Google Needs to Provide Android App Interstitial Alternative

Yesterday Matt Cutts from Google tweeted that Google search results for users on smartphones may be adjusted based on the kinds of errors a web site produces (of course I was excited):

Important: if your website has smartphone errors, we may change rankings for smartphone users: goo.gl/x8R4A #smx

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 11, 2013

Matt links to a page that outlines two examples of errors that might trigger this downgrade of a site's position in the Google search results and, right in the first paragraph, links to Google's own common mistakes page:

As part of our efforts to improve the mobile web, we published our recommendations and the most common configuration mistakes.

I think it's fair to assume that anything listed on the "Common mistakes in smartphone sites" page can negatively impact your site ranking. In particular this section on app download interstitials caught my eye:

Many webmasters promote their site's apps to their web visitors. There are many implementations to do this, some of which may cause indexing issues of smartphone-optimized content and others that may be too disruptive to the visitor's usage of the site.

Based on these various considerations, we recommend using a simple banner to promote your app inline with the page's content. This banner can be implemented using:

• The native browser and operating system support such as Smart App Banners for Safari on iOS6.
• An HTML image, similar to a typical small advert, that links to the correct app store for download.

I think it's good that Google links to the Apple article. I think it's unfortunate that Google does not link to Microsoft's own solution. If you read my blog regularly, or just follow me on Twitter, you may know that I covered both Apple's and Microsoft's app banner solution in January in the post "App Store Meta Tags."

You might also note that I stated that Google Play offers no such feature. Google, the force behind Android and the one now (or soon) penalizing sites in its search engine for app interstitials, provides no corresponding alternate solution of its own.

A great thing that Google could do for its Android users, for its search engine results, and for app developers, is to support a custom meta tag that allows web sites to promote their own Android apps in the Play store. Developers can start to replace awful Android app interstitials on web sites, users can get a cleaner experience, and site owners who can't conceive of other ways to promote their apps on their home pages can move toward something that is easier to maintain and doesn't penalize them.

I think it's nice that Google is paying attention to web devs by adjusting search results, but my ranty tweets are probably falling on deaf ears. The web would be indebted to someone who can get Google's and Android's ear on this.

Social Media Profile versus a Web Site

This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page.

Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author's "infographic" that suggests users find Facebook more useful than a brand's site). I have been down this road more than once, but I thought I would follow the link and see what those six well-thought, sound business reasons must be.

1. Websites Require Constant Maintenance

Given the immediate nature of social media, a traditional marketing web site needs far less maintenance than trying to engage followers. I argue that many users expect content on a web site to be relatively constant, updated as appropriate and, in the case of some web applications, automated to a degree.

A Twitter account that pushes out content every few days, however, might be considered slow. One that pushes content every few minutes can be an assault to a follower's timeline. One that doesn't respond to tweets from users might be considered disrespectful.

Contrast this with a Facebook page that has some traction and has many fans. When those fans post to the brand's wall or comment on posts from the brand, there is an expectation of a quick response from users, which requires constant vigilance to keep users from feeling like they are being ignored.

The author also claims web sites can cost between $50 and $5,000 dollars to build, but makes no effort to identify how much a social media resource costs to maintain profiles and fresh content across multiple social media outlets. This assumes a business isn't so clueless that interns are considered good resources for representing the entire brand on social media.

Sticking with the cost argument, I think the author hasn't been paying attention to recent Facebook changes in the form of promoted content.

2. Social Media Is Scalable

The author seemingly assumes most web sites are hosted on servers under desks. Granted, the real point is that a web site may not be able to handle traffic from a random viral traffic spike.

This may very well be true for some sites, but given how many sites are hosted on, and get resources from, content delivery networks and national hosts, the need to scale can often be handled with a phone call to a hosting provider to kick the site into the next hosting bracket. One cannot call Twitter or Facebook when it has been overloaded and demand it scales up for your traffic.

Interestingly, pages on my own site have suffered far more downtime as a result of embedded content from Twitter and Facebook. When they suffer the inevitable and random "fail whale," their poorly-written scripts can take down my entire page. At least when social media platforms are on the fritz, I can still direct users to the rest of my web site for information.

3. Websites Require Specialized Knowledge

I am actually a little sad this point isn't true. With the preponderance of WYSIWYG editors, export-to-web features, free platforms like Blogger or Wordpress with pre-built themes, it's far too easy for someone without specialized knowledge to get his or her message out there. And this is a good thing.

The author does make a point that to have a truly unique site with modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS will require someone with skill to do it for you. Oddly, the alternative he proposes is to use exactly the same Facebook or Twitter layout as everyone else. And I can personally guarantee it won't be built to modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS.

To be fair to social media, almost no web site claiming to be built to modern standards actually is either.

4. Your Customers Are Already on Social Media

Really? He knows that? He has run a series of surveys, done market analysis, engaged my users directly and determined they are on social media? And he found more than 15% of US adult web users are on Twitter?

