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Celebrity Gossip

Celebrity Gossip

By now you've heard about SEOmoz's study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such as the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention - and they should. Smart SEOs look at all the factors, including those at the bottom of the list! Today we look at negative ranking factors - those SEO characteristics correlated with lower rankings - and how to avoid them.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about negative ranking factors.
Now, we talk about ranking factors a lot here at SEOmoz. Every two years SEOmoz publishes a study called the "Ranking Factors." We just published one about a month and a half ago, two months ago. The positive factors get a lot of publicity. We find things that correlate to higher rankings, and we spend a lot of our time on those.
Some of the more positive famous ranking factors that we talk about are such things as page authority, which has a 0.28 correlation to higher rankings. Now, I know we say this a lot, but I need to give my disclaimer here, that correlation does not equal causation. What this means is that when we see pages with high page authority, they are most likely associated with higher rankings. We look at thousands of search results across the website, we analyze those pages, and we try to find relationships characteristic of those pages and those higher rankings. When we find a relationship, we often say that they are positively correlated. Other elements that have positive correlation would be exact match dot com domains. So if your domain name is, say, Diamonds.com, you have a pretty good chance of ranking for diamonds - for that keyword. Also, linking root domains with partial anchor text is a 0.25 correlation. That just means the broad diversity of domains that link to you with some sort of partial anchor text, there is a pretty high correlation between that measurement and higher rankings. Now, this is what we talk about a lot.
What we don't talk a lot about is the opposite effect, the negative correlation. There are certain factors, there are certain things we find associated with web page that actually are associated with negative rankings. We don't pay a lot of attention to those, but they are actually in there in the ranking factors and they are all the way at the bottom, but they are sort of worth paying attention to, because if we can avoid these, we might be able to learn something about better ranking models and better correlations.

Domain Name Length

Starting with some simple ones, an obvious negative correlation is the domain name length, 0.07. This is kind of an obvious one. If you had a domain, Shoes.com, this tends to rank better in search results than something like Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com. Now again, correlation does not equal causation. We can think of a lot of reasons for this. For example, Shoes.com, that's probably a much older domain name. It's probably been around for 10 years, has a lot of back links going to it. Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com kind of looks a little spammy. It is probably not something that is going to earn a lot of links. By the way, if you go ahead and look at these correlation statistics, dashes actually are another negative factor. The more hyphens a domain name has, that is actually another negative correlation factor. That doesn't mean you can't use long domain names. It just means they tend to not do as well from what we observed.

Response Time

Kind of a controversial one here - response time. We love drawing small pictures of animals here on Whiteboard Friday, so here is our tortoise and our hare. 0.05. Now, we don't really know what this is. There is a lot of debate in the SEO world if slower web pages, slower servers cause lower rankings. We don't really have a lot of data on that. We don't really have a definite answer. What we can see from the correlation, this isn't a huge correlation, but we see that these pages tend to rank a little lower than others. We know that faster websites, faster response times present a better user experience. If you have a slow site, it is definitely worth looking into.

AdSense

Now here is a surprising one. There are a lot of people, getting new into SEO, they think that if you use Google services, such as installing Google Analytics on your site or putting AdSense on your site, that Google tends to favor those websites and that you'll rank higher. Correlation data shows exactly the opposite. Google AdSense slots correlated with lower rankings, 0.06. So website A here, if it has all these AdSense, and you've seen these pages - you click on them and they are filled with AdSense - they tend to not rank as well as pages with fewer AdSense slots. Another thing is the number of pixels. So, not only the amount of slots you have, but the pure amount of volume, of space on your website that is taken up by AdSense, we see those associated with lower rankings. Again, doesn't necessarily cause it, but that's what we see. As a user, if you think about it, which page would you rather link to? Both things being equal, I'd much rather link to that page. So it makes sense.

Percent of Followed Linking Pages

The most surprising result of this year's correlation data was the percent of followed linking pages. This requires a little bit of explanation. This means that if all your links pointing towards your domain are followed, we tend to see those sites ranking a little lower. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense off the get-go. You'd think if all your links were followed, you'd just be great in rankings. But think of domain diversity. Sites that rank well tend to have a lot of sites linking to them. They have sites like Wikipedia that have no followed links, citations no followed links. In general, they have a diverse link profile, whereas spammier sites, smaller sites, newer sites, they are going after those links. They have to work very hard for each one of them, and their diversity is not as great.
These are only a few of the negative ranking factors that you'll find in this year's 2011 SEOmoz Ranking Factors. You can dig into it. We'll link to it in the bottom of this post and Explore Your Own. It's worth looking into all of them. You can learn so much SEO. I love to hear your comments. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Celebrity Gossip

Recently Firefox automatically updated to version 5, and with that update came a nightmarish scenario: virtually every Firefox SEO add-on suddenly ceased to function.

By now many of these add-ons have been repaired, but at the time I was rescued by a side project of mine – a portable SEO Browser designed to run from a thumbdrive, complete with all my favorite tools and SEO gizmos. I've been meaning to share this idea with the Moz community for some time, and in the light of the morning's Firefox add-on debacle, I think there's no time like the present:

I call her 'SEOfox'

Of course, saving myself from a Firefox update wasn't the intended purpose of my SEO thumbdrive, the original idea was to have browser full of SEO tools I could carry around with me at all times. That way whenever a friend or acquaintance asks me to take a quick 'look at their SEO' I'd have a full array of tools at my disposal, rather than just their blank browser.

Side Note: Do you get asked to examine websites at parties too, or is that just me?

As it turns out, there are several other benefits to a portable SEO browser:

1. It can be used on a desktop/laptop as a separate install of Firefox, so you can keep a clean main install for your browsing pleasure. (I'm a Chrome man myself, but plenty of folks use FF.)
2. You can drop a copy on someone's desktop - fully configured and ready to go. (Incredibly helpful for getting new employees up to speed, or helping an SEO newbies help themselves.)
3. You maintain direct control over updates, so you'll never accidentally outdate your SEO add-ons.

If you're interested in setting up your very own portable SEO Browser, you will need:

* A Thumbdrive with at least 250 Mb capacity.
(I love my Patriot Xporter XT although it's admittedly not the sleekest drive on the market.)
* Access to both a PC and a Mac.
* About 30 minutes of time.

Many of you already have these items, so let's get started.

PC Installation

1. Plug your Thumbdrive into a PC you have access to.
2. Download and Install Firefox Portable.
The core component of the SEO Thumbdrive is Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition, a PC-only version of Firefox designed to be run from (you guessed it) a portable device. Firefox Portable lets you carry all your SEO extensions and bookmarks with you, while leaving no personal information behind on the machine you run it on. Download the Firefox Portable installer, and then install it directly onto your thumb drive, ideally in a folder marked “PC” or “Widows” to keep it separate from the Mac installation to follow.

3. Launch Firefox Portable and Install Your Favorite SEO Add-ons
Because every plugin you install in Firefox Portable will be carried with you, and you won't be using it for normal browsing, there's no reason to go light on the number of add-ons you install (save personal taste). There are a lot of spectacular SEO add-ons out there, here are a few of my favorites:
* Firebug - Absolutely vital for examining/debugging technical SEO issues.
* FlashBlock – Ultra-simple flash blocking with one-click reactivation.
* Web Developer - Lets you disable Javascript, Cookies, Images and CSS to see a site the way spiders do (plus dozens of advanced features more relevant to web developers).
* MozBar - The SEOmoz toolbar – PageAuthority, DomainAuthority, direct interface with Open Site Explorer, and more nifty functions than you can shake a stick at.
* Google Toolbar - Get PageRank straight from the source, and you can turn off pretty much all the other functions.
* User Agent Switcher - The next best way to pose as a searchbot if you're not using MozBar.
* RankChecker - A tool by Aaron Wall, very handy for quick low-volume ranking checks. (Requires registration to download)
* SEO For Firefox - Another tool by Aaron Wall, I mostly leave this one turned off, but the SEO XRay functionality can be quite useful (Requires registration to download)
4. Customize Toolbar Layouts (Optional)
All those plugins you just installed probably made a huge mess of your Firefox Portable browser window, luckily the visual formats of most of these tools are fairly malleable!

* Right-click in the toolbar area and select "Customize…"
* From here you can reorder all your add-ons, move buttons around, and even hide functions you don't need by dragging them to the “Customize Toolbar” window.
* If you're feeling advanced, you can even play with the "space" and "flexible space" options to beautify your layout.
* Consolidate your chosen features into as few menu bars as possible, and hide the rest.
5. Install Additional SEO Tools
Turns out many SEO tools/programs run just fine from a thumbdrive, so you might consider rounding out your new portable toolkit by installing a few.
* Xenu's Link Sleuth (PC) - Your own personal site crawler, finds broken links, catalogs files, builds sitemaps, etc..
* Screaming Frog (Mac/PC) – An SEO influenced Xenu alternative, more robust functionality but costs 99£. (See Peter Meyers' post on Xenu vs. Screaming Frog)
Free version works fine from thumbdrive, paid version untested.
* Does your favorite SEO application run from a thumbdrive? Test it out and share results in the comments.
6. Test
Disengage your thumbdrive, take it to another PC and open your portable SEO Browser
* Make sure no instances of Firefox are currently running on the computer your thumbdrive is plugged into. If Firefox is already running, activating your SEO Browser may cause an error message or cause new windows to open in the system-based instance of Firefox, rather than your portable version.

And Voila! You now have a highly transportable SEO arsenal (besides the one you keep atop your shoulders) that you can carry with you at all times. The only thing that remains is to repeat the process on a Mac with a few subtle differences:

Mac Installation

1. Plug your Thumbdrive into a Mac you have access to
2. Download and Install Portable Firefox
For the Mac installation instead of installing Firefox Portable, you'll be installing...wait for it... Portable Firefox! (Amazing right?) Download the Portable Firefox installer, and then install it directly onto your thumb drive, ideally in a folder marked “Mac” or “Apple” to keep it separate from your PC installation.
* The installation is a bit more of a drag-and-drop than the PC version.
3. Launch Portable Firefox and Install Your Favorite SEO Add-ons
You know the deal.
* Firebug
* FlashBlock
* Web Developer
* MozBar
* Google Toolbar
* User Agent Switcher
* RankChecker
* SEO For Firefox
4. Customize Toolbar Layouts
(if you feel like it)
5. Install Additional SEO Tools
Xenu may not be an option on a Mac, but the Screaming Frog is still a viable option.
* Mac users, are there any other favorite applications that would run from a thumbdrive?
6. Test
Disengage your thumbdrive, take it to another Mac and open your portable SEO Browser.

And bam, there you have it – your personalized cross-platform ultra-transportable SEO Browser and toolkit. Anyone else need a cigarette?

P.S. In the spirit of Jason Freedman's recent article You don't get shit you don't ask for: if you enjoyed this post you can follow me on twitter at @allforJesse -- we'll chat about neat SEO things, it'll be great.

Celebrity Gossip

Celebrity Gossip

Last week, Google started showing Google profiles at the bottom of U.S. search results. This caused quite a stir among the search marketing industry and a flurry of blog posts have been written about it. As with any topic there are varying opinions on the profiles. Some feel that it is a great way to brand yourself, while others feel that Google is a bully trying to force us to hand over our personal information.

See the image below for an example of how the Google profile results displays Rand's information:

Google Profile Search Result for Rand Fishkin

Either way, I was completely unphased at first. I read a short article about it, thought "huh... interesting," but quickly went back to work (heck, it was my second week on the job!!). Not long after, I started noticing my Twitter stream was discussing the profiles more and more. Still, I hadn't even thought about creating a profile yet, why bother right?

That's when it hit me... DUH! My name is Jennifer Lopez, and nowhere, nohow was I ever going to find myself in any SERPs for any search related to Jennifer (even Jen or Jenny) Lopez. Until now! Right?! Maybe? As soon as I realized the possible potential of my profile, I stopped what I was doing and created mine. Although I didn't fill out every little detail, I did add quite a bit of information. My focus was to make sure my name was set to Jennifer Lopez, and to list all the other names I've gone by in the past in the "other names" section.

About 20 minutes after I created my Google profile, I finally started showing up at the bottom of Google search results for the terms "Jen Lopez" and "Jenny Lopez." Wow... there I was! The first of MANY poor Jen (Jenny, Jennifer) Lopez' of the world finally getting their Google debuts! [One annoying "feature" is that the profiles don't show up in the results for famous names: Jennifer Lopez, Mike (or Michael) Myers, Michael Bolton, John Stewart. I've submitted a question to Google about this, in addition to asking @googleprofiles (a valid Google twitter account) via Twitter.]

Check out the results for a search on "Jen Lopez" below:

Google Profile Search Results for Jen Lopez

The profile results not only show you a brief intro about the top four, it also has links to view the full result set for your query. With links to searches on MySpace (huh? who still uses MySpace?), Facebook, Classmates (again, huh?) and LinkedIn. Think of the possibilities...!

Long ago I had decided that I had to brand myself as "Jennifer Sable Lopez" for the very reason mentioned above. As of two weeks ago, I more or less dominated the SERPs for any combination of Jennifer, Jenny, Jen + Sable + Lopez. "Sable" was the key factor though. Without it, I was nowhere to be seen. Although I still don't rank for "Jennifer Lopez," I'm quite excited that someone can now search for me sans "Sable" and find my information.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not condoning the fact that Google is pretty much forcing us to create/update our profiles in order to show up correctly in the profile section. However, before you completely throw out the idea of creating your profile, think about the positive possibilities and the doors that this may open. Think about the other people out there with YOUR same name, who never show up in the SERPs because you completely dominate it for your name. Think of the JLo's of the world, and the possibility that we'll finally be found in a search!

Profile Components

If you haven't created your profile yet, I suggest getting on the ball! The first step is to simply search for "me" in Google and the first result will take you to the first step in setting up your profile. I won't go into full detail; Danny Sullivan wrote a great tutorial on how to set up your Google profile.

You can add quite a bit of information, here's a quick list of items you can fill out:

First and Last Name
Nickname
Other Names
Location Information
Work Information
Education Information
Short Bio
Links
Profile URL
Photo
Contact Information

One of the great things about the profile is that you can make it as complete as you'd like, or only enter the most basic information. The only information you must enter in order to show up in the SERPs is your first name and last name. It's really up to you how detailed you want to be.

Verify Your Name

I really wanted to call out this portion because it took me quite a bit of digging before I figured out where/how to verify my name. This is one of the first things I did after setting up my profile. I have no idea if it will help with my rankings or not, but I wanted to have any kind of edge that I could get. Verifying your name is simple once you find where to do it! The only way to do this right now is through your Knol account. If you already have an account, you may already be ahead of the game, if not setting one up is quick and easy to do. Follow the steps below to get your name verified.

Sign in/sign up to Knol
Go to "My Profile" at the top of the page (Note: if you have never created a Knol before, you'll need to click "add a Knol" - but don't actually need to create one - in order to see the "My Profile" link) [edited to add this!]
Select "Edit My Preferences" next to your image (under your name)
Select "Name Verification"
From here you can select one of two ways to verify your name - either by phone or credit card. I chose to verify via phone... I'd much rather have Google call me, than know my credit card number!
Once you select "Verify name by phone," you're asked to fill out your name, phone number and address. Then select "Verfiy name by phone" again.
Finally, you get a page that displays the information you just entered, plus a verification code. As soon as you receive the call (which was within seconds) they will ask you to enter the verification code.
Follow the directions from the phone call and voila! You're verified.

Details, Details

I'm sure people have tons of questions regarding the new profiles, so below I've listed a few details that I've found out from my initial research. These were questions I had and found the answers to.

Currently, this is for U.S. search results only.
Links from the profiles do not pass link juice simply because they're from a Google domain. Matt Cutts responded to this question posed by Danny Sullivan.
If you already use Gmail, it automatically uses your Gmail name as the profile URL (which is mildly annoying). However if you don't have a Gmail account, apparently you have the ability to create your own URL (as long as it doesn't already exist).

Conclusion

In general, I'm a bit annoyed that I "have" to fill out my information in order to rank, but at the same time I think this is a great tool to help get the information YOU want to show up in the results. I'd love to hear your profile stories, what you love or hate about it. Do you have any additional information to add?

By the way this is my first post for SEOmoz, I'd love to hear your feedback in general. I look forward to writing more in the future!

Celebrity Gossip

Like most in the SEO community, I’m always looking for ways to improve content for my clients. Whether it’s a website, blog, or a press release, there is always a way to make it rank better. Recently, I began optimizing profiles on LinkedIn, a social networking site for business professionals. Using my own LinkedIn profile as a test, I’ve discovered that the same principles we hold near and dear to SEO also stay true to LinkedIn Optimization or, as I like to call it, “LIO”.

For 2 months, I altered various fields of my profile and logged the effect on the number of searches that it appeared in according to LinkedIn analytics. While I’m not one to rely heavily on a single method of measurement, LinkedIn doesn’t offer an option for analytics so my primary method of measurement was the in-house tracking system. The results I found were conclusive- it is possible to optimize your LinkedIn profile to rank better in search. Before diving into the results of my study, I’d like to point out a few areas that I believe are key to achieving an optimized LinkedIn profile and also give a brief “how-to” on optimization techniques.

