As Google Checkout ramps up, many thin arbitrage / shopping aggregator sites are going to see a significant love loss from Google. In September Andrew Goodman wrote a piece on how paid search and organic search quality criteria may play off each other, after coming across a post on Inside AdWords where Google stated that some types of sites are likely to merit a low quality score:

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

• eBook sites that show frequent ads

• ‘Get rich quick’ sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

Market Saturation

It does not help any of the shopping aggregators that there are about a dozen competitors (BizRate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping, NextTag, Epinions, DealTime, Pricegrabber, Pricerunner, Yahoo! Shopping, etc.). From a marketing standpoint almost all of them offer near identical user experience, so few of them are remarkable or linkworthy. The whole field (including Yahoo!) compete based on renting large swaths of links.

Everyone MUST Rent Links to Compete

Given Google’s recent war cries against buying and selling links, and that there are so many shopping comparison sites, it is easy for Google to whack a few of them with it going unnoticed by anyone outside the companies. But if you are in the comparison shopping field and do not rent links, how can you compete with Yahoo! when they do? You can’t.

The Fall of BizRate.com

I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them. In fact, I didn’t even see the US site ranking for “biz rate”. For that term bizrate.co.uk ranks #1. When I visit the UK site from a Google search result for “biz rate” the site asks if I want to view the US site or the UK site.

Google’s Algorithmic Whitelists Are Not Carved in Stone

BizRate, which sold to the E.W. Scripps company for $525 million, used to be on Google’s editorial white list.

The “voice” delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.

As media gets more saturated, we get better at filtering out garbage. Jakob Nielson’s article about writing articles instead of blog posts does a great job of explaining why writing fewer and more in depth articles is effective for gaining and keeping attention in a competitive marketplace.

On a related note, Frank just noticed a TV show skipping the TV and starting out on the web. There is no easier way to increased perceived authenticity than having a direct and open relationship with the audience.

IBM also offered research on the attention economy in a paper titled Vying for attention: the future of competing in media and entertainment. Rich Shefren recently created a mindmap of what he calls the Attention Age Doctrine, which shows why people are willing to pay larger premiums for great advice and nothing for decent advice.

1. The not for profit site that is down, requiring you to buy through the payment link inside of Google’s cache

2. The site with Google Checkout and Google AdSense on their home page
3. The site with a sleazy Clickbank affiliate ad for how to steal stuff
4. The site with no money back guarantee
5. The site with a design that looks like I created it in January 2003 (my first month on the web)
6. The eBay member with 0 reputation
7. The eBay member that takes a month and a half to ship
8. The eBay member selling authentic lithographs
9. The eBay member selling the item used

While I listed the above faults as though each was a different site, many of the sites actually suffered from multiple trust eating offenses. I consider myself a savvy searcher and yet these were the best sites I could find for what I wanted to buy. Because of the price-point I was unwilling to trust any of them enough to buy.

At lower price points we are more likely to let little things slide, but almost every site undermines conversion rates. A year from now I will probably look back on this post and laugh at some of the things I was screwing up today.

Amazon.com not only offers stuff like the holiday toy list, but they

• offer video samples of products in use

• allow you to find out what is new, what recently got hot, and their best sellers by category
• list the highest rated consumer reviews near each product
• allow users to comment on the reviews
• tell you what other consumers who viewed the item you are looking at eventually bought

All of that editorialized information makes people more likely to talk about their site (free marketing), makes people more comfortable buying (higher conversion rates), and thus increases how much Amazon can afford to pay for traffic (through search or affiliate channels).

But you don’t have to have that sort of scale to editorialize your content. Many niche sites would do well to integrate user feedback. How hard is it for your content management system to create a most popular list which links to your highest traffic pages or most frequently sold items? After setting it up, it requires almost no effort to maintain, but provides social validation for what is already popular.

If you sell something expensive and want to avoid being replaced by improved technology and consumer feedback aggregation you should look to sell an experience instead of an object. One of the easiest ways to do that is by editorializing the offer and following up with the customer throughout the purchase process.

Manufacturers are going to foot the bill for some new types of product information packaging, but by the time they do everyone will have the same information and it will no longer be an advantage. Those who are quickest to adopt the new information formats and new types of interactivity will have fatter profit margins.

I have been a big fan of linkbait, but for all its upsides it does have many potential risks that are rarely discussed by most marketers. Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.

The potential upside of a linkbait driven marketing campaign is growing smaller by the day. In the third video here, DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.