For my target audience, he is right. Although that's by accident. I can also rattle off plenty of businesses (including my own clients) who don't know that for sure, haven't done the research, aren't in a position to, and can even guess that it's still not true.

The assumption in the article is that users are already inundated with web addresses. He argues that somehow a link to a Facebook page can percolate above all that, that even a Twitter hashtag will make sense to more users. The logic is that users are already on social media, so they'll just go right to your message.

Nevermind that your target users may be in a demographic that doesn't use social media. Or your business may not be a fit for social media. Or that there are still more web users than Facebook users (even if you include the thousands and thousands of fake accounts). Or that there is already enough noise in my Twitter and Facebook feed I don't see stuff from my real-life friends.

5. You’ll Be Easier to Find

Using SEO as a dirty word (well, it is), the author suggests that it's hard to find things on the web. He says social media platforms have their own search already, so if you just focus there you will be found much more readily.

To make an anecdotal argument here, which is abnormal for me but curiously appropriate in this case, I can tell you that if I want to find a brand or person on Twitter or Facebook, I go to Google first. Google provides a far better search for me than I can get in Facebook's or Twitter's results, partly because both Twitter and Facebook are too busy trying to pitch me or assume I know their lingo. If I'm not logged into either one, it's an overall useless experiment. If I am trying to research a product or service, then Facebook and Twitter are the last places I'll go.

Given how readily Twitter suggests people or brands I should follow that are either promoted, of no interest, or that I have already unfollowed, I would not rely on the discovery method of gaining new followers. Given how Facebook has changed its model to require you to pay to get your message in front of fans and their friends (promoted posts), I wouldn't rely on discovery there, either.

If you dismiss the value of a search engine to help users find you and rely solely on the search and discovery features of social media, then you are painting yourself into a corner. Twitter use won't generate enough content over time for all your targeted phrases (unless you constantly assault followers) and neither will Facebook, because they both push older content down, out of the view of search engines.

6. Facebook and Twitter Facilitate Content Creation

Yes, they do.

When I am particularly angry at a brand, I go right to their Facebook wall and post my issue. I also approach them on Twitter. In some cases, I hijack their hashtags. I create all sorts of content about how much that brand has disappointed me. The brand may respond and make it right, but my words are out there, getting indexed by Google, being associated with the brand.

But that's not what the author means, he means (his words) content can often be generated through the simple click of an upload button. Regardless of the fact that you need someone to take that photo, craft that caption, be available to respond if people engage with it, and even hope that anyone cares, he's telling us that content is free and writes itself.

Which it doesn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have had such a good turnout (and feedback) at my content strategy session at the local WordCamp.

Wrap-up

Only in the closing paragraph does the author suggest that maybe you might still need a web site and maybe you might benefit from Twitter and Facebook. So I have to ask myself, why didn't he lead with this? Why are the hollow arguments told strictly from the perspective of spending you effort on Facebook and Twitter to the detriment of your site? Because he's a social media services peddler.

If the author truly believed that Twitter and Facebook are more important to have than a web site, then I look forward to when he demonstrates that belief by shutting down his site and moving it all to Facebook and Twitter. Until then, it's a poorly-argued sales pitch.

Related

These are posts I've written that go into more detail on some of the points I raise above. Traditional web sites easily have as many issues and more, but that's not what this discussion is about.

• You Get What You Pay For
• Picplz Shutting Down, as Free Services Often Do
• Use Twitter's New Embedded Timeline without Slowing Your Page
• Reviewing Twitter's New Profile Header
• Facebook, HTML5, and Mis-Reporting
• Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits
• Facebook Likes…Your Data
• Twitter As Passive-Aggressive Enabler
• Twitter's t.co Continues UX Failure of Link Shorteners
• Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing

SEO Isn't Just Google

This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in Buffalo's first WordCamp for WordPress users. Before my presentation I made it a point to sit in on the other sessions that were in the same track as mine.

When discussing SEO, all the sessions I saw mentioned only Google. The Google logo appeared throughout, Google's PageRank was discussed, Google search result screen captures were used, and so on.

The presenters for an SEO-specific session even went so far as to embed a video of Matt Cutts (from Google) in their presentation and declare that Matt Cutts stated that WordPress is the best platform for SEO.

For context, Matt Cutts appeared at a WordCamp in May, 2009 to discuss his search engine (Google) for an audience using a particular platform (WordPress). Matt even said, WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues. Instead of doing it yourself, you selected WordPress (at about 3:15 in the video). He's pitching his product to a particular audience to validate their technical decision (he's just saying they don't need to manually code these tweaks).

If while watching that video you heard Matt Cutts declare that WordPress is the best platform for SEO, then you are engaging in selection bias.

This same selection bias is also happening when developers work so hard to target Google and not any other search engines. If you convince yourself that Google is the only search engine because you don't see other search engines in your logs, then perhaps you are the reason you don't see those other search engines.

