Personal online reputation management

July 2nd, 2008 Jason

I had someone at work hit me up the other day for some personal advice. Thanks to some misadventures several years ago, when you Google her name there’s a couple very negative articles from a couple very high-profile sites sitting in prominent positions in the SERPs. Obviously, this is something she’d rather a prospective employer not see. So she asked what she could do.

Here’s my first email back to her.

‘Online reputation management’ is a big issue these days thanks to situations exactly like this. I thought I’d send over a few articles which talk about it.

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628265
This is a good, broad overview.

http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/07/11/reputation-management/
This is very much centered on *personal * reputation rather than a brand.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/27/online-reputation-management-basics
This is very brand-focused, but it still applies: Your name is your brand.

http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2006/11/09/top-5-ways-to-establish-an-internet-identity/
Even if you’re established already, there’s more places you can be, over which you’ll have more control down the road.

http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/reputation%20management Links to a bunch of other articles which may be of interest.

The theme you’ll probably see is that t here are no silver bullets, but there’s definitely things you can do. The fact that those articles/comments are now 2 years old will probably help - feed the search engines some new information that’s more up-to-date, and the older stuff should fall away. You won’t get rid of them entirely, but off the first page of results would be a great start.

Think of it as a bit of an advertising campaign for yourself; like any campaign, there’s some thought and planning that needs to go into it, but it can be done.

I’m intrigued by this as an exercise because of the challenges involved. If she doesn’t own (and use) her-name.com then is there value in starting it up now? Possibly, but that alone isn’t going to take down the very well established site which contains - admittedly - some very valid commentary. So, what to do?

Look for specific ideas from me later.

Posted in seo | No Comments »

International Search Summit, London, May 22

May 19th, 2008 Jason

I will be at the International Search Summit in London this Thursday, May 22. I’m quite looking forward to the networking, for one thing, but as my remit continues to expand from the UK on an almost-daily basis, I’m expecting it to be a load of good information as well. Maybe see you there.

Posted in conferences, seo | No Comments »

The great SEO race

May 7th, 2008 Jason

I’m working out a little internal competition for my team.

We’ve got a handful of small niche sites that recently went live. Each site is a thin vertical slice of information aggregated from several broader datasets, essentially mashed up with other new and relevant content. The plan is for us to each take charge of one site, and within the limits of our acceptable SEO practices, go head-to-head to build links, secure SERP placement, and generate traffic.

Each niche is roughly equivalent in terms of specificity and search volume, and the only budget is time - there are no paid campaigs, so it’s seems a pretty even playing field. I’m thinking that we benchmark on several factors:

  • overall page impressions + percentage growth
  • page impressions from organic search + percentage growth
  • Google SERP position on a pre-defined set of 5 to 10 key terms
  • inbound links as counted by Yahoo!
  • downstream traffic to the parent sites (this is the conversion metric)

Benchmarks will be taken at 2 month intervals for 6 months, with a lunch on the line for the mutually agreed leader at each checkpoint.

Dev resource and access to certain tools (Hitwise) is limited, and that’s a detail we need to work out before this can start, but there will be some ability to make changes to the sites themselves and do competitive research.

It will be an interesting challenge, to say the least.

Posted in Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo, seo | No Comments »

SES NY Day 4: Meet the crawlers

March 20th, 2008 Jason

Session brief:

Representatives from major crawler-based search engines cover how to submit and feed them content, with plenty of Q&A time to cover issues related to ranking well and being indexed.

Yahoo!, Google, and MSN all put themselves on the podium and each ran through an overview of their webmaster tools. Anyone who is already using these tools and/or keeping up on the industry blogs probably didn’t get much new out of it, though I did catch just a couple tidbits:

  • Yahoo! will now accept the robots.txt sitemap.xml URL being on a different domain. I think this is pretty new, and useful for anyone who may have issues with getting things hosted on their corporate servers.
  • The protocol for supplying a Google news feed is different than the standard sitemap.xml protocol. I hadn’t looked into this much in the past, so that’s probably not new, but it’s good information to have heard.

