I always insist, when a public story breaks in the SEO field of big proportions, you should take every opportunity to learn from it. The Chrome paid posts debacle is actually a pretty good example, as unlike in previous situations, Matt Cutts has publicly announce EXACTLY what the penalties were.  Which is all kinds of awesome to know.

A bit of background reading over at SEObook who originally spotted the story, then to Danny Sullivans breakaway post with more analysis and again Danny’s post on the announcement of the penalty. If you want, you can also read Matt Cutts response over at Google+.

What did I learn from the situation?

It’s possible to be Innocent

Despite the hype, I don’t believe that the campaign the Google Chrome team ran was to gain links. To be honest I doubt they needed them.  I am with Andrew Girdwood on that (and you should read why here).

By mistake, some webmasters added those links. So what happened if this activity was caught by the manual spam team? Pretty much a penalty. So in effect, it IS possible for someone to screw up link building without realising. If you were a small business (read: NOT Google or another brand) then you would be in effect screwed.

As Danny rightly puts it:

It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?

Now lets take another coment – made by someone on Matt Cutts post:

So if I understand this correctly, it was only 1 sponsored post (out of 400) that was passing pagerank that was against the guidelines? Since the writer was being paid to write an article about Google Chrome they decided to insert the link editorially and that’s what has generated this penalty? Would there have been a penalty applied if that 1 post had not linked to Chrome and it was just 400 paid spammy posts? The whole thing seems strange. Polluting the internet with poor content and spamming the video is ok but one link (which the author deemed relevant in this case) is not? I don’t get it someone please clarify.

The bolded sections are my highlights.

This link was not paid for.

The payment was for the hosting of the video.

The link was given by the editor. Update: Want more proof? See this post by Dave Naylor on Unruly Media and how they send out campaign requests. If I was Unruly Media, I would be fuming.

As an advertiser, you HAVE NO CONTROL over what someone puts up on their site over and above what you have paid for. So did Google, in effect, unfairly punish themselves just for good PR? The mind boggles.

A Single Link and a Singular Penalty Example

Matt Cutts said:

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

So Google penalised itself. The chrome main page dropped out of the index for its most profitable generic “browser” and its most appropriate brand “chrome”.

However, the page https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95346 ranks for Chrome instead.

Now call me a conspiracy theorist, but I CAN understand why the original Chrome page ranked for “chrome” . Not sure why the support one does though.

Chrome Backlinks via Majestic SEO

What Should then?

Personally I see this page now supposedly the stronger one – of course, I haven’t investigated the value of other internal Google  links, nor the value of each link. And I admit my view is very simplistic.

I guarantee you, if such a penalty was applied to ANY other site for ANY brand term, NOTHING from that site would rank. Interesting to see a PAGE specific penalty in this way.

Or is that NOT a page but a subfolder?

Why use Google Chrome

Aha! It IS a subfolder specific penalty, because I am pretty sure ONE of those pages ranked for “Why Use Google Chrome”.

Oh wait! SEMrush confirms that at their last crawl, their recorded ranking position 1 for that term was http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/more/index.html

In fact, if you dig into the above SEMrush data a bit deeper, you will see that a common high volume query was: “what is google chrome”.  Guess who ranks at the no. 1 position for that?

No. It’s not a Google property, but the Wikipedia page I highlighted above. Which makes me wonder if that  support page which now ranks for Chrome has been manually promoted or is it just that the next best page from the domain surfaced?

Let’s go back to SEMrush and check previous US rankings for “Chrome”:

Support page ranked or not?

Ha! According to SEMrush data, that page did NOT rank in the top 20 results. Yet here it is. At position 1.

Let’s pull out a screenshot Danny Sullivan has of the US results for “Chrome” just to verify.

Danny Sullivans screenshot

Now a disclaimer: The Support page DID in fact rank in the UK. (see screenshot below).

Support page in the UK

What does this teach you?

1. The penalty isn’t PAGE specific as some people are saying – it’s to the whole subfolders – which in effect are now being treated as subdomains as well – we knew that they made this change for recognising internal links in the past year. But as I demonstrated, the penalty is to the whole subfolder / subdirectory.
2. The surfacing of the support page – if you have  penalty on a particular page / folder / directory of a site, you CAN rank again for that KW as long as you have another section of your site dedicated to ranking for the same KW. In theory at least. Especially if that KW is a “brand” signal.

Manual Penalties Exist, and Always Have.

Often I hear when Google is being taken to task over some legal issue about them artificially pushing up or down certain results, we have had quotes saying that Google cannot control the flow of the organic algo. However no one seems to mention these penalties, which can be applied – which means that though they may have no manual control of the UP switch, they do in fact have control of the DOWN switch – which has the same effect as the UP switch if you demote everything slightly.

This to me constitutes control over the organic placements. I think it’s time everyone started reading more about Foundems Search Neutrality  Campaign. Like I said on a recent post in Econsultancy:

“…serious investigation by capable organisations on the Google Monopoly of the search market and its anti-competitive behaviour to various niches.

I don’t think it’s fair that Google is allowed to bring out products and services that are simply clones of businesses it’s been taking money from to market, and using its data to build and market their own services.”

Some Other Takeaways That SEOs Should Be Aware Off

On Matt’s Google Plus post, a bunch of interesting questions have been asked, some of which have been answered well by John Mueller ( a googler I really respect)  – which I am pulling out because they are worth recording somewhere other than a random Google plus post.

Would another site’s page be “banned” from Google search, not just demoted in pagerank?

Generally speaking, we only remove pages or sites from the index if there are significant issues with regards to our webmaster guidelines with the website itself. As mentioned in http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

there’s also a blog post on this topic at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html which covers some of the possible negative effects.

Would another site’s root domain get demoted, not just the offending page?

As mentioned in http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/tips-for-hosting-providers-and.html

“We try hard to be granular in our actions when protecting our users and search quality, but if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific web host that are spammy or are distributing malware, we may be forced to take action on the web host as a whole.”

In a case like this, it’s easier to be granular since it’s based on a very specific action.

Now that Google knows how innocently a good site can get caught up in a mess like this, will the ability to “plead your case” be opened up a bit before demotion?

You can always explain what happened in a reconsideration request. As Matt mentioned, it’s important that you document your efforts in getting any known issues cleaned up in your reconsideration request.

There’s more on reconsideration requests at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843 .

I realize it’s not often that the community at large will find and diagnose an issue with a website in this way, but if you’re unsure of what your site has run into, you can always post in our webmaster’s help forum to get more input. While you may not always get answers from Googlers there, the replies there will often point you towards issues that can be resolved, and in many cases, in the right direction.

I often say that you need to try new things, test new theories, play with the SERPs as often as you can. After all, if you blindly follow what others, and don’t try your own experiments, you won’t be a competitive SEO.  At the same time, read others experiments, learn from them, but try and replicate your own.

For example, Shark SEO posted about Multiple meta descriptions. This is a technique others in SEO, including old school SEO superstars such as Greg Boser and Dave Naylor have been playing with meta descriptions for years.  Greg has even advised up to 5 meta descriptions on a page, if I recall our twitter conversation correctly (see this tweet from Joost) , while Dave has been playing with Snippet optimisation for as long as I can remember.

So what’s the premise?

Simple: Show a different, more relevant meta description for a page for different queries. AKA Dynamic Meta Descriptions!

Why? To improve your click through rates of course!

Does it work?

In a nutshell, I don’t take anything as gospel – I try and test as much as I can. In this instance, I did, and it works!

The below is a search for my Brand: Explicitly Me.

Explicitly Me Meta Description

See that meta description?

Explicitly Me is an experiment on exposing weakneses in Google, Bing & Yahoo. Visit the site at Explicitly.me to get awesome Blackhat Tips.

