You know as soon as you go to see someone speak and you hear a speaker say “don’t tweet this” some idiots going to have it on twitter within seconds (may be the embedded command in the statement – all they hear is “tweet this”).

Anyway last Friday I was one of the Caliber ten that went to the Distilled #linklove conference – (if only some of you had paid attention to my emails you would have been there too #fail). It had a great line up of SEO folks talking about links – and not links that most SEO’s punt out (directory submissions, online PR etc) but the sort of link development that can be used to help rank businesses for short tail terms – real honey pots. TBH it wasn’t about do this and you get a result. It was here is how I think and TBH Wil Reynolds and Martin McDonald rocked. They weren’t just SEO geeks, they are the kind of inspirational people that a wannabe #SEORockStar will never be. Why? Because they do SEO – they don’t just talk about (seems to be the new curse of the industry – moron does some SEO, moron get’s a twitter feed/blog/facebook page, moron advances to being an #SEORockstar – do some bloody work please).

If you missed it there will be a proper DVD version available soon (go buy it as soon as it’s out and get your kids vested in links now so they can grow up knowing how to rock Google – my kids ten and he loves messing with Google and YouTube currently – chocolate is an inspirational force like great SEO’s).

Anyway here’s Martin’s slides from his presentation.

Courtesy of MOGmartin’s SEO Forum

1. Google Losing Pages – in the last couple of weeks I’ve seen more and more pages being ‘lost’ by Google. I had a section of one clients site dissapear (it came back) but all the same it vanished. Oh and currently my blog homepage (http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/) vanished. Google just keeps losing things which is most annoying.
2. Webmaster tools data in constant flux – I love Google Webmaster Tools (it’s got loads of nice wee things in it). But the link data is getting farcical – esp for internal links. I’ve seen pages for whole sites in the main navigation get no listing for internal links. Is like Google just decided that main navigation counts as boiler plate and is removed! I had that scary thought one night and have been trying to reconcile my head to it. Don’t think its true – more of a glitch but a glitch none the less.
3. Spammers winning the war – the advent of the Splog link scenario fills me with fear and anger at the same time. Maybe every site with a link listed on digital point should be investigated and attacked. But not just link spammers. Sites with rubbish continue to leech their homepage value into the site and outrank valuable pages. Take the Wikipedia (no link as I dislike it) ranking for almost everything – should Domain Authority really be given this much weight in the algo? i dont mean Domain Authority as expressed by SEOMoz etc (which seems more like a made up drug than cake ever could hope to be) more the internal strength and trust of a domain in itself which passes to all pages.
4. LDA the new LSI – I’m sure LDA is part of the algo in some way. It makes sense on a gut level. But the SEO love in over it is just nuts. It’s Googles fault I know but anything with a TLA which SEO’s can use is taken as Gospel, never understood, never really researched and just used as  a new way to baffle clients and make SEOs feel important. All in all a dis-spiriting pain in the ass and a refelection of the shallow depths to which SEO has stumbled. Google instant seems to be causing even more ‘research’ and inference by folks who should know better.

Oh as an aside as I’ve mentioned LDA no doubt some folks will be pinging me like mad for links from trackbacks/pingbacks. That aint going to work either. Same

Mild rant over.

One of those I’ve seen getting used more and more is to put a set of links in a div attach a JavaScript link onto the whole div so that if the user clicks you get taken to page a. Under this you place a set of links – all to the same domain with some nice anchor texts and link these back to the specific pages – so that the search engine can read and index all of the links.

UX is completely different from what SX (I just made that up but by SX I mean Search eXperience I was going to use the acronym for Search Engine eXperience but I didn’t fancy getting adult filtered). there is no way that a user can click the link – unless they have JavaScript turned off of course.

What was more kinda surprising that I’ve came across a big brand doing this – not a small company. I guess they know if Google catch ‘em nothing will happen. Too big to be banned I guess.

TBH I’m kinda impressed at this but also dissapointed if the search engines can’t algorithmically see it. Oh well. Let me know if you find any pages hosting this kinda stuff. Interested to see how widespread it is.