For once, the Q&A was the heart of the session, and after a bunch of standard “I have this very specific issue with my site” kind of questions, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try raising a ruckus with a meaty one. I wanted to know how the engines were currently viewing the use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute on internal links to a website’s own pages. Though Matt Cutts has gone on record about it several times, I think there’s still confusion, so I asked. The responses:

  • Sean Suchter of Yahoo! said they are not using a nofollowed link for calculating the “link quality distribution” score for a page. He did not specifically say, “don’t use it on internal pages,” but he did specifically say, “I would be wary of using it for sculpting pagerank.”
  • Evan Roseman of Google did a marvelous bit of dancing and basically said “go find Matt’s post,” but also said that there were some situations where an internal nofollow might be appropriate. He did not comment on the use of it as a sulpting/siloing device. (The post in question is, I believe, on Matt Cutt’s blog here, but there are other more recent - and not always clearly consistent - quotes on SEOMoz, SEORoundtable, and Dave Naylor’s blog as well. In fact, there’s a lot of opinion out there, if you do as Evan suggested and Google: Matt Cutts nofollow )
  • Nathan Buggia from MSN dodged entirely and simply said he thought there were better uses of your time and money than worrying about it. Which, interestingly, is pretty much what Matt said in Dave Naylor’s post, and with which, honestly, I have to completely agree…though he didn’t, technically, answer my question.

I was a bit amused that Evan referred to the question several times as a “pretty advanced topic.” Sorry, man, the SEO 101 session was three days ago, and I didn’t cross the ocean to go to it.

Posted in Google, MSN, SES, Yahoo, conferences, seo | No Comments »

SES NY Day 2: Orion panel on Universal Search

March 18th, 2008 Jason

Official pitch:

Search result multiplicity is not a new phenomenon, but recent advancements will guarantee the world of search and marketing will be changing forever. Before you attend this week’s optimization and best practices sessions, hear from industry gurus about how search, marketing and information seeking is changing the industry that follows the search. Our ongoing series on universal search will include research data available only at SES.

I almost didn’t go to this, and in fact showed up a bit late, but in the middle of a day of sort of uninspiring sessions, this genuine conversation in panel format ended up making me glad I went.

As I walked in, comScore’s James Lamberti was discussing a very interesting graph they’d built. Their research into universal search results showed a direct correlation between type of search result and clickthrough rate. In their model, if “no universal results” provided a 100% clickthrough rate, including video results showed a slight decrease to (I think) 98%. As more types of results came into play (images, maps, and so on), the clickthrough rate continued dropping, and result sets including “news” or “stock quotes” were showing less than 50% clickthrough.

Predictably, the Google rep-du-jour (Jack Menzel) then got raked over the coals for the rest of the session and spent a lot of time denying that they’d changed their business model. If they were intentionally providing information which did not lead people to click off the page, aren’t they then becoming a portal site? How are they going to monetize this, and how will that affect the downstream sites ability to monetize themselves?

Lamberti commented that the future value in search results will be not in the click, but in what is being displayed in the results. If people are clicking less, then it’s all the more important to be showing them something of value in the window of opportunity you have. The follow on question I have is a practical one: how do you measure this? Right now, universal results are showing for a small percentage of search traffic, but I have no idea if my sites are showing as part of an integrated SERP or not. I can’t get impression data for organic results, now, can I? No, I cannot.

The other Big Issue that put Jack on the hotseat was the fact that Google owns space in many of the channels now listing in the universal search results, and it’s hard to believe that there is no bias. YouTube has the most traffic and the most videos, but does that mean they have the best video for a particular result set? No. But the perception is that YouTube gets preference because Google owns it. Is it true? Jack insisted not.

Of course, with a G-man on the stage, the conversation was bound to focus there, but clearly Yahoo! and Ask and everyone else are taking their result sets in this direction as well, and in the theoretical or “big picture” view, the questions directed at Jack are going to be relevant to all. The final takeaway comments from the panelists were worth summing up, as they really seemed to encapsulate some very key bits of the future of search:

  • Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director of Big Mouth Media thinks it is important to understand how the searchers of today are different people. There is a whole generation growing up with YouTube and Flickr and social networks and they are interacting with the web in new ways, and their expectations are different than Google’s original “ten blue links.”
  • Lamberti agreed, opining that this is the way search has to go, because it’s what the consumer wants.
  • Jack Menzel simply said Google were not changing their business model at all: they are continuing to try presenting the best, relevant content on the web.Universal search is just reflecting the fact that there are more images, there is more video and images and maps and etc. available.
  • Finally, John Battelle of Federated Media commented that we’re at a unique turning point, paralleling it to the shift from DOS to Windows. The difference being, instead of 200 developers in Redmond creating something in a vacuum, Google is engaging their users and advertisers in a conversation, and this is just one step along a continuum of changes leading to an interface and experience we don’t yet know.