Now let’s run a search for my name:  Rishi Lakhani

Rishi Lakhani Meta Description

Rishi Lakhani (rishil) is a specialist SEM consultant, working on Paid, Organic, Affiliate and Social Media. To find out more, feel free to get in …

How cool is that? Its picking this up again from my meta description, and serving the right one for the query.

Here is a Screen shot of my meta description, but if you don’t believe me, check it yourself:

meta description snippet

Dynamic Meta Descriptions are Cool

Now that I have validated that you can in fact have dynamic meta descriptions, I feel justified in deploying them for a number of sites and clients. Some example situations in which I would deploy these:

1. Brands Home Page – Brands home pages tend to rank for all sorts of stuff, from brand name, to top level generics. How cool would it be to have the home page meta showing a brand message when a brand query is entered, and showing a generic offer led copy when  a generic keyword is searched for? You then please both the Brand Police, and your SEO CTR requirements.

2. Top ranking generic pages – although I need to test this a bit more, I also think you can optimise the copy to show smaller variations in the description tag, for example, when a Car insurance page ranks for  both, Cheap Car Insurance, and Car Insurance Comparison – traditionally you would optimise ONE meta description for that page to include both keywords. But how cool would it be to show TWO separate ones which are query dependant? E.g.:

Car insurance comparison desc

Cheap Car Insurance Desc

Takeaways:

Read your peers, keep an eye on what they are trying and testing. See their results, then try and replicate as many as possible, as long as the results they get are something you can use.

The Best Content Spinner

An Idiots Guide to Content Spinning!

eHow Not to Spin for SEO

Everyone has heard of Article Spinning. Many SEOs and Affiliates have tried it. But I dont think a large number of SEOs understand it. Let’s take the no.1  result on the search “Article Spinning”

(shock horror, its wikipedia )

Article spinning is a search engine optimization technique by which blog or website owners post a unique version of relevant content on their sites. It works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles, and replacing elements to provide a slightly different perspective on the topic.

Ok I guess I can live with that simple explanation. But the how what and why? Don’t think Wikipedia, nor any other page one results in the SERPs explains it in its entirety. So I have taken a stab at a first draft.

Why Spin Articles? Duplicate Content Penalty?

Duplicate Cheetahs via http://www.flickr.com/photos/garycolet/158704281/

The most common misconception about duplicate content is the word “penalty” attached to it. There isn’t a “real” penalty for duplicate content, it’s simply an algo indicator of low quality content or repeated content that lowers the value of duplicate content in the SERPs.

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that. Google.

So it’s not really a penalty, but dice it which way you like, the effect is to kill your site in the SERPs… Yeah, there are intentional duplicate content pieces out there, such as Affiliate Content, or subdomains,  or site wide / category wide descriptions / paragraphs. But the fact is google’s algo removes duplicate , or lowers the ranking value of, and shows either the more original piece of content or the piece from the most trusted domain / page.

This is where spinning comes in. It allows you to vary your site content to be different, yet say the same thing J. However, this isn’t as great as you would think…

The Technical Definition

Content spinning is a bit more technical than most assume. In simple terms, yes, it’s the replacement of certain predefined sets of words within a piece of written copy to variations that could in silo replace those words, such as synonyms. In technical terms, there are various arts to Article Spinning, for example defining spin syntax.

Article Spinning Syntax

Article Spinning Syntax

A Spin Syntax is basically a marker for where and how you want to replace  certain parts of your piece of content.

So let’s say I want to spin:

Rishi Lakhani today is really cool.

A simple syntax would be:

Rishi Lakhani today is really {cool | awesome| radical}.

As you can see, we will end up with three variations of the same sentence, meaning roughly the same.  This is called “Simple Flat Spinning”.

Extended Flat Spinning would actually pick up on more words:

Rishi Lakhani {today| now |presently} is really {cool | awesome| radical}.

Which now gives you a 3*3 = 9 variation spin. Flip one more word and the same sentence hits 27 variations.

Still with me? Head not hurting yet?  Ok let’s look at the Nested Spin:

Rishi Lakhani today is really {insanely {cool | awesome| radical} | mentally}?

Notice the bolded additions. See the potential results:

• Rishi Lakhani today is really insanely cool.
• Rishi Lakhani today is really mentally awesome.
• Rishi Lakhani today is really mentally radical.
• Rishi Lakhani today is really insanely awesome.

These aren’t all the variables – can you work them ALL out? Now imagine an Extended Spin used in addition to Nested Spin Syntax, and you get the real power of article spinning.

Article Spinning Demonstration

So I decided to show you how some simple Online Article spinners work. Using a free spinner, I spun my original text below:

Original Text:

This is an example of how article spinning works. Isn’t it interesting how we can use logic to translate words mechanically? After all automation saves a lot of time, however I cannot guarantee that this will help you become successful in optimizing your websites. A human writer makes more sense, but sometimes an artificial one does the job quite well too. The trick is to find the right artificial content spinner. Now let’s see how this works.

Spun text:

This is an illustration of exactly how article rewriting functions. Isn’t this fascinating how we are able to use common sense in order to turn phrases robotically? In the end hands free operation will save considerable time, nevertheless We cannot ensure that can help you be successful within refining Your own websites. A human article writer will work better, however occasionally a man-made One can the job quite well too. The secret is to discover the best synthetic content spinner. Now let’s observe how this functions.

Not too shabby? You get the gist of what I am trying to say, however the choice of words isn’t perfect.  See the potential variations of this one paragraph by observing how the syntax has been set up:

Advanced Content Spin Syntax:

{This is an|This is an|It is really an} {example of|illustration of|instance of} {how|exactly how|just how} {article spinning|article rewriting|article re-writing} {works.|works.|functions.} Isn’t {it|this|that} {interesting|fascinating|intriguing} {how we|the way you|the way we} {can use|may use|are able to use} {logic|reasoning|common sense} {to|in order to|to be able to} {translate|convert|turn} {words|phrases|terms} {mechanically?|mechanically?|robotically?} {After all|After all|In the end} {automation|automatic|hands free operation} {saves|will save|will save you} {a lot of time,|a lot of time,|considerable time,} {however|nevertheless|nonetheless} {I|I|We} {cannot|can’t|can not} {guarantee|assure|ensure} {that this|this|that} {will help you|can help you|will allow you to} {become successful|achieve success|be successful} {in|within|inside} {optimizing|perfecting|refining} {your|Your|Your own} {websites.|websites.|web sites.} {A human|A human|An individual} {writer|author|article writer} {makes more sense,|makes more sense,|will work better,} {but|however|yet} {sometimes|occasionally|at times} {an artificial|a man-made|a synthetic} {one|One|1} {does|will|can} {the job|the task|the work} {quite well|very well|quite nicely} {too.|too.|as well.} {The trick|The trick|The secret} {is to find|is to locate|is to discover} {the right|the best|the proper} {artificial|synthetic|man-made} {content spinner.|content spinner.|article spinner.} {Now|Now|Right now} {let’s|let’s|permit’s} {see how|observe how|observe} {this|this particular|this kind of} {works.|works.|functions.}

Isn’t that just so cool? SEO Automation can be fun

Translation Spinning

Google Translate Spinning

Now traditional content spinning isn’t the only way spammers and blackhats have generated reams of “original” and “unique” content. Google kind of gave them a helping hand. Not convinced?   Let’s take this way back, when the google Blog pointed out:

Though we do offer a handy translation utility, our algorithms won’t view the same article written in English and Spanish as duplicate content. Similarly, you shouldn’t worry about occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) being flagged as duplicate content.

