Yahoo Updates Their Index

Yahoo’s index has changed. They had notified webmasters in September that they had made upgrades to their algorithm to go along with the new Yahoo Search Assist. It took a couple of weeks for them to roll out the update, but there are significant ranking changes in their SERP’s.

What Has Changed In Yahoo?

One of the more significant changes I noticed was there are more blog type pages in their natural SERP’s. Yahoo has always been behind Google when it comes to recognizing blogs as solid content providers. This blog has never had many pages in Yahoo’s SERP’s, but today I noticed over 75 posts that cracked the top 20 for its keywords. This is good news for social network marketing based search engine optimization strategies.

One thing that I have noticed in comparing Yahoo to Google is that Yahoo’s SERP’s have improved and in many cases are better than Google. The reason why everyone used Google in the first place was the relevancy of their results. Over the last year Google’s results have been watered down with ad-only, weak content sites. Yahoo has tightened up the Inktomi engine and let in fresh content sites. They don’t give as much juice to Wikipedia either which is a good sign.

The bottom line is that except for ASK, the major search engines have all suffered from content spam and are not as relevant as they used to be just 3 years ago. From a marketing standpoint it is more important than ever to utilize social network marketing strategies and to follow Solid SEO Guidelines.

A final note: Yahoo’s spider which is called Slurp is still based upon Inktomi. Meta tags are very important to Yahoo, more so than Google. Your site’s description can greatly affect your placement. With WordPress there is a plugin called Head Meta Description which allows you to control the meta description, but on other websites it is important to optimize your description for Yahoo. If you don’t have a proper meta description Yahoo will resort to the one that is in the Yahoo Directory which is BAD. If that has happened to your site you can apply the following meta tag for both Yahoo and Google’s directory which is just as lame, the ODP:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir” />

Be sure to check your meta tags if you expect to have any placement in Yahoo.

Another problem with Yahoo is their ping service. I have noticed that many Site Explorer API’s are not functioning anymore. None of the WordPress systems I maintain are able to update Yahoo through ping or XML-RPC. If you are unsure of what XML-RPC or ping services are read my post: Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing for an explanation and a list of ping services.

I believe that these are just some bugs related to their Search Assist update and the recent shuffling of their index.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you would prefer to receive updates of this blog through your email, click here to subscribe to email updates.

Google Page Rank Goes Up For Some Sites

This morning the new Google Page Rank Update was unveiled and many sites that I manage rose in PR. Get Found Now and it’s blog rose from a 3 to a 4 and all of my other clients that use WordPress also saw an increase in PR. This is coming on the heels of Google’s Last Page Rank Update Which Hit Sites Selling Links Hard.

I am still not convinced that Google’s public Page Rank matters very much in the SERP’s, but we shall see over the next couple of weeks if the index reflects these changes to PR. I certainly hope that it does since all my sites rose in PR. Whether PR matters or not, by sticking to solid SEO practices and Search Engine Optimization Guideline We All Must Follow your sites will be as successful as mine. The trick is to not do anything tricky. Post relevant unique content, use solid keyword stuffing tactics, use deep link navigation and obtain on-topic inbound links and you will do fine.

The fact that this update rolls out within a week of a negative update is indicative of Google trying to appease webmasters clamoring for justice in the SERP’s. It remains to be seen how our placement will be affected with the new PR.

Along with the PR update there was also some of the dancing you would expect within the SERP’s. The main index has not had a major update in a while and I suspect that we are 2 to 3 weeks away from an index overhaul. The last time Google updated PR, 15 days later there was a major overhaul of not only some elements of their algorithm, but of the SERP’s as well. I believe that something similar will take place again.

Everyone by now should have a baseline of where there top 100 keywords rank in Google. I use Rank Tracker as my tool of choice for creating SERP’s reports. I will be running reports daily on all of the sites I manage and will keep you all informed of any major index changes.

Google Page Rank Update Hits Sites Hard

The wait for Google’s Page Rank update is finally over, but the results are not what many expected. Staying true to their threat that they will be penalizing websites that sell links, they have knocked some pretty heavy sites on the head. This is one more example of Google eliminating competition in online paid advertising. While this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that follows Matt Cutt’s blog, it still is more evidence that Google Is Not Your Friend.

