On Internet Business

Google’s latest algorithms go after content farmers and bad online retailers

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Online Retail, Paid Search, Search, Social Media

Back in December, the Google algorithm was tweaked to deal with a surreal business scenario that was played out through the search engine rankings of an American eyewear retailer, the pages of the New York Times and the number-crunching desks at Google HQ.

Bad Retailers Punished

Essentially, one online retailer had realised that its many extremely poor online reviews and customer comments were actually pushing it up the search engine pages. So (it is claimed) it made an explicit company policy of ill-treating customers and abusing them when the complained, so that they would make negative ‘flaming’ online reviews which served to put the company at the top of the Google searches again, and again, and again.

When the NY Times wrote about this bizarre scenario, the comments redoubled and the company made the top spot on Google … at which point the Google mavens decided to do something. They designed a substantial revision to the search algorithm that stopped negative reviews driving a company up the popularity ladder.  How they did it has not been made clear, and there are still some questions about whether businesses can use this tweak to drive down their competitors by posting false negative reviews to drop rivals back down the rankings. Even so, the tweak made many online retailers happy.

Content Farmers Cut Out

In February a new algorithm, nicknamed Farmer, came into play, and now we’re seeing the results. The familiar name is the clue – this algorithm goes after content farmers who regularly top searches with content that is either derived from other sources (aggregated) or just packed with keywords (spammy).  This is meant to give more content-heavy, original-material sites a chance to reach the top 2 or 3 position, ahead of some of the sites that exist purely to link content to paid-for ads in the hope the viewer will click on them.

Together, these new algorithms herald a substantially different future for online retailers and information providers – they attempt to stop bad retailers using their poor reputation as a search engine tool and they aim to stop content farmers clogging up search pages with keyword-rich but content-poor information.

For many online retailers this heralds a new opportunity – the chance to revamp their own content format to deliver quality information and good customer engagement, not just for its own sake, but because it’s worth competing for a first page ranking again. Or at least it is for now, until the farmers and cowboys work out how to beat this new system …

algorithm billboard courtesy of toastyken

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Google Seller ratings and the advent of customer/competitor terror campaigns

Posted by Michael under Mobile Search, Paid Search, Search

Google’s latest changes have created an environment that can spell disaster for online businesses that rely on Google ad words. It’s recently unveiled seller ratings which mean that advertisers using Google ad words will have a star rating and a link to a page showing customer feedback.

At first glance, this would appear to be fair and reasonable for both seller and potential buyer. But as the recent TripAdvisor debacle illustrated it is essential that the reviews are from bona fide customers.

No problem. After all, Google has a source of reviews and ratings from verified customers. But instead of using its own verified customer reviews from customers using Google checkout, it has instead started using review sites. In order to leave a review on these sites, you don’t have to have bought anything. This opens the whole situation up to abuse. One disgruntled customer can leave a host of bad reviews – in fact, anyone who doesn’t like you or your company can leave bad reviews.

According to Patrick Altoft, seller ratings have a direct impact on quality score. A few negative reviews, perhaps from a competitor and a seller’s cost per click increases. The seller is left to find a way of quickly getting positive reviews in order to control their marketing costs.

Google need to stop doing this and presumably as the feedback works through the system to show that this is not in either the buyer or the seller’s benefit, they will. In the meantime online sellers will need to put effort into ensuring that they have four or five star reviews on Google product search. As Altoft points out, don’t forget that masquerading as a customer and leaving a review of your own product or service is illegal.

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What Matters? Google Rank v Customer Feedback

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Online Retail, Paid Search, Search

These are such different animals that at first you might not think to compare them, but I come across business people who have strong belief systems that incline them to rely on one or the other.

• The Google Rank Guys – these tend to be start-ups and online entrepreneurs who’ve grown up in a world of online commerce and focus on the grail of getting the best possible Google rank. They have a point – if you’re the best business the world it won’t do you much good unless people know your name and can access your services and these days that’s an online process.
• The Customer Feedback Fans – this business ideology says that if you have a great reputation you can grow your business organically, without worrying about what Google (and the other search engines) are doing with your online presence. They have a point too – long term gains from good customer relations are not just a way of keeping your business in the public eye, they are a way of learning what your customers want so you’re in the right place to provide it.

One thing we’ve seen in recent years is Customer Terrorism. If one in a thousand customers has a bad experience with you, they will share their experience a thousand times more loudly and widely than the 999 who had a good experience. Counteracting customer terrorism requires a two pronged approach: engaging that customer, and the people they’ve reached out too is one side of the equation, but the other is to maintain your investment in Google and other rankings so that the rant of complaint doesn’t feature as the top hit when your brand is entered as a search term. This is crucial management of reputation which companies need to have as a focus, if they are to survive the occasional blip of a bad customer experience going viral.

