A New Scourge For Yahoo: Affiliate Mapspam :: Web Optimization Techniques
March 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Search Engine Land - There is a cautionary tale for Yahoo, Google or any company that allows user generated content in their local product. These affiliate spammers are deceptively providing a "service" that is unneeded and unwanted. Whatever they a
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The Shortcomings of the Long Tail :: Google Page Rank Update
March 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by HannahS
I work for an online marketing agency, and we’ve been working on a paid search campaign with a niche online job board for some time now. Received wisdom suggests that in order to create a cost effective paid search campaign you should focus on long tail search terms, as you’ll get more targeted traffic and cheaper clicks.
Now, we work with clients from a wide range of industries. Broadly speaking, the long tail has worked very well for us, particularly for highly competitive sectors like insurance and financial services, but seemingly this just isn’t the case for our niche job board client.
We were running job title focused ad groups, type of organisation focused ad groups, even the location focused groups, e.g., ‘job title in London / Manchester,’ etc. were seeing very low volumes and a desperately low click through rate. After a lot of head-scratching we decided to go back to basics, and back into the shoes of those searching. Once you stop and think about it, the answer is pretty simple – it’s all about the intent of the searcher.
If I’m looking for a job online, I’m not looking for my preferred search engine to return me my perfect job, I’m looking for the perfect job site. Until I have a look at what’s out there, to be honest I’m not even entirely sure I could define my perfect job. Obviously, there are some things I’d like – e.g., salary, commute not too hellish — but for a truly fabulous job I’d be willing to compromise on those things.
So, a marketing bod like me is far more likely to search for a fairly broad term like ‘marketing jobs’ rather than a very specific term like ‘Head of Marketing within 6 miles of central London’. Once I hit the relevant job site I’ll start narrowing down my search, but at the point that I hit the search engine I’m keeping my search broad.
I should probably state now that we’ve not totally abandoned the long tail, but in order to deliver volume we’re back to increasing our bids on the more generic search terms.
Now it strikes me that there are probably a few industries like this – real estate, dating, and so on. Anyone else care to share some examples?
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101 Five-Minute Fixes to Improve Your Web Site :: Search Tools For Web Pros
March 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A webmaster’s work is never done. What may have worked a few years ago when could be outdated today, so it’s important to constantly improve your Web site. However, a massive overhaul is just too much work to undertake at one time. Instead, tackle t
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What’s Good for the WMC HTML Verification File Isn’t Good for the Meta Tag :: SEO Gods… Search Experts!
March 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by Brent D. Payne
Most of you are probably aware that you can utilize the same HTML file to verify Google Webmaster Central access for several different domains and subdomains. Google makes that very easy to implement. Simply keep the HTML file handy and load it up in whatever folder you need to verify. I’ve been doing this for over a year now with Google HTML verification files. Why the hell Yahoo! doesn’t do this is beyond me. Their verification process is different for every domain and every Yahoo! Site Explorer user. For that reason alone, I haven’t verified a number of the Tribune domains with Yahoo!.
To make it even easier, Google will even follow a 301 redirect to verify a site. Yeah, that is really handy. Put your verification file in one location and then just do a 301 redirect to that verification file. For those on more complicated infrastructures, it can be actually easier than dropping the HTML file.
Bottom line . . . I’ve been singing praises about how user-friendly Google’s Webmaster Tools site verification process is for over a year now. Unfortunately, I now have to complain that they didn’t follow this same user-friendly aspect when it came to verifying sites via a Meta tag. While it’s still not as bad as Yahoo’s implementation, they do force you to use a different Meta tag on a per domain basis. Thus, you will need to login to Google’s Webmaster Tools every time you need to supply a webmaster the correct Meta tag for their specific domain.
Can anyone let me know why there is this disparity? Is there some type of security concern if you allow the same Meta tag? Is there some type of security concern that made Yahoo! do their crazy verification? Shouldn’t the search engines make the process as simple as possible for the webmasters?
This isn’t intended to be a rant, but a question and discussion. Hopefully, we can get the SEs to take notice and make it easier on the webmasters–especially Yahoo!.
Thanks!
Brent D. Payne, SEO Manager, Tribune Interactive
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Use ‘What Googlebot Sees’ to Find Scrapers :: Daily Search Engine Optimizations News
March 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by Brent D. Payne
Most of you are aware I recently took a position at Tribune as their in-house SEO manager.
One of the first things I did was get a current state of the union. After working through the issues of verification for the dozens of sites (another post, perhaps), I realized that ‘What Googlebot Sees’ for a handful of the domains is ‘Privacy Policy’. Now, this is obviously a red flag for us to add a ‘nofollow’ tag on the link (that’s perhaps another post also), but in addition to that, I found something else.
What’s that? What did I find?
Scrapers . . . lots of them. You’d think they’d take the time to add a line of code to their bot to remove such a common piece of code as ‘Privacy Policy’, but . . . nope.
Take a peek at your Webmaster Central console under the ‘What Google Sees’ section. Not only will it highlight what you should ‘nofollow’ but, if you dig a little deeper, you may find some scrapers. What you do next is your decision. Options? Take a legal stance, allow them to do it until you gain some more inbound links, reach out to them with an RSS feed (or other linking option), or do something a bit more blackhat, like making your ‘Privacy Policy’ type links an image with an alt tag for the targeted keyphrase. 
I’m not going to share what we’re doing (though it is not the latter), as that would lead to proprietary information; besides, that type of decision is going to be pretty site-specific, anyway.
P.S. They turned the river green on St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. Interesting, but not sure if it was worth standing in the cold for 45 minutes with my 4-year old son.
Brent D. Payne
SEO Manager
Tribune Interactive
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To Use Images or Not to Use Images in Your Posts :: Search Engine Marketing News
March 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
How important is using images in your posts? Michaels example is one of many to show the benefits of putting your little 3 minutes worth of effort into adding an image, including locating, cropping and tagging. As Michael puts it, “How nice is it to
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow “follows” so post your links.