Again they are expending energy on creating a monopoly in online advertising and not doing anything to make their SERP’s better.

Does Page Rank Matter Anyway?

There are a lot of my peers that believe as I do: Page Rank means less now than ever. This is a bold statement, but I think it is true, as far as “public” page rank goes. Yes there is a difference to the little green bar on your Google Toolbar and what Google really uses to gauge sites. In fact of all the sites that were targeted in “Google’s bitch slap” as some are calling it, none have seen a decrease in placement as far as I can see. Several high rollers in the blogosphere that were hit by a 3 PR drop haven’t lost any traffic either.

I am more inclined to believe that this is a warning shot across the bow of sites that are selling links, more than an actual real penalty like their earlier 1 to 30 drop that affected some sites a year or so ago.

If you actively sell links, you better make sure your links are both stealth (not part of a syndication network like Text Link Ads) and are relevant to your site’s content theme. When I buy links, I don’t choose sites that have off-topic links. I also only buy links as a last resort for a client’s site that has gotten off to a rocky start or are trying to expand their keyword set.

All in all a look at the SERP’s shows more and more sites ranking in the top 10 for high powered keywords that have PR in the 2’s and 3’s. A lot of people are freaking out about this, but I am counseling my clients to remain calm and stick to our plans which rarely include paid links. The best thing to do now is stick to the SEO Guidelines We All Need To Follow.

SEO Guidelines We All Need To Follow

A few years back I was filling out my resume. It was very difficult to explain what exactly it was that I did. SEO was a term that hadn’t quite hit the limelight. In fact searches on Monster and other career sites yielded no results for SEO or search engine optimization jobs at all. Internet Marketing had a few listings, but they were limited to pyramid schemes or other nonsense.

Today the job market knows what SEO is and there are plenty of listings for people that are experienced in both search engine optimization and search engine marketing. The problem now is that what people like me do is hardly covered by these categories and again I have no easy answer for the question “what do you do?” My kids also have a hard time in school answering “what does your daddy do?”

With the addition of social network marketing, Web 2.0 applications, server technologies, podcasting, blogging and other next generation skills added to my resume, it is harder to say in a few words what it is I do. I guess the best description would be – Internet Presence Management. That pretty much encompasses what I do, I mange online businesses Internet presence. Every aspect of what they do online and how they do it from the server to the website, from traffic analysis to usability studies my peers and I are Internet Presence Managers!

Now that I have a title all figured out I can finish that resume. Not that I really am looking for a job, but I like to see what is out there. I have gotten many clients by answering ads in Monster and careers.com. One of the major changes in my industry is that companies are looking to keep their SEO in-house as opposed to outsourcing it. Companies that live and die by their presence within organic SERP’s really need someone full time to help them make decisions that pertain to their Internet Presence.

A company that relies on search engines for their business must take SEO into consideration in every single business decision that they make.

Search Engine Optimization Guidelines For the 21st Century

SEO today is a lot different than 1999. Pay Per Click is not an option for a lot of small companies in large markets due to click fraud and ad-only sites spending lots of money filtering traffic through their spam doorway sites (read my article PPC Is Ruining the Web for more info). Legitimate companies are having a harder time than ever penetrating the SERP’s. To combat scamming spam, we all need to follow several guidelines to rise above the muck in the SERP’s.

