Edgy bloggers using Google’s Blogspot might have been miffed already—but likely also understood—at Google slapping content warnings over their adult-oriented material and demanding age verification. But what might deter (poorly) minors from viewing is also preventing search crawlers from accessing the content at all.

My blog has erotic content, which have led Blogger to put up a content warning page. Users will have to click on a link on that page to get to the blog.

This is fair, and the content warning page itself has actually had no effect on the number of visitors.

The reason I hadn’t put up one myself was that I was afraid of the effect it would have on search engine visibility. Unfortunately my fear turned out to be based on a real problem.

The content warning page uses a DIV-tag/javascript for the relevant button. There is no regular link from the Content Warning page to the blog itself.

Even if Blogger is a part of Google, no one has apparently told the Google spiders how to find away around this javascript. Nor has anyone told the Blogger people to change the code of the content warning page
(or to give the spiders another route around this hurdle).

The theme was picked up in another thread by “Grey,” who explains the problem this way:

Google Blogger blogs with Content Warning splash pages (http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=86944) aren’t friendly with Google Webmaster Tools. The forced splash page is evidently to confusing for the Webmasters Tool to bypass. Attempted verification causes errors. Blogspot blogs without the warning work perfectly fine.

John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Zurich, responded with a less than reassuring post in that thread:

This is something the teams here are already looking into, but I don’t have more information than that at the moment. I agree that it would be great if we could get all websites at least verified in Webmaster Tools, as well as being indexed in the normal web search index.

It seems reasonable no one would object to a content warning, but if Google is true to its commitment to index the world’s information, erotic content on its own blogging service should be on the list to include.

More on this topic if and when Google addresses it.

Hat tip to Search Engine Roundtable.

It’s no secret that web analytics are important to the success of a website. It looks like that importance might even increase in the future as change unfolds in the search industry, throwing a fork in the spokes of how Internet marketers drive traffic to sites.

Web Analytics and SEO

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz lists web analytics as one of the top seven reasons that companies are investing in SEO during the economic downturn. "It’s sad, but true," he says. "When a downturn arrives or panic sets in, someone, maybe the first someone in a long time, checks the web analytics to see where revenue is still coming in. Not surprisingly, search engine referrals with their exceptional targeting and intent-matching are ranking high on the list."

Word on the street is that web analytics are going to be playing an even more crucial part than ever in traffic heading into the new year. As both Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts talk about in their respective interviews with WebProNews, Google is going to be getting more personalized with search results, and this is going to make traditional SEO strategies more difficult, and perhaps some even obsolete.

We discussed recently how your site’s bounce rate might already play a role in your search engine rankings. SEO Black Hat shared some interesting findings and Google Analytics data regarding this:

Overall Traffic

Google Traffic

Bounce Rates

Obviously it’s going to take some analysis to improve your bounce rate. Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, and Google Analytics group manager Brett Crosby discussed this with Mike McDonald at SES a while back:

Blog Analytics

Blogs have become a big part of business for many companies, and site-owners. Blogs shouldn’t necessarily be treated like other sites when it comes to analytics however. "There are more companies blogging now than ever," says Lee Odden at Online Marketing Blog. "How do you measure results? Measuring the social web is a different thing than what most web analytics packages offer. It can be easy to start a blog, but making it successful requires an excellent feedback mechanism. Blog analytics is one of those sources of feedback to know what’s working and what’s not."

Odden is conducting a poll on preferred blog analytics tools, and so far Google Analytics is ahead by a long shot.

Kaushik discusses in-depth, six metrics that should be used to measure the success of a blog (as illustrated in his chart below) in a detailed blog post.

Video Analytics

As online video usage continues to trend upward and video search is improved upon, video analytics are going to carry increasing significance as well. It’s going to be interesting to see the strides made in this department over the coming year.

YouTube has already begun offering a tool - YouTube Insight, which is an analytics program for videos that lets users get a look into where and by whom videos were posted. A couple months ago they released a feature for it that allows you to actually pinpoint the specific parts of videos that get viewed the most. This will be a huge metric, particularly when it comes to advertising. "If you give users the tools to attract larger audiences, they’ll create more ad inventory," as Advertising Age noted.

I’m sure there are a number of other video analytics tools out there, and it will be interesting to see what other tools (and metrics for that matter) become relevant.

Analytics Mistakes

Bryan Eisenberg at the Microsoft AdCenter Blog talks a good deal about the seven biggest mistakes of web analytics, which according to him are as follows:

1. Improper Implementation
2. No Goals Setup
3. No Segmentation
4. Paying Too Much Attention to Irrelevant Data
5. Not Setting up Milestone Events Documentation
6. Not Combining Quantitative Data with Qualitative Data
7. Not Taking Action On the Data

That last one is the one that should really be weighing on your business-minded conscience, and what is likely going to hurt you more than ever in the future. Although the first one will get you on the wrong track right from the start, so taking care of that should be a top priority.

Let me be blunt. Quit screwing around and start taking your analytical data seriously. It just might be the key to your business’s survival as we face not only economic downturn, but a new world of Internet marketing waiting ahead for us. Thoughts?

