I know I am in the minority here but Google is creepier to me than a nosy neighbor.

How could I have such a crazy opinion about Google?  Let me explain.

Google is tracking and recording just about every bit of personal usage data they can get.  It does not matter if you have a Google user account or not.  Even if you have never logged into Google, they have been smart enough to create a unique account to store your personal usage data.

The personal user accounts that Google maintains for every person can keep track of what computer you use, your geographic location,  what you have searched for, what websites you like to visit and much more.  They can store this data even on people who have never created a Google account and think they are using Google anonymously.

• Do you remember when you researched your child’s lice problem?  Google does

• Do you remember last Valentine’s day when you searched for some private adult items?  Google does

• Do you remember which months you search for diets aids and which ones you search for chocolate?  Google does

• Do you remember searching for a local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting?  Google does

At least with a nosy neighbor you can close your window curtains to stop them from seeing what you are doing.  It is much harder to stop Google from collecting and storing this data.  Let’s say you are going to uninstall the Google Toolbar that the factory shipped your computer with and never visit Google.com again.  It is estimated that Google’s tracking code is installed and collecting data from about 30% of all websites online.  Imagine if your nosy neighbor was collaborating with 30% of the houses on your block to track and record everything you do.

Google has a good reason to be tracking and recording this data.  MONEY!  Google can be more profitable by analyzing you and showing you more relevant ads on Google.com and the millions of websites that form their ad network.  In general I am okay with improving relevancy because it helps users and advertisers. My problem is when the pursuit of better relevancy overrules many privacy considerations.

In case you have searched for vacation home rentals and then visited an automotive website that showed you ads for vacation homes and wondered how that happened – you can likely thank Google’s Adsense program.  Or if you bought some adult diapers online and then visited a cooking recipe website and saw adult diaper ads showing, you can again thank Google for tracking your personal usage data.

As much as I enjoy adult diaper ads appearing on totally unrelated websites,  I do not feel comfortable with Google tracking personal usage data.  The risk of having just anyone see my personal information or my family’s information is creepy and scary.

How can anyone see this information?  AOL has already accidentally released the usage data on 650,000 human beings.  That information was able to be traced back to users including a retired lady in Florida who was researching some slightly embarrassing medical conditions for her friends.  Google can also make a mistake like AOL’s and release information.

Even if Google is infallible (because we all know large corporations never make mistakes),  the data is not safe because Google has already been hacked.  Google is a huge target of hackers.  I would guess that they face a hack attack about every second of everyday or about 2.6 million attempts in a month. The odds are some of these security attacks will be successful.  Recently a Chinese hacking attack was able to defeat Google’s safeguards.  The hackers accessed and downloaded information on many human activists which was supposedly being kept safe by Google.

Let’s not forget human nature – because Google does employ thousands of people with different levels of security access.  What’s stopping one of these Google employees from going to work and stealing the data to resell it.  How valuable do you think having all of this usage data for hundreds of millions of people is?  It would also be a great way for a disgruntled Google employee to hurt the company with millions of innocent individuals being stripped of their privacy.  By the way that Chinese hacking attack is suspected to have been helped by an internal Google employee.

This is not a new issue.  For over 10 years there have been many articles written about online privacy including this very informative one by search industry leader Danny Sullivan writing about Google privacy concerns in 2003.  Yet most people are still unaware or just don’t care about online privacy.

Some people may not care because Google does not intentionally attach your name to your usage data file.  With a little bit of analyzing you could probably figure quite alot of personal detail from these numbered usage data files.  Have you ever searched for your name in Google?  Or your relatives name?  Have you ever searched for directions and always used your home address?  Have you ever entered your credit card number accidentally into the search box instead of the checkout page?  All of that information has been captured.  With a bit of analyzing it would not be hard to figure out your name, home address, credit card number and possibly even your social security number or anything else you have typed into the search box either intentionally or accidentally.  That potential exposure is way creepier to me than anything my neighbor could make me feel.

What can you do? Start with being more aware.  You really do not have any privacy online.  What you do online is being recorded and the odds are good that whatever you do online will eventually be revealed. With the supercomputers that are becoming more and more common it will not be hard to analyze the “anonymous” data usage and track them back to individuals.  Happy websurfing!

Please Note – I did not want to expose Target’s flaws but I feel it is very unfair how they are being rewarded by Google at the expense of the mom & pop retailer stores.

If you have ever worked on improving a website’s ranking Google you know that there are rules you must follow.  If you break any of Google’s rules (either intentionally or accidentally) you run the risk of your website being penalized or possibly even banned from Google.  Since Google has a quasi monopoly over online search most people would never dream of doing anything that might attract the wrath of Google.  Target, one of the biggest retailers in the U.S. does not share that point of view.

Target.com is currently flooding the Google search results with millions of near identical error pages.

Why does this matter?  Because when you have a powerful site like Target.com and you start hanging millions of pages off of it you are bound to get some decent rankings regardless of how terrible your page is.  For example Target.com is currently ranking #1 for Exercise Bike Clearance.

