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.

It’s not that I don’t or won’t use FireFox, it’s that FireFox is far too valuable for me, as a debugger/developer/investigation tool. I don’t want lots of uncontrolled requests from it, for Gmail/Buzz updates. It would interfere with my use of Charles and other testing/analysis tools. I end up *having* to use Safari, Chrome, Camino, Flock to get my other things done.

As a result of not having Gears in those other browsers, I’ve got used to running Apple’s Mail, which has the added benefit that the blogs that I like to read are interpolated in my combined (business, personal, private and administrative) email streams. Running Mail means that I don’t have to use the browsers’ memory to hold my email, cuts down the WebKit processor usage and usually means that I don’t need to open lots of sessions for different mail services.

Buzz

I find that after the privacy issues involving Buzz have started to wither, I’m becoming a fan of Buzz. Why?

• I’m finding new users who’ve got interesting things to say.
• If I don’t have to switch applications, or tabs, it’s a decrease in my perception of “switching tasks” – it’s my comms window and I’m switching modes, not switching tasks.
• The length of postings and comments is more comfortable than Twitter; 140 characters focuses the mind, but not a lot of people can manage to say anything substantial in 140 characters…
• Linking articles is *easy*.
• Comment streams are easier to follow than on Twitter (without having a desktop app that requires refocus)

After I’ve used it a bit more, I’ll probably think of some other reasons… There’s plenty of improvements that I can see a need for (I’m still not entirely convinced that the privacy issues are resolved), but the raw, out of the box experience is sufficiently positive, that I expect to be using it more than Twitter and FaceBook. Much of that coming from not having to switch mental contexts with application or tab switching – the old issue in user interface task analysis, of whether the next task feels like a context switch.

A mild downside for personal use is that I can’t see how to get analytics on link usage – unless I revert to some hideous URL shortener technology twiddle. And, of course, if one was running a corporate Buzz (guys, I’m in Marketing, of course that’s the next thing I think about), then there’s the whole issue about how many Gmail accounts I can have open in a browser at a time. Part of my need in running so many browsers is that I can separate task-groups. If I’m in Camino, then I do this set of tasks. If I’m FireFox, I’m doing this group, etc. And that means that I can have a separate Gmail session for each (this is partially a vestige of my days involved with InfoSec, and partially a consequence of me wanting to isolate activities so that as we grow the company, I can delegate those IDs to someone else to manage). Adding a whole new set of identity-tabs to have concurrent Gmail identities open for running Buzz, will be problematic.

Anyway, with a good Buzz experience, so quickly, I decided to give the whole Gmail on Mac experience another chance. I opened a Safari tab on Gmail, and went to check the settings. Offline browsing is still not available for Safari, but it recommends FireFox and Chrome. I’ve got Chrome running most of the time, anyway, so new tab and Gmail… and still no Gears. There’s a help link (“Offline Mail is not supported by your browser. Learn more”) which, when clicked, takes me to a page that tells me nothing visibly useful about Chrome, the Mac, and Gears. Why am I referred to this page, with a single vaguely applicable statement (“You may be able to enable Offline Gmail on Safari” – but no mention of Chrome and Gears on a Mac)? I have no idea.

I use my Firefox instance for investigating web sites – lots of GreaseMonkey, debugger/developer/SEO plugins, use of Charles to investigate whether Analytics is working, etc. I really *don’t* want to use Gmail/Buzz in that environment. I guess that most other users are able to use FireFox, but personally, despite the positive experience of Buzz, because I can’t sensibly use Buzz (I need to stay in Apple Mail to get consistent online/offline usage of email), I’ll be on Buzz rarely.