Attorney General Rob McKenna reportedly stated that, “When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull a high ranking. Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn’t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.”

The lawsuit was filed on the 12th of November, 2008, in the King County Superior Court and it accuses of Visible.net, Captures.com and their owner, Gilbert Walker, of violating the state consumer protection and telemarketing laws.

The website, ‘Webmarketingsource.com’, is also owned by the same and the services provided under these banners include Website designing, Search Optimization, E-commerce services and other Internet Marketing services. The defendants promote these services through their above-listed websites and telemarketing. The packages offered by them feature a startup fee ranging from of $3,749.99 to $9,749.99, in addition to a monthly fee ranging from $39.99 $99.99.

Paula Selis, assistant attorney general of the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit, was quoted as saying, “The Attorney General’s Office and Better Business Bureau have received nearly 90 complaints about the defendants, showing a pattern of recurring problems since at least 2005.” Among others, the lawsuit accuses the defendants of the following violations:

• Failure to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor and also failure to provide a written confirmation of a consumers’ rights under the Act of Commercial Telephone Solicitation.
• Misrepresenting the ability to significantly increase the website traffic to customer Web sites by providing top search-engine rankings and failure to deliver other promised services.
• False claim of an affiliation with other marketers including ‘Specialty Merchandise Company’, reportedly a drop-ship wholesaler.
• False claims that its customer service representatives are reachable at all times when, in fact, customers are frequently unable to reach the representatives and sometimes do not even receive return calls.
• Failure to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests.
• Continuing billing the credit cards of consumers who have attempted to cancel the services and submitting alleged debts to collection agencies.

The state is presently seeking civil penalties, consumer restitution and a court order to halt the deceptive practices of the defendant.

Comments

Google has been seen saying following words about participating in the link schemes:

“…there are some webmasters who get involved in link exchange programs and other build partner pages just for the purpose of cross linking and disregarding the quality of links. This leaves a long term impact on their sites. But the strategy totally violate the set guidelines of Google Webmaster and can also have negative affect on search engine ranking results..”

When the Google is seen stating this, Microsoft is not left supporting its competitor:

“…use of techniques like Live Search index might affect the ranking of your website or even get your website removed from the search index. Settling down for link farms techniques can artificially increase the number of links to the webpage, but it is not genuine…”

Yahoo also believes that sites those are cross linked excessively are consider unwanted and thus, face lack of ranking problems.

Now the question arises, why would Skip Chilcott publicly recommend Link exchange scheme that is a semi black hat technique? Along with this, he would also endorse certain firms/ softwares to help you with adopting link exchange scheme.

Why Should we Discourage Link Exchange Schemes?

We have seen search engines becoming more competitive as well as useful for SEOs and even common researchers. All of us depend on these search engines to find relevant information. The reason why search engines have gained so much credibility is because they offer maximum information in quickly. As so many people have started gaming the search engines, this is resulting in more spam and less quality results. In order to stop receiving spam, we have to ensure that attributed like low quality links should not be taken into consideration by search engines. Google is one of the preferred search engines, which has not only discounted the bad links from counting but has also taken strict actions in order to prevent webmasters from googling the search ranking with shady SEO techniques.

It is true that reciprocal linking or participation in automated link exchange program however does not completely benefit users. These are only beneficial for the webmasters who game the whole system. And if despite of abiding to some strict rules, search engines are still gamed, they will lose their usefulness.

When a top notch employee of Microsoft gives a shady advice like semi black hat SEO, it clarifies the doubt that why Live search has yet not been successful in producing good results.

After identifying the mistake made by him in first post, Skip Chilcott came out with another post. For this, he took advice from colleagues over at Live Search. He made them share some expert advice about linking best practices.

Possible White Hat, which are Link Exchange

• The links that assist users in finding more relevant information about particular subject.
• Links, which are not meant for promotion or do not give link juice to a site that has spammy nature.
• Links that are meant for traffic and not at all for better search engine ranking.
• Links that you would also recommend to search engines due to the quality and highly informative details they offer.

There are some natural link building techniques referred by many Search Experts. These are:

• Should I Avoid Link Exchange / Link Trading Hubs? by Aaron Wall of SEObook.com
• 8 Ways to Buy Links without Buying Links written by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org
• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website written by Aaron Wall working for SEOBook.com
• The definitive link building strategy offered by Web Credible
• Five Link Building Strategies That Work by Brian Clark of Copyblogger
• Link Building Tutorial - A Complete Walkthrough written by Saad Kamal

Comments

To keep it simple, let’s look at some areas that you can change very quickly:

1. Change your title and meta descriptions for the main pages on your site. If you have never looked at them before, then this is even more important. Not only do the engines consider the title tag one of the last of the on-page factors that are still relevant, your marketing message might have changed and your site could be behind the times. I tell folks to review these areas on a quarterly basis and make sure that your messaging is on point relative to your business goals.

