Garret French and others have recently re-started conversations concerning Social Media and marketing. Two camps of though have been proposed, which you can read more about at the links above. I myself find I am in camp 3. I, unlike most web developers, began in print design, a more traditional marketing medium.

Camp 3 is simply this:
Social media was once the truest form of online journalism/news/sluething/diaries/etc available. Drudge being a great example. Fark.com still being one of the truest sites out there. Big time marketers saw potential in social marketing(Blair Witch Project being one of the first) and decided to utilize it, no different really than product placement in movies and television. American Idol is nothing more than digg geared towards wannabe pop stars as opposed to blogs/news. If you watch American Idol(which I don’t past the embarrassing audtions), you’ll see Coco-Cola cups in front of each judge. Now, informed comsumers see two types of content simultaneously taking place. The first bit of content takes place via the judges, contestants, interviews and montages. The second piece are the product placements. Now, no one feels that the product placements taint the other content on the show, they simply co-exist. No one would be disappointed to find out Simon is really drinking coffee, Randy is drinking Pepsi and Paula is drinking liquid Valium. We understand why the cups are there and their intentions and we are not alarmed, offended or tricked by this.

Now, online social media is no different. We, as consumers and average Joe’s, understand what is taking place online. We don’t get our shackles up(sorry, a southern colloquialism for getting upset) over the corporate placements within any social media. SNL post clips online. Does it bother us? No we understand it is there as both an advertisement for the show and for our enjoyment. Fortune 500 companies pay employees to maintain corporate blogs and they have discretion over what is posted like wartime morale officers comming down on Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. Does this bother us? No, we take it for what its worth and move on.

Garrett is an old friend of mine, his post is worth the read as most of his client base resembles mine. Neither one of use are going to land a big Nike or Sony or Microsoft contract anytime soon. And thats great with us, we’re not going to get our shackles up.

I recently came across an article written by Jim Boykin that covered what a links page should not look like and I have to admit that I have a few of those on my site.

He points out the blatantly obvious attempt at gaming the search engines using these tired old links directories. He suggests links within content as a way of exchanging or gaining quality relevant links.

It is a good read and the basis for a restructuring of my internal link building efforts. I will be shutting down my reciprocal links directory and instead ask that if anyone wants to exchange links, perhaps they could contribute to our blog or exchange ideas via social networking.

A great deal of discussion has taken place over White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO. It’s a really old debate actually. “Should I try this new thing they call ‘Google Bombing’?” is an age old question that still pops up from time to time. Does one simply focus on proper html structure, content and a solid link foundation? Should I tempt fate and try the newest cloaking technique I just read about? What about this request for a link exchange? Am I getting involved in an honest link exchange or am I’m getting involved with some low life making a fortune off of link farms?

Truth be told, most sites employ some sort of mixture of both tactics, often deemed Gray Hat SEO. Gray hat could be anything from a creative CSS and JavaScript combination that keeps relevant text in the top of the code yet displays it at the bottom of the page, all the way to down to a mild cloaking scheme. Have you ever heard of sIFR. To me, it is by far one of the most thoughtful, creative and under-utilized ideas available for a web designer. It allows the graphic designer and the SEO specialist to get along a little better. To be honest though, it dips its toe into the shallow end of the gray hat pool. Does that stop me from using it? Never.

So how far are we to go towards the dark side before we go full blown black hat? Do we strive for a Yoda-esque style of righteousness or do we follow Anakin’s footsteps by destroying all that is good only to ask for forgiveness once we have been banned by likes of the imperialistic Google?

At heart, I’m a philosopher and that’s how I got into web development believe it or not. A simple “if” statement isn’t a far cry from my introductory symbolic logic classes. Descartes is often referred to when talking about the first Matrix movie or incorrectly quoted as writing “I think therefore I am”, but he was also a master of deduction. His way of thinking always seems to find its way into my problem solving. I tend to strip problems, and even code, down to what I know works, assume everything else is an error (the evil genius) waiting to happen and then fix it from the ground up.

