I’ve long been anti-Microsoft migrating first to Linux and then to Mac OSX. I’ve been using OpenOffice since the days it was first released (remember Star Office?). I used Mozilla long before Firefox every came out and even stopped supporting some older versions of IE with Onomojo. Needless to say, Microsoft would have to do something extremely well to catch my eye and even more so to actually get me to use it.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been using Microsoft’s Bing search engine more and more lately. I feel my results are more relevant and less spammy. It seems these days 5 out of the 10 search results on Google are simply screen scrapers reposting content and dumping Google Adwords all over the place. Of course Google is going to rank those higher simply in the name of profits. They of obviously will never admit to that though but think about it. If they generally rank sites with Adwords on them higher, they can make a significant more amount of money per day. Its hard to believe any corporation would ignore that fact. Certainly, a publicly traded company is at the mercy of shareholders who are only interested in the pursuit of more profits. With that being said, Google still has to maintain credibility in its search results so the same game applies but I simply refuse to accept the idea that Google doesn’t inflate rankings of sites that use Adwords onsite. Just do a few random searches and you’ll see what I mean.

I’ve been finding that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is pulling more relevant results and less junk results than Google. I don’t have any data to back that up. Its just my general perception of the results. One thing I really like is Bing’s image search. It does an Ajax call to keep the page scrolling down so you never have to click on the next page. Hover over an image and it magnifies it some with details. All in all, Microsoft is onto something good with their Bing search engine. I think its going to be a major competitor within the next year. I’ve already noticed that I go to Bing first for some types of searches.

People are trendy. They like the latest trends and naturally migrate towards trendy sites. Bing will win more and more search traffic if Google doesn’t up their game. Google long ago stopped actually innovating and instead went into operational mode since there’s no real competition out there. They’ve just been trying to position themselves to maintain that dominance without actually bringing anything new to the table. Bing is coming out swinging. Its only been a few months since it went live and its already making converts out of long time anti-Microsoft people like myself. In my opinion, that says a lot both about the technology behind Bing and the lack of innovation from Google. Take it for what its worth.

I have numerous SEO clients and one thing that I’ve noticed in the past few months is a drastic improvement in Microsoft’s Bing search engine’s quickness to respond to on-site content changes. All my clients are performing extremely well on Microsoft’s Bing search engine first and then the others follow. Yahoo and Google seem on par with each other as far as quickness to update and in rankings in general. Yahoo does seem to occasionally throw in huge random ups and downs but on the most part its in sync with Google’s rankings for most of my clients. Bing’s results however all outperform the other search engines in terms of quickness to respond to content updates as well as its ability to maintain high rankings for new content over time.

I’m not sure what Microsoft did to their search engine when they rebranded it as Bing but it does appear to behave differently as far as rankings for my clients. Despite the low amount of traffic it sends it is positive news either way. Now if only they offered some quality free tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics it might start making some converts.

What I would personally like to see is for a top search engine to publish a detailed description for how to get them to view your site positively. They all keep it behind a black box and let the magic behind SEO consultants do the research but why? Why not just come out and explicitly say here is how to get your site ranked well. Here is what we don’t like. Here is what we do like. Then provide useful tools for optimizing your site to make it better. Offer a free set of SEO tools direct from the search engine. Then have a paid version that goes a lot deeper. I’m sure I’d have all my clients on the paid version in no time. Its not paying for rankings, its paying for the tools to get the site ranked better.

Its a whole new twist on SEO that who ever takes advantage of first might just become the next king of search.

Note: Microsoft didn’t pay me to write this but they should. They need all the positive publicity they can get.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the FTC’s recent decision to fine bloggers for not explicitly stating any compensation received for writing a blog. The FTC will now supposedly fine bloggers for writing reviews of products or services without specifying that they’ve been compensated for it. While the FTC has much bigger problems they should be dealing with like metered cell phone usage, misleading multi-year cell contracts, and software patents in general they are now focused in a direction they have absolutely no jurisdiction over. Will we now have federal blog readers employed with US tax dollars to just read blogs all day and make sure no one is writing reviews without specifying compensation for the review?

The whole logistics of enforcement of such fines is laughable in my opinion. First, what if I host my site in another country? Will these fines still apply? Second, a lot of blog sites have multiple authors with no realistic way for a site owner to ensure every writer is following the rules. Who will be responsible if a writer blogs against the rules? Finally, what will the FTC do if my site in another country and I am marketing specifically for US customer? Are they planning a great US firewall like China so they can excerpt more control over our online commerce and enforce penalties like blocking overseas sites?

