All About Content

It’s pretty intuitive that higher rankings should result in greater website traffic. But in the world of SEO, lots of things are bandied about as facts, when actually they are often just one person’s opinion that kept getting repeated until enough people parroted it to make it sound authoritative. That’s why it’s always important to look for evidence that an assertion is true.

So do higher rankings result in more visitors? A picture is worth a thousand words, so check out these graphs tracking performance of one of the websites I manage, over a six month period:

The colored lines in the first graph illustrate the site’s ranking on Google for its most important keyword phrases. The second graph shows visits and page views. Looking at the dates, you can see that a change in rankings precedes a change in the number of visits - so you can assume causation, not just corrolation. So there - not that I was going out on a limb, but here’s evidence to back my claim that rankings do make a difference.

Additional clarification and answers to questions that ought to be asked:

Q: How did you create these graphs?

I use WebPosition Gold to track rankings. I output the data into an Excel file and then create a PivotTable. From the Pivot table I create a graph of the position my site held for a particular keyword phrase, using date as the x-axis and ranking as the y-axis. This will give you an easy-to-read look at upward or downward trends in positions.

If the analytics program you’re using on your site can’t generate something like my second graph for you automatically, just take the traffic data it does give you and plop it into an Excel file. Make another PivotTable to chart visits/page views over time and then superimpose the two for a clear view of how rankings affect your site.

Voilá, you’ve made your case that additional resources should be devoted to SEO.

Q. Isn’t it true that search engines penalize marketers who use WebPosition Gold?

WPG has a bad reputation among SEOs - with Google going so far as mentioning this product specifically as something that shouldn’t be used for optimization - but my use of WebPosition Gold is very conservative. I only use it to track positions, never to submit anything to a search engine.

I also don’t believe Google will “penalize” a site for any practices that can be faked by someone who isn’t in control of the site; otherwise everyone would be using this or similar software to get their competitors’ sites banned. By using a Google API key, I also avoid tripping Google’s CAPTCHA, which you’d otherwise do if you send too many automated queries in too a short a time. I’ve never run into any problems using WPG this way.

Q. Why did you only track Google positions?

The particular site’s rankings in Yahoo are fixed. They haven’t changed at all in 6 months, so I can factor them out when looking at at causal relationships. For simplicity’s sake, I didn’t include MSN Search because it doesn’t refer very much traffic to my site. You will want to monitor all three before you can determine whether to include them in your analysis.

If you are running PPC campaigns, you have to be able to filter ad-referred traffic out for this rankings-versus-traffic comparison to be at all meaningful.

Q. The keyword legend is illegible. What keywords are you tracking?

Can’t give away all my secrets now, can I? Anyway, does it really matter?

Q. Okay, but how did you decide what keywords to track?

I use a very unscientific calculus of two variables: which phrases are referring the most visitors to my site and which phrases, overall, Internet users are searching for the most. The former set of data you can get from your log files or analytics software. The second can be found using tools like WordTracker or Oveture’s keyword suggestion tool.

Q. What happened in late September that caused such a dramatic drop in your rankings?

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, but it happened before the Jagger Update came out. In fact, the site’s return to the top of the SERPs coincided with Jagger, so it doesn’t appear to have been any type of penalty caused by the update. (shrug)

I could speculate that it had something to do with Jagger raising the importance of links from “authority sites” - so those authority sites needed to be scrubbed before Jagger started. That’s why my site jumped around before the real search results reshuffle - Google needed to run the site through some special filters to confirm the site belonged among those sites whose links would be worth more. I could speculate. But I have absolutely no evidence for this - in fact, it’s not even an educated guess, I just made it up - so this entire paragraph is just a bunch of nonsense. Goes to show that you can’t believe much of what is written online about SEO.

MSN on Google - First Gates dismisses Google as copycat. Now MSN Search rep says results are “at least as good” as Google’s. Audience laughs.

Google retorts to Yahoo - Not that we’re saying it matters, but we’re bigger, nyah, nyah.

Yahoo on Google - Yahoo Search employee Jeremy Zawodny says Google is merely building Yahoo 2.0

Google’s Matt Cutts talks to Google Blogoscoped about various things, including giving props to Yahoo’s Web 2.0 successes.

Microsoft blogger and evangalist Robert Scoble warns that Google Maps is leaving competing Microsoft and Yahoo products in the dust.

