The Art Of SEO - The Science Of PPC

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Vince Update Explained

Back in February, Aaron Wall wrote about a “minor” Google algorithm change that Todd Malicoat labeled the Big Brand Bailout. After a bit of controversy, Matt Cutts issued a video response to a question and labeled the change Vince after the engineer who worked on the change.

While the above conversations were interesting and create a significant amount of chatter, none of them shed any light on what ingredient Vince added to the secret sauce that produced these limited by quite stunning changes in some very, very competitive results.

SEO Book provides the answer this week, courtesy of insight by UK SEO Guru Patrick Altoft. Aaron ads some compelling evidence to Patrick’s theory that Google has incorporated user query refinement to boost rankings for sites. This is a subtle trick to reduce the noise inherent in user behavior because unlike click tracking, query refinement requires an overt action by the user from which the search engine can infer intent. It also aims to reduce the likelihood that the user will need to refine their query, which is appears to be one definition of relevance.

It isn’t clear that this explanation provides any competitive exploits. The obvious take away is to make sure that your company is a thought leader that gets included in articles about your niche and to maximize your exposure in the consideration set at the top of the search results (Organic and Paid results above the fold). Those recommendations haven’t changed in five years.

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SEO Means Optimize For Users

SEOMoz gives some terrible advice about SEO and user focused development. Rand presents some graphs about different optimization components and how their effect on ranking has evolved over time and magically draws the conclusion that SEO should focus on engines, not users because additional SEO tactics are required to rank.

I am not going to comment here on how he ranks the impact of each tactic. I disagree with some of his analysis, particularly the importance of keyword research and keyword mapping but I agree with others. The larger point here is that Rand is arguing against “focusing on users”, saying this approach is bad SEO advice because it does not include other SEO tactics.

Rand is ignoring the considerable nuance in the meaning of “designing for users”. The art and science of designing websites for users has evolved significantly in the thirteen year thanks to the contributions of Jakob Nielsen, Gord Hotchkiss and tens of thousands of designers, conversion optimizers and site owners who have observed user behavior, tested and validated different theories to enrich the body of knowledge about user interactions with the web in general and search users in particular.

The overall consensus from this research is that the tactics embraced by push oriented designers and agencies who claim to be designing for user are not effective. Flash based sites, fancy formatting and dominant images are almost as much of an obstacle for users as they are for engines. What works for users and for search engines is delivering clear information scent that matches the search intent, bulleted content and the judicious use of bold text. Scent should be presented in easy to read text with high contrast and the content should be written with the assumption that the user wants to scan the page in 3-5 seconds to make sure they are in the correct place. If the scent is not delivered in that time frame, the user will hit the back button and “bounce” from the site. Users will rarely engage with the site navigation if the landing page doesn’t match the search intent.

During the last 12 years, SEO has evolved from the process of manipulating search engines by jamming pages full of hidden keywords to a high ROI discipline with a data driven methodology rooted in query frequency that focuses on developing a site which matches the search intent of users with content that meets that intent. I call this evolved SEO Website Optimization. The effective optimizer focuses on creating pages that attracts visitors and reduces bounce rate, engages users and creating conversions.

A majority of the changes over the last five years with regards to how the engines regard on-page and on-site factors are rooted in the engines trying to emulate human users as they crawl and interpret the page.

  • Content in the golden triangle is more important than content in other locations on the page. The impact of keyword stuffed H1 tags has diminished over time but designing your site to deliver good information scent in your headline is more important than ever for both SEO and for conversion.
  • Engines readily admit that the location of a link on the page matters. Links in the variable content area on the page, particularly links in the golden triangle, count more than links in the boilerplate, the left/right rail or the footer. The savvy optimizer includes the most important links as citation links above the fold in the variable content area of the site, where users are likely to see them
  • Toolbar data, analytics data, conversion optimizer data and other streams give the engines an incredible assortment of information about how the user interacts with a site and we are seeing this data affect rankings more and more.

    • While the engines are tight lipped about how they use this data, Matt Cutts revealed at SES San Jose this year that Sitelinks are driven, at least in part, by the popularity of individual pages on the site. During a site clinic review of Meijer.com he observed that their Store Locator is buried in their primary navigation (and suggested they make it more prominent) but that is was a popular page “because it appears in your sitelink”. The Meijer Store locator page is also the second listing below the sitelink despite being buried in the global navigation and completely lacking content on the page. User behavior data explains how a boilerplate ONLY page with a few graphics is the second highest ranked page on the site.

I will not take issue with Rands observation that SEO involves a lot of tactics that are specifically for the engines nor do I embrace the Google party line that says “make content for users, not for engines”. SEO is a multi-faceted discipline and I completely concur that these factors cannot be ignored. On the other hand, any SEO who does not focus on designing sites for users is doing a huge disservice to themselves and their clients.

Conversion takes place at the intersection of search intent, content and user experience. More and more, on-site SEO occurs at the same intersection.

Updated: Rand posted an update on his site as well as a comment here reflecting that he was misunderstood. He was trying to say that it is a mistake to ignore SEO for the engines and ONLY focus on users. It is impossible to argue with that. Given that, I have toned down my remarks some and I hope we can agree that user centric design is essential for SEO…it just isn’t enough.

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White Knight Checks Google Cash

It would be arrogant to say all the credit belongs entirely to White Knight SEO, but it looks like Google has taken notice of our efforts and decided to block advertising on the keyword google cash and google money tree.

