jondyer.net

Posted by Tom_C

Today Google announced the release of a new social feature: +1

Read more about the launch from these in-depth blog posts:

• Danny’s ever-excellent coverage: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-facebook-like-button-70569
• Official Google post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/1s-right-recommendations-right-when-you.html
• Official Google page: http://www.google.com/+1/button/

Quick Summary

Rolling out across English Google over the next few days is a new "+1" feature that allows you to endorse URLs. If you’re not yet seeing it in your search results enable it in Google experimental. Once enabled you see a little grey +1 next to all search results – including adwords listings:

Once you click a result you see something like this:

All of your +1 results appear on your Google Profile:

I’m a really big fan of this from Google – they seem to be doing a lot of things right with social at the moment and this seems to be universally received as positive by the twittersphere. It’s a lot of fun and ridiculously intuitive to +1 something and I can really see this catching on.

The Impact of +1 on SEO

So what’s the impact of this for SEOs? Well I’m struck by the opening paragraph from the Google +1 page (emphasis mine):

The +1 button is shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out."

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Note how Google is emphasising right from the start that this is going to inlfuence search results. Another quote from the official Google Blog (again, emphasis mine):

Say, for example, you’re planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif. When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

So the bottom line is that getting people to +1 your content is going to help you get more organic traffic from Google. Maybe even more/cheaper paid traffic too!

The Rise of Social SEO

Of course, for me this isn’t so much a new direction as much as a continuation of the social circle work that Google has been doing recently. I’m a massive fan of results from your social circle – as I’m searching around these appear on a crazy high % of search results:

These social results pop up all the time and are immediately obvious and useful to me. The more that Google rolls out this integration the better imho.

Is this how Google are going to reduce the emphasis on links? Maybe.

Social Metrics Are Already Well Correlated With Rankings

I’m not going to go into too much detail here as we’re still in the middle of gathering data and running analysis but here’s a sneak peak from Rand’s presentation that he’s giving in SMX Munich next week. We’ve run a correlation analysis on a whole bunch of search results (~10,000) for a wide range of factors and there’s some surprising results. Check out this graph:

It shows that Facebook shares are well correlated with rankings. In fact, comparing to other factors we see Facebook shares are similarly correlated to the number of linking root domains.

It’s early days in the analysis and all we’re showing here is correlation not causation but it’s kind of surprising the correlation is so strong!

(Aside: I should point out a few things here – when we say Facebook shares we’re talking about the aggregated number of Facebook interactions; comments, likes and shares as reported by the Facebook graph API. The full analysis will breakdown the different types of Facebook interactions in more detail. We should also say a big thankyou to Topsy as we have been using their totally awesome API to gather Twitter information)

In my opinion this is why inbound marketing is going to overtake SEO as the primary function of SEO professionals. Engaging across social channels to get links, shares, likes, comments and +1s is going to be the future for generating organic traffic to your site. Not just from Google but these channels are increasingly driving significant volumes of traffic in their own right.

+1 & Social Metrics Will Be Hard To Game

Previously the biggest objection I’ve heard from SEOs about user-generated signals is that they are easy to game. Well I’m not so sure. Think about how much information Google has on you and all the ways they can justify your profile is tied to a real human being account. For example – to show you’re a real human being Google could look for the following signals:

• Gmail
• Google analytics
• Google calendar
• Adwords
• Google voice
• Google checkout
• Chrome sync
• Search history
• Google docs
• Google reader
• Youtube
• …. etc

Don’t believe me? Why not head on over to your Google dashboard and see just how much information Google knows about you.

Still think it’ll be easy to fake?

Combine this with some measure of author authority, which we know Google and Bing are looking at, and you have a pretty good picture of which accounts are influential and which are spammers.

Let’s also not forget that Google are smart. I very much doubt that social signals will impact search results equally – some industries just don’t have a strong social footprint. For these industries I think (hope) Google will normalise the impact and won’t let the "fun" site outrank the "useful" site – they can easily tell which niches have a lot of social activity and those that don’t. For the more mundane/commercial industries Google will fall back on the regular signals of links.

What’s Next for Google +1?

Google are already talking about a new publishr button that you will be able to embed on your page to allow people to +1 content from your site – very similar to the Facebook like and tweet this buttons that already exist. Once you enable +1 you’re also opted in to show this information on 3rd party sites in exactly the same was as Facebook buttons:

Here’s a few other more speculative things to think about:

1. Will Google create aggregated pages for the "hot" +1 content on the web?
2. How will Google persuade regular people to create their Google profiile page and add their friends?
3. It seems like this is a very direct threat to the Facebook like button – how will Facebook react?
4. How will +1 results impact Adwords listings?
5. What kind of dashboard/analytics information will be available to publishers to see who is +1′ing their content?

