In the past few years, we have seen a flurry of articles celebrating the forthcoming death of SEO (AKA linkbait) and an even larger flurry of angry rebuttal articles from the SEO community (AKA retweetbait).

So not wanting to be left out of that link party, I decided to weigh in with our clients’ opinion on that matter (click for larger version):

Have a nice day.

In between having an awesome time at Pubcon and having not so awesome time catching pneumonia, there are quite a few articles that have gathered in my Reading List bookmark folder. So here are the articles that have caught my eye in the last few weeks.

If you think I missed something groundbreakingly important or that your article has covered one of the discussed topics in a better way, please let me know in the comments and I will make sure to review it and post it in the next Reading List.

Enjoy

Here we go, another reading list. It has been a bit more than a week so I hope I haven’t missed anything. If you think I am missing an article from these lists, let me know in the comments and I will include it in the next one.

Enjoy!

Hey, I got some nice reactions to my reading list. So here we go again. Make sure to pay attention to a special insight at the end of the list, i think it is worth it

And now for all the mysterious mentions of the discussion in some of the above links: it is amazing how one can learn from any activity, even when learning is not the intention. In the past few weeks, while gathering articles for this list, I have noticed a growing trend of guest articles written by people from Wordstream – a new keyword research tool (yes, I am linking to them with targeted anchor, since their efforts deserve some reward). In addition to the guest posts, I have also noticed some very interesting links that they scored from very respectable places (pay attention to very targeted anchor text in the first two paragraphs of this article ). It is very interesting to follow the progress of Wordstream website for keywords that they are using to link to their website, both in guest posts and in other mentions around the web and to see how their ranking changes over time, when they are competing in a niche that at first glance looks very saturated and competitive. It can be a compelling case study in optimization through content syndication and other tactics. One can learn a lot by watching what others are doing

One of the responsibilities I have in the new company is to organize a weekly list of recommended reading and send it out to everyone. I have been getting good feedback about these lists and since I am already doing them, I thought it would be a good idea to put them up on the blog.

Obviously, not everyone will agree with the importance of the posts i put up here and they will not be new for everyone, but I thought you will enjoy reading the stuff that has kept me interested for the past week (or so).

I will also add a short commentary to each link, sometimes referring to related articles, sometimes arguing the points made in the article, if nothing else then just to make it less of a regurgitation of someone else’s content that we see too often on the web.

So here is the list for the last week:

When beginning a new SEO campaign, a crucial first step is the keyword research. As a part of this step, one wants not only to find a comprehensive list of keywords that could serve as a potential target markets on Search Engines, but also to be able to predict amounts of traffic that each keyword will bring to his site. So we usually turn to different keyword prediction tools that provide us with this kind of information. Obviously, the most popular such tool is Google Adwords Keyword Tool, but there are others – Google Search Based Keyword Tool, SEMRush, Spyfu, Wordtracker MSN Excel based addon (check a great review and tutorial on SEOMOZ about this one), etc.

When we look at these tools, we can see only a single value for each keyword, representing a predicted monthly number of searches performed for that keyword on search engines. However, there are important issues that need to be taken into account when considering this data: what position will bring that amount of traffic ? Can the change in title (such as adding a brand name, special characters, call to action, etc.) increase the amount of traffic that the site gets from a current position ? How do Universal Search Results affect the percentage of traffic I get from the 1st page of Google SERP ? In order to be able to consider these issues, we need to be able to estimate the percentage of traffic that each position will bring.

Now, when reading about the importance of getting to the first page on Google, there is one piece of information that always gets quoted: 90+% of users do not go past the first page of SERPs ( I don’t know who was the first to come up with that statistics, so I will just link to this SEM article). While being probably true, this statement creates a misconception that if we do succeed and get our site to the first page of results, we have managed to achieve exposure to those magical 95% of users.

I am sure that many people rationally understand that this is probably not the case, that each listing in the top 10 does not get the same amount of attention and that introduction of ads on top of the SERPs and universal search results within the SERPs change the distribution of clicks among the top 10 results. That said, it is hard to find valuable and reliable data that confirms or negates these premises. In order for people to check it themselves, they need to control every site in the top 10 for a keyword that provides enough traffic for these measurements to be statistically significant. Furthermore, there would probably be need for at least another such setup from a different niche to confirm the validity of the results in the first niche. To summarize, it is close to impossible to produce such research with the means available to an average website owner.

