SEO Lesson #3: Content, Content, Content

Google's search engine ranking algorithms have always been a moving target.  Two significant updates occurred in 2011 that have both raised and lowered rankings of many sites.  Around February 2011, engineers tweaked the system, in what became known as the "Panda update".  This could explain why more and more people are looking into free article writing services to get fresh content for their sites.  The first update was focused on the North American markets however the changes were rolled out worldwide.  So why did this update matter so much?  It is very simple.  Having your page show up on page one of the results is critical.  Studies have been done that generally indicate around nine out of every ten clicks are on sites ranked one through ten, although I have never seen a perfect study.

The penalty is simple.  Panda penalized sites with poor quality content.  Google has been fairly warning SEO firms that content is king and we agree.  As written on our previous posts, original, relevant and timely content always beats black hat SEO tricks in the long run, nevertheless, so many people still try to land in the top ten spot with a site that has very little content of use to the searcher.  This does not help anyone over the long term other than the SEO company that made a few bucks.

As noted by the Google webmasters:

"Almost the whole year of 2011 was a series of several updates related to content. Initially observed closely by SEO practitioners talking about the decrease of ranking of various sites and asking each other in forums if there was an observed algorithmic change and was dubbed as the Farmer Update which I believe the name probably came from Webmaster World where most group named algorithm updates come from. The changes were too evident already that when Google decided to talk about it already, they said they already have a name for the update and it was the Panda Update. And then this is were the series of updates came in."

Google's Matt Cutts, an anti SEO webspam policeman, noted that in the initial rollout, only around two percent of Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP's) were affected.  Apparently many of those affected have simply been scraping content from other pages.  This happens a lot with Technoracle posts.

A second update went after content farms and pages with large amounts of advertisements compared to content.  This is often done in conjunction with the scraping.  A good example of this can be found here:

http://www.seofacts.biz/flash-seo-more-secrets-from-technoracle/

This site takes content from Technoracle, adds tons of ads and publishes.  Such pages will never beat the original page in terms of rankings unless some additional content is interpreted as useful.

Panda has been criticized, largely by those who feel their sites were unfairly ranked lower.  Since the original Panda release, an update has shown promise to fight perceptions of false positive rates (FPR's).
Barry Schwartz reported that some sites actually recovered after the 2.2. rollout.

Google’s Panda update runs for all languages worldwide except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The big take away from all of this?  Simple.  Like in real estate (Location, Location, Location), in SEO land the mantra is Content, Content, Content.    Focus on good, unique content and interested parties will come. 

SEO Lessons: Guayaki Yerba Mate

As part of our ongoing technical work at Technoracle, we like to work with business owners to help them understand search engine optimization (commonly referred to as “SEO”) and provide better results for them. An initial step is often to ascertain the current state however this proves problematic. To explore this problem, we will use the case study of Guayaki. Guayaki is a company using a restorative business model to help provide fair wages to everybody in their supply chain and also restore sub tropical South American rain forests. in fact, it is referred to as the the "Mata Atlantica", or Atlantic Rainforest, deemed one of the top 5 priorities for biodiversity conservation in the world by conservation international.   The Atlantic forest has been reduced to 7% of its original size.They sell products based on Yerba Mate, a substance commonly used and shared by civilizations for centuries and a common stimulant drink. The powers of Yerba Mate are very restorative and we have started consuming it while coding instead of coffee. On a personal note, it seems to be better for productivity than straight coffee or Coke/Pepsi.

Since most people curious about Yerba Mate seem to search for the term “Yerba Mate” or “Yerba Matte” (mis-spelled), they desire a good ranking and currently have it in some areas. The first step was to use our Google Adwords account to ascertain the most relevant search terms and search term volume for any given month. Google however, uses localization and profiling as factors in ranking search results. To illustrate this, we asked several of our networked associates and friends to help do a straw poll on the current rankings. From what we understand, most of them had never searched for this term before so the results were probably more accurate than someone who has already logged several searches for the term and has those searches linked to their profile. This blog post is a summary of some of the results we encountered. While not considered scientifically conclusive, these results may be of interest to others.