Imagine if each page generates just one visitor each day.  We are talking millions of Google users being tricked into visiting Target.com.  Does this page really live up to Google’s rhetoric about delivering a good user experience?

Instead of Google removing these pages that are obviously error pages they instead are rewarding Target’s spam attempt with high rankings and online holiday traffic.  In case you think for one second that you should do this on your website – THINK TWICE.

Google’s algorithm gives preferential treatment to big brand websites.  Big brands have more links and more trustworthy websites referring to them.  That link popularity is quite powerful in the Google algorithm.  I am not even going to get into the quality signals that Google sees from the high level of toolbar usage coming from people visiting Target.com.  The Target.com domain has so much power in the Google algorithm they can bend the Google quality rules more than any small mom & pop website can.

Another thing to remember is that users searching on Google expect to see big brands in the search results.  If they don’t see them they think that Google is broken.  Google is in a difficult position.  They need to balance user expectation of seeing big brands in the serps while still controlling the big brands.

I just hope that something is done because Google users deserve higher quality serps &  smaller retailers deserve more equality when it comes to Google’s quality standards.

Here is a crazy idea – the better you understand search engines the you better you will be able to interact with them. I am not talking about the mathematical algorithms of the search engines I am talking in more general terms. What does the company want? What are the employees trying to achieve? What is the motivation driving them?

Before we can get all freudian and psychoanalyze this lets get clear about some things:
-Search engines are made up of many, many teams.
-Each team has many, many individuals.
-Each person is an individual with their own personal ideas

Basically search engines are just like every other company and their employees are just like you and your coworkers. Ready for my incredible wisdom? Get ready to be shocked by my “Master of the Obvious” observations.

Search Engines Care About Profit
Every search engine cares about profit and they care alot about it. When I talk about profit I am talking about the search engines wanting to make enough money to pay for the employees big obscene raises instead of having layoffs. Ideally there is enough profit left over that the company’s stock price skyrockets making the employees even more rich throught the stock options most of them signed up for. Sure there are a few search engine employees that have made their millions and no longer care alot about money but they are the tiny minority and if you keep reading you’ll see why they still care about their search engine being very profitable.

Profits Come From Traffic
To make the mountains of profits, the search engines generally need mountains and mountains of traffic that they can monetize. This traffic helps the search engines be profitable everyday which they need since they have lots of employees and lots of computers they need to pay for. You cant even imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars are needed to pay for their research and development. This is why the rich engineers who personally dont need more money care about profit – to pay for their research and other projects. For search engines to have mountains of traffic you need alot of happy customers that keep going back.

User Experience is Critical
If you want happy users to keep generating traffic on your search engine then you need to give users what they want. Imagine if people went to a search engine and searched for Disney and got porn. That search engine would have no repeat users & no traffic to monetize. Many search engine employees are incredibly sensitive to anything that potentially jeopardizes the user experience since that user experience is closely tied to profitability. Now imagine if instead of our Disney example the user searched for BMW and got an affiliate website that had no content. This experience would probably also upset the user and lead to a loss of traffic. Are you starting to understand why some search engine employees may ferociously hate low-value affiliate websites. This is also one reason why search engines have a different rule book for big brands – they need to ensure users can see the big brands that the user expects to find.

Endangering User Experience Aint Smart
Search engines recognize that the user experience leads to repeat traffic which leads to monetization which lead to profit which leads to raises. If you try to spam your way into the serps with a low value website then you are basically endangering the raises of the search engineers. Which is a very quick way to make enemies and to get your website killed. Some shortcuts make sense but trying to push low or no value websites is probably not a smart shortcut. The “churn and burn” spamming business model was great 5 years ago when the search engines were not as sophisticated. Now the search engines are much better identifying website quality signals which now take longer to generate and are much faster at burning websites that could endanger the search engine user experience. It is much smarter for your long term profit strategy to build a website with lots of quality content that the search engines will want to rank highly.

Basically What I’m Saying…
Yea I know I’m not Shakespeare and I thank you for lasting this long reading my drivel. I’m just trying to help explain why search engines do the things they do. The more that you can align your internet strategy with the search engines the easier it will be to achieve long term success. You can fight the search engines but why waste your limited resources? I would prefer to pick my battles and try to make my long term path as easy as possible.

I had a great time meeting alot of new people this week at SMX East and at Jane and Robots Summit. Several things became very apparent from my brief time stepping out of my cave and mingling with others. I noticed that newbies are still making newbie mistakes (some things will never change). More experienced people were always making newbie mistakes.

My forehead really hurts from the repeated times I smacked my forehead after listening to a semi-experienced webmaster running a profitable websites and totally misunderstanding a basic concept. One common feeling that I found was that press releases suck and are worthless for internet marketing. As you could probably tell from my blog title, I disagree with this.

I (and many of my colleagues) regularly use press releases for internet marketing and PROFIT from it.

How is this possible? Well let me first tell you how I don’t use a press release…

Simple Paid Link – If you think of a press release as simply paying $100 and getting a link then you are gonna lose money.