There are two ways that such researches can be done: one is by eye-tracking studies. In these studies, a group of people is fitted with an instrument that follows their eye movement and records them against what the examiners are seeing on the screen. It also records the clicks they do on websites and correlate that data with the “heatmaps” created through the eye tracking. For some more info on those studies and on their misgivings, check out this great post from 2006 by Bill Slawski.

The second way is to get hold of the search engine log data that provides not only the identity of keywords that were searched and results that were clicked but also information about the position that a URL was located at when clicked.

Luckily, there are both kind of data available. There are quite a few people out there interested in web usability and testing those concepts through eye tracking studies. As I mentioned in my Affilicon 2009 presentation, all of the major search engines cooperated with universities and conduct academic researches in order to investigate new concepts or improve the existing ones As for the search engine data, remember AOL data dump of 2006 ? So apparently that dataset included all of the data needed for estimating the number of clicks each website would get if it was located in a different position on SERPs.

In this post I will try and summarize several such researches, spanning the time from 2005 till 2008. Only the 2006 study is based on the user data accidentally released by AOL and the remaining studies are done by the eye-tracking technology. They are all investigating the distribution of clicks each of the top 10 results on Google gets. It is interesting that one of the researchers signing on the majority of the eye tracking studies is Laura A. Granka. She did her PhD in Communications at Stanford and has been in the User Experience Team at Google since 2005.

Here are the links to the sources of data for all five studies according to the years:

Notice that the above dates are dates of publication, not necessarily the dates when the study was done.

And here is the graph presenting the results of these studies (click to enlarge):

I have added the CTR for each location for the 2008 data

Some Conclusions:

SEO Strategy

It is obvious that the vast majority of users click on the first 3 results (60-80%) and that anything below these positions will bring low to negligent traffic. These results should make us consider the overall optimization tactics – instead of massive investment into links for the sake of promotion of a few highly searched keywords with high competition; it may be worth our while to go for the long-tail traffic with almost certain top 3 positions through concerted efforts in wide scope content creation, site architecture optimization, deep linking, etc. Obviously, the shape of the above curves will depend on the nature of the search query, nature of the target audience and the data should also be cross-compared with the expected ROI from each term.

Universal Search

There is a very clear difference between the data in 2008 and the previous years – there seems to be a sharp shift of the majority of users towards the top 3 positions, making the above described differences even sharper. There is also a spike in users that click on the bottom results in the 2008 data. This can be explained by the introduction of universal/blended search results – video, news and image results. By being visually different, these results will naturally draw more clicks than the bland organic listings. Furthermore, an additional research done by the iProspect company shows that 36%, 31% and 17% of users click on the Image, News and Video results respectively. This should point towards possibilities of inserting content into those three categories of results and thus capitalizing on more SERP real estate.

There also seems to be a pronounced difference between the 2004 data and the later studies – there seems to be a much more pronounced gravitation of users towards the #1 position than in the following years. In order to understand the reason for this we should look in the way the research was conducted (was there any difference in the methods, was there a pronounced difference in the queries that the test subjects used, etc.). However, we can speculate on some other explanations, such as possible higher quality of SERPs in those years which brought more relevant results in top position for more searches than in the later years when more users had to click to lower-ranking results since the top-ranking sites did not offer the best match to what they were searching for.

In between the whole nofollow-gate affair, SMX Advanced, Google indexing links in Java and a velvet revolution in Iran, there was a Google I/O conference. The conference sounded like a pretty cool place to be, especially with the Google Wave announcement and the Android phones being given out to all attendees, there was also a Site Review Session done by Matt and two guys from his team, Brian White and Greg Grothaus (who mostly  sat and looked at their laptops while Matt was stealing all the limelight ).

