Ideas for Business

Internet Jargon is fast becoming a new language spoken by many and understood completely by few.  New acronyms, words and phrases are being added daily. It’s changing the way we speak and write (Read Article).

It’s so important to keep current and understand what’s being said.  Most likely your audience is at different levels of understanding. 

I like to include definitions wherever possible in my web writings, memos and blog postings.  In order to get our messages across we all have to learn a new language.

Here are some resources that can help:

Glossary of Internet & Web Jargon

Dictionary of Internet Terms

Understanding Computer & Internet Jargon

Internet Acronym Server 
As a baby boomer who majored in English, I studied Shakespere and the 18th Century English poets. Today my job in Internet Marketing takes me to the brave new world of Internet speak.   Can you imagine Lord Byron with a laptop? 

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear a new term.  Sometimes I laugh right out loud because old words have new meanings.  The good thing is that I can remember these terms because I find humor in them.

Here are just a few that make me smile:

Netiquette – I hope you have it!
Chips and Salsa – What time does the game start?
BLOB – Steve McQueen’s first movie or ___.
Gopher – University of Minnesota’s mascot or somebody else?
Click Farmer – I’d like to meet one.
And two old standbys:  Cookies and SPAM. – What I’m not having for lunch today unless I’m in my fallout shelter.

If you don’t know the meanings, look them up.  And next time you’re writing a blog post or an email, plug in some definitions and help promote better understanding of the Internet’s language.

Google has announced increased counter-measures will be put in place to neutralise the practice of buying links which game the ranking algorithms.

For many years webmasters and SEOs have indulged in buying links to boost the rankings of their sites in Google’s SERPs. This practice became especially prevalent as Google increased the link relevance in their ranking algorithm.

Google strikes back

On Saturday Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web Spam (and generally all-round nice guy), posted about Google’s intention to go after paid links that don’t disclose their paid status to both visitors AND search engine bots. In the post Matt gave information on how users could report paid links that are not following Google’s guidelines:

- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

This data will be used to “start testing out some new techniques we’ve got“.

And what does the SEO world think?

The response in the webmaster/SEO world has been fairly predictable - virtually everyone is up in arms. For a great mash-up see here, more good commentary here.

There seem to be a lot of people who think this will be openly abused:

The call for submissions of paid links is also fraught with problems, most obviously that of competitors sabotaging each other by buying ads for them and reporting them to Google, and secondly of just how Google expects to be able to detect paid links without access to a webmaster’s bank account.

Now if you know Google you will be aware that they really hate human intervention. Algorithmic solutions scale far better than human solutions, and it’s commonly known that Google cant apply the HR to many areas that need them.

Is this valid?

I think that Google is going to roll out something that simply turns off the juice from any link that appears to be a paid link. So if I go out and spend my hard earned money buying links to point my competitor, and then report that competitor for link buying, all that will happen is those links will no longer pass any juice. Will the competitor’s ranking drop? No. Because they will still have all the link juice that got them their rankings in the first place. Google are going to tackle the supply side rather than the demand side IMO.

As for the request to report link buying activities, well that’s really some more smoke and mirrors. Google is after the link buyers so that they can ferret out the link sellers. And if you used Google’s spam reporting feature you’ll know that those reports do not result in micro-level changes to the index. Reported sites are not (generally) removed. Instead Google uses the reports to tweak their algorithm to pick up such sites on a later run.

It’s all about scale with Google

Google doesn’t like human intervention. Plain and simple. Google prefers automation. So I think that the reports will simply be used to test and tweak whatever automated techniques Google is about to unleash.

So will I be able to sabotage my competitors with this feature? I seriously doubt it. Time will tell.

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It’s nice to see one of these big blog memes make it to Irish shores. Both Gavin and myself were tagged by one Mr Halfdeck. Gavin put up a great post, so now it’s my turn.

So why do I blog?

1. One real reason.

   I’d really love to say I blog to make the world a better place but I’ll be frank. I blog for one primary reason - to draw attention to myself so that I can earn a living. You may or may not have noticed that I don’t have a sales/brochure site, just a blog with one or two very basic pages to whore my wares (I can’t stop using the word whore since SMW007 - thanks Lar ). And thus far it’s worked incredibly well.

2. To interact with others

   The real beauty of blogs, and the reason why I always recommend that clients start blogging to achieve better SEO results, is because suddenly we can all interact via the blog. Readers can comment, respond, argue and engage. Engagement leads to links. Period.

3. It’s just so damn easy

   OK. It does take some work, but think about it - Wordpress installs in about four clicks. And I have to hand to the WP guys - it’s just such a worthy publishing platform. Easy, easy, easy, and very effective. Posting decent material does require some work, but the response you get in Point 2. above makes it all worth while. I have a lot of people to thank for that.