In the interim, I’ll be looking forward to the day that Google get Gears working fully on the Mac on Chrome and Safari. Or perhaps I’ll try to find some time to work out how to get two instances of FireFox running, with different configurations… Or perhaps Apple might find a way to interpolate Buzz into my Mail-stream, along with my preferred blogs. *That* would be my first choice:

• Integrated message stream (tasks, mail, blogs, Buzz, maybe Twitter and FaceBook) for multiple accounts
• Offline and online usage, with messages queued for when I reconnect
• Lighter on the CPU than multiple browser sessions
• Ability to monitor and post corporate as well as personal and administrative items

So, small brickbat to Google for initial privacy issues, big bouquet for adding a cool new tool with some great characteristics, moderately sized brickbat for making offline usage on the Mac into a FireFox-only experience… and I think I’ve found another reason to consider an iPad. I can let my desktop focus on my site investigations, coding, admin, documentation. The iPad can sit next to it, and focus on the comms, notes and logbook. Have Safari on the iPad open for Buzz, and I’m not distracted by what’s happening on the main activity screen of my Mac, except when my attention leaves the screen, anyway. And the iPad will take care of resynch when the signal comes back.

I logged into our banks internet banking facility. I wanted to make a payment on Friday, 5th February 2010. I went through the identification of the recipient, and the payment and changed the offered date from Monday 8th, to Friday 5th. It refused the payment request, saying that I must choose a date between Monday the 8th and some date in June.

So I picked the 6th (Saturday). Still no go. Then the 7th (Sunday). Still wouldn’t accept it. Finally, I selected the 8th February, a Monday. Bingo! Payment will be processed.

It then processes the payment and tells me that the payment will be taken from the account on Friday the 5th February and deposited in the target account later that day. Which was exactly what I wanted in the first place, and it kept telling me it wouldn’t do.

Imagine my annoyance at having, for ten to fifteen minutes been told I couldn’t do what I wanted, and then being told that despite offering a different date for the payment, it would be paid earlier than I’d actually requested? What if I *had* wanted to pay on the Monday, 8th Feb? Then the funds would have been out of my account on the 5th, and not the 8th, as requested.

I’m disturbed by my Banks inability to work out when they are prepared to act, and the misrepresentation of the dates of actual activity, versus requested. It makes me less confident that they’ll do as I request. and I’m now more likely to pick up the phone or drop into the Bank. Or to change banks.

Purchase Processes – Especially For Special Offers

Our client had a similar issue – there was a particular offer they made, which couldn’t be fulfilled through the order interface, until after another action had been completed. But this wasn’t expressed clearly to users. They wanted the offer, signed up for what they were told to buy, and then couldn’t see the mechanism to access the offer – until they’d completed another stage in the the checkout. There were technical reasons why this order of actions was important – but the user could have been given a text notice that this is what the system would do. It’s no good when only *your* staff know how the system works – it is the customer that needs to be told, and told clearly, or conversion rates online suffer and the customer service phone lines heat up.

The only diagnostic that this company identified was an increased dropout in the funnel and decrease in conversion rates – when they were expecting total sales to increase.

This is a classic example of “you have to understand your business the way that a customer sees it, not how you know it works”.

This article is part of a series of short meditations on user interaction and the extension into social marketing, following on from a look at reducing the barriers to interaction, and some of the pros and cons of allowing user generated content, in “SEO: Remember Relevance?“

Harsh criticism, you might think, but I’ve been part of Google’s attempt to de-staff and automate customer service, by relying on the willing help of volunteers. I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum. I contributed a lot of posts, over the years. In the early days, it was a good place to learn AdWords problems, and to spot problems and policy changes before they were announced. Over the last few years, Google has taken to sending users with problems to the Forum first, rather than to customer service.

Now, I don’t mind answering, in public, questions about AdWords, if I have the time to do so. What I don’t like is answering the same question, repeatedly, when it it caused by a failure to understand information architecture and search engine optimisation and I especially detest it when the question is entirely within the province of Google. An example of that? A user saying that their credit card has not been accepted by Google. There is no reason for anyone outside Google to know the causes for that. There is nothing that anyone outside Google can do about that. It’s a problem caused by Google deciding to decline payment – so what can you, or I, or any one else outside Google, say to the n’000th person to claim their card payment has not been accepted? There’s an entire subsection of the AdWords Help Forum that consists of would-be AdWords users complaining that their cards have not been accepted.