2. Change your level of involvement. If you are one of those folks who is completely on top of their Web site’s search marketing, then more power to you. I can safely say, however, that the overwhelming majority of site owners in the SMB space have not looked at their most important SEO factors in a very long time. SEO requires regular attention by someone in the know. It is not a "one and done" practice. Be sure you are ALWAYS involved in building new one-way inbound link partners. If your SEO efforts have been inconsistent, then it is likely that your reputation with the search engines has suffered.

3. Change your agency. Wow. I can’t believe I just said that but it is something that should be considered often. There are many client-agency relationships that slip into a catatonic state, sapping the essential creativity needed for SEO success. You have the right to demand that your agency do what YOU need for success and not get caught up in a monthly set of deliverables that are routinely spit out to meet lax contractual obligations. If you are paying for creativity, then demand it or tell your current provider to pack their bags and take a hike.

4. Change your clients. For you agency folks this may come as a shock but there are bad clients out there that drain your resources and turn unprofitable after some time. If that is the case, fire the client. What? Yup, you read that correctly. Fire the client. Agency relationships that are on auto pilot hurt both client and agency alike. If your client has been unresponsive, or unwilling to invest the resources for success, then guess who is at fault when the client complains about results. The agency will always be wrong. Avoid that by cleaning house of bad clients and looking to do good business with those who value your knowledge and time.

5. Change your attitude. This is the big one. We are in uncertain times but your attitude toward your SEO efforts should correlate directly to the level of success you have. Search engine optimization is extremely attractive in an economic downturn. Efficiency and measurability make for very wise marketing budget spending. If you go for broke now, you stand to be in or near the front of the pack when things pick back up. Expect to win.

So it’s time for change. Take control. Make some money. Smile a little. Change can be good.

Comments

How do you optimize your site for the search engines when you have hundreds of thousands of pages of content? That’s a big job and can get increasingly difficult as the days pass and more pages are created. It doesn’t have to be as difficult as it seems though.

At Pubcon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews caught up with Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International, a search engine marketing consultancy firm that specializes in global enterprise companies. They talked about some things that companies can do to simplify their search engine marketing efforts when their sites are huge. Hunt spoke a little about this at the PubCon session called "Discover Techniques Used by Enterprise-Level SEOs/SEMs", but talked a little more about it with Mike.

Companies with millions of pages often leverage all the different properties of partners they have and use them to get links. One way Bill talked about doing this is getting partners to link to specific pages instead of your homepage. He gives an example of a company like IBM sponsoring events. These event pages would have IBM logos linking to IBM.com, but what IBM could do is talk to the people running the event page and ask them to link to a more topical page instead of their homepage. If it was for a supply chain management event, they could link to a supply chain management page.

Another example would be OEM partners. You can have them link to the appropriate channel of your site instead of the homepage. The more partners you have, the bigger impact this kind or reaching out will make on your search engine marketing efforts. Bill says to just go out and see who’s linking to your homepage and simply ask them to change the link. And if they’re your partner, they’re more likely to comply.

Affiliate Issues

A large company is bound to have some affiliates, and you probably don’t want to step on any toes in cases like these. Bill suggests looking at the combination of paid and organic data that’s out there and turning off paid words if they’ve got a good organic ranking. Bill says to ask yourself "Is there cannibalization?"

When working with companies that have a lot of channel partners and brands themselves you have to understand what the cost is of having that affiliate partner, he notes.

A lot of big companies (like Intel) are starting to use "co-op dollars" or subsidize their channel partners work by saying: Here’s a list of words you can use, here’s some acceptable copy and if you use those, we’ll pay "X" percentage like they do with the Intel Inside program. It subsidizes and you get almost twice the amount of budget.

"Sit down and do the math," says Bill. Does it make sense to compete or does it make sense to subsidize? Or do you not need to do anything at all? Subsidizing your partners is a big win for them and you let them do all the heavy lifting.

Organizing Big Sites for SEO

For Big sites with many pages, Mike asked Bill for some tips to keep them organized and pointed in the right direction. Bill offered the following advice.

The first thing is to take your words and tier them (such as three tiers). Bill returns to IBM as an example of having 53 million pages. You can’t do SEO on all of those outside of using templates. Tier the words…take 100 words for example, and assign them each a page and monitor how those are doing. Use the page ranking…is it meeting the criteria or is it not? Focus on making sure those primary phrases are there.

Another big issue is whether or not you are actually getting indexed. Bill says to use XML sitemaps and run your own spider to "make sure you’re not getting trapped out."

Using templates is big though. Bill says he has clients that have hundreds of thousands of pages, but they can fit neatly into five templates. "Optimize five templates, and anything that’s built in that template is search-friendly out of the box." It’s not quite perfect, he says, but it’s about 80% there, and then you can fine-tune it. I would also add that a good amount of internal linking in large sites is probably a good idea as well.

A huge site with tons of content would appear to be a gargantuan task when it comes to SEO, and without organization, it can be just that. Considering the advice Bill Hunt has offered though, it doesn’t have to be as intimidating of a process as it appears on the surface.