Why the FTC even care? Marketing companies have been hiring bloggers to write reviews for years on sites like Pay per Post. My guess is the FTC is really less interested in protecting consumers and instead focused on brainstorming ways to help potentially generate more revenue for the US government and themselves. Its a laughable waste of tax dollars in my opinion.

NOTICE ON COMPENSATION: I received no compensation from the Wall Street Journal or the FTC for writing this blog.

Over the past few years I’ve worked with a number of different keyword tracking applications. I found that the best reports to send my clients are generated by Advanced Web Ranking. It generates nice PDFs of the keyword progress over time which is an easy to understand visual for my SEO clients. The application allows me to do a little analysis on the competition for our targeted keywords as well. Another thing that I like about the latest version of this application over others is that it allows me to schedule the tracking for all my clients so I can focus on the on-site SEO work and marketing. In addition to that, I can have the application email the reports directly to me and my clients after it finishes. The time saves of using this application over the others that I’ve tried has allowed me to really focus my attention more on improving the website ranking and analyzing the data rather than wasting so much time on simply gathering it. Advanced Web Ranking streamlines things and makes keyword rank tracking easier.

Lately, I’ve been doing more cross analysis of search engine rankings and PPC campaigns to minimize the money spent on search engine ads when we are already ranked #1. Its a waste to pay for clicks on keywords when you’re already ranked #1 for the keyword. One thing I’d like to see in future releases of this app is integration into Adwords and other PPC campaigns so I can easily see which keywords I’m paying for, in what search engine, and what their current rankings are. I’d like to be able to set a threshold ranking to turn on and off PPC ads when the search engine rankings cross a certain placement threshold. Its a time consuming process looking at all the keyword rankings and seeing which ones are in our PPC campaigns and at what CPC. That’s where I’m spending a lot of time these days with PPC management and I have yet to find a tool that does that. It would be nice if Advanced Web Ranking would include that in future releases so I can have just 1 tool that can handle all my SEO & SEM needs.

Besides the missing feature, I still use Advanced Web Rankings search engine ranking software daily to track the keyword rankings of my clients so I can give them quantitative evidence that my SEO techniques work and work well. The maintenance plan that comes with a subscription plan that keeps the search engine parses current in case the search engines change their outputs. Without the maintenance plan, when a search engine changes their search engine output it sometimes breaks the rank checking for that search engine. The maintenance plan keeps them current so you can be sure that the rankings will work for all the search engines you select. I typically use the big 3: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. MSN is basically just Bing now though. If you’re interested in more than those 3, Advanced Web Ranking includes a huge list of other search engines from around the world to choose from.

I was recently working on improving the search engine rankings of a site with lots of user generated content and noticed that users were creating 404s through bad links. The users were able to add links to other sites in their comments and such but sometimes the links were bad. Sometimes they were even local links so the search engines were effectively seeing a bunch of internal 404s from the user generated content. This was essentially defeating any seo being done elsewhere on the site and needed to be fixed quickly. My original idea was to use hpricot to scrub all the anchor tags and append a rel=”nofollow” tag to them all. I was mulling over how to write the hpricot parsing code when I found the Sanitize gem. It does exactly what I needed and saved me the hassle of writing the hpricot parsing code. The gist of it is:

[source:ruby]
Sanitize.clean(html, Sanitize::Config::BASIC)
[/source]

As an added bonus, it also can scrub out unwanted script tags and more. Now, the site won’t be nicked for having internal 404s from the user generated content since they’ll all have rel=”nofollow” on them.

The short answer is yes. Older domains get ranked better than newer domains. Its minor though and if it changes hands along the way the effect is minimized. Search engines aren’t stupid and just having a long lived domain name isn’t likely to make much of an impact on rankings unless there is some relevant content on the domain during that time. If its not used and not ranked and then you buy it, you won’t likely get too much benefit from better rankings simply because the domain is old.

It is known that the age of a domain does influence rankings but changing hands through purchasing a domain is likely to eliminate whatever minor effect that has. So the long answer is no. Older domains don’t really influence rankings as much as people like to think because you have to purchase older domains from squatters which means it changes hands. If you bought a domain years ago and tossed up a simple landing page or mini site and now you want to revisit that domain and develop it then yes it will have an advantage since you owned it for a while.

I recently got asked by a client which top level domain he should pick. His first .com choice was taken so his second pick was a .me domain. I’ve been asked this a few times so I felt I should clear up any confusion.

The only top level domains that have an influence on rankings are .edu and .gov. I have not read anything that contradicts that. The only thing I can think of that would possibly make me want to pick a .com over a .me domain would be purely from a user’s perspective and not SEO related. I think more people are willing to trust a .com or .net domain than a .me , a .biz , or another less obscure top level domain. Other than individual perception of the top level domain, there is no effect on rankings.

