In this case, I had a client that had a number of very similar pages that did not fully have the rel canonical tag fully applied as a solution. Based on Eric Enge’s interview with Duane Forrester, where Duane stated “If we are finding your pages, but not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that.” I decided to see what Bing Webmaster’s Index Explorer had indexed as “quality content” as a data point.

Bing Webmaster Indexation Stats, the spike in the middle was due to some crawl errors.

Google introduced the URL parameters settings in Webmasters Tools so you could help Google decide whether to crawl pages with a parameter. With Google this is working fairly well. Bing has recently introduced a similar feature, called “URL Normalization”. The feature is confusing, you have two choices: “Enabled” and “Disabled”. Non intuitively “Disabled” means that Bing doesn’t do any “URL normalization”, so if you want the search engine to do the normalization you enable it. What that means is not entirely clear, but the instructions on the page say “use this page to specify the parameter “abc” be ignored …” So apparently “enabled” means “ignored”. Clear? Maybe to you. It hurts my head.

So far the tools at my disposal have proven ineffectual in addressing the duplicate content in Bing’s index. Of course the search engines have the position that rel canonical is a hint, a 301 is the preference, but a 301 is not an option here.

And even more sadly, I didn’t even get to a strategy for the similar pages.

The opponents say that SOPA would give the US government the ability to completely block a website from US viewing even if just one link on that site violates copyright. It wouldn’t matter if the link was created by a user and not the site owner, blockage would still be possible. If that doesn’t bother you, this FAQ on SOPA may. No wonder sites such as reddit – which are driven by user generated content – are up in arms over this legislation and plan to go dark on January 18th as a protest.

While there is some fearmongering going on here, it is clear that the legislation is dangerous and not really in the spirit of a free and open internet that many of us expect. SOPA opponents have many valid points. While there are signs that the White House is beginning to waver in its support of the bill, we are not out of the woods yet.

Joining the SOPA blackout protest? Read this first

Many are urging webmasters to protest by posting a statement on their site or altering their site to redirect to this effective AmericanCensorship.org infographic. There are already WordPress plugins created that you can use. However before you run off and implement any of these, consider that your actions may have a negative impact on your site’s SEO. Have a read of this post: How to participate in the outage without hurting your site with Google search. Google recommends that you have your site return a 503 HTTP status code so that it knows not to spider your content that day.

It occurs to me that maybe Google should just not crawl that day?

Picture by aussiegold and published under the Flickr Creative Commons License

Today you have a lot of options you can choose from. One way to get traffic is to pay for advertising with the search engines and other networks (such as Facebook). Or instead of paying for advertising, you can focus on getting your website found when people search for a solution that your business provides. You can also attract interest with social media. In this article we are going to look at advertising using PPC and ranking using SEO.

What is PPC?

A popular way to advertise is by using PPC. PPC means Pay Per Click. Often when you search on Google or Bing – you will see “sponsored” listings at the top of the page and/or to the right. If you click on one of these sponsored links, the advertiser will pay the search engine for that click.

It isn’t a simple flat rate. The advertisers bid for placement in the listings. You would think the highest bidder would always get the first spot, but this is not always true. Google and Bing take many factors into consideration, including the quality of the ad and the site and how well it matches the searcher’s query.

What is SEO?

SEO – search engine optimization – is the art and science of getting your website to appear in the coveted top organic listings (those that appear under the sponsored listings. SEO activities include optimizing your website pages to match the keywords that searchers enter into Google and the other search engines, and also promoting your site to get other websites to link to yours.

Which is better?

It depends on the answers to the questions below:

1. What’s the competition like? The effort it takes to rank for a set of keywords can vary widely based on the market and how “niche” your keywords are. If you are a local business, using local SEO to rank for search terms that have your city name in them can be successful without a lot of effort and time. However if you want to rank for “car insurance” you will have to have a big SEO budget and time.
2. What will be your PPC spend? Competition matters in the PPC world too. Some terms (legal issues are an example) are quite expensive to bid on.
3. What’s your timeframe? To get traffic quickly, PPC will be much faster than SEO. New sites can take 3 months or more to rank consistently. You may want to consider using PPC to kick things off for your business until your SEO efforts start to pay off.
4. Are you testing? Maybe you are creating a new landing page for a product you are offering. A focused PPC test can give you a lot of information on how well your page converts. This information can help guide both SEO and PPC efforts in influencing the headline you write and the keywords you use in both your PPC campaigns and SEO efforts.
5. How do you want to target your audience? With advertising, particularly on Facebook, you can get fairly precise on who to advertise to. Google gives you the ability to select the geographic locations to advertise to. If you advertise on the display network (adsense ads) you can even choose the websites to advertise on. Facebook additionally lets you target certain demographics and interests. While you can target your SEO efforts as well, by its nature, SEO traffic will be less targeted – focusing only on the keywords used in the search query.
6. What do your competitors do? If your competitors are heavy users of advertising and their sites are not well optimized, you should ask yourself why. It might be an opportunity for you to capitalize on their oversight, but then again there might be a good reason why they are focusing their efforts in one area over the other. Keep in mind, that certain types of sites (think a lot of content) lend themselves more naturally to SEO, and others more to PPC.

Many online businesses will employ both SEO and PPC campaigns to get traffic. To answer the question, which is better? the answer is neither, it all depends on what you want to accomplish and the market you want to compete in.

So what about setting up your own domain and pointing it to your marketing system? Not a problem, for $10 or so, you buy a domain and then forward it to your marketing system URL.

This won’t cause any SEO problems for my new domain, right? Well, “it depends”.

Domain Forwarding – 301 and 302 Redirects

The simplest way to forward your domain is with a redirect. This means that when a user visits your domain, say www.mynewdomain.com, the server sends back a code to the browser that tells it to go to a new location, such as iuser.marketingsystem.com. There are two types of my website has moved codes. One is HTTP code 301 which says the new location is permanent, the other is HTTP code 302 which says the move is temporary.

If you browse SEO articles on the web you’ll see advice to always use 301 redirects to make sure that the SEO benefit passes through to the target domain. But is that really what you want here? If you are interested in building up the SEO power of your new domain, a 301 redirect will defeat that goal as it just passes all that link juice to the marketing system, which may not be what you want. A 302 might be better, although with 302s, Google will decide which URL to index, which may or may not be in your favor.

Domain Forwarding – with masking

With the redirect described above, the user will see the iuser.marketingsystem.com URL in the browser after the redirect completes. Masking, also called URL Frame, will hide the target domain from the user, keeping www.mynewdomain.com visible in the URL box in the browser. Sounds perfect, yes? Well, let’s look at what spider sees when it visits the domain. Here’s an example <frameset rows='100%, *' frameborder=no framespacing=0 border=0><frame src="http://iuser.marketingsystem.com" name=mainwindow frameborder=no framespacing=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0></frame>

This code tells the visitor that the content is all coming from the marketingsystem.com domain. The general consensus is this masking using frames are bad for SEO and most tests agree with this. Your mileage may vary. In any case, savvy users visiting with Chrome or Firefox might notice that the browser is getting a response from marketingsystem.com, specially if it is slow (Waiting on ….). So, although you can insert meta tags in the frameset code to try and optimize the “page”, this approach is not ideal either.

Name Server solution

So what’s left? Instead of forwarding the domain, you can use DNS to map the domain to the target system’s nameservers. DNS is how the internet determines where your website is actually hosted, it translates the domain name to an IP address. By pointing to the marketing system nameservers you are transferring that translation process to the marketing system which will figure out what files to show your web visitor. Since in this we are trying to build the SEO value of our domain rather than the marketing system URL, this is a better approach than redirecting or forwarding with masking.

There are a couple of drawbacks however. One is that if both domains get indexed, Google may consider this duplicate content. You want to avoid having any links go directly to your marketing system URL. Also, as much as you can, customize the marketing system website. If your website looks like a hundred others, it will be harder to get it to rank highly.

Bill Slawski, who writes the frequently referenced SEO by the Sea blog, gleans insights on what the search engines might be up to by studying the whitepapers and patents published by Google’s and Microsoft’s engineers. In the interview, he theorizes that “Panda may be a filter … where some web sites are promoted and other web sites are demoted based upon some type of quality signal score” that was placed on top of the existing algorithm.

Rand Fishkin, co-founder of seomoz.org, thinks this quality score was based on work done by human quality raters, and “in combination with machine learning algorithms, Google is using the aggregated opinions to filter and reorder the results for a better user experience”.

At this point, some of you might be putting your hands up and saying “umm, translation please”.

