Social Networks and Search – will they just spoil each other?

October 21, 2011 – 7:38 pm

Social is all over the place these days – even the mainstream media mentions it often, particularly at the moment with Facebook having just announced major changes at F8 and with Google pushing Google+ as a major alternative. Following so many SEO-related blogs and Twitter feeds as I do it’s easy to get the feeling that everyone is obsessed by social; it’s only natural I suppose since many of them are busy trying to work out how they can be used to boost their own personal business reputations in the industry or are working out how they could affect the search rankings of their clients.

Truth to tell, I fear most of the imprecations to business clients to embrace social networking falls on deaf ears; or at best are mistaken for direct marketing opportunities. But this post is less about them than a more general consideration of the effects that two two channels may have on each other.

In recent years Google and the few remaining others have been fighting an often losing battle against spam and some of the less ethical practitioners of SEO. There have been more and more complex algorithm changes to combat this problem. Even when it works this has, in some people’s opinion, pushed the search results in a direction that isn’t always that useful for the average searcher. A lot of searches turn up nothing but commercial results even when you’re looking for information – try looking for technical info and you’re often flooded with either buying sites or content farms – while even if you are looking for items to purchase you often end up with endless price comparison sites.

In what they claim is an attempt to combat this they’ve been increasingly turning to social signals. However there are other considerations which may be more important to them. Basically search isn’t a money making operation and Google haven’t been a search company for a long time  – what they are is an advertising company because that’s where the profits are. I’m old enough to remember forum discussions about Google’s lack of ability to make money (a bit like Twitter today) and the answer to that was of course Adwords and later Adsense. Now, as a mega corporation the pressure on them is to continue to make ever-increasing profits, and the answer is still the same. The longer they can keep you on their properties the more chance they have of advertising to you

In the meantime the social channels, and particularly Facebook, have been spreading their influence in ways that have encroached more and more on the time spent on search engines. The problem for Google is not that Facebook might start another form of search engine, it’s that by channelling people’s use of the web through an almost permanently logged in social experience they are reducing the time that Google can show ads to them. This explains the emphasis that Google have put on trying to crack social over the last few years, culminating in their own full social networking property, Google+.

The problem is that if they use social signals for rankings purpose then they leave themselves open to social spamming – which will almost certainly be easier than link spamming and harder to combat, while also ruining social channels which will become flooded with fake posts and general noise.

The effect on social doesn’t much bother me much from a personal point of view as I only use Twitter – I value my privacy far too much to use either Facebook or Google +. It does bother me that another area of the internet in general may be polluted and lose what value it has for people, and the effect on search bothers me much more. It might sound odd coming from an SEO if you believe any of the badmouthing that our industry often gets, but I want the search results to be much cleaner; much easier to find quality results in all areas. To find information for informational queries, to find good suppliers for commercial queries, and to find proper technical results for technical queries. I can’t see how social signals can help produce that.

Google’s other answer seems to be ever-increasing personalisation of search, but this has never convinced me. When I search I want the widest range of potential information (within quality constraints of course) to choose from – I don’t want the search engine pandering to what I already know, or confirming any bias that may have crept into my opinions.When Jean-Luc Picard asks the Enterprise computer for information would he want only ideas that came from sources he had already approved? No, and neither do I.

Equally he probably wouldn’t want it influenced by the gossip from Ten Forward. I’d rather they keep search and social separate and fix search.

By bill | Posted in Google, SEO, Social Networking | Comments (0)
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Links – are there any genuine link builders out there?

June 27, 2011 – 10:52 am

In recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about links. I’ll say straight away that getting them has never been a particular strength of mine – I’m more of a structural, technical and content SEO – but analysing them is definitely something I know about. I used to think that I actually wasn’t very good at links and that I was missing something about how the experts operated. I used to ask the ones I knew how they did it, and I’d read endless blogs and articles about it, but the secrets seemed elusive. I’ve even been known to advise a client that since we’d optimised everything else that they should consider hiring an outside specialist to boost their link profile for that final push that would take their top 5 rankings to the number one spots.

Now there are a lot of SEOs out there who seem to think the subject is about nothing but links, and some of them, particularly in the USA, are well-respected professionals. However there are others who are less well-respected – the sort who cold-call and promise that all the target company has to do is hire them and they’ll get them thousands of links and they’ll shoot up the rankings and everything will be dripping money in no time.

