Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

At Pubcon in Las Vegas today, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, two key members of Google’s search team, took the stage to talk about Google search, and answer questions from webmasters. Here are 24 takeaways from what they said: 1. …

Advertising breakdown by industry, November 2009, from Nielsen Online

Rankings of the top 50 Internet advertisers by media value in June 2009

Last Tuesday, we discussed the idea of Google potentially making some changes to PageRank and it’s relationship to no-follow – particularly in the context of PageRank sculpting. As a quick refresher, PageRank sculpting is the practice whereby you add no-follow attributes to less important links in order to emphasize links you deem more important.  We used an analogy of a bucket withe holes in it. The holes represented your outbound links.  Your website’s PageRank (link juice) flowed thru the holes.  The fewer holes you had, higher the percentage of your link juice went thru the remaining holes (links). That’s PageRank Sculpting in a nutshell.  Dividing your link authority by a smaller number of links in order to maximize the authority you pass on. At the end of our article, we mentioned that no official word on how Google was going to change the dynamic between no-follow and PageRank, but as of last night, we now know a little more.  Matt Cutts made a post on his blog about the way Google has decided to deal with the issue.  The biggest surprise in the post was actually Matt’s claim that this change went into effect “over a year ago” but nobody noticed. Beyond that, Matt’s explanation of PR Sculpting fit pretty nicely into our analogy.  Matt said “nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page”.  Which basically means, if you plugged some of the holes in your bucket, the remaining holes received a higher percentage of your link authority.  This statement is also significant because it pretty much (by definition) says unequivocally that Pagerank sculpting ‘worked’ conceptually at least.  But that’s ‘worked’ with an emphasis on the past tense. The change Google implemented ‘over a year ago’ according to Cutts.  Made Google count the outbound links regardless of the no-follow attribute.  To paraphrase Matt in his post, if you have 10 PageRank points on a page with 10 outbound links and you put no-follow on 5 of the links, each of your 5 remaining links would pass just 1 point of PageRank now.  Prior to the change, each of your 5 links without no-follow would pass 2 points apiece.  Now, your PR passing ability is spread out or divided by all of your links – regardless of their no-follow status. Matt does a pretty good job of anticipating several questions that will doubtlessly arise from his post.  I’ll Highlight a couple of the more important points below, but would also urge you to go check out the real thing (like you haven’t already…) Whenever you are linking within your site, don’t use no-follow
   Q: Since PR is divided amongst outbound links, no-follow or not, should I turn off comments on my blog? 
“A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”
 So, there you go.  The debate that arose during SMX Advanced as to whether or not Google was changing how they handled no-follow in terms of PR sculpting has now been answered.  The big surprise in all of this is that they apparently changed it all a while back, but at the end of the day it was pretty much the change we were anticipating anyway.  Namely, no-follow links do not pass PR, no-follow links do not pass anchor text value, but no-follow links DO count toward your total of outbound links.  The obvious question this creates I suppose then is: why, then, should we no-follow anything?

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts regularly answers user questions in the form of YouTube videos at Google’s Webmaster Central channel . One recent question he took on goes: As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine result pages? This is not a new subject. You might recall a thought-provoking blog post from SEOBook author Aaron Wall on the subject a while back. WebProNews spoke with Wall and discussed the issue a little bit further in another article . A little while later, Cutts posted one of his videos, and pretty much disputed the fact that Google gives weight to any sites just because of their brand. In that one, he said they focus more on things like trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, etc. In this latest video, he dismisses the notion in a way that seems a little more concrete, indicating that Google does not rank based on brand. "I would not agree with the premise of you question," he says. He notes that small mom and pops complain that big brands are getting too much weight, while the big brands are complaining that they are not getting enough. Essentially, Google’s position on the matter is that they just try to deliver the pages that are the most useful to the user. If you consider those other words (trust, reputation, pagerank, etc.), it makes sense that big brands would rank higher frequently because the reason they have become big brands is likely that they have built a solid reputation , and people trust them because they know the brand, and this inspires linking, which leads to pagerank . This makes sense to me. Would you agree? Talk about it in the comments .

Last night Hulu ran the live telethon style infomercial for Bing called the " Bingathon ". So how did it perform? Well, it appears nothing " official " has been released yet . So let’s see what some Twitter users (a co-host, industry professionals and everyday users) are saying about the Bingathon. Did any of you watch the Bingathon? If so, what did you think about it? Tell us . Olivia Munn , co-host of the live event with Jason Sudeikis , tweeted the following… This shouldn’t come as any shock that Microsoft is claiming an early victory . Think about it, what is the real measurement for success here? What other live telethon launch of a search engine is there for comparison? Some of the search industries biggest names threw in their two cents about the Bingathon via Twitter… So we’ve heard what a co-host had to say as well as people in the industry , but what does the everyday user have to say about the Bingathon? Some Tweeters loathed the event … …while some Twitterers were just happy for the 24 hour commercial free Hulu , provided by Bing. Scanning through my #Bingathon search on Twitter I did notice that the overall feeling of the Bingathon wasn’t very positive . With that said I was able to find a few Tweets of people who seemed to enjoy the event… It’s really hard to say for sure if the Bingathon was a success, but it did manage to get people talking… even though the talk wasn’t 100% positive . So was this one of those " any press is good press " moments?