So when looking at SEO techniques, how do we decided how far we can take it? Machiavellian SEO practices are out of the question. Full blown deception and manipulation is sure fire way to get kicked out of search engine indexes everywhere. Unfortunately we all can’t be the uber-sites Nietzsche forecast. Kant would suggest we follow Google’s wishes and build a site and links as-if the web was some utopia void of corruption that is driven by a set of standards that everyone practices. Even Google doesn’t truly enforce its own standards.

Where does that leave us? Truly white or black hat practices aren’t going to achieve the success most of us desire. Most of us would benefit from floating in the gray hat practices of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. We should try to make as many parties happy as possible. We should strive for the common good. Show the search engines what they need to see and at the same time present the visitor with the information they are looking for and customer retention will rise. If you cloak your site, visitors will arrive through Yahoo, Google or MSN and realize you weren’t what they were truly searching.

Content Re-publication/Syndication

There are plenty of misconceptions out there that prevent people from truly succeeding. We offer a product called RSStatic that comes in both a free and licensed version. I’ve written about this before, but basically is publishes content on your site from RSS or other XML feeds. Once a week I get an email asking me if this will get them in trouble for having duplicate content. Then I have to explain what duplicate content is truly about. I have to explain that there is very big difference between duplicate content and content syndication. Services like moreover wouldn’t be in existence if this were the case. Google News works because of duplicate content. How many sites republish the same AP article? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

Link Building

RSStatic brings me to another point. There has been claim after claim about building links too fast. People are afraid that if too many incoming links show up out of nowhere, that they’re going to get a penalty. Search Google for ‘php forum’. As of the writing of this post, there are 376 million results. The #1 listing is phpbb.com. Most people know what it is, but if you don’t, it’s a free forum script. When you install the forum on your site, instantly you site will have a bunch of new pages with a link at the bottom pointing to http://www.phpbb.com. If you do things right and start a few forum threads to get the ball rolling, phpbb.com will suddenly have a few extra hundred incoming links. And that would just be from your site. RSStatic goes through the same process. Massive amounts of links can be directed at a site and no one gets in trouble. So to this I say, offer something free for people to put on their site. If you sell candles, offer a site counter that looks like a candle burning and make sure your link is at the bottom. If you sell a script, offer a stripped down free version. If you have some sort of online competition, offer a the code for a “Vote For Me” banner and encourage people to use it. HotorNot.com made its fortune by doing this. Paypal rose up from the shackles of eBay by implementing their buy now buttons on personal websites.

Hidden Text ,CSS and HTML Structure

This is the biggest myth out there. A talented web developer can work wonders with CSS layers and text. You can browse WebMasterWorld and WebProWorld and read the fear in people’s hearts over hiding anything. Sure, white text on a white background is going to get you nailed. But a savvy developer can work wonders hiding text and navigation for honest practical purposes. View the source on UAPB.edu and pay attention to the left hand navigation. Viewing through a browser and all you see is the top level <ul><li> structure. With the right CSS and a little javascript, you’ve hidden text from the visitor and set up a nice mouseover effect. Hidden Text? Yup. It can work and it is safe. Beyond simply hiding text is html structure. Most algorithms look at things from the top down. They assume that the closer text or the h1 tag is to the beginning of the code, the more important it must be. Those same elements might not be what you want your visitors to think is the most important. This is the beauty of layers. With the proper CSS, you can place the first paragraph of text in your code at the bottom of the visual output. You can put the last h3 tag in the code at the top of the page visually.

Google gets what it wants, your visitor gets what they want. Utilitarian SEO - As many people as possible are content. Deceptive? You bet, but aren’t you reading this because you are interested in learning a few gray hat techniques?

News of Googles latest acquisition of DoubleClick (Online Advertising Solutions) has been circulating for a few days now. What you might not know is that with that purchase, came a shiny used SEO company named Performics. Performics is a search engine Marketing company that offers services like paid search marketing and organic search engine optimization. They are the largest firm with clients like America Online, Bose, Cingular… you get the picture. It breaks down like this;

Google buys Doubleclick.
Doubleclick owns Performics.
Google keeps Performics.

