Spotted another site in the top 20 of Google for ‘car insurance’ - Car insurance is a really competitive search term that generates a huge amount of conversions, so it is a battle ground for spam sites to get onto the first page.

The other day i reported on sitenumberone breaking into the top 10 for a couple of weeks and yesterday i noticed quicksilhouette.whsites.net in the top 20.

This one is doing a really crappy spam technique but one that has worked for a short period of time and even a day in the top 20 of car insurance can be big money.

The site seems to be down today, (possibly because it is hosted on a free hosting network and they have exceeded their bandwidth for being in the top 20!).

Here is what they have done:

They are doing a very simple form of cloaking - showing the search engines something different to the users. The have created some content that is displayed to the user:

and some content visible in the source of the page that contained links to other sites. The visibility was hidden in the CSS file. The content was then broken into small pieces of text through <span> tags and making it look continuous through <nobr> tags. I think they may have done this bit to make it look like the text is a hidden navigation structure and not a large block of hidden text.

This is a old technique to hiding content so why has it worked?
Well, it looks like it may have been a couple of small factors:

1) It’s not the hidden content on the above car insurance site that is helping them but the hidden content on the link network pointing to it. The network pointing to it have no authoritive links but it is doing the same cloaking technique as quick silhouette resulting in hidden links pointing to quick silhouette. Now the content may not offer much benefit but the links could still be followed by the search engine passing on link equity to the quick silhouette site.

2) The second factor is a bit more interesting and offers more insight into what Google is currently looking at. Quick silhouette is hosted on a web hosting network - whsites.net. This results in the domain having a huge amount of links and many of authoritive ones.

The second point and the sitenumberone factors offer the same outcome, that Google is looking more at the domain authority from link juice being passed to the overall domain and holding weight in Google’s trust of the site.

Both sites have now dropped out of the results but there is a link between these two sites and both the internal linking structure and overall domain authority, factors that you should consider when optimising your website.

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Some people may have noticed a really spammy site ranking 8th for car insurance.

www.sitenumberone.org.uk/car_insurance.html is the page ranking.

After a bit of analysis into this to find out what is making it rank so high, I’ve noticed they have over 100,000 links pointing to the domain and about 758 pointing to this page.

Looking at these links they seem to be from sites like:

www.efcva.org
www.vtccm.org
www.crfpd.org

There are loads of sites like this.

Looking at these domains they all expired recently and have been registered in the last month or two. The spammy pages like the ones above have then been created and point to the site number one website.

The domains that expired all seem to have a number of authoritive links (www.crfpd.org has 32 .gov links).

So it looks like the company doing this has used a tool to find expiring domains, found the ones with authoritive links and then bought them. They have then created the spam page to help site number one to rank.

In theory Google says this won’t work as the site will have a new registrant so will go back into the sandbox but this may only be the case if the site is redirected to another domain. The fact this site has created a page and not redirected the site may have got around this with Google.

Hopefully Google will pick up on this and kick it out pretty soon

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I recently received a email from a guy trying to buy a link on my site. He obviously hadn’t read the site or he would know that I have a slight understanding of SEO but it reminded me of this post on Search Engine Land.

Here is the conversation:

Hi,

Are you interested in getting a template/ banner/ header/ logo/ business cards/ mascot designs for no money for your site, in return we require text links from your site. Please get back to me if you are interested.

Warm Regards

XXX XX, Webmaster

ABC.com – Website Design Services

XYZ.com - Custom Logo and Marketing Materials

My reply:

Hi XXX,
I don’t generally include advertising on my site, particularly text links as i thought i read something about issue with search engines if i did this, is that not the case?

He continued:

Hi
Thanks for the mail. Yes, there are certain rules followed by search engines to rank a site, it follows an algorithm, according to that the text links you are placing must be under the heading “blog roll, featured sites, my favorites sites, etc.” you should not use the heading with the word “link” then the search engine deeply scan the data and make some action. So there is no harm if you put text links of others, but you should not use the heading as “link/ links” thats it, and the links you are placing should be relevant to your site thats all a search engine wants. You no need to worry I will give relevant links to your site, so let me know which product you are interested in template, banner, header or logo. Reply me ASAP.
Regards,
XXX

Interesting response! Completely untrue but at least he’s creative!

I continued:

Hi XXX,

I’ve looked at Google’s webmaster guidelines and it doesn’t mention anything about what you have said, it does say that i should use a ‘nofollow’ tag though -
In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links.
Do you advise the nofollow tags go on your links to prevent causing any issues with Google?

Sorry about the questions, i just want to make sure i am not harming my site by including links to other sites.