Given that Google hand edits some hyper-successful linkbaits, is it any surprise that they aim to minimize the upside potential of random one off linkbaits? A couple of my better friends who are a bit cynical went so far as stating that linkbait is only promoted by search engineers because it is so easy to detect and devalue. Linkbait is the new reciprocal links page.

Compare linkbait to developing a real brand. Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding. If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you. They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results. They can show at most a few ads before they list your site, or they degrade their user experience. And, as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases. Brand building is nothing they could ever really penalize, as they have no reason to want to penalize companies for creating real brands.

You don’t have to be a brand guru to learn how to build a brand. Simply discover a couple legitimate channels, track why people talk about them with Google alerts, and replicate the best ideas while ditching the bad ones.

I am by no means a standard for success (I have many flaws that need fixed), but this 5 minute and 25 second video highlights some of the things I did right that helped me do well on the web.

I am off to the blogging conference tomorrow, so no videos for a few days, but please let me know what you think of this one. If you will be at the Blog World Expo I am speaking there Tuesday about SEO. Feel free to stop by and say hi.

• Register Domains Early & Often: As soon as you have a good idea go register the related domain. The registration and re-registration fee is negligible compared to the potential rewards of executing on a good idea.

• Built At Least a Few Links: Search engines and web users have a limited number of ways to gauge trust and credibility. Setting up at least a basic site and building a few links for it costs next to nothing compared to the potential rewards of owning a good idea. Throw out a shingle, get it a few links, sit on it for a year and come back to it.
• Ride Successful Trends: You don’t have to be first, but it doesn’t hurt to be. Also look to duplicate some of the best ideas from the past, while looking for ways to modernize them.
• Reinvest in Your Best Channels: If something is a success reinvest in improving the design, the layout, and the offering. If you are beyond self sustaining you are not far from making relatively large profits. A few months of learning, testing, and tracking can lead to a ten fold increase in income.
• Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow: Google is mapping out your psychological flaws. Tomorrow the web is going to be dirtier and more competitive. Skipping one hour of work today might mean 3 hours of work next year or 12 hours of work the following year.

The Website Health Check tool aims to provide a simple and intuitive interface to seeing if your site has any major SEO issues. The site queries Google to grab pages you have indexed in Google, and looks for issues amongst the first 1,000 results.

If your site is exceptionally large, you can use the date based filters to view a sample of recently indexed pages in Google to see if there are any duplication issues amongst those pages.

Questions Answered by the Website Health Check Tool

• Is Google indexing your site? Are they quickly indexing your new pages?

• Do you have duplicate content pages getting indexed in Google?
• Do you have canonical URL issues?
• Are any of your pages in Google missing page titles?
• Does your server send correct error messages?

Feedback Needed

This tool is in beta. Please leave feedback below.

I sent the programmer this URL and he would love to get your feedback on what you think of it. We are looking to have version two out before the end of the month.

Features We Are Looking to Add

• Allow you to search for not just a site, but a site and a keyword, like [seobook.com seo]

• Add indexed page counts from all major global search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask)
• Allow webmasters to grab results from any of the above 4 engines, or mix and match
• Make each data point we collect link to the source

What other features would you like to see?

Video About How to Use the Website Health Check Tool

Try the Website Health Check tool today.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• why you should ignore the trap of free content + ads as a business model

• how creating and marketing free content and promotes information pollution
• how to package and sell information
• how you are not like a typical web user
• why you need to take advantage of new trends and ignore trends of old
• what brands actually sell
• how primitive the web is

Many of the points he hits on are similar to my post titled Death of the Book: Publishers Will Become Interactive Media Artists with the exception that Brian is more eloquent and used much better formatting. If you only read one thing this week, make sure Brian’s Teaching Sells report is on that short list.

Good Job Google

Here is an example of the spell correction working right…

Lets say you want to go to my blog located at www.seobook.com/node, but misspelled node as nodd. When you search for www.seobook.com/nodd they offer the correct URL as a suggestion.

Bad Job Google

Now lets say that I misspell a filename. What if I typed www.seibook.com/bok (If you add a second o to the word book in the filename this URL exists). What does Google do? Even when I am not signed in, Google STILL recommends people go to SeoBook.com, to the URL www.seobook.com/blog instead of recommending they go to seibook.com/book/

In that last case correcting the URL and keeping the people on the same site only took changing 1 letter, but Google decided instead to change a letter in the domain name, and change 3 in the filename!

Why Not Fix This?