Google uses geographical location and Guayaki’s head office is in Sebastapol, CA, USA. Most of their business is in North America. The request was simple. We asked random associates to navigate to http://www.google.com and search for the term “yerba mate” and note where any guayaki.com hosted page appears in the results. Here is a random sampling of results:

This is only a small sampling but it shows a pattern of higher results in countries where the product is sold.  We tried to search via google.com however google redirects the browsers to google.ca.  We consider ourselves tainted as google could note that we (Yerba Mate fans) have visited guayaki.com several times and hence elevate it in my results via any personal google home pages.  Nevertheless, we found it on page 2 in 12^th spot.  This was shocking considering one of the principals and co-founders is located in British Columbia and does considerable business here.

So what does this mean? 

Simply stated, search results seen by one person are not necessarily universally shared.    The first step in SEO is to get an accurate read of where your site appears before any attempts to optimize.  This, in itself, is a difficult feat.  Google uses cookies, IP addresses and a host of other mechanisms to determine how to provide you with the most relevant search results.  If you commonly search for your own brand, it is possible it may appear higher in search results on your computer than a computer that has never searched for the same term.  Google, Yahoo and Bing have all stated this policy clearly but have not explained what that means exactly in terms of results.

What would we recommend for Guayaki?

Since the first site that appeared most commonly was Wikipedia, we found a way to link Guayaki to the Yerba Mate page in Wikipedia.  This is done is accordance with Wikipedia’s terms of service and standards.  The page itself claimed sources were required for verification so we added a footnote to show verification that Yerba Mate is in fact sold as an iced beverage in a can.  Be careful about this however and do not try to spam others with links to your page.  Some types of links are not even followed such as blogger comments.  We never advocate trying to hack the system.  The system is set up to govern itself via feedback and respecting terms of use is something we encourage all people to do.  

Having said that, there is a potential that this blog article itself may end up elevating their ranking since it contains links to their site but that is not the intent of this post. 

DISCLOSURE:  David K. from Guayaki is a personal friend.  He has not asked us to post this blog to help with SEO.  We are merely helping him as we would with any other client to understand the SEO landscape.  We have not been paid to post this article.

How does this information help you?

Before you start any SEO project, try a similar grass roots poll to understand where you currently rank and in what geographical areas your brand is ranked higher.  Match this information with your goals.  You may find this is a chicken and egg problem as business in one area may be slow due to the fact no one finds your website or brand via a search in Google, Bing or Yahoo.  If you are trying to build business, approach SEO as a regional endeavor.

If you have any follow up questions on this topic, please don’t hesitate to contact duane at Nickull dot net.  We’re always glad to help.  If you want to know more about Guayaki, check out this video.

App Store SEO (Continued)

Earlier we published a blog entry discussing the important emerging market of App Store SEO (read).   What we are learning is that there is a disturbing trend taking place with people who publish apps.  Many simply direct users to their apps by phrases like "Go to the Apple Store or Google Market and search for <term>".  Of a list of several dozen of these we researched, several of the searches now reveal competing apps are showing up above the vendors' application.

So why is this emerging place so important?  Simple.  Users search for applications.  If you do not rank high enough in any filter query or search, the potential end user will not find your application.  Most developers want a wide as possible implementation base of their mobile applications.  We have spent a lot of our lives working on SEO.  There are several posts on this blog about this topic.

Mobile application SEO is not only an emerging market, but will likely become a large part of an enterprises digital presence.  Once again, the rules that determine most of the "relevancy" in various mobile app marketplaces has not been made public leaving us to test and hypothesize.  Uberity has now come to understand the evolution of such systems.  So what should individuals do? Short of getting an online degree in an effort to understand this, here are some tips.


1.  Don't refer potential application users to your application with non-deterministic mechanisms like "search".  You have no control over AppStore SEO and it is a dynamic place with new apps being added every minute.  A better method would be to use absolute mechanisms to resolve directly to your app such as QR codes or a URI.

2. If you are trying to get a higher ranking in either the AppStore or the Google Android Market, do some research to find out what terms people are actually searching for that are relevant to your application.  For example, if you have a financial stock market monitoring application, you might find that people are searching for terms like "Dow Jones", NYSE, Stock Market and more.

3.  Use the terms from your research in your applications title and description.  Some of these words are used for building a relevancy index for mobile applications.

4. Divide and conquer.  Simply put, use your existing web presence to augment the mobile app visibility by creating links to it from your blog, website or other presence.  Our initial research has shown some promising trends.

5. Don't use punctuation marks in your app title.  This is valuable real estate and most are ignored by the search utilities.  For example, searching for a "*" reveals no applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=*&so=1&c=apps) while searching for either "!" or "+" reveal a bunch of Google applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=%2B&so=1&c=apps).

