Search Engine Musings

A few months ago I blogged about trust and how it relates to websites - both in the eyes of the search engines and the users. I’ve also written more recently about reputation, particularly that of our industry. Some recent occurrences have led me to think further on these subjects and on how trust is hard won but so easily lost.

Gaining the trust of users

To achieve trust in any sphere you need to have an overall air of reliability and integrity as well as demonstrating many small areas of competence and professionalism. Similarly on a website it’s not just about having a padlock symbol on your shopping cart - there are many factors at work to develop trust amongst your users. Some of the ways to ruin your chances of achieving trust are:

• A badly built or maintained site
  I’ve seen sites with missing images, buttons which don’t work, internal links that are broken or pages missing. None of that gives an impression of a company that is taking due care.
• Bad spelling or grammar
  Suggests a sloppy attitude and/or poor supervision. Will they treat orders the same way?
• A tortuous or broken ordering system
  Suggests a lack of logic, thought, or consideration for customers.
• Lack of contact details
  Raises a big red flag about what happens if things go wrong with an order, as well as suggesting the company is ignorant of the law.
• Is anything demonstrably untrue?
  I’ve seen sites displaying a W3C HTML validity symbol that actually had over 180 validation errors. No matter how much I wanted their product there’s no way I’d give my credit card details to a company who is either stupid or dishonest.

You need all of these things (and many more) to be right in order to earn trust; only one needs to be wrong in order to lose it or at best to sow the first seeds of doubt. Only if you’ve already built up trust in your brand will mistakes be forgiven. But even then a serious mistake can blow years of work. Even organisations such as major long-established banks have suffered downturns after exposing customers’ details via an insecure site and it could be argued that this has contributed to the general lack of trust in banks that is apparent now.

Gaining the trust of business clients

The same principles apply in business-to-business practice. If you, as an SEO or web designer, are going to attract contracts and the long term trust of a client then you have to earn it by ensuring that you provide what you promise and act in a professional manner.

• Be open about what you are going to do to a client’s site
  Using smoke and mirrors to convince a client you have expertise will rebound on you eventually because they’ll always worry that they aren’t in control.
  
• Don’t try to baffle them with science
  If they ask questions then take the opportunity to gently educate them; time spent at the beginning should pay dividends later when you’re sorting out what keywords are working and what aren’t and want to make changes or refocus.
• Don’t try to juggle too many jobs
  If you promise results by unrealistic dates you’ll simply end up missing deadlines.
• Don’t rush to re-prioritise every time a client calls
  If a client is pressing for priority treatment you have to respond realistically - if you promise them a date then you have to deliver, but you also have to deliver on previous deadlines for other clients as well so there’s no point hoping you can fudge it. If it’s not possible then you have to tell them that. You may lose the odd client but you’ll gain the trust of the ones that are left and the lost ones would probably have been on your back all the time anyway.
• Be clear about cost schedules and invoice on time
  A professional client will expect a professional payment regime. If you’re late in sending an invoice then it looks sloppy. And an unprofessional client will just take the opportunity to pay late.

Gaining the trust of search engines

And search engines? Just like the established brand, once you have an old and trusted site then you can probably get away with the odd mistake without any great damage. You’ve built up a track record and will be given the benefit of the doubt as long as it’s not too serious. If you’re a new site they have no initial reason to trust you so if you do anything dodgy then they’ll likely jump on it and it’ll take a lot longer to develop trust and good rankings. You need to be squeaky clean and give the right impressions.

• Don’t try to take shortcuts
  Padding content with other people’s material to bulk up your site, or joining link schemes to boost your link profile is easily found and will hold you back.
• Don’t stuff your content or meta content with too many keywords
  Your potential keywords should grow with the size and age of your site.
• Get the links that a good site should have
  Do make sure that the links that would be expected from a professional site are in place - if you aren’t in the local council’s business directory or chamber of commerce site then make sure you join and get in there. One professional link source is worth a hundred cheap directories or blog comments.

The old joke goes “If you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made”. The fact is you can’t - you have to mean it and you have to show you mean it.

