SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Google, Paid Links, and a Smackdown

From Rand at SEOmoz:

So Matt’s comments yesterday (he didn’t pay me for a link, so I’m afraid I can’t give one out) set off a treasure trove of commentary about the use of paid links.

[…]

Google should not have any influence on how markup is controlled. They are completley out of their jurisdiction in making this request.

“Nofollow” was created to say “I don’t have editorial control over this link or I can’t vouch for its quality.” It was not created to say “money may have partially influenced my decision to provide this link.” If that were the case, most of the link structure of the commercial web would be invalid

Google has no ability to track paid vs. unpaid links effectively. For every example folks are giving in the forums of how they might do it (banner ad sizes, common text link formats, etc.), there are 5 ways to have paid links they could never track down.

Promoting fear in your public relations to help keep your results of higher quality is a naive, short term solution. Google’s forte in quality has always been about engineering solutions algorithmically and not via public relations.

The inherent arrogance in telling web developers to modify their content to suite your whims can not have good long term results. Google is valued as highly as they are because of their brand’s goodwill. You can ask yourself whether this will help or hurt that goodwill.

In order to be ranking competitively in Google in many, many spaces, you need to buy links. Anyone who’s done large scale link research in any niche will immediately identify dozens if not hundreds of directories, sites, membership-signups, etc. that provide high quality links (that are editorially given), but the require some type of fee. The Internet is not a commercial free, capitalists-shunned part of the world, and if you want publicity and recognition online, just as offline, you have to be prepared to spend.

Ouch. Cutts will be reeling from that one for a while. In any case, I agree more on the nofollow side of things. If Google could really determine a paid link from a non-solicited link, the nofollow attribute would never have been introduced. Google’s already waived the white flag with nofollow, now they’re telling everyone to be careful. Sorry. I don’t buy it.

From the Horse’s Mouth - Google Ranking Technology

Last week Google filed this, their annual SEC report. For most it’s a lesson in boredom. But for the SEO-minded, it’s a potential gold mine. I liked the excerpts on on-page ranking factors:

Ranking Technology. One element of our technology for ranking web pages is called PageRank. While we developed much of our ranking technology after Google was formed, PageRank was developed at Stanford University with the involvement of our founders, and was therefore published as research. Most of our current ranking technology is protected as trade-secret. PageRank is a query-independent technique for determining the importance of web pages by looking at the link structure of the web. PageRank treats a link from web page A to web page B as a “vote” by page A in favor of page B. The PageRank of a page is the sum of the PageRank of the pages that link to it. The PageRank of a web page also depends on the importance (or PageRank) of the other web pages casting the votes. Votes cast by important web pages with high PageRank weigh more heavily and are more influential in deciding the PageRank of pages on the web.

Text-Matching Techniques. Our technology employs text-matching techniques that compare search queries with the content of web pages to help determine relevance. Our text-based scoring techniques do far more than count the number of times a search term appears on a web page. For example, our technology determines the proximity of individual search terms to each other on a given web page, and prioritizes results that have the search terms near each other. Many other aspects of a page’s content are factored into the equation, as is the content of pages that link to the page in question. By combining query independent measures such as PageRank with our text-matching techniques, we are able to deliver search results that are relevant to what people are trying to find.

SEO wrapped up in a couple paragraphs. Nice!

Back to SEO Basics

Lee Odden over at Search Engine Guide has a nice article about the three pillars of search engine ranking:

1. The site must be easy to crawl
2. Fresh, themed content
3. Link popularity

Not a bad list. I liken it to site structure, content and linkability. The last is probably the most important as it indicates the quality of a site. Ask yourself this: Would anyone voluntarily link to my Website because of it’s content or underlying idea? If you can answer yes, you’re already ahead of most.

Catching up on SEO - A Roundup

I’ve read some excellent posts/articles in these last few days. Not having the time to comment on them all (and wanting to close the tabs from Firefox), here they are, in no particular order.

• Leveraging Pr On Site
• Cloaking Beyond IP Delivery
• Co Citation - understanding how it effects your SEO
• What To Do If Your The SEO Client Nobody Wants
• First Comes Content, Then Come Links
• How to Setup a PPC Campaign for an “Established” Website
• Measuring Success as an SEO
• Google Indexing JavaScript; Crawling Like a Human?
• SEOmoz Blog | MSN Offers the Holy Grail of Link Searches

Waiting for the Engines After an Internal 301

Rand over at SEOmoz is sharing some interesting data on the lag between implementing an internal 301 and when the search engines finally recognize the new URL.

For us, I’ve noticed that Google takes between 2 and 6 weeks to recognize and properly index, although the rankings seem to follow fairly directly (so links must be re-directing, too). For MSN, it’s a bit shorter - 1-3 weeks depending on the site. Yahoo! can take the longest, with between 4-8 weeks being standard, although there are exceptions on bigger sites.

External 301s is a different story - the engines (except MSN) are terrible about catching up with those.

As always, Yahoo!’s well behind Google and MSN here.

Local Search Marketing Tips

More from Search Engine Strategies New York, Search Algorithms and Research, this time in the way of local search marketing positioning:

Zip codes/IP may be used to improve local results, as Bill and Rand mentioned. This is called “entity extraction” process. So once again, make sure you place your address in the footer.

Try it for yourself. Conduct a local search - what do you see? Adding a local phone number can also help quite a bit.

Search Engine Algorithms, Patents and Information Retrieval

Rand has a nice slideshow up at SEOmoz about search engine algorithms, patents and information retrieval and cataloging. It’s a nice refresher for those in the know, but one slide is of particular importance (though highly non-scientific, obviously). It’s a survey of 13 gurus in the industry and their take on common SEO elements and their importance on a scale of 0-5:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

I’d agree with most, but certainly not accessibility (of the 508 kind). Numbers 10 and 3 also seem to be centered around the same topic.

Note: Rand’s SEO Cheatsheet is also a nice refresher.