AHA! So let’s take my original content and give it a bit of a play with google translate

English to German back to English and into Swahili and back into English:

This is an example of how article spinning. Is not it interesting how to use logic to translate the words mechanically? After all, automation saves time, but I can confirm that this will help you be successful with optimizing your website. A human author makes more sense, but sometimes artificial and does work quite well. The trick is to find counterfeit goods Spinner. Now let’s see how this works.

Bit of garbage, but still, it’s unique

Human Article Spinning

Human Spinning usually makes more sense, and is more reader friendly. I took my original paragraph and gave the following instructions:  I would like you to rewrite the below paragraph to mean exactly what it says, but trying to replace as many words as possible. The result?

Using the thought process of a written piece to rewrite content into a new form is an example of article spinning. Creating unique versions of an already written piece is easily manipulated with software that can generate dozens and even hundreds of variations. For search engine optimization, this sometimes works to get more visitors to your website. Of course, it can also be done without the use of software, but it’s more time consuming, and there is no magic formula that will ensure that your website will thrive as a result of spinning, with or without the use of technology.

Total cost: $1.50

oDesk Spinning Advert

It’s interesting, the writer slightly modified the meaning of the content, and it still sounds to wordy, however I didn’t leave much room for creative adjustment, so it’s not a horrendous piece, but neither is it a work of shakespear

Article Spinning Blackhat

So what do Blackhats and spammers use article spinning for? Just a few examples, but there are plenty more.

Made For Adsense Sites

I recently shared how facebook is creating thousands of autogenerated pages using grayhat techniques, by simply using Wikipedia content in most cases.  Not only are these pages duplicate content, but they rank well. This is partly because of Facebooks trust factor. However the average webmaster doesn’t  have this authoritative trust to be able to rank content stolen straight from Wikipedia. However, a lot of long tail traffic is available by these pages ( even if Facebook got 1 visitor a month from its estimated 17 million page 1 rankings, then it gets 17 million visitors to its sites through dodgy SEO).

Now imagine recreating every single one of those ranking pages, spinning the content to make it “original” and then using Googles  recommendations, slap ads around it…

Duplication Detection Prevention

This one is pretty obvious… rip off someone’s content completely and pass it off as your own! Better still publish 100’s of variations on different sites and profit…

Link Spamming Variations

Ever noticed your comment spam sometimes sounds like nonsense? That’s because comment spammers who are autogenerating comment links in volumes are using article spinners to vary their comment text too.

Another Link Spamming method is to create Parasite Blogs and auto fill the content of these for backlinks.

Grayhat Article Spinning

Meta Desc Spinning

When you are faced with hundreds upon hundreds of similar product feeds, crafting custom meta descriptions can be a pain. Also, a simple find and replace doesn’t necessarily make your description unique. However if you work out decent logic to spin these, you should be able to autogenerate 100’s of variations that still make sense, and remain unique.

On page content spinning for Ecommerce

The same technique can be used for commonly distributed on page text. Often large ecommerce sites will have portions of text that is the same throughout the site, reducing the “uniqueness” of the page. Spinning this content distributes the risk. For example, WP Robot has a built in spinner to vary the text it steals from its various feeds such as amazon.

Article submission

Ok, so you want to submit to 100’s of low quality directories to get links back to your site. You write one article and submit to 100 sites. What’s the result? Google counts one, and deems all the others as duplicate, thus reducing the value of these. Now imagine you spun the article to generate 100’s of variations? What happens? You have 100’s of unique articles, on 100s of sites, almost all of which Google will see as different (theoretically).

Which is better? 1 article, or 100’s of variations?

Link anchor variation

When submitting articles for link generation (don’t laugh, people still do it, and it still works to some extent!) You can use Anchor Text Spinning to vary your anchors. Why do this? Well google does recognize and substitute synonyms and related words. See my post on the Tilde Search Operator for more information.

Content Spinning Wordpress Plugin (Free)

There are many Wordpress Content Spinners out there, however you may want to try the Free Article Spinner Plugin for Wordpress by Zack Katz.

Free Online Article Spinners

For my example above, I used http://www.extremewordspinner.com/ to generate the spun content. If you know how to split and add syntax, then you can also use http://www.freearticlespinner.org/ . these are both OK for simple jobs, however you won’t create the volume of content that you would with a commercial spinner.

The Best Content Spinner

The Best Article nd Content Spinner

After speaking to a bunch of people, the general consensus has been that from a commercial point of view, the Best Content Spinner is indeed the best content spinner that money can buy.

Finally…

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Learn About Scraping

So a little while ago I pointed out that Facebook is running a massive Grayhat Strategy to Rank for Longtail in the SERPs, essentially carrying out SERP Sniffing to an insanely large scale, with the view of potentially building a community driven Content Farm. Some really interesting questions popped to mind:

• How many keywords are they ranking for?
• How well are they ranking?
• What sort of traffic volumes would they get?
• What would the commercial value of that traffic be?

Not all of these are easy to answer, and may or may not be of interest. So I expanded my questions with:

• How can I check their Rankings?

So I had a rough answer. Scrape and Rank. In reality, this would not be possible without the Dark Art of Scraping Google Search Results.

Which kind of lead me to think, this is a pretty simple, yet good method of referencing rankings. However scraping need not be bad. Like any SEO technique, it can be used for both,good and evil.

• How can I use that technique for blackhat purposes?
• How can I use that technique for whitehat purposes?

So I have figured a way to answer SOME of my questions. I then asked myself:

Can I create a simple and rough version of my technique so that ANYONE can use and verify?

The answer was, yes, to an extent. The recipe would include:

1. A Scraping Script,
2. A Rank Checker,
3. A Spreadsheet
4. A little time.

Summary: In the post below I demonstrate

• The potential extent to which Facebook is gaming the SERPs with crappy content
• The ability to use Scraping for both white and black SEO techniques

The Technique:

Stage 1:

• Scrape results for:  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Afacebook.com%2F+%22Community+Pages+are+not+affiliated+with%2C+or+endorsed+by%2C+anyone+associated+with+the+topic This query ideally finds all community pages indexed from the Facebook domain.
• Capture the title tags: e.g  “Association football | Facebook”.
• Export to excel, and edit field to delete all references to “Facebook” to get a spreadsheet of keywords to check.

Stage 2

• Grab the keywords and Rank Check for google .com
• Compile and sort by everything in positions:
  • Pos 1
  • Pos 2-5
  • Pos 6-10
  • Page 2
  • Pos 21-50
  • Pos 51-100
  • Pos 101-200
  • Not ranked
• Sort into pie chart, and analyse.

The Results

I scraped the first 600 results of the query, with the help of the awesome Richard Shove.  Well I had to strip 8 keywords for non eligibility / repeat.  Also, when ranking, I only considered ranks up to the first 200 results. And I define a good rank to average rank as anything in the top 50.

What did I find? The ranking data makes good reading, even for such a small dataset:

Google SERP Rankings for Facebook

The data shows that of my keywords selected, only 25% weren’t ranked in the top 200 positions. Of the same data set, 17% ranked on page 1 of the SERPs.

Theoretical Extrapolation

Now lets look at that in theoretical terms. The query I used to generate this list indicates 119,000,000 results found.(That is One hundred and Nineteen MILLION results!!!)

Site Query Equals 119 000 000 Results

This is nowhere near the real number indexed.  Why do I say that? Well you will get different indexed results depending on how quick google serves up the data to you… So refreshing the search gives me a different number indexed.

Site Query Equals 219 000 000 Results

Lets just say for simplicities sake we have 100,000,000 pages indexed. If the data set above forms a working sample, then you expect 75% of these results ranking for the keywords necessary. 17% of the same  dataset ranks in page one.