All in all, quite a provoking conversation, one which offered no solutions or tips and tricks, but addressed some hard questions and I think left everyone in the room with a lot to consider.

Posted in Ask, Google, SES, Yahoo, conferences, seo | No Comments »

Why there will always be search

February 24th, 2008 Jason

In conversation the other night at the SES London after-party, a few of us got into a lengthy conversation about the future of search. The starting point was a question about whether tracking and personalization would advance to the point that search engines as we know them would become moot.

Now, even back in the pre-internet days, the library (remember those?) had a search function. You would start at the card catalog and find the book you wanted. These days the card catalog has been replaced by a terminal screen, but the function is the same. Or, you could wander the stacks - organized by category - and manually find things that looked relevant. Or had good reviews on the back, or had a pretty cover.

Search engines are the card catalog of the web, though each of them has their own version of a Dewey decimal system. Based on a couple words or concepts, they’ll deliver a set of pages which they’ve determined match your needs. Just like some of the books you find in the card catalog won’t really be what you want, some web pages in the SERPs are going to be more useful to you than others. At the same time, search results can be the equivalent of the categorized stacks in the library, letting you browse through a variety of pages around a related topic.

What a physical card catalog doesn’t do, though, is offer suggestions of things I might like. Search engines are aiming to do this with personalized search results, as are sites like Amazon (with the “Amazon suggests” feature), Last.fm, or Stumbleupon. These sites want to be the friend who passes me a book and says, “I think you’ll like this.”

The thing is, even if someone knows me really well, they’re not always right…because frankly, personal preferences aren’t rational. Even within a genre I like, some things will work for me and some won’t. I can’t really tell you why I like James Bond books but not Mike Hammer books. And if my Last.fm playlist leans towards melodic singer/songwriters like Cat Power or Neko Case, their algorithm is never going to even consider offering me any Norwegian death metal or west coast hip-hop. But I like both of those things, too.

So to the original question: no, personalization won’t replace search. We’ll always have a need to find new things, and there will always be personal, irrational filtering that a software program will never be able to consider. And now and then I’m still going to want to just browse the stacks and pick up something with a pretty cover.

Posted in geek, seo | No Comments »

On linkbuilding

February 4th, 2008 Jason

We’re off on a serious linkbuilding campaign for a couple of our sites in Q1, and I’ve been boning up on the current opinions about the process.

It’s interesting that SO MUCH of what counts as SEO these days seems geared either towards mom and pop sites (start a blog, make widgets and funny videos, get eight million links), or to bloggers wanting to make a buck out of AdSense (use digg, use stumbleupon, whatever, get eight million links). I’m not saying that common linkbuilding strategies WON’T work for a big corporate site, but I think the game is different. For one thing, there’s going to be a whole lot more at stake any time somebody in marketing gets an idea to do a silly video or a widget that might be a valid bit of linkbait, and it’s going to take a whole lot more buy-in to get it done.

But there’s loads of considerations in a simple linking campaign as well, and what I’m particularly considering at the moment are free directories.

Directory links are recommended, and a dime a dozen. Or less, since there’s so many free sites out there. So, given a target of x number of links in x weeks, go for the low-hanging fruit, right?

I’m pretty skeptical.

First off, some of our sites are pretty powerful already. Is there really going to be a return on getting a link in that free directory? For our smaller brands, there may be value to free directory listing simply in building visibility, but our focus, first and foremost, must absolutely be to protect the brand, and thus we need to be extra diligent in how we source those links.

So, I’ve been driving the team to do really do their research on a directory before submitting for a link.