Profile Headline

The first and most important field to optimize on your LinkedIn profile is the headline. The headline field can be most equated to a meta description in SEO terminology. It’s a way to explain what you do and how you do it (in as few words as possible) to the world without having to use one of those awful labels known as a “job title”.

For my headline, I opted to go with three keywords and my contact information. For those that aren’t too familiar with LinkedIn, contacting a non-connection isn’t easy unless you’re in the same group or you have a mutual friend, so adding contact information is helpful for new business development. Like its SEO counterpart the meta description, it’s the first thing a searcher sees when searching on LinkedIn.

Profile Summary

A LinkedIn summary is a chance to describe who you are, what you want to accomplish, and what you aspire to be. In SEO terms, I like to think of it as the first 100 words of the page. This is a great opportunity to add a ton of keywords, related terms, and longer, more descriptive strings. While it’s important to use your targeted phrase a few times throughout your summary, keep in mind this is a professional profile and if you sound like a robot you most likely won’t win the bid, get hired, or be able to go more than 4 consecutive hours without your coworkers calling you R2D2. Just like any effective website, a LinkedIn profile optimized with user experience in mind will get the sale long before a keyword-stuffed can of SPAM.

Job Title and Description

Another important field when looking to optimize a LinkedIn profile is the job title and description. I’m not going to open myself to hate mail from HR reps, so I’ll bypass job title optimization and cut right to the description. The job description you provide doesn’t have to and most likely shouldn’t be word-for-word verbiage from your job offer letter. Be creative, yet truthful; descriptive, yet succinct. Remember, your target audience has even less time than you to spend reviewing job applicants or proposals so cut to the chase.

Group Memberships and Connections

Group memberships and the total number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections also play a part in determining your ranking in LinkedIn search results. Group memberships and connections are a lot like incoming links- they serve as a “vote of confidence” of sorts, and the closer your connection is to the searcher, the higher up you will show if they use the one-click filter option to sort by relationship. My best advice would be to join as many (relevant) groups that you can and connect with a few LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) from your industry. Note: Don’t connect with random strangers, it’s just plain rude!

Hidden Gem: DoFollow Link Love!

A little-known perk of having a LinkedIn profile is the strength of the domain and the presence of doFollow, customizable anchor links. Your profile allows three links for your website, blog, or Twitter with default anchor text like “My Website” or “Other”. The “Other” field, when selected, allows for customized anchor text. Instead of selecting “My Blog” or “My Website”, use the “Other” option and give yourself some link love from a trustworthy PR 8.

Pulling It All Together

Because we’re all results-driven marketers, optimizing content and leaving it alone simply isn’t an option. We need to track, and we need to measure! Throughout my 8 week test on LinkedIn I kept a log to track changes and measure results. The fields that I changed over time were headline, summary, and work description- each of which were explained in detail above. Some other notable variables included a new recommendation from a vendor and a premium LinkedIn subscription.

Conclusion

While the actual numbers aren’t something to write home about, they show an increase of search impressions by as high as 5.5x the baseline measurement. Changing the headline, summary, and work experience alone increased search impressions by a factor of 1.8. Because a new recommendation is an uncontrolled variable, there’s no accurate way to measure (or predict) the results of this type of action. Upgrading to a premium membership slightly increased the number of search impressions but, in my opinion, not enough to justify the cost.

Key Takeaways

After reading this HOW-TO, I hope to drive home the following points:

Adding keywords to the 3 high-traffic fields of your LinkedIn profile will provide a measurable increase in the number of it will display in search results.
Optimizing your profile will not only help it rank better in search results but also pre qualify potential connections.
Sometimes it’s best to think of optimizing your content for user experience, not for search engines.

1000000+ Dofollow Profile

Sunday, 24 July 2011

360 SEO DoFollow Profile

Google's Negative Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

Domain Name Length

Response Time

AdSense

Percent of Followed Linking Pages

Friday, 22 July 2011

How to Build Your Own Thumbdrive SEO Browser

100 SEO DoFollow Profile

Google Profile Search (aka How to Rank for Jennifer Lopez)

Profile Components

Verify Your Name

Details, Details

Conclusion

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Best Results