BIG picture? If (and note I say IF) my hypothesis holds, then these community pages that rank on page one equal in the region of 17,000,000. That is Seventeen MILLION folks. What traffic wold you hope to generate with 17 Million results on page 1 in google?

Not finished yet. The three most common variations on these pages title tags include:

• Community
• Interest
• Topic

Now cross reference any keywords that have these extentions added, in order to make a mid range keyphrase. I can only guess at the volume of page one rankings for those keyphrase variations.

At this juncture, I must point out that my friend Branko who is an awesome SEO Scientist, highlighted the fact that my methodology  needs verification:

If I was you, I would take 2 more random sets of 600 queries and see if the distribution is similar. That way you can get an idea of how much fluctuations you have and how solid your data is. If you want to take it to the next level, there are statistical tests that can tell you whether your sample is representative of the population.

Now I was too lazy to do that to be honest. However I am sure those of you who are better at analysing and manipulating sata may be tempted. If so, let me know!

Singing in the SERPs, I am Singing in the SERPS…

Now this is a massive massive invasion of the SERPs. And if I had the full X Million KW list to hand, I would love to have dug through it. But even my unscientific approach indicated something we British would call “corkers” . Danny Sullivan taught me a neat trick years ago, of comparing a high volume KW against another to get an indication of popularity. My list indicates that Facebook ranks well for “Singing”. Now lets use Danny’s technique:

Singing vs Viagra

How cool is that? Singing gets more searches than Viagra. and here is a scraper page auto built by Facebook ranking for it. I include this because it indicates the potential volume of traffic that can be had by a large scale site that gets involved in Gray SEO techniques.

SERP Scraping for Whitehat Purposes

Whitehat Scraping

When working on large scale SEO projects, for example Ecommerce SEO, competitive analysis is key in successful Long to Mid range strategy. Often we as SEOs tend to hone in on the “money” words and forget that the long tail not only exists, but is highly profitable.

I am not saying that we DONT target long tail keywords, but I dont think we competitively analyse this data.

So how do you use SERP Scraping for comptitive analysis? Do I have to really tell you?

• First off, scrape all the pages indexed for the competitor in question.
• Second, most common ecommerce SEO set ups use keyword splitters in the title tag. (They could be pipes, commas, arrows etc etc.) So use that knowledge to pull off keywords from your scraped data.
• Third, run a rank check on the full list.
• Four, compare against your own data. Where are the gaps?
• Profit.

SERP Scraping for Blackhat Purposes

Blackhat Scraping

Again, this is quite a simple use of that SERP rank data.

• Find a number of large sized sites with average or poor SEO
• Scrape all the pages indexed.
• You can use title tags, headings, etc to compile keywords from your scraped data.
• Third, run a rank check on the full list.
• Four, sort the data. Start with one word, two word, and continue sequencing till you get to 4-5 word combinations.
• Now you have an insanely large keyword list with rankings – sorted into  keyword tails.
• I would then further sort these into “common” themes, e.g all car and auto related words / phrases together…
• Use an autoblog tool such as WPRobot to create thematic microsites which automatically pump out content based around your keyword sets. Add links where necessary.
• Profit?!

A serious Blackhat would probably know how to use Scraped SERPs for much much more than what I suggest above. However, I have chosen to demonstrate the lowest common denominator   After all, this is a similar technique to the one I would say Mahalo used…

The Scraper

So there are a bunch of tools you can use to scrape, but to show you how easy it can be, see the link to the Google Scraping Script. (A big thank you to Dan Harrison of Wordpress Doctors and William Vicary of Semto).

In case you think this is the only way to do this,  here is another variant of the scraping script (thanks to Yousaf Sekander of  Elevate Local).

This is just a limited version of the scraper and will take ages to pull out industrial strength data. If you are looking for something much more robust, try:

• Scrapebox
• 80 Legs
• Scrapy

The Data

I have no doubt that I have probably made a few mistakes. So here is the data – use it as you will.

http://bit.ly/FacebookScrapingData

Is SEO a gazetted Officer?

Google Suggest is a Reputation Management Nightmare at times. A number of companies have been hit and hurt by results that show up with “Company Name + Scam” for example. The problem with those results is that when users see the suggestion, they are immediately tempted to click on them, as opposed to their original query.  In fact, google have been sued in France successfully and forced to remove some negative suggest results .

Is it Costing Businesses Money?

The other effect is financial. Ever seen Google Suggest results for businesses that run Promotional or Voucher Codes?

Currys Voucher and Discount

The obvious impact is that users are tempted to find a discount or voucher code , even though their original journey would have been to the brand.  This means that a number of Promo Code websites are profiting from Google Artificially showing those suggest phrases.

SO How Does Google Suggest Work?

Andy Beal who runs the awesome reputation management tool trackur, suggests (excuse the pun) that user behavior and search volume impacts google suggest:

In practice, it’s not quite that simple. After some testing, it appears that Google Suggest takes into account the following:

1. What was the first keyword search? For example, someone searches for my company, Trackur.

2. They then decide to refine those results by changing their search to “Trackur Free”–which was what they were looking for all along.

3. If enough people make that refinement, compared to simply searching Trackur, then it starts showing up in Google Suggest.

This is a theory adopted by a number of SEOs. In fact, a very good friend of mine, Brent Payne manipulated Google suggest just to show that sheer volume CAN change those suggest results. The first test worked and failed, while the result of the second is still live:

Brent Payne Manipulated This

The Alternative Theory

The problem with the above method of manipulation is that it requires huge volume, and cost. It also sends some sort of manipulation signals, and can be caught. So how can you affect Google Suggest without the use of Mechanical Turk or other large scale manual manipulation techniques?

Let me take you to a post from 2009 that gave me a “tubelight” moment (bolding mine):

google suggest results are hurting my business. When typing in my domain (which people do for whatever reason in a search engine) it shows “MyDomain.com” as the 1st result but shows my domain with negative words about my domain as the 2nd and final suggestion “MyDomain.com sucks“. Im needing to alter the google suggestions. I saw a competitor of mine had this “sucks” term listed on their site at one point but am not sure if thats the reason its now suggested and connected to my domain. I doubt many people would actually search for “www.mydomain.com_sucks”. Its all a bit odd. (Webmaster World)

The question is answered by Robert Charlton – and kinda hits a decent sized nail in the head (see my bolded portion):

suggest was a Labs project before it became a standard feature on the search box. In the Labs incarnation and in the early days of the search box implementation, numbers were returned along with the phrases. The numbers then reflected the number of pages returned, not search popularity.

Ultimately, google dropped the numbers, and I think the official word (or popular supposition) was that they did so because they were distracting and people weren’t really looking at them. But it’s also likely that google dropped these because they had factored other considerations into the personalized (and perhaps other) configurations of the tool, that the numbers therefore weren’t really correlating any more with what the tool was showing in the personalized setup, and it was too complicated to switch displays.

So Can Sheer Volume of Content Manipulate Google Suggest?

In fact a few weeks ago, Malcolm Coles and I were having a discussion on Twitter about this very phenomenon and he has put together a number of other people reporting exactly what I am – that Google Suggest does NOT only rely on search volume.

I decided to run a few tests. (lazy ones to be honest). In the first instance, I decided to use the power of twitter and RTs to drive indexed content for my two chosen terms, “ha ha ha” and “rofl” to be appended to my name in suggest.

The test with “ha ha ha” had a strange result, instead of going on suggest, it went on to appear in related searches:

Rishi Lakhani ha ha ha

So I pushed ROFL. And as you can see, as of last week:

Rishi Lakhani ROFL

Is Manipulating google Suggest Against their Guidelines?

