One of the great things about ging to Pubcon is going to great parties, meeting with lots of people, sharing ideas and doing some networking. Ask.com stepped up the plate and sponsored drinks Monday night. Google was next holding a dinner and mixer tonight. Yahoo however has no love for the webmaster holding an exclusive invite only party for only 150 or so people.

So some of you are asking hey Gray aren’t you just pissed you didn’t get invited? Damn straight! However I wasn’t the only person annoyed, in fact there was a protest party held in the Ghost Bar of the Palms Hotel. C’mon Yahoo stop playing the elitist game of social networking, and open it up to everyone.

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

Yahoo Doesn’t Like Web Publishers

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I’ll admit I’m like the people Guy Kawasaki recently talked with I don’t spend a lot of time watching TV. I watch the occasional Mythbusters, American Chopper and animal planet nature documentary, and a few TV show I run some blogs for, so we’re talking about less than 5 hours a week. Since I spend a majority of my time in front of a monitor I’m pretty comfortable watching video there, especially if it happens to be search engine related news.

Google Current
Google Current used to be, EMPHASIS ON USED TO BE, my favorite service. The original format they had when they launched was perfect, for example look at Hollywood Dream (about 3 minutes). However they somewhat recently updated and went to a slightly longer intro, why we need a 30 second intro on a 3 minute video is ridiculous compare this video to the last one. However last week they totally and completely F*cked it up (and I never use the f-word). Look at this crap, this crap and yet more crap. I’m about ready to do my impersonation of Charlton Heston on the beach “YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!! DAMN YOU!“. I mean we went from meaningful, insighful, and eductional commentary on subjects like LonelyGirl15 to crappy stupid lists scrolling across the screen! If anybody knows where I can send my complaint that someone involved in this project will actually read it please let me know.

Yahoo Current
Ok my first thought when I discovered this was YAY Kinga Phillips formerly of Google Current didn’t get fired after all. However after poking around the Current Buzz page I was left wondering did they use a designer they found on MySpace? The page is confusing at best. I’m not sure where to go and what to do in I’m having too many “Don’t make me think” choices. On top of that why is the RSS button burried down in the right hand corner and not featured someplace a bit more prominent? However once we get to more unneccesarily confusingly complicated page with the actual video the content is entertaining.

So what’s the takeway, we’re still in the very early stages of this game and there’s lots of opportunity and room for improvement. It’s not too late MSN or ASK to throw their hat into the ring and try and make a play. It’s also not to late to fix what’s broken. These short 3 minute videos are perfect for video IPods or other portable devices. I think what we really need is Jason Calacanis to come in make move set a good example for people to follow.

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

Looking at Search Video News

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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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I was reading SEOMoz The New Yahoo! Home Page – Why isn’t this News? and am still feeling the halo effect of Gladwell’s keynote at pubcon. I actually started to post this in the comments, but it got to long and wordy so decided to post it here (sorry Rand).

I like Yahoo, I like a lot of the products they offer, I like the tools they make, and I like that they play much nicer with web publishers. However Yahoo is missing something, they don’t have an evangelist, they don’t have a maven who’s working the interweb, and blogorama bringing the Yahoo goodness to the masses. Don’t get me wrong Jeremy (who wore the same “I’m not Matt Cutts” t-shirt I did to pubcon) is doing his thing, and this isn’t a dig against him. I actually like that he’s critical of Yahoo from time to time. However there’s no one out there shamelessly self promoting what Yahoo is offering to the publishers, the users, the bloggers, the digg-nation, the netizens and most importantly the digerati. In short Yahoo is missing a missionary who sincerely believes in Yahoo what they are offering, and how it will make the web a better place. Here are some examples of what I would do if I were Yahoo:

• Show local businesses how they can use Yahoo local, show them how to get customers to submit reviews, show them how they can integrate Yahoo Maps. Show them how integrating Yahoo offerings adds value to their website and company.
• Push Flickr into the mainstream, sure you and I know what flickr is but how about your neighbor or your grandma, find a way to get it in front of them, maybe offer a bounty for referrals, for people who sign up new pro accounts.
• Del.icio.us ok don’t you dare screw this one up, it has got to be one of my favorite things you own. It took me a while to “get it” though, you need to work on a way to get it outside of the geek set. How about tieing in with a TV show or movie. Get people tagging clues from CSI or something, then at the end of the season open up a contest and have people solve a mystery or puzzle with things they’ve tagged from the show. What you are really doing is teaching people how to use the tool, and how helpful it can be.
• Yahoo 360 how about you bring some cool people into the community. Some marquee name athletes or summer movie blockbuster celebs. Have them post to their Yahoo 360 blog and connect with other people.
• Get a team of people who develop and release code that lets you do cool new stuff to integrate Yahoo offerings into people’s web pages and blogs. It doesn’t matter if they integrate it into your platform or not, just get the message out that “hey Yahoo has some cool stuff and look what you can do with it”

C’mon Yahoo it’s not to late to step up to the plate and do what’s got to be done.

