdCenter Invites

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In the past week Google played catch-up with MSN AdCenter by offering Adwords Targeting based on demographics ( see Google AdWords Help Center: What is demographic site selection? and Targeting as a Strategy). Maybe I spent a little to much time in AOL chat rooms in my youth (yo ASL roomies), but I don’t place a lot of stock in the accuracy of online demographic data.

To be clear if I’m selling air conditioners I’ll definitely want to target Florida residents over Alaskan residents, but going much deeper than that doesn’t seem accurate based on the data. I will admit that I intentionally give the wrong information everywhere I possibly can. It’s a combination of the impish joy of stickin’ it to the man and my paranoia about being tracked. In short I try put out so much conflicting data it’s impossible to separate the truth from the fiction. From a marketing standpoint I want my IP to be large uncategorizable blob of data. I will acknowledge I’m probably not representative of the typical internet user, but I think people are becoming more sensitive about how much information they give out freely, and in some cases telling little white lies.

Personally I think all of this data is really just to attract traditional print and TV advertisers online. By giving these people metrics they are accustomed to working with, you are going to have an easier time getting them to open their wallets. As anyone in sales knows it’s easier to sell someone something if they think they want it, whether it really works or not.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Will the Real Online Demographics Please Stand Up

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If you’re looking for travel tips don’t use MSN, they think you’re looking for trips instead

Orlando Vacation Tips
California Vacation Tips
Ireland Vacation Tips

This is particularly bothersome as I’m bidding on about 20 variations of [location tips] in MSN. What’s even more curious is those words are my best converting words in Google.

(screen shot after the jump)

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

No Travel Tips on MSN

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Dear MSN AdCenter PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, DROP THE PRETTY PICTURES AND FUNKY GRAPHS AND JUST WORK IN FIREFOX DAMMIT!

Next how about just a big old text area to let me drop my keywords in, I don’t want to import from some funky excel sheet, or some other mumbo jumbo.

I’ll make it real simple STOP MAKING ME USE YOUR OTHER PRODUCTS WHEN I WANT TO SPEND MY MONEY TO ADVERTISE WITH YOU.

rant over.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

MSN AdCenter and Keywords

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Search Engines and ranking algorithm’s are evolving, in fact many of them are coming close to simulating artificial intelligence and exhibiting distinct personality traits. What better way to explain these personalities than to use an example everyone can relate to their high school teachers.

Sister Google

We all know Sister Google is the strictest English teacher you’re likely to encounter, and she’s a real stickler on spelling. She has her teacher’s pets like little Jeffery Amazon, Megan Ebay, and Craig List who can get away anything and get high scores on practically every test. However for the rest of you it’s a different game. All of the references in your material had better come from trusted authoritative sources that are on her secret approved list of resources, or else forget it she’ll never recommend any of your work to anyone, and it will go on your permanent record.

Vice Principal Yahoo

Technically Vice Principal Yahoo teaches history, in fact he’s been a teacher longer than anyone else in the school. Trouble is he’s really not interested in being a teacher, he has a lot of other jobs to do, and gives them top priority. As long as you do what you’re supposed to do there are no problems. However what inevitably happens is one of the loud mouth kids starts making trouble and Vice Principal Yahoo comes in and sets things straight. He’ll punish the whole class just because a few students are out of place. In fact on a few occasions he’s be known to completely reorganize lessons and test scores so they are exactly the way he wants them, regardless of who deserves the highest grade.

Ms. MSN

Ms. MSN is your groovy drama teacher who is into creativity, arts, and entertainment. Secretly all the students know she wants Sister Google’s job, but since Sister Google isn’t retiring she had to take another job and bide her time. Ms. MSN rewards free creative thinking. Want to score well in her class use double or triple hyphenated domains to show off your free thinking flair. Put your important words in bold and italics, she loves that. The real secret to getting a good grade on one of Ms. MSN’s test’s use CSS.

Mr. Jeeves

Mr. Jeeves is your hopelessly out of touch science teacher. While Mr. Jeeves is pretty smart he’s got a bit of an identity crisis. The students all laugh at him because he’s so behind the times. The other teachers don’t take him seriously because he’s always been afraid to stand up and make a name for himself, he’ll just get in line and follow the other teachers lead. Don’t count Mr. Jeeves out though he’s got some pretty powerful influential friends with a lot of financial backing, problem is they just don’t know what they want to do to back him for the long term.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

If Search Engines Were High School Teachers

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So with all the big deal that Matt Cutts made about buying text links you’d think the Googlers would be able to filter pages out of the SERPS that are clearly paid advertisements like 1,2,3. You can see that they are indexed and are starting to rank (thank you very much Google Alerts). Nothing against the products on the pages, but clearly they don’t have any meaningful content and aren’t much different than the other 50 million thin affiliate pages out there, except that they are on MSN.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

MSN Premium Advertiser Pages

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