Simply put yes. Therefore I warn you, you can and probably be penalised for the two suggestions below. This puts Google Suggest (now google Autocomplete) into the blackhat SEO category. Let me pull out a tweet from Danny Sullivan during SMX West

Google views manipulating suggestions as “abuse” & will take “corrective” action as needed #smx #1b2

Using Google Suggest Manipulation for Good

Source kandyjaxx on flickr

I ran a similar test for a brand, where they really wanted to push a product. The sheer volume of search on the brand was quite heavy, so we tried to get the product showing up for google suggest. (I can’t show the result as I have an NDA unfortunately).  It worked for a very short time however, and I need to hone the test a bit more.

But how does that help?

• Allows you to force branded queries into common deep product searches (better conversion!)
• Allows you to remove discount queries so as to claim back brand search share and discourage discounting
• Allows you to reputation Manage more easily than using mechanical turk.

Using Google Suggest Manipulation for Profit

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anilmohabir

For lazy affiliates like me, (that’s what the Thinkvisibility Expert Panel call me!), this is probably a decent way to gear up search volume around a brand.

How? Well consider setting up manipulation around a range of words that users may get tempted to click through from Google suggest – scam is probably the best one. Craft a landing page optimized for the word, but pull a bait and switch in the copy.

• User sees Brand + Scam
• User Clicks Through
• Content on page says that no, it’s not a scam!
• Provide link to continue to brand
• Profit!?

This can be geared in many, many other ways… I leave you to think about them independently.

Final Note

I have been berated that my subscribe button isnt big enough. So here you go. Subscribe.

Subscribe to my feed

For those of you who read my blog, you must have come across my post on SERP Sniffing. In short, I define SERP Sniffing as:

Utilising Gray / Blackhat techniques to research SERP weaknesses so as to exploit them for Whitehat Purposes.

The strategy entails creating hordes of auto gen content, launching it on SERPs, and capturing ranking and traffic data per keyword, which would justify creating content around that keyword(s) so as to legitimize the ranking, and or port it over to a new domain so as to capture an easy win. The other tactic is to use a lot of aggregated content to create the “look” of real data on some of these light weight pages. (content aggregation is quite a well used spam technique).  Tools such as WP Robot do exactly that from a number of feeds and sources.

In my opinion Facebook is potentially running a cross between UGC Content Aggregation, third party Content Colation, SERP Sniffing and Automated SEO. Maybe not intentionally, but it is. These are Grayhat SEO techniques…

Site:Facebook.com

Site:Facebook.com

With 1.6 BILLION Results indexed, you expect to get a huge volume of long tail traffic from search engines, regardless of what anyone says. Let me show you a few examples…

Lazying Around!

Lazying Around

Interesting – this is a common misspell, and ranks No. 4 on Google. Lets see what the correct spelling of the keyword ranks:

Lazing Around

Hmm, not as high, but still page on at No. 7.

Good use of SEO Automation on the Meta description by the way:

Welcome to the Facebook Community Page about *add keyword*, a collection of shared knowledge concerning *add keyword*.

The “How” of Building This Content

A large portion of this content is autogenerated from your interests, and likes, which used to be static content:

“Profiles no longer are a static list of likes and interests. Now, they are a living map of all the connections that matter to you.”

Wowsers. So if I and a number of others add those interests (which was just static text before), FB goes off and creates a community page for me and others? What about completely random and related stuff, such as, oh I dont know, lets try “Reading and Horse Riding“:

Reading and Horse Riding

Ahh. There it is. Ranking nicely at no. 4.

So how do those pages look like? Here are a couple:

Lazing Around Facebook

Reading and Horse Riding on Facebook

So what is happening here? Leveraging UGC content to create a whole host of internal, anchor heavy, link profiles, which then link to a number of Community Pages:

On each Community Page, you’ll be able to learn more about a topic or an experience—whether it’s cooking or learning a new language—and see what your friends and others in the Facebook community are saying about this topic.

Of course, not ALL of these pages are blank, check this one out:

Flash Floods Wikipedia Content from Facebook

Note the use of “No Follow“(!) on external content, including original source. See those links I have added arrows to? yeah, those are Wikipedia Scrapped content pages.

Question: Why is Facebook recreating Wikipedia? If any other business did that…

Official Pages vs Facebook Community Pages

Ok so what is the big deal? So what if Facebook creates pages out of peoples likes and dislikes? Well, another problem is that trademarks and brands arent safe either

Sookie Stackhouse Facebook Page

Check out the ranking for the Sookie Stackhouse Character, which HAS an official page (”community” so to speak). See the ranking  when you append “Facebook” to the query? Note, you as the page creator have NO control over Facebooks content and c ode. So if tomorrow they decide to block all user created pages off search engines, who do you think will get an intant boost in SERPs? (I am not the only one who thinks that Facebook Community pages could be a nightmare for brands)

Should we be worried?

Yes. As I demonstrated above, the content is mostly Wikipedia rehashed, that is definitely being leveraged for SEO, however the longer term goal is to start fleshing these pages out manually (CONTENT FARM!!!):

Community Pages are still in beta, but our long-term goal is to make them the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic. We’re starting by showing Wikipedia information, but we’re also looking for people who are passionate about any of these topics to sign up to contribute to the Page. We’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help.

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=382978412130

This in my opinion is EXACTLY how a number of SERP Spammers operate to occupy a number of niches.

The problem?

Well Both Bing and Google confirmed that they use Social Ranking Signals. So these “likes” are counted as votes? Yes? Ahh cool.

BUT

The likes and votes that make up these so called “Community Pages” arent real likes. They are MENTIONS of a topic that Facebook is converting into a “like”.  This is FORCED manipulation of their social graph, and NOT user “votes” as likes tend to be.  One user quite interestingly points out:

My Logic - SEO benefit

Is This SEO?

Normally I would say maybe… however, as I showed in the Description Meta Automation above, it seems that this is aimed at Search Engines Users rather than Facebook Users – FB users DONT see Meta description.

Now apply all of this information on two factors:

1. Facebook has already got a MASSIVE site authority.
2. Google is using Facebook signals to rank content.

Update (More Data to Prove the Hypothesis)

Some people speculated that Facebook may lose out to the Farmer Update – however, looking at SEObooks highlighted SEMRush data, it seems untouched:

Facebook Post Farmer Update

If you have a SEM Rush Login, you may want to play around with their data on Facebook Keywords.

Facebook Keywords

Resources

• To start with, you better start reading up on Facebooks effect on the Open graph
• Read Danny’s Post on Social Ranking Signals
• Facebook is after Rich Snippets on SERPs too
• Facebook is ALSO (in case you forgot) after the same SERP share as that of Quora and Yahoo Answers).
• Dont forget they are after Groupon and other Locations Services too

You are probably bored reading about the JC Penney Fiasco. I know I was for a little while. But I couldn’t ignore this opportunity – it isn’t often that you get to see a Brand SEO campaign that is nearly burnt to the ground because of dodgy link building practices. You want a case study? Well it’s all in there. Intrigue, suspicion, politics, dirty PR, etc etc.

With such a high profile shame and name in SEO, what have you learnt? If you didn’t walk away with the following 10 learnings, you have wasted this wonderful educational opportunity.

a)Link Farms Are Still Well

Doug Pierce, the SEO responsible for highlighting the poor SEO practices by JC Penney ran quite a detailed analysis of backlinks.  After careful consideration, a number of these have come from the TNX network:

“The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients.”

