Archive for July, 2008
Google Knol - Google’s Latest Attack on Copyright
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Knol Off to a Quick Start
One day after Knol publicly launched Wil Reynolds noticed that a Knol page was already ranking. Danny Sullivan did a further test showing that 33% of his test set of Knol pages were ranking in the first page of search results. Danny was also surprised that his Knol was ranking #28 after 1 day. After citing it on his blog now that Knol page ranks #1 in Google!
Google’s House Advantage
From the above data (and the aggressive promotion of YouTube content after the roll out of universal search) it is fair to state that house content is favored by the Google algorithm.
Another Knol Test
Maybe we are being a bit biased and/or are rushing to judgement? Maybe a more scientific effort would compare how Knol content ranks to other content when it is essentially duplicate content? I did not want to mention that I was testing that when I created my SEO Basics Knol, but the content was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com). Even Google shows this directly on the Knol page
Google Knows its Duplicate Content
Is Google the Most Authoritative Publisher?
Given that Google knows that Business.com is a many year old high authority directory and that the Business.com page with my content on it is a PageRank 5, which does Google prefer to rank? Searching for a string of text on the page I found that the Knol page ranks in the search results.
If I override some of Google’s duplicate content filters (by adding &filter=0 to the search string) then I see that 2 copies of the Knol page outrank the Business.com page that was filtered out earlier.
Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm. Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source.
Hijacking Your Rankings via Knol - Google Knoljacking
Where this becomes a big issue is if a person…
- posts your content to Knol
- and buys/rents/begs/steals/spams/borrows a couple decent inbound links
they can get you filtered out of the search results - even if your site is an authority site. Bad news for anyone publishing copyright work online.
Google Knol Undermines the Creative Commons Spirit
Some new publishers decide to license their work via Creative Commons (hoping to be paid back based on the links economy), but Google wants no part in that! All outbound links on Knol are nofollow, so even if a person wants to give you credit for your work Google makes it impossible to do so.
Google Voids YOUR Copyright
Why do I get enraged by this sort of activity? I remember when one of my sites was voted against, and Google paid someone to steal it and wrap it in AdSense. The person who stole my content outranked me for my own content because a Google engineer thought that was reasonable and fair.
To this day someone publishes seobookopen.blogspot.com, a site dedicated to stealing and sharing an old version of my ebook. As the opening post on that blog explains
www.seobook.com very famous book from Aaron Wall its really good but paying $79 its really sucks so yesterday, I think why not to share this book to my friends etc openly in text by decompling Acrobat files
Can a casual mention get it removed? Nope. Can flagging it as spam and highlighting that it is stolen copyright content get it removed? Nope. I need to file a DMCA request to get it removed. (Or maybe they will remove it out of embarrassment after I hit publish on this post…we shall see!)
Google Pays Thieves
Google doesn’t like lonely cheating housewives, unless it favors their business objectives.
Microsoft Search BrowseRank Research Reviewed
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cNet recently covered a new Microsoft Search research paper on BrowseRank [PDF]. The theory behind the concept of BrowseRank is that rather than using links (PageRank) as the backbone of a relevancy algorithm, you could look at actual usage data from hundreds of millions of users.
Since there are more web users than webmasters BrowseRank would be a more democratic system, but many users are mislead and/or easily influenced by social media, public relations, and some referral spam strategies, so BrowseRank could surface some low quality temporal information, making manipulating Digg and other “firehose of traffic” sources more valuable than they perhaps should be. Although if certain referrals were blocked (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) and/or BrowseRank was combined with a blended search strategy (like how Google mixes Google News in their organic results) Microsoft could have a bit more confidence in waiting out some traffic spikes to see if traffic is sustained. And this potential shortfall (if managed properly) could actually lead to a major advantage over the stale effect of PageRank. If you create non-resource hyped up piece of linkbait that gets a quick rush of links and never gains any more votes then why should that page have a lot of authority to pass around your site?
BrowseRank can look at user time on site to help determine if the site was of quality, and perhaps even normalize for page length, but what happens if a page is really good at answering a common question? Even if people only ask it once in a great while quality content should not be penalized for great formatting, ease of use, and a great user experience - though as search evolves search engines will keep displaying more content in the search results, license specialized data, and answer many common questions directly in the search results.
