Craig’s Mostly Search Blog

The topic of paid links to support an SEO campaign is as much a philosophical one for SEO’s as it is tactical.

This post is not intended to explore the philosophical side.  Instead, I’m going to address the question of: how good is Google at detecting paid links?

I just completed another experiment on the topic.

Here is what I did:

I built a page optimized for a localized service.  I got the page ranking #32 for my benchmark keywords.  I waited one month to be sure that the SERP had stabilized.

Then I spent $100 to pay an Indian contractor to acquire triangular links.  The links appear on pages that have at least 50+ completely irrelevant themes (the sites were also largely irrelevant to the service I optimized). The $100 spend acquired 20 links that have nearly identical link text.

Within 3 weeks, the page shot up to a #2 spot on Google.

I think this improvement was clearly a result of the rather spammy looking backlinks.

A counter point to the apparent success might be: “but Google’s filters haven’t yet profiled those links - and in time, the links will be identified as purchased and the SERPs will decrease again.

Maybe so.

But for $100, this service can easily afford to keep buying links and staying ahead of the filters.  The ROI on that buy is far greater than the cost per click for paid placement.

We all buy stuff online.

One thing everyone should consider doing is becoming an affiliate of Amazon.com.

Why?

You get a piece of the referral purchase back. You can buy almost anything on Amazon, and you can also price compare, so you get the lowest price, and a piece of the revenue.

Steps:

1. Sign up as an affiliate
2. Put up a web page with the link code they give you. If you are not sure how to do this, you can simply have a word document on your computer that has a link to Amazon with your affiliate ID.
3. Everytime you make a purchase, make sure you enter Amazon by clicking your affiliate page.

Example:
Over the holidays, I spent nearly a grand on gifts (lots of relatives). I got about $75 back AND got the lowest prices around.

Over the course of the year, I bought everything from USB cables to a juicer on Amazon and I get checks back.

The recent Google PageRank update, from the observations of myself and my SEO team, seems to have significantly lowered overall PageRank.

Google has to do this from time to time. Based on Larry Page’s original algorithm, PR has to be lowered from time to time (as it increases over time).

I’ve followed a number of sites, including Adobe (PR 10 - which nows has a number of internal pages at PR 9 for the first time in a long time) and I am seeing a calculated deflation.

One could argue Google is doing this either to correct the PR inflation or to inflict some pain on the link broker business.

I think Google is doing this to correct the inflation, but I could be wrong. Regardless, I do believe we saw a large drop in average PR.

I’ve played around recently with link-bait ideas on my personal blog, and what I’ve discovered is that if you piss people off, they will link to you more than some of the other tactics I’ve tried.

I also tried flattery (Study Determines Bloggers Are Better in Bed), which resulted in a handful of comments by other bloggers but no links.

I’ve also published experiment results, which do get a bit of buzz as well.

But if you anger a passionate group of people about their core values, voila - links!

Of course, this is not the best way to go about building a brand.

Even if you are a retailer, I strongly believe in adding more content to your site.

All the time.

From an SEO perspective, there is the concept of “fresh content” (the belief that search engines prefer new content). There is also the PageRank consideration - as more web pages are added to a site, a properly linked site increases its overall PageRank.

And then there is the real reason (for me): going after the long tail.

If you have 2000 articles on a topic and you strategically target long tail terms, you are likely to see a lot of traffic from that content. (I’m not going go discuss, in this post, converting that content).

But how do you get so much content? After all, you are doing the copy writing, or your writer is swamped.

I’ve been using Forum Booster for some projects (not big brand projects). You can have articles written for $10, and they’re fairly good (tier 2). If you have a topic with a long tail, it’s worth spending $1000 to get 100 articles. More than likely, you’ll see a positive ROI before long.

Tonight I went to a Bank of America ATM.

I saw a new validation message that I haven’t seen before.

After selecting English as my language, I was prompted with this:

“You’ve selected English as your language. Is this correct? (Yes | No)”.

