Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

When I launch my browser (Firefox) it starts with 4 tabs. The first three are the major engines with "seo services" in the query just so I can keep close tabs on how we're doing. The 4th is another Google datacenter with the same information. Yes, I'm that obsessed. It also gives me a close watch on what's going on at Google - I can constantly see any time a minor adjustment is underway.

When I walked in the door this morning, our Director of SEO Services Daryl Quenet asked me if I'd seen the results and who was up today. He was getting a different set of results than I had gotten just a short while earlier. After searching other phrases it became pretty clear - there's a minor update underway. If fact, we have one client that in the duration of a call was in position 3, then 22, then 13 and then 6 (and it was about a 5 minute call).

In the results for the competition for "seo services" I've admittedly been a bit disheartened with who we're competing against lately. As I've noted previously on our blog, there was once a time when we were up against WeBuildPages for the #1 spot. That isn't the case anymore and unfortunately, a lot of the sites now beating WeBuild have what I would consider to be "less that ideal" link strategies. To me, I'd almost rather be #2 in a solid competition against worthy opponents than #1 in a competition against sites that have sloughs of footer links and blogrolls. Basically, I'd rather be up against "real" linking strategies.

Unfortunately, it appears that the newer algorithm (and it's been this way for a while now) is favoring link strategies that go exactly against the best practices. I'm not going to name names here (you can check the backlinks of our competitors (and us too if you like) to find out who's doing what - on maybe spend your time researching your own industry) but here's some of what we're seeing get results that they shouldn't be:

Paid Links:
Ugh. There are numerous competitors out there who have bought links and are reaping the benefits. No matter what Matt and crew might say over at chez Google - they're just not as good at devaluing them as we're being told. One of the sites I was looking into has many paid links in obvious locations on irrelevant sites and is doing quite well with them. Now, I'm not saying go out and get yourself some paid links - it's always a risky venture but this is definitely the area of biggest annoyance to me as we have no paid links simply because we're not willing to risk our rankings and to watch sites climb into the top 10 with them, even after being reported, is annoying to those of us that have secured legitimate links with great effort and is hurting those that they beat out.

Links On Client Sites:
Alright, admittedly this is a tactic that I don't love but I can't really argue it. We tend not to put links on client sites. I personally find it to be in poor form to charge a client and then take a link from them HOWEVER there is a legitimate claim that this is advertising and giving credit where it's due.

Regardless of what side of the equation you're on in that debate though, should these really count as backlinks? They're not links given by the site owner as a vote, they're default links put there by the party that will benefit. Google needs to find a way to discount these links much better than they are right now.

Run Of Site Links:
This is an easy one. If a link appears on every page of a site - it shouldn't count. If it's there for traffic, great but I can't think of a single reason why a run-of-site link, any run-of-site link, should be legitimately counted as a vote. Even if the link is to a parent company - the link is not so much a vote as a disclaimer and should be treated as such.

Widgets:
This one might come right after paid links in my list of annoying links that shouldn't, but do, seem to be working right now. One of the sites I've found has that majority of their links coming from a counter that links with an image to their site. From what I can see, they don't even offer the counter on their site and thus - they likely (though not necessarily) have paid to have their link put in by the counter creator as a "sponsor".

In this case we have a paid link combined with a low quality, non-anchor text link (though the images to have alt tags) that it effective. This obviously shouldn't be the case if what we're trying to count are real, quality, vote-given links.

And So ...
So what's the purpose of this rant? Well, I know that people from Google visit our blog, I can see them in our stats and so my hope is that one of them will read this blog, take a look at how they're counting backlinks and give credit where it's due - to links worked for and earned by either providing valuable information, providing a valuable resource, or other such "tactics" that actually reflect a vote from one site to another rather than counting a default link with low value based on Google's own guidelines and articulated philosophy towards the subject.

And just to help things along I'm going to give a link to WeBuildPages for SEO services just to give them a boost. Now they just need to get their onsite optimization in place and perhaps we'll once again be up against companies that should be in the top ten. ;)

A Warning:
Now some of you may be thinking, "Hey, these tactics are working so let's do it !!!" If that's your mentality then I warn you to do so at your own risk. Google is trying to get a better value system in place for links and eventually they will succeed. If you're looking to only rank briefly then you might stand a chance but if what you want it to build a quality site that will withstand the ebb-and-flow of the algorithm over time (and I hope you are) then these tactics will eventually get caught and downward your site will tumble.

We're starting to see a very little bit of this in some cases (depending on which set of results we're seeing right now Google settles on) but not enough. My hope is that Google will be able to pick these links up, give them the credit they deserve (none in most cases) and let the true links acquired in mine and other industries count as they should.

Labels: backlinks, black hat, link building, paid links, webuildpages

Any one with any experience trying to get a site listed on DMOZ, knows that most of the time it can be a battle. One of my sites I have submitting 4 times over the last 2.5 years, without it being listed! This happens for various reasons, the most common is the editors just don't care, or they don't have time to maintain their category. The second was they seem to constantly have technical difficulties, at one point they lost several months worth of submissions (Although they don't admit to this fact). Check out this Form posting here to see just a few of their recent issues.