Thanks

He continues with more bullshit:

Hi
What you said is one of the criteria, there are many criteria regarding links, if the links are related to your sites, there is no harm, no search engine will take any action. No follow links you can be used for the links which are irrelevant to you. Having related links search engine will enhance your rankings. I think we are more out of topic, so kindly get back to me regarding product. Await for your good answer.
Regards,

I like the way he has said it will help my rankings by doing this and then has said ‘we are more out of topic’

I replied:

Hi XXX
What site would i be linking too?

He responded:

These are my link details, send me the product details, I will go through it tomorrow, moving now, bye
1) Link Text - SEO Services
Link Url - abc.com
2) Link Text - Marketing Strategies
Link Url - xyz.com
3) Link Text - Web Developer
Link Url - 123.com
Regards,
xxx

So he has lied to me about the guidelines and then asked me to link to SEO services!

I got bored at this point and told him the truth:

Hi XXX,
Looking at the three sites below they are all registered by XYZ.com and all three offer SEO services. Based on this i would expect you and them to know Google search engine guidelines. How you can actually say ‘there is no harm, no search engine will take any action’ and ‘Having related links search engine will enhance your rankings’ is absolutely disgraceful. You are lying to people who may not know any better, luckily i do!
I work for a world leading, ETHICAL search engine optimisation agency and if you actually took the time to read the sort of things included on my site you may have thought that this person actually knows about SEO and i shouldn’t try to trick him into damaging his own site through such blatant lies!

I now have the 3 sites and the parent site that is blatantly breaking Google’s guidelines and, as such this email and it’s history will now be sent to Google’s spam department and hopefully all 4 sites will be removed for the listed very shortly.

I don’t care that they are buying links but a hint to the ones who try it out there - if someone starts to question, it don’t lie. It just makes things worse and you will look like a moron, especially when it gets sent to Google!

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Google announced the other day that it can now index flash content:

We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

This is obviously a benefit for the Flash websites out there but the amount of information spiderable to the search engines is still pretty minimal and a Flash website will never be able to compete with an HTML website. So a word of warning, don’t let the creative agencies out there use this as an excuse for creating a funky site that still won’t rank for anything!

Full article can be seen here

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Working in digital marketing you have to keep on top of the next big thing and mobile search, or advertising is expected to be huge!

Juniper Research expects mobile services will exceed £500 million by the end of 2008, rising to £3.8 billion by 2013. This growth is largely due to the increased capabilities and speeds of mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone and also down to cheaper roaming tariffs on the network suppliers.

How can a business make the most of the mobile search market?

Stage 1 – A business has created a mobile version of their website.

This is quite common now, with a number of sites creating a simple site, with a lower resolution and much faster loading times. The site is very basic and offers the users only what they would expect to need whilst out on the go.

Ideally these are the sort of sites you would expect to rank very well in the search engines when users search using a mobile version of the engines, such as Google mobile, offering the company less competition as this is still within the early adaptor stage of the technology adaption lifecycle.

It is, therefore recommended that any business that feels a mobile strategy would benefit them begins to invest in a mobile website as soon as possible. To create such as site I would say you should invest largely in user experience, more so than website design, as a user on a small mobile device will need quick links and simple navigation, design is not particularly important.

Stage 2 – A paid search campaign is created

Paid search has the benefit of offering very quick results to the highest bidder. A mobile platform offers the added advantage of the ability to directly call the business. This could offer a service of cost per call or free calls or both. Potential the mobile paid results could link to the mobile site but also display a ‘call’ link. This link will allow your mobile phone to call the company directly. This could be offered as a free call service to the user, how this would be implemented is questionable but the option maybe available.

It makes sense to offer the user this ‘call’ option as navigating a mobile site can be difficult and time consuming, if the user is in a hurry, let’s say they need a train time table quickly, the mobile site may be difficult to navigate or slow to load. The call option offers the user a quicker option and an alternative to the phone directory services, moving the search engines into direct competition with these services.

Stage 3 – A local business result

The next step to paying for the traffic through paid results is to get it for free through natural search. However, from a user’s point of view they may be using their mobile phone to find a local business. The local business results in Google is a perfect example of how this works, the only difference being that the majority of new mobile phones have built in GPS, meaning Google already knows where you are.

I have Google Maps on my Nokia N95 and love it. I use it regularly for its directions and the built in GPS really helps. The next step is to include a search facility for local businesses. Google maps can then show local points that these businesses can be found, much like the online version allows on a computer. By clicking on one of these links it will show you the business details, (much like Google local). The business could then link to the mobile version of the site or have a phone number with a link that allows you to directly call the company from your mobile phone.

All these features are more or less already available. The mobile users want easy and efficiency, design isn’t that important due to the size of the screen. A mobile internet experience should be built around ease of use and, therefore, so should the business mobile site.