For now, why not do us a favour and go give SEOmoz a nice juicy +1 :-D

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Posted by dandeceuster

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Far too many of us in the SEO industry tend to think in absolute terms. You are either White Hat or Black Hat, this works or it doesn’t, this link is amazing or it is worthless…you get the point.

This is dangerous thinking because if something isn’t absolutely perfect or golden, we tend to evaluate it as useless. In nothing is this more obvious than in link building.

Link builders come from two schools of thinking. They either (a), pursue and take any link from anywhere or (b), research and scrutinize every potential link opportunity.

If you think like the first group, then this post is not for you. But if you are in the second group, this post should help you evaluate the value of a link.

The anatomy of a link can be thought of in five parts: anchor text, trust, relevance, placement and outbound links. Each one makes up a piece of the link pie.

I already know what you are thinking- what about authority? The five pieces of the pie mentioned above are what make the pie, but authority is what determines the size of the pie.

This means that if your link is on a high quality, authoritative website, search engines will pay a lot more attention to the metrics of that link that one on some spammy website.

Let’s look at each individual metric then and see what they all mean.

1. Authority

As I just mentioned, authority is what determines the size of the pie. The more authority a domain has, the more weight search engines give to the metrics of their outbound links.

Tip: Any search in Google will bring up websites with domain authority at least in the thirties. If the website you are considering for a link opportunity does not have at least a 30 for domain authority, you won’t get much value from it.

2. Anchor Text

For the better part of the last decade or so anchor text has been the most important metric of a link. Marketers understood this and it is precisely because of this metric we saw the rise of the Google Bomb.

Blog comment spam is another malady that is directly tied to the importance of anchor text. It’s only because of this metric that I have to delete comments on my blog from readers like "cheap online cash advance overnight."

Exact match anchor text isn’t the only way to be successful here. A website that sells mountain bikes and targets that keyword should not turn down a link with the anchor text "bicycles."

Tip: Try and get links with your keywords in the anchor text. Be sure to maintain some variety though; search engines can detect unnatural amounts of identical anchor text.

3. Trust

A lot of people struggle to understand the difference between authority and trust. SEOmoz has their own metrics called authority, mozRank and mozTrust. I would recommend reading up on them to get a better idea for the difference.

Building trust with search engines is key to achieving great rankings. There is only one way to build that trust and that is to get links from websites that have a lot of trust built up already.

Tip: Writing a press release is a great way to get some trustworthy links. Lots of news and media outlets have trust with the search engines.

4. Relevance

Relevance is a measure of how connected your content is to the page that is linking to you. It makes a lot more sense for an exercise blog to link to a website that sells treadmills and not one that sells telescopes.

It is difficult to determine how relevant another website is to you however. One handy way is to use the LDA tool from SEOmoz. Just plug in your keyword and the URL of the page you are looking at and see how relevant it is to that term.

Tip: Try to get links from websites that have similar content to yours.

5. Placement

The original PageRank formula by Google treated all links on a web page the same. Each one would pass an equal amount of PageRank. This was called the Random Surfer Model.

Google and other search engines are a bit more advanced now. Bill Slawski explains how Google could be using a Reasonable Surfer Model in their current algorithm.

This means that having your link in the footer of a web page isn’t going to help you out a whole lot. A contextual link right at the top of the page in the middle of the content is more likely to be clicked, and thus, likely to pass more PageRank.

The same is true of lists. People are a lot more likely to click links at the top of the list, so those links could pass more link juice.

Tip: Get links that have a higher chance of actually being clicked.

6. Outbound Links

If all links on a page passed an equal amount of PageRank, then more outbound links on a page meant less PageRank per link. Every outbound link on a page devalues your link ever so slightly.

This is why some directories seem pretty useless these days. With hundreds of links on a page, what value is there in adding just one more?

Tip: Don’t post links on link farms or other pages with lots and lots of links already on them.

Conclusion

Back to my original point: in the SEO industry we tend to think all or nothing. It’s not uncommon to see people turn down a link opportunity with great anchor text and great placement on a relevant page because it didn’t have much trust or authority.

This seems flawed to me. Just because you can’t get every piece of the pie you don’t want any of it? Why turn down a little just because you can’t have a lot?

The same goes for partial pieces. A partial anchor text match is not as good as an exact anchor text match, but it’s better than nothing.

I’m not saying you have to settle for any link from anywhere, but if you can get even two pieces of the pie, I would take it, even if you don’t get the other three.

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Source: http://bit.ly/aPzFlC

I’ve had a lot of positions at my current company (ClickEquations, formerly Commerce360), but one of the ones I most enjoyed was a multivariate testing project I did with a large entertainment provider.

In preparing for the project, I read a ton about testing, what to test, past tests that worked, etc. There is no shortage of information about what to test or how to test it (see. www.WhichTestWon.com, for example).

What surprised me about the experience was that very little time was spent talking about the most important elements of a successful test: people.

Specifically, the people you need to help you with a test.