In addition to looking at traffic that comes via links, BrowseRank also identifies direct URL visits via bookmarks or typing in URLs. These types of traffic sources
are considered “green traffic” because the pages visited in this way are safe, interesting, and/or important for users.
Such an algorithm would add value to direct navigation keyword rich URLs. Another obvious extension of such an algorithm would be identifying brand specific searches and URL searches, and bucketing those referrals into the green category as well.
To encourage such branded search queries and long user interactions it would be better to create strong communities with repeat visitors and many web based tools rather than allowing useful user interactions occur through browser extensions.
Another big issue with BrowseRank is that it highlights many social media sites. The issue with social media is that any piece of content is generally only relevant to a small number of people and most of the content is irrelevant to the population at large. Unless the search engine had a lot of personalized data promoting the general purpose social media sites would be blunderous - surfacing lots of results that are irrelevant, spam, or both.
One of the big advantages PageRank has over BrowseRank is an economic one.
- People are more likely to link at informational resources, thus surfacing those pages and sites higher in the search results.
- This gives Google’s organic search results an informational bias which makes searchers more likely to click on Google’s paid ads when performing a commercial search.
- Google also has the ability to arbitrarily police links and/or strip PageRank scores to 0 with the intent to fearmonger and add opportunity cost to anyone who gathers enough links pointing at a (non-corporate owned) commercial domain. This layer of social engineering coerces publishers to create the type of content Google likes to rank.
Taking Your Beginning Blog To The Next Level Of Traffic - by Michael Natkin
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Like so many pursuits in life, it is easy for blogs to get stuck in an intermediate rut. I know, because I’ve been there. My site, Herbivoracious.com, has hit several plateaus in its first year of life. Each time the visits started to level out, I debated whether it was worth the effort to keep writing if only a few people were going to read it.
Naturally I wondered what it would take to get more exposure for my site. So I began to research all of the great information out there on promoting your blog. And there is no shortage of advice. I know, because I’ve spent countless hours reading articles, with more tips than you could ever follow - some of them contradictory.
Aaron & Giovanna’s Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization provided the most straightforward and usable techniques that I found, and since I’ve put them into play, my search hits have gone up dramatically, as you can see:
In this article I’ll share with you some of their ideas that I found especially easy and effective to implement, along with a few practical suggestions of my own.
Allocate Your Time Wisely
When I lived in Milwaukee, I used to pass a corner grocery whose hand-painted sign said “Where Cash Is King”. If the Internet could paint a sign for itself, it would say “Where Content Is King”.
Far and away the most important thing you can do on your blog is write great posts and include great pictures and video. Even if you manage to draw visitors to a site with relatively few, crappy articles, they won’t come back. The search engines are actually pretty smart, and they aren’t going to send traffic to you if there isn’t value there, and other quality sites aren’t going to link to you either. Besides, how happy are you going to be if you aren’t proud of your material? You won’t be blogging for long.
So bottom line, you should be spending at least 80% of your time developing content, and only 20% improving the site. Naturally it will be sporadic. I’ve had brief periods, such as when I recently added this Visual Index, where I spent a ton of time on site design. But most weeks I don’t mess with the blog at all, I just write my posts. Remember that your design is a work in progress, don’t feel as if you have to perfect it out of the gate.
Get Off The Beaten Path
It is a lot easier to be a big fish in a small pond than a minnow in the ocean. If your posts are all on extremely popular topics, it will be hard for them to get to the front page of a search engine no matter how good they are. That is where the long tail of the curve comes in. This post I wrote about making fluffy couscous is number 5 on Google for “how to make couscous”, and generates traffic every day. Imagine how much more effective that is than a post about chocolate chip cookies, which everyone and their grandmother has written about. The same is true in any subject area. Your thoughts about what a fine orator Barack Obama is are no doubt incisive, but probably not going to send you a lot of hits.
Get To Know Your Blogging Platform
When I first started blogging, I was happy enough to use a basic template. Before long I’d graduated to the pro level of TypePad, where I could tweak my own CSS. Then when I was ready to do more sophisticated design and SEO, I moved to their top-of-the-line Advanced Templates system so I can implement just about any feature I want.
Whichever blog platform you use, there is a lot of power under the hood. Don’t expect to absorb it all at once, but learn about the pieces that are relevant to your current goals, and build an arsenal over time. Even the simplest things, like knowing how to schedule posts for future delivery so you can keep content flowing during a vacation, can make a huge difference.