  • How relevant is the directory? Is it really just a random collection of links, or is it a site which is actually useful to a user?
  • More specifically (for us), how relevant is it to the UK, and to our brand site?
  • What kind of link will it provide? Direct? Nofollow? Redirect?
  • What kind of traffic does the directory have? Any?
  • Does anybody actually link to it?
  • Does it allow links to adult/hacker/poker sites? (All potentially bad neighbors)
  • Does it live on a shared server with adult/hacker/poker sites?

Really, these are all valid questions that anyone doing link development for any site should be considering. Are free directories worth it?

The relevance question is a huge one. We can be way better about finding opportunities than a listing of free directories (and in fact we are…). Anybody can find a list of free directories and claim 20 new links in a month. What else can we do?

To that end, I’ve also been doing a lot of reading to get my head back in the flow to start really pushing them to get creative, and here’s a few linkbuilding articles that I’ve found particularly worth the read in the last week or so.

There are of course loads more out fantastic articles out there, and I’ll probably add to this list as I keep going.

What else can we do? Well…there’s loads, but that’s another post.

Posted in links, seo | No Comments »

The week in search - week 2

January 13th, 2008 Jason

A weekly roundup of articles I found interesting and useful in the last 7 days.

Week 2 of 2008:

Wikia launches:
The much-touted launch of Jimmy Wales’ stab at user-generated search results. Is it really an SEO free-for-all? Only time will tell.

Graywolf on Wordpress SEO
Michael takes a great look at how to maximize the keyword benefit of your post titles, post slugs, and page names.

Self Made Chick
Self Made Chick talks about blogging in first person. A particularly useful post as I ‘find my voice’ here, but the rest of her blog is great as well. It probably resonated more with me this week than it might normally as I’d just been talking with a friend about ways she could get a little extra income for herself, and SMC has some great first-person experience doing just that.

AdSense changes the rules
 Google announced changes to the AdSense referral program, and there’s lots of interesting commentary going ’round about it. Problogger calls it flat out stupid, while Andy Beard rationalizes and then looks at exploiting it, and Bruce Clay offers a very reasonable opinion: it is bad business to alienate your best customers. I couldn’t agree more.

I also brought a new assistant into my team this week, and so have been reviewing a few useful beginner links I’ve had stashed away:
SEO Best Practices at KingFriday.co.uk
Tips for Your First Day In-House at SearchEngineWatch
The SEO’s Guide to Linkbuilding at SlightlyShadySEO
and the white papers at SEO-Theory.comI intentionally include the slightlyshady link because we strive towards completely ethical SEO, and I think it’s important for the new person to have a sense of what is and is not generally acceptable to do. There are also things in the SEO Theory reading that I don’t agree with, and I expect that some very worthwhile discussions will stem from the team diving into them more.

Posted in Week in Search, links, seo | No Comments »

Automatically post friendly URLs to Twitter and Facebook

January 12th, 2008 Jason

In a fit of self-propagation, I set about this week to explore making Wordpress post to my Twitter any time I update.

I found a basic, but functional, plugin called Twitpress, which does exactly what I wanted. Except…I’m also using the All In One SEO Pack, which rewrites page URLs into an SEO-friendly format. (Really, a must-have plugin.) Twitpress by default will tweet the stock version of a post URL:

http://RelevantText.com?p=24

instead of the format I want to show:

http://RelevantText.com/making-the-most-of-server-errors-20080111/

Now, I know that a)Twitter links are nofollowed, so this doesn’t really matter for the spiders, and b)Twitter also automatically turns long links into tinyurls, but it still bothered me (more on why in a minute). So, I set about to fix the plugin.

After reading through what the plugin code was doing, I surfed through the WP database tables a little bit, and discovered that I needed to change one line in Twitpress. Hooray!

In the twitpress.php code, replace line 85:

$proto = str_replace("[link]", get_option('home')."?p=".$postID, $proto);

with

$proto = str_replace("[link]", $post->guid, $proto);

‘guid’ is a field in the wp_posts table, if you care.

Bingo. I’m very pleased with myself.

So why, you may ask, do I care about how the links look in Twitter if they aren’t spiderable? Because I’ve also installed the Twitter App on Facebook, so any time I update Twitter, my Facebook status updates as well…which means the link is then being pushed out along the newsfeeds of all my contacts there. The link is still not spiderable, but it is potentially much more likely to get seen, followed, and possibly linked to. Through the tinyurl redirect, it now goes to the right version of the URL, and when people subsequently link to the post, I want them using the right one. This, I think, will help that along.