There’s a risk to over-reliance on Google too, which is that failing to build customer retention can leave you exposed to failure if your Google rank drops, which it can do for no obvious reason. It’s a poor strategy that builds a business on one supporting structure.

We use the NPS framework to help us evaluate how we’re doing and monitor recency, frequency and average order value to give us metrics that show how our regular customers are changing their relationship to us. This tells us about ourselves and our place in the market, but it also shows trends in the market as a whole, which then gives us a chance to respond to global changes swiftly and professionally, meeting client needs without compromising on quality or service.

Google doodle courtesy of dannysullivan

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Business masterclass: dealing with online complaints and criticisms

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Search, Social Media

It can destroy a business – the moment when you realise that somebody, somewhere has something bad to say about you. For Arclid Transport, this week, it’s the emergence of a video on YouTube that appears to show one of their lorries pushing a car along a motorway at 60 mph. The video was taken in January and the police were informed at the time, but have reopened the enquiry as a result of public and media attention.

So what do you do if something bad turns up about you on the net, or on social media?

Be objective – Assess the situation. Has your organisation done anything to deserve the commentary, complaint or coverage that you’re getting? While it’s both easy and natural to leap to your own defence, it may be better to stop, think and redress any problems at the same time as reacting. If there’s any grounds to the complaint, deal with them using three simple stages:
• Accept – admit where there has been a problem
• Explain – if there is a reason for the problem that might change people’s view of the situation (serious illness in your call-handling team? A transport strike making import of components impossible and therefore slowing up your deliveries?) state it simply and honestly, without making excuses
• Act – say what you are doing to solve the problem, and thank people for bringing it to your attention.
Maybe you can’t say a great deal, but you can at least thank the poster for their comment and say that you’re getting in touch with them through other channels to find out more about their situation and how you can put things right.

Request removal – Unfair or defamatory commentary exists and you can contact the forum moderator or site owner and ask for its removal. Many will work with you on this, but some won’t and in those cases, and if the commentary is totally untrue, you may want to take legal advice. Remember that ‘ghost’ versions of internet pages can exist in caches and you may also need to ask search engines to implement Content Removal Request for you.

Ignore the problem – this seems insane, but it can happen that you can’t get rid of bad publicity. It might be that an internet site is owned by the friend of the complainant, for example and so they just won’t take bad material down. In this case you’re better off putting your energy into the process of smothering bad commentary in good. You can do this by asking your loyal customers to post good reviews on Facebook and LinkedIn and on trade-based directories like FreeIndex. This stops bad comments being at the top of the list when people search for information about you.

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Google – the short history of a global revolution

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

1998 – Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin who overturned the conventional search engine procedure of ranking results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page in favour of a system that analysed the relationships between websites.

2000 – it’s already the world’s largest search engine, having indexed a billion web pages

2002 – the new cost-per-click advertising model that Google introduces becomes its greatest revenue generator

2004 – floated. As Google shares hit the NY Stock Exchange, and investors see the historical income jump from $85 in 2001 to $1.5 billion in 2003, they make nearly a thousand Google employees into overnight millionaires.

2006 – the YouTube generation: Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion, dwarfing the $580m that News Corporation paid for rival social networking website MySpace in 2005. The combined power of Google with YouTube, which shows more than 140 million videos daily, makes Google the biggest media giant the world has ever seen.

2007 – Google Street View premiers in five US cities but soon runs into protest in other parts of the world – such as being told by European Union data privacy regulators to warn people before it sends cameras out to take pictures for its maps and to shorten the time it keeps those uncensored photographs from one year to six months.

2010 – Google Buzz, the challenge to Facebook, is launched – will it become the future of social networking?

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Why Google’s Personalized Search matters

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Search

Since early December, Google has been personalising everybody’s search results, unless they opt out of the personalisation service. Why and how and what does it mean?

What is Google personalised search?

Essentially, Google’s search engine now ‘learns’ from your past searching behaviour to tailor the results it produces in a current search by comparing the results with the ones you clicked on in previous searches. So if you regularly click on search results from the TF, or the Daily Mirror, more of those search results will start showing up in future searches, because Google will give them a higher ranking, as compared to other results, because you seem to favour their content.

Any user can easily opt out of the personalisation option, and already most journalists are opting out, because it’s not in their interest to have their search results limited in this way – whether the general public will understand what is happening and how it affects their access to the internet is another matter.

Why does it matter?

A good question, to which the answers, as yet, are not clear. One troubling aspect of the situation is that Google is being coy about the percentage of search results, per searcher, that are being personalised – is it 80% or 20%?

And does it mean that, over time, a searcher will only see results from sites they favour, so if you prefer to buy British, for example, and therefore tend to click on British businesses in a search list, would you, over time, end up ONLY seeing British business results? Google says no because it wants to maintain ‘diversity’, and to ensure that areas of the web are not ‘inaccessible’ to people because of their search history. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be seismic changes in the way online retailers and other businesses find themselves being represented in searches over time.