We saw that this strategy gave JC Penney a massive boost. We saw that the traffic and revenue potential of the keywords it was targeting. We also know that this link net would probably have carried on until it was caught by a manual review – and that algorithmically it’s not easy to spot a link farm, if done well (and in instances even if done badly).  For an over view of TNX, see this post.

b) Anchor Text Links Still Rule

This one is simple. In most cases many SEOs are going down the path of “Anchor Text is Dying”.  It may be being degraded a bit in its value for ranking, however as this VERY recent example showed, the volume of anchor text still works.

c) Off Topic Links Hold Value

We are often told that the context of the area where we acquire links is extremely important. That the site, the age etc should be relevant to the linked to destination.  The JC Penney scenario blew this out of the water. Is relevancy that important? For a sustainable strategy, absolutely. To pass human review, it’s a must. But for a quick win? Not so much.

As Search Engine Land puts it:

“Doug Pierce, who worked with New York Times to uncover what was happening with J.C. Penney … that the site had a LOT of links pointing to it. From peculiar sites. With very descriptive anchor text.” (emphasis mine).

d) The Art of Booster Linking

Do you know what a booster linking strategy is? No? You should. This is the biggest lesson to those who haven’t run high scale brand and seasonal SEO campaigns. It has been the Gray Hat  practice of a number of large brands to “acquire” volumes of links just before any large trading season. Normally this is put into place 3-4 weeks before and should ideally be eradicated almost immediately the end of the season, to avoid detection.

Branko Rihtman ran some of the URLs through Majestic SEO‘s link reporting tool and found that it appears that links were acquired in two bursts that coincided with the holiday seasons at the end of 2009 and 2010.

Booster Links for JC Penny

SEL showed us with the help of Branko (or @Neyne on twitter) when these links went up. Unfortunately they didn’t come down quick enough, to quote a Couple of Dave Naylor Tweets:

“they took a risk( calculated I hope), boost ranking for the holidays, they should have pulled the links down 2 weeks ago”

“…did you see the links? they were at best booster links, short term gains but long term NONOs”

Does this strategy work? I have seen proof that it does. And now with the JC Penney issue, You can all see it in action.

e) The Need For In house SEOs

JC Penney has categorically denied the knowledge of the existence of paid links. They refuse to admit that they were aware what their SEO agency was doing to get them such stellar results. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, it highlights why all brands need an inhouse SEO to ask these relevant questions, even if they have an agency that does the SEO work. A real SEO would have spotted the bad linking practice and questioned it.  The least they can do, as Econsultancy puts it, is to use some basic free tools to make sure that their strategies are on track.

As Doug puts it:

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

f) The Need For Contracts

So let’s assume that JC Penney are in fact LYING. Let’s assume that they KNEW what was going on.  Where does that leave us? With one SEO agency that did as they were told, maybe even highlighted the dangers, and who now may have to shut down after such a visible destruction of their reputation.

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,”

Assuming that the above quote is false, then the agency should have something in writing, an email, a contract, a mutually agreed disclaimer highlighting the dangers of these bad links. If they did, then they could make a massive come back – proving that they did what their client ask. So protect yourself if a client asks for dodgy practices, despite being warned.

g) Google New Link Spam Algo

Interesting to me was a specific comment on the NYT piece and tweet from Matt Cutts.

“David Segal of the NYT discusses some blackhat SEO: http://goo.gl/RdnTi Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken.”

So the first part is the Google Algorithm “starting” to work. What were these algos? Considering that from what I have been reading, google has been concentrating on low quality Spammy sites, as well as maybe looking at content farms, what is this “new” algo that is looking at Spammy links? To highlight the NYT comment:

“He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm change that had a negative effect on Penney’s search results. (The tweak affected “how we trust links,” Mr. Cutts said, declining to elaborate.)”

So a new link detection algo. Maybe not strong enough to capture links like JC Penney’s in one sweep (hence the need for manual action) but a new spam link detection algo, which I don’t recall reading anywhere else about.

h) Google Manual Movements

The same tweet above also confirms Manual Action by the google Spam team.

This shouldn’t be news to you. Shouldn’t be news to any one. There have been countless stories about manual penalization, and recently, via googles “Bing Bait” fiasco, that these movements can happen upward or downward. Does anyone else need proof that Google can, and does manually influence organic results?

i) Negative Spammy SEO  / j) Killing Competitors with PR

I have bunched these two learnings together because they work well togther. For years google says that Spammy links cannot hurt your site. Anyone who believes this must be insane. How does google determine via the algo WHO placed the Spammy link?

Matt Cutts on Spam Links

Lets assume, just for a second, that neither JC Penney nor their SEO agency were at fault here – someone used TNX to buy those links, and then leak the story out to the NYT, what would the result be?  To quote neyne:

Dear @jcpennys, one of your competitors just did a hit job on you by the means of NYT article. A smart hit job at that.

And to summarize this joint strategy? Well Skitzzo puts it well:

How to Kill Competitors Rankings:

1. Buy spammy links to their site
2. Get media to embarrass G about the spam
3. Profit!

Finally – You may want to see Alan’s Post on JC Penney Has Bigger problems than paid links as well as JC Penneys Official Relpy  regarding the Fiasco.

The Art of SERP Sniffing

SERP Sniffing is a technique that has been used by a number of thin affiliates, blackhats and spammers to identify profitable long tail keywords to optimise for. Typically this technique charts thousands of easy pickings across the SERPs to bring in long term, scaleable traffic.  I would like to explore this technique, and demonstrate how it works, especially since I tried it myself to prove that it can and does work.

However, it is necessary to define the long tail and issues associated with it before going on to the technique itself.

What’s the most difficult part of SEO for the long tail? In my opinion there are two parts that make long tail strategies difficult:

1. Identifying Long Tail Keywords

By definition, long tail keywords make up the multitude of variations in any keyword target campaign. This means that there may be any number of strings attached to the original set of keywords / keyphrase to make up a number of sub sets, which could further branch off into sub-subsets. Most of these are independently low volume, but combined make a huge share of related traffic that sites ought to target. However, because of their low search volume, most of these keywords do not show up on most keyword tools.

Keyword Longtail Explained

How do you identify these? Or do you blindly pursue keyword variations by aptly stuffing your target pages with a number of variations that you can think off?

2. Identifying Ranking opportunities amongst Long Tail Keywords

So let’s say you have somehow compiled a list of X,000,000 Longtail Keyword variations. Well done. Awesome. Your keyword skills rock. But which ones should you try and target first? How easy is it to rank for these? As a rule, long tails tend to be easier to rank for, but assuredly, you won’t be the only person trying to get those rankings either.

How do you work out how quickly you can rank for KW X over KW Y without carrying out detailed SERP scraping exercises to work out some sort of value model in scale?

The Problem in Decision Making

So ideally you want to work on the easy ranking keywords first and then worry about the rest. Or you may want to work on the pot of higher combine traffic value long tails first. Either way you need the data that shows:

• Ease of Ranking
• Potential Traffic per LTK (Long Tail Keyword)

Neither one of these are easy to define, nor is there a ready guide where you can grab those numbers from. So how do you go about defining a detailed long tail strategy that is based on “real numbers” with regards to traffic and rankings?

The way to decide would obviously require real figures, real potential, in order to define priority. After all isnt it about profitability? Time is money and all that? Can you really waste time chasing after rankings that dont actually have traffic potential?

Show Me the Money

The Spammers Guide to SERP Sniffing

Warning: This is a HIGH risk strategy that may get you banned, and I don’t actually advise it. The following technique is for educational purposes only, and I do not condone Search Engine Spamming.

As I have discussed in my previous posts on Black Hat SEO, and SEO Automation, there are some industrial level methods to drive 1000’s of rankings fairly easily. This is easier when targeting the Long and Very Long Tail traffic, however the strategies aren’t sustainable as they are prone to creating “Burn Sites” which may gain short term rankings but not long term sustainability. This is because Google algo does recognize such sites and penalizes them, or “deprioritises” them in the SERPs.

