But what was the number one listing on Tuesday and Wednesday has vanished by Friday:

What’s really remarkable is how thoroughly this site has vanished:

It’s usual for a site to have the home page as the first page in the sitelinks list. For the home page to vanish… well, looks like Google hates this site. And I wouldn’t bet on any rank being passed.

Unsurprisingly, none of the Google penalty checking websites that I could find suggest that there’s a problem with this site. After all, it has results in the listings. Just very low ranked and none of the top pages (like the home page) show up. Sure sign of a problem of some sort!

So, what happened? Well, the site was probably reported to Google, possibly even before I saw the solicitation. And Google acted, quite quickly.

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can use Google’s Undeclared Paid Backlinks report form to report sites that are using and offering undeclared paid backlinks. I don’t know what you do if you aren’t a registered webmaster – perhaps find one and ask them?

So, what happened to the companies mentioned in the story? I can’t find them, now, either. Certainly not on page one of results (I’ve used the non-personal search on our tool to view Google organic and paid search as if in another country)

Google really isn’t happy with undeclared paid links. At all.

"Flam" - Flattery Spam example, praising the comment policy as if it was an article.

Next up, has the nature of spamming changed? I believe that it has. On this blog, and clients’ blogs and generally across the internet, I’m seeing a lot more “flam” – flattering spam. “You’re article really helped me with this difficult topic, thanks, I’ll be linking to you and subscribing to your feed” – stuff like that. Contributes nothing but a feeling of pleasure… and sometimes even sneaks past Akismet, if the author has managed to lull the suspicions of bloggers.

Of course, the acid test is whether my attempts to deflect spammers to the Comment Policy page have been effective.

Results

This WordPress blog's Comment Policy attracts most spam, now.

After seeing the trend towards “flam”, I’ve gone back throgh comments here (and on client sites) and made sure that every comment is substantive. That is, it contributes to the material in the posting and would be helpful to other readers.

That in turn, raises the question of what to do about those rare cases when someone says something useful, but then leaves a keyword loaded username. IMO, the best thing to do is to re-write the name as something more sane. After all, the comments here are no-followed, and it is, bluntly, rude to post under a keyword rather than your own name – not to mention being outside the guidelines for marketing laid down by the Advertising Standard Authority and described in the Code of Advertising Practice.

Recommendations

If you run a blog, there are three levels of protection to consider, basically depending on the volume of spam you get – which in turn is a reflection of your sites’ popularity with search engines (more on that, in another article I have in progress).

We have a general recommendation which is that marketeers have to reduce the barriers to engagement. Philosophically, I’m opposed to the idea of making it more difficult for a user to add a comment to a blog, to defend from a spammer. It’s just wrong. The burden should be pushed to the spammer, not the user. So, wherever possible on any form, we avoid CAPTCHA (which is, itself, subject to easy attack from Mechanical Turk style systems – use automation to find the CAPTCHA and just push the images to paid-by-activity humans who’ve signed up for the service).

If your blog is not popular (up to tens of visitors per day), then basic tools like Akismet are absolutely fine – though too infrequently used on small blogs, IMO. You’ll probably get no more than a one or two “flams” per day – and the rule is “if the comment could have been applied to any article you’ve ever written, it is probably spam”.

If your blog is moderately popular – hundreds of visitors per day – then Akismet or other crowd-sourced or Bayesian detectors are probably not quite enough; consider using a honeypot to distract spammers to a page or posting where you know that the overwhelming majority of comments will be spam. This, too, should keep the count of suspect spammy comments that need attention down to a handful per day.

If your blog is seriously popular – well, you can probably afford to have a few annoyed users who can’t get through the defences. Very popular blogs might want to consider both a crowd-sourced and/or Bayesian and CAPTCHA solution of some sort. That’s not as extreme as some US magazines who have ludicrously tough comment defence, added in pursuit of finding candidate new subscribers, rather than spam reduction, I suspect, and an illustration of the maxim about reducing the barriers… I cant be bothered to sign up, when they make it so difficult.