So, now that Google owns one of the largest Search Engine Marketing firms in the world, will this be perceived as a conflict of interest?

I predict that Google will keep Performics and sell services to large clients wanting to rank better on their search engine. Thats what they are doing with Adwords. You pay money to show better on the serps pages, but many people overlook the paid results because they feel if they had to pay to get there, then they may not be as relevant to the search query.

So now, will we be seeing paid optimized sites sprinkled in the natural serps? If your answer is no, then you are very naive my friend.

A lot of SEM Experts are defending their craft as it comes under attack from PPC marketers and the like. The SEM crowd is launching SEO contests to show just how hard it is to rank well in the serps.

I have even written articles about using best practices page design to increase you overall seo effectiveness. I actually believed all of that too, untill just recently.

A search on Google for “website design” (without quotations) produces on average around 548,000,000 results. That is pretty stiff competition. Lately, there has been one site that has been showing up in the top 10 search results for that term and it is really baffling me. I have watched this site push down a website that I thought was a pillar of the website design community. They were always a level 10 search results company. I have also watched some other killer sites get pushed down further in the serps due to this new comer.

So, I figure I should go take a look and see what makes this site so special. I open the page from the serps and view the source code where I expect to find all of the key ingredients added just right. To my suprise, I find the following;

1. Relevant Title Tag.
2. No Description Tag.
3. No Keywords (noone really uses them anyway).
4. 22 Images and not a single alt tag.
5. No CSS Sheet because all of the style information is viewable (gasp).
6. No Headings tags to give relavance to a particular keyword.
7. A measley PR4.
8. 82 Total words in the file.
9. SEOMoz Page Strength of 3.5 (Not a major player).
10. Domain Tools SEO Text Browser SEO strength of 66%.

With all this not going for it, how the hell did it make it into the top 10 for such a competetive term? It’s all in the links folks. After looking at this site, I have to believe SEO is nothing more than leveraging well placed reciprocal links. We currently rank #7 for website design and I’ll be damned if we let this site kick us down. I might get a lot of crap for making this post, but how else can you explain it?

Most site designers tend to use relative links in internal site linking, but they should actually be using absolute links. For those who need a refresher, an absolute link is a link where the full URL is given in the link such as “a xhref=http://www.domain.com/news.cfm” whereas a relative link only provides the name of the folder/file such as “a xhref=”news.cfm” mce_href=”news.cfm” .

Now, while most people have been taught to just use relative links, it is actually not the best for both search engines and preventing people from scraping your site content. Some people tend to use relative links because the shorter code can decrease a page’s download time and decrease the amount of typing they do. However, a millisecond is about all that is saved this was as far as load time and the majority of users these days are not on a 14K dial-up anymore.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago last week there was a Q&A session that had top engineers from MSN, Google, Yahoo & Ask as well as other top figures in the SEO world. A question was posed as to which type of links were preferred, all of the search engines agreed that an absolute link is the way to go. I agree with them not just because they are the experts but because their reasoning makes sense.

People who go to a site by typing in the URL (although many people are just typing the url into a google search and then clicking the first result) may enter the www or may not (e.g. www.domain.com vs domain.com). To a user, either one makes sense as they see the pages the same. Now, when search engines crawl links they don’t want to crawl the same thing over and over again. If they crawl a link to the non www site, then every page linked from there (if it has relative links) will keep the spider on the same non www URL. Now, when they crawl through a link with the www in front of the domain - they see this as a different page and will index all pages again. Essentially they are giving each page a rank twice and crawling twice as much.