To provide context, this table shows the ratio of searches performed by different search engines in August 2012 in the United States. These are from comScore's August 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings report.

Google Sites	66.4%
Microsoft Sites	15.9%
Yahoo! Sites	12.8%
Ask Network	3.2%
AOL, Inc.	1.7%

It's easy to dismiss 16% when you don't know how many searches that translates to.

More than 17 billion searches were performed in August 2012. Google ranked at the top (as expected) with 11.3 billion, followed by Microsoft sites (Bing) at 2.7 billion. The breakdown of individual searches per engine follows:

Google Sites	11,317,000,000
Microsoft Sites	2,710,000,000
Yahoo! Sites	2,177,000,000
Ask Network	550,000,000
AOL, Inc.	292,000,000

To put this another way, for every four (ok, just over) searches using Google, there is another search done in Bing. For every five searches using Google, there is another one done using Yahoo.

If your logs don't reflect those ratios in search engines feeding your site, then you need to consider if you are focusing too hard on Google to the detriment of other search engines.

Now let's take this out of the United States.

Considering Bing's partnership with the Chinese search engine Baidu, contrasted with Google's battles with the Chinese government, it might be a matter of time before Bing tops Google for Asian searches. Given the size of the Asian market (over half a billion users), if you do any business there it might warrant paying attention to both Baidu and Bing.

Related

• Selection Bias When Reviewing Browser Stats, March 13, 2011.

Update: May 15, 2013

Bing is now up to 17%, having taken almost all of that extra point from Google.

We Really Still Have to Debunk Bad SEO?

I've been doing this web thing from the start (sort of — I did not have a NeXT machine and a guy named Tim in my living room) and I've watched how people have clamored to have their web sites discovered on the web. As the web grew and search engines emerged, people started trying new ways to get listed in these new automated directories, and so began the scourge of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) peddler.

The web magazine .Net posted what to me is a surprising article this week (surprising in that I thought we all knew this stuff): The top 10 SEO myths. I am going to recap them here, although you should go to the article itself for more detail and the full list of reader comments. Remember, these are myths, which means they are not true.

1. Satisfaction, guaranteed;
2. A high Google PageRank = high ranking;
3. Endorsed by Google;
4. Meta tag keywords matter;
5. Cheat your way to the top;
6. Keywords? Cram 'em in;
7. Spending money on Google AdWords boosts your rankings;
8. Land here;
9. Set it and forget it;
10. Rankings aren't the only fruit.

The problem here is that for those of us who know better, this is a list that could easily be ten years old (with a couple obvious exceptions, like the reference to AdWords). For those who don't know better or who haven't had the experience, this might be new stuff. For our clients, this is almost always new stuff and SEO snake oil salesmen capitalize on that lack of knowledge to sell false promises and packs of lies. One of my colleagues recently had to pull one of our clients back from the brink and his ongoing frustration is evident in his own retelling:

I have a client who recently ended an SEO engagement with another firm because they wouldn’t explain how they executed their strategies. Their response to his inquiry was to ask for $6,000 / month, up from $2,000 / month for the same work in two new keywords.

This kind of thing happens all the time. I recently ran into another SEO "guru" selling his wares by promising to keep a site's meta tags up-to-date through a monthly payment plan. When I explained that Google doesn't use meta tags in ranking, his response was that I was wrong. When I pointed him to a two-year-old official Google video where a Google representative explains that meta tags are not used, his response was to state that he believed Google still uses them because he sees results from his work. My client was smart enough to end that engagement, but not all are.

Because I cannot protect my clients in person all the time, I have tried to write materials to educate them. For our content management system, QuantumCMS, I have posted tips for our clients, sometimes as a reaction to an SEO salesman sniffing around and sometimes to try to head that off. A couple examples:

• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords
• SEO Spammers Using Your Contact Form

Along with these client-facing tips I sometimes get frustrated enough to write posts like this, trying to remind people that SEO is not some magical rocket surgery and that those who claim it is should be ignored. I've picked a couple you may read if you are so inclined:

• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords
• Derek Powazek on SEO as Snake Oil

And because I still have to cite this meta tags video far far too often, I figured I'd just re-embed it here:

Related

My ire doesn't stop at SEO self-proclaimed-gurus. I also think social media self-proclaimed-gurus are just the latest incarnation of that evil. Some examples:

• Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits
• Social Scoring As the New SEO
• Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing

Thoughts on Muse (Obvious Pun Avoided)

I downloaded and installed Adobe's new web design tool, Muse (code name) (also at Adobe Labs) out of morbid curiosity. Just like Adobe Edge (which refuses to launch), I had very little expectation that this would be a fully-developed sales-ready product. Instead of getting into extensive detail about the quality of its code, its accessibility support, and so on, I figured I'd do a very quick review of how I think it affects web developers.