That “reducing the barriers” stuff is really important. Take a look at Bob Cialdini’s Influence – an old book, now, but still germane as it deals with fundamentals of human behaviour. Until you’ve given something of value to someone, they are unlikely to give you much of value. So asking for a full name and address and other contact information, just to drop a comment, is fabulously in excess of what most people will be comfortable to do. In the wake of the Sony hacking, users should also be becoming more aware that leaving details on publicly addressable sites is dangerous. And thats compounded by poor security practices from large organisations who confuse users’ ability to detect safer and less safe places to submit details (see my earlier article on Google’s absurd inability to help users identify which are trustworthy Google URLs and which URLS can be abused by scammers).

I have my doubts that the Sidewiki sidebar will be rendered on anything other than informational sites with UGC – which, by and large, will already have a mechanism for users to contribute and so will have no need for a Sidewiki. The fear amongst business site owners will be that users with a grudge will control the conversation. There’s plenty of evidence that suggests that users with a good experience of a business are much less likely to tell others, than users with a bad experience – in a ratio of about in in 12 (users with a bad experience are much more likely to tell others). So even if your business manages to annoy only a small fraction of users, they’ll be a lot more visible than the small fraction who are ecstatic about your business.

Unless the Sidewiki enables a clearly valuable business interaction – one that doesn’t leave site owners worrying that Google is controlling the agenda, and one that doesn’t overemphasise the negative commentary – then Sidewiki will remain a sideline. I think the idea of UGC paralleling the site content is probably the right sort of thing to be thinking about. I suspect that the current implementation and interaction model aren’t enough to satisfy business owners to make the Sidewiki an integral part of the site’s experience.

I’d fear it being added to, for example, the NHS web site. The amount of quackery and bogus advice that could be offered would make me nervous about the value.

So, for now, Sidewiki continues to be a technology in search of a solution. It appears to come from a philosophy of user interaction that isn’t matched by the real world, that users will contribute overwhelmingly. That may be true for sites engineered to make that happen (Hub Pages, Wikipedia, etc). But sources of tested information (NHS, NIH) and of commercial information (product details, sales, etc) can suffer in the face of unqualified, biased or defamatory comment. That doesn’t mean that Sidewiki is always useless, but does mean that the philosophy needs to be exposed as having a benefit to the site owner, many of whom will see nothing but risk when they look at the tool. Another case of Google mistaking technology for product – as with Wave.

And the blog announcement itself doesn’t do a lot to encourage confidence. What’s the first comment? A series of spammy links. How long would it be before some twit starts dropping spammy Sidewiki comments on sites, in order to benefit from their PageRank? Given the rest of the mythology surrounding SEO, it won’t be long after Sidewiki comments are seen, that there’s be someone selling Sidewiki spamming as a service, off the back of user ignorance that the Sidewiki domain is not that of the website…

The searches are also amusing, because this blog has a comment policy. Searches looking for text indicating that this is a blog that accepts user generated content, will tend to find that policy page. In turn, that means that I get a lot of flattering comments about the article… posted to the comment policy. Bit of a tell that the commenter isn’t really engaged.

What’s also interesting is where people are coming from. Mostly China, India, the US.

So, is there anything that can be done, apart from using Akismet and other despamming tools, to help reduce blogspam? Might be worth changing the text, or possibly replacing the text with a graphic, to indicate where a comment should be left. That’d reduce the search volume coming to the blog from people intent on spamming. However, that’s essentially a defence based on security through obscurity – I’m going to experiment with changing that text and see what it does to searches leading to this blog. :)

I will, of course, continue to use the comment policy page as a great detector of spam. All those people telling me how great the article is, submitting to the comment policy page, have completely signalled their lack of interest in contributing! Like all these spammy comments, mostly targeting a few choice pages:

That sample is moderately representative – about half the spam submitted, is submitted to the comment policy page.

How Does Google Rank Results

I don’t know all the details. Rand doesn’t know all the details. Some guys at Google know a lot of the factors. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the search quality team, claims over 200 factors go into ranking.

What we do know is that backlinks – credible links regarded by Google as likely for a search user to visit – are important. We know that anchor text is important. There’s some other factors that we know influence Google ranking.