People misspell their search engine queries all the time. That is why it can be incredibly helpful when Google steps and offers "did you mean suggestions." Google actually offers a few different spell-check features in its search results. These come with the internal codenames: "Did you mean," "Chameleon" (mid-page suggestions), and "Spellmeleon," where a couple results are shown for the corrected query. Chameleon: Spellmeleon: "Did you mean" comes up fairly often, and a problem that some businesses might face as a result of this is that Google doesn’t understand that their name is a valid query, and offers a "Did you mean?" alternative. In this Web 2.0 world, where seemingly every start-up is some weird non-existent word, it’s not hard to envision this happening fairly often. One business owner actually sent a question about this into Google’s Matt Cutts, who answered it in the following video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel . The question presented to Matt was: When I do a Google Search for my business name, Google suggests "Did you mean:" with some other company name. Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening? Cutts says that there’s nothing that he knows of that a business can do about this at this point. "The hope is that over time, we learn that sort of thing automatically," he says. "Anything you can do to build the reputation of your business, so it’s more well-known, so that you’ve got a lot of links pointing to you, and you’re more easily found on the web…" Cutts suggests as a possible solution.  These are the kinds of things that signal Google to realize that it is a valid query, and that it’s not something that they need to show a spelling suggestion for. So in theory, if you promote your business well enough, the "did you mean?" will not be an issue. There aren’t any special forms or anything you can fill out to notify Google at this point. So if this is a problem for you, you have a little work to do.

If you want your blog to do better in Google’s search results, Matt Cutts recommends WordPress. According to a presentation Google’s Webspam captain gave at WordCamp San Francisco, Word Press takes care of about 80-90 percent of SEO mechanics. The presentation, which spans 50 pages, is available at Cutts’ blog in Google Docs or PowerPoint . Other than how WordPress helps automatically, Cutts gave tips about how to get a blog to rank better in Google. The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable. Being Relevant Some of this is voodoo and some of this technical, obviously. The big questions are necessary, equivalent to who am I? Why am I here? Cutts recommends asking yourself: “What do I love?” “What am I really good at doing?” What do I have to say?” Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via bloggery, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive.” Cutts recommends ALT attributes. Also consider URL structure. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords). Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing. Being Reputable Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation: Be interesting Update often Find your niche Provide a useful service Do original research or reporting Give great information Live blog Make lists Create controversy Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed   Other Useful Information Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking. Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.” Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).    

Everybody’s talking about Bing today since the Microsoft’s new search engine became unexpectedly available on a widescale. That includes Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts. An interesting conversation took place on Twitter today between Cutts and Betsy of the Bing account . Cutts was apparently doing a little ego searching on Bing and does not appear entirely impressed with the results. SEO Services Group has transcribed the conversation:   Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though: http://bit.ly/4a8Q1Y Bing: @mattcutts anytime you want to give feedback to @bing, we’re here. I’m sitting with the devs at present. ^betsy Bing: @mattcutts I know you are disappointed in ego search stuff tonight w/ @bing, but try ‘mtv movie awards 2009′ and see what you get. ^ba Matt Cutts: Ouch. The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too: http://bit.ly/B2r5F It’s a YouTube->WordPress autogenerated blog. Matt Cutts: @bing okay. First web result was from 2008 instead of 2009, even with 2009 in query: http://bit.ly/SToK1 . Google nails it. Matt Cutts: @bing but doesn’t it bother you that [mtv movie awards] on Google gives great news results and 2009 url, but w/Bing I only see 2008, 2007, ? Bing: @mattcutts Uh – the first answer folks see is the news answer, not what you circled. Apparently twilight won. ^ba Matt Cutts: @bing by the way, Twilight did rock. I’m not ashamed to say it–glittery vampires rule!! That’s about it for the conversation between the two (so far), but Cutts referenced that number 4 result again later: To me, this just looks like Cutts stepping up to market Google in the wake of Bing’s launch. Bing’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it only makes sense that Google would want to make sure they don’t go thinking its better than their own search engine. It’s about protecting the brand. Whether this is Matt’s intention or not, Cutts pointing out shortcomings in Bing’s search results is going to resonate throughout the industry. He is practically the posterboy for Google, at least among the search and tech savvy crowd.  A lot of people follow Matt Cutts. A lot of people hang nearly everything on what he has to say (search-wise). Cutts has shed some light on some issues with Bing though. It’s a little early to burn the search engine at the stake. After all, it’s not even supposed to be launched yet, but after trying an ego search for myself (not something I performed in my first Bing runthrough ), I am also much happier with Google’s results. By the way, here are some more Bing findings . What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts .