Archive for December, 2003

December
31

Google Update: Ginger

Google gave everyone an early New Year’s present as they did an update which will greatly help sites adhering to their Terms of Use. If you have been following our advice, especially over the last six months, you should see a nice jump in the number of back links Google recognizes for your site.

Google’s first big change is they are giving more relevancy to internal linked pages. This is apparent by the large increase in back links for the domains that we track: 28%. This is the largest single increase we have seen in more than two years. As we have been discussing all year, with solid content, a focus on your business plan, and an easy to crawl internal linking structure, your site will be successful in Google. This has been a better option than optimizing your pages for Google directly.

It is clear. Research the right keywords for your target audience, build a compelling site with content that pinpoints a problem and offers a solution, and ensure your site is Google-friendly. That’s it. No hidden text, cloaking, proprietary technology, etc. Focus on giving the customer what they want, and nine times out of ten it will be what Google wants as well. Because Google changes their criteria every 3-4 weeks, by the time the new criteria can be properly tested, implemented, and then your site re-spidered, it can be two weeks or longer. This allow for your site to only be in full “Google compliance” for 1-2 weeks per month. Take our advice, think and build long-term. This is how we gained our top ten ranking for “web marketing”.

The Update
True to their form when they did an update on New Year’s Day 2003, they are using the New Year to launch a new set of criteria. While you will not see a major shift in your rankings with this change, you will become more competitive online. More back links means a higher PageRank, and with more internal links counting as back links, your site will begin to gain serious momentum through Q1 2004.

Google Update: Ginger
As is Google’s schedule, they introduce an algorithm change first, then follow it with an update of back links and PageRank information. Since they did the algorithm change recently, this is the update that was to follow.

With Google’s new criteria of treating internal pages with more importance, this makes “Page Saturation” even more valuable. The more pages you have in Google’s index, the higher your link reputation will be.

From everyone at Web Marketing Now, we wish you a happy and safe New Year!

Posted in Google, SEM/SEO | No Comments »

December
19

SEO Tips & Reminders

Reminders
As the new year approaches and the “dead time” comes upon us (the week between Christmas and the New Year), we wanted to send you some reminders to help pass the time away. This is the perfect week to do the maintenance on your site that your staff has been putting off for months. We put things off too. :-)

  1. Have a Detailed and up-to-date Site Map
  2. Your internal linking structure is vital. Absolute links will improve your Google standing while using relative links will not.
  3. References to your site by the top directories in your industry is often an overlooked marketing method of increasing your reputation online.
  4. Purchasing links from reputable sites is a viable way to increase your exposure and increase your PageRank.
  5. Do not underestimate the power of great content.
  6. The Internet has an estimated 500 billion documents online, Google has less than 1% of those documents indexed.
  7. 550 million searches are done on the web each and every day. Search engine marketing is a vital part of your advertising campaign.
  8. Online advertising is growing at a rate of 35% per year and worth $2 billion right now.

Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book”
Back in October, Amazon debuted their new service called “Search Inside the Book”. They have scanned the pages of over 120,000 books and it is online in a searchable database. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is setting up a new search company A9 in Palo Alto, California. It seems that Amazon is set to have a more powerful product search than they currently employ. This technology could splinter off to a product search across the web. Bezos is looking for new revenue streams, and he knows that a market that is growing at a rate of 35% per year is worth getting into.

Google Still King
Google will earn nearly 30% profit from an estimated $1 billion in revenue this year. While in the 90’s, search engines were never revenue enhancing segments of corporations, searching has now become truly profitable. It shows how technology people can be successful in the media of the Internet. Disney could not as they took Infoseek with a strong market share of 32% to a dead engine in less than two years.

Microsoft Looks To Step Up
Microsoft, known to get into competitive markets late, dominate, and leave market share kings in their wake (Netscape, Apple and IBM) is rumored to be stepping things up a notch in the search engine arena. While their search bot first appeared on the web in April of this year, Microsoft has publicly stated that building their own search engine was a bigger challenge than they realized. Then there were the rumors surrounding Google and Yahoo! buyouts, but nothing materialized.

Microsoft is coming out with a next-generation operating system in two years, code-named Longhorn. It makes sense that Microsoft will integrate together their new web search, and their ISP with Longhorn. With “everything out of one box” Microsoft will have a distinct advantage. The consumer will have a computer, their operating system, their ISP, their business applications and an integrated search – all out of the same box.

Here is food for thought: you are typing a research paper in Word and want additional information on European art. You highlight the keyword, right-click, and choose “search”. You are returned the top results from MSN search in a pop-up window that hovers above your application (MSWord). You browse the information, highlight the content you want, and click and drag it into your document. It is formatted properly and even provides a reference automatically from where you obtained the content. That is power, and it will be available. This may be death to other search engines.