What *else* do we know?

We (professional search engine optimisation people) know that on-page content is valuable. For low competition keywords – keywords where there aren’t a lot of links and anchor text, and hardly anyone searches – then page content is enough. Look at the example in the graphic below. There’s precisely one page on the internet, with that text for something that I can’t find on Google. When I wrote that, it was true; if you search now, you’ll find that page. Well, until some spoiler copies it elsewhere…

However, try putting the word “bad credit loan” on a page on a new web site with some other relevant and unique content, valuable to a user, and see how high you rank for the term. You can wait. And wait. And wait. You’re not going to show up on the first page of results, just by having a great page alone. It’s not just the content, it’s the backlinks that make the difference.

So we now know, as a result of this test, that while Google does pay attention to on-page factors, they also pay attention to backlinks. And in competitive spaces, *effective* backlinks count for more than the page content.

The important message to understand from this is that different factors apply under different conditions. Content alone won’t put you on page one. Backlinks alone won’t keep you there.

Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate

So, at some scale, do CTR (Click Through Rate) and Bounce Rate make any difference? I believe they do, and this blog is a testament to that. Look at this screenshot.

That’s a Google Analytics shot of the last 15 months activity for a specific page on the Merjis blog. It’s all about “gclid” – something you’ll probably care about if you do paid search and look in web server logfiles.

I’m using this blog as an example, because I’ve been using it for tests for years – I know how it works, and it isn’t confidential client data. I can reveal the usage, because I have my own reasons for running a blog, and few of them directly have anything to with making money.

Most other pages on this site get a profile like this other example:

This is pretty typical for a “newsy” blog article. Usage on the day that it is written, and a dribble thereafter. It then usually dries up after a few weeks, because the rank has decayed with time.

So why, with a higher bounce rate, does the older article do better than the newer article in rankings? If Bounce Rate is important, then surely the lower bounce rate in a newer article must mean that Google should drop the older article?

I suspect that Google doesn’t have a rigid number. They look at how well you do relative to other sites. And especially, they look to see whether search users search again for the same or very similar searches. Read that article on SideWiki, and it’s lightweight. No real information. No real recommendations. The long lived article on gclid has a much higher bounce rate and longer reading time. It’s the reading time that’s the clue. When you’ve read my article on gclid, you probably don’t want to read another article about gclid. It’s reasonably definitive.

Google sustains that old article in search results, despite its’ great age, and despite a high bounce rate, because those users who do read it, value it. It’s there, because it helps Google to deliver a page of search results that users value more than *without* that article present.

Uh – You Didn’t Mention CTR

Again, I don’t think it is actually CTR that Google is looking for. It is user satisfaction. So a high CTR, caused by a misleading piece of copy, won’t help. You have to deliver what you offer. Again, I don’t think that Google is measuring conversion, either. But a high CTR message with a high conversion rate, meaning that users are highly satisfied – that’s what Google wants you to make.

You won’t be directly rewarded for high CTR – but you can measure it (especially if you also run PPC and can get the impression rate). You won’t be rewarded directly by Google for high conversion rates. But Google does appear to prefer sites that answer the question posed by the search query. And the proxy that can be used by Webmasters, who don’t have access to Google’s richer data, is their own performance, as CTR and Conversion Rate. Increase those, and you are more likely to increase position.

Interaction of Factors

If you have a good site, with highly relevant content, you tend to get more links. So disentangling backlinks, and the immeasurable relative user satisfaction, is difficult. Pretty much the only way that I know it can be done, is when you have web sites with accidental misbehaviours that create the right conditions for a test. The technical problems that create the conditions are rare – and recreating them in a real website is likely to decrease the performance. It’s unlikely that anyone will give you the opportunity to mess up their site, just to prove what works.