Ego Boost – If you are submitting press releases because you like to see your google alert for your name get triggered well congrats on seeing your name online but it is not the best way to profit online.

Generic Content Distribution – By submitting a press release for every page of your boring, crappy content you are probably creating more of a duplicate content issue than any promotion benefit. People don’t care about generic, boring, crappy content.

How should you use a press release…

Selectively Promote Best Content – Only use a press release when you have content that is interesting. I don’t care if you think its interesting or if your mom thinks your are special. If I gave your press release to 100 people waiting at a train station would more than half read past the first paragraph? Don’t worry every industry (including your boring industry – no offense to you but its probably true) has an interesting angle you can use for a press release. You just need to be creative or hire something that is creative.

Attracting Traffic Leads to Links – Technically a press release is a paid link because you are paying a submission and it will probably lead to some links but don’t think of it as paid link. Take pride in having your press release being so interesting that it gets picked up by bloggers and newspaper editors. If you focus on having a high quality press release that attracts real readers I guarantee you it will also gain backlinks. If you are only focusing on the paid link aspect you are probably pushing a low quality press release that will likely deliver low to no link benefit.

Overall you want to use a press release as a promotional tool that just happens to have a side effect of attracting links to quality content. Come up with a funny top 10 list or a useful guide for that new product in your industry. Just come up with something that has value and will be interesting to someone other than you. Otherwise just ignore this blog post and keep on ignoring the benefits that press releases can bring to your website

Technical issues are often taken for granted when people are devising their SEO plans. These technical issues can make or break your SEO plans so you should pay attention to them.

Yea I know you aren’t a technical person but you don’t need to be. Here are some easy ways any non-tech person can make sure their technical seo issues are taken care of by simply using notepad and text files.

.htaccess file
Love .htaccess files, don’t fear them. They can help you do really cool stuff.   .htaccess files are text files that simply have a weird filename of “.htaccess”. I don’t know why they have no characters to the left of the (.) but they don’t. I do know my desktop computer doesn’t like naming files that way so I name them 1.htaccess and then use my ftp program to rename them “.htaccess” once I have uploaded the file.

#1 – Deal with Canonical issues (non www. auto redirect into www.)
It generally is best to only have all of your pages appear on your site with www. or without www. in the url. This will avoid duplicate content issues. Honestly I think accidental duplicate content on your own site is generally not a big concern. I do worry alot about difussing my link popularity. Link popularity is vital to search engine rankings. I want all my links pointing to one version and not to have the value divided across two version (non www. and www). If you want your content to always automatically redirect to the www. version simply add this and of course change the domain to your own.
~~~~copy below this line~~~
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
~~~~stop copying~~~

#2 – 301 & 302 Redirects (automatically move visitors to where you want them)
Do you have a ton of backlinks pointing to a page that you deleted? You don’t need to lose that link popularity. Simply use a 301 redirect to have your web hosting computer automatically redirect your visitors browsers to the new location. 301 redirect are called permanent redirect and the search engines will transfer the link popularity. 302 redirects are for temporary redirects and will not have the same link popularity benefits. In other words use 301 and avoid 302 if you want link popularity. To add a 301 redirect just add this code to the .htaccess text file.
~~~~copy below this line~~~
redirect 301 /oldlocation http://www.newlocation.com/page1.html
redirect 301 /oldlocation2 http://www.newlocation.com/page2.html
redirect 301 /oldlocation3 http://www.newlocation.com/page3.html
~~~~stop copying~~~

Robots.txt File
This is a text file that actually uses the .txt file extenstion. Oh my how refreshing! You are so gonna rock this

#1 – Keep it simple whenever possible
You don’t even need a robots.txt file. If you don’t have one the search engines won’t be blocked from any of your content. I would suggest you at least upload a blank robots.txt file just to avoid having a ton of 404 file not found errors. You can do alot of cool things with robots.txt but many of those cool things are not officially part of the robots.txt protocol and thus will not be supported by all search engines. The most common cool thing is the wildcard feature. Using wildcards aka pattern matching in your robots.txt allows you to block files that containing a matching string of text. Google, Bing and Yahoo support it but many smaller bots don’t support it.

#2 – Touch it once, verify it twice
If you are gonna try to do anything fancy or for that matter anytime you upload a robots.txt VERIFY IT. Google has a free robots.txt validator that you can use in their webmaster central area. I can’t count how many times people have uploaded an untested robots.txt that had a typo which prevented the search engines from crawling their site and thus prevented their site from ranking in the search engine results. Don’t be lazy, be careful and always test your robots.txt after every time you touch it.

Log File
#1 – Make sure every domain is maintaining a log file of all activity.
Some cheaper hosts do not automatically turn this on. If you do not see a log file (it is basically just a text file) then ask your host to make sure it is on. I would recommend you have your log file save as much information as possible. I would strongly suggest you archive them. In case you ever have a really big SEO issue your log file will be able to provide great clues and insights that may help to solve the issue. You may not be able to make sense of all the data in the log file but you can send the file to an expert who will be able to analyze it for you. If you have no log file you have nothing to give to the expert.