However, short term rankings and traffic are great too. Not for sustainable businesses, but for research for sustainable businesses. Imagine if you raked in all the relevant data that these “burn” sites gave you? Then used them on legitimate sites? Thats what SERP Sniffing is.

Utilising Gray / Blackhat techniques to research SERP weaknesses so as to exploit them for Whitehat Purposes.

So How Does It Work?

Well to start off with, take your Sets of Two Word Phrases. Categorise them logically as you would in the absence of data, into their long tail targets.

In essence you could have:
Phrases:

• Blue Widgets
• Red Widgets
• Pink Widgets

Categories:

• Phrase + Location
• Phrase + Review
• Phrase + Buy
• Phrase + For Sale
• Cheap + Phrase
• Free + Phrase
• ETC ETC

Now you set up an automated site, where you pull in content in some real volume on the Categories and Sub Categories related to your Keyword Sets as identified above. Make sure you scale the operation such that the posts per category are coming in fast and hard once the site is indexed.

Use a “burn” link network to scale up back links (these only work in the short term and are also easily penalized).

Using your analytics, you should be able to identify keyword combinations that start driving traffic – in my experience such sites die out in periods between 2 – 14 days – and as a result you need to run daily exports of keywords and run ranking reports against those keywords.

Once the site has been burnt, you now have data:

• The Keywords that drove traffic
• Identified SERP positions for such keywords.
• Ease with which positions were garnered.

Real Example:

I ran this experiment on a site that could in no way be linked to my main sites, keeping the domain reg, domain ownership, hosting etc all different to anything that could be linked back to me, either via the algo, or manual human review. The site is defunc and the niche which I ran it for is one I dont work in. This was purely an exercise in experimenting. I didnt try to monetise the site.

I picked a Keyword Set of 4 two word combinations, further broken down into 6 subsets, which made my total categores into 24.

Site ran for a total of 15 days from indexation, and started bringing in traffic. See the Traffic Spike:

SERP Sniffing Traffic Spike

The strategy identified over 2,400 keywords that drove traffic to the site in the days it ranked. Think about this. I had an original target of 24 keywords (categories!). Automating these with random, yet related content multiplied the keywords into a data set of 2400. Thats nearly 100 variations per phrase!

Keyword Traffic Rank Breakdown

Cross referencing these keywords vs the SERP rankings showed that over 90% of these rankings were on page one. So I have a pot of 2400 Keywords that drove traffic, with 60% in positions between 1 and 4 that drove traffic to my site in a space of 14 days.

Now dont assume that the traffic that comes in in this method is crap either – check out the page view stats:

Traffic Page Views

Assuming that this is the normal trend of traffic for this category, if I maintained those rankings on a legitimate site, with good quality content, for those target keywords, with pages dedicated to these LTKs, then I stand to gain [(7100/14)*365] 185,107 page views annually. ( I am not disclosing traffic data – sorry!)

Summary

As I demonstrated above, the technique does work. I dont advise it, for obvious reasons. However, compare YOUR Long Tail Keyword research vs this method – are you surprised that Spammers, Blackhats, Feed Affiliates can still profit from the SERPs? your data is based on intelligent, but guesswork. Their data is based on real opportunities. guess who prioritises limited resources better?

Paid search gives you many options to test and play with the SERPs and Keywords in a way that SEO cant. I have used PPC on several occasions to make decisions around SEO, and quite successfully. It is often hard for businesses to understand the “value” of SEO, and I know for a fact that most big brands use Paid Search as a medium more extensively than Organic Search. The budgets for SEO are often a fraction of those allocated to PC. Yet businesses are still to understand that Paid Search budgets have a “one hit” shelf life, while SEO ROI is for much longer periods.

In financially motivated businesses often SEO is undervalued when the SEO teams fail to show profit / ROI centric nature of organic search, and I often end up reaching the benefits of looking at SEO from the lens of a Paid Search marketer.  SEO should not focus purely on traffic potential of keywords, but on the profit potential of keywords. In the past several studies have shown that PPC gets more budget than SEO.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pandaray/2576981899/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Some of the areas that you can use Paid Search for include:

Testing Copy Messages

Your Meta Description and Title tags are important from a User Click Through point of view. Using PPC copy tests you can determine what messages get better click throughs from the SERPs – especially testing variant permanent Title Appends.  For example I found that a brand that used “official” in their PPC copy gained a CTR upwards of 5% better than previous.

So we switched the PPC messages from the “brand keywords” to more sales oriented copy, while switching the home page title tag to include the words “official site”. Organic SEO from branded keywords grew, while PPC traffic dropped, and the joint traffic improved.

Results? More free traffic for their branded keywords.

Determining Long Tail Targets

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zrahen/4392138128/

It’s not always easy to determine which long tail or three word / four word phrases to target, ideally you want them all, but sometimes time and budget limitations won’t let you target all the variants. In my experience any keyword can have between 10-50 variations, especially if you start looking at adding location modifiers to make up phrases.

How do you determine the rate at which to attack certain sub sets of keywords in terms of optimization priority? I use PPC to help me.

Create lists and ads for your target KWs and run them for a decent time frame – for high volume phrases (between 1000-10000 a day) I am usually happy to use a two week timeframe.  Let those keywords float in ideal positions (1 and 2) on PPC.  You will often find that the site converts better on some, while not on others. There could be many reasons for this – but at least you will find the most profitable key phrases in any subset to determine your rate of optimization.

PRO TIP: You can use this technique for brand new key words that the business never considered to see if they work – you often find what I call “Eureka” keywords that the site never thought of, but become very profitable.

Determining Budgets

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/omegaforest/4927169808/

This exercise is similar to the one above, but in this instance you can use C to determine ROI and budgets. Now I am not unilaterally saying that PPC and SEO ROIs are interchangeable – they aren’t. But you can often work out some sort of a standard variant where ROI of PPC=(x)SEO (on SERP #y). This sort of formulaic working from historical data could help you determine what to expect when certain keyword sets move up in organic results.

PPC has a better conversion rate. It’s true that PPC converts slightly higher than SEO in a keyword-to-keyword comparison. But 88% of the traffic comes from SEO and 12% from PPC. Rand Fishkin in his presentation PPC vs SEO

Cross referencing the spend on PPC against those keywords will enable you to work out stronger arguments for determining the potential uplift of sales by targeting certain SERP positions for these keywords. This in return allows you to work out the profitability, and hence desirability of those keyword sets – and in return allows you to allocate more budget towards acquiring those positions.

In a ROI centric business this sort of methodology is essential in working out SEO Budgets and actually increasing the value of SEO visibly to businesses.

Almost half of UK companies (49%) are now spending at least £50,000 a year on paid search marketing, up from 45% last year and 39% in 2008, while there has been a significant decrease in the proportion of responding companies who spend less than £5,000 a year on paid search, from 25% last year to 14% this year. Econsultancy Search Marketing Benchmark Report

I have covered some of this over at SEOmoz on SEO Budgeting.

Of course none of this looks at the long term Branding value of generic searches and determining longer term ROI time frames for generic Keywords:

Only 30% of purchases driven by non-branded Internet searches occur within the same online session when consumers conduct an initial search, according to a study by research firm Compete Inc. (source)

Landing Page Determination

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jadendave/5210820423/

As I have mentioned above, SEO should focus on profitability – and some of the key aspects of profitability are where you land your site visitors on. For Keyword “X” should you land on the “home page”, “category page” or a “custom built to purpose landing page”?