1. Take SEO Into Consideration – Search Engine Optimization needs to be thought about in every business decision that your company makes. Most marketing departments have at least one SEO expert, but SEO must be taken into consideration by executives, programmers, graphic designers and web developers as well. Every decision from personnel to what type of web server your sites are hosted on, needs to keep SEO in mind.
2. Keywords Matter – by now you all know that SEO starts with keyword discovery. While a lot of experts rely on tools to make keyword lists, I prefer to use the interview process to create and organize keywords. Knowing what your potential customers are going to type into the search engines is the first step in site development and marketing plans.
3. Social Network Marketing – now more than ever Web 2.0 or social network marketing is taking the drivers seat in SEO strategies. Mainstream sites that are not embracing Web 2.0 will be left behind by their competitors that are using it. Read my post Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing for more insight into these strategies. There are a whole set of guidelines just for Web 2.0 marketing. For this post I will touch on a few of the more important concepts.
   • Participate In Markets That Apply To Your Business – It is important to market your site in relevant communities. Rather than going for exposure everywhere, stay targeted. In online marketing more is usually better, but sometimes a sniper rifle will do more damage than a machine gun.
   • Keep It Real – this is especially true if you are utilizing blogs as your primary social marketing outlet. Promote yourself, not your products in your blog. If you do it right, people will follow your links and find your products or services easily. They don’t require blatant promotion, in fact that can turn a visitor off more often than not.
   • Learn About Your Community – you don’t want to rush right into a social network and self-promote without showing the community that you have something to offer first. You need to get experienced in your marketplace before posting in forums or marketing in social media sites.
   • Stay On Topic – don’t dilute your content with multiple topics about everything under the sun. Stay focused on what you do best, write about what you know. This is particularly important when trying to obtain inbound links. Good content is the best way to create a buzz and get solid inbound links.
4. Get Those Links – inbound links are the best way to promote your site. They are also the only way to rank high in the SERP’s and stay there. With Social Network Marketing it is easier than ever to obtain links. That being said the reality if the situation is a little different than it used to be. One way inbound links are not easily obtained anymore. Unless you are paying for links or are creating buzz through excellent content, it is harder to get those one way links. Reciprocal links have less of an impact that they used to as well. So why am I contradicting myself? One minute I am saying it is easier than ever to get links, then the next statement I am saying it is harder than ever to get one way links. The answer is the manner in which you can get links. There are more avenues than ever through social network marketing.
   • Online Press Releases - here is one avenue Google has not cried about when it comes to paying for links. By using an online distribution network, your release has the potential to gain hundreds of links from a well conceived press release. Optimized Press Releases are a great way to build buzz and links.
   • Syndicate Your Content Through RSS – with the advent of RSS Syndication Services there are more ways than ever to get your content on other sites. An RSS link is by far the most powerful link your site can obtain. Another high profile site that puts your feed on it, will boost your rankings faster than any other method. A managed content syndication service will greatly increase your exposure and bring both traffic and links.
   • Viral Video Marketing – with sites like You Tube your videos have a great chance to get syndicated leading to inbound links. By creating how-to videos for your products and instructional videos for your services you can say a thousand words with one video and gain exposure and links. Many sites need to educate their customers about their products and services. Video is the best way to get your point across. Remember to stay on topic!
   • Pingbacks, Trackbacks and Other Blog Goodies – by having a blog on your primary website you are able to keep the spiders coming back. If you don’t have a blog yet read my post about SEO and WordPress to get started. Blogs are a powerful way to communicate with your customers, but also allow you stay updated with the search engines.

Combining these strategies into your marketing plan will insure success, but don’t think for a second that it will be easy. SEO is a full time commitment that needs to take priority over everything else!

Publisher Click Fraud And Viagra

Yep you read right! Click fraud and Viagra is the title of this post. What do the two have together other than keeping a lot of people up at night? “Buy Viagra” is one of the hottest keywords as far as Google AdSense money goes. A site hosting Viagra ads can rake in $10 to $35 per click through Google AdSense. While this post is talking about click fraud, you should know that Viagra type keywords are used by a lot of professionals to gauge Google organic SERP’s.

It is also going to serve as one of the examples I will be using to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Google’s SPAM filters, how their SERP’s are being watered down and spoofed by spammers and how black hat webmasters are raking in a fortune through click fraud.

This is an important concept to understand: how legitimate websites are getting beaten out of hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars a day by publisher click fraud. There are two different types of ads from Google that have two different types of clients:

1. Google AdWords – These are ads and keywords that companies buy and bid on. They are mostly text links that appear within Google, but also can appear on other sites through AdSense. People that purchase Google AdWords keyword text ads are advertisers.
2. Google AdSense – These are advertiser’s keyword text ads that appear on sites other than Google. People that put Google ads on their sites are called publishers. When advertisers bid on keywords, the top 4 or 5 will be spread out to the sites within Google’s AdSense network that have enough keywords to qualify for those ads. This is where the most damaging and least talked about type of click fraud takes place. Our example today about Viagra and the doorway and ad-only sites is just one of the big money industries that is getting hammered with click fraud.