It’s not a nice place for a volunteer to hang out. And the rewards are minimal… because the interesting problems are now very few and far between. Anyone wanting to ask a serious question about *how* to use AdWords effectively, is lost in the noise of people whose adverts aren’t running yet (another Google internal problem, where Google has decided to defer approval of the adverts, or keywords, and no-one outside Google knows the precise reason) and other repetitive self inflicted customer service wounds. I wince when I look at the forum – so my response to this miserable treatment of Google’s customers is that I’ve resigned as a Top Contributor.

Agency and GAP Treatment

Agencies can have a Google Account Representative assigned to them. Sufficiently large accounts may have a “vertical” strategic team associated with them. So at any one time I’ve had between one and three account reps to handle problems. I’m actually pretty pleased with the way that works. I can have a new MCC set up inside a day. I can get billing questions resolved, and sort out linking, and raise account limits and have adverts pushed through expedited reviews.

But if you are a mass market, self-signed up customer, with a low budget? Tough. You’re on the self-help program. And that can be a maze of twisty links, all leading inexorably to the AdWords Help Forum, for volunteers to solve problems that Google has created for you, partially because they create a maze of ever shifting links to more or less incomprehensible answers and forms, and the forum.

Google Staffers

Google has a team of staffers who respond to Google-oriented questions. These are the AdWords Pros (AWPs). Empathetic. Pleasant. Courteous. Access to a lot of areas inside Google.

They answer thousands of posts. By eyeball estimate, the most prolific answerer, AWP.Bindu, from India, answers somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 individual threads a year, having checked the account to find out what the status is. She’s unfailingly nice, and really does try to help.

The AWPs are also sometimes ready and willing to help the Top Contributors tackle problems. Top Contributors, or TCs, have to answer frequently, and correctly, and courteously. Otherwise they won’t be TCs. It takes time. Months of answering several questions, correctly, every day. TCs have their own private area in the forum, invisible to normal users.

Why Am I Spitting Rivets This Time?

Google isn’t merely annoying an army of small businesses who’ve had their AdWords accounts terminated for unstated and apparently irreparable reasons, but it isn’t even able to obey it’s own guidelines for making websites. And if it did, the help services it offers, supported by volunteers, would be a lot easier to find, slightly more useful, and less painful for the volunteers that help Google deliver customer service.

Look at this ageing article by Google’s own Matt Cutts, on the use of the Nofollow link attribute. Old news for SEO. The summary of that article is that “page rank sculpting with nofollow is dead, and we may penalise organisations that overuse nofollow”. And what does *that* mean? It means that the nofollow attribute, originally intended to help reduce spam in discussion forums and blogs, has been so widely adopted that the use of the attribute is destroying the way that the web passes link weight.

What does Google do, in its volunteer supported web forums? It nofollows each and every link in every article, even when posted by a Google staffer, much less the “trusted” Top Contributors. The consequence of that is postings with links that refer users to better postings with good information, are not ranked any higher as a consequence of the additional links. That means that users are not served with the best content. That means that TCs and Google Staffers waste time repeatedly answering the same question, because the search engine has been rendered useless.

What does Matt actually say?

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.

In other words, when Google staffers have nofollow links to pages inside Google, or to pages outside Google, they are not doing the right thing. By nofollowing links within the help forum, useful pages inside Google aren’t ranked more highly, and external authoritative resources are also not helped. Ultimately that should lead to Google penalising itself for attempted pagerank sculpting. Amusing, eh?

Why Are Customer Problems Exposed To The World?

Google has taken a philosophy of user contributed content and applied it to ludicrous lengths. As I said earlier, there is no way that someone outside Google can usefully comment on why a specific advertisers adverts are not running. There’s lots of reasons. They usually boil down to “you’re in an account review or an advert review”. But that’s not the specific help that advertisers are looking for – like why their card has been refused.