So while Matt was talking mostly about pretty basic stuff (which was understandable since this was not the usual SEO crowd he caters to), I managed to fish out a few interesting tidbits from his talk. While these are not necessarily new for everybody, it seemed to me that some of the stuff he said was not always clear enough or was just guessed, so it is nice to have them out in the open and confirmed. I would recommend for anyone interested to go and watch the video and for those that do not have time/mental strength to do so, here are a few gems that I  picked out of the talk. Again, it is possible that none of these are new for you, but I am sure that there will be people that will learn some things from this:

1. Google doesn’t read the text in the images.

   While this is clearly stated in Google Webmaster Help section, every now and then there are speculations popping up about how Google definitely reads text inside images. So Matt clearly said that Google will not OCR the whole web and will not read the text inside images any time soon, even if they do have OCR capabilities, as can be seen from the Google Books example.

2. Don’t worry about keyword density, make sure Google knows there is a word on your page, after 2-3 repeats, it doesn’t matter any more.

   While it was clear for a long time that keyword density does not play a role in the ranking algorithm, I have never seen a clear statement of “2-3 repeats” and then no impact. Matt did review a site that was stuffing keywords and made it clear that Google knows how to discover these cases and punish them.

3. If you want some links to get more PR, put them higher up in the page.

   We all knew that the links showing higher up on the page seem to be more important, but this is the first mention of the fact (that I know of) that there is different PR flow related to the position of the link inside the page. This may explain several phenomena that people were seeing affecting the importance of the link (such as supposed decreased importance of links in footer)

4. Google doesn’t care if you link to www.site.com/dir/dir/dir/page.html as opposed to www.site.com/page.html. All that matters is the linking distance from the homepage. Other search engines, however, may deem that important

   So while it is not exactly news that Google does not care how deep your URL structure is, as long as the pages are linked from homepage, it is interesting that he bothered to mention the situation with other search engines. So when building your website hierarchy, try to make it as shallow as possible

5. Pagerank can go to images, not only pages

   Again while this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, it is interesting to hear it directly from Matt himself. So when thinking about those linking images, make sure that you are using an optimal image that you would want to appear in the Image SERPs

6. Typically, Google revisits the whole index on a weekly basis. In the worst case, it will be monthly.

   This seems like a good benchmark to start checking whether your pages are in the main index or the supplemental  or whether you are being punished or neglected for some other reason.

None of these are news to people that have done optimization for a while, however i have a feeling that a few newcomers may find this information valuable, especially when one sees the questions that are being asked on forums, blogs and Google’s Webmaster Help groups. So there it is.

We usually focus on optimization for the organic SERPs, but there is a lot of traffic to be found in other Google Services as well. For example, if we look at the levels of traffic other Google subdomains are receiving, we will find that even though the numbers drop sharply after google.com, there are still substantial numbers in other services:

(taken from Wolfram Alpha, originally from Alexa)

Specifically, Google News can be a great source of traffic not only due to the volume of searches performed, but also due to perceived authority that listing in the News section can carry. I don’t have any hard data on this, but it would be interesting to compare the conversion rate of News visitors vs. regular search visitors.

In any case, I wanted to share a problem one of our clients had with his Google News listings recently and the way how we managed to solve this problem, hoping that this solution will help other people with similar problems.

We’ve noticed that the number of visitors coming from Google News has dropped sharply in mid-April. Performing a site: search on Google News, showed that the most recent article indexed was from April 18th. Since this specific client publishes several news articles a day, all of which usually get featured on Google News immediately, it was obvious there was a problem.

A quick check of the Google Webmaster Tools of the site discovered a list of news-related errors, the most frequent one being “Title not Found”

Searching for that specific error on Google, led me to this thread on Google News Help forum, which in turn pointed to this page on Google News Help for Publishers section. There are two suggested ways to fix this particular problem:

1. Make sure that the title is repeated both in the <title> tag and again in the body of the article in <h1> tags. The suggestion is that these two are as similar as possible, although we found that they do not have to be identical
2. Ensure that the <h1> title in the body of the article is not hyperlinked

Prior to the first delisting of this client’s articles from Google News, they performed a number of changes on the website, including hyperlinking the <h1>Title to point back to the original article page. This practice is commonly used to both ensure the link back to the original content from the websites that pick up the articles feed from the website and to tell Google which of the articles is the original one and thus prevent duplicate content issues.