However, if you want to go about it… Here’s what I think you’ll need:

• A visibly horrible page, with a low conversion – as your starting point
• Weak Title and Meta Description as a starting point
• A lot of visitors per day – it takes a long time to demonstrate, otherwise
• The ability to make sitewide link changes to the page under test
• Good backlinks – you’ll want to know that you *could* rank well on page one

Change the URL for your horrible page, sitewide. Wait for Google to find it and rank it again. Note the position. Watch the position fall over a period of a week or two (depending on visitor volume). Now improve the page, and switch the URL again and wait for Google to find and rank it. Then watch the rankings change and note which way they go. Now revert the page and switch URLs again, and this time change the Title and Meta Description. Now watch the ranking changes. Now fix up the page again and once more switch the URL and watch.

You should, IME, find that you achieve a higher long term position when you have a better title and description, and a higher converting page with a lower bounce rate. If you can explain why you *shouldn’t* get a higher position with a site that is better for users, I’d love to know the reasons. But don’t make your explanation involve “gaming” the system.

And, FWIW, I don’t believe that the Title and Description are important, as direct factors for SEO. You can rank perfectly well for keyword free pointless titles, and descriptions without keywords that are positively turgid and rambling. However, show the user that you are focused on solving their problem, and your CTR increases; and if you are focused on the user, you’ll probably have a reasonable landing page, which will engage and convert better. Google’s not going to reward you for a better snippet, directly, but for a better user experience. Your only measures though, will be what you can observe – CTR, Bounces, Conversions. If I could tell you to look at the “re-query rate”, I’d tell you to do so – instead, you’ll have to use the information you can get.

Implications For SEO

If a blog article can decay to little traffic in a few weeks, or sustain rankings for years, on the same blog, with the same blogging software, then the difference must be backlinks? Well, not substantially. Over the years, I’ve had more backlinks to newsy stories, but still this “gclid” article keeps ranking. And all the time, the other lighter weight articles just keep falling out of the listings.

There’s a few other similar articles on this blog that rank, and stay high for years and years and years. Non-competitive searches, but of long lasting traffic value. And the other sites that I’m competing with, for attention, are large forums. High weight. Much more frequently updated content. I’m *deliberately* not trying to place links for articles. Just letting what happens, happen – so I can understand why it happens. So there’s no contamination effects here with deliberate link placements.

What are the articles? They all tend to be like that gclid article. Something that is detailed, informative, and means that you can go away and do something. Useful articles, in other words. Harder to write than “straight news” articles, as you need unique content, written to address the audience. That’s part of my reason for writing – attempting to develop clearer communication.

The clear implication is, I think, that useful content matters. And how do we know it is useful? It’ll show up in search engine rankings, usablility data and other disturbingly hidden and arcane resource. Google will reward useful content with a better sustained rank – but won’t put you on page one just because you have a great article, unless you have some backlinks to create credibility.

But How?

Rand makes the point that data about use can be gamed. But so can backlinks. That’s the major part of undeclared paid backlinks, small world building, and other “black hat” techniques. We know that Google sees through most black hat techniques, given time.

We also know, or can find out about, Google’s interest in invalid impressions and invalid clicks. For example, invalid impressions are generated when search engine ranking tools are run – they reduce the effective CTR. Invalid clicks are generated when users double click, or are paid to click. Just as with paid search, these two types of invalid activity are measurable by Google. In fact, Google can measure a lot more than a webmaster can see.

We webmasters only get to see bounce rates and conversions. Google gets to look at whether users search again. Much more valuable. If you want to build the worlds’ best search engine, then you want to feature the results that tell you that you’ve got a winning page – pages where users don’t need to search any more. Results that have users positively selecting that site again, when they see it in listings. Webmasters just don’t have that detail, directly. We just don’t know if the other guy answers better – unless we expend effort to learn our customers’ minds and make sure we have the best answer.

User Experience

Google’s Ten Things lists, first, “Focus on the user”. The results from this blog, and from other client activities that I’m not going to reveal in any detail, are fairly clear. Content that Google can measure as being liked by users, rank better and longer than content that is spammy, tedious and weak. The factors that lead to better rankings will include appropriate Titles and Descriptions and engaging content. It has to be, or rule 1 is broken.

We know that Google has experience of measuring impressions and data to look for invalid data. We know that Google is pretty good at it – or there’d be more click fraud problems with AdWords. So, if it can be done, and it is an important indication of quality, why wouldn’t Google use searchers behaviour to modify results, not just personally, but across the index?