The target audience is pretty clear from the Muse (code name) web site introduction:

Create websites as easily as you create layouts for print. You can design and publish original HTML pages to the latest web standards without writing code. Now in beta, Muse [(code name)] makes it a snap to produce unique, professional websites.

And this:

Design your pages
Focus on design rather than technology. Combine images and text with complete control, as flexibly and powerfully as you do in Adobe® InDesign®.

Right there is the gist of the product — enable print designers to convert their designs into web pages. Just like Photoshop would produce massive image slices to support Photoshop "designers," this product isn't about the code. With its integration of jQuery effects and Lightbox widgets, it seems almost like this would be a tool for a photographer to build a gallery site.

If you are a coder, or someone who cares about the code, this tool isn't for you. You will quickly see that the HTML is produces is not exactly structural or semantic, and that the piles of CSS and JavaScript aren't exactly necessary. Muse (code name) doesn't allow you to edit the HTML, so you still need to "publish" your work before you can edit it. If part of your coding process involves making your HTML meet accessibility standards or even just structure your content for good SEO, you will find it impossible.

If you are part of a web team, perhaps in an ad agency or interactive firm, then you will find that this tool doesn't allow you to collaborate well. If you get a favicon, for example, from another member of your team, Muse (code name) cannot import it; it only accepts PNG, GIF or JPG. If you receive a background image to drop into an element, Muse (code name) will crop the image, even increasing its dimensions to fill the element, regardless of your plan to allow more of the image to be revealed should the container change in size.

If you find yourself pasting HTML code from Google Maps or Twitter in order to embed third-party widgets on your site, you may find that is nigh impossible short of publishing your pages and then hacking through the HTML output. While I did not find a menu option to do that, even if it exists it will require a full "publish" step every time you want to tweak your embed code.

If you find yourself leaning on CSS techniques as simple as printable styles or as complex as media queries to support alternate display sizes, you will be disappointed. This tool is not intended to support liquid designs, adaptive layouts, document re-flow, or really anything related to alternate viewing.

If you support a web content management system, then for all the reasons above Muse (code name) is not a good fit. Just building a single page to use as a template will require a great deal of work to reformat the code to fit into most content management systems that are out there. Should you ever have to change the core template you either have to go back to Muse (code name) and repeat the process, or you will have to skip Muse (code name) for all future revisions.

In short, it comes down to these two key points:

1. Muse (code name) has the potential to be a great tool for the single graphic designer interested in showing off his or her work without having to learn a technology outside of his/her knowledge area (nor worry about accessibility, standards, alternate displays, SEO, etc.);
2. If you are a web developer (or web development firm), your job is not at risk. Muse (code name) is making no effort to replace you. If anything, it might keep you from getting fewer calls from people who might not be good clients anyway.

If you are looking for a pedantic review of the HTML output, I suspect plenty of others will cover that. Since Muse's (code name) target audience won't care, and anyone who does care will already know the issues just by playing around, it's not even worth getting into here. Besides, with 120,000 other people downloading Muse (code name) after the first day, I expect plenty of reviews of the markup will come.

Now to Examples!

These aren't intended to be open shots at Muse (code name), but instead I hope someone at Adobe can use them to help better it overall.

This image shows how Muse (code name) looks on my netbook (I may have tweeted my frustration last night). As you can see, the menus are off the top of the screen along with every other useful feature. I was able to close the application thanks to standard keyboard shortcuts.

Using the default page size settings (960 pixels with a min-height of 500 pixels), this is the sample site I quickly cobbled together. I did not start with a design or goal other than throwing some elements on the page, so don't tell me my site isn't as awesome looking as it could be. Because it couldn't be awesomer.

What about the file output you ask? Here is the /css directory:

File name	Size (bytes)
articles.css	5,106
bio.css	5,106
blog.css	5,106
books.css	5,106
contact.css	5,106
ie_articles.css	5,009
ie_bio.css	5,009
ie_blog.css	5,009
ie_books.css	5,009
ie_contact.css	5,009
ie_index.css	5,009
index.css	5,106
site_global.css	4,305

The duplicates are for IE support and you can expect to see all your content in every page twice as it relies on IE conditional comments to serve up one copy for IE9 and one copy for anything below IE9.

Here is the /scripts/0.9 directory:

File name	Size (bytes)
jquery-1.4.4.min.js	78,766
jquery.museMenu.js	2,382
MuseUtils.js	9,317
SpryDOMUtils.js	14,604

Without those script files, those simple-looking menus on my example just don't render.

