Leaked Google Search Quality Guidelines

October 20, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Google, Internet Marketing, PPC, seo 

You no doubt have heard by now that Google’s most recent search quality guidelines was recently located online.  This new one is dated March 2011 while the previous one found online was from April of 2007.  I had originally heard about it from Search Engine Land who has since been contacted to remove the document.

If you’re not familiar with this document, it is a document that’s given to Google’s Search Quality Raters in order to evaluate a website.  The most recent document runs 125 pages with what begins with instructions to the reader and then moves on into the details.

However, prior to the removal I did read the document and took some notes that I felt were particularly interesting.  I did notice that most of it is plain-old common sense.  If you’re posting content on a website that has little to no value other than to get affiliate sales or clicks on your ads, then you’ll probably get flagged by one of these raters.  This should come as no surprise to anyone.

What follows are my snippets of notes taken while reading this document.

  • “When doing your work use the Firefox browser.”  This is paraphrased but essentially they want those doing the ratings to use Firefox.  Since it’s Google’s own document I don’t understand why they would recommend Firefox instead of Chrome and while this tip is not directly related to the content of a website, it was interesting.  I did later learn that this is because Firefox offers an Add-On called “Web Developer” which is helpful in the rating tasks.

Rating Scales

Perhaps the most written about within the document was that of using rating scales.  In other words, depending upon the site, the raters give it a certain kind of rating which comes in 6 varieties from “Vital” to “Unrateable”.
Essentially, “vital” means that if someone is searching on “Target Stores”  the search results should show the official Target Store website.  If someone is searching on “Pizza Hut” then the official site for Pizza Hut should show up in the results.
Alternatively, if there is a site that, upon a visit, immediately warns you that it is expected to have malware then this would be considered “Unrateable.”  Because the rater should not click through to the site in order to determine its value.
Between these two are four other kinds of ratings which vary and while I won’t add them all here, I will give you the most important things to remember when you’re developing your own website and its contents.
A Good Web Page…

  • Is of high quality and helpful to your readers.
  • Can also be fun to read OR
  • Contain recent news.
  • Be on-topic.

On item I did note was that in a portion of the guidelines it was stated that while evaluating a page it may get a lesser rating if it’s less up-to-date.  Something to keep in mind if you update your site on a very in-frequent basis.

Additionally, your page may get a lower rating if it’s “shallow” or in otherwords, contains little to no helpful content.  We’ve all run across these pages that are nothing more than a paragraph or two and that really doesn’t offer much for the reader.

Of special note was the use of the SPAM flag.  The pages that fell into this category were sites that have copied content or repeated keywords.  Now, regarding copied content. Evidently at least where Google is concerned, as long as the copied content is well-organized and helpful for users this shouldn’t get the lower rating.

In essence, it’s truly left up to the judgement of the person looking at the page.  This could be very subjective in my opinion as one person may think a copied content page is well-organized while another one may not.
Web Spam

While reading over the web spam portion of the document, here are a few things to note:

Hidden text on the page is generally considered spam (this is no surprise).

Keyword stuffing may be considered spam if it’s annoying to the user (again, this can be very subjective; what’s annoying to one person might not be to the next).

Redirects – If a URL redirects to another URL then it might be considered spam but only if the URL that the redirect ends up at is different from the one displayed in the search engine results page.  HOWEVER, it is noted that at times a company will get a new URL and then redirect the old one to the new one.  In order to be sure that this is correct, the rater is encouraged to check out the WHOIS records which shows who owns the domain.  If the WHOIS record is not available or its protected, this could cause your site to be flagged as SPAM even if it’s not and all for such a small mistake.

Additionally, it also went on to talk about those web pages created specifically to get clicks on PPC ads (such as AdSense) on a site and how to determine if the page they’re viewing is a real web page or a spam page.

They do NOT consider the following kinds of pages to be “spammy”:

  • Price comparisons.  Even if the user has to click an affiliate link to go to another site in order to get the product that they want.
  • Product reviews.  This also states that the review content must be original.
  • Recipes;
  • Lyrics, quotes, etc.
  • Coupons and the like.  Again, they mention here coupon or promotional codes, discounts, etc.  This is not considered to be “spammy”.

Another thing to be aware of is that of using copied  content alongside of PPC ads.  Even if a site specifically allows you to use their content and even if you have linked back to the original source, it is still considered “copied” content and will therefore receive a lower rating.

If the site is nothing more than one that uses feeds from any kind of site (think about those sites that use RSS feeds for example), and also uses PPC ads this will also receive a lower rating.
Blogs

Sometimes people will use auto-generated blogs that scrapes information from other sites in order for it to appear as though it’s a real blog – its only purpose however, is to generate clicks on PPC links will be considered “spam”.

On the bright side though, some blogs are truly legitimate but the blog owner hasn’t done a great job of monitoring those who leave comments on their blog and thus, tend to get hit with spam a lot.

If a site like this is found and there are lots of spammy links they don’t want to penalize this blog owner simply because it has been taken advantage of by someone else.

On the other side of the coin however, I noticed that it was stated in these guidelines that those sites that have “commercial intent” or in other words, try to make money from their site are mostly spammers.  While I take great issue with this statement (if this were true then Amazon.com would be considered a most egregious spammer would they not?), you have to take this into consideration yourself as to how to go about creating your own content.
Thin Affiliates

A thin affiliate site is a site that exists solely to make money from affiliate links and offers little to no value to the visitor.