What is the impact likely to be?

As yet there are only questions, rather than answers, but those questions are crucial ones for the SEO market:

1. Can this effort by Google to drive personalisation, as an opt-out rather than an opt-in feature, be seen as a counter attack on SEO?
2. Will new sites suffer as a result of the creation of a personalised search history; how does a new brand become a favourite and; what could the break-through mechanisms be that would allow this to happen?
3. How can website managers adequately judge their site ranking in Google with personalisation being applied?
4. How confused will users be by the different kind of results they get as they move between computers and find that items that appeared high on their ‘personalised search’ computer don’t show up on the first page of their ‘public’ computer or one they share with other people at home or work?

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Top Link Building Tools

Posted by Michael under Search

Following the sad demise of Marketleap.com tools, on 15 November, which was highlighted on its website as follows: As of November 15, 2009 all free Marketleap.com tools will be discontinued. We would like to thank you for the years of devotion to our tools and recommend the following sites as resources for viable replacements: SEObook.com, SEOMoz.com. Thank you.…. What are the alternatives?

Hub Finder is free web based software which looks for hub pages using the Yahoo! API. It allows you to find sites which link to common resources that you manually enter, or resources that rank well in Yahoo! for a specific term. You can manually enter sites you want to cross check, or grab the top ranked results from Yahoo! Search.

Linkscape claims to provide never-before-accessed link data on over 54+ billion URLs across 230+ million domains and that this allows you to analyze your competitors to see what they’re doing successfully and how you can emulate their success as well as judging the quality of potential links to your site and measuring the success of viral marketing and link bait campaigns

Costs around £35 a month but regular attempts to up-sell the current client base new add-ons and frills might annoy those already up to budget and not wanting/able to invest more. Linkscape is ‘backed up’ by add-ons from the such as:

• Competitive Link Research Tool – Find critical sites your competitors are getting links from but you aren’t
• Linkscape Visualization and Comparison – Visualize and compare the link profiles of two web pages and get actionable suggestions on improvements.
• Backlink Analysis – Fast access to lots of your most influential anchortext and backlinks

Majestic-SEO says it is the world’s largest backlinks and anchor text database with proprietary robots that have crawled over 137 billion webpages and found more than 1,137 billion unique links and their anchor text. This information is available in detailed reports, where links and anchor text are shown in order of importance, based on their backlinks. Each website’s backlinks can all be downloaded as ‘.CSV’ file.

There’s a complex pricing system that depends on credits (the cheapest of which is £2) to buy backlinks information for the domains you’re interested in exploring.

Yahoo! site explorer

Since the recent beta rebuild, Yahoo!’s free site explorer has become more like Google’s offerings, although Google still seems to be more forthcoming about information like queries your site ranks for; inbound link anchor text pointing to your site; crawl management. However the new Yahoo! data are more concise and better organized than the Google data dumps. Of course, to a certain extent Yahoo! search optimization is no longer that popular and many businesses say they get little or no traffic from Yahoo! – but it’s the third most visited search engine, used by around 60,000,000 people each month which is a lot of traffic to be ignoring, so Yahoo! might be a good place to start reinvesting in SEO.

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12 Top Tips on Link Building.

Posted by Michael under Search

Link building is one of the most challenging and important tasks required for building a successful website. So what practical steps can you take to build links to your website ?

1. Person to Person Networking: Even with the explosion of social media it is worth remembering that links are created by people wanting to interact with content or other people. So if someone you know has a website or blog talk to them about how you  can link your websites.
2. Recommendations:If some does something well (a service,a product, a presentation….. ) tell others. Good Kharma comes back to you.
3. Link Bait: Can be risky. Create a controversial story to get people talking in order to get links to your blog or web site. Beware,  you can acquire links AND the wrath of others with a poor or poorly thought out startegy.
4. Directory Submissions: Although now widely discounted, there are still directories worth submitting to like DMOZ.
5. Competitor Analysis: Look at your competitors. Who links to their sites. If they link to them should they also link to you.  ?
6. Press Releases: Submit to services like PRweb. Results may be short lived or it could create longer term links if the press release is interesting enough !
7. Article Submission: Although declining in popularity, it is still an option.
8. Guest Posts: Blog on someone elses site or get someone else to blog on yours.
9. Submit story to online media: If you have a great story perhaps the Guardian, Telegraph or BBC will pick it up.
10. Share ideas and information: Got something genunily useful get it out on the web.
11. Break News First: Know something first, get it out on the web to get links.
12. Buy Links: This comes with a huge health warning. It is a tactic that Google will not tolerate  At a recent internet conference, I heard link brokers described in the same way as drug dealers. They are not interested in the impact of the links they have sold. Bad links will get your website penalised by Google and will damage you web business. Although it may well be a common practise with many major e-commerce sites buying into this strategy. It is not something I would recommend or get involved in doing.   