#2 – Non-tech people may be scared when dealing with log files. Relax, its just a text file.
I’m sure you have used notepad before. Take a deep breath and start feeling confident because you should feel confident with dealing with a simple text file. Using notepad (or whatever program you prefer) search the log file for “301″ redirects by simply searching for the number 301 (i told you it would be easy). Make sure you don’t have a 301 pointing to another 301, that just aint good for your link juice. Also search for “302″ redirects and strongly consider switching them to 301 redirects. Search for 404 file not found errors. Those 404 errors could be leaking link juice so either upload the missing file or turn it into a 301 redirect.

Technical SEO is only intimidating if you let it be. Be confident and go do some great techincal SEO with your notepad program. This will help you to better understand the situation when you need to deal with the more serious technical issues that do require a Phd. If you ever find yourself in that position go ask Vanessa to help point you in the right direction.

Backlinks are critical to good search engine rankings.  If you don’t think so, stop reading right now and find me a profitable keyword that has a website ranking with no backlinks.    For everyone else that already knows backlinks are important to get your great content ranking in the search engines I’ll continue writing my poor excuse for a blog post.

How do you find the best backlinks for your website while avoiding the bad poisoned links?  Its called link intelligence.  If you are cheap like me you have probably only used the free backlink searches provided by the search engines.  In case you just came out of a coma Google backlink searches are worthless (Google intentionally degrades the data past the point of usefulness).  Google Webmaster Central offers decent information but only for domains you control which is not very helpful to any smart webmaster.  Yahoo however still offers usable link intelligence for the entire internet with Yahoo Site Explorer.

There are two pay-to-play link intelligence services – Linkscape from SEOMoz and Majestic SEO.  Since I am a glutton for punishment I have used my own money to test these two pay services to compare them against the free information Yahoo Site Explorer.

How Did I Test This?

I selected 9 websites that I felt would represent most webmasters.

• willsandtrustslaw.com – Local California Lawyer
• bigmexpress.com – Local New York City Fishing Boat
• schools.nyc.gov – Government Site for 1 million NYC Schoolkids
• multiplemyeloma.org – National Charity Website
• americanprisonconsultants.com – Small Consulting Business
• milliondollarhomepage.com – Viral Success Story
• seomoz.org – Established SEO Resource & Smackdown Contestant
• majesticseo.com – Newer SEO Resource & Smackdown Contestant

I ran reports on these nine websites during the month of August 2009.  It quickly became apparent that Yahoo Site Explorer, SEOMoz LinkScape & Majestic SEO do provide link intelligence but each is unique and has its own flavor.  It is a little hard to compare them to each other since they each provide slightly different data points.

Disclaimer – I personally know people at SEOMoz & Majestic.  They are nice, smart people and both companies have provided me with temporary testing accounts in the past.

Factor #1 – PRICE

Many people wouldn’t start talking price as the first factor because they aren’t cheap like me or always thinking about the return on investment.  Yahoo Site Explorer is free so it is wins the price comparison!

SEOmoz charges between $80 (up to 20 domains) and $230 (up to 125 domains) a month. If you sign up for a year you can save 20% of your membership cost. Based on my experiment with these 9 websites I found that SEOmoz cost less than Majestic. SEOmoz also has their own checkout process and credit card processing.

Majestic charges based on how much data they have for each domain & how often you want it updated (1 week up to 1 year).  The more data they have and the more updates you want, the more credits it will cost you. Each credit is one English pound (about $1.50) and they do offer bulk discounts up to 30% off. If I had wanted to see Google’s backlinks I would have needed 600 credits. Majestic is charging in English Pounds so you may have to pay a finance charge on American credit cards or VAT with European credit cards. If you are researching sites with less than 1,000 domains linking to them, then Majestic will probably be much cheaper. (ps Majestic currently uses Paypal for their checkout process). Below are the costs for 1 week updates of the nine urls I tested.

• willsandtrustslaw.com 137 linking domains – 0.50 credits
• bigmexpress.com 175 linking domains – 0.50 credits
• schools.nyc.gov 8,740 linking domains – 20 credits
• multiplemyeloma.org 5,313 linking domains – 3 credits
• americanprisonconsultants.com181 linking domains – 0.50 credits
• milliondollarhomepage.com20,201 linking domains – 25 credits
• seomoz.org 32,096 linking domains – 40 credits
• majesticseo.com 247 linking domains – 0.50 credits

Factor #2 – QUANTITY OF DATA

Majestic SEO had more than 600% data of live backlinks for the nine websites I tested when compared to SEOMoz. Your exact mileage will vary but I expect 95% of the time Majestic SEO will have more data than SEOmoz Linkscape. I am sure Yahoo Site Explorer has more data than both Majestic and Linkscape. Unfortunately Yahoo’s display limitation of 1,000 backlinks prevents them from ever winning in a size contest unless you are looking at websites with less than 1,000 links.

Majestic SEO captures and retains data on deleted links and redirected links. I couldn’t find this data in Linkscape. Since some people don’t care about deleted links and links that don’t boost search engine rankings I did not include that data in determining the size of the dataset.