Microsoft may be in the game late, but they have the control over the right pieces in the market.

Posted in SEM/SEO, Webmaster | 1 Comment »

December
16

Yahoo! Rumors

Yahoo! Rumors
Get ready for another big change from Yahoo! very soon according to our sources. We feel very confident with this information as this is the same source that brought you the information just six days before Yahoo! did the big switch in October of 2002 – when they switched completely to Google results. This one will be as big.

As it now has been nearly a year since Yahoo! purchased search database Inktomi. Over the last several weeks, Yahoo! has been more and more aggressive with testing their new search results powered by Inktomi. Our source stated it is a “85% certainty” that Yahoo! is going to kick-off the new year by dumping Google and officially switching to their new search results.

This move is significant, and we have been preparing you for it for nearly a year. With the dominance Google has on the market, this will be a significant blow to the giant. Yahoo! has a 28% share of the market, and it will hurt Google’s market reach. There will be three major players again: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

What You Should Do Now
:
If you haven’t already positioned your most important pages with Inktomi, we suggest you place this on your priority list to do within the next three days. If this information leaks out, there will be a strong push to register pages with Inktomi, causing a delay in indexing. Time is of the essence.

To register the pages on your own, simply go to Position Tech. The standard fee is $39.00 per year for the first page and $25.00 for each additional page. These rates are likely to increase once the announcement hits. Inktomi will then respider the pages every 48 hours.

If you have a very large site that you wish to be indexed, Inktomi has a Trusted Feed program. You can get more information at Position Tech.

LookSmart Announces Layoffs
Due to their officially losing the MSN account next month, LookSmart announced they are laying off half of their workforce. While this looks as it is due to Inktomi and Sprinks announcing they would no longer use LookSmart, this is directly due to the loss of MSN.

What You Should Do Right Now:
Check your web logs and calculate the amount of traffic coming to your site from the LookSmart partners. It is easiest to take your traffic report from LookSmart (what you paid for your billing period) and compare that to the total number of referrals from search engines during that same time period. If the number is greater than 8%, you must get aggressive now or risk seeing a significant change in traffic when MSN switches next month.

Ah-Ha Changes Name
Pay-per-click search engine Ah-ha changed their name to Enhance. Ah-Ha has never scored well in any test we have conducted. Despite the name change, their service will not improve.

Posted in Yahoo | No Comments »

December
5

Affiliates and Spammers Aimed by Google

Google Update: Affiliates and Spammers Aimed
In the last week, we have uncovered some additional details which sheds light on the latest Google update. We reported last week that Google was taking an “anti SEO” stance. According to the continued testing that we have done this past week that doesn’t seem to be the case. It looks as if Affiliates are the ones that Google targeted the hardest, and usually Affiliates are the ones to use aggressive SEO practices (i.e Black Hat SEO and Spam).

Google updated their index again yesterday, after performing a deep crawl last week. We saw some positive movement with the changes we did for our sites. Most notably, we moved back into the top ten in Google for the term “web marketing”. While a one position move may not seem as much, when you move onto the first page, it is. For example, we saw a 42% increase in our visitors through Google after the update went live yesterday.

The reason for the increase were the changes we implemented into our sites based on what we have reported thus far. While every industry seems to be affected differently, by making slight changes to our pages, we are seeing positive results.

According to our test results, 42% of the top 30 results, and 31% of the top ten results in Google before Nov. 15th have been dropped in the new update. That is the definition of aggressive algorithm change. More than 80% of the sites that dropped out that we tested were Affiliate sites or sites that violated Google’s Terms of Use. What of the rest? Unfortunately, there was collateral damage.

Spam Triggers
Affiliate sites are known to be very aggressive in SEO marketing tactics. They usually buy a domain that is keyword rich, have a network of sites with links pointing to various pages in attempt to artificially boost their Link Popularity, and other methods. The main problem is, many commercial sites, fell into the category as either a Spammer or an Affiliate and were hit with the penalty. This being caught in the “cross fire” has hurt many sites, but with Google continuing to tinker with their new algorithm, sites may return.

Guaranteed Protection

While there is no absolute guarantee, especially with the search engines, there is one common characteristic among the sites that did NOT receive the penalty from Google – high PageRank. Sites that had at least a 6/10 PageRank were not affected at all. It is very possible that Google could point to the difficulty in getting a 6/10 PageRank and if a site is ranked that high, they must be a top quality site based on their own criteria.

We highly recommend to step up your efforts in boosting your PageRank to a 6/10.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »