EzSEO Newsletter # 84
July 3, 2005 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 84
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Google Report Analyzed
2. New Experiment – Unleashing the Power of Articles
3. A useful site
4. Other Stuff
Hi again
In the last couple of weeks, a confidential report apparently written by Google, “leaked out”. This report is causing sleepless nights for a lot of affiliate marketers, but today, we will look at what it means, and how you can ensure your affiliate sites don’t disappear.
Whenever I talk about Google, and their guidelines, I always get a handful of emails from people telling me that “Google is not God”, and “Why should we take any notice of what Google want?”, or “Who do you think you are telling us what we should and should not do for Google”, etc, etc. If you intend to write to me to tell me something like that, don’t. The answer is simple. We may not always like what Google does, but if you want your pages to do well in Google, you have to play by THEIR rules.
Also in today’s newsletter, after an initial success with Article Announcer, I will tell you all about my next experiment with this tool, and the initial results I have seen.
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1. Google Report Analyzed
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Here is the report:
http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc
(If you get asked for a username and password, just cancel, and the document should show up).
Some have called it a hoax, others have seen it as the end of affiliate marketing, but if you actually read this report, you will hopefully see what I see:
(a) Affiliate sites are here to stay
(b) If you do things right, you will end up with less competition from other affiliate marketers (since so many will ignore this report).
This report was apparently given out to people chosen to work for “Google’s spam department” as “Raters” – maybe they should be called ratters ;o). That’s right, Google apparently has hired people around the world to do web searches, look at the results in Google, and identify those sites that Google considers Spam.
With Google doing such weird stuff lately, and some affiliate sites disappearing without trace, things are starting to make sense.
This “leaked” report details what the raters should look out for, what to label as spam, and what not to label as spam. I am sure that you agree, whether this document is real or not, it is certainly something we should all look at carefully.
Below, I have highlighted the main points of the report. I hope to show you exactly what you need to do to stay on the right side of these “Raters” and of course Google itself.
Before we begin, I just want to say that I don’t think any of this is new. I think that what Google is trying to achieve here is what they have always tried to achieve – relevant results without spam. I think that Google’s filters only go so far, and Google realise this. There is nothing as reliable as a human for determining quality, so hiring people to search out spam was the next logical step forward.
OK, let’s look the main points.
(a) the first thing Google instructs its raters to do is read and learn the Google Webmaster Guidelines. We looked at these in detail in Newsletter #79.
Google have told their raters to pay particular attention to:
(a) “The distinction between pages designed for human viewers and those set up for search engine robots”
and
(b) “The specific enumerated manipulative techniques for which sites may be ‘punished’ by Google”
You can see a lot of pages in Google’s index that have been setup purely for search engine robots, or pages that are designed to do nothing more than increase your rankings of other pages.
These are typically pages that hold no interest to human visitors, and are merely there to either manipulate your own rankings, or make revenue from Asense (or affiliate programs).
Techniques here might include “hidden text”, keyword stuffing, pages containing search engine results (like TE pages), pages that only contain RSS feeds and little else, cloaked pages and doorway pages.
If your page is not interesting for a visitor, and is only setup to get Adsense clicks, or boost rankings of other pages, then these are the pages Google considers spam.
Do this test:
Remove all income generating code from a page (Adsense, affiliate links etc).
Then ask yourself this:
“Is this page still of value to a human visitor?”
If you truthfully answer yes, then you are OK. If you answer no, then that page would be considered spam by a rater.
Google goes on to highlight several common spam techniques. Here they are:
Spam technique 1 – Sneaky redirects.
Have you ever clicked on a search result in Google, but the URL you end up at is not the one listed in Google’s results? = SNEAKY REDIRECT.
Similarly, if you click on a link on a website and it takes you to a URL that is not the one referenced by the link = SNEAKY REDIRECT.
Not all redirects are sneaky. Some are there for good reason and don’t try to deceive your visitors. Examples of this might include using your .htaccess file to redirect to affiliate links. This technique is widely used to hide affiliate links from visitors, or make URLs shorter and easier to remember. I doubt Google would include this as a sneaky redirect. Another safe type of redirect is a 301 redirect typically used to move a site from one domain to another.
If your redirect is not there to deceive your visitor, then it is probably OK.
**
Spam Technique 2 – 100% Frame.
This technique is a form of cloaking. On clicking a link in Google’s search results, the page you are taken to has the URL of the page you expect, but a frame is used to show the contents of a completely different page.
The result is that Google’s spider indexes and ranks the original page, but the page shown to visitors is a different one.
This is spam.
**
Spam technique 3 – Hidden Text / Hidden Links
Invisible text is easily done. Create the text or links in the same colour as the background colour. To the visitor, that text is invisible. To the search engine spiders that see only the raw HTML, they are there.
Often these can be spotted when you visit a web page by using the keyboard combination CTRL + A. This selects all text on the page, and hidden text can then be seen as they are highlighted by the browser.
Another form of hiding links is to hyperlink to a page using punctuation. e.g. linking a “.” to a webpage. Its not invisible, but it is an attempt to hide a link from the visitor.
Another forum of link hiding that I have seen is to have a phrase hyperlinked to several different documents. To the visitor, the hyperlink looks like a normal link, but move your mouse cursor along the link and you will see the address in the status bar at the bottom of your browser change to reveal different URLs for different parts of the phrase.
**
Spam technique 4 – Po.r.n on expired domains.
A technique often used by webmasters. Buying old domains with existing PR and backlinks and using that PR to get ranked well for an unrelated topic.
This relates to all niches, not just P.orn.
**
Spam technique 5 – Secondary Search Results / PPC
These are pages set up purely to collect PPC revenue without providing much relevant content of their own. e.g. Traffic Equalizer sites. For those still arguing that TE is a good tool (you are in the minority), Google specifically mentions that the pages it wants marked as spam are those that contain search results feeds, and not much else.
Google also mentions sites that have directories setup to include DMOZ listings. However, it only specifies that these should be penalised if they contain PPC advertising e.g. Adsense. Those setup without Adsense are obviously providing the visitors with a service and should be ignored (links to relevant sites in your directory is value added for your visitor).
Think about the motives for setting up a directory like this. Is it for revenue, or for visitors? If the former, Google want it marked as spam. If it is the latter, you are OK for now.
**
Spam technique 6 – Thin Affiliate Doorway pages
To cut through this section and give you a summary, Google considers affiliate pages that don’t provide useful content to the visitor as spam. e.g. a page setup purely for ushering visitors to an affiliate program is considered spam, if that page does not provide the visitor with useful information or a useful service.
Pages that add value, and are useful to the visitors even if the affiliate links were removed are OK.
What this means is that you need to provide interesting, unique content on your pages. Create a page that will really interest your visitor, and then affiliate links are OK.
Again, ask yourself this question.
“If I removed all advertising from this page, would it be useful and/or interesting to a visitor?”
If yes, your page is safe. If not, it would be marked as spam by a rater.
**
The report continues with the same sort of guidelines, but nothing new.
To Summarize this report: To keep your affiliate sites safe:
Create every single page for the visitor.
Give the visitor a useful service,
eg. review something, then provide an affiliate link. That is fine.
Do surveys on the site and provide the survey results, and your affiliate links are probably fine.
Create a page that compares prices from different sources and your page is fine.
Create a page that reviews different merchants, and helps your visitor make the correct buying decision and you are fine.
Create unique, relevant and interesting/entertaining content on your site, and the affiliate links will be fine.
Also, don’t use any technique that is only there for the search engine spider.
For your affiliate site to be safe, create a site that provides “a service” to your visitors.
Google say:
“Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of the website”
and
“Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?”
Is this last point an indication that you should have pages without affiliate links on them?
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2. New Experiment – Unleashing the Power of Articles
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Those who have followed this newsletters in the last few weeks, will know that I carried out an experiment using Jason Potash’s Article Announcer to test the claims on his sales page.
My initial results were impressive, with a large number of backlinks to my site, gained for only an hour of work.
Just to recap where we were last week, my article entitled “Why does the link page have a PR zero?”, had 440 references in Google (that was 10 days after I used the software to ubmit it to 10 article directories). I call them “references” because not all of these listing contained my entire article (and therefore did not contain that all important resource box linking back to my site). Some of these references were merely “scraper” sites, posting the headline of my article from RSS feeds supplied by the article sites.
As time goes by, these scraper sites will lose my headline from their pages as the feeds are updated with new articles. Over time, I would expect the number of references to eventually drop, as the only references eventually remaining in Google will be those sites that published the entire article on a static page.
Well, today, 17 days after I submitted my article, here are the standings:
Sunday 3rd July:
Google: 568 references
MSN: 185
Yahoo: 51
Remember, you can follow the progress of this article yourself, by typing in the title at the search engines (enclose the title in quotes).
OK, so what benefits have I seen from this article submission? Well, the ezine subscriber page has moved into the top 10 of Google for the phrase targeted in the resource box (previously is was on the second page of results).
Additionally I have seen an increase in traffic from the sites posting my article. Imagine if I could generate enough traffic from my own articles so that I was not dependent on the search engines. Has the penny dropped yet?
I decided to try another experiment. This time, I wanted to see if an article could increase my profits in a measurable way. I took an article I wrote in a previous newsletter and called it:
“How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic”
This article talks about the importance of keywords, and how I use my KRA-WT tool with Wordtracker data to find the best possible keywords to target. In the resource box of the article I included a link to my Wordtracker Tutorial which you get for subscribing to my newsletter.
I wanted to see if this article could (a) boost sales of KRA-WT, and (b) increase newsletter subscriptions.
OK, the experiment started on 29th June 2005 at 16:30 (GMT) when I started the submissions.
Searching Google for my title resulted in 0 references. The article was submitted to 71 article directories in the Article Announcer database, and took about 65 minutes to submit to all 71 (that is less than one minute per submission).
At 07:30 on Friday 1st July, I checked Google. There were 2 References to my article (both Ezine Articles).
At 07:39 on Saturday 2nd July (yesterday), that had risen to 17 references.
Today, Sunday 3rd July at 08:22, here are the results
Google – 7160 references
MSN 1856 references
Yahoo 49 references
I did not check MSN and Yahoo before the experiment (I know I should), to make sure there were no other articles by this title, but looking through the results, I see that all of those I checked were referencing my article.
Now, before you fall off your chair looking at the 7160 references in Google, have a closer look at the results. These 7160 references are all from just 10 sites. You see, a lot of article sites put links to new articles on a lot of internal pages to ensure spidering, indexing and visitors can find new articles.
Even so, for 65 minutes, and only 4 days, it is still impressive. I fully expect the number of indexed sites carrying my article to increase over the next few weeks and months. I will keep you up to date on how these numbers fluctuate in next weeks newsletter.
Even though it has only been 4 days since the initial submission, I have seen an increase in sales for KRA-WT, and an increase in the number of daily newsletter subscriptions (one day was double the baseline average of news subscribers I am use to).
It is too early to say if the increase in subscribers and sales will be significantly different from the usual numbers I get, but I will keep you updated on this.
If you are thinking of buying Article Announcer yourself, you can get a fr..ee copy of my Content Publisher if you buy Article Announcer through my link. More details of this offer can be found on the Content Publisher homepage.
Incidentally, I received an email from Jason Potash yesterday (the brains behind Article Announcer). He told me that one of the features I had requested will be added in the next few days.
That feature will allow you to enter up to three HTML resource boxes (for those article sites accepting formatted HTML in the resource box), and Article Announcer will randomly choose one of the three when it submits your article.
This feature will allow you to diversify the keyword phrases you use in your resource boxes, and even link to different pages of your site from the same article posted on different article sites. Those who have read my newsletter for some time, know the SEO emphasis I have put on using different link texts and phrases to point to pages of your site.
This application is just getting better!
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3. A useful site
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A Back Link checker for the major search engines. If you play with this tool a little, you can see clearly that Google does not show most of the actual backlinks a page has (though it does know about them).
This is an important point to remember when checking your (or your competitor’s) backlinks.
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4. Other Stuff
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Content Publisher is currently only available to those who buy Article Announcer through my link. However, the software is now ready for release (I just have to finish setting up the customer site which will have video training, a forum, etc). If you want to know when it is released, I recommend you sign up for the Content Publisher announcement list, as you will also be given a chance to buy it at a discount. The sign up form can be found at:
This week, the July Niche Blueprints should be released.
As you know, I release two limited edition blueprints (100 copies only) every month giving everyone who wants one, a chance to get one. If you want to be notified as soon as they are released, you can sign up for the notification list on that site.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them here online.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old affiliate marketing newsletter archives.
Have a great week!
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster@ez-search-engine-optimization.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
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