I also noticed that a significant amount of the backlinks Majestic SEO reports that SEOMoz Linkscape did not report were from scraper websites and other very low quality websites. This made me feel slightly less impressed with Majestic’s huge size advantage but still very impressed.

Factor #3 – QUALITY OF DATA

It is hard to judge the quality of data especially when there are tens of thousands of links to compare. To help make this decision I decided to look at the top 5 backlinks from each source. SEOMoz Linkscape and Majestic SEO make this easy to find. For Yahoo I manually pulled out some backlinks from the first page of results. I then compared the pagerank, number of other links, and my gut feeling about the quality of each backlink.

In my opinion SEOMoz and Majestic tie for quality of backlinks. Neither of them are perfect but both of them are much better than what is publicly available from the search engines. Looking at the top backlinks for MultipleMyeloma.org, SEOMoz ranks the CharityWatch.org backlink at #8 but ranks Zentrickster at #1 which I feel is a questionable call coming from them. Majestic ranked most sites very well but they had a handful of false positive backlinks which is probably related to the timeliness issue (keep reading for more about this).

The issue of whose data quality is better could easily be debated with many, many good points for both Majestic SEO and SEOMoz’s Linkscape. Since they are both more than good enough and definitely better than what the search engines publicly provide I am calling it a tie and gonna move on.

Factor #4 – TIMELINESS OF DATA

Yahoo wins hands down. They update their search index everyday and have way more crawling power than either Linkscape or Majestic. I’m not sure exactly how often Site Explorer is updated but it seems more current than Majestic and Linkscape. If you want to see the first sign of a backlink being discovered then use Yahoo. If you don’t mind waiting up to a few weeks for a new backlink to be discovered then use Linkscape or Majestic (which is what I do).

A common issue with both Majestic and Linkscape is that sometimes they will report false positives because they haven’t revisited the page so their link reports could be slightly out of date. This seems to mostly impact websites that constantly add and remove backlinks on a daily basis (like the front page of digg.com). From my point of view this is not a big issue since most of the time you are looking for permanent links. There are not many reasons to need real time link intelligence. Also I think this will become less of an issue for both companies as they continue to expand their crawling resources and their recrawl rate improves.

In case you are wondering about the report processing time – it is fast regardless who you use. Yahoo immediately returns data when you request it. Linkscape and Majestic take literally just a few seconds to retrieve the report for any domain you request.

Factor #5 – USABILITY

The best data is useless if it is not east to access and understand. Yahoo shows little data so it is easy to have good usability. Linkscape comes in second place because there is a tiny learning curve to understanding all the information they display and the options you have for sorting.

Majestic is not terrible but it definitely deserves third place in the usability category. They provide so much information, options and countless ways to play around with the data that is honestly overwhelming. Imagine trying to drink from a firehose. I get the feeling a very smart programmer designed it to be as powerful as possible and forgot to ask for a designer to lend a guiding hand. This will probably get improved since they recently started making their website prettier.

Factor #6 – EXTRA ITEMS

I don’t want to write an ebook about this so I am just gonna spout off a list of extra items to consider.

SEOMoz provides free archive access to old reports. Majestic SEO made me pay. If you use Majestic make sure to download all the data for archival purposes.

You may have some problems recreating my backlink counts on Majestic SEO since I used some of their filters. Majestic is like a stick shift car – not as easy to use but if you want to drive a Ferrari you better learn to drive stick shift.

SEOMoz does one of the best jobs of analyzing links in the entire industry. Their MozRank and MozTrust are as good as you are going to find publicly available.

Since Majestic SEO provides reporting on deleted and no longer existing backlinks you could use it to reverse engineer a drop in traffic, rankings or maybe even some penalties.

SEOMoz includes a bunch of other tools and benefits for your monthly membership.

Whenever I beta tested and found bugs both SEOMoz and Majestic were quick to fix them. I have never had a problem or heard of a customer service problem with either company.

Factor #7 – WHAT THEY SAY

I have provided both Majestic SEO & SEOMoz Linkscape Team to preview this review so they could include their words of wisdom (and also make sure I didn’t totally misuse their tools).

Majestic Said:

I’m happy to be equated to a Ferrari that needs a stick shift!

In terms of price, we give all data on domains you control free of charge at the moment. What’s more, we provide more free stuff than Yahoo, including the ability to compare the back link history of up to five domains. This is very cool and I think unique.

Does Yahoo has more data than majestic’s back link data? We are not so sure. We started crawling four years ago and we think we have more link data than Yahoo and we are catching up with Google. We see part of our business being at an enterprise level, with big players building applications on top of an Enterprise level Link API.

This mass of data also affects out indexing updates (freshness) is indeed our greatest challenge at the moment. Expect an update very soon, but also know that we are working on this issue.

Cheers, Dixon Jones.

SEOMoz Said:

The data we provide in our tools is almost always a contextually selected subset of the data in our index. We’re trying to provide only the most relevant, actionable, and up-to-date information to our users. This means that in each context, we are going to exclude some data we think isn’t adding extra value.