6. Ensure you categorize your mobile application properly.  Misclassifying a game as a business app would confuse people.

If you are reading this and want to know more about what we are doing, please contact us at info at uberity dot com or by visiting our website at http://www.uberity.com.

Searchable Flash - some early tips

Adobe announced this morning (I am in Zurich) that it is has worked with Google and Yahoo! to improve search engine capability to reach inside of the Flash (SWF) file format. You can read the FAQs here.

So how does it work?

This is being done via a headless Flash reader that can extract strings from Flash and use them to build an initial page ranking and string array for each page. The string arrays themselves are then fed into Google and Yahoo! ranking algorithms where they will give the page an initial ranking for each tree. Exactly what is indexed and what rank the search engines will give it is yet to be seen. Don't automatically assume everything in SWF is now at par with HTML text.

For example, a large vector-based drawing of the word "Washington" will not likely make you rank high as it is still not text. Cognitive capabilities are not easy to bestow upon machines (which is why Captcha works so well).



Why you might be excited

Without doing anything, the engines will use some of your text values in SWFs and possibly adjust your rankings for certain terms. This is a good thing for people who have not yet learned how to get Google and Yahoo! to use static content for their indexes. In cases where your unique text content has previously been inaccessible, there should be improvements.

Why you might not be so excited

Initial page ranking is not the silver bullet it once used to be. As soon as searches are performed and your content comes up, both Google and Yahoo! will still dynamically adjust your score based on a multitude of conditions. I have outlined several of these tips in this blog post already. Duane's World Episode 3 also has some tips and tricks on how to use Google's dynamic page ranking algorithm to move up the ladder.


Some tips and tricks:

Flash developers who took care have had their content indexed all along. Using XML or XHTML data providers with strings in them and a link from the index.html shell was a great way to get stuff indexed and still generate good page rankings. From your main SWF, you simply just used the XHTML file as a data provider and parsed it with E4X (ActionScript 3's XML parser). That way the same raw data was both indexed by search engines and also used by the application. Those developers who took this care might now be trumped by those who will get lucky and have high rankings.

Flash developers, like HTML developers, still need to understand that the pages that point at your content have a lot to do with your dynamic rank. Content is still king too. Make sure you have your keyword well researched before betting the farm on it. For example - how many people performed unique searches on that term? Is it an unambiguous term?

This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

One of the best ways to achieve a higher ranking is to examine other Flash sites and see what they have done. Sombrio is a good example. If you search for this in Google, the Sombrio Clothing Company comes up #1 out of about 2 million.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=sombrio&btnG=Google+Search

Note that if you read this, then click on Sombrio Cartel, you are actually helping maintain it at the #1 place. Google will see the above string as a search in true REST style, then track what you click on, bounce rates etc.

Peter Elst also noted some additional concerns here. He wrote:

The concern I have here is that URL requests to the backend will get indexed, those URLs getting exposed in search queries or spider bots hitting those URLs could cause issues. Its not like in HTML content where the search engines can ignore form submit URLs, there is no such context in a HTTPService or URLRequest.

True. Once again, developers owe it to their clients to learn more about how the systems work. Note that Google currently does index some content and you can try this search by clicking here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q=sombrio+filetype%3Aswf&btnG=Search

More on this later. I am going to try some experiments to see what is possible.

Duane's World TV - Episode 3 live

Episode 3 is now live. In this episode, I talk about Search Engine Optimization. Some of the tips are talked about on a previous blog post however a lot of the information is new including an interview with the gurus at 6s Marketing.



Note that the tricks of search engine monitoring are linked specifically to the Google personalized search page but do apply to regular page rankings as well. Why else do you think Adobe got #1 rankings for such terms as "SOA White Paper" and "Enterprise Developer Relations"?

SEO - Search Engine Optimization Tricks

Consider this a gift if you are seeking to lead the search engine rankings with some newer tips and tricks. I used to do this for a living and have tried to stay current over the new technologies as they come out. SEO is generally much easier now that there are fewer search engines to target. Back in the good 'ole days we had to target multiple engines and change the code behind to be specific for each one.

I have a long history of working on search engine projects and feel nothing reveals tricks like building a search engine to see how it works. One project was the Initiative to evaluate XML Retrieval (which I was largely working with Universities on advance ontological and syntax mechanisms) while another one was the GoXML Contextual XML Search Engine launched in 1998, days after the recommendation was done. GoXML is still featured on PatentStorm.