Why can’t you improve the results when you click on your own listings? Because it is identical behaviour to the banned AdSense practice of clicking on adverts on your own site. Detectable. Invalid. Not counted. And for reasons that I don’t want to go into, I believe the same will be true of botnets and eLance and Mechanical Turk attacks. There will be a signature associated with them, that doesn’t match normal user behaviour. The signatures can be spotted and countered, by assigning the activities as invalid – just as it is in AdWords. Since AdWords continues to run without being infested with click fraud to unusable levels, we have a working system, on a global scale, that shows that user behaviour can be extracted from noisy fraudulent behaviour.

It isn’t perfect, true, but it separates AdWords from being a system that solely acts to transfer advertising funds to thieves, into a system that, more often than not delivers prospective buyers to an advertiser’s site. It isn’t perfect, but it works well enough. AdWords only works because it identifies and categorises user behaviour.

User behaviour categorisation works in one system that Google has, worldwide, on a service with measurable economic value. Why wouldn’t it be usable in organic search results?

Conclusions

Failing to identify and understand user interests is an SEO mistake. These are reflected by (but are not completely explained by) CTR and Bounce Rates – because that’s about the best that Webmasters can get. Google doesn’t have to use those – they have better numbers that are more meaningful to user experience. But saying that “Google doesn’t use bounce rates” is not the same as saying “Google doesn’t take account of user behaviour”.

Unlike Rand, I believe that Google cares very deeply about the user experience, and that Google has very sophisticated technology, probably shared with the Google AdWords guys, to identify unusual search behaviours and exclude them from consideration.

Given enough data, probably gained from multivariate testing on all the different data centres, Google can identify whether users are more, or less, satisfied by different ordering in search results than a pure backlinks-plus-content model would give.

Small scale tests probably won’t show anything about user interaction – because the activity doesn’t have statistical significance or because the signature of strange search activity is too obvious. So, don’t try faking it – if you’ve read this far, you probably aren’t smart enough to outwit Google’s teams of click-fraud defence guys. They are really pretty good, as anyone with a rational assessment of AdWords click fraud levels will tell you. Not perfect, but good enough to make the effort of using AdWords worthwhile, rather than primarily a way of siphoning your advertising funds to fraudsters. :)

Why do I say “if you’ve read this far”? Because if you really knew how to hide click streams, you’d be doing it with AdSense. And you’d have stopped reading at that point – because you own the game already. If you can’t own that game, you can’t own the game of spoofing user behaviour in organic search – it is (not identical to, but close enough to) the same game. At the moment I don’t understand why you’d bother with SEO behavioural spoofing, if you’d gamed AdSense, because the revenue is a lot more direct… Maybe that’s why Rand hasn’t spoken with any black hatters that have cracked it?

And if Google can detect unusual impression and click data, then they can fulfil their primary mission, with respect to modifying organic rank based on real user data about preferences and satisfaction.

I think the reason is that site owners who “invest” in spammy paid link purchasing rarely deeply understand what they are buying. And link spammers don’t really care whether what they do is effective, so long as there are people prepared to buy, and so long as Google and Bing mistake the links as being valid in the early days. Businesses usually evaluate the impact of an activity fairly early – so if they are told that the search engine impact will be most visible a few weeks or months after starting, then that’s when they’ll measure. A spammy link buyer will keep buying for years, because the impact is positive at the time of the measurement – the value declines with time as Google and Bing detect the patterns of spamming.

The very worst link spammers will submit your site to places that are already known to the search engines as places for low quality links, and already offering no value. So the most value that you get from the service, is a list of places that won’t have any impact… Useful if you need to go back and clean up the spammy links, later.

Take, for example, this piece of spam, submitted to this blog:

It looks appropriate. It’s about H1N1 and it has been submitted as a comment to an article about H1N1. But the URL given is for a product, even though the name offered is not a keyword. Is there any way to tell that it is spam? We could search for a key piece of text that seems unlikely to be in other comments. And here’s the traces that this is a piece of spam:

We can see the same author ID, with the same comment in many blogs – 314 blogs identified as carrying that precise piece of text, presumably with the same link to the “Fish Oil FAQ”. It is definitely spam.

