by Jonah Stein on May 5, 2008
I will be speaking on June 4th at SMX advanced on SEO Analytics. Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know - It’s more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.
Not surprisingly, I will initially focus on ROI for ecommerce sites, particularly the importance of configuring your internal systems to capture Lifetime Customer Value within your CRM system instead of leaving it to 3rd party tagging software.
I will also talk about Crawl frequency and index inclusion as well as some of the data hidden in Google Webmaster Central.
Does anyone have a metric you find useful that you are willing to give up or a tool that you recommend? All contributions will be duly credited.
by Jonah Stein on April 30, 2008
Google has been displaying local results for queries that contains a local component for some time now. A common query like san francisco restaurant displays 10 local search results along with a map. We now expect this type of local targeting because the query contains a geographic component which Google interprets as a geographic data.
Many search pundits have been calling recent changes in SERPs another Google dance. Evidence suggests that Google may be adding geographic information about brick and mortar stores and service companies to the algorithm along with reverse IP lookup to help boost site rank for regular results. Take the query engagement ring . I conducted this query in San Francisco and Los Angeles and got very different results.
Here is the same query in San Francisco.
Just to be sure I wasn’t seeing results from different data centers, I went ahead and queried multiple date centers using the SeoLog.com Datacenter Ranking Tool and discovered that the results didn’t match the LA results or the San Francisco results. In fact, some sites significantly better in both San Francisco and Los Angeles than they show on any of the data centers using the SEOLog tool.
We know Google been collecting service area information from webmasters from webmaster central. We know that they have extensive data from Google maps and third party vendors about where businesses are located. It makes sense that Google would add relevance to a website that represent a brick and mortar or service that is nearby. It appears they are starting to do so.
by Jonah Stein on April 18, 2008
My son decided to make brownies last night. Since he is of the Google generation, the thought of a cook book never crossed his mind. Instead, he headed right to his laptop and searched for brownie recipe .
Imagine my surprise when he asked me why Google was suggesting adding weed to his brownies. I consider myself pretty liberal as a parent and I don’t fault Google for returning porn if my child enters a keyword that calls for porn, but I really don’t want them suggesting adding drugs to dessert.
by Jonah Stein on April 9, 2008
IndexTools announced today that they have been acquired by Yahoo. IndexTools has been one of my favorite Analytics applications since last years Analytics Shootout. Not only did they show the best results of all the tools we studied, they were also among the easiest to configure and offered a robust range of custom reports.
What I love the most about IndexTools is that they are able to collect all of the data a site owner needs from the beginning, so adding additional metrics to your reports only required small changes in the report instead of starting the implementation process again.
No word yet on whether Yahoo! will be offering IndexTools free to site owners to compete with Google Analytics, but if they do I will be among the first to sign my clients up, because IndexTools flat out rocks!
by Jonah Stein on April 8, 2008
What’s the difference between great link bait and spam?
Complaints to Google from sites you outrank seems to be the most important factor. Consider the two widgets below. The first sites ranks #1 for "online dating" while the second has been banned by Google for using spammy, off topic widgets after Google received some complaints about them. The second site has essentially been smoted from the index.
OK Cupid
Your Score: Read Minds
We’ve discovered your super power! Hope you like it…
You’re a psychic and you can read minds! But please don’t read my mind right now, because I’m imagining you naked. Of course, you’re probably already used to people doing that. Ah, the joys of being a psychic. At least you’ll always ace interviews and pass your college exams with no problems.
JustSayHi
81%How Addicted to Apple Are You?
Free Online Dating
In fairness to Google, the folks at JustSayHi did stray into the dark side. After they ranked number 1 for most dating terms, they started promoting other domains with their widgets. They crossed the line with Google’s TOS. On the other hand, after a couple of failed re-inclusions, they decided to start over with a new domain and rebuild an entirely white hat site at One Plus You using the same quiz widgets. It turns out that Google considers the One Plus You quiz results widgets to be Spammy and Off Topic when they include the anchor text of "Free Online Dating".
The challenge for marketers is to know where to draw the line between very effective link bait and spammy, off topic link bait. As long as the algorithm rewards targeted anchor text, marketers will continue to find a way to get people to link to them using preferred anchor text.