For advertisers playing the Google cash game, this is at best check, not mate. We have not induced a moral decision by Google to protect naive users. This appears to be the narrowest possible compromise, a strategic retreat by Google to avoid the obvious embarrassment of having the organic results overtly exposing the scams advertised on the right. Google is still allowing advertisers to bid on variations like google cash detective and google cash system.

In the past, Google has publicly promised to take down fraudulent advertising and failed to do so. This time around, there was no press release, Google just suspended bidding on a couple of exact match terms. The moral of this story is that if marketers and publishers establish and maintain the moral high ground, we can pressure the ad networks to act responsibly.

Updated September 16: Google posts more advice about how to fraud site that tell you how to make money with Google.

Especially noteworthy is the section about Reporting a sponsored link. It appears they need our help to figure out when someone is advertising on Google using the Google trademark.

If the site in question appeared as a sponsored link on the Google search results page, please report the site through the AdWords Help Center.

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Google’s Cash Cow – Scam Advertising & Profits

By now, you have gotten at least one email inviting you to make easy money by placing links on Google. These scams go by names like “The Google Cash System” or “Easy Google Cash”. The bottom line is pretty simple, these offers are scams and they are designed to take advantage of the most vulnerable people in our society, the unemployed, the opportunity seekers and the naive.

On July 1st, 2009 The FTC announced a series of indictments against a handful of online scams operating under a variety of corporations and d/b/a’s, including Google Money Tree, Google Pro, Google Treasure Chest and Internet Income Pro.

Online fraud is extremely profitable because you do not have to spend money delivering goods and service. You don’t even need a physical address — advertising is the primary expense. One of the things these scams is that they find their victims by buying advertising through ad networks, notably Google Adwords. According to Harvard’s Ben Edelman, search engine advertising receives up to $70 for every $100 of revenue from online scams. Take a look at a search for Google Money Tree and you can see that Google is still profiting from companies advertising on this phrase. Given the FTC indictments, it is morally offensive that Google is still making money by allowing advertisers to bid on these terms!

This scam has now been reborn under the name Google Cash. Note that the original ebook solid as “Google Cash” is not the same as the various get rich quick schemes now being offer and the advertisers for this term vary. Readers should be highly skeptical of any company advertising for “Google Cash” or talking about getting paid by Google to “place links”, but this is not a specific characterization of individual companies as fraudulent . Read their fine print and decide for yourself.

Read it carefully and you may see that by paying a very modest fee, say $1.99 or so, you are actually agreeing to a repeated monthly charge of $70 or more unless you cancel your “membership.” Again, the exact details vary, but each of these offers depends on what is called a reverse billing fraud to make money…by victimizing the same people again and again.

Google, stop being evil.

Update 9-2-09 @ 10:19pm:

I have been encouraged by Paul Schlegel to add the following list of sites where victims can file complaints about online fraud: Paul runs a Work At Home information site with a bunch of affiliate links but also has spent a lot of time exposing online scams and assisting victims. He recommends that if you are a victim of a scam or discover one, you should report the information to the following:

Paul also recommends reporting the scam to the BBB because (the Federal and State government agencies will NOT put out warnings, because doing so could possibly jeopardize their case before they have time to collect evidence). I have pretty mixed feelings about the BBB, but he points out that they will issue warnings AND says the FTC goes through their documentation in case they need extrinsic evidence to make a judgment on matters of deception.

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Using SEO for Good – Introducting White Knight SEO

For years Google has successfully hid behind the “don’t be evil” mission statement and aggressively blurred the distinction between SEO and spam, fraud and other illegal activities while ignoring the fact that Adsense is the single largest source of revenue for spam and that Adwords makes millions of dollars each year from ads for fraudulent products or services. Spam is bad and hackers are a problem, but the primary vector for many criminal activities are the ad networks themselves, not professional SEOs.

Its time we stop complaining and actually start doing something about it. The ROIguy is pleased to announce a new idea we are calling “White Knight SEO”, which aims to protect users from these scams by dominating organic search results with consumer protection information. We hope that we can place advisory content to take over the top 10 results in Google for searches related to common scams and online fraud with a particular focus on areas which are using adwords & adsense to snare victims.

The first target is “Google Cash” and related terms. If you are interested in writing about this topic (or any other type of spam/fraud that is being perpetrated through Adwords), we invite you to join our crusade and protect consumers from fraudulent offers around “Google Cash Detective Review – Scam Alert”. In turn, we will do our best to publicize the articles and hopefully earn some links to help them rank.

Update, August 19. David Rodnitsky of PPC Associates is the first official White Knight (even if he isn’t an SEO) with his Google Cash Review.

Update, August 21st, 2009. Jonathan Hochman offers his take on Google Scams

Update, September 3rd, 2009. Jonah Stein weighs in with Slaughter Google’s Cash Cow

Intent Focused SEM

SEO and Pay Per Click landing pages should almost always be designed with the same content and the same layout because search engines reward on-page and on-site factors by trying to emulate human users as they crawl the page and navigate the

Great Content Users Like

Great content is essential to SEO and to PPC. Too many websites are filled with keyword stuffed pages that read like they were written in 1999 and feature a Call-To-Action that matches the needs of the site owner but not the user's query or desires;

UX & Conversion

What Works For Users The art and science of designing websites for users has evolved significantly in the last 20 years thanks to the contributions of Jakob Nielsen, Gord Hotchkiss and the real world lessons of tens of thousands of designers,