4. To help others

   Without insulting the profit perogative in Point 1. above, I do try to help others if I can. By publishing that help on my blog it may also be useful to someone else later on. You know those moments when you’re looking for a solution to some problem and suddenly you find it on a blog somewhere? So I put as many solutions up on my blog because information is only useful if you can access it. And there I have stumbled upon another reason why I blog. Search engines just bloody love blogs. I don’t mean normal love. I’m talking about infatuation love. Hey, I’m not complaining

5. Scrap all the above

   Here’s the real reason:

You can find that site at www.realex.ie.

Or at www.realexpayments.com if you are so inclined….

So why is Realex the real reason I blog? Well without crap sites like the Realex website I probably wouldn’t have too much to write about. You see blogs are the world’s Number #1 medium for that pastime we all love so much - the rant.

So here it is: I have a username and password to login to Realex Resource Centre. I don’t have the URL for the Resource Centre (client’s account). Do you think the site mentions Login? Anywhere?

But they do have a nice search box on each page. Search is so useful. I should know. But have you tried using the fantastic Realex site search feature? It’s really cool in a very deja-vu kind of way - no matter what you search for the result is always just a refresh of the page your searched from. No results to be found.

So there you are. That’s why I blog.

I was going to mention that I hadn’t been tagged before and then I remembered that indeed I had. And on that occasion I very rudely never responded. But I do hope that Pat has since forgiven me.

And finally here’s who I’m tagging:

1. Damien Mulley (probably one of the most interesting Irish blogers)
2. Pat Phelan (not because I ignored Pat’s earlier tag, but because I think he has fast become an authority in his niche, and I’m interested to learn what motivates him)
3. Lar Veale (OK - it’s not Lar’s blog per-se, but, again, I really am interested in what motivates business blogging)
4. Krishna De - another interesting business blogger, and I’m interested in the business side of things again.
5. Thomas Holmes - a really positive blog (the yin to my negative yang) and dual language to boot. Interesting from so many angles.

This is a great meme and I hope it spreads to more Irish blogs.

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I met Krishna De in Cork last month. She gave a fantastic presentation on marketing and leveraging the Internet to achieve your business goals. In fact, without prejudice to any of the other speakers, I found that Krishna’s topic area was of the most interest to me. Krishna also availed of my offer for a free site review. So without further ado…

KrishnaDe.com

I have to say I have always admired Krishna’s website. It is just well polished from the get-go. The homepage just speaks ‘professionalism’ to me:

If I were to find any fault it would be with the footer - I can’t easily discern between text and links. But that would just be nit-picking.

More than meets the eye

It was only when I sent in a spider that the true size of Krishna’s site became apparent. I knew that her blog has been on-line for a number of years and so expected the blog to be quite extensive. But I hadn’t expected this:

Crawler 1: 2,306 internal pages
Crawler 2: 2,604 pages (some external)

A look at Google’s index shows that Krishna’s site has a high number of pages in the supplemental index:

Pages Indexed: 1,330
Pages Supplemental: 964

That’s a particularly high proportion of supplemental:indexed pages, and to me this is the most pressing issue for Krishna.

A robots eye view

Here’s Krishna’s robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /_mm/
Disallow: /_notes/
Disallow: /_baks/
Disallow: /MMWIP/
Disallow: /audio-for/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /onlinebrand/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *.csi

When I look at some of the files that have made their way into the supplemental index I can see immediately that many should not be indexed in the first place.

HOLD PRESS - I’ve just noticed that Krishna’s site has been hacked:

Those links at the top of the page shouldn’t be there. That’s taken from Google’s cached version of the page. Here’s the original page. This type of hacking is normally carried out by altering the .htaccess file to cloak your pages for GoogleBot. Normal users are shown the second page, while Google sees the page with the links.

I’ve seen this hack a lot recently. The best medicine is to make sure that your software is up-to-date. There have been issues with Wordpress, and that’s why the Wordpress guys are very much on the ball with updates. You have to carefully check your server to see what else has been left around. The first file I would check is .htaccess, although in this case I have a feeling there may be a bit more going on.

I cant tell for sure if Krishna has fixed this. This hack might be a bit more elaborate than normal user agent sniffing. When I access the page as GoogleBot I get the clean version so the hack has either been treated, or is using a IP delivery or reverse-lookup to only cloak for the real GoogleBot. I sent Krishna a mail as soon as I found this so hopefully she already knows about it and had it patched.

Back to work…

There’s not a lot I can do while I wait to hear back from Krishna. So I’m going to go ahead with what I think Krishna should do to fix the supplemental issues.

The crawler found 2,306 resources in Krishna’s site. it also found about 100 cases of duplicate content covering about 250 pages (the homepage was accessible via 4 URLs). Most of the duplicate content came from the trailing slash problem. Krishna can solve most of this by installing a small Wordpress Plugin called Permalink Redirect.

