Have been looking at this for a while. I just published a quick post on link buying and within 10 minutes my google alerts fired me an email saying it was indexed.
Did a quick check and yes…there it is.
Willing to bet it has a lot to do with breaking news being part of the algorythm and has aspects of “freshness” to it.
We hear it all the time, paid links are blackhat, paid links are whitehat, unethical, part of the normal marketing operation of any business blah blah blah. The discussion is irrelevant whatever you think about paid links they are here to stay.
Now before Googles witch hunt it was a free for all, people throwing money at paid links, loads of sites selling links and to be honest alot of the links were junk, ad blocks or irrelevant placement. With paid links (no condom!) being “illegoogle” the world of buying links has completely changed. It has put off a great many webmasters for fear of Googles hairy side (backhand slap :-). Buying links (and not being caught) is now a lot more difficult because we all have to operate under the radar and we have to make certain demands on the way the link is presented.
I personally like this situation, buying links has become much more of a skill than it used to be and with many a webmaster unwilling to risk it, the power and value of expertly sourced paid links has increased significantly.
Just a quick one today about the basics for managing your social profile and your online reputation.
I’ll just be talking about blogs and forums because that is the area I am teaching my web monkey. Sounds easy doesn’t it - search out all the forums and blogs that discuss your niche and form a profile and pressence on there. But is it actually that easy? Well it depends on several factors.
What your current online reputation is like:
This is important if you are being hammered for service or products or whatever you firstly need to get in there transparently and let them know that you are here to help. And help you must, you will need to solve problems on an individual basis by liaising with which ever department is causing the problem. Start showing some genuine concern and make sure that your actions are consistent with what you promise.
If you aren’t being mentioned or are the subject of positive conversations great get in there transparently and interact with/thank those who are taking care of you. Be the one that people come to if they want advice or have any questions. Start to become an authority in your area.
How competitive your niche is:
If you are operating the server space for example you can be sure that there are some busy bodies keeping an eye on what is being said and where the conversations are happening. You may well find that significant figures on significant forums and blogs have reputation management as an agenda. Some are completely transparent and some are not. If you leap in and start defending or promoting a certain site you’re going to get nowhere.
For this you need to take a multi level approach. If you are being hammered see above.
You will also need to develop useful profiles on the main sites (not so transparently). Over time you can gain trust and authority and ultimately help others to see the good in your company 
Web savvy niches are going to be much harder to work than less techie filled niches. Choose your tactics wisely, think about how much time you have to put into this and what will bring you the greatest return.
How busy your “blogsphere” is:
This really comes down to a case of do you need reputation management? If you are breaking a new low traffic niche the chances are that your time is going be better spent driving traffic to that site rather than trying to interact with a community that has little or no presence.
Have a look around, if there really is no conversation going on then start one. Forums are easy to set up but require some thought to get going (think outsourcing, posting yourself under different names, get a competition going or enlist company staff to get involved). Blogs are something you should be involved with anyway, get posting.
What you are able to contribute:
This comes down again to highly skilled yet repetitive work and who you get to do it. Ideally you need an expert in your area who can really add value to the conversations and who can write well. If you do not have this then decide how much you trust this person and task them accordingly. You may ask them to post conservatively and provide you with a record of their work until you are comfortable with what they are doing or you may simply get them to find all the converstaions for someone else to tackle at a later date.
When you are getting an employee to do the majority of the work you need to keep an eye on where they are visiting and what they are posting. The simplest way I have found is for them to copy and paste the url of any thread/blog they have added to. You can cross reference this against your list of key sites and check the work at random for quality.
However you do it, make sure that you are (mostly) honest, transparent and congruent with the image you wish to portray.
It’s inevitable, as people spend more and more time online they become familiar with the internet world. Terms like SEO and RSS become commonplace and people become skilled searchers and savvy purchasers.
They’ve been burnt by the get rich quick schemes or have been cautious enough to take a good look around and have found that its the same old crap in different packages. But then, during their lurking and their reading they see blackhat mentioned and it sounds a little sexy.
Everyone in the blackhat forums and blogs talks in riddles and part conversations. They discuss programming abilities that even a skilled google searcher cannot grasp and allude to (metaphoric) pots of gold found through testing new exploits and gaming new sites and technologies.
“If only I could get to know their secrets, if i could get my hands on their tools I wouldn’t even need to be able to code i could just apply my cunning and give up my day job“.
And there it is, straight back into the fire. Not buying ebooks/cd’s that contain the money making secrets of millionaire internet marketeers but buying the secret tools that rogue marketeers have used to beat the system.
“This time it will be different because I am turning to the dark side, I am cutting my teeth in an arena where the rules don’t apply. I am not buying a get rich quick scheme I am buying tools that in the right hands will make me rich.”
Do you think that the people who came up with guestbook spamming or link farming just happened upon it or bought it in an ebook? No. They were immersed in their field and saw an opportunity. Google bombing, cookie stuffing, cloaking etc etc. These were opportunities exploited by those dedicated to what they do. These were not get rich schemes they were get rich from finding an opportunity by being an expert in your field schemes.
If you want to make money online read, learn and do. There are internet marketing millionaires that haven’t been born yet. They will grow up, learn to master whatever incarnation of internet marketing there is at that time and find an opportunity.
Marketing is marketing whatever medium you happen to be using. Blackhat simply means against the guidelines of whatever search engine. Stop thinking in terms of this tool or that technique and start thinking in terms of what need can you satisfy and why it should be you that staisfys that need.
In an ever increasingly competitive marketing environment companies are taking extra steps to ensure that they are successful online. One of these steps is to bring their online marketing efforts inside the company rather than using an SEO agency.
This comes with several advantages but also has problems of its own.
The advantages are obvious. An in house SEO is able to fully understand the company and the market they are in. They are able to establish working relationships with key departments and decision makers and can also see how the dynamics of the company function. This can be key in securing funding for the online marketing efforts and for convincing the management of the direction and spend that is necssary for success.
Activities such as link building and PPC are almost always best done in house because they require a solid understanding of the market, blogsphere (for want of a beter word) and product/service that you are in.
With an internal SEO you have someone who is fully accountable for results and who can make informed descisions about what needs outsourcing and what doesn’t.
However, only working on one site or sites in a certain field can mean that the SEO doesn’t get the same kind of perspective that an agency SEO does. Working on many and varied projects means that you are constantly having to reevaluate the way you approach a sites promotion. This means constant study and experimenting with your techniques. Obviously from this comes a wealth of knowledge and understanding and can mean that you are able to see a project with fresh eyes.
Personally I like to remain in house but to liase extensively with other SEO’s about projects that I am doing and that they are involved with.
If you are choosing to move your SEO in house don’t expect that you will no longer need or use external expertise. What you will be able to do is leverage their expertise and gain the maximum value.
Running a website brings with it its own set of requirements and idiosyncrasies. The one that often raises its ugly head is the need for very repetitive work to be done by a highly skilled and often expensive member of staff. Indeed there are times when I do certain tasks not a million miles away from basic data entry. But it is the subtleties in that data that make the job so much more demanding. For example each Meta description (assuming that you are optimizing that page for the serps) needs to be a highly targeted accurate description of the pages content and (sometimes) it requires something to get their juices going.
Meta tags, spreadsheets for sites that will sell your products, content writing, PPC campaigns, link building, competitor analysis all require an excellent grasp of the subject (both SEO and industry specific) but also have to be done over and over ad nauseam. They require attention to detail, good enough is never good enough because each time that information is read it may mean a sale or a subscriber is just around the corner (or not). It may mean that your items are not listed in quite the right category and therefore may as well not be on the site at all.
You can worry about your link building and your reputation or the design of your site but you also need to know who is looking after the detail. Too many companies that I have worked with are unable to appreiciate the need for above average staff for these tasks. The damage that can be done may take weeks to correct once it is discovered. This then creates two requirements, firstly the hiring of suitably able staff and secondly your web manager/seo needs to maintain their vigilance over the work that is done on site. If the details are not taken care of you may one day find the devil lurking.
Not sure why i did this search but a search for search engine on google gives this result:
Big G can’t be found till the 3rd page. Obviously we can see why this happens but it does show a relevancy gap that Google is unable to address even when it comes to itself. Afterall if I were to ask you for a search engine what would you reply with?
It’s unlikely to be Dogpile.
Inevitably (unless you are very lucky) you will come across a site that needs to be completely changed. Nothing on the site is right, awkward navigation, disorientating site structure, unweildy urls and an almost unfathomable buying process.
The part of the site that I’m going to concentrate on today is the url structure. Overly complicated variable stuffed urls have several problems. Firstly they do not indicate the structure of the site (modern users are more commonly using the url as a means of orientation and navigation), secondly they do not contain the keywords that are relevant to the page and thirdly, depending on the number of variables, they may not be adequately crawled by the search engine spiders.
Effectively your only option is to change the url structure. But this can be fraught with dangers. If they have worked hard to get their site ranking (even with the url structure as it is) you really don’t want ot lose this.
There really is only one option that is open to you as far as mapping your sites is concerned and that is the use of the 301 redirect. This tells the browser/search engine that the page they are looking for no longer exists and that it has moved permanently to another address. I won’t go into why search engines love this but trust me they do.
Depending on the technology your site uses please be cautious who you use to implement these redirects. Problems can and do occur
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/asp-net-2-and-url-rewriting-sometimes-harmful/
http://dev.communityserver.com/forums/p/476049/536640.aspx
Now the process of mapping your new sites urls to your old sites urls is always going to be tedious and time consuming. In an ideal world you would find the equivalent pages on your current site and your new site, redirect the old to the new and thats it job done. However things are never that simple. You will probably find that every page you currently have does not have an equivelent on the new site.
The site I am currently working on has around 10,000 pages indexed. I am fortunate enough to have three years worth of analytics and stats data with which to work. Without this data your job is going to essentially be guesswork until the site goes live.
So i run a report for the landing pages over the last 3 years and get a list of around 8,000. I then cross reference this with a report on the most popular pages and what pages have referers over the same period and get an excel sheet with the url, landings, refered pages and visits in columns. This is just to check that i am not missing any pages that may have significance but have never been an entrance page. As i expected, over the course of 8,000 urls the two data sets virtually merge into one and no important urls are missed. I am then left with several thousand urls that i wish to work with.
Now some of these urls are no longer going to exist and some of them had had less than 10 visits. I prioritise the pages based on number of entrances and then write a short PHP script to crawl each url and pull out the title of the page. So I now have a list of all the urls on the old site that i want to have equivalents for on the new site. I also have information about the contents of that url to help whoever is doing the mapping.
You guessed it, i have no intention of doing this myself, but my web monkey is more than happy to oblige. Once he is used to the practice of finding the relevant page on the test version of the new site and copying that into the spreadsheet he can do a lot in a day! Within a week or so we have a full list of all the urls and their equivalents ready for the 301 magic.
What magic? …well i will elaborate in a future post but please do not migrate 8,000 urls all at once!!
notes
From experience Google will cope with largish numbers of redirects but it may take time for the new site to settle down to the same (and hopefully improved) state of the old site.
Where there is no equivalent page I simply redirect to a page that has similar content and matches the perceived intenet of a visitor to that page (a bit of thought required from the web monkey).
This is not the only thing you should be doing to ensure your new site suffers as little as possible (think site map and notifying sites that link to you amoungst other things)
You may suffer in the rankings in the short term due to your pages losing trust rank but this should sort itself out over time if your SEO efforts are up to scratch
Excellent discussion on this here
Sounds like a silly question doesn’t? No actually it doesn’t.
It’s an easy mistake to make, you’re chatting away with your webdesigner/business partner/internet management company and you say “let’s get that domain name”, “sure”, they say, “its only a few pounds/dollars I’ll do it”.
And then you forget about it, the site goes up or you shelve the idea to be addressed in the future. Time goes by and you make a success of your internet idea or the domains you bought start to become more valuable on their own.
So the time comes that you want to make changes within the company or relations between you and your partner/designer become tense or your internet management company goes bust. Then you realise, YOU DON’T HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR DOMAIN NAMES. Whoever bought the domains has registered themselves as the owner (and yes, I have seen IT management companies do this as well).
As anyone who has been to court knows it is an awful, costly process and one that is best avoided and if the company you were using goes bust and they all magically bugger off, who are you going to take to court to regain control?. Also there is no need for it.
If you can, always make sure you are the one who is down as the registrar (tell them that you’ll handle all the annoying domain stuff and register it in your name) . If that is not an option you should have an agreement drafted by a professional, a commercial or corporate law specialist.
Don’t let it sneak up on you.
As more businesses go online and those that are online increase their efforts the problem of web management becomes evermore relevant.
The internet is steeped in myth and misinformation. This is partly because anyone can get involved and set themselves up as an “expert” and partly because of the fast moving, everchanging and highly complicated nature of the technologies involved.
The business of doing business on line is loaded with unfamiliar and potentially very expensive terms like SEO, web 2.0, ASP, JSP, PHP, Ruby, AJAX, CPM, CPC, PPC, XXS, SQL injection, Organic, usability accessibility, Linux, IIS, Blackhat, Whitehat etc etc. More familiar terms like affiliates, ROI, overheads, advertising, branding, hacking, security etc are also mentioned but how do they apply to the online environment?
What is going on? Who is doing what? What technologies are involved? Are we as competitive as we should be? What are the latest developments? How do we measure things? What can we measure? How do we know who to hire? What constitutes relevent experience?
These questions go on and on and in most companies no one is able to answer all of them. Even if there is a substantial online effort the people involved are often contained in disperate groups with poor communication and collaboration systems in place.
As the internet matures and we move further from the wild west internet of a few years ago we find that there are best practices and effective methodologies emerging. Yes the internet moves at an alarming rate so you need to kept up to date by people who know where to look. Yes there are a bewildering number of technologies available but there will be a best fit for your efforts once all your needs are taken into account. Yes there are angencies that will provide a very poor service for a great deal of money but likewise there are true professionals who provide excellent ROI.
As the web grows and becomes a more professional environment the role of the web manager is one that becomes ever more necessary.