I can’t find anyone talking much about MSN Search, except Microsoft, which just goes to show, IMO, that like the rest of us, neither Google nor Yahoo see the #3 engine as a major threat.

Since the consensus is, more or less, that the size of an engine’s index doesn’t matter, it’s the results you get, sometimes it’s just fun to experiment to see both the number of results returned and what the highest ranking sites are for a keyword that likely isn’t the subject of anyone’s SEO efforts.

This weekend, a search on “.com” yields:

• In Google - 6,450,000,000 results.
  Top 3: Yahoo, CNN, Amazon
• In Yahoo Search - 10,700,000,000 results.
  Top 3: DotComArchive.org, Wikipedia entry on “dot-com”, FuckedCompany.com
• In MSN Search - 2,751,291,895 results.
  Top 3: Microsoft Component Object Model, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Maps

Scroll down to see a comparison of PageRank (according to the Google Toolbar) and inbound links to each page (using the advanced link: operator in Google and in Yahoo’s Site Explorer). Couple of things to keep in mind: the PageRank score displayed by the toolbar isn’t the actual PageRank used in the Google algorithm. Real PageRank is recalculated continuously, whereas the Toolbar is only updated once every couple of months. Also, Google only displays a “sampling” of backlinks, not all the links it’s aware of.

Google and Yahoo Search sent 25% more visits to the 10 leading shopping comparison sites for the week ending Nov. 19 than for the same period in 2004, according to Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence firm. Furthermore, comparison shopping sites are taking a bigger share of shopping-related searches on the major search engines leading up to the 2005 holiday shopping season.

While Hitwise does cite increased user familiarity and comfort with the major shopping sites, it is not clear whether the 25% increase in traffic is also due to the increased PPC spending or organic SEO strategies, or both.

Wondering where to shop? eBay is the place to go find anything new and used, popular and obscure. The site boasts 168 million users with 60 million listings (including five million new listings per day). Nearly $1,400 worth of good are bought and sold every second. With numbers like these, eBay is often considered a barometer of consumer shopping trends (source). Shopping.com (an eBay company) also features a Consumer Demand Index to help you identify currently popular items.

But this holiday season, you might also want to try some other aggregator sites and/or marketplaces that will help you in your search for the perfect gift at the right price:

• For CDs and DVDs try Shopping.com (an eBay company) - With a pool of 60-plus online vendors for music and movies, this site ranks well on both availability and pricing.
• For electronics products, as well as jewelry, visit BizRate.com - Good search functionality and a clean layout make it easy to sort through brands and styles, as well as compare merchant ratings.
• Toy shoppers should try PriceGrabber.com - A site with one of the largest range of toy products. Create a “shopping agent” to notify you of price drops.
• For books, Amazon.com is an obvious choice but don’t stop there. If you want to do your part to support independent stores, don’t overlook Powells.com, which has a great selection and a money-back guarantee. Campusi.com, on the other hand, is an aggregator site that will help you find rare and out-of-print books from 50,000 different sources.
• Cell phones? Glad you asked. Visit Point.com for frequently updated “scoops” on new price drops of popular model wireless devices from online retail stores like Wirefly.com, Buy.com, Radio Shack and others. Wirefly.net also lists current best sellers, in case you need help picking a phone.

The first four recommendations come courtesy of Real Simple magazine.

Or rather, three security holes in Google products found this month. And, well, actually make it four (eh, see what I did there?). Considering the rate at which the company has been putting new applications on the market, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find a few bugs, I suppose. But the folks at the Googleplex have not been forthcoming about the security flaws found in GMail, Sitemaps, Google Base, and Google mini, which to many folks doesn’t sound like a do-no-evil kinda stance to take.

See also the Jan. 2005 story in The Register about a GMail/Froogle security issue.

The nine-page paper Web Spam Taxonomy (PDF), authored by Zoltán Gyöngyi and Hector Garcia-Molina, was presented earlier this year. Zoltán Gyöngyi — a grad student at Stanford — also co-authored the paper on link spam detection I blogged about earlier this month. Gyöngyi and Garcia-Molina propose a taxonomy of current spamming techniques and define web spam as “all types of actions intended to boost ranking (either relevance, or importance, or both), without improving the true value of a page.”