So, if you put all absolute links and a spider comes in from a link that doesn’t have the www, you will guide them back to the www pages and then only rank those pages and save them the time of crawling a site twice or more. This also stops what is called PageRank bleed - meaning that the one page gets all the juice and isn’t spread across two versions (the www & non www) of the same page. This is can actually be seen on a site (masterlink.com) if you check the PageRank of http://masterlink.com/news.cfm and http://www.masterlink.com/news.cfm. (You can use this link to check the PR of these URLs to see the difference in ranks)

Another thing that should be done is for all requests for a website without the www to be redirected to the www version of the site. So if I typed in domain.com there would be a 301 redirect to www.domain.com which is just a back up guarantee that they hit the right pages. Search engines can sometimes still get mixed up so this solves this canonicalization problem.

Now, some of this may sound crazy, I agree to an extent, but ultimately search engines drive the majority of Internet traffic so playing by their rules can only enhance the opportunity for good rankings.

-Mark B

I don’t write as much as I used to or would like too. Web development takes up most my time these days. My awesome and most humble boss takes care of most the editorial duties around here. Yet that is what inspired me to sit down and write this very article.

My boss, Jeff Phillips, has been doing some blogging on the company website concerning SEO tactics and practices we see a great deal of people overlook. We build quite a few sites and do pretty well in the search engines, but we also understand true SEO is a bunch of leg work and even more patience. That doesn’t mean we can’t advise others how to get off on the right foot and have a solid search engine friendly foundation. That has been the theme of his writing.

Back in my WebProNews days, I can remember when the Google Sandbox theory broke. Then, it went from being theory to a provable fact. Finally it just was something that site owners came to accept and plan around. As I started with C.A.D. Website Design, I can remember advising new clients that their site, worst case scenario, might not show up in Google for up to six months after we launch it. Google’s sandbox had become just part of the web development environment. Then my boss started blogging.

We don’t run our blog through Blogger. We don’t use any of the main tributaries into Google to post our articles. We don’t dump an RSS feed to Google News. We didn’t even start to ‘tag’ anything till yesterday, 12.06.06. We simply host our own PHP based blog (WordPress) on our own server. So when Jeff posted SEO Best Practices When Designing Your Website Part 2 we expected to sit on our site for a brief time before we saw it in the Google index. However, a few hours later, in came a Google Alert letting us know that very post has just been indexed. Not long after that another alert came in to notify us that a link to the article had been indexed.

How could this be? We run a program we developed called RSStatic. Basically, it will take RSS feeds and generate static pages using each item and description from a feed. Sometimes these pages would take months to get indexed. Google loves RSStatic pages, but the sandbox effect was still in play with them. I’ve known for years that Google has a heart-pounding love for blogs, but this was unprecedented.

I’ve watched over the past year as our sandbox time slowly decreased. However, I couldn’t have expected it to become non-existent. So why then, are we seeing a sandbox of hours and not days, weeks or months? It’s simple really. Have you ever heard the saying “It takes money to make money”? Google is a capitalistic search engine so with them it should be changed to “It takes rank to get rank”. We’ve seen this for years.

Some people these days like to claim PageRank is for entertainment purposes only. My guess is they say that because they don’t have any. PR plays a big part in who we link to and who we want linking to us. Any web master will tell you the same. No one wants to throw away their PR on some newbie fresh onto the scene. Conversely, those same newbies are fighting over those scraps from the well-ranked, established sites. Rank begets rank.

At first I thought it was multiple factors that led to the reduction of our sandbox. I though it was a mixture of site age, established links and an established, spam free host. But through deduction I realized our site has a lot of new incoming links. RSStatic is used on a bunch of sites and each page it creates has a link back to CADWebsiteDesign.com. I also remembered that we have recently switched host from Datapipe to Rackspace. So unless Google takes into account who the host is and not how long the site has been hosted there, that factor is null as well. That leaves us with it simply being an established site.