Let’s consider the scenarios.

1. I understand English, which is necessary to answer the question. I answer yes.
2. I don’t understand English, which is necessary for the question. I hit buttons until something happens.

I usually expect to find these idiotic oversights on web forms. But in the real world, I have a higher standard for usability and design. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because tangible machines seem more important.

I am now finishing three books on Social Media (Groundswell, Join the Conversation, The New Influencers).

While I find the books very insightful, I have one minor issue that I can’t stop dwelling on. Two of the books above (Groundswell and Join the Conversation) have some very bold statements about the end of “shouting” and how marketing as we know it is being forced to change by the online communities.

And I have to say - I believe we are seeing, and will continue to see, the “conversation” explode.

But then I start to think:

When I look around my apartment at all the brands I have, I can think of a traditional marketing campaign for many or even most of them, but I can’t think of why I would want to have a “conversation” with the vast majority of them.

I’m sure the people at Canon, Trader Joe’s, Ragu, and The Bank of America are nice people. But I don’t want to talk to you. Please don’t join my conversations - I barely have enough time for the friends who have earned my respect. If I need customer support, just pick up the phone quickly and please don’t offshore it to India.

Additionally, the vast majority of successful case studies of conversation marketing in the books I have never heard of. I guess I was not a part of those conversations. But I did see the traditional campaigns from those companies.

I do think there is a place for the “conversation” in the overall interaction mix (not always marketing), but let’s not get carried away with it.

I think the “shouting” these authors reference is going to be replaced less by “conversation” and more by the one way message (the shout) evolving into a more entertaining format. I posted about Bud’s hilarious swear jar ad. (I consider this a form of buzz marketing and not conversation. I am watching, not having a conversation). This is a great example of something I totally enjoyed watching.

I could be wrong. Maybe I’m right. Time will tell.

One of the largest issues that bloggers face is comment spam.

What is comment spam?

Well, when I post, I get at least 50 comments that are automated from soul-less spammers who want a warrant less link back to their worthless site.

The solution?

Akismet Spam.

I am not writing an ad for them, it’s free.

It’s a wonderful plug-in for Wordpress.

One of the biggest obstacles to search engines has been forms.

Because form fields require input (phone number?
email address?), they have presented a dead end to finding the content the form processor would serve up.

Until now. Maybe.

Google announced this morning that it will attempt to crawl through web forms.

One concern I have is duplicate content.

Why?  There are so many websites that understand the crawl-block that forms present, and they are serving up “static” versions of those pages on their site (usually accessible through a site map).

If Google begins finding two versions, it will kick one of them out of the index.  If the version kept is the one found by way of the form, then there are other implications, such as internal linking.

I like to create an internal linking architecture that gives preferred target status to highly valuable pages, thereby driving up PageRank.

If Google chooses to kick out my static page, then the page in the index is going to have lower PageRank.

Note: Google usually uses PageRank as an indicator of which page to keep, so it theoretically will make the right choice.

But I have seen this not work so often that I remain worried.

As an example, we had two clients last year who came to us with indexing issues.  After investigating, we realized Google crawled their staging server (which was not blocking bots).  These PageRank-less pages were selected for the Google main index.

On a side note: don’t rely on robots.txt to be 100% effective blocking your staging server.  Password protect it.

People often confuse focus groups and usability tests.

Focus groups are small groups of people (5-8) that sit around a table and react to ideas and designs shown to them.  Since this is a group process, people tend to react to other’s opinions. Focus groups are great for quickly getting a sampling of users’ opinions. Marketers love focus groups, and these sessions should be done EARLY in the process of development in order to determine what people like - NOT how they use something.

A usability test is one user who is shown something and asked to either figure out what it is or try to use it for a typical task.

Focus groups are really meant for determining what your audience wants in the abstract.  Is the product useful?  Would they buy it? Does the brand resonate?

Focus groups should be used EARLY in the process to answer those types of questions.  Focus groups should not be used after a site is developed - they will not tell you whether people can use your site.