That background image I mentioned earlier? Muse (code name) re-cropped it and converted it to a PNG file, increasing both the dimensions and file size:

File name	Size (bytes)	Dimensions
Banner_bg.jpg	11,271	627 x 80	original image
master_U355_full.png	41,800	960 x 97	Muse (code name) -ified image

Related

• Developers respond to Adobe Muse at .net Magazine.
• Adobe's Muse (code name) site re-coded as XHTML 1 strict, dropping from 78k to 5k.
• Added August 25, 2011: ZDNet asks, as a response to Muse (code name) criticism, What is wrong with bloated markup? I answer in the first comment.
• Added September 2, 2011: Even FastCompany weighs in on this: Adobe's Muse Lets Designers Make Websites Without Knowing Code

Recent(ish) News on Google, Bing, SEO/SEM

I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them "artists"). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that you should invest in the SEO vendor to do just that.

I also try hard not to spend too much time addressing the ever-changing landscape of the search engines, let alone focusing on just one of them. However, sometimes it's worth wrapping up some of the more interesting developments because they can genuinely affect my clients who aren't trying to game the search engines.

Content Farms and Site Scrapers

If you've spent any time searching through Google you may notice that sometimes you get multiple results on your search phrase that look the same in the results, but when visiting the site you find they are just ad-laden monstrosities with no value. Sometimes one of these spam sites would appear higher in the Google search results than the site from which the content was stolen.

Google has now taken steps to not only push those sites back down to the bowels where they belong, but also to penalize those sites. These changes started in late January and went through some more revisions at the end of last month.

I think it's fair to expect Google to keep tweaking these rules. Given all the sites that offer RSS feeds of their content (along with other syndication methods), it's likely that many sites integrate content from external sites into their own. The trick here will be for Google to recognize a site that has a original content that also syndicates third-party content from a site that has nothing but content taken from elsewhere. If you do syndicate content, then you should be sure to what you site stats and your ranking in the search results to see if you are affected at all.

Additional reading:

• Finding more high-quality sites in search
• Google Changes Algorithm To Penalize Site Scrapers
• Do You Republish Other People's Content? You'll Want to Read This
• Google Declares War on Content Farms
• Google Announces Massive Algorithm Change, Declares War On Content Farms, Including Demand Media

Page Titles

Perhaps you have spent a great deal of time carefully crafting your page titles (specifically the text that appears in the title and which displays in your browser title bar). Perhaps you have noticed that in Google the title you entered is not what appears on the search results page. This isn't a bug, doesn't mean your site was indexed improperly, and doesn't necessarily mean your page title had some other affect on your page rank. This is done intentionally by Google.

This does imply, however, that your titles are unwieldy. Google does this when titles are too short, when they used repeatedly throughout a site, or when they are stuffed with keywords. If you find that your title is being cut off (implying it's too long) then you may want to limit your title to 66 characters, or at least put the most important information in those first 66 characters.

Additional reading:

• Dynamic Title Snippets on SERPs
• When Google Rewrites Your Title Tags
• When Google Titles Don't Match Page Title

Social Media

It wasn't that long ago that Google and Bing said that links in social media (think Facebook and Twitter) will affect a site's position in search results (PageRank for Google). Some people may even be tempted to run out and post links to every social media outlet they can find, hoping that the more inbound links, the better for their site. Thankfully it's not that simple.

Both Google and Bing look at the social standing of a user when calculating the value of an inbound link. This can include number of followers (fans/friends on Facebook), number followed, what other content is posted, how much a user gets retweeted or mentioned and a few other factors. In short, those Twitter accounts that come and go in a matter of hours that tweet a thousand links into the ether aren't doing any good. A good social media strategy that is garnering success, however, should also give a boost to the sites it links.

What is not clear, however, is how URL shorteners (and which ones) affect the weight of those links.

Additional reading:

• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
• The Straight Dope on Facebook, Twitter, and SEO
• Google + Bing Confirm that Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO

Random Bits

These are some random articles I collected for posts that never happened. I still think there's good stuff in these and warrant a few minutes to read.

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results and Bing: Why Google's Wrong In Its Accusations should be read together. The accusation from Google that Bing is stealing its search results is fascinating on its own, but reading Bing's response demonstrates a host of things Bing also does differently. For me it was an entertaining battle, but that's about it.

HuffPo's Achilles Heel discusses how Huffington Post relies on questionable SEO techniques, which I equate to spamming, and wonders how long the site will be viable if AOL isn't willing to keep up the SEO game as the rules change. It could be a great purchase for AOL, or a dead site full of brief article stubs.

Is SEO Dead? 1997 Prediction, Meet 2009 Reality is a two-year-old article dealing with a twelve-year-old argument. And still relevant.

When A Stranger Calls: The Effect Of Agency Pitches On In-House SEO Programs should be particularly interesting to people who are charged with some form of SEO within an organization. Too often the unsolicited call or email comes in making grandiose promises and citing questionable data and results. This article provides a good position from which to push back and make sure you and your employer aren't taken to the cleaners.

A 3-Step SEO Copywriting Confession almost sounds like an admission of wrongdoing, but instead talks about how to structure your content for SEO without completely destroying it.