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

How I would Fix Yahoo

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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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In what may turn out to be a PR nightmare Yahoo admits to not wanting to be number 1 in search

Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance

“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

Idiots! Complete and utter idiots, why not just roll over and admit you’re someone else’s lap dog content to get nothing more than table scraps. As crappy as the MSN search engine really is, at least they aren’t running away like a frightened dog with it’s tail between it’s legs. I keep saying it Google is ripe for a slip up. There’s no need to take a provocative stance, just wait patiently and silently in the wings, stalking … waiting for the right moment when they slip up, at the first sign of blood move in for the kill. We know you’re faster than the lava lamp lounge, so why are you throwing in the towel?

Categories:( google | google | yahoo | yahoo | seo | seo | search.engine.optimization | search.engine.optimization)

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

Yahoo: Yea We Suck and We Don’t Give a Damn!

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All right the cat’s out of the bag everybody knows about and is using WebGuerilla’s excellent backlink tool the tattler. It works off of Yahoo’s Site Explorer data and lets you dump it into a spreadsheet. I also like to mix it with Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer to look at anchor text.

Now if there’s an enterprising programmer out there who’d like to take it to the next level here’s what I’d like to see. Take the data from Yahoo Site Explorer, and work out 2 or 3 link nodes and build a graphic representation of the link network, ala touchgraph style. What you’d end up with is a nice reverse crawl that would show site clusters. I’m pretty certain Google is already using this level of data to asses quality of backlinks.

Categories:( webguerilla | webguerilla | aaron.wall | aaron.wall | backlink.analyzer | backlink.analyzer | seo | seo | search.engine.optimization | search.engine.optimization)

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

Show Me Your Backlinks

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My niece who is really a wonderful sweet little girl, has a very small menu of acceptable foods. She will eat cheerios, pancakes, or eggs (scrambled only) for breakfast. For lunch and dinner the list of acceptable foods includes mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, steak, hot dogs, French fries and one or two other things that escape me at the present moment. However when you come to my house for dinner you are exposed to a wide variety of foods. For example the rice and grains in my pantry right now are cous cous, risotto, quinoa, basmati, and jasmine.

So what does the eating habits of children have to do with personalized search? Well if the big three Google, Yahoo, and MSN have their way you’ll all end up like my niece, getting only what you want and never experiencing diversity or relishing the feeling of serendipitous joy. Instead of ordering something from a menu and discovering something new like bacon polenta you’ll be stuck with the same foods week after week. Personalized search will use your own individual zeitgeist to determine which sites you are clicking on and try to give you more of the same. Sorry Goolge you can keep your chicken nuggets and French fries, I’d much rather have chicken strips breaded with Doritos cool ranch and sweet potato fries anyday.

Categories:( google | google | yahoo | yahoo | msn | msn | personailzed.search | personailzed.search)

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

Personalized Search and My Niece

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SEO Case Study: Optimal Title Structure

Experiment: To determine what the optimal structure is for a title soley for page ranking.

Hypothesis: Page titles are one the most important on page ranking factors, and achieving the best layout will help a page rank for it’s desired phrase. I believe that that [Keyword Phrase : Title] will rank higher than any other construct, followed by [Keyword Phrase] in isolation.

Procedure: To test my theory I created the following experimental files:

To allow you to see the results I published the files on this website. However to keep the experiment valid and free from “tampering” I repeated the experiment on two other websites, who’s URL’s I will keep secret (from this point forward known as control group 1 and control group 2). To keep the results as pure as possible I created a 4 word phrase combinations which had no websites showing results at the inception of this test.

From this test it appears that Google favors [Keyword Phrase : Sitename] and MSN favors [Keyword Phrase]. Yahoo however seems to have a problem indexing all of the files quickly, so no conclusions can be made about Yahoo’s rankings. Additionally conducting an [allintitle:Keyword Phrase] and [allintitle:"Keyword Phrase"] yielded the same results on Google.

One test on Google yielded slightly different results. As has been observed in other tests, Google results often seem to vary slightly with testing samples. This is probably do to “intellegent factoring” of multiple aspects in Google’s ranking algorthym (either that or Matt’s messing with me).

When I take over an existing website or start working with a client’s existing website, the first two things I will look at and change are the title tags and internal anchor text. From my experience these are the two changes that give you the most bang for your buck. If you have new website or a sandboxed website it may be more beneficial for you to leave the page titles with just the keyword phrase until you can get enough trust/quality/link diversity to get organic traffic from Google. Just make sure you make it easy to go back and change/adjust. Alternatively you could try cloaking IP specific delivery for your title tags, but I’ve never tried it myself, although it seemed to work for Google until they banned themselves.

Again these tests would be more conclusive if others repeated them over a wide variety of domains and published the results. As an incentive if you don’t do it on an uber spammy website, I will link to your published test results.

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

Optimal Titles: SEO Case Study

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