The other annoyance is the waste those schemers represent. Their elaborate devices take time, energy and talent to deploy. These folks are sharp enough and skilled enough to get a real job, but instead of building something they choose to be leeches on the backs of those who earn an honest day’s pay.

What am I railing about? Two different scams.

SCAM #1: Affiliate thief

The client prohibits affiliates from bidding on their brand name. Oftentimes, we’re prompted to look for affiliate theft because sales on our client’s trademark drops off the table for some reason. We have tools to help detect this abuse, and normally a quick scan of the destination url reveals that the traffic is really going to www.dirtbag.com or whatever after the Google redirect. But check out this scam:

The top is what our analyst spotted; it looks like traffic is being passed from Google to our redirector rkdms.com, but it isn’t! Not yet. This thief actually creates a spoofed version of our normal redirector and sends the traffic to her/his domain. Then — devilishly clever — after it’s gone through the affiliate’s site to get their credit tagged, the traffic is sent back through the real rkdms.com redirect (shown below the spoofed version) and on to the client’s site.

The net effect? RKG doesn’t see a drop in brand traffic through paid search — the user got our tracking tags. But, the affiliate still gets the commission by inserting its tag as well. We don’t see a drop so aren’t prompted to look for the theft, and a casual look at the destination urls on the trademark ads wouldn’t look out of the ordinary because of the spoof. Fortunately, our analyst had the razor sharp eye to spot the scam.

SCAM #2: SEO Link spam

RKG Blog generates many conversations with our readership, which we deeply appreciate. We also get a lot of comment Spam from both the standard spyware, malware villains and SEO companies looking to build link networks without doing the hard work necessary to do it right. Akismet has caught 190,000 of the first type, but has a bit more trouble spotting the last type.

Usually this later class of spam that makes it passed the filter is fairly easy to screen manually: “hi, love your blog, keep up the good work” type of generic message with links embedded. The more advance folks do something like: “Great post on [Title]” with dynamic insertion of either the title of the post, the author or a chunk of text from the post.

This morning, the prize winning dirt ball actually got a couple past the gatekeeper because instead of grabbing something easily identifiable, s/he grabbed a complete sentence from one of the other comments on the page so it looked like a well thought-through reaction to the post. His bad luck was that one of the comments he placed stole a snippet from one of my comments which I recognized as sounding a bit too familiar.

Clever, very clever, and evil.

Pretty clearly, the folks above have serious programming skills. They could undoubtedly get jobs with real companies doing positive work. Instead, they’ve chosen the Madoff route. I hope it leads them to the cell next to Bernie.

Technorati Tags: affiliates, link spam

Adam was kind enough to participate in the following interview on the state of SEO as we enter 2010, and will join us at our Client Summit in Charlottesville this May.

George: Adam, you’ve been in the SEO game as long as anyone in the space. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry?

Adam: All I can think is, “what happened?” When I started in this industry, Yahoo! ruled the day with its directory (and search as an additional option). Then Google came along with its simple interface, which was alone so innovative and refreshing – the interface was a big part of the Google phenomenon – everyone wanted to use it, everyone talked about it. And now, look what happened: Google took nearly all the marketshare and Yahoo! is giving up in the search space completely.

The search marketing industry has grown a lot, and from a glass-half-empty point of view not always for the better. There are a ton of low-quality SEO and PPC services polluting the marketplace. It’s getting more difficult than ever to sort the wheat from the chaff. I don’t know how someone without experience in the industry could accurately select a partner, except by referral. There is some amazing talent out there, but they’re not always the loudest and most vocal. It can be hard to find.

Now social media is changing everything again, and real-time search, and Google is getting more aggressive with monetization of its channels. I’m especially interested in how URL shorteners are upsetting what have been signals inherent to SEO: links. Google is also pushing its Product Search and rolling out new interfaces, and even experimenting with taking away the URL, or at least changing it to a breadcrumb trail. That feature, and sitelinks, and anchor text links appearing in search results – there is a convergence happening with what have traditionally been site architecture factors in SEO. This is great for us as a company because we’ve been trumpeting the importance of site architecture all along.

George: There was a great fire-storm at SMX Advanced in 2008 over the distinction between “black hat” and “white hat” SEO practices, with some practitioners arguing that anything that works is okay. They reason: who is Google to define “good” and “bad” behavior? They’re not the law, so why let them set the rules? What’s your take?

Adam: Certainly, but if you don’t play by their rules they reserve the right to kick you out of their search. It’s their search engine, just like it’s “our site” to do with what we choose. I think it’s fine to approach SEO from the point of view of a blackhat, provided one accepts the risks and consequences. It’s not for me. I’ve always been white hat. It just makes sense for me, for my company and the clients we work with.