But that is just a side note as to why my faith was originally lost with this fine directory. Last week I was working on optimizing a client website, and was looking at the SERPs for their keyphrase. They are currently trying to compete for a state wide health insurance keyphrase (ie Alaska health insurance but a much higher competition state). And I noticed an anomaly in the results all the sites listed were between PR4 - 7, except for a single PR2 site. Let me tell you how quickly alarm bells went off. After a quick analysis of their backlinks I quickly discovered how they manipulated their results.

The website followed the standard header, top navigation, left navigation, then right content. Now this is how they got sneaky, in their header instead of their company name they listed their keyphrase (ie Alaska Health Insurance), with their real company name listed under the left navigation in small text. Then submitted their website to DMOZ under there keyphrase, and had it accepted in the regional health insurance page!

Now you might be asking how can just a DMOZ listing make such a different in a sites results? Firstly DMOZ is rather old with a lot of authority the Web Archive lists its first version cached as Jan 25, 1999. Secondly DMOZ isn't just one site, anyone can take the data from the directory and post it any where they like. So you can easily end up with 2 dozens links just from one submission over the course of time (I don't think most people tend to re-download the data set after the first time they set it up, so get listed as soon as possible).

So being a good netizen (Internet Citizen), and purely with the Google and the quality of the Internet at heart I filled out the "report abuse/spam" form documenting what had happened. Needless to say I was shocked when I looked at DMOZ yesterday to find out that in less then a week they had updated the listing with the actual companies name. As a result they have currently dropped from position 5 to 8, and I'm sure they will continue to drop at least a few more pages.

Maybe it just might be time again to submit my site to DMOZ!

Labels: backlinks, dmoz, search engine spam

Last night while sitting in my front yard pondering this latest update on Google (yes I know, I need to get a better hobby) a factor occurred to me that I hadn't considered previously. Now, I haven't had time to really test it yet but I am seeing some evidence of link growth rate being a factor in this recent update on Google.

Essentially what this means is that it is possible that sites with a high growth rate in links are ranking higher than sites that may have more links overall, but who's link acquisition rate is slow.

As noted, I have not had the opportunity to test this or even look into it in great detail however, it occurred to me and there are some indicators that this may be the case and as it was missing from our article on the update I felt it necessary to add it here.

I hope that this update was kind to you all and wish you well through the subsequent adjustments that are sure to come.

Labels: backlinks, google update

Thanks Google - Now I Can See My Backlinks !!!

Only a couple hours later and there's already an update below.

Well today appears to have been an even bigger day than I first thought. First there was the launch of Yahoo!'s Panama and now I'm reading in Google's press center that there are some great enhancements over there too. :)

At 2:44PM Google announced on their blog that they are providing even more information in their Webmaster Tools than previously. We've all done the backlink checks with link:www.domain.com only to be disappointed with the resulting list. Google hasn't shown a full list of backlinks in ages so how were we to know where are backlinks were from and where they were going. Well now we know. :)

In their Webmaster Tools the fine folks at Google are now showing a full list of the backlinks they know about that point to your domain and even better, they list off all the pages in your site so with a simple click of a button you can see the backlinks to any given page. The reason Google stopped showing the backlinks in full was that this list was too easily manipulated by SEO's (those crafty buggers ;) but not knowing the status of one's own site worked against website owners favor. This is a great addition to their tools and wins a BIG THUMBS UP from this SEO. Don't give my backlink data to my competitors, but thanks for letting me see it. :) Oh, but if you like you can give theirs to me. ;)

If you haven't already, create an account at Google's Webmaster Central. You'll be glad you did.

And Now, Personalization ...

And today I had brought to my attention an interesting page on the Google Search Results help area. A big thanks to Jim Hedger (co-host on Webmaster Radio) for pointing this out to me. The post reads:

When you're signed in to Google Accounts, you'll now get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. For example, if you use Google Bookmarks or Google Search History, you'll get more targeted web search results and recommendations for videos or gadgets. You can easily access these recommendations by adding the "Interesting Items" gadget directly to your personalized homepage.

And so the lives of SEO's everywhere gets just a little more complex. Truly personalized results? Now, if you see different results than I do, how exactly is a company like Beanstalk supposed to honor guarantees when what we're seeing may be different?

Alas, that is our problem to sort out and not yours (how happy are you about that?) but one this is sure, with better, more personalized results being fed, users are sure to win and SEO's will need to adapt. As I noted to Jim when he asked how it would affect SEO's, I replied:

"In the long run it will force SEO to do what they SHOULD do. Write compelling content for the target market, push into social media and establish links from industry hubs."

It might take more to rank sites when the exact variables are so specific to the end user however in the end the big winner is the client (oh, and the searcher). It might make my life a bit more difficult but it makes the industry and search engine stronger, and that can only be a good thing. Unless you're concerned about Big Brother. ;)

I refound a blog post from none other than Google patent guru Bill Slawski on the subject of personalization. I love patents as much as the next guy ;) but noone can do their analysis justice like Bill so rather than try in vain to capture what he has to say on the subject I'll just link to his post below. In his work you'll find great analysis and links to a number of related Google patents that will open your eyes as to what this all means. Thanks Bill and keep up the great work.

You'll find Bill Slawski's blog post titled, "Google Personalization Methods" here.

Labels: backlinks, google, personalization, webmaster tools