Our focus since launch nine months ago has been providing the most important data to users. As you point out, we’re working hard to exclude scrapers and duplicate data, although we believe there is an overwhelming amount of these. Over the next six months we’ll take that expertise in quality and scale up.

Consider a couple of other Linkscape powered tools. These tools provide very specific, actionable information:

Comparing Link Profiles:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-index-update-visualize-data

Competitive Link Finder:

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

We do offer a much more comprehensive, deeper data service for partners. Information can be found at:

http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape#custom-reports

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/.

–Nick Gerner

My personal preference is Majestic SEO. They provide more data including deleted backlinks and they are cheaper for less competitive industries. Since I am serious about making profit online I also use Linkscape since it does a much better job estimating link juice and trust. Linkscape is a much better bargain for highly competitive keywords with huge amounts of backlink data. I strongly encourage you to try both of these services.

Using the data from Majestic & Linkscape I have boosted the rankings for several of my websites. The data even helped me find a website that I was able to get a banner ad on and now that website is a top referrer to one of my websites. I have made a good profit from both of these services.

This is a no-brainer. How much money would you gain if your website climbed one spot in the rankings? If you can gain more than $100 a month then sign up for Majestic SEO and/or Linkscape. If you can’t make a profit with this data you may want to rethink your future in SEO.

How is your e-commerce website doing? Does it seem to be stuck in Google and not ranking? You are not alone. It is simply not enough just to have an e-commerce site in order to be profitable online. You need to spend alot of time working on SEO. Even with SEO your e-commerce may still be blacklisted by Google if you make a few common mistakes.

Your e-commerce store needs to be high quality or the Google gods will forever exile you to the land of poor rankings, low traffic and no sales. I am going to assume you already know the basics of search engine optimization and that you have already done the basic work for your site. If you are still having problems ranking then check out these ways you might have accidentally signaled to poor quality to Google and got blacklisted.

Content First, E-commerce Second
When people are in a shopping mall they walk into pretty stores filled with lots of great things. Imagine seeing a store with nothing in it just 4 items on a shelf and a cash register. I think we can agree that is pretty pathetic. Is your e-commerce site making the same mistake? Do you only have product listings with no unqiue content? You should have significant content that shoppers will find interesting. Including details product listings with as much information for each item (cleaning instructions, storing tips, maintenance pictures, technical specs, tips for combining with other items, etc). This will make your e-commerce store unique and more useful than the other hundred stores all selling the same item. It will also send an important signal to Google that your site should be in the serps.

Functional On-Site Shopping Cart
Don’t assume it is working and especially don’t assume there are no problems. Make sure to check out your error log to see if there are any problems. Your cash register may work every time except when someone enters in a discount code. If you don’t test it and keep an eye on your error log you will never know this. A non-functioning shopping cart is a huge signal to Google that your e-commerce site should not be ranking. I am not even gonna mention all the sales and profits you are losing. Make sure your shopping cart is functional and on your site. Why did I say “on your site”? If you are using an off-site solution Google may confuse you for an affiliate site (especially if you are weak on content). Affiliate websites are not exactly given a helping hand by Google if you know what I mean. Make sure you avoid this potential issue which can hamper your efforts to rank well.

Return Policy & Physical Address
Is your return policy so obvious that a blind grandmother can find? A return policy is a very big signal to a quality website. If you do not have one or Google can not find it they may think your site is poor quality. The same goes for your physical address. I know many of us want to only interact online but if you are trying to do e-commerce you should make sure your have a physical address that is easily spotted on your pages. A physical address and return policy will help to increase the quality signals for your e-commerce website and avoid you getting blacklisted. Plus having your physical address appear on your page helps you to attract more local business.

What Other Quality Signals?
I could make this into a long, long, long article. But I think you get the general point that Google is looking for certain signals that they feel will generally make users happy. Here are some other quality signals that you should think about because I am too busy to explain why each of them would be a good quality signal to Google.

• Privacy Policy
• Shipping Calculator
• Customer Support
• Order Tracking
• FAQs
• User Registration

What Does It All Mean?
In case you haven’t noticed the quality signals Google are looking for, are most of the times also good for your customers. By working on these quality signals you can increase the positive quality signals Google is looking for and also likely increase your profitability by improving customer satisfaction. In case you are thinking that your particular customers would not really benefit from those items #1 you are probably wrong and #2 don’t forget this is not just about customer satisfaction. This is about making Google think you are providing a good customer experience on your e-commerce website. The more that you can make Google think your website will satisfy web users the more rankings and web traffic Google will be inclined to send your way.

PS If you are really smart you’ll have realized that mimicking these quality signals can improve the chances Google will like your affiliate websites too

Ever wonder how the search industry veterans can figure out and exploit Google updates even when Google doesn’t realize they updated something?  It is not about being lucky or being psychic.  The secret is good research.

Good research will expose the patterns in the algorithm.  Knowing these patterns you will see what is being rewarded and what is being penalized.  That information makes it much easier to create a website that Google rewards with good rankings.  How do we get this research?