CADWebsiteDesign.com has been around a long time and the whole time it has been owned by a single entity (Jeff and his wife, Lucinda, are very close). Not only that but it has ranked well since I’ve worked here. I’ve seen it go from being ranked #16 for a tough term, website design, to our peak at #4. Currently we rank anywhere from 4 to 8 depending on which datacenter you hit. As I’ve seen us climb, I’ve see our sandbox dwindle. So is Google giving “props” to its favorite sites? Is it bending the rules for those who been around awhile and haven’t gotten kicked out of the club? Does it take rank to earn rank? I think it’s hard to disagree.

Google’s sandbox used to be look upon as a penalty for being a new site. We might consider re-thinking that and looking at it as compliment for being established and remaining atop the rankings. It’s like becoming a partner at a law firm. Once you’ve not only paid your dues, but done the labor to work your way up, you are granted certain privileges that the interns are left envying

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If you are a webmaster, you know what DMOZ is. If you are new to building web sites and site optimization, you will soon learn what DMOZ is. DMOZ is a human edited directory located at http://www.dmoz.org and is used to power the directory for Google.

DMOZ also powers directories for many other search engines and is provided free of charge to those search engines. A listing in DMOZ is critical for any webmaster serious about ranking well on other search engines, the most powerful being Google.

Getting a listing on DMOZ is difficult if not almost impossible. All listing submissions are reviewed by a handful of overburdened human editors. Finding the appropriate category to submit to, writing a concise title and description, and a long wait are all ingredients to a successful DMOZ submission.

It is highly speculated by the webmaster community in general that DMOZ is also very corrupt. Searches for DMOZ complaints will almost always show forums where there have been much discussion on how most of the category editors have personal websites in their category and will regularly delete submissions, change descriptions to be meaningless, and overall squelch any new submissions or their competitors submissions.

Several forums covering this topic are;

http://www.v7n.com/forums/web-directory-issues/23616-dmoz-corrupt.html

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=5999

http://richardz.blogspot.com/2005/01/corrupt-dmoz-editor.html

An excerpt from the blog above reads like this…

Sabotaging a Competitors DMOZ Listing for Fun & Profit

The Wisdom of Weeding Out the Competitors
It is imperative to join DMOZ and sabotage your competitors. No offense intended, but if you don’t join DMOZ you are ignoring a fundamental strategy for promoting your website. Your website’s viability depends on you getting into DMOZ and sabotaging every single one of your competitors. If your competitors beat you to the editorship your website will be toast faster than you can say, “Am I homeless yet?”

“My arch competitor had a dupe content subdomain that they set up for traffic overflow and I changed their dmoz listing to the subdomain with duplicate content and it slaughtered their rankings for a couple of months.

Speaking as someone with 4 years of sabotaging experience, switch their listing from www. to non-www from time-to-time. Switch them from www.example.com to www.example.com/index.html, stuff like that.”

Everybody is doing it. You should too!

I don’t care if you believe me or not. The economics is enough motivation to make it happen. Here are the most common techniques for sabotaging a competitor:

Let it be
Let the site sit in the Unreviewed Queue. Don’t edit it. Don’t touch it. Never click on the link to visit the site. Just pretend it isn’t there.

Across the universe
In the DMOZ editor dashboard you have the option to move the contributed website to a “more appropriate” category. Move it to the lowest level cat you can find, preferably a cat that is not currently edited, and one that has over sixty other websites in it. This cat must be related topically, but not really appropriate. After a year it will probably get bounced to another category and so on, and eventually end up back in your category. Wait six months or a year, then do it again.

The long and winding road
At some point you have to let in a competitor or two. Butcher the submission. Strip the title of important keywords and replace them with useless variations that nobody searches on. Mutilate the description because the last thing you want is for someone to actually click on it. A short and irrelevant description is the way to go. Don’t go overboard. It has to be defensible. When your competitor’s website reaches the end of the submission road, he or she will wish they never submitted.
AOL/TimeWarner own DMOZ and they treat it like the dollar chasing b***h it really is. And you should, too. Sabotaging your competitors is not simply about deleting their sites from the categories, but a more subtle and ongoing process of destroying their relevance for important keyword phrases.

You have to do what you have to do. The person who ranks at the top of the search engines sleeps better than the webmaster whose site is on page eighty six of the serps. Sabotaging your competitors is one way to get there.

There is a forum set up just for DMOZ editors located at http://resource-zone.com/forum/Â

A quick glance through this forum will show you quickly how frustrating it is trying to get resolution over an improper listing, or just plain old getting reviewed in a timely manner.

One of my personal experiences with the DMOZ editors on their forums is cronicled here at http://resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43425Â where I have asked for a category change.

The last comment on the forum for the request of a cat change comes from one of the site moderators and I quote…

“This isn’t the place to either request or justify category changes. You gave the benefit of your judgment when you first suggested the site. Now it’s up to the editor’s judgment.”

Like I said when I titled this blog post, still necessary, still hated. It would be refreshing to see Google quit using them all together.

I have read of a Google 30 point penalty with increasing frequency in the past 3 days. I have seen it mentioned at webmasterworld.com and Webproworld.com.

From Webmasterworld

Hello everyone, I just got my site rank #31 on its own domain name and bunch of keywords/phrases I usually watch were bumped from #1 to precisely #31. Those #2 through #10 are sort of all over the map but generally within the first 60 results. Does anyone have some experience with this? What would the respectful audience here think a most likely reason for such penalty is? What do you suggest as the best strategy to fix this? There has not been any major redesign recently, just routine adding pages here and there. Some unique, some syndicated industry-related content. Thanks for any idea or comment

From Webproworld

I need some help about my webpage http://www.manolyahotel.com/
it was number one at google when you search with ”north cyprus hotel” but it is not anymore. my site lost for a few months and now I can only see it number 30 or 31 . I hope someone help me about this. thank you

Various SEO experts that watch Google very closely propose that this could be a form of graduated penalty based on the severity of the infraction where a 30 position penalty would be the first level, a 40 position penalty being the second level and so on…How can you tell if you may be subject to this 30 Position Google Penalty?
Well, according to some posters, you would conduct a search on google for your domain name without the www or the .com/net/org, etc. If your site is listed at #31, then you may be subject to this penalty.

Who issues the penalty?
It is believed that this penalty is automated. Webmasterworld Admin Tedster said:

I’ve seen urls get a -30 and then seen that penalty removed in stages over several weeks after some condition was fixed. It sure looked automated to me. No, I can’t prove that, except to say that Matt Cutts talked about wanting to do some automated penalties with automated removal quite a while ago. And in general, Google always looks to automate wherever they can because “it scales”.

The penalty could be anything from keyword stuffing to abuse of anchor text in a shady reciprocal linking campaign.

So, you have a website, but you find that you are not getting the traffic you need to generate sales. You read an article online about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and find yourself completely lost. What are metas, how do I write an effective title, etc? You are completely overwhelmed. A few days later, you get a phone call or receive an email from a so called SEO group that can guarantee top 10 placement for keywords.

Any company that contacts you out of the blue and guarantees top 10 placement is most likely using Black Hat SEO tecniques.

Beware of statements like;

We optimize your site, creating pages that get you top positions in the search engines.
We Guarantee top 10 placement.

These so called SEO experts may be using a technique called doorway pages. A doorway page is a page created just for a search engine spider. They typically consist of jibberish sprinkled with keywords related to your service or product. These jibberish pages then re-direct to your home page when a human visitor clicks on a link to go to your site. From Matt Cutts Blog, you can see an example of such a practice here.

Another common practice of black hat seo is to promote a URL that the seo company owns to try to drive traffic to you. There is an article that covers this here.

I know this article is short and sweet, but here are a few pointers in determining if an SEO company is on the up and up.

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
• Cold calling telemarketers are just that.
• Determine if the keywords they say they can get top rankings for are not obscure keyword strings that you probably rank well for in the first place.
• Make sure they are not employing doorway pages.
• Ask them about organic SEO by building traffic naturally through well written pages and a clean link management system.