Some examples given of this are:

If a “buy now” button exists but you are taken to the affiliate site on a different domain than the one that you’re on, it’s considered a thin affiliate page.

Image sources having a URL that is different from the page you are on.  TIP:  When you do promote a product and you are using an image from the product site, it’s best to download it to your own computer first and then upload it to your web server.

Again, on the bright side, if you’re offering price comparison’s or reviews even though it uses an affiliate link, that site would not be considered to be a “thin affiliate” site.

In all cases, just keep in mind that if you were to remove ALL advertising on your site how much content would actually be left?  If it’s little to nothing, you should probably get to work creating some helpful and unique content for those pages.

There was quite a bit of information contained within these guidelines but many of the ones I omitted are truly just common-sense and typically can be found in the Quality Guidelines already provided by Google.

All in all, when you’re creating your own websites and pages the best thing for you to do is keep the user in mind.  ”What is best for the user?” because in the end, this will help you far more than just about anything else you can do on a site.

ADVERTISERS
Site disclaimer about links.

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Facebook Advertising 101

October 16, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Facebook, Marketing, PPC 

Facebook is actively used by millions of people all over the world with many of these people logging in on a daily basis.  As a matter of fact, their traffic alone is very close to the amount of traffic that Google gets on a daily basis and it’s growing.

The biggest difference between Facebook and Google however, is that Facebook wants you to stick around for awhile, engage with others, play games, etc.  Whereas Google’s main goal is to get you off of Google.com as quickly as possible.  Now this might sound a little counter-intuitive but Google’s main goal is to deliver to you relevant search results.  If they do, you’ll click off of Google.com and head off to a website that hopefully had your answer.

So while both Google and Facebook get their fair share of traffic, they have different overall goals.

One of the best ways to get traffic is to advertise on Facebook.  And that’s what we’ll touch on here.

When it comes to advertising, I’d have to give the upper-hand to Facebook.  Not only are they more affordable, but they keep statistics on users that range everywhere from their age, their relationship status, what groups they belong to, what their interests are, where they’re located, and more.

As an example, let’s say that you sold hair bows for little girls and you decided to advertise on Facebook.  Using all of this data that Facebook has on their users, you can specifically target users based on all of this data.  Why this is so significant for you as an advertiser, is because you’re not just basing your advertising on keywords much like Google’s program does, but rather you can really nail-down who you want to see your ad.

However, the biggest downfall with Facebook advertising is this.  Let’s say that you decided to show your ad to Moms who have daughters; makes sense right?  Even if those Mom’s see your ad and click on it, they’re likely going to see the ad again quite often as long as you have it running.  Someone searching on Google however, likely is seeking out a very specific keyword such as “hair bows for girls” and the likelihood of them seeing your ad on more than one occasion is rare.

So you want to handle Facebook advertising a little differently.

Instead of just running a generic ad consider using that ad to promote products that someone will want to use on a continuous basis – such as offering a wide array of different colors, sizes, etc., in other words, products that will be wanted by your audience over and over again.

You can also run specials that are only good for a certain period of time.

The key with Facebook advertising is to create a wide variety of advertisements so that the user is always engaged with your product and so they don’t see the same ad over and over again.

Lastly, you can use Facebook as a way to capture leads and add them to your auto-responder program.  This is a big plus for many Facebook advertisers simply because Google has put a kabosh on this kind of advertising.  If you tried to place an ad on Google that led to a lead-capture page, the odds are your ad would get disapproved before anyone could even see it.

In a later post, I’ll create a walk-through that will take you through how to set up a Facebook advertising campaign but for now, if you were considering marketing your product, website or even your Facebook page on Facebook, I highly recommend it.

ADVERTISERS
Site disclaimer about links.

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Google Analytics – Removing Your Own IP Address

October 14, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Google, Productivity, Traffic 

Using Google Analytics on your website gives you lots of great information about your site visitors and keywords along with a host of other useful information.  But sometimes that data that you get can be a bit skewed if you haven’t told Analytics to NOT count your own IP address.

Chances are, you visit your own site quite a bit and these visits are being counted in your overall data.

So how do you tell Analytics to stop tracking your own visits?

It’s actually very simple…here’s how:

  1. First you need to find out what your own IP address is.  To do this visit http://www.whatismyip.com/.  When you get there you’ll see in very large letters at the top of the page “Your IP Address Is:” and this will be followed by a series of numbers such as 012.345.678.910.  Copy your IP address down and then head to Google Analytics.
  2. Once you’re logged into your Analytics account you’ll see the website(s) you’re tracking.  Next to each site on the far right-hand side of the page is an “Edit” link.  Click this link next to the site you want to modify.
  3. The next screen will have a section entitled “Filters” – once you find this look for an “Add Filter” link on the upper right hand side of this section and click that link.
  4. Now you’re going to create a new filter.  Choose the radio button that says “Add new Filter for Profile” if it’s not already selected.
  5. Next, give the filter a name that’s easy for you to identify what the filter is for such as “My IP Address”.
  6. Next, choose the “Predefined filter” button if it’s not selected already.
  7. You’ll see various drop down boxes.  In the first box choose “Exclude”.  In the middle box choose “traffic from the IP addresses” and in the third box choose “that are equal to”.  Finally, enter your IP address that you just copied into the boxes.
  8. Click “Save changes”.
Sometimes within a large company there are multiple IP addresses that are used.  If this is the case, you’ll need to apply additional filters and add in these other IP addresses individually.

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