Monitoring Baseline Rankings

In order to analyze the change in rankings you first need to know the starting rank positions. I recommend looking at the top 30 ranking URLs for a variety of serps.  In case you didn’t realize there are many different types of serps.  Yes Google has occasionally singled out and treated some genre of serps differently.  This is why you want to monitor  more serps then the one serp you actually care about.  The more serps you track the easier it will be to notice patterns.  Notice that I said to record the ranking URLs and not websites.  You should pay attention to the specific URLs ranking and not just the homepages.    Here are some examples that I monitor:

• Local Serps (i.e. new york flowers, 90210 florists, etc.)
• Brand Name Serps (BMW, IBM, Nintendo, etc.)
• Cutting Edge Serps (Viagra, Free Porn, Poker)
• 1st Tier Serps (New Cars, Life Insurance, Car Rental)
• 2nd Tier Serps (Custom Business Cards, Marathon Training, Bedding Sets)
• Plus many more…

Collecting Data

Once you know what URLs are ranking it is time to collect some vital statisitics.  I like to record the number of backlinks the URL has,  how many backlinks the entire site has and the general quality of the backlinks.  Does the site have backlinks from quality, relevant homepages or are the backlinks filled with ROS, off topic, blog spammed link farms.  I also pay attention to how many pages are on the site and the page layout.

Secret Tip – Collect More Data

Most new people make a mistake at this point and this is why many of them have trouble.  You are monitoring 100 serps in a variety of serp genres.  For each URL you collected a complete profile of vital statistics.  It was alot of work but you did it and now can rest easy. WRONG, you need to re-collect data regularly.  I would recommend every two weeks or once a month.  Backlinks change, websites add content and redesign their layouts.  You need to know if the rankings changed because your competition added 100 new pages of content or had their blog mentioned in Yahoo news or Google updated.  That is why you need to stay vigilant.

Correlation is not Causation

With all of this great data you should be able to notice patterns.  Good for you.  Be careful that you do not read too much into the patterns.  For example have you noticed that almost all #1 ranking websites have a copyright symbol posted on the bottom of the page.  I guess you need a copyright notice to be #1.  This is more likely just a mild case of correlation (similarities) as opposed to causation (cause and effect).  However if you notice a very weird correlation like 40 clean websites that used to be #1 last month are all now ranking at exactly position #6 then you have probably stumbled across a Google glitch.  Yes, Google makes mistakes and often they do not even realize they made a mistake and yes the position six mistake was a real situation.

Your continuous research and observations can help you to better understand the Google search updates and also alert you to changes your competition make.  Both of those pieces of information are a good way to help you boost your profits.

In case you are not a veteran of search engine optimization you may not know that your website’s link popularity is critical to high rankings on search engines.  The quantity AND quality of the links pointing to your website will help to determine if your website is #1 or #100.  Since link popularity correlates so closely to your search engine rankings it makes sense that people will do anything to boost their link popularity.  This led to people paying for links which then led to Google to penalizing paid links in order to prevent people from buying their way to #1.

Despite Google saying all paid links are bad there are several allowable paid links…

Yahoo Directory

Any directory that is #1 run by human editors, #2 you have a good chance of not being approved #3 has a relevant category, and #4 is a well established site is a good directory to pay for a submission. Technically you are paying and may get a link in return but Google does not consider this a bad paid link (according to Matt Cutts, Google Engineer).  That is because these links  rely on editorial review to ensure only quality relevant sites are listed.  99% of directories do not fall into this category and should be avoided.  For the 1% of directories you should pay to submit your site.  You’ll even get some small direct traffic.  It won’t be alot of direct traffic but it will probably still be cheaper than PPC traffic.

Give Away a Prize

Connect with your niche industry and give away a really cool prize for a good reason.  Linking to your website is not a good reason, that is simply bribery.  You are trying to generate a buzz that will then entice webmasters to write about your prize or contest on their site and thus gain you an editorial link.  For an example if you are a local florist you could run a Mother’s Day essay contest about why their mom deserves free flowers .  You will gain many interesting essays that you can post on your site (good content) and interest from your local newspaper and bloggers which will probably link to you.  All that this contest would have cost is a little time to manage the contest and a floral arrangement.

Provide Free Content

Webmasters are always looking to add relevant, quality content to their website to improve the user experience.  If you have good information that you can share then consider helping them and helping yourself.  How are you helping yourself?  By including a byline in the free article you generate a link back to your website.  If you create a poor article no one will read it and the webmaster will no longer host it on their site.  You need to make a really good article besides you want to take pride in your online reputation.  If you are a gun store think about writing articles about how to properly clean guns and offer them to hunting websites.  That way your informative article gets in front of a related audience that has a good chance of sending you some direct traffic.  You may think this is a free link but remember it is not cheap to generate high quality content.  This is definitely a link you are paying for.