Besides reading the documentation for your platform, learn which external websites are considered the experts and hang out there. For example, John T. Unger’s TypePad Hacks is a legendary resource for TypePad users. Many of the concepts I learned from SEOBook were then implemented using code I found there.
Get To Know An Analytics Tool
Your blogging platform or host probably let’s you do a basic review of your referrer logs. You should look at them regularly to get a sense of how your traffic is doing and where it is coming from. Before long you are going to want to dig deeper. I recommend Google Analytics because it is free, easy to set up and use, and let’s you drill down deep to figure out what is and isn’t working on your site.
Likewise, you should immediately move your RSS feed over to FeedBurner. It is also free, they will give you good stats on people that are reading your content without going to the site, and lots of useful features too. Their FeedFlare service let’s you trivially add links so that users can socially share your post via digg/stumble/facebook/email and so forth.
Don’t Waste My Time, Man
There are a ton of sites out there that offer badges and widgets which promise to network traffic too and from your site. I won’t name names, but for the most part I think this is a waste of time. At least in my niche, I just never saw any significant hits coming in from them, and they make your blog look like a tacky MySpace page, which will cause visitors to click away in horror.
Also, until you are getting at least 1,000 page views a day, don’t waste a lot of time on monetization. (Unless of course the point of your blog is to review products). On Herbivoracious I have Google AdSense between posts, adsdaq ads, and a featured publisher deal with a food blog aggregator. I also include Amazon affiliate links whenever I mention a food, utensil, or book that my readers might like. I’ve screwed around a fair amount with the types of ads, positioning, and style. My total earnings from all of that is negligible, maybe $50/month. I probably shouldn’t tell you that, but I want to be honest to spare you the pain of thinking you are doing it wrong. If I were doing it over, I’d skip it for the first year and just focus on building content and credibility.
Along those lines, you need to be realistic about your niche. Herbivoracious is sort of triply niched: food > vegetarian > fine dining, which means that my readers are loyal but not necessarily legion. I don’t have any illusion that it can have the same readership as Gizmodo! It might someday lead to a book deal, or a job offer or some other amazing thing, but it is unrealistic to think it can ever be my day job.
Finally, please don’t bother trying to do so-called Black Hat SEO. Google is smarter than you. Trust me. No link farms. No hidden text on your pages. Don’t try to spam StumbleUpon or digg. All you are going to do is get yourself blackballed.
Optimize Your Design
There are a few basic things you should do in your design to make sure that both users and search engines can find your best content.
- Write good page titles with specific keywords, preferably near the beginning. For example, imagine I started with a hypothetical post title of “Recipe: Tofu Grilled With Lemongrass And Thai Chilis”. “Recipe” is generic and though useful, is going to appear on millions of pages, so let’s move it to the end to get “Tofu Grilled With Lemongrass and Thai Chilis - Recipe”. I thought I was done at this point, but when Aaron reviewed this article, he pointed out that using keyword suggestion tools we can see that people search for “grilled tofu” rather than “tofu grilled”, so let’s make our final title “Grilled Tofu With Lemongrass and Thai Chilis - Recipe”. The other descriptors (lemongrass, Thai chilis) will help people envision the dish, and will generate search results as well, because of the long tail we discussed above.
- Be sure your meta description tag for each post is clear, as it can appears in search results. Well written descriptions increase the odds that a user will actually click to your page.
- The meta keywords tag, on the other hand, is pretty useless. Search engines mostly ignore them because they are so easily manipulated. So set them if it is easy for you but don’t worry about it.
- Put a caption on every image you use, so that image search engines will find them. Set the alt attribute on the img tag as well.
- Include a navigation bar that encourages new users to find your best content. For example, I have a “Most Popular Recipes” link. People who look at your best stuff are more likely to subscribe and visit often.
- Prominently feature links for readers to subscribe via RSS or email.
- If you feel comfortable, include a picture of yourself - people relate to faces.
- Include a “recent comments” section in your sidebar, and then be sure and respond to most or all comments. When other users see that you, the author, are responding they will be more likely to join in.
- Include a “recent posts” (or “related posts”) list after each post. When the user reaches that decision point after an article, they will be encouraged to remain on your site longer.