SEO has little to do with indexing the content of a page nowadays. All that does is give you a starting reference point. The indexbot parses your page noting some particulars and provides you a weight with various terms.

The key metrics are:

1. Domain name matches search string (note – since hyphens and periods are removed during the webbots normalization process, things like www.ford.com are equal to www.f-or.d.com). Not many people know this since they do not write code to parse domain names. The hyphens are removed since not many people search on hyphens and the search engine index needs to be as efficient and lean as possible.

2. How many relevant sites that point at the site are very important. I showed some Adobe colleagues how to use this to our advantage to beat out Microsoft and Sun for the term “Enterprise Developer Resources”. All I did was ask that everyone make a signature to their email that said “Adobe Enterprise Developer resources – http://www.adobe.com/devnet/lifecycle” and then go about our normal business of posting to public threads. The index assumed that we must be relevant given the other top sites seemed to have links pointing at Adobes site. In reality, these were only archived email threads with the signature being treated as a link. All the Search Engine saw was “-links to -> Adobe.com. Within 6 weeks we beat out MSDN, BEA, Sun, IBM etc. and are still #1
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=enterprise+developer+resources&btnG=Google+Search

3. How people click on the top ten search results in Google. Google uses an adaptive algorithm which is a variation of the GoXML algorithm of which I co-wrote. We had 51 unique patent points in 1998 on this. When you click on one of the top ten results, Google simply tracks the result via a pass through. You can see this in action by doing any search on google, then right clicking the link and copying it. Where you see www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/ or get that URL if you copy/cut, when you right click and copy link, that actually translates to http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&amp;amp;amp;amp;cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adobe.com%2Fdevnet%2Flivecycle%2F&ei=JzZkRvzMEZqUgwPkmNmKBw&usg=AFQjCNGx7iKEUn38Kcfk8woBnWtcNueL9g&sig2=ope-x2wZBZhBXtNlk_fj0w

A case study is “Architectural patterns metamodel”. Matt Mackenzie and I wrote a variation of the gang of fours template for architectural patterns using UML 2.0 and linking known uses. It is now ranked #1 since it is the most used template by many software architects. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=architectural+Patterns+meta+model&btnG=Search

Note that this is referenced by the unique IP address bound form the incoming HTTPRequest header so you cannot spoof it without additional tricks. Since you have to first receive the call back code from google to build the new outgoing request in order for it to register, there is almost no way to spoof it ;-)

4. The meta tags are indexed and useful but only up to a certain point. Many people who have no clue how code works try in vain to do things like META Content=”mountain, bike, mountain bike, mountain bike clothing . Etc. The truth is that the meta keywords are parsed and normalized stripping out both the commas and spaces except for one space or other delimiter to separate the array. All the indexbot see from the above example is “mountain:bike:mountain:bike:mountain:bike:clothing” Any word repeated is generally disallowed completely and interpreted as spamdexing the bot.

5. Any keywords that do not appear in the body in plain text at least once are heavily discounted unless the core content of the page has no visible words, then the indexbot defaults to what it has to work with to establish the baseline weights.

6. Any keywords that appear more than approx. 7% of the total word count for the body are discounted as spam. (Note - this cannot be verified lately but it used to be true in the early part of the decade).

7. Words in large fonts near the top of the page and in the page title weight very heavily. People used to trick the SE’s by making this text the same color as the background. The human would not see anything but the indexbot would. The SE’s caught this trick early on and made a cross reference of colors to nab perpetrators. What many people do not know is that you can beat this by using javascript which the indexbots do not see. A browser’s parser hands this off at a later stage to the rendering engine so they might catch this later. I suspect that Google should catch this trick in the near future.

8. Google overlays the search matrix with an ontology classified by a first order of logic that separates all results into a modal array. The ontological nodes are also ranked at the meta level based on the preceding and mix into the pages dynamically but within the constraints defined by their librarians. That is why a term like “washington” will have results for the president, the state, the university, the actor etc all in the top ten. One way to trick this is to find the least common context then build a site to get #1. Once you have done that, replace the words for the context of your choice and you will usually stay in the top ten since the visibility draws

I have other tricks but have never failed to get any site less than 3rd for the terms including “mountain bike”, aromatherapy, whistler rentals, enterprise developer resources and many others...

Oh yeah - these are the tricks I am willing to share. I am still keeping some others as closely guarded secrets. It's not hard to figure out since it is all based on simple logic. Enjoy and good optimizing. Post your success back here if you find this helped.