Additional reading (that I wrote):

• Negative Reviews Can Now Affect Site Rank Downward
• Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank
• Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords

Negative Reviews Can Now Affect Site Rank Downward

One of the ongoing truths about search engine optimization (SEO) has been that inbound links are usually a good thing. This has caused SEO scammers to abuse the practice by creating and using "link farms," sites that exist solely to link back to client sites. This "spamdexing" technique is based on having many of these sites (hundreds, thousands) with nothing but links. Quite some time ago Google, Yahoo, and other search engines from the mists of history all recognized this bad practice and started penalizing sites listed on those indices.

When you get SEO spam email claiming that the spammer will list your site in 300 (or some other large number) search engines, this is often what they mean. If you can name more than three search engines, you are already ahead of most Internet users and you recognize that 50, 100, 300, etc are all untenable numbers. If you get an email from someone saying he or she likes your site, has linked to it, and wants you to link back, it's probably just another link farm.

Sadly, with the proliferation of community and social media sites that allow users to post comments and rate organizations, we see a repeat of the comment-spamming model that has caused blogs (among others) to implement CAPTCHA and other Draconian measures to try and hold back the tide of comment spam. As the adage "all press is good press" has led us to believe, coverage of any sort is good for business. That also means that sites that track comments about business, such as Epinions, Get Satisfaction and others like them, can end up boosting an organization's rank in the search engines even when customers complain about the organization. Let me restate — if people had anything to say about you, including bad things, they were giving you a bump in search engine results.

Cue an article in the New York Times, A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web, which tells the story of a woman who purchased a pair of glasses from a company that appeared at the top of the Google search results. Not only did she not get the product she wanted, it took a decidedly Single White Female turn and became a real life game of harassment from the vendor. The motivation for the vendor to behave this way is pretty clear from a comment on Get Satisfaction, posted by the very person harassing the customer.

Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com. I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.

When you see comments like these from "Michael" on Get Satisfaction, you can see how Michael's constant "complaints" are really doing nothing more than acting as link machines back to the offender's site. You decide if Michael is a real person or just part of the link spamming.

While this is an extreme case, it was enough for Google to take notice. On December 1 Google announced that it has made changes to its search algorithm (Being bad to your customers is bad for business):

[W]e developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue[...]

Google makes some fair points about blocking (or lowering the rank of) an organization's site outright that has negative commentary associated with the organization. In that scenario, many politician sites would fare poorly. Competing organizations can engage in a war of defamation on third party sites. And so on.

What's key about Google's statement is the phrase "extremely poor user experience." This goes beyond just poor customer service and defective products, and can now capture sites where people complain about the design or the usability. I am one of those people who has reached out to a site to complain about a technical or implementation problem (yes, I am that jerk) and, when faced with no response, have taken to the critique sites to restate my case (complaint, whining, whatever). If you get enough user experience (UX) designers to complain about a site's ability to confound, or enough disabled users to complain about a site's inaccessibility, those can now impact a site's overall Google rank.

As you read the Times article, remember that even if your organization would never behave that way, if your site is impossible to use and people say so on opinion sites, then you could fall into the same bucket.

While you're considering that, make sure your site loads quickly, too (see the last link below).

Related

• Beware The Link Farms – Avoiding Mistakes In SEO Link Building
• A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web
• Being bad to your customers is bad for business
• Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank

Google Instant Preview Overview

It's like I'm running out of novel titles or something.

With the launch of Google Instant a couple months ago, the landscape for SEO changed as now site authors had to consider targeting keywords for search results that appear as the user types (see my post at evolt.org: Google Instant and SEO/SEM). Anyone who thought that Google would still for a while from there was wrong. Just last week Google introduced Instant Previews, which now shows search users the preview of a page before visiting it (see the announcement at Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews). The embedded video from Google below provides an overview of the feature.

To be fair to others, Google didn't exactly pioneer this, but as the biggest player in the market, Google's implementation can have an effect. As a result, expect to see people react to it in different ways. Many users, however, may never know the images are available since they will have to click the magnifying glass icon (or use the right arrow key) to activate the feature.

One key feature of Google's implementation is that it highlights the keywords in the screen shot, showing users just what the search term hit within the page. This is particularly handy to see if your search term is hitting some main content, or just some ancillary content on the page, potentially saving users extra clicks and time spent reading through a site. In looking at my own site, I can see that it highlighted the introductory text instead of the giant h1 with my name in the banner.

Since showing the preview to the end user doesn't get reported in a site's Google Analytics data, it will be very hard to measure how effective the preview is at getting users to visit your site.

Before you get excited that as a user that you can now spot SEO spam sites before clicking a link, don't get your hopes up. Google offers support for a meta tag that allows you to exclude a site from the preview (read the Instant Previews entry on the Google Webmaster Central blog for the scoop on other bits for web developers):

Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tag to your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users—in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.