Anyway he’s battering up a new website all about internet marketing/SEO/links etc over at his new SEO Blog (check him out).

I hate it. It’s a serious #fail – it’s not as bad as the whole debacle between Google and China (I just linked to the Wikipedia I feel defiled but I’m in a hurry here) but it’s annoyed me.

bingoogle - Google Background Image

Sun Life Direct PPC ad with arrows on the sitelinks

Huge blue arrows next to the site links – all that is missing is a couple of large neon signs which say “CLICK HERE” in blinking text to attract even more attention. Yesterday the background colour of the top PPC ads (yellow above) had changed to pink on my machine and green on another computer! I thought I was going colour blind -apparently not.

OK back to follow CTR improvements on PPC sitelinks for a while and determine if this increases the value of these for clients.

Three folks, ten mins each to talk about a segment of a topic. Simple. Fixed length podcast (which is always good) from knowledgable folks. Anyway you can check them out over @ http://explicitweb.co.uk/.

Right back to work I toddle.

I can’t say I’m overly surprised as I had the same issues a couple of years ago (excluding the PPC hassles he seems to be accruing) – but yell stealing his brand as his research appears to show is taking the whole thing too far. Has anyone else had similar issues with Yell?

It would appear to allow the functionality to set trigger points for the website in relation to the traditional Google Analytics metrics and dimensions. It looks like it could be useful for setting indicators on pages when things are working as part of tests etc – has a change altered the bounce rate by a certain degree etc. Could also be useful for inputting monthly revenue targets and ask it to email out when a channel reaches target, or when conversion falls (useful if you’re testing a new booking engine on a website) etc.

Am away to test mes about with this for a bit and will post back any findings etc.

Cost per influence is mentioned on only 3,430 webpages (according to Google by doing a quick intext:”cost per influence” search) . And some of these date back to 2005 so its not exactly a term setting the heather alight with online conversations and interest. And to be honest I think the whole concept may be wrong.

The great love that I, and lots of businesses, have for online marketing is that its quantifiable. I make a PPC advert up I bid 10 pence of every forty people I get a sale. The sale costs me £4.00 and I make a couple of quid back as profit.  If its not profitable I do some refinement, if it’s not profitable I turn it off or keep going with it accepting that revenue generation is more important and that other high return keywords will subsidise this one. With every channel its the same – we spent ‘x’ and we got ‘y’ as our return.

By starting to bring in concepts such as “cost per influence” everything beomces fluffy. Less empirical. Not based in numbers and we’re unable to define cost and benefit. There is a link between having strong PPC and a strong SEO campaign (PPC can beomce tactical and SEO more strategic by working together). But no agency goes in and says if you spend an extra couple of quid on PPC you’re SEO will benefit due to the growth in brand equity, and this means you can cut back on your SEO investment. And why? because:

• they know they can’t prove it

They know that banner advertising will always cost you a fortune and deliver only marginal results (marginal compared to PPC, SEO, email etc). Accept it. It’s expensive: that’s why most agencies will tell you banner advertising helps with ‘branding’ – my friend colin once described “branding as the excuse you give for not making sales” and I agree whole heartedly. Measuring brand equity online is a fools errand – it can’t be quantified. And if it can’t be quantified should we really be bringing it into online marketing. Just because your brand was mentioned 20 times in one tweeting day doesn’t indiciate that your campaign worked.

Cost per influence looks remarkably like the excuses made for campaigns that were for “branding”. Online marketing is about proving causality between action and result. I’m not saying that online advertising cant have a benefit in developing brand equity etc. Rather than you should not view these kind of fluffy, unquantifiable variables as something of use to your campaign.

Online campaigns generate return,  clients invest to make returns and achieve targets. Multichannel analysis may indiciate cross campaign pollonation and benefit. But an indiciation of something is not evidence, and saying that some one came through one channel and bought on another without a clear factual basisis wrong.

Here endeth the rant for today. Feel better.