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CRO & Big Companies

If you manage your own website, launching a test happens in an afternoon and you’re making the calls. If you’re heading up a conversion rate project for a website with hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, it quickly becomes a project convincing people to help you test with some conversion rate optimization attached.

That was the case for the company I worked with, as it was one of their first forays into testing. Getting momentum required buy-in from several key stakeholders:

1. Champion – We had an awesome internal advocate who prioritized the project and rallied the troops. He served as the central point of contact to coral everything on the client side while my coworker (the account manager) and I got to focus on the testing.
2. Executive Sponsorship – The client had to lay out money for both software (we used SiteSpect) and our consulting fees. Working on our project also meant diverting hours for contributing departments (see below) from other projects to testing.
3. Development Buy-In – Every testing project involves some changes to your site in one way or another: DNS changes, tags in footers, Mboxes, etc. The bigger the site, the more cautious the IT and development team. You need to get in their sprint cycle. I recommend you choose a technology that allows you to ask for help from development once and then permits changes on the fly afterward.
4. Creative – Someone has to create all of those test variations and in bigger companies, they generally have to be sensitive to brand guidelines or other restrictions. More importantly, you need an ally on the creative team who is will to let you butcher their work and possibly test something that, from a design perspective, they may not necessarily agree with.
5. Analytics – Chances are, there is already someone in the company doing analytics or, as was the case for my client, statistics. You’re going to need access to analytics data to design an effective test and they might even review it with you.

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Converstion Team Optimization

Testing can fundamentally change how a business operates and where decision making power lies. It also involves new and different business processes. That is to say, testing means change. People, especially bigger companies, are often slow to change.

In my experience, a great Champion and Executive Sponsor set the tone for the rest of the team. They approve budgets, timelines and the allocation of resources. A great process and communication help win over the rest of the team, but that’s for another blog post.

The Surprisingly Important Element of Successful Testing

Posted by richardbaxterseo

This morning I set myself a challenge. Using some inspiration from recent excellent ideas, strategies and articles about the Panda update, I decided to see if I could cobble together a quick strategy to weed out pages that might be deemed as “low quality” in the eyes of Google’s most recent major algorithm update.

I gave myself two hours to get the data and to put this post together, with the intention that you’ll be able to download the template and pick up your analysis from where I left off.

It’s all about poor performance

This methodology should help you identify poorly performing pages that have few, if any links and a high average bounce rate across a wide spectrum of keywords. This might help you identify any page candidates that need a rethink.

Step one – Head to Google Analytics

Head over to analytics and navigate to Traffic Sources > Search Engines:

Now, select “Google”

Step two – Get lots of raw data

Make sure you can get your hands on plenty of data by inserting the &limit=50000 query into your report URL. This might come in handy later!

Step three – Sort by landing page

We’re interested in landing page performance, so in your left hand sort column, select “landing page”

Step four – Download the data as CSV and create an Excel Table

Ok so far so good – by now you should have a rich data set all tuckered up in Excel. To make your data into a table, highlight it and press CTRL-L on your keyboard.

Step 5 – Head to Open Site Explorer

Next, we’re going to export all the links data that Open Site Explorer can give us, and use VLOOKUP to add the number of links to each URL in our table. Whee!

If you’re not familiar with VLOOKUP, check out Mike’s awesome guide to Excel for SEOs. Create an Open Site Explorer top pages report (My favourite report since, ever), download the data and throw it in an Excel tab called “Top Pages”.

Tip: for the purpose of this blog post, you’ll need to remove the domain name from the Open Site Explorer data. Do a find and replace for your domain, replacing the domain URL with nothing, like this:

Step 6 – VLOOKUP time

Next, you’re going to need to combine the analytics data with the top pages data from OSE. Create a new column in your analytics data called “Links” and add your VLOOKUP, just like this:

Pro tip: use IFERROR to weed out any nasty N/A errors, replacing them with a 0, like this:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP([@[Landing Page]],toppages,6,0),0)

Step 7 – Create your pivot table

With a complete data set, you’re now able to create your pivot table. Insert a pivot table and setup your filters, labels and values like this:

Step 8 – Filter by bounce, visits and use conditional formatting

At the end of my data mashing, I came up with this table:

I can only imagine what this data might look like on an extremely content thin, "low value" site. Any page with a very high bounce rate, measurable level of traffic and low / no links might cause some concern and there are certainly a few pages in this list I’d like to take a closer look at.

If you’d like to take a closer look at your pages, you can download this Excel document here:

http://bit.ly/PandaData

PRO Tip: Add your keyword data

I have a working theory that it’s good to have a complete picture of a landing page’s performance. In principle, you could build a more complete picture using keyword data. Think about it like this: if a page has a slightly below par bounce rate, with the keyword data intact you can investigate the problem a little further. Is there a specific keyword that’s causing a problem? How would you approach this problem?

I hope you enjoy using the data and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this type of analysis could be developed further. Happy number crunching!

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