If you spot a positive consumer opinion, a review that praises one of your products or a great critic on a trusted website, don’t hesitate to link to it! This is not only a way to serve positive feedback about Your Company to your existing website visitors and to encourage consumers to give you (positive) feedback, but also may change the future SERPs for a “Your Company” search query into something more like this:
This is like using Google, Yahoo! and MSN as giant mouths in your Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy.
While there are companies that use nothing but online advertising, some companies still almost neglect the web. Most of these companies are the top overall advertisers. AdAge released the 2007 edition of the Top 100 US Advertising Companies (pdf, or via this html link) a while ago, but I stumbled upon it this weekend. Research documents like that always are fun to read.
It’s almost funny to see how some companies still avoid the Internet as an advertising opportunity. I took the top 25 companies (totaling a stunning $53 Billion) and listed both their advertising spending and their internet advertising spending.
There are lots of different opinions on what causes Google to index a site or page. With a test on a new test subdomain on a brand new domain, I tried to bust a couple of these myths.
1) Google indexes a website if you add a Google Analytics code. Busted!
Nope. The first thing I did, was adding Google Analytics to all pages on this subdomain. I even visited some of the pages with around ten different IPs. Even after a month, Google didn’t index the website.
2) Google indexes a website if you use Google AdWords. Busted!
The second thing I did, was opening a brand new Google AdWords account. By bidding on a few keywords (with low, lower and really, really low search volumes), I hoped to see if this could trigger Google to index the subdomain. I even visited some of the pages by clicking on a few ads with around five different IPs. Three weeks, the website still wasn’t indexed.
3) Google indexes a website if you add Google AdSense. Busted!
Unlike the previous tests, I already assumed that this one wouldn’t work. Adding AdSense and even clicking a few of the ads (don’t worry, it were PSAs) didn’t manage to get the subdomain indexed.
4) Google indexes a page that can only be reached through nofollow links. Busted! As you can see on the first page of the test subdomain, one of the links is being nofollowed. Like Matt mentioned a few times, Google shouldn’t index nofollowed pages (accessible by nofollow links only) or give weight to nofollowed anchortext. After doing a site: query, I noticed that the page isn’t indexed. Google doesn’t even return the URL of the page. But here comes the weird part.
5) Google indexes a page that is excluded by robots.txt. Plausible!?!
I always thought that adding a noindex-meta tag to a page would mean about the same as excluding it with robots.txt. This, however, would mean that Google won’t show the page in it’s index. As you can see in the screenshot below, Google actually shows an excluded URL when you do a site: search.
I don’t care if it’s a frikkin’ supplemental page, you shouldn’t show this page if I explicitly tell you not to access the page!
So if you don’t want Google to show a particular URL, I guess you’d better use nofollow in stead of robots.txt…
This was just part of a first test, I hope I will be able to publish some more results/ bust a few more myths soon. If you want to suggest an SEO myth, or if you have test design suggestions or other things, please leave a comment or send an email. Seriously, I’d appreciate it.
Oh, and the credits for the personification of Googlebot go to SEOmoz (like you didn’t know…).
Viral Marketing seems hotter than ever. Where everybody in the SEO world is talking about link bait, the traditional marketing agencies are pushing their viral skills. Almost every marketing agency has some viral experience and is profiling themselves as an expert. With lots and lots of new funny, clever and great viral campaigns every day, it hurts my SEO heart to see what some businesses are missing out on.
The great thing about a successful viral campaign, is that it generates a lot of attention (and links!) in a very short period of time. When you look at some viral campaigns, it seems that there are still lots of marketing agencies that forget one of the most important factors of the 21st century; The Search Engine. Just take a look at these 4 examples that completely missed the link boat. Keep in mind that I found these examples in under 30 minutes, what must be an indication of something…
2) WhySoSerious.com
This campaign was apparently launched for the latest Batman movie? I don’t know that for sure, because the domain WhySoSerious.com is already redirecting to a The Joker fansite. With a 302 redirect. No, seriously. They’re almost throwing away the 900 blog links WhySoSerious.com attracted during the past few weeks…
3) The Skittles Touch (Skittles)
Ok, maybe this isn’t a viral campaign, but I still wanted to mention this one. A lot of webmasters and bloggers embed YouTube (or other) movies on their websites, when they think it’s a cool one. In some occasions, YouTube (or the other movie website) will show the opening frame of the movie, when the movie isn’t playing. This means that the first frame is a great branding opportunity, and this is what The Skittles Touch is missing out on. Oh, and they didn’t add their URL to both the last frames of the movie and the YouTube page…
Let’s say you’re targeting keywords with a high competion and with an extremely high spam density. Something like “Buy cheap viagra online”. The top 10 in Google is filled with a couple of .edu’s, a .gov and a few other domains. Looks really competitive to me.
Now go out and build some Google trust. A public job at Google would be extremely suitable to let your website gain enough trust. If you’re website is trustworthy, go add “Buy cheap viagra online” about 7 times to a 9,000 words page. Make sure that the page attracts a few hundred links.
Now get someone to add a link to your webpage with the anchor text “Buy cheap viagra online”. That link doesn’t even have to be an authority link by the way, a single link from a website like this should be enough.
Oh wait, a link from this website is enough. Did you spot the “Buy cheap viagra online” link in the blogroll of this website? It’s filed under “sponsored links”. It has been there for about a week and a half, Google has cached it 4 days ago. A website that wasn’t present in the top 1000 for “Buy cheap viagra online”, is now ranking 3rd for the targeted keyword. Hey, that’s our friend Matt!
This means that it’s quite easy to get some good rankings in Google, even when you’re targeting competitive terms. All you need is three things:
1) Trust
A somewhat older website (> 2 years) with lots of links (> 10k, with at least a few hundred of high quality) is a solid foundation for good rankings. This is a really important factor, if not the most important one.
2) Keywords
Ofcourse, your website needs to mention the keyword’s your targeting. On a page with around 8,000 words, a keyword density of 0,1% should be enough.
3) A link
If you succesfully implemented 1) and 2), a single link with the right anchor text can be a trigger for Google to rank your website.
Edit: I just noticed that Matt doesn’t even need the “online”, he ranks #5 for “Buy cheap viagra“.
It was about time that someone released a social news website for SEO news. Search Engine Land released Sphinn. You really did a great job, Danny & crew!
Go to Plugins > Plugin Editor > and click on the social_bookmarking_reloaded.php file. Towards the top of the code is where you can add new bookmarking sites. CTRL+F for “blinklist|” and add “sphinn|” to the list.
Now open sites.xml and add the following code:
Now save this image: and upload it to wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded. Go to “Options” in your WP-admin and select Sphinn in the Social Bookmarking Reloaded section.
Done.