I am not going to give scumbags the blueprint on how to both spoof Google into placing ads that are not relevant to the site, nor am I going to explain in great detail the simple technology I used to make fraudulent clicks on my own account.

Before I dig in, my post on how PPC Is Ruining The Internet yielded a comment from Neil at Fraudulent Clicks a site that deals with click fraud and has some good info on how to identify it. He had stated that “AdWords suppliers can spot content network fraud quite easily”, a bold statement indeed. I unfortunately disagree, and decided to run a couple of tests to prove that I could wrack up a slew of clicks and have it appear to the advertiser as normal traffic. I have both a Google AdWords account and a separate Google AdSense account which is how I was able to prove that click fraud in NOT easily detected.

The search world often gauges terms related to Viagra due to its popularity in worldwide searches as well as the high price that it brings to publishers. If you want to know anymore about this take a look at one of my friends’ site Syndk8 which is running a test on “buy viagra” SERP’s. (And yes I just participated in that test by putting in the link : ))

How Publisher Click Fraud Is A Million Dollar Industry

Now that everyone understands what publisher click fraud is, I am going to briefly tell you what I did. I put some money into my AdWords account and bid on some low-cost keywords about data backup and put up a one-page wonder sub domain site called crash recovery systems and used some scripts I downloaded off the Internet that allowed me to put 6 Google Ad boxes along with bogus text about disaster recovery I blatantly scraped from another site.

That is the first part of publisher click fraud. Taking a webpage and putting on more than 2 allowed ad units and spoofing the AdWords server into serving high cost text ads that have nothing to do with the domain. These are in direct conflict with Google’s Terms and Conditions:

Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful information about the product or service in your ad. For instance, direct users to the page where they can buy the advertised product, rather than to a page with a description of several products.
Originality:

Feature unique content that can’t be found on another site.
Provide substantial information. If your ad does link to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional, unique content.

At this time I have taken the site down just in case someone rats on me and gets my account disabled, but I captured the screen with Camtasia so I could put up a video later on showing the site and ad units it served.

The next thing I did was go onto my Kubuntu machine and loaded Ice Weasel (this is another name for FireFox) that uses a proxy server that utilizes .edu domains. I went to the site and clicked on MY ad. I then quickly chose another server in the list, refreshed my browser, cleared the cookies and went back to the site and clicked the ad again. The whole process took less than a minute.

I did this a few times then went into my AdSense account ad saw that I had made $16.00 at 12 cents per click on the text clicks and 19 cents by using the search box and clicking on my ad in the SERP’s. In fact the search AdSense is even easier to spoof because you are going through yet another interface. By setting up multiple entry points I could have done this all day long and wracked up a hundred or so dollars on a 12 cent click. This can be done to the extreme on personal injury lawyers sites, Viagra and pharmaceutical sites to bring in even more profit.

Now I know my detractors are going to say that advertisers will recognize sites that don’t convert leads or have an inordinate amount of clicks, but a good webmaster knows how to cloak sites and could easily build 10 or 20 doorway pages on different sub domains, hide them and make calls to the ads through proxies and even simulate interest traffic. Interest traffic is a site visitor that looks at more than 2.5 pages in at least 2 minutes of surfing. I was easily able to simulate interest in the site by clicking on links filling out forms. When you are getting a few dollars per click it doesn’t take a genius to know that faking interest on a site can easily spoof the fraud filters.

When I went back into my AdWords account and looked at the analytics, there really wasn’t any apparent click fraud, the traffic looked normal and so did the behavior. Publishers that do this will have multiple sites and many ways to simulate legitimate traffic.

There is only one way to eliminate publisher click fraud. Google MUST remove doorway and ad-only sites. Going back to the Viagra example, a search for “Viagra” yields these results:

The two red arrows are 2 ad-only sites that are in the top 10 of Google for a major search! Look at the web.archive content. It is total nonsense! How can this be? Google needs to focus on getting spam and publisher fraud sites out of the index. Rather than declaring war on paid links, Google should be cleaning up its act.

Next Page »