George: If there is a distinction above, where is that line?

Adam: They’re not the law, but they own their search engine. Play according to their rules or you don’t get to play at all. Ultimately, they draw the line in the sand and black hats flirt with it, step over it, sometimes get caught and sometimes don’t. It’s a lot easier to not have to worry about that, which is why I like doing things in a white hat way. However, if there is a gray area it’s likely paid links. In some markets, the SEO is so competitive that literally everyone in the top 5 is buying links. And many of them are Fortune 500 companies.

George: A few years ago it seemed to me that the classic bag of “dirty” SEO tricks still worked pretty well, even though the engines claimed to be onto them. Do you think the “scammers” will always be one step ahead of the engines, or is the reverse more the case, that the engines change the algorithms and the SEO folks then have to figure out what changed?

Adam: There will always be folks at the cutting edge of spam. Sounds ironic, but it’s true. Spam is the area that innovates, just like porn innovates on the Web. Today Yahoo! is more vulnerable to link manipulation. Paid links being the best example. You can throw some pretty dirty links at sites and do it aggressively and they normally reward the action with top rankings. It isn’t surprising seeing how their web search hasn’t really evolved over the last few years – other areas of Yahoo! of course have innovated and evolved. But search just hasn’t, so it’s probably no surprise they’re giving up the ghost to Bing.

Otherwise, things have changed dramatically. Google seems to be wanting to get away from its traditional model of dependence on links. It’s too easy to manipulate, thus their jihad against paid links about a year ago. You don’t hear as much anymore from them on paid links – they’ve sent the message – now it’s time to push their “report spam” feature and you can bet companies and consultants are using it daily. (We’re not, by the way. We prefer to focus on building our client’s presences than pulling their competitors down.)

Bottom line from what we’re seeing is that paid links can still work, very well. But the risk quotient is higher, depending on the approach. Above and beyond great content you need great links – you just do – and Google so far hasn’t seemed interested in shaking up established brand residents on top results buying lots of links. There is a fuzzy gray area between what are partnerships, paid links, manipulative links, and clean non-manipulative links. I’m sure Google knows where the line is drawn, but I sometimes do not. It’s not always as easy as saying ‘nofollow’ either.

XML sitemap adoption just hasn’t happened like the engines wanted it to (Google especially). However, with product search becoming more important Base feeds are probably a natural evolution of the same basic idea – give Google a link list with product information instead of solely relying on the crawl.

George: There has been an interesting discussion about “page rank sculpting” with some folks saying it’s essential and others saying it’s totally bogus. What’s your view?

Adam: I’ve been on panels with Leslie Rhode and he has some very interesting approaches, so I would never say it’s bogus. Leslie has tests that prove pagerank sculpting has helped to push rankings. However Rand Fishkin, a pretty vocal proponent of PR sculpting in the past, says it’s actually best for indexation issues. I respect Rand’s opinion on SEO and think this is something to pay attention to. For myself, I follow the simple rule of focusing on what makes sense from a user perspective, what products we care about selling, then I feature those prominently on our clients pages. That’s about it.

Nofollow is still useful. My friend Shari Thurow often laughs about what “patsies” we are as SEOs, because we follow Google around like a dog begging for a treat. Google says to PR sculpt, we freak about it for a year or so, Google says it stopped working a year ago, we freak about that now and say never to use it! What a sad state of affairs. In SEO we need to develop our own creative approaches to things and think for ourselves!

We’ve deployed some pretty aggressive uses of nofollow in cases where, 1) we’re doing something that’s primarly a short-term tactic, for example while a redesign is being conducted, or 2) there are serious architecture issues that can’t be resolved easily.

Personally I’ve always thought nofollowz sucked for PR sculpting, but it’s great when I don’t want a bot to crawl a link.

George: If someone grabbed a copy of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies from 2004 and both understood and followed all the fundamental teachings therein, how far would that get them these days?

Adam: Fundamentally it would cover things just fine. The problem someone would have is in taking an existing site and finding out how to maximize SEO from it. There are problems to solve, crawling issues, indexation issues, technical hurdles, and these are the sticky aspects of the work we do. But yes, by and large, SEO hasn’t changed: links and content, and a site that’s accessible to the bots. Where we’re seeing a lot of potential are on the alternative verticals such as Google’s blended product listings, maps, bing’s video results, etc. These are areas that fundamentals won’t take you very far in.