In the last year I’ve had the opportunity to closely assess the performance of a couple of these so-called link specialists and basically I’ve had all my concerns confirmed. The links I’ve seen created have been awful – in my view so poor as to be a danger to the site rather than a help. Artificial sites created purely to link together and then link out to the company’s clients – often with the same lists of links on every site. Thousands of exact match domains created on obscure south sea island TLDs and then scraped content added. Comment spam on obscure blogs and forums, often in foreign languages. In one hilarious case I found there was a spammy initial forum post on a Ukraine forum with a long series of comments which were ALL from different spam droppers.

Occasionally one or other of these tactics might actually give a short term minor boost but in most cases this was quickly followed by a drop back down. Lots of links, no value.

In my own efforts to find links the thing I notice most often is that the majority of sites that would be worthwhile targets just don’t have any mechanisms for giving links any more. Links and resources pages are largely a thing of the past, and many sites don’t have any outgoing links at all – either the management have banned them or the webmaster has listened to some ill-informed stories about “leaking pagerank”.

That doesn’t leave much – directories are largely worthless these days, while press releases probably always were. Article creation has taken a big hit from Panda and there aren’t always suitably relevant blogs or forums for many ecommerce sites to build up relationships on. The same thing applies to guest blogging – guest articles about SEO are easy; guest article opportunities about garden ornaments or bed linen tend to be a bit fewer and far between!

And yet still we see SEOs writing articles about link building. Of course they never actually tell you how to do it in enough detail that you can follow their methods – they talk about all the above methods that don’t work or aren’t relevant in most subject areas, or they talk about training link builders and the abilities they need to have, or they tell you how NOT to get links. In short they are just link bait about link building.

So come on guys tell me – are there ANY white-hat link building methods or is every method really a bit shady ranging to completely black-hat? Do any of you offer genuine, quality link building? Because if there are any I’d like to either get some training from you or outsource some client work to you – but beware, I know crap links when I see them so you’ll have to be the genuine article. (And if you’re an Indian spammer called “Steve” or “April” then don’t waste your time.)

By bill | Posted in SEO, spam, techniques to avoid | Tagged | Comments (2)
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Pressing the wrong international buttons

June 4, 2011 – 2:10 pm

A Tale of Edinburgh University Press and search engines

This weekend I was doing some research for additional content for my Scottish Books site and had occasion to do a Google search for Edinburgh University Press. To my surprise their site didn’t appear in the first page of results, or the second, or the third.

Intrigued, I found a link to it on one of the sites that did rank, (it’s http://www.euppublishing.com/) and then viewed the source code (always my first action when I want to check a site’s setup and quality). First thing I noticed (apart from acres of whitespace) was  lang=”en-US”  in the html tag – not the best indication especially for a .com. That gave me  an idea and I went back to Google and clicked on the “web results” link (I had searched on UK-only as I usually do for UK-based queries). Low and behold up came the site in number 1 spot.

So Google thinks that Edinburgh University Press isn’t a UK site. Could it just be that language setting? Let’s dig a little further, I next activated my Netcraft toolbar – ahha, they are on IBM servers in the USA, another poor signal and almost certainly a rather more important one. (I’ve seen many many .com sites failing to rank in the UK because of being hosted elsewhere)

Since it doesn’t look as if there has been any SEO done on the site – poor and duplicate title tags and no meta-descriptions – it’s a fair bet that they haven’t got a Webmaster Tools account where they could have told Google the site was UK, although that isn’t the whole solution by any means.

Robots.txt puzzle

While musing on this situation of one of Scotland’s most important academic publishers not showing up in UK searches and whether I should try and contact the webmaster about it, I cast around pretty much on SEO autopilot checking various data, and having seen that there is a robots-noarchive setting on the home page, I checked the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Oops! Seems they either don’t want indexed or are being somewhat badly advised!

Hang on, they were listed in the Google worldwide results…

So how are the search engines handling that? run a  few site: commands:

Bing only lists 1 page with no details (although as usual they can’t count their totals – 2/2 of 150??)

Yahoo only lists 1 page with no details.

Blekko says there are 250 pages but doesn’t list any of them.

Google lists 901!! (and gives another nonsensical total of 45,000) and includes page content in the short descriptions. (At least they aren’t cacheing it)

Hmmmmm!!!

So much for Google obeying robots.txt – seems they make their own minds up (not the first time I’ve seen this)

So the moral of this story is, be careful about your domain name suffix, be careful where you host your site, don’t tell people you speak American when you’re British, and don’t expect Google to follow standards or stay out of your website when you tell it to.

By bill | Posted in Google, SEO | Tagged , , | Comments (2)
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Clouds, Trust and Security

May 14, 2011 – 5:14 pm

Recently we’ve had two major issues with online networks. One was the large number of services that depend on Amazon’s cloud facilities, which went down for a number of days. The second was the Sony PSP gaming network which was badly hacked and was down for even longer, and more importantly seems to have leaked users personal data and possibly credit card details – although the truth of this still somewhat uncertain.