- Simplify, and then simplify some more. Make sure that everything on your site is there for a reason, especially the stuff “above the fold” on the front page. If you’ve got something useless on there, those are pixels that could be left pleasingly blank, or could be put to work driving traffic. For example, I replaced my list of Archives By Date which was filling a few hundred pixels of sidebar space, with a popup that serves the same function. The date archives are pretty obligatory, but really how many of my readers are looking for what I wrote in November, 2007 specifically? The popup fills the need but saves the pixels.
Don’t Forget, SEO is Only Part of the Traffic Story
Besides creating great content and optimizing for search engines, there are a lot of other things you can do to build traffic. Here’s are some of the keys, each of which is worth of a whole article:
- Build relationships with other bloggers, especially those in your niche and in your geographic area. You can start this by commenting respectfully on their blogs, or dropping them an email. Don’t ask for favors until you know someone a little. Instead, do small favors for them like linking to their blog, commenting with valuable info, suggesting related story ideas, participating in contests or surveys they are running and so forth.
- While you are reading other blogs, don’t just skim to find stuff you can comment on. Go deep, and learn from what is working for each author. Don’t try to copy their style. Be yourself but accumulate good ideas that you can incorporate.
- Learn about non-blog websites in your niche. For example, TasteSpotting, FoodGawker, and PhotoGrazing are invaluable for food blogs with good photography. They send hundreds of hits to each of my posts that they accept, and those are well targeted visitors that love food and have the potential to visit Herbivoracious regularly. Urbanspoon not only links all my restaurant reviews, they provide me with a way for users to automatically see the location, phone number and hours of each business, and simple social ranking. What are the equivalents in your neck of the net?
- The web is a huge place and you can’t know everything that is happening on it, but you can use Google Alerts to keep track of new web pages that refer to you or your site, and to keywords that are relevant to your niche. If someone writes about you, be sure and say thanks and go comment on that page. When a topic you care about comes up, strike while the iron is hot and write a post too. Watching your logs and analytics data pays off here too. If you see a burst of hits coming in from a site you didn’t know about, go check it out right away and see what you can do to to help that trend continue!
Wrap It Up, I’ll Take It
Blogging can be great fun, whether it is primarily an outlet for your thoughts, a way to showcase your talents or build your credibility as an asset to your profession or business, or even as a way to directly make money. If monetization really is your primary goal, you should definitely dive deep into the business side and do Aaron’s SEO Training Course. If your goals are more modest (at least for now), the tips above should help you get your hits growing in an encouraging direction.
Weekend Links
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I was recently interviewed by Eric Enge. On a related note, Bob Massa reminds us that asking to interview people is a great way to build links. Egobait works. Even a goofy contest where my wife is dressed up as a reindeer is bound to get a link. 
SEO for Firefox was updated to include nofollow on links that are blocked via a meta robots nofollow tag.
In this blog post Amit Singhal highlighted how Google’s search system is heavily dependent on creating local vocabularies.
Google AdWords has blended keyword targeting and site/placement targeting. They also bought Begun for $140 million from Rambler Media, the #3 Russian search/ad play. Dave Davis highlighted how you can use AdWords conversion stats to buy undervalued domains.
Google created Ratproxy to find site security related issues.
The Google speech team is beta testing audio search.
Wordpress 2.6 launched with a cool built in versioning system good for seeing how you edited your content over time.
Paul Graham shared 30 great web based business ideas he would like to invest into.
How to Migrate Blogger Powered Blogs to Wordpress
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I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain (smart) I was still using Blogger (dumb) when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word.
These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.
Step 1: Download and install Wordpress (also requires setting up a MySQL database).
Step 2: Make Wordpress URL configurations.
- set the category base to /c and set the tag base to /t
- set the post slug to /%postname%/
Step 3: Cloned my mom’s old blogger theme design using Themepress (cost $10), and then had to hack the CSS by hand for about 10 minutes.
After verifying the layout was fairly decent I deleted the blogroll links and the opening post.
Step 4: publish my mom’s old blog onto blogspot.com so I could import it to Wordpress using the one click import located at domainname.com/wp-admin/import.php
After importing it I used Blogger to republish the blog back to her domain instead of leaving a copy on Blogspot, such that she does not have a stray cloned version of her site floating around.