Many sites go through redesigns and in the process URLs change. In particular, most sites we redesign we attempt to use pretty urls that contain keywords for the page. The keywords end up bold in search results if they are in the search terms. The thinking is that the bolding of the keywords increases your CTR on search results. The problem comes when you try to figure out what to do with a site that is already ranked well and you are switching over to pretty urls. The question is whether you should let the old urls just 404 or should you go through and make 301 redirects to the new pretty urls. Here are my thoughts on it:

The search engines will see the 301 redirects and start to modify their index with the new urls. The entire site won’t be reindexed at once so for a period of time it will still think that there are current pages on the site linking to urls that then do a 301. This will negatively impact rankings. How much impact is difficult to say. As the entire site is eventually reindexed the search engines will see that the site no longer links to the old urls and the site won’t be negatively impacted. I’m guessing it’ll take 3 months to remove any negative impact. Its just an educated guess though.

The 301 redirects will also have a positive impact on rankings in that the urls will contain the relevant keywords. As the site is gradually reindexed, the search engines will start to see that there is a navigational importance to the keywords used in the links on the site. It will boost the effect of those keywords and improve how the search engines interpret the site’s internal linking structure. As a result, it will have a positive impact.

Once the site is completely reindexed and the negative impact from the 301 redirects is negligible the site will ultimate have better ranking potential than before the change since the internal linking structure has been given more weight to keywords in navigational structure.

This is all known and predictable. What we can’t be sure of is if the weight of the positive impact will balance the weight of the negative impact in the short term while the site is being reindexed. From my experience, I expect rankings to slide initially and over a three month period regain and surpass the original rankings.

If you simply ignore the current site urls and just do 404s, the search engines will start to reindex your site but will also register a bunch of 404s. This is probably going to give you a much more negative impact than you’ll get from the small decline you’ll get from doing 301s. I strongly advise doing 301 redirects and to remember that your rankings will likely drop slightly but will ultimately recover and exceed where they were before (that’s assuming there wasn’t any changes in the redesign itself that negatively effects your rankings).

I don’t think its necessary to go into the benefits of adding a blog to help market your site. Its widely accepted as an easy way to add new keyword rich pages and help out rankings. There are some questions about whether an off-site blog or an on-site blog is better for rankings. When I’m referring to an on-site blog, I’m assuming its going to be integrated into the main site we’re promoting. An off-site blog might be with a blogging service like Blogger or something similar. The off-site blog will link out to the main site we’re marketing. The thinking is that that off-site blog will generate more rankings potential for the main site because it will be a valuable incoming link to the main site. While that may be true to some extent I still prefer on-site blogs.

An off-site blog may have ranking benefits by having externals links from another site into your main site but the off-site blog will require its own link building campaign independent of the main site so it can get ranked on its own. I’m not sure its a good use of resources to have 2 link building campaigns: one for the blog and one for the mian site. One benefit of an on-site blog would be that we can use the blog pages as potential landing pages for Adwords and other PPC marketing (sure we can do that with an off-site blog but it would require another click before they get to your main site). I think you could write your on-site blog posts in a way that would make the main site an informational resource for its theme. I think the SEO benefit would be better as a
result.

Keep in mind that Google hires teams of people to visit every site in their search index and rate them. The purpose is to improve the quality of search results and get spammy looking sites out of top rankings. I believe there are so many spammy looking blogs out there that just link out to other sites that their effect is decreasing over time as a result of this manual rating. The blogs like this are labeled as thin sites and devalued in ranking once they are reviewed. I think its better to focus on getting blog content on-site that makes your main site look more like an information resource. I would shy away from the traditional blog look and feel and try to make it look more like a rich resource of information about issues related to the topic. When it gets manually reviewed, you’ll more likely get a bigger thumbs up than you’d get from a thin off-site blog.

Of course this is all just an educated guess at best so take it all with a grain of salt.

I’ve been working with one client for several months now and they are extremely pleased with the results I’ve produced for them thus far. Here is a snapshot of the monthly analytics data for the site over the past year. You can get a larger view of the graph if you click on the image.

I started working with them in July and by August you can see that their traffic more than doubled. From July to now, I’ve continued to work with the client on increasing rankings through seo, link building, and improving visitor retention. The result is that their natural organic search traffic has seen an increase almost 10 times what it was, from 1,800 to 17,000. I’m pointing this out because I like the latest Google Analytics monthly graph view. It really helps in showing trends over time and its encouraging for clients to see the upward results from my seo work.