It is reasonable for users to ask other users about the impact of geotargeting, or what kind of advert copy works best, and the reasonable fees for an agency. But asking other users about decisions that Google has made, for reasons kept private inside Google? It makes no sense to me, or to anyone else that I’ve spoken to, outside Google.

The philosophy that users are frequently enough nice and helpful is fine. I am, even with a snitty posting like this, attempting to help other users on the internet. It is even, in a painful way, helpful to Google, by pointing out that the policies they have developed are one thing and reality is another.

I like the idea of the forums. I use the other Google forums myself. But to withdraw customer service for wounds that Google has inflicted, and only Google can comment upon, and to direct those damaged customers to volunteers for support, is just not sane. Or if it is sane, it is sane in ways that mean that Google can reduce staffing – it isn’t sane in terms of developing a reputation for good customer service.

And lo and bhold, what do we see when the Nexus One ships? The same philosophy that users will help. How can I, sitting outside Google, respond to a question about when someone’s phone will ship? Or issue an RMA for defective hardware? Or deal with provisioning questions? These all need levels of of authority that are really part of the social contract between user and service provider. A relationship in which random third parties should not be welcomed by either side.

Yes, I do run an AdWords Help Forum blog (with Kim doing most of the postings, these days, as I’m just so annoyed with Google). But I regard it as a supplement to Customer Service, not a replacement for it. That’s why I resigned as a Top Contributor. Preventing users from advertising for Google internal reasons, then telling them to consult ignorant third parties, is demeaning for all involved parties.

And then nofollowing every useful link, makes the value of posting much lower than it should be, forcing the volunteers to keep answering the same questions, again and again. Some proper information architecture and linking would help a lot.

Updates

2010-06-21 – typos corrected.

1 – Ignore Other Opportunities

You can appear on Google Map listings. In Image search. In Video search. On YouTube. Blog searches. Mobile search. News sites. News aggregation sites. Bookmarking sites. Press Releases. Social networking (FaceBook, My Space, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc all have their markets and uses). Human moderated directories. Professional and trade association directories and many, many other places.

(We come across companies with an obsession to show in precisely one place – usually Google organic search results. There’s a risk to that. If Google change their ranking algorithms, all the traffic can disappear; spread your risks by appearing in all the places you *should* be. They don’t usually have the volume of traffic you can find on Google, but some have high quality visitors, even if of low volume, and some have really high volumes of variable quality – if you don’t consciously consider these, your competitors will have no competition. )

2 – Redirect Everything, All The Time

Sick of those boring old URLs that everyone else uses? Evade the search engine results pages by changing your mind about what the page is called. Why stick with just serving the page you were asked for – deliver an excitingly renamed page on every request!

Use a custom Web Content Management System with a unique tracking code in every page request! Or, use Microsoft’s incredible “This’ll Fool The Spiders” Cookieless Mode. Then, when a spider comes to visit, the pages that ordinary users see will be renamed dynamically. Now you can decorate your URLs with “?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1″ *AND*, in a 2 for 1 Daft Deal, insert unique strings like “(X(S1)(hjkgjhgw2823tku))” into all paths recorded by search engines. That’ll split the weight between multiple competing pages and drop your rank. Super move!

For an extra trick, change the page content after each crawl, so that spiders will take years to recrawl frequently enough to work out that the page is actually the same, whatever the wierd bit in the middle, or at the end, does.

(This seems to be a misguided attempt to help people who don’t allow cookies or to provide some other kind of session interface. However, the public part of the site doesn’t critically need cookies and tracking – so for the sake of a tiny handful of people who want stateful operation but don’t want to allow cookies, they stopped spiders from crawling efficiently, and spread pagerank to thousands of “different” pages. The new “canonical” link tag should help reduce this perverse usage, eventually.)