These aren’t the only ones, just the most high profile. There’s been problems in the last year with Hotmail, Gmail and Google Analytics amongst others.

Personally I’m not a fan of cloud computing – I simply don’t trust commercial systems driven by costs to be reliable enough or secure enough, but I had felt that I was a loan voice in the wilderness and having started this post a few days ago I was wondering whether to bother finishing it when I received the latest edition of Windows Secrets newsletter (highly recommended) and read an article by Woody Leonhard. Woody has long been a favourite author of mine, from the days when I ran the computer books dept at James Thin and seized on his early books on things like Word 6 macro programming. He has a robust and common sense approach that I find echoes my own and is above all practical. So it was a relief to find that he shares my doubts about the cloud.

It seems to me that the idea is being largely driven by accountants and supported by uninformed users who have become beguiled by file sharing services, online image galleries and webmail to believe that they don’t need to bother with security and file organisation. Of course most of them haven’t even heard of the file organisation tools on their systems and couldn’t tell you where their files are most of the time – Microsoft’s determined hiding of Windows Explorer and its increasingly awkward design in Vista and Windows 7 have contributed to the problem.  I’ve always found when training work colleague and friends that the best way to improve their understanding of and comfort with computers is to teach them basic file management and to display ALL file extensions.

Accountants with no concept of the technical issues surrounding network management and system security read advertising claims about cloud systems and only see vast savings in expert manpower and expensive hardware with no conception of the implications should anything go wrong. Only when the accident happens and there is an outage or data loss does the penny drop.

Any business that relies on other peoples’ networks cannot function when those networks are not available – with the resultant loss of sales, cash flow and customer loyalty.

Any business that leaves its data in the hands of someone else risks total disaster if that data is lost.

Call me an old fashioned Luddite but to me the only way that makes sense is to have your data on your machines, your emails on your servers and your local machines, and to have solid backup strategies in place. Likewise security – do you really believe that another company cares about your security and data privacy as much as you do? How about the taxman? If your accounts are in the cloud and they go poof! what do you think the Revenue will say about your responsibility to maintain your records? If your webmail system serves you targeted adverts in order to provide the “free” service do you really believe that your mail stays private?

So for me I’ll continue to use pop mail boxes with only occasional use of webmail *on my own servers*, rather than 3rd party mail systems whether Gmail or Hotmail or anything else. I’ll continue to hold my own files on my own machines and if I need to synch them I’ll do it when they are facing each other across my own network rather than across the cloud. And while services like Dropbox have some useful capabilities I’ll be very careful about what data ever crosses their threshold. My data – my responsibility. My clients’ data – my responsibility.

And when the next major outage or security fail happens Woody and I will still have our data intact.

By bill | Posted in Computing, Security | Tagged , | Comments (0)
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Should you follow the SEO rockstars?

April 18, 2011 – 9:25 pm

In the old days if you wanted to learn a subject you read a book on it. That doesn’t work with SEO because it’s a very fast-moving subject and by the time anyone writes a book about it and goes through the publication process the information is inevitably at least partly out of date. So the way that many people learn, whether they are beginner pros or aspiring do-it-yourselfers, is to read blogs and articles. The problem is that there is a lot of disagreement out there about what works and what doesn’t. So who should you read and what should you believe?

I’m NOT going to give you a list of the best blogs to read, not because I don’t agree with their advice per se but because I don’t believe that the same advice is applicable for everyone. Just as in the wider world of marketing what works for companies like Tesco or Barclays Bank isn’t necessarily what will work for a small telecommunications company or a  medium-sized specialist retailer, so the appropriate SEO techniques will be different.

There are many ways of doing SEO but it could be said that they mostly fall into two main categories – those who believe links are far and away the most important factor in ranking and those who take a more general view and think that site architecture and content are at least as important. If you read a lot of blogs and articles you might get the impression that most Americans fall into the former category and a higher proportion of British SEOs are in the latter.

That may or may not be true, however I believe that it’s more a case of which market sectors you work in that influence which strategies you are more likely to favour, and which are likely to work best. It’s often forgotten that many of the prominent “stars” tend to work for large clients whose sites often have very large numbers of pages, are often difficult to reprogram, and who have very complicated overall marketing strategies. In contrast to that many of the people who read their blogs are working with small to medium enterprise (SME) businesses whose sites are much more varied, often built to pretty low budgets and often on open-source platforms and who are working in niche areas. Is it really likely that exactly the same techniques and principles will apply?