SEO spammers will likely use this, including domain name squatters and people who squat on misspellings of common web addresses. In time, users may even come to recognize that a lack of a preview is akin to hiding something.

If your site relies heavily on Flash or third-party plug-ins, you may also need to spend some time testing how it looks in Google Instant Preview. There is a reasonable chance that the preview will have broken puzzle piece icons in place of the Flash element. In the words of Google:

Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or a black square. We're working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

This screen capture of the preview from Lifehacker with an embedded video, which almost ironically show how to use Google Instant Preview with your keyboard, shows what happens when you have plug-ins embedded in the page.

You may also want to skip splash pages or interstitials (the modern splash page for within a site). A splash page may become the preview, and that could end up keeping users from following the link to your site. I've been railing against splash pages for well over ten years (see my article showing developers how to allow users to skip them from over 11 years ago: Let the User Skip the Splash Page), but perhaps this new feature of Google can help push more developers to abandon them.

Time will tell how well this feature is received by end users, and more importantly, how developers consider making changes to their sites as a result. I predict it's just a matter of time (probably backward in time, since I suspect this has already happened) that someone implements a user agent sniffer to detect the Google crawler and serve up different styles to optimize the layout of the page for the preview size and format. If I wasn't writing this post I'd probably be working on that instead.

Google Instant and SEO/SEM (at evolt.org)

Written this past weekend and live today, my latest article at evolt.org is available: Google Instant and SEO/SEM

There's quite the potential for change that this seemingly simple user interface change could have, both on user behavior and money spent on SEM/SEO. The next few weeks may prove to be very interesting.

If you are new to Google Instant (what's that, you're in one of those corporate environments that standardized on IE6 ten years ago and you cannot upgrade?), you can get an overview at the official announcement on the Google Blog, or you can watch the (self-congratulatory) video Google provided.

Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank

If you've been paying attention to the world of SEO and the intersection with Google, then you may have heard a few months back that Google was considering using the speed of a site to affect a site's rankings. Google has already factored in the speed of a site when considering its AdWords quality score.

On Friday, Google announced that it is now implementing site speed as a factor in organic search rankings. What this means is that if your site is an extremely heavy download or just takes too long to draw, then it may be penalized in the organic search listings.

While Google doesn't explicitly define site speed, it's safe to assume that it is a combination of overall page size (including files) and render time (including server response and time to draw the page). For those developers who seem incapable of posting anything smaller than a 1Mb image in the banner, or slimming down their HTML be removing all the extraneous cruft, this is motivation to start working on those optimization skills, even if their sites don't feel the wrath of the penalty.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Currently only 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed.
• There are over 200 hundred factors used in determining page rank, and this one isn't being weighted to high that it kicks out the major ones.
• It currently only applies to visitors searching in English (although you can expect to see them change that over time).
• It launched a few weeks back, so if your site hasn't changed in its search engine rankings, you are probably safe.
• Google links to a number of tools to test the speed if your site. Check out the links at code.google.com/speed/tools.html.
• Nealry four months old now, Google Site Performance is an experimental Google Webmaster Tools Labs feature that shows you latency information about your site.

Hopefully few of you are concerned by this. If you are following best practices, you are already striving to have your public-facing sites draw quickly. Not only does this do things like reduce the load on your servers, it also cuts down on your overall bandwidth costs. An additional advantage is that you don't have to rely on your end user having a fast computer, lots of RAM (or swap space on the drive), and a fast connection. Given how many people surf in corporate environments that aren't exactly cutting edge, this is just good practice.

Related Articles:

• Using site speed in web search ranking at the Google blog.
• Of Google and Page Speed at Zeldman.com
• Page Speed Factored into Google Search Rankings at WebSiteOptimization.com
• Site Speed Now a Factor in Google Rankings at LifeHacker.
• Google Search Rankings Now Consider Site Speed at Mashable.
• Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking at Search Engine Journal.
• Site Speed, Google's Next Ranking Factor at Search Engine Land.

Reminder: See Me Speak, Tues. Nov. 3

I will be one of the panelists at the Infotech Niagara panel session titled "Maximizing Your Web Presence." It takes place Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 8:00am at Buffalo Niagara Partnership's conference room, 665 Main Street, Suite 200, Buffalo, New York 14203 (map below). BNP has parking information at their web site.

From Infotech Niagara:

Ok, you have a website, now what?

Join infoTech Niagara for a panel discussion on "Maximizing Your Web Presence." Our panelists bring years of experience in web strategy, web design, search engine optimization, social media, web video and more.

Come learn from the experts what you can do to leverage new and existing technologies to maximize the effectiveness of your web presence.

Panelists include:

• Adrian Roselli, Senior Usability Engineer, Algonquin Studios
• Brett Burnsworth, President, Zoodle Marketing
• Jason Holler, President, Holler Media Productions
• Mike Brennan, Vice President, Noobis, Inc.

Continental Breakfast will be provided.