In what way are Google and Bing so stupid that they can’t detect the same piece of writing in comments, when they can tell that a site has two or three paths that lead to the same product, wrapped in a templated page? It doesn’t add up that Google and Bing would penalise a site owner for multiple paths to a product that customers buy, but don’t penalise spammy links. So, do the search engine penalise spam?

Why are pages containing spam reported in search results, if the content is treated as spam?

Search engines are looking at the overall quality of the site and its’ pages. Some spammy comments to a blog or a discussion forum won’t kill the pages’ value. If users are finding the whole page is useful, then the whole page isn’t deranked – unless the web spam teams decide that the only reason for the page is to host, or be target of, spammy links. So you can find spammy postings on pages that have weight. A few spammy links on an otherwise useful page, won’t kill the page. That’s why we can still find spammy comments – they are a part of a page that is valuable.

That doesn’t mean that the reverse is true – spammy comments can be found, but it doesn’t mean that the links in the spam carry any weight. If they did carry weight, then we should find at least 314 sites are offering weight to the Fish Oil FAQ. So… where’s the site in the listings?

Interestingly, you can’t find the site named in the spammy posting. Yup. All that spamming and link dropping has had no useful effect at all – just try the search for links for fishoilfaq.com. Which just goes to show that the technique is pointless – it doesn’t work.

Back To Duplicate Content

Google and Bing are tolerant of genuine duplication within a web site. The large search engines even have a mechanism to help webmasters to signal that they are aware of duplication in their sites, and have a preferred path to that resource – the canonical link ref. A signal agreed to and used by the major search engines. It’s been so successful that search engines are now respecting the canonical link reference tag across domains (with some limitations).

But, identical postings, across a range of blogs and discussion forums, with keyword laden author names? Somehow that pretty obvious technique is supposed to defeat the search engines with wicked cleverness? It does, for a while. Then the web spam teams notice, zero weight the spam, and decreases their trust in your business. And that’s why duplicated postings in user generated content don’t work – blog spamming is an ultimately sterile exercise. If you’re going to comment, comment because you are a part of the discussion. Be interesting enough, and people will write about you and what you’ve written, in their articles – just as I’ve written about Danny Sullivan, below.

This decay in the value of blog spam (and other types of undeclared paid links) is why we hear the repeated refrain from businesses that:

“we hired an SEO agency for link building, it made an impact at first, but since we terminated the contract there’s been no impact on our business”.

Spammy link building has a positive effect on visitor volumes in the first few months or even years. But after a while, the search engines downgrade it, and decrease trust in the sites that gave you links (because those sites host undeclared paid links) and in your site (as a business that buys undeclared paid links). The activities have less and less impact with increasing time, and it is harder for your business to make headway once the search engines suspect that you are focusing on spamming as a link building strategy. You can even find that an entire chunk of your website is not being given any credibility for inbound links.

Blog spam has an unpleasant impact on the blogs it is dumped on, too. Read Danny Sullivan’s article about the way that blog spam affected a nascent site that may been useful to a specific online segment. The site did have some spam defences in place, but doesn’t it seem just a tad nightmareish that a site offering some long lasting value is taken out of action through activities that ultimately have no or little value. The economic equation is imbalanced. When that happens, as Danny implies, there is time and space for ethics and morality to play a part. Law? I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that – all that a US based law would do is to drive the targets offshore, or to use anonymising proxies, etc. (See our ancient article about tracking the steps in a spamming effort, apparently by some Ukranians).

Summary

Spend less time worrying about duplication on your own site – use the canonical link reference to help yourself and the search engines. Read Google’s official description about the canonical link reference, and how they have coordinated with Bing and Yahoo to understand the tag.