In paid search, you can test all three variants. In SEO you may have the potential to rank only one over the other. By the time you realize you have targeted the wrong landing page, it may be too late or taken too long to switch. This can be a costly mistake, and short of conversion optimization on the target SEO page, you can’t do much in the short term.

I would suggest using PPC testing to determining the best converting pages per keyword sets, you would often be amazed by the results. In one instance I found that the home page is the best converting page – regardless of what you did for a particular generic keyword. In other situations, when we targeted  a landing page built for  “KW” and “KW+Local Modifier”, where we were targeting both the top keyword and the local area – we found that for the total sets of keywords, it converts worse  than the page that WASN’T optimized with page elements for the local modifier. (i.e No mention of the “local” aspect on the page actually helped the conversion, but made SEO for full range of long tail much more difficult). In the end we had to split it into two pages – one targeting “KW” and another targeting “KW+Local Modifier”.

Resources

• I am not a great believer in PPC+SEO=More (Synergy), but there have been cases of this being reported, and reported often enough to test.
• Better Coverage of the PPC & SEO Square off in the Battle of the SEM Heavyweights – SES Chicago 2010
• PPC Blogs – check out David Szetela’s BIG LIST of decent PPC blogs on his blog roll. (you should follow him on twitter too.

What Other SEOs Say

When I asked Twitterverse the question “Q: Do SEOs use PPC as a research tool?” – I was encouraged by the answers, which proved that I wasn’t the only one using the techniques above:

• staceycav Sometimes…. or at least conversion data from PPC can be useful in assessing potential keywords for a SEO campaign.
• Chris_Dugdale Yes. Always (where possible).
• mmhemani Why not, usually people use more then one tool for keyword research and i think using PPC is also a good idea.
• TomNashUK A: they should do
• justinparks yes. It helps quickly (and sometimes expensively) answer questions.
• firstconversion Id like to more, its not very popular with clients tho they dont like paying for exploratory things
• seoforumsorg yes – its the single most valuable source of information to SEO’s.
• inkodeR I’d hope so – most effective method for KW research available. Can’t trust data from KW tools.
• Searchmetrics Absolutely – knowing PPC data is important for understanding the competitive nature of a keyword for organic ranking
• _robh_ if they don’t they should
• marccclevy when I can afford it! Definitely v.useful.
• LordManley A: Yes. Perfect for honing meta descriptions and titles to maximise CTR, for example.
• gfiorelli1 I do, especially to understand the real value of some middle to long tail kwds that has “officially” no data statistics.
• SamuelCrocker A: When data is available/when I can make it so
• tatiana_london i think it is still used, to find keywords with good ratio of conversion/volume, with less competitive SEO then high volume
• rishi3211us i think most would do.. there’s so much of valuable & proven keyword data in there
• TonyVerre A: YES.
• yrewol yes, and if they don’t, they’re missing out on a lot of the “optimisation” bits of SEO
• PrachiDeshpande I use it as a research tool. Specially, to target best performing PPC keywords for SEO campaign.
• NeilTompkins Yes and no. I normally use PPC to get an idea of how competitive the phrases are.
• olivier_amar For sure. It’s a great tool to see which keywords convert and bounce.
• David_TappYes, as long as we can get the information off of the PPC agency.
• netmeg I do. (I really respect NetMeg by the way!)
• souvikmukherjeewould have loved to but not always possible, specially when you are working with small businesses. Small business clients usually have stingent marketing budgets so you may not get the luxury of experimenting at your own cost.
• Adrac_Ltd Yes. So that we can target keyterms appropriatly on the website and in the link building campaign

Thank You to all those who responded

It seems that the fashion for the last few weeks for people to be concerned about is google promoting its own properties manually in the SERPs. Now this may or may not be true. But I am inclined to veer on the NOT TRUE side of the argument.

Why?

Well how many people have just looked at the SERPs highlighted that Google is manipulating and ran SEO audits on them? Chances are that those properties are riding on google’s own authority as well of instantly acquired links when the properties go live. Sebastian (as usual!) really hits the nail on the head:

If a Google property ranks on Google’s SERPs at all, blame the tech bloggers, webmasters and SEOs of this planet for abusing their anchor text and link love, because Google doesn’t tweak its own pages for SEO purposes. Also, hand jobs belong to adult entertainment and this industry is responsible for its content. Google just crawls and indexes their output, but prevents mere mortals from viewing hand jobs by applying sensible default values for the &safe-parameter.

I am no Danny Sullivan, but if you really want to read a well balanced piece of coverage, then you need to read this article.

It’s Not All Rosy Though

My issue is the One Box. The one box is not a property that is in fact seen as a “google” property, rather as quick answers for users from G’s Database.  This is definitely artificially inflated to be the first result – as you can’t really link out to it, hence can’t be influenced by anyone BUT google.  Since the onset of these quick, bite sized results, I have stopped using websites for 10 things, and I am guessing all the top ranking sites have lost out on an insane amount of traffic over the years simply because of googles intervention to deliver results beyond the SERPs.

1.       Time. Sometimes I would like to know the time, right now (maybe my computer or phone doesn’t have the right time, or whatever). Simply ask: “Time”. Want to know the time in Melbourne? Ask for “Time Melbourne”.  Guess who would lose out on all that nice traffic and ad impressions over time (excuse the pun)?

Google One Box: Time

Google One Box: Time Melbourne

2.       Currency Conversion. I used to use currency conversion sites a lot, but google lets you do that straight off the search as well:

Google One Box: Currency Conversion

3.       Cinema Times. Why would I visit a third party site if google shows me the Movie times in my local area?

Google One Box: Cinema Times

4.       Calculator. I misplace my calculator often – before, I would just got to an online calculator for quick sums instead of using excel etc. But now:

Google One Box: Calculator

5.       Postcode Search: Don’t know what a postcode is for? Drop it into google – gives you a map and the local tube station.

Google One Box: Postcode Finder

6.       Stock Quotes. Want to know the stock quote of a company? Type it in:

Google One Box: Stock Quotes

7.       Weather Forecasts: Want to know the Weather somewhere? I used to go to the Met for weather, or to a similar international site for weather info internationally, but now:

Google One Box: Weather

8.       Flights and Tickets. Not a really well known search result, but did you know you can compare tickets and buy them from the one box results? Isnt out in the UK yet, but how long till it is? What will happen to all the flight comparison sites?

Google One Box: Flights and Tickets

9.       Food / Restaurant Search. A large number of sites used to fight for organic listings for types of food, food+area names etc. The Google Local results have displaced most of these. We could argue that these aren’t google properties – but really?

Google One Box: Food Search

10.   Product Search. How many comparison sites have been hit with google artificially inserting its Google base products into the SERPs?

Google One Box: Products Search

11.   Celebrity Info. Did you know you can get a large number of celebrity details using the one box? (however, as Malcolm points out, that data aint great…)

Google One Box: Celebrity Info

12.   Public Data – Want to know the population of a country? Their rate of unemployment? There is a One box Search Result for that.

Google One Box: Public Data

13.   Need a Definition? Guess who gives you a quick result?

Google One Box: Definitions

To be honest there are plenty more, and in development. Most of these are taking away traffic share from sites that have spent a lot of time and effort capturing these long tail queries.

Summary?

Is google promoting its own properties in this sense? Yes.

Is it bad for users? No.

Is it bad for sit owners / publishers? Probably.

As a side note, google is ALSO making somewhat an unfair use of it paid search offering in competitive industries:

When I first noticed this search (way back when it wasn’t being promoted via PPC this way), I wrote that it spells the end of Credit Card Affiliates over time. more industries are to come. What should you as a publisher do? Probably run…

Google Credit Card Comparision PPC Ads

Resources

Check out Google features and onebox result  suggestions.

More About the Google Onebox