It turns out that this hyperlink was preventing Google News bot to correctly identify the Title of each article and therefore to stop lisitng them in Google News. Removal of this hyperlink got the client’s articles back into the Google News in a matter of minutes.

Quick glance at other Google News listed sources shows that the majority of them do not have hyperlinked Titles. There are those that do (like LA Times for example), but they may be doing something else to ensure the correct recognition of the Title. In any case, if you are planning on getting your site listed in Google News, linking from the <h1> title of each article is not something I would recommend.

OK, so not so long ago Rand put out a post saying that Google will count only one link to a URL from any given page. This is a phenomenon that was originally noticed by Michael VanDeMar but many an eyebrow was risen at both posts. That particular facial hair elevation trend has seemingly culminated by David Eaves’ post which supposedly debunks the theory. However, some problems were found in the way David has conducted his research (starting with the fact that it was done in google.co.uk which seems to behave like Yahoo did 10 years ago). Since we love to solve dilemmas around here and since argument from personal incredulity is not terribly popular in my neighborhood, I decided to conduct a separate test which will cover most of the questions raised in and around the above mentioned posts. (BTW the initial discussion is covered at SERoundtable, as usual)

So, in order to test the theory, i picked two sites that sometimes double as my furry lab animals and set them up so that site A links to site B with two links using different anchor texts. The phrases appeared only on a site A, they were not to be found anywhere on site B and if that site was to rank for any of those two phrases, it would be only due to the anchor text of the links pointing from the site A.

The testing process went like this:

1. Setup the sites like described above and wait for Google indexing. After the links are indexed, check the rankings of the site B for the two phrases.Result: Site B ranked for the first phrase and not for the second phrase. The below image describes the situation:
   
2. Switch between the position of links to site B. Now the previously second phrase appears above the previously first phrase on site A. Wait for Google to index the change and check the locations of B for the new phrases.Result: Site B dissapeared from the SERPs for the new second phrase (previously first) and appears for the new first phrase (previously second), like in the image below:
3. Revert the situation to the initial state: Switch back between the phrases, wait for indexing and check the rankingsResult: Site B reappeared for the initially first phrase and dissapeared again for the initially second phrase, like in the image below:
   

OK, so to me this is a pretty solid data supporting Michael’s and Rand’s claims. The fact that the SERPs reacted to my changes in the order of links back and forth is kind of hard to debunk.

However, one question that kept popping up is whether nofollowing the first link will cause Google to index the second link even though it is placed lower in the code. So i performed an identical test to the one described above, just with the first link nofollowed throughout the test. The results are pretty interesting – Google did not change its behavior due to the nofollow attribute applied on the top link.

Even when i switched between the first and the second link (preserving the state where the top link is nofollowed), Google still counted only the top link and not the bottom one.

Besides the fact that nofollowing the top link will not get you around the Google ignoring the second link, it is interesting to see that Google will still count the top link even though it is nofollowed. Maybe it was due to the fact that the nofollowed link was the only link on the web using that phrase as an anchor text ? Who knows… sounds like a theory worth testing.

As for the general settings of the experiment, the keywords I have used belong to the “semi-promiscuous” kind, meaning that they are made up of words that mean something but as a combination are not commonly used. The phrase #1 had about 40 results and the phrase #2 had about 270 results in Google SERPS. It took about two to three weeks for Google to index each of the changes, meaning that each set of results persisted for that time. It also means that the testing for this post took about a month and a half. Hence the posting frequency

As i write in every post describing an experiment, the conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt, Google is a black box that cannot be 100% scientifically tested (I am not talking about you Matt), i was not wearing my lucky underwear when performing the tests, etc.

PS. In the course of the described experiments, i did come up with a method that can help circumvent the described situation and force Google count all the links from a single page to a target domain. It was even independently confirmed by an SEO who knows what he is talking about (unlike me) and is being successfully used on some of our sites. However, I was asked not to blog about it, so if you want to know more and I know who you are, either personally or from Sphinn/Twitter/Plurk/etc., contact me through the form and I’ll drop you a hint

OK, so after a long break, I’m trying to get back on track with posting. Had a great time in South Africa (owe an apology to Viperchill for not giving him a call, family business was crazy mate, but I get there about once a year so maybe next time?), had a great time in Eilat on my Marine Microbiology course and now it is time to get back to business.