Next step, Krishna needs to update that robots.txt file. I would add in the following to stop Google crawling certain areas of the site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /_mm/
Disallow: /_notes/
Disallow: /_baks/
Disallow: /MMWIP/
Disallow: /audio-for/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /onlinebrand/
Disallow: /learningzone/
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/plugins/
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *.csi

Soemwhere in Krishna’s blog she has linked to her plug-in directory. The result is that Google has indexed a tonne of files from her Wordpress Plug-in directory. This has two effects:

1. increases the site size, and therefore the Pagerank needed to carry each page;
2. decreases the Pagerank passed to each page as there are more internal links than needed.

So not only should Krishna remove the links to those pages, she should also make sure that the bots no longer crawl resources that shouldn’t be in the index. The two most obvious offenders I could see for low-value filler content were Learning Zone (/learningzone/) and the plug-in directory (/blog/wp-content/plugins/). So I’ve disallowed the bots from those areas.

Calendars can drive bots batty

I’ve found that dynamic calendars are very often the worst culprits for driving search engine bots around the twist. And Krishna’s site hasn’t let me down. Within the LearningZone there is a dynamic calendar. This is just one more reason to keep the bots out of there.

Permalinks

I notice that the crawler came back with a large chunk of default Wordpress page URLs. These are the URLs that look like www.mysite.com/?p=1234. Krishna must have changed over to the more SE-friendly permalink structure, but not changed all her internal links.

Although there could be quite some work involved, I think it would be useful to fix this issue. I saw some duplicate content issues due to the use of both default and permalink structures. If you are interested in the duplicate content URLs here’s the full report:

krishna-de-dupes.txt

Other thoughts

My eyes are getting a bit weary now, but there are just a couple of other thoughts on Krishna’s blog.

Internal linking can be a great way to help your pages rank well. For a start you can control the anchor text used, and anchors are what give relevancy to the linked material. Google loves anchors, so don’t use ‘click here’ or ‘look at this’ where you could use great descriptive anchors for your links.

I looked through some of Krishna’s posts and the thing that struck me was the lack of links. A great way to keep posts out of the supplemental index AND boost your internal traffic is to cross link in your posts. If you discussed something previously which is related to your current post then link to it. And use good descriptive anchor text in your links. It’s amazing how just one or two good internal links can see pages jump out of the supplemental index.

I hope Krishna has fixed this up

It’s such a pain in the rear when hackers get into your site. And it goes to show that you can never be too careful with the security of your website. Hopefully Krishna either has this sorted or soon will.

And if you want to see a great example of a blog that shows you what on-line marketing is I would strongly advise that you head over to Krishna De’s website.

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As anyone working in the SEM field can attest, our industry is one that is held to an unusually high standard of accountability.  While other means of traditional advertising and marketing have been considered necessary or automatic for so long that they are rarely evaluated based on the ROI they produce, but simply considered a form of brand awareness or public relations, online activities are often heavily scrutinized.  Perhaps it is our own fault for developing so many tracking and analytics programs.  After all, online results are only analyzed (sometimes over-analyzed) because they can be.

Because it seems that accountability for SEM activities is not likely to go away any time soon, it’s time to embrace it and view analysis as an opportunity to prove the value of online activities (and ultimately the value of you and your company) to your clients.  This can be an overwhelming task considering that many clients have never used an analytics program or even taken the time to fully calculate ROI for various marketing activities.  In many ways, it is like being handed a box of thousands of puzzle pieces and told to figure out how they fit together to make one large picture.

Fortunately, Google offers a solution for tracking online activity that is not only comprehensive, it’s free.  Anyone who has ever shopped around for analytics programs knows that it is rare to find one that is both comprehensive and inexpensive (It is not uncommon to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for a quality program.).  While Google Analytics is by no means perfect and it has frequently been criticized for understating results, I believe it is one of the most under-rated programs out there.  Once your account is set up, you are able to track how visitors found a site, how they navigated through it, calculate CPA and ROI, and ultimately determine which marketing campaigns are most effective….and did I mention it’s free?

Setting up your account to track various marketing campaigns is relatively quick and easy, with Google even providing a handy URL Builder tool.  After tagging all or your campaigns and setting up goals and funnels, you can begin to answer some of your client’s most fundamental questions:  Where is site traffic coming from?  Where are visitors abandoning the sales process?  How much is the average online sale? Which programs are producing the best ROI? 

As we all know, sometimes seeing is believing.  Google Analytics allows you to grant account and report access to various users.  This allows you to share data with clients as you see fit and give them a visual representation of the status of their campaigns.  You can tell them that X% of their conversions came from a specific campaign, but seeing that data neatly organized in easy to read charts and graphs can help drive your point home and prove the value of your efforts.

As always, there are numerous opportunities for customizing your Google Analytics program to account for different variables.  However, it has been said that marketing is “half art, half science.” That means that gathering data is only half the battle.  While it is a vital part of determining which campaigns are producing the most traffic, conversions, etc., it is up to you to draw conclusions from that data and optimize campaigns accordingly.  That is where the greatest opportunity lies to set yourself apart from the competition and prove your value to clients. 

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, Web Analytics, SEM Campaigns