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Microsoft tackles analysing social media

Posted by Michael under Search, Social Media

Measuring the impact and effect of social media campaigns has become a key issue for business. Many tools that measure social media (they are called analytics) are blunt instruments – they create charts but have no real-time flow and have to be accessed, they don’t alert the company to new emergence of social buzz.

Microsoft’s new tool is named Looking Glass and it’s still a prototype with a few chosen companies being involved in a test and response phase at present.

What makes Looking Glass interesting? Two things – the first is that it sends e-mail alerts if social media activity picks up or changes direction – so it reveals negative or positive feedback in social media commentary within the alert. The other key feature is the reporting reveals which days of the week generate the highest activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. A Microsoft spokesman said, “… if you are not using it as a listening tool, then you are really not getting the complete benefit of a Twitter or a Facebook because a part of [your] job is to watch the conversations on the wall.”

Looking Glass is not the only kid on the block though – new systems with similar approaches have been launched by Squidoo which offers a way to let brands filter their online reputation for a fee. And Trackr has launched an online Authority List that tracks and identifies thought leaders the online communities. As it says on its website: Discussions on brands, products and trends are no longer controlled by marketers. Influential bloggers, reviewers, gamers, and other digital creators lead these conversations and shape opinions.

So why does Looking Glass stand out? The main reason is that it blends social media data with reporting from other campaign channels such customer databases, call- and service- centres and sales data so that an organisation has a seamless sense of the ‘buzz’ and a clear picture of where that buzz originates. And it allows a company to keep track of who is saying what about it, through which channels. Not all businesses are convinced of the need to monitor social media, partly because they can’t see how to integrate monitoring with PR or other promotional activity, if Looking Glass can offer the ability to link sales data, commentary and management of brand, for example, it may make the breakthrough into the mainstream that the other systems haven’t.

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SEO and Flash

Posted by Michael under Search

Flash animation was developed as a way of allowing a website to display highly complex content because it fits more of that content in a finite space, without destroying the aesthetics of the page design.

However, it’s also go itself a bad name as being impossible to integrate with SEO or even as being invisible to search engines. This isn’t necessarily the case, but if you’re opting for a Flash-based website for your business, there are issues that you need to understand before, not after, you put the site into operation.

Starting with Flash

The first thing to do is to ensure you’ve got five key areas fully integrated:
1) Content creation – how are you going to update your flash site, who will be responsible for refreshing content?
2) Copy – traditionally copywriting techniques don’t work with the clean ‘white-space’ attributes of Flash, so be sure your copy or copywriter is aligned to the Flash ideal
3) Site architecture – html based sites have a simple enough map – be sure that your Flash site is just as navigable not just for the end user, but for everybody in your company who needs to tweak the site
4) User experience – be sure your users are likely to be Flash-lovers. If you’re selling orthopaedic beds, it’s not likely that your target demographic will appreciate Flash nearly as much as if you were selling skateboards!
5) SEO – don’t abandon SEO to be ‘sorted out’ after your site is built and the content has been agreed. SEO needs to feature in the decision making process too.

One method for optimising Flash sites for SEO uses blended architecture, this means the site has search engine accessible content plus JavaScript to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. If a browser has Flash capability, the Javascript organises the page’s document object model to replace the alternative content, which has primacy, with the Flash movie. As search engine spiders don’t trigger Javascript they automatically find and indes the non-Flash content which should include: links, headings, text and images, and should be SEO optimised. Sites like the Cadbury one are blended architecture.

When to use Flash

Flash should be used for functionality – if you want to show a movie that demonstrates your product’s movement, like a stairlift or sells a personality, you need Flash, but if your content, offer or benefits is static – like a shopfront or a photographic model whose appearance is generally frozen in a photograph, you don’t necessarily need Flash.

Guidelines on alternative content

If you’re using a blended architecture site, you have to ensure that the text items are absolutely the same as the Flash ones, or it can be seen as spamming and your URL may end up blacklisted. Using alternative rich systems like Adobe to reflect the content of a slideshow or film is not spamming, in fact it’s recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative which says that multimedia content should have an alternative representation available to ensure all web users have equal access to all information.

Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Flash

• Where possible, embed your Flash into html pages so the page is found immediately by spiders and ensure that your html content is an exact representation of the Flash content
• Create textual representations of what is in the flash using no-embed tags
• Consider breaking down any large flash files into smaller ones so that you can create more content for your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) if you have one flash and one html-based page to reflect it, your site may look thin to search engines. Deconstructing it to create various html pages, each about different concepts in the Flash page, can give you added richness.

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