Spend more time worrying about what your linking strategy is telling Google and Bing – are you telling the search engines that your business will lie and deceive? Here’s Bings statement about spam and what they do in response to detecting spammy links. You really want those outcomes? You really want to pay people to cause work for other site owners, that has no long term benefit and may have disastrous repercussions on your own site? And when you find that the search engines no longer trust you, then you’re going to face a higher bill to remove links – there’s automated link placement, but the technologies for link removal are largely manual, and hence more expensive.

It’s pretty easy to establish the practices that lead to long lasting, higher ranking web sites. Start engaging with your prospects and clients, or find another way to engage with an online audience – at this point in the search engine optimisation game, they don’t have to be the audience that you sell to!

Follow this on Buzz.

The technique of copying already well ranking content is partly a misunderstanding about why search engines rank anything. It’s actually possible to have a page rank highly, that Google hasn’t yet crawled. Examples are difficult, as they’d rely on exposing client details, but if you consider the two following outlines, you’ll understand a little more about why breaching copyright is both dangerous for your business, and a not very effective technique:

• Google bombing, or link bombing, has ranked pages for keywords that aren’t on the page at all
• Uncrawled pages can rank, showing just the anchor text and the link

The big thing to walk away from this story is that copying copyrighted material isn’t a good idea, because it doesn’t entirely give you what you think you’re getting, and may get you in trouble. Better to go write some genuine material, than steal it.

Rewriting Content

An alternative is to use artificial intelligence to rewrite the copy. I stumbled into a rewritten article from the Merjis blog a few days ago:

This example is probably using a simple technique of thesaural replacement, rather than any serious linguistic tools. The technique renders the text of the original article – the title is correctly preserved as “Discussion Forums and Customer Service” – as high entropy gibberish. These site scrapers went another step, though, and had a straight copy of the article, too.

Very much on the black hat side of SEO, I recommend clients to stay away from this sort of activity, not just because of the legal and search engine optimisation risks, but because most companies that have or should have customers, have more useful ways to interact with their customer and prospect audiences. Finding scraped content on a prospective clients’ site is a huge red flag for the account.

If you have a real brand, it is much, much better to focus on what your customer and your prospect needs to know, and engage them properly, than run the risk of tripping search engine filters, bans or public exposure.

History and the Current Era

A long, long time ago, I submitted sites to search engines. I’m talking about 1994-1996. By 1997, the web was becoming decently interlinked. That linking of sites into a formed web, is what allows Google and the modern generation of search engines to work. The old stuff, like AltaVista, HotBot and Lycos, which in their early days relied a lot on submitted sites, has both evolved and disappeared in the face of the modern, link following search engine.

How do the modern search engines decide to rank your site? Strictly, no-one outside the search engines knows all the details. But observation, testing and reading what the search engines themselves claim, shows that search engines like sites with links to them – not just any links, but links that are formed for a good reason, that a user might feel was a good reason for visiting the link. I’m not going to discuss that much more in this article, just this whole idea of search engine submission.

The key points are that modern search engines, like Google and Bing, follow the links around the net, and use those links to find and rank sites. If your site is so poorly linked to, that it hasn’t been found, how high in the ranking will you appear, after submitting your site? The answer is “on competitive keywords, not very far – and on uncompetitive keywords, you may do quite well, but are those valuable enough to try to get?”

By and large, you are better off making sure you’ve joined relevant trade associations with member directories, joined LinkedIn and mentioned your site and formed relationships with business colleagues, or even joined appropriate discussion forums and linked to relevant and useful comment on your web site – these are all more valuable uses of your time and money than submitting your site to Google or Bing.

You do have to watch out for who’s linking to you. Some “neighbourhoods” can reduce the trust that Google extends to you. I can’t tell you what precise directories and link farms might be involved in automated submission, but I’d tend to be very suspicious about the value of those links. By and large, anything formed from automation, will also tend to have a lot of spammy content – and you don’t want that, pointing to your site. Spammy stuff won’t add link weight and trust.

As a small business looking to promote yourself on the web, be very cautious about following up on the offers you get in your email, and instead of spending time on those, go find someone in a discussion forum with a problem of the type that your business solves, and help them – especially if they have a problem that you can answer in a longer article, or a YouTube video, on your blog, explaining the options and how to use what you recommend. Takes about the same amount of time, costs about the same or less, and is likely to result in the search engines both visiting, and better ranking, your site than just “submitting”. And you may have helped someone who becomes a client, or at least thinks more favourably of you.

