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 »

Microsoft sets ultimatum for Yahoo! deal

April 5th, 2008 Jason

Microsoft exec Steve Ballmer has given Yahoo! 3 weeks to come to an agreement before they go ahead and initiate a hostile takeover.

Full text of Ballmer’s letter is reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

This quote really seems to sum up the Microsoft’s whole attitude:

This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares

In my view this assumes that the other alternative - Yahoo! remaining an independent entity - doesn’t offer “full and fair value for their shares.” Hm.

The hostile takeover thing is really what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft, really, but I never imagined that we might see it on such a large scale. It’s not so much “shit or get off the pot,” it’s more like “shit or get flushed anyway.” My.

Posted in Microsoft, Yahoo | 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 »