And there are tricks. There really are. It’s just that accomplishing them requires a great deal of attention, knowledge and resources. You can’t just stuff a keyword tag or push some hidden text, you have to innovate in creative, different ways. It’s about blending content that’s unique, that hasn’t been seen before, and finding ways to re-purpose and compare content and products together. And it’s also about leveraging the blended results, and the features Google continuously rolls out in the search engine. Suggested searches (these can be manipulated, and are, by the black hat variety), sitelinks, anchor text links, microformats… all kinds of fun stuff.

George: True, False or other: Search Engine Spiders have evolved to the point that they’re evaluating pages much more like a smart human would than they used to?

Adam: False – they are still robots. They are machines. It’s all data. However, and here’s the wrinkle, they’re deploying humans much more than they probably ever expected nor wanted to. The “hand job” is alive and well in SEO and happens every single day (and Google employs thousands of quality evaluators). So while the crawl and discovery phase is primarily a robotic duty (I’m sure with some human involvement, in cases where dials need to be turned for specific situations), indexation and ranking take on some human elements. That’s my opinion, anyway.

George: Do you see optimizing for Google and optimizing for the other engines to be different activities? Do you have to make choices or can you optimize for all of them simultaneously?

Adam: Same all around. Our motto is, what’s good for Google is good for the rest. And it pretty much is. As Bing evolves we’ll see if that changes.

George: What’s your take on Caffeine?

Adam: This might be a big one, might not, it’s just a big question mark to be honest. They say they’ve rewritten the entire engine, but that it primarily effects indexation not rankings. Well, I doubt that. Expect rankings to change. I think they’ve been extremely cool about it, releasing Caffeine as an alpha/beta for the web community – that’s unprecedented. This kind of thing is really good for SEO – keeps us on our toes.

George: What’s the most common mistake you see in site design?

Adam: Probably when sites try to be too “SEO’y” if that makes sense. Over-optimized sites. The days of putting multiple keyword phrases into title tags are over. Sites need to quit stuffing them with phrases. And those anchor text heavy footers are ugly and probably filtered out anyway, so sites need to quit using that tactic. I’d say in general, people are way too focused on link text. Link text is naturally diverse, yet you see SEOs (on company sites and on external links) using exact match anchor text. It’s silly and not only looks spammy, probably doesn’t have the impact they think it does.

Vary the link text, forget the SEO footer, and make clean, smart title tags. Reinforce other phrases in the copy of the page. Focus the page on a primary theme. And place prominent links to important pages and categories on the home page. Then build links. That’s pretty much it!

The one thing people seem to miss is the idea of consistency, which is something Shari Thurow really taught me. The more opportunities you have to use consistent links internally, the more hints you give the engines and the more those hints all line up consistently, the better. Internal linkage, XML sitemaps, link canonical tags and redirects, all of this stuff needs to be pointing in the same direction. When it does, you’re giving Google and the engines all the information you can about your pages, and they’re more likely to use that information as stronger hints.

George: Thanks so much for taking the time, Adam!

If those of you reading have follow up questions for Adam please post them here!

Technorati Tags: Adam Audette, Audette Media

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The Search Marketing Expo team will be hosting their 2009 SMX Advanced show June 2-3 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle, Washington. I’ll be heading out to Seattle to talk paid search at the show.

The show is designed for the experienced search marketer- focusing mostly on advanced tactics while providing little background for those not familiar with the search.

This year, there’s some added buzz around the show, as a possible debut for Microsoft’s Bing has been rumored.

I’m looking forward to the show and the networking that it brings. Want to connect at the show?

On Tuesday, June 2, join us as we’re chatting paid search at the PPC Birds-of-a-Feather lunch table.

On Wednesday, June 3, be sure to check out Proving & Improving ROI in Paid Search. We’ll be discussing methods for proving what paid search is returning for your investment, as well as presenting ways to get even more ROI out of your campaigns. We’ll be covering topics including data warehousing, lifetime value, marginal return, cross channel attribution, advanced bidding tactics, and more.

Hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: Danny-Sullivan, marketing-conference, SMX

We here at RKG hit the “migrate” button too quickly. Now have some heavy lifting to get our RSS working again. (Perhaps we’ll drop FB until it works?) We’re not alone: the phrase “google feedburner transfer broken” returns 37K hits on Google today.

Apologies to all our readers experiencing disruptions due to FB/Google server problems. What a mess.

Feedburner users: we recommend delaying this migration as long as possible, until the process works.

Technorati Tags: 404 error, 502, 502 error, 503 error, broken feed, feedburner, feedburner 502, gateway error, Google, migrate feed, Rick-Klau, transfer feed

“So, how do I get my website to show up higher on Google?”

RKG provides SEM services, but the SEO/SEM distinction is lost on folks outside the industry. Though we don’t sell SEO advice, we still have a decent understanding of natural search best practices. But trying to explain SEO from the ground up to favorite Cousin Jay or dear friend Annie’s-husband-Peter is daunting and time-consuming.

Here’s my new favorite response to The Question:

“Google provides a great free tutorial called Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Read it carefully, then I’d be happy to answer any specific questions afterwards.”

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. A great resource for beginners. Thanks, Google.

Technorati Tags: beginner search optimization, beginning seo, google rank, Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, SEO

The trackability of online marketing programs can lead to a false sense of security in knowing what drove business in Q4. Retailers need to be particularly careful in assessing the relative performance of advertising channels as two skewing factors in particular were at play:

1. Uneven Distribution of Offers: Some channels may have had the “benefit” of more attractive discounts than were generally available. This is particularly likely of email and affiliate channels and leads to two separate impacts:
   • All sales dollars are not created equally. If programs are evaluated by sales dollars driven rather than margin, recognize that $100 worth of discounted sales is less valuable than $100 in full-priced sales, often MUCH less. Say your normal margin is 40%. On $100 sale at full price there is $40 in gross margin. If everything is 20% off because of an email code and that buyer still spends $100, they’re getting $75 worth of merchandise ($125 sale reduced to $100), hence there’s only $25 in gross margin. A 20% discount in price, but a 37.5% reduction in gross margin.
   • Offer Wars: In a season when consumers were disproportionately concerned about price, your SEO and PPC programs had more than usual competition for sales against sometimes reckless offers from competitors. The race to the bottom led those unwilling to play the game to drop out of the competition on keywords where they normally compete well.
2. Coupon Affiliates: Consumers have been conditioned to search for coupons, and that unfortunate tendency was doubly amplified during Q4. The consequence being that customers coming in on paid search or natural search links originally, did a last minute “Acme coupon” search to generate a code and steal credit for the order for the affiliate program from the program that actually brought the customer to the site. Look for year-over-year dips in SEO and PPC being offset by unexpected “humps” in affiliate sales. The affiliates aren’t necessarily doing better, they’re just cannibalizing more.

Each marketing program should receive careful scrutiny. Each program should be evaluated based on how well money has been used, and whether the vendor’s compensation makes sense for the work they’re doing. However, it is a mistake to compare top line growth rates across channels expecting differences in those rates to reveal great truths about the relative success of the programs.

The complexities of multichannel interaction are growing, and the evolution of each channel is different. Just as it would be a mistake to stop mailing catalogs because the catalogs drive people online, it’s a mistake to assume that recessions impact all channels equally.

In a very real sense, we’re all wading into unknown territory. As the recession worsens we’re all going to learn a great deal about online marketing in tough times. Expect the dynamics to change and keep an even hand on the tiller.

George

Technorati Tags: cross channel interactions, multichannel-economics, Q4 PPC results

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OK, what is Chrome “destination search”? Here’s an example. If I start typing “cnn.com”, Chrome suggests “Search cnn.com for <enter query>”:

If I select that option, or if I finish typing out “cnn.com”, Chrome presents what I’ll call a destination-search box in the address bar or the browser:

See the light blue search button for the specific site in the address bar? If I enter a query there, Chrome searches CNN for “obama” (or whatever), using CNN’s own site search.

(Note this is different from Google’s Search-Within-A-Site feature, which uses Google Search, and of which I’m not a fan.)

Chrome can do this because it “understands” the site search box on the destination site.

I noticed Chrome Destination Search works for some retailers (Crutchfield, Zales) but not others (Overstock, PetCo), and wondered why.

After some poking around, I think that using non-conventional HTML forms (eg using Javacript submits) in your site search confuses Chrome. I’m not 100% certain, but this held for the sites I checked. If Chrome can’t figure out your site search, Chrome doesn’t give your site the desirable Destination-Search presentation.

Now, Chrome has under 5% browser share, so who cares about any of this? Valid point. Four thoughts:

• As much as possible, urge your web developers to favor “semantic” HTML. Simple well-formed HTML helps ‘bots better understand meaning from markup. Spiders typically ignore Javascript. If your forms aren’t constructed conventionally (that is, input fields with an input type=”submit” button), spiders won’t understand them. Semantic HTML helps not just Google, but the entire web.
• If you need fancy Javascripty actions, go ahead and use them, but add them clientside using progressive enhancement. Few retailers use progressive enhancement. More should. The idea is simple: send simple lean standards-compliant pages, and add all the bells-and-whistles to the page after it loads before it renders. Your human visitors won’t even notice, and your site becomes much friendlier to ‘bots (and visually impaired humans, and mobile devices, too).
• I’d wager that Google drives Chrome marketshare during 2009, perhaps reaching 15% by 2010.
• If better markup leads to better presentation in Google Chrome, might not the same hold for Google natural search results too?

Technorati Tags: chrome, crutchfield, Google, javascript, overstock, petco, progressive enhancement, zales

According to reports, users can promote / banish / annotate listings in their personal SERPs. Google will collect petabytes of preference information, and this user feedback will likely impact rankings.

SearchWiki will change some of the rules of the SEO game, for sure. What about AdWords?

Here are my predictions. Just musings, I’ve no insider information here.

• Short-term, there will be zero relationship between SearchWiki and Adwords. Google needs time to see how this new system works over time and at scale.
• Intermediate term, I’d predict SearchWiki up-votes and down-votes will play some role in Quality Score. A small role, as click-through rate is still the most important factor for Google, because CTR proxies relevance and because CTR drives Google revenue.
• Long term, expect Google to test applying SearchWiki voting to Adwords.

That last one is interesting to ponder. Would it help or hurt PPC advertisers if Google allowed searchers to reorder the ads on the right?

Google would never allow users to turn off all the ads — that’s Google’s revenue — but perhaps Google might allow individuals to ban or promote certain advertisers on their own personal SERPs. And if so, would those preferences elapse, or be locked in forever? By phrase per advertiser, or by advertiser overall? And at what point would individual votes flow into general QS?

Heck, if I’m advertiser “X” and consumer “Y” really doesn’t want to see my paid ads on searches for phrase “Z”, then being intentionally absent on that serp might help me, cutting down my ad costs with no sales loss. Perhaps.

Overall, the balance between advertiser and consumer is swinging towards the consumer. Think blogging, social media, user reviews, Tivo. Legitimate email marketers live in a one-strike-and-you’re-out world. Increasingly, catalogers do too.

Again, this topic has zero immediate impact on PPC, and likely won’t in 2009. But, to me, still quite interesting.

Allowing users control of the right hand rail — what do you think?

Technorati Tags: Business, Google, SEM, SEO

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If you didn’t see this yet, check it out: Google Webmaster Tools (free and highly recommended) now provides a report of inbound links pointing to nonexistent pages to your site.

Inbound links drive traffic and rankings. Inbound links are precious. Allowing inbound links to fail on nonexistent pages is a marketing crime.

Once you’ve found your inbound broken links, you can contact the site linking to you to fix them. Smarter: handle it on your side, routing the traffic where you want to send it by (re)creating the appropriate page. Smarter still: issue a 301 permanently moved redirect and flip the traffic to where it should go.

Ignore broken inbound links long enough and they’ll go away. Bad. Sad.

Thanks, Google engineers, for these valuable data.

Link: Helping Website Owners Fix Broken Links, GoogleBlog

Technorati Tags: Code, SEO

Last Thursday and Friday 30 people from 18 of our client companies joined us for networking and deep conversation about online marketing.

The main event on Friday included my take on Search Marketing in 2008 and some great tips from Larry Becker on website effectiveness strategies.

We then branched out to discuss:

• Setting efficiency targets for marketing programs and how the incremental view plays into that,
• How clients addressed Multichannel Credit Allocation and where they see that going,
• Catalog circulation strategies and prospecting in 2008,
• Social Media. From video and blogging to Facebook, Twitter, etc. What was worth doing, what seemed to be a waste of time at this point.
• Email frequency, open-rate benchmarks and strategy,
• SEO strategies and the merits of outsourcing some or all of those efforts,
• Affiliates and strategies for controlling the bad actors without dismantling the program entirely,
• The power of purls — personal urls — as a marketing tool,
• and much much more.

The Summit showed that many folks were wrestling with the same complex issues, and that most retailers were struggling to meet “plan” this year, particularly since July.

The event also confirmed for all attendees what we had always known: RKG has really smart clients. Many great insights shared both in the public forum and in more private networking contexts throughout the event.

As we plan for future events, clients: please let us know what you’d like to see in terms of content, format and locations so we can make what was a great event even better! And, if you’re not currently a client, but would like to be… :-)

Thanks again to all who participated!

Technorati Tags: RKG , SEM, SEO, Social Media, Web Effectiveness, Web Usability

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