There’s a guy at Google, called “Matt Cutts”, who’s really helpful, especially to learners. Read a nice interview with Matt Cutts, with a side salad on search engine submission. And another, older message about the official looking requests for money in order to have your site submitted.

Have a look:

Dentist Lake Worth
http:// www. dentallakeworth. com | randomizewee@gmail.com | 122.53.68.2

Symptoms of swine flu are similar to most influenza infections: fever (100F or greater), cough, nasal secretions, fatigue, and headache, with fatigue being reported in most infected individuals. Some patients also get nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. In Mexico, many of the patients are young adults, which made some investigators speculate that a strong immune response may cause some collateral tissue damage. Some patients develop severe respiratory symptoms and need respiratory support (such as a ventilator to breathe for the patient). Patients can get pneumonia (bacterial secondary infection) if the viral infection persists, and some can develop seizures. Death often occurs from secondary bacterial infection of the lungs; appropriate antibiotics need to be used in these patients. The usual mortality (death) rate for typical influenza A is about 0.1%, while the 1918 “Spanish flu” epidemic had an estimated mortality rate ranging from 2%-20%. Swine flu in Mexico (as of April 2009) has had about 160 deaths and about 2,500 confirmed cases, which would correspond to a mortality rate of about 6%, but these initial data have been revised and the mortality rate currently in Mexico is estimated to be much lower. By June 2009, the virus had reached 74 different countries on every continent except Antarctica, and by September 2009, the virus had been reported in most countries in the world. Fortunately, the mortality rate as of October 2009 has been low but higher than for the conventional flu (average conventional flu mortality rate is about 36,000 per year; projected novel H1N1 flu mortality rate is 90,000 per year in the U.S. as determined by the president’s advisory committee).

From Google h1n1 (Swine Flu) tracking in the UK, 2010/02/05 at 6:49 AM

So, what makes this spam, rather than a valued contribution?

• It is not from a person, but from a targeted keyword
• The supplied URL is appropriate to the keyword
• The topic is appropriate to an element of the article, but not the meaning
• The author is in the Philippines – not itself a definite marker, but contributes to the likelihood – but is wildly unlikely to be the targeted dentist
• The submitter has identified the article based on search results, not on the content – that is, a previous search lead to finding the article, but the article was not read and understood and an appropriate response composed. Instead a well crafted and rare piece of text was composed and submitted – but was irrelevant to the thread
• It has nothing to do with the relatively rare topic of dentistry; barely discussed online. Whereas Swine Flu gets a lot of high interest coverage… if you were targeting spam, you’d want high ranking, frequently searched topics.

Google’s search results show the signs of this specific craftwork in many blogs, where the indications of spamminess have been overlooked. Some of the comments left by this spammer are even on-topic and thread-relevant.

You could consider this the dark side of creating frictionless interfaces. OTOH, amongst the more sophisticated SEO spammers, there’s software that signs up for places like PC World (creates fake email address registrants, completes the forms with fictitious data, submits the forms, reaps the emails and authenticates, and then adds spammy comments). Creating friction to exclude spammers can decrease interaction with real users – there is a balance of evil to strike; how much near spam will you let through, in order to make sure that you can engage with the right audience?

This is a moderately clever piece of spam – it evaded Akismet, for example. If I’d been writing about the US situation, then I might even have let the spam through, as a useful contribution to the thread.

Is it entirely evil, like some of the spam submitted here? No. But this is almost good enough to pass as a valid commentary in a social forum. If you spam, then that’s the kind of area you need to be in, to make it through to trusted forums. Serious, unique content that contributes to the dialogue. Good effort, but only an ‘F’ – you were busted on relevance!

This article is part of series of short meditations on social marketing and customer interaction, following on from yesterdays “Google. Foot. Gun. Shoot.” and the previous article about soft paywalls “PC World – Online Subscriptions”