3 – Only Idiots Need Descriptions

Your site is famous for what you do. You don’t need no stinking meta description. Besides, people say that the meta stuff isn’t important any more. Dump those weaselly bits that say ‘name=”description” content=”some boring old rubbish”‘. It’ll make the page smaller too, so it loads faster. That *has* to be good!

Alternatively, forget boring old HTML and build a Flash Site. Sure, you need a stinky piece of HTML to *load* the Flash, but you don’t really have to do anything with it, like Titles or Descriptions. That’s *old* stuff.

(We still come across far too many sites that buzz with graphical excitement, and are either unfindable, or if you stumble on to them in search, have a dull as dishwater title and no description. It’d take 400 characters to put up a meaningful title and description that would help users to find and recognise the site as useful. And not a lot more to make Flash content into a decoration for users that want to engage with it, while the real site is delivered in search engine friendly AJAX.)

4 – Optimise *All* Pages for the Same Keyword

Well, if getting *one* page in the search engine results is great, think how much better it would be if every page in your site was showing all over the search engine results pages? Make sure that you use all the keyword optimisation tricks you can think of, to make sure every page ranks for the same keyword, including your contact page, privacy page and terms and conditions page. Everyone wants to see snippets from your privacy policy, anyway, no matter how irrelevant to the keyword.

(If you don’t optimise each page for different keywords, you confuse the search engines about which page to rank – reducing the likelihood of any page appearing at all. Don’t repeat titles and descriptions, either. Don’t link to other pages with the text “click here”, either – a nice descriptive link text helps you and users.)

5 – Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

For ease of development, and to give that creative freedom, just let anybody name any page anything! So if you sell hot water bottles, we could have pages called:

• hotwaterbottles
• hotwaterbottle
• hot_water_bottle
• hot-water-botttles
• HotWaterBottles
• Bottles/hot-water

Each page makes a slightly different claim about what you do. Each is linked to a few times. So there’s no particular page that has all the weight for your product. They are all good pages for your product. They just don’t rank very highly. But that’s OK, because they are creative.

(Creativity is great. But a creative site you can’t find and reliably navigate, is… a work of art? A lost opportunity? An investment without a return? Your choice of what you call it – but “high ranking” and “popular” shouldn’t be in your list of descriptions.)

6 – What Call To Action?

Write effusively about your company. But don’t let anyone know what the products are or what they have to do to get it. Avoid phone numbers. Don’t offer contact forms. No shopping baskets and storefronts. No email addresses. It’s a web site. They sell themselves, automatically…

(We’ve come across sites that manage to completely conceal what the product is, and have no mention of any contact information, whatsoever. Companies that say they deliver results… no idea about even what sector they work in, and no idea on the page what to do to proceed further. Tell users what you’ve got and what you want them to do; they’ll do it if they want what you’ve got.)

7 – Hide The USP

When someone buys from you, they pay slightly over the standard price… But unlike your competition, you include free delivery and on-site service for three years. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to *mention* that? Somewhere? Or are you really just going to let visitors guess that’s what you might be offering?

Start off by assuming that you’ll only be seeing your regular customers and your staff on your web site, and you could be right.

(We’ve come across sites that have great reasons to pay a little more than the lowest market price – but who seem embarrassed to admit they have a reason why their product costs more – whether that is functionality, quantity or quality. If you have a Unique Selling Point – tell the visitor what it is. Clearly. )

8 – Abandon Shop, Abandon Shop!

Your visitors have added items to the shopping basket. They click on the purchase button. They aren’t signed in!

This would be a great moment to empty the basket for them. If they are a new customer, they probably need a nice new basket, not that old, used one with stuff in it. Do them a favour and just clear it out. Now they can order with confidence …. wait… where did they go?

(Focusing on parts of the process can destroy the whole point. If you create a great login system, that’s interesting. But lose the basket, and you’ve lost, no matter how good the login system or the basket are. Even better – don’t make users remember whether they were registered before and force a password retrieval process – if they aren’t on your site every day, to buy something, they *will* forget registration details – so focus on collecting shipping details and match those to an ID, if you have to, as late in the process as you can. It is more important to get a new, satisfied customer, than the registration details of someone you’ve annoyed, who won’t buy. )

9 – Never Diminishing Circles

Special! Discount For New Customers!