It seems like Google are applying their penalties all over the place. Instead of manually punishing sites, they came up with all these red flags that can send your site into the depths of -60 / -300 / -950 penalty/filter. The penalties are site specific and it is very interesting to find out what triggers them and when they are lifted.

So, I know it sounds weird, but when one of our customers recently got hit with a severe loss of positions in Google SERPs, a part of me was obviously upset with the disturbance, but another part of me was excited due to the fact that I can analyze the change in locations and try and figure out what would cause this particular filter to be applied. At the beginning I was really flabbergasted by the weird nature of the filter, so I turned to several of my SEO friends for advice and opinion, but nothing could really replace the bricks and mortar approach of doing one change at the time while monitoring the locations. So to cut the long story short, I’m going to give a very concise list of the actions that led to the penalty and the reaction we got from SERPS:

1. Customer decides to change the focus of his site to a different, but similar product. That move involves change in on-page optimization, so I am thinking, since there are changes about to be done on the site, why not throw in nofollowing of the majority of navigation links, according to the recipe – link love flows from homepage to all the inner pages and from inner pages only to homepage and pages I want ranked.
2. Locations for the new keyphrase begin to change – on www.google.com, as seen from Israel, the site climbs from #53 to #26 and then to #8. On www.google.com as seen from the US (by using the gl=US argument) the site plunges to the neighborhood of #300, fluctuating from #283 to #345. The same is true for every other keyword that was introduced to the on-page optimization and is not represented in the anchor text of the existing links. The old keyword holds first page position on Google seen from any country.
3. I remove the nofollow from the site navigation. After about a week, the site climbs to the area of #100 for all the new keywords on US Google. The Israel Google location is moving between #6 and #8. The old keywords are slowly slipping down but are still holding first page locations on both Googles.
4. I tweak a few links from our sites + get a link from a relevant PR4 site using the new keyword as the anchor text. After about two weeks, the site is at first page locations for all the new keywords, while slipping to the second page for the old keyword.

The whole incident is summarized in a graph representing change in locations over time:

It is important to notice that when i refer to Israel Google, I do not mean www.google.co.il. It is the good old www.google.com but seen from the Israeli IP address. Similarly, US Google is www.google.com with the ?gl=US argument in the URL or www.google.com seen through a US proxy.

So what happened ? There are several things here that require attention:

• This was definitely a filter and not an overall site punishment. Furthermore, it appears to be automatic and not manual.
• The filter seems to be triggered by a combination of the implementation of nofollow and a significant difference between the on-page and off-page optimization.
• The filter is keyword sensitive
• The filter is country specific! This observations is in accordance to what quite a few other webmasters/SEOs were seeing in other niches. The big question is whether these filters are applied only on Google US as a rule or there is some kind of other input which will define the country on whose results it is implemented. I can think of Webmaster Tools localization, Analytics data or even Google toolbar data as examples of such possible input.

This is not the first time that nofollow has been nominated as a red flag for Google. Eric Lander has written about it on SEJ and there is a discussion on the Sphinn thread. I know that there is a big question about whether nofollowing your navigational links could serve as a signal for Google to punish you, however I don’t think that the nofollowing by itself was what has caused the penalty in this case. I think it was a combination of signals that caused the infamous red flag to be risen above the customer’s site

This is all very interesting as an observation, however without actual implications to my everyday SEO work, it would not be worth much:

1. If you are changing on-page optimization, do it gradually and hand-in-hand with addition of the incoming links targeting the new keyphrases.

2. Do not implement nofollow PageRank sculpting abruptly or at the same time when you are doing other big changes on your website (for example, I wouldn’t try doing it close to a hosting move)

3. Before you optimize your site, try and define where is your target audience going to search from. Then monitor locations on www.google.com as it is seen from each of your target countries. This task can be somewhat automatized by using Google Global Firefox extension.

Anyone else seen similar thing happen ?

PS. on unrelated note, does anyone know how to remove the Sphinn button code from Feedburner RSS ? It is driving me crazy!