That seems awfully broad to me. One perfectly ethical or legitimate SEO technique, for example, is to clean up sloppy or deprecated code. This is primarily intended to make the page easier for a search engine spider to read and has nothing to do with changing the information being presented to the user. It may also constitute a usability improvement, but does that add to the “value” of the page? Being easier to find, as a result of SEO, doesn’t make a page more valuable — that would be circular since search engine position is ideally determined by the page’s value. So technically, strictly speaking, altering code to make it W3C compliant is spamming.

The authors also claim on page 2 that “most SEOs engage in practices that we call spamming” [emphasis added]. But the techniques they go on to define are certainly not practices that I engage in, and are generally dismissed by nearly all SEOs I know of.

Those techniques include term spamming, which consists of:

• Body spam. In this case, the spam terms are included in the document body. This spamming technique is among the simplest and most popular ones, and it is almost as old as search engines themselves.
• Title spam. Today’s search engines usually give a higher weight to terms that appear in the title of a document. Hence, it makes sense to include the spam terms in the document title.
• Meta tag spam. The HTML meta tags that appear in the document header have always been the target of spamming. Because of the heavy spamming, search engines currently give low priority to these tags, or even ignore them completely.
• Anchor text spam. Just as with the document title, search engines assign higher weight to anchor text terms, as they are supposed to offer a summary of the pointed document. Therefore, spam terms are sometimes included in the anchor text of the HTML hyperlinks to a page.
• URL spam. Some search engines also break down the URL of a page into a set of terms that are used to determine the relevance of the page. To exploit this, spammers sometimes create long URLs that include sequences of spam terms.
• Repetition of one or a few specific terms. This way, spammers achieve an increased relevance for a document with respect to a small number of query terms.
• Dumping of a large number of unrelated terms, often even entire dictionaries. This way, spammers make a certain page relevant to many different queries. Dumping is effective against queries that include relatively rare, obscure terms: for such queries, it is probable that only a couple of pages are relevant, so even a spam page with a low relevance/ importance would appear among the top results.
• Weaving of spam terms into copied contents. Sometimes spammers duplicate text available on the Web and insert spam terms into them at random positions.
• Weaving is also used for dilution, i.e., to conceal some repeated spam terms within the text, so that search engine algorithms that filters out plain repetition would be misled.
• Phrase stitching is also used by spammers to create content quickly. The idea is to glue together sentences or phrases, possibly from different sources.

Web Spam Taxonomy also discusses other spam categories and techniques including: cloaking, using CSS for keyword stuffing, link farms, exploiting PageRank of expired domains, JavaScript redirects and others. It’s a good overview of current spam techniques (most of which, however, have become much less effective at least in Google since the Bourbon and Jagger updates this year). Check it out.

The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day, up from 38 million in June 2004.

Overall, among Internet users, there is now little difference between the size of the email-using population and the size of the search-engine using population — 91% of all Internet users have sent or received an email at some point, compared with the almost equal 90% who had used search engines.

Of the 94 million American adults who use the Internet on an average day, 77% will use it for email, 63% will perform searches, and 46% of surfers who will use it to gather news.

Check out what’s new at Google AdSense. OnSite Advertiser Sign Up is described thus:

Your content is valuable. And starting within the next two weeks, advertisers will be able to bid for placement on your site right from your web pages. With Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, a new feature of AdSense, your AdSense ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’ link that takes interested advertisers to a page which you can tailor for your business.

Please note: If you’re already displaying AdSense on your site, you’ll have to opt out of this new program.

But that’s not all. Google is going full out with its advertising programs. It has created a referral program for AdSense publishers to recruit new publishers: When someone who clicked on one of your referral buttons reaches $100 in AdSense commissions, Google will pay you $100 too.

Recommended reading:

• Google AdSense Optimization Tips
• 15 Common Mistakes by Google Adsense Publishers that Violate Terms of Service
• This 8-part series from ProBlogger.net: AdSense Tips for Bloggers
• Interview with Jason Calacanis

For homework, go through these articles and identify everything I’m doing wrong with this blog.

Last week, TechWeb ran a story: “Prosecutors claim a Mac specialist on trial in connection with the killing of his wife did a Google search for the words: “neck snap break” and “hold” before she was killed.” His search history is being used as evidence against him.

Lessons to be learned: killing people is always a bad idea. And being a Mac user still doesn’t make you invincible.

Also see: Don’t Count on Your Anonymity