Send Bloggers Free Samples

This might be considered bribery but even Google does it.  Make sure your intent is not to bribe but instead to better connect with relevant industry players.  Bribery will result in negative press (which will still generate links so its not all bad).  I am not advocating you mass mail free stuff to every blogger on the planet.  I am talking about picking the people that are informed and vocal in your industry.  By providing them free samples of your latest products you open a great channel to receive feedback.  If your new product is good then the blogger/developer/newspaper writer/forum moderator will be happy to report on your product.  It is smart business to better connect with people in your niche industry.  This is not cheap (just ask Google) but if you pick the right audience you should see a positive return on your investment.

Killer Blog Content

If you generate amazing content you will be rewarded by people referring to and linking to your website.  Years ago Bruce Clay created the search engine relationship chart that internet marketers religiously downloaded whenever it was updated.  More recent examples of great content can be found on Digg, Sphinn and other social sites.  Not every bit of content you produce will be rewarded with industry buzz and backlinks.  If you consistently produce above average and interesting content you will see people refer to you when they write or add you to their blogroll.  Be careful to not publish over the top tabloid stories.   You may be rewarded with many short term links <cough>13 yr old hires hooker</cough> but will probably upset alot of people in the long term.  Play it safe and avoid the Jerry Springer stories and focus on develop a real following of readers.  If your content is good enough to generate a following of readers it will definitely be good enough to gain links.

Quality Press Releases

Did you know that newspaper writers are constantly under pressure to produce interesting articles.  They are always seeking ideas and yes they do look at press releases.  Sometimes they even republish press releases with only minor changes.  Before you think that any press release will be successful you should take a reality check.  You need to have something important to say in press release for it to get any love.  If you do have an interesting story or ground breaking invention then definitely shout it from the roof top and use press releases to help spread the word.  A well written press release can help expose your company and gain interviews, contacts for future news articles and if you are really lucky getting your story syndicated in the national Associated Press feed.  You are more likely to be hit by lightning then get your story republished by the AP.  However a really interesting press release can generate alot of publicity that will bring in links and direct traffic.

Hire a Link Staff

In case you forgot what I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post let me remind you that good links=higher rankings.  You should be taking links very seriously and develop your own link development staff.  A good link developer can pick out the quality links from the garbage links you should avoid.  Once they identify good quality link partners they can then contact them and facilitate a link to your site.  It is not easy but it is important if you want your website to rank well.  A good link developer is worth their weight in gold.  If for nothing else an educated link developer will help you to avoid the many minefields there are, ranging from the obvious mistake of paying cash for a text link ad on a banned porn site to the less obvious mistake of having a glitch in a robots.txt file.

I didn’t bore you to death yet?  Lets wrap it up

Paying for link popularity has been happening since the first days of the internet.  You pay for your domain name and without a domain name someone can’t link to you.  What has changed is the amount and method people are paying for links.  As these examples show many of the more acceptable ways to generate links also generate direct traffic to your site.  That is not a coincidence.  The search engines work everyday to increase their sophistication to maximize relevancy in the search results.  They try very hard to distinguish editorially reviewed links from plain old advertising.  Think about how you can have people give you editorially reviewed links on quality websites and you will finding ways to improve your long term link popularity.

For most people they will get the best bang for the buck if they develop a strong relevant website and market it accordingly.  If you want to venture on the more riskier side, you can still be profitable (even obscenely profitable) but I suggest you use a domain that won’t make you cry if it is banned from the search engines and that you research the risks you are undertaking.

My friend Tim Key runs a modular homes website and every now and then asks me for advice. I always enjoy helping him because it is very interesting to see what goes on in the smaller less spammed industries. What I have more commonly found is “innocent search engine spam”.

By this I mean it is only natural that people will want their sites in Google and will try their best to achieve it. Unless you regularly spend alot of time dealing with Google it is not simple or easy to know what to do and more importantly what to avoid. Here are some examples of “innocent search engine spam” that I have found working on a new modular home blog.
Sins of the father don’t clean themselves up

I came across a modular architect’s website. This modular architect is award-winning and commonly referenced by the press and good quality inbound links. You would expect to see his site do well. It doesn’t because the company that built his site in 2003 used hidden keyword stuffing (white font on white background). How do I know this because when I noticed the hidden text I checked out the html code and there was an actual comment in the code explaining everything. Clearly by the html comments they thought they were doing what Google wanted. The site is managed by a different web firm but the offending invisible text has not been removed.
Pretty Modular Homes Stink

Experienced internet marketers know where this is going – search engines are robots that can only read and can not read pretty images or video. No matter how pretty the site is, if you only have images, video or flash animation the search engines will not show you alot of search love. I have lost count how many sites have pages of quality text hidden from the search engines because it is in flash or images.

Even “Expert” Marketers Make Mistakes

Some of the modular housing sites are doing a great job. You can tell they have put alot of work into building good content with nice usability. But even these “expertly” optimized modular home websites have issues. The most common I notice is the improper use of 301 and 302 redirects. The worst use I have ever come across was a 301 into 302 into 302 into 302 into 302 into a 301 redirect. I would be shocked if the search engines had no issue with that setup. If you think you are an expert make sure to audit your work. It is easy to build up excessive layers over the years for your website. If you audit your website yearly you should be able to identify innocent mistakes that are easy for you to fix.