After the recent episode during which some rankings were bouncing around unpredictably and I theorised that Google was dumping data due to a corruption in their indexes, we now seem to have returned to a rather more stable index with most of the sites I monitor being back to their normal positions or in some cases a little better. The erroneous backlink information seems to have disappeared as well so I suspect that the big reindex has pretty much finished and we are back to the normal everflux situation.

Let’s hope that this year there are no further dramatic shifts of the kind that have occurred leading up to the Christmas period in recent years, or the conspiracy theorists will be out in force again suggesting artificial Adwords boosting. Given the current state of near panic in the financial markets the world economy could do with a stable and prosperous festive period.
Which raises an interesting thought - one search engine, which didn’t even exist 10 years ago, now has the power to affect the world’s economy in major ways, just by changes in its search results; quite apart from what it does with the mountain of money it’s amassing. I wonder what the governments and the international banks think of that?

We’re all guilty of it sometimes - because we’re tired, or short of time, because we really must have some fresh content, or a new blog post or (gasp) our traffic might go down. So what do we do? We grab a news story we’ve read somewhere else and we rearrange the words a bit and press ‘Publish’. And we really should know better.

Do we really think that it’s got any value, either as spiderable copy or as readable copy? Do we think anyone is going press Sphinn, or Digg?

Of course not, not if we know what we’re doing. If one of our clients did it we’d be quick to tell them off and suggest a rewrite. It’ll irritate our regular readers who will have seen the same news elsewhere and have better things to spend their scarce reserves of time on. The search engines will pick it up as basically the same as the the original article, because generally what they index is not the actual words but a stripped down semi-mathematical representation of the words. So it won’t be seen as having much value; it’ll be an extra page but not much more than that.

No, if you’re going to write a news story it’s either got to be original, based on your own observations or analysis, or, if it’s from somewhere else then you have to give it something extra - that awful modernism ‘value-added’. It needs to be analysed, looked at from a fresh angle, taken further forward. It needs your input, your perspective, your expertise, your opinion.

If it doesn’t have that then press delete rather than publish!

(PS - for those younger readers like Mike who don’t remember coal, Taking Coals to Newcastle is an old phrase that suggests pointlessness - since Newcastle was always the centre of coal production in the UK there was no point in taking any there. Likewise there’s no point in taking the same news to a market that already has it.)

Earlier this week I wrote a short article on the Oyster Web site about the SEOMoz quiz, If by some chance you aren’t an SEO and don’t know about this, it contained 75 multiple choice questions relating to our dark and mysterious art. After we’d torn the answers apart we enjoyed reading Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox doing the same the following day. They seemed to agree that some of the questions were vague, or had multiple possible answers, or were just wrong. It was of course a great bit of link bait and bound to attract endless comment, but it was also a salutary reminder that there are very few hard and fast rules in our business and what is regarded as a certainty by one expert may be only a possibility to another.

SEO as an empirical art…

A lot of what we do is based on our own experience of what has worked for us in the (usually recent) past and observation of what is or isn’t working on sites we are asked to look at. Google occasionally feed us the odd crumb of information amongst a sea of generalities, Yahoo and MSN/Live don’t even go that far. What worked last week may have less effect this week after the filters have been adjusted. That is why there is unlikely to be a useful academic course in SEO in the forseeable future - there is no standards body, and any examination would be out of date before it was set. Whenever you read any book or article about optimisation the first thing you do is check how old it is to find out how much suspicion you should have about whether it’s still true.

…with a commercial twist

Those of us at the sharp end of the business have to constantly rethink our opinions and check what is working, while still maintaining our faith in the fundamentals of structural web coding, good writing, and semantic markup. Those from a marketing background may tend towards one style of working, perhaps emphasising links and social networking solutions a little more, while those from a web design background may tend towards another, emphasising technical considerations.

Some theorists try to conduct experiments (if that isn’t a contradiction!) to determine what really works and what doesn’t, but it means having an isolated site that has no commercial importance - you can’t do that with a client’s site. With so many variables involved it’s also notoriously difficult to isolate definite effects and one of the problems with having an isolated site is that it’s the very connectedness that causes some of the effects.

This constant change of core knowledge is part of what makes SEO so interesting, but it has a high price in terms of research, and is part of the reason that good optimisers are hard to find and worth paying for.

As a consequence of the paid link controversy and whether you should use the nofollow attribute on paid outbound links, there is now another one about whether webmasters should use it on internal links. On one side there is the original suggestion from Matt Cutts in his interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, and followups from such as Dan Thies, while on the other side are people like Michael Martinez who find the idea of trying to manipulate PageRank by this method dubious at best and downright dangerous in most cases.

In the meantime there is also the question of using nofollow on blogs as an anti-spam measure, or not, depending on your perspective.

Nofollow on Blogs

Lets take the easier one first - blogs. This is what the nofollow tag was invented for, to stop people spamming the comments sections of blogs and forums with pointless messages containing embedded links back to their sites. Even then it was a bit controversial and many argued that there were better ways of combatting link spam. The debate has raged on and there is now a “dofollow” movement that advocates getting rid of nofollow tags from blogs (some blog software adds them automatically). Of course you then need other methods of defence against the robot blog-spammers but this can be managed - Askimet does a pretty good job in Wordpress blogs and you can pre-moderate if you have low levels of comments or only allow people who have already had comments approved. I already make links within my posts carry full weight and I’m inclined to go the dofollow route on comments too - just need to decide on the best method of doing it.

Nofollow on internal links

On the thornier topic of using nofollow to manipulate PageRank within a site there are a few arguements that I find persuasive.

Firstly I don’t believe enough people actually understand PageRank enough to start trying to fiddle with it. Anyone who reads the SEO forums will know that they are full of questions which show that people believe the most nonsensical rubbish about the subject and pick up on old wives tales at the slightest opportunity. The sort of mess that these folk could make of their sites with nofollow doesn’t bear thinking about.

Secondly the kind of pages that are being suggested as candidates for downgrading - About Us and Contact Us pages for instance - are actually perfectly useful pages that often can be made to rank well for important terms. The potential gains are far outweighed by the likely losses.

Thirdly we have the problems that would be caused to the usability of sites. Many websites use Google’s own search system to provide site-search facilities, and studies show that many users will use the search boxes to navigate a site. If you close off some of your pages with nofollow then those pages won’t show up in these search results. Why would you want that to happen? Golden rule - build sites to serve your users.

Fourthly there is something very fundamental here which I think needs to be addressed. Google have always said that you should show users and search engines the same things. That’s why hidden text and cloaking is so disliked by them. If you show a user a link then you are telling them that it’s worth following it. If you use a nofollow attribute on it then you are telling the search spiders that it isn’t worth following. Isn’t that rather dishonest? Isn’t that against the very rules that Google want us to adhere to? I think it is, and for that reason as well as the other listed above, I won’t be using it.

Why does SEO have a bad name?

No matter what we think of ourselves, beavering away in our own market sectors - whether we come from a web design background, a pure SEO background, or a marketing background - the fact is that we have a fairly poor reputation with some of the general public and more importantly the very business people who need our services the most. The situation seems to be worse in the USA but we should be aware of it here in the UK as well.

The other day I wrote an article on the Oyster Web site (Why Danny has to use the f-word) regarding the exasperation felt by SEO guru Danny Sullivan over persistent attacks by two US businessmen who repeatedly refer to SEOs as spammers and a problem for search. While we in Scotland have escaped a lot of the bad reputation, possibly due to our national image as solid, trustworthy and straightforward, there remains a suggestion that search engine optimisation is all tricks and snakeoil done by geeks fronted by used car salesmen barely keeping one step ahead of the algorithms.

You sometimes get the impression that some SEO companies perpetuate this in order to make it seem that they have some secret knowledge that you have to buy to be successful. While at the other end  of the scale there is the real nuisance of the cowboys who charge a few hundred quid and do a grab-it-and-run job leaving the hapless client with a site that will drop out of the indexes as soon as the spiders spot the hidden text or cloaked content. Their bad practice inevitably tars the whole industry.

Improving our image

If SEO is to take its correct place within a mature web industry we have to get rid of this poor image and be seen as the skilled professionals that most of us are. Let’s say it loud and clear. SEO is the art of combining well written quality content, good coding and programming, good design, good usability, and good marketing to make websites that are attractive to users, relevant to search engines and deserve to be highly regarded by both. It takes skills in all these areas and the ability to combine them successfully. No tricks, no cheating, just good professional work. (and very little swearing!)