What about errors in the domain extension? If you type in ASP.nt (leaving out the e in net) Google does not correct that spelling error. If you type in ebay.cm (ebay.com leaving out the o) Google does not correct that error. Why launch a feature such as this without correcting the most common errors?

Via Domain Name News I recently discovered Sold Names, which aggregates publicly available price data for domain sales. You can also view last week’s sales at DN Journal. If you find someone underselling a domain name browse through their inventory and see if they have any others worth buying.

A few updates worth making:

• allow you to insert your RSS feed of your blog on the page

• track all comments from a user
• allow adding additional widgets / gadgets to profile pages
• layout improvements, but I am not sure how as of yet

What updates would you like to see made? Should any of the fields be expanded? Should any of them be killed?

You can edit your profile page under the my account section of the right sidebar.

Not that they asked for it, but here is my advice for Yahoo! Search:

• Following Google’s moves from last year is no way to catch them.

• How about marketing yourself on your key properties.
• Invest in Wikia search and share technology with them to attack Google from multiple fronts. Google engineers have openly admitted to frequently hand editing the search results. Now that search is back to being about people tell the USER that it is their web and THEY own it.
• What if you assumed you already lost the search battle and decided to counter Google by being open about search, and being actively involved with the webmaster community? What is the worse that can happen? People start talking about you, trying your product, giving you feedback to improve your product, talk about you, and you gain marketshare. Oh no!

Google Stats Are Wonky

Many of Google’s webmaster stats are rarely updated and/or intentionally inaccurate. And many stats change on a whim, while reflecting no real change in the structure of the web.

PageRank is the Wonkiest Stat of Them All

Toolbar PageRank scores are only updated about once every three months. In between updates hundreds of millions or billions of web pages are added to Google’s index. These new pages absorb PageRank and generally cause the PageRank of existing pages to be lowered. Pages that were a high PR 7 might become a low PR7, pages that were a low PR7 might become a high PR6, and so on. The one exception to this rule is that if your site’s inbound link authority grows faster than the web does then your PageRank score goes up.

PageRank is recomputed in near real time and toolbar PageRank scores are perpetually outdated. If you are starting from a PR0 and get a few quality links then of course you should expect a PageRank greater than 0 on the next update, but even the fact that your pages are getting indexed means you have some share of PageRank even if the toolbar does not show anything. In some cases the toolbar not only shows outdated data, but sometimes it even sticks, showing you the PageRank score of another site or showing all pages as 0.

It is no coincidence that Google chose not to update toolbar PageRank scores in a great deal of time before spreading more propaganda against paid links, and then launched a partial data push (how often do they do that)? This way when they finally update PageRank and many pages have a slightly lower PageRank score many webmasters will wonder “was I penalized?”

Why the Hate for Paid Links?

As Michael Gray rightly points out:

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to “know a guy” to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any “gaming theory” to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

If making PageRank function requires hand editing isn’t that an indication that PageRank is irrelevant? Why not change they relevancy algorithms rather than trying to scare people?

Deflecting Blowback

Danny Sullivan posted about Google’s latest battle against paid links. I followed up on the absurdity of the situation, and in response to our posts Danny and I were both called liars. Which might seem like a fair assessment of the situation to a person new to search marketing.

Why would Google make an official webmaster announcement, but provide no quotes for the story and not publish it on any of their own websites? Probably because they know what they are doing is illegal, and want to be detached from the story to not look like overzealous dictators.

What Google Can’t Cloak

The two things Google can’t cloak are the visitors they are sending you and how much they charge you for a click. Sure their ad auctions have a hidden “quality” factor to them, but that is just an indication of how much they trust your ad account and your site. If Google is sending you more traffic and ranking your site better then you have nothing to worry about.

My friend’s lower PageRank score was an anomaly. It was irrelevant, because at the core, his site is ranking better and Google is sending him more traffic. At the end of the day Google can put smoke an mirrors wherever they like, but if your search traffic trend is up you are not penalized.

Why Search Traffic Can Go Down Without a Penalty

1. Competition: if the competition is out-marketing you then your site might slip.

2. Seasonal traffic patterns: if you go out of a high demand season it makes sense that your traffic may drop even if rankings improve.
3. Automated filters: In some cased individual pages might get automatically filtered for being too closely aligned with a particular term, but they can usually overcome that by loosening the focus of those pages and their inbound anchor text. That is why it is important for an SEO to track their statistics, to know where they are and how reliant they are on each phrase. In some cases I have seen sites which ranked for many additional new queries but got filtered for one of their highest traffic terms. The page focus and anchor text was loosened and the page came back ranking better than ever.