Once import was complete I looked it over and verified it generally looked good. If you still have your old site up you can view the Wordpress blog version by going to yoursite.com/index.php (presuming you installed Wordpress in the root of your site).
Step 5: rewrite the .htaccess file to include both the Wordpress specific functions and rewrite rules needed to lose the dates from the URLs. The exact .htaccess file you need to write depends on your old URL structure and file extensions (the below one redirects html and shtml files). Our .htaccess file looked like this (note there were a few dozen lines like the first line, but I limited it to one in this example for brevity)
redirect 301 /2008_07_01_archive.html http://www.fattyweightloss.com/2008/07/
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (d{4})/(d+)/(.*).shtml$ $3/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule (d{4})/(d+)/(.*).html$ $3/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Please note that when Wordpress imports your blog some of the stop words are removed from the URLs, which can end up creating some mean 404 errors until you line up the new URLs with the old ones (which we deal with in step 7). Also, if you used Blogger tag pages then you might need to make your .htaccess file a bit more complex than the above one, adding entries to redirect the tag pages.
Step 6: Delete my mom’s old static file archives.
If you are afraid that something might get hosed up with the move you can rename the old archive files and folders. For example:
- Name the root index.html to something like index5.html
- If you have a /2004/ folder make it something like /12004/
After these are renamed or deleted click around the site and verify it generally works.
Step 7: Installed a couple SEO related plug ins.
Akismet - comment anti-spam tool installed by default, but I had to get an API key and enable it.
SEO Title Tag - allows you to make the page title and H1 post heading different…great for on page optimization.
Redirection plug in - keeps track of 404 errors and allows you to redirect URLs.
What I did, rather than redirecting URLs, was find the URL slugs that did not align with the old URLs and rewrite the URL slugs to add the stop words into it (I believe the most common ones were and and the).
I monitored 404 errors logged by the redirection plug in for ~ 4 days and fixed everything I came across. I figure all the important, well linked to, and/or high traffic posts should have got traffic within the first 4 days.
After 8 weeks I will flush the 404 error log and look for any stray link equity that I am not capturing, and redirect those URLs to their new location.
WASABI Related Entries - this plug in automatically creates a list of related entries wherever you like in your theme (you can install it in the sidebar or possibly after your comments). The beauty of such a plug in is that it allows you to keep more of your PageRank flowing internally, and it allows you to put a bunch more keyword rich content within a page without it looking spammy. For instance, given the following image you know what the related post is about without even seeing it.
Lorell reviewed a variety of other related post plug ins.
Step 8: While I was fixing up my mom’s URLs I helped offset the revenue shortfall from the short term traffic decline by using IE conditional comments to place an extra AdSense block on her 404 page when Internet Explorer viewers accessed the error page.
Step 9: Final window dressings
Use Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl the site to look for any broken links you need to fix. Please note that you may need to change the number of threads running or Xenu might get blocked by your server. I had no luck with 30 threads, but 4 worked ok.
Set up your robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot from trying to create search pages (?s=). Also prevent them from trying to index admin pages, feeds, trackback URLs, and the p= post URLs (presuming you are using post slugs as mentioned above).
User-agent: *
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /*p=
Disallow: /?q=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /*trackback
Disallow: /*feed
Disallow: /*wp-login
Disallow: /*wp-admin
Disallow: /*xmlrpc.php
Matt Cutts offers some tips to protect your Wordpress blog from getting hacked. Patrick Altoft offers tips on how to use a Google Alert to check if your blog gets hacked.
Map out keyword strategy and assign old posts to related categories. Set your default category to something that is useful rather than leaving it as uncategorized. While editing particularly high traffic posts it might make sense to see if the page title or page contents could be further improved to make the post even more successful. In some cases a post can rank for a wide array of related keywords.
While ensuring that are category pages are linked to sitewide, I used conditional PHP statements in the sidebar.php file for monthly archives such that they were linked to from the homepage, but not from the individual post pages. This drives more link equity toward the category level pages, while driving less to the date based archives (as we would rather rank for low fat recipes than for August 2007).
<?php if ( is_home() || is_page() ) { ?>
<li><p class=”sidebar-title”>Archives</p>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>
As a bonus, one could also add a plug in for editing default category pages, but we have not done that yet as we still have a long way to go with categorizing the current contents first. Anyone know of a good plug-in to edit category pages?
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