Jan 14 Update: After my initial excitement, I’ve discovered that this is still slightly buggy - notifications occasionally appear on twitter with the p= URL, and sometimes with no URL at all.  This seems to only happen when a post is first published, and not when later edited, but I’m not clear why, as the ‘guid’ field is populated with the first publish of a post. So, this is cool when it works, but I’m still looking at it. 

Posted in Facebook, Twitter, geek, php, plugins, seo, site, wordpress | No Comments »

Making the most of server errors

January 11th, 2008 Jason

Nobody thinks twice about planning for and dealing with 404 errors on their website. It’s going to happen, right? Not because you didn’t properly redirect when you moved a page or something, of course! But you expect that somebody will mistype a URL someday, and you plan for it and have your fancy or funny 404 page in place on launch day.

I was reminded today that people often don’t deal with 500 server errors at all, but on a large dynamic site these errors are just as bound to happen as 404s, and they’re far more troublesome. They are unpredictable, untrackable (unless you want to trawl through server logs, which I for one don’t), and harbingers of doom for your site because more often than not, they are indicators of something very bad going on behind the scenes…and you can bet your AdSense check that if a user sees them, a search spider does, too. When a spider hits a server error, it’s usually dead in the water, and that spells disaster for your rankings.

The good news is, it’s actually not too hard to deal with them properly.

One of my large corporate sites was having some massive issues with server response time last year, and as a result we were seeing a significant uptick in the number of 500 errors being reported in Google WMT’s crawl stats.

For the most part, it seemed like simply backing up and reloading the page usually got past the error, but GoogleBot isn’t going to do that. We really had no way of knowing just how pervasive the problem was, but we knew it was affecting the user experience, and clearly killing GoogleBot on a regular basis. While the technology group worked on the backend issues, we stemmed the problem from the front end by creating a custom error page to display any time a 500 error occurred.

The criteria were minimal:

  1. Improve the user experience when an error occurs
  2. Provide search spiders a way to continue through the site, and
  3. Be able to solidly track the number of server errors being delivered as part of our overall statistics

Fortunately, both .NET and Apache make it very easy to define a custom page to display when a server error happens.

In Apache, it’s dead simple - add a line to your .htaccess file like this:

ErrorDocument 500 /friendly500.html

(the nice thing here is that you don’t need to tweak the server config file, which you probably can’t do if you don’t manage your own servers…)

Microsoft servers are a little more involved. For a friendly error page in .NET, IIS tells yout to edit the web config file to include this code:

<customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="errors/friendly500.html">
</customErrors>

As noted here on Techrepublic, you may define different pages for different errors:

<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="errors/ErrorPage.aspx">
<error statusCode="400" redirect="errors/friendly400.html" />
<error statusCode="401" redirect="errors/friendly401.html" />
<error statusCode="403" redirect="errors/friendly403.html" />
<error statusCode="404" redirect="errors/friendly404.html" />
<error statusCode="408" redirect="errors/friendly408.html" />
<error statusCode="500" redirect="errors/friendly500.html" />
<error statusCode="503" redirect="errors/friendly503.html" />
</customErrors>

The page can have either an .aspx or .html extension, but keep in mind that if the server is having problems there’s no sense in trying to deliver another dynamic page. Keep it static.

One caveat : IE will try to display a friendly error message of its own, unless the error page is over 512k, so put some text on it.

As our existing 404 page is essentially a sitemap, we quickly realized that we could simply duplicate it as ‘error.html’ and with a few text changes, use that. Users now get a friendly “Oops!” message, and spiders and users alike have a variety of useful links enabling them to continue navigating the site instead of going elsewhere.

Results?

A snapshot report from Google WMT in July showed 218 server errors that happened during their crawls in the previous two weeks. Today, there are none listed at all. (To be fair, the tech guys have been doing loads of work to make things run better as well, and credit where credit is due.) But we can also now see in our statistics that regardless of what GoogleBot is seeing, the error page has actually loaded…um…let’s just say “rather a lot” this month so far, and we can now start assembling solid numbers of how much the server issues are affecting the user experience and to argue for even more improvement work on the backend.

Posted in geek, seo | No Comments »

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