Mobile advertising is just around the corner and a mobile site strategy should be considered for the digital strategy of most businesses.

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I heard a while back that Google is able to manipulate form results so that the Google bot can index the information after a form has been completed.

I have just seen an instance of this has actually happening on Brand Republic and i wouldn’t think Brand Republic will be too happy about it!

I searched in Google for ‘ad agencies tables‘ the first result is from Brand Republic. Having clicked on this you can clearly see the agency table:

However, if you go directly through the URL then the user needs to enter their log in details:

I have tried to crawl the site as a Google bot and see if this is something that Brand Republic want to happen but the login details are still displayed to the Google bot, meaning Brand Republic are losing out on loads of user data through Google automatically bypassing their forms.

To resolve this i would suggest that Brand Republic and anyone else with the same issue uses their robots.txt files to exclude the search engines from crawling past the form pages. If you are unsure of how to do this please leave me a comment below and i’ll detail it for you or have a look at this post by Google.

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MSN has recently announced it is going to start paying searchers when they convert on particular websites, similarly to an affiliate program but the money going to the searcher not a website.

Sounds like it could be a potentially innovative approach to changing search engines as we currently know them.

To start with it will more people using Live search, taking some of Google’s market share but only for corporate websites, if there is no monetary conversion then I can only assume they will be no financial reward to the searchers. As the internet is about 80% information I think this is still a rather large percentage of searchers sticking with Google due to their superior results and relevance.

As users start to rate the service they received from the corporate website and MSN having a large database of conversion data, MSN’s results will start to take all this information into account making MSN the search engine for great deals and service and Google becoming the search engine for information, (or will that be Wikipedia?). This could be a potential threat to Google and will be interesting to see how they react.

There could be the potential problem of websites not wanting to share their conversion data with MSN, will this mean they will never rank in the Live results?

Also could this mean searchers are purchasing goods or services with the intention of returning them so they get their money for nothing from MSN? I’m sure there will be plenty that try, meaning the idea could prove to be a very big headache for the websites selling the products or service.

There are a lot of potential problems with this idea but if it works it could be a big step in Microsoft’s desire to compete with Google in the search engine market.

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Interesting question really, most people would probably say ‘are you joking!’ but the reality is Google is adapting and developing to, ultimately, create more relevant results to the users.

A Brief History of Time.

Ten or so years ago before Google we had meta search engines and directories, both very easy to manipulate in order to help your website appear high in the results. Problem was that there were millions of documents and web pages on the net and these search engines couldn’t deal with relevant results. Along came Google with their ‘pagerank’ algorithm and created a way to categories web pages based on off page factors (links).

The number of Google algorithms has since increased and the level of complexity in the overall rankings results is more and more difficult to manipulate.

So back to the question, is SEO dying – the answer is yes. Google doesn’t want you to ‘buy links’. A method still used by a number of dodgy search agencies that will ultimately backfire on their clients in the next year or two, resulting in the search agency going out of business if they don’t adapt quickly.

The other optimisation techniques involved by search agencies is the on-page optimisation. Now this is very important and does work for uncompetitive search terms but for the competitive terms you have no chance of benefiting purely from on page factors. Also more and more people have an understanding of this, using freely available tools to find traffic driving search terms, so why use an agency to optimise a site for you?

Google is trying to be more about other factors (although they have not quite achieved this just yet). They are looking for useful content, people clicking on a link and staying on the site for a long period of time. Links are still important, but Google is hoping to nail the ‘naturally acquired links not paid links’ type of algorithm. Whether they are close to this I don’t know but with more competition there comes more marketing analyst that are happy to report a competitor for dodgy tactics. If you don’t like that idea? Tough! If you are my client’s, or my competitors and you are cloaking or buying links and it means I will gain out of it, (and i’m not doing anything wrong) then I’ll be the first one to report you. Don’t like it, then don’t do the dodgy tactics! I’m sure more and more ethical agencies and companies will be taking this approach as search becomes more and more difficult to gain naturals positions. Search Engine Journal recently had an interesting post on whether others would consider reporting unethical sites.

So what can SEO do for you today?

Well not a lot really – you can’t buy links, you can optimise the pages but that isn’t particularly effective tactic in a really competitive market. So what else can a ‘search agency do?’

I know the answer is to become a digital agency but that justifies my question in the first place – search marketing is dying. The answer is to have creative and useful content, a well designed and user friendly website, market research (whether through talking to your customers or using social websites to understand what people are saying) and more importantly, getting the content out there. To become the new search marketing agency you need to become an online PR company, a copy writer, a creative, a web designer. You have to be a marketer, not a techie!

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