There are a vast number of ways of building websites and when you take account of size  and the resultant complexity of architecture then these ways multiply the complexity of how those sites perform. A link going to a site may strengthen one page or percolate down to many others. Anchor text pointing at a site with few keyword targets may have very different effects from one that has many. Social connections may be essential in one market and almost impossible in another. Site programming may be absolutely critical in a site that has high traffic and a lot of data to pull from a database, but far less important in a smaller site or one with lower traffic levels that is never stressed near to its limits. Conversion rates, bounce rates, site speed – all may have very different levels of importance in different sites and different markets.

What this means is that you have to analyse a site as a whole – the business, the competition, the purpose of the site, the coding of the site, the architecture of the site, and a hundred other things before you can get an idea of what will be the most important factors in any particular case. You can’t say in advance that “it’s all about links”, or it’s all about social”, or “it’s all about architecture” You need to have a thorough understanding of how all these different factors work in different environments and marketplaces. So if you simply follow the advice of an SEO star who works in a different market to yours then you could be making a big mistake. What works for him may not work for you. I’m not saying that Rand or Aaron or Bruce et al are wrong – I’m saying that some of their advice may be suitable for a different market sector than yours.

Whether you’re in the SEO business yourself or are a businessman trying to make sense of it, you need to keep an open mind and read widely – but most importantly you have to think for yourself, and work out what’s relevant to you rather than blindly following the “SEO rockstars”.

By bill | Posted in SEO | Comments (0)
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IE9 – are we looking at the new IE6?

March 22, 2011 – 9:14 pm

This one’s webdev related rather than SEO, but then I’ve always been a web developer as well and I’ve always believed you can’t be a good SEO without being a good developer, and vice-versa.

IE6 used to cost me a LOT of time chasing bugs. I’ve always said the only correct way to code a site is to build to web standards first and then test in a range of browsers and build the fixes for those that don’t work properly. For many years after CSS became the preferred method of design that generally meant that everything worked pretty much as expected in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and then you tore your hair out finding and fixing the bugs in IE6. These were usually traceable to the hopelessly non-standard “haslayout” property which could destroy a design if you weren’t aware of its effects – whole sites like Explorer Exposed were devoted to the arcane and mysterious machinations of this web design nightmare. (Thanks guys, you saved us all many times over!)

When IE7 came along we were promised life would be much better – except it had loads of bugs too, just different ones, and since IE6 didn’t go away we had to deal with two lots of problems. IE8 was better, but everyone hated Vista so few upgraded and we had to deal with 3 lots of bugs. Thank heavens with the advent of Windows 7 that IE6 usage has declined to such an extent that it’s now viable to either ignore it or at least tell the client that the design will be different but acceptable for its remaining users and that there’s no real alternative if they want the latest features and looks at a reasonable price.

With CSS3 and HTML5 causing great excitement among developers we’ve all been hoping and praying that Microsoft’s promises of standards compliance and CSS compatibility would come true and we could all finally move forward in reasonable confidence without screeds of IE conditional statements. I had largely ignored the beta versions of IE9 although a programmer friend had tried it and removed it because some many of his regularly visited sites broke in it.

Now it’s finally been released and what do we find? Well without going into too much research it’s not looking so good. Two relatively simple CSS3 properties that designers have been banking on (and which are well supported elsewhere) are text-shadow and background gradients. Neither is supported in IE9. Come on guys, if you can’t handle those what right have you to call it a modern browser?

What abut HTML5? There’s been a lot of discussion (ok, flaming) on numerous forums since Microsoft touted the results of a series of W3C tests that showed IE9 coming out ahead of all its rivals. Sadly those tests were but a small subset of the full HTML5 feature set and biased towards things that IE9 handled pretty well. Lots of other features are apparently much less well supported if at all. Earlier today I looked at a site about HTML5 forms, and was astounded at what was reported there – almost complete lack of support for any of the new form features.

Ok, I accept that HTML5 and CSS3 are not finalised specs, but actually they may never be because of the way standards are now developing – the web world is moving too fast for standards to ever be set in stone. To use that as an excuse not to support features which designers and developers have been crying out for for years is a poor response.

Now when I finally get some time to do some properly detailed research I’ll present a much more in-depth comparison here, but so far I have to say that I’m less than impressed, and it seems to me that once again we are going to be stuck with a major browser, that will inevitably be used by a substantial number of people, that holds back progress, provides a poorer user experience, and costs developers and their clients vast amounts of time and money to support and work around. Remind you of anything?

If the best they can say about IE9 is that it’s better than IE8/7/6 then I’m afraid that isn’t enough. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are going to kick its butt!

By bill | Posted in Web Design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
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