In order to purchase this item, you must be signed in. Register Now!

Item Discount Only Applies To New Customers. Please select another item.

Purge cookies.

Special! Discount For New Customers!

Rinse and repeat.

(We’ve come across many variations of this. Special offers you can’t reach, technological obstacles to users completing a purchase. Test your site; monitor for small creeping changes having a huge impact. It is tedious to pretend you are a real user, and try to look at the screen as they do, instead of just *knowing* that at this screen you ignore the big graphic link that says “Buy Me” and must click the small text link in the footer, or whatever the trick is. If you want customers, you have to hit the problems and solve them, before would-be customers hit them and become dead basket cases. )

10 – Unique Navigation System

So many stores have boring links to look at, with categories of product and links to related products, etc. Let’s make an exciting visual storefront that exemplifies our brand values! We can use special parts of the screen, with unexpectedly tiny and ambiguous icons in pale grey on paler grey to act as store navigation! That’ll be exciting! New! Different! We’ll stand out from the crowd with our uniquely low conversion rate!

(Forcing users to understand new navigation systems can work – if the site is a game or a puzzle and that’s the point of the site; it might work for something like the the Wii, or PS3 sites, but mostly fails everywhere else. Non-standard navigation prevents users from understanding what they have to do to get to the right page and the right activity. Why would you *want* to turn away business for a shop, by disguising the front door as another display window or as a brick wall with a “closed” sign up and the lights off – the visual cues are important user interface design features, not a fashion statement. Usually. We did some work for a company who insisted that would be users solve a puzzle before they could register – and the registration rate declined dramatically; buying users are usually trying to solve their problems, not yours. )

11 – Make Your Business Problems A Challenge For Your Users

So you have a lot of products… Organize them on the web site, the way that your business divisions are organized! Users will naturally understand that, for example, *this* printer is managed by the “Small Office/Home Office” group and *this* very similar printer is managed by the “Small Business” team. Or, organize the user interaction by department. Have marketing offer products over here… and the basket is filled using these links over in the Sales part – and the order is submitted directly to accounts, who have their part on the site. But because each part of the site can change independently of the others, no cross linking between divisions of the company! If users want the products enough, they’ll learn what to do.

(OK, there is some value in exclusive brands, because they keep people out and that can let you drive up the price… but is displaying your lack of ability to organise a functionally effective customer oriented interface, something you really want to tell customers? Customers shouldn’t be aware, from your web interface, how complex a problem it is to manage their order – that should be your problem, not their problem. We’re perpetually astonished that so many businesses reflect their internal issues to customers, and make it harder for customers to buy, not easier. )

12 – Server Response Codes

Stand out from the crowd in search engine results! Why bother with boring messages relevant to your users, when you can show a fashionable and stylish “Planned Server Downtime” or an equally gorgeous “The Page You Were Looking For Cannot Be Found” search engine results title? Hack your web server so *all* pages are “200″ (Page OK). Then, when a search engine spider visits, it can’t tell whether the page is what visitors want, or a temporary out-of-service page.

This is one drastic technique to reduce the number of 404′s in your site reports. Get to the top of your managers’ “outstanding staff reports” by eliminating all 404′s, 301′s, 302′s and 500 series status codes in web server reports. Now you can have 100% good page delivery! Even if the page is rubbish.

(We have no real idea why the guy that did this, did it. We think he wanted to reduce 404′s, but he may just have been having a bad brain day.)

Summary

There’s lots of way to kill your business on the web. Many more than we’ve listed. How many are you using?

A recessionary environment is a good time to take a hard look at how effectively your web site is working for you. Hopefully we’ve tripped a few alarms and you can review whether you are making the most of the web marketing opportunities you have.

Thanks to “bizwriter” on Twitter for drawing this article to my attention.