Let’s start with a blog post from Google itself that outlines a series of questions that a human might use to rate a site’s quality. As Rand points out in the interview Google has a stable of human raters that look at sites and rates the quality. In the past Google had used the aggregated opinions of these raters as a data point, but apparently with Panda it is more aggressively using the data to actually impact where the site ranks in the search engine results.

How is this done? Well it’s truly rocket science, but the ratings by the humans is used as a reference point to judge the quality of the sites that Google crawls. Google also has the capacity to “learn” from the process, getting additional ongoing feedback from the raters and the new site blocking extension you can install into Chrome and Firefox. As the interviews also point out, Google is increasingly also using a number of “engagement” signals that track user behavior with sites that give it clues on whether visitors like the site’s content or abandon it quickly. This all takes a lot of compute power and sophisticated processing and the whitepapers that Bill was pointing to show that Google has developed this.

So what does this all mean?

• Panda is the start of a new approach by Google, it’s no longer not just about the number of backlinks and how well your site’s content aligns with the search query. Those things still matter but are now are not the only game in town.
• Even if your site has great backlinks and is well optimized, if it doesn’t pass the “quality sniff” test it may not rank well.
• Panda was not a singular event, it is continuing to evolve in ongoing releases. For example the “block site extension” data was not used in the February Panda, but was added in a later Panda release.
• The search engines are able to read your page and figure out the segments of it, for example what part are ads, what part is navigation, what part is content.
• Unique content (and I don’t mean rehashed, spun articles) matters more than ever.
• Design of your web site matters, a user’s experience with your site matters.

Eric Enge interviews Rand Fishkin

Eric Enge interviews Bill Slawski

• Keyword Research – determining the keywords used in queries for your niche.
• Site architecture analysis – Is your site easily crawled by the spiders? Are your important pages easily reached? Or do you have a lot of duplicate content? Is your navigational links obscured by javascript? Do your images have alt tags?
• Page optimization – Updating your page titles and H1 tags to be keyword rich.

• Make sure you are not listed as a partner or sponsor on a site.
• Ideally the sites with your link should be relevant to your niche
• Does the website have a quality feel to it? Or does it seem to add no value?

It looks so innocent ....
Flickr Image by TheBrassPotato

From the Huffington Post, to the Wired Interview with Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, to every SEO pundit; there is no shortage of reading you can do about Panda. So instead of getting into the weeds like everyone else, I’ll write about it from a more overview perspective for the non-search geek.

For steps to take, check out my guest post on Panda.

What was Panda?

Google is constantly making changes to its algorithms it uses to create the search results you get when you type in a query. Most of these changes are not noticeable. But every so often a big change comes along that people notice, especially the webmasters when they look at their traffic stats and see a drop. Google estimated that almost 12% of search queries were affected when Panda rolled out its US only February 24th debut (it has since been expanded to the UK and other countries).

Why all the noise?

Panda was a big deal in many ways. First of all in its impact. Due to the huge loss of traffic at some websites, people actually lost their jobs. Others had to change their operating procedures (check out the new guidelines at ezinearticles), and still others went on a massive pruning / adjusting exercise to address the pages apparently causing a problem and dragging the website down.

The other big deal, is that Panda is a shift in Googlethink (if that is actually a word). This is an oversimplification, but historically the Google algorithm has been using incoming links (called backlinks) to a website to measure how important that website is; especially if those links that were from an “important” high PR (page rank) site. However this approach tended to favor big, we cover everything, websites over smaller sites that had great content but not as developed backlink profile. Sites that did well in promotion (gathering those backlinks) floated to the top of the search results, but their content wasn’t always the greatest. So people had been complaining for a while about this. Panda was an effort by Google to make page quality more important when determining what to show in the search results. It still looks at backlinks to a site, and the on page optimization (ie. page titles), but now page quality is a factor too. A lot of the discussion on Panda has centered on what is exactly meant by page quality. It’s not just original, high value content, design and ad placement seem to matter too.

Who was impacted?

A lot of the large “content farms” and article directories were hit. And a number of ecommerce sites with “thin” content were affected as well. Ecommerce websites have unique SEO problems in this area, especially those with large catalogs. It’s a lot of work to write unique & fresh descriptions for each product, and many ecommerce websites just show the manufacturer’s description which just looks like scraped content to Google. Most active blogs were not impacted.

• SEOMoz’s March Winners and Losers Post
• International Winners and Losers from the Global English Rollout