Cost:
ITN Members: $10
Non-Members: $15
Students: $5

Register online.

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Derek Powazek on SEO as Snake Oil

There are many on the web who will recognize the name Derek Powazek. He is the name behind old-school sites such as Fray.com and Kvetch.com (which has apparently been taken over by spam bots) and wrote a book about communities (Design for Community, which mentions me by name, which is awesome). I also had the pleasure to meet him at SXSW back in 2001 and even participate in his Fray Cafe. So when I saw his blog post on SEO that started off with this statement, I was pleased:

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

What pleases me more is that it echoes a comment I made in my post Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords back in September:

Those of us trying to protect our clients from SEO/SEM snake-oil salesmen are happy to finally have an official statement from Google.

Now that I've tooted my horn and compared myself to someone considered one of the top 40 "industry influencers" of 2007 by Folio Magazine, let me get to my point. I've been working on the web since Hot Java was still a browser, was excited when the first beta of Netscape Navigator made its way to world, when Yahoo were a couple of guys in a dorm posting links, when my Jolt Cola web site was included in their index because I asked them to include it, and since then the way people find things on the web has changed dramatically. For the last decade or so the search engine has become more than a convenience, it's a necessary feature of the web, without which we'd be stuck wandering billions of terrible pages of things we don't want to see (many thousand fewer of those pages once GeoCities finally closes down). Because of this, getting your site into the search engine in the top spot has become the holy grail of online marketing, one that far too many people are happy to exploit as an opportunity.

Derek makes two key points in his article

1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.
2. SEO is poisoning the web.

He supports the first point by noting that formatting, structure, summaries, quality links and so on have worked since the beginning and will continue to work. There's no magic there. It's free to read anywhere on the web. For his second point he references all the Google bombing tactics that are employed by bots to spam blogs, comment areas, twitter accounts, parked domains, etc. as well as questionable tactics that exploit loopholes (albeit temporary ones) in a search engine's ranking algorithm.

As of now the article has 180 comments, many of which are optimizers who take umbrage with the blanket statement that SEO is the work of the soulless foulspawn and their dark arts (my words, but I think I summarize his sentiment well enough). After receiving so many comments Derek added a post yesterday, his SEO FAQ, responding to a generalization of many of the questions and comments. He also offers some suggestions, including this one targeted at clients (I just took the first part):

If someone approaches you about optimizing your search engine placement, they're running a scam. Ignore them.

Having said something similar in the past to clients, this is normally where I'd segue into a discussion with my clients about how I've worked hard to ensure Algonquin Studios' content management system, QuantumCMS, adheres to best practices and provides many ways to get quality content into the pages, links, titles, page addresses, meta information (after I tell them Google doesn't use meta data for ranking but they insist because they've been conditioned to think that way) and so on. This is also the part where I remind clients that their help is needed to write that copy, interact with users, customers, partners, industry organizations, etc. to generate quality relationships and references (often in the form of links), and to plan to spend time working on this regularly to keep it fresh and relevant.

I look forward to the time when I won't be spending chunks of my day clearing spambots from my QuantumCMS Community forum, batting down spam email about submissions to 300+ search engines, ignoring bit.lys in unsolicited Twitter @ responses, and generally fighting the after effects of all the black hat SEO enabling we've allowed for years.

Come See Me: November 3

I will be one of the panelists at the Infotech Niagara panel session titled "Maximizing Your Web Presence." It takes place Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 8:00am at Buffalo Niagara Partnership's conference room, 665 Main Street, Suite 200, Buffalo, New York 14203 (map below). BNP has parking information at their web site.

From Infotech Niagara:

Ok, you have a website, now what?

Join infoTech Niagara for a panel discussion on "Maximizing Your Web Presence." Our panelists bring years of experience in web strategy, web design, search engine optimization, social media, web video and more.

Come learn from the experts what you can do to leverage new and existing technologies to maximize the effectiveness of your web presence.

Panelists include:

• Adrian Roselli, Senior Usability Engineer, Algonquin Studios
• Brett Burnsworth, President, Zoodle Marketing
• Jason Holler, President, Holler Media Productions
• Mike Brennan, Vice President, Noobis, Inc.

Continental Breakfast will be provided.

Cost:
ITN Members: $10
Non-Members: $15
Students: $5

Register online.

View Larger Map

Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords

In a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog today (Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking), Google has clarified its policy on meta tags and page rank. Those of us trying to protect our clients from SEO/SEM snake-oil salesmen are happy to finally have an official statement from Google. In short, here it is:

• Google does not use meta keywords in its web search ranking and "has ignored the keywords meta tag for years."
• Google sometimes uses the description meta tag as the abstract for search results, but not for web search ranking.

There are many other variants of the meta tag, including some unique to Google. See the Google Webmaster help page discussing meta tags for a list of values Google supports (pay attention to the robots meta tag). Watch the video below for an explanation from a Google representative and his Threadless t-shirt.