Author Archives: Tom Petryshen

In a move that is sure to please pro privacy advocates while simultaneously upsetting many marketing managers and SEO consultants, Google has officially killed referred data for users who conduct a search query while logged into a Google service. Anyone not signed in though will continue to send referrer data.

What does this mean to marketers and SEOs? Well for starters, you’ll no longer see the keyword referrals that triggered the organic visit in your analytics, even if you use Google Analytics. While you will still know the visits came from a free or organic search you’ll no longer be able to see the keyword phrase associated with the visit as it won’t be passed along. This of course will make it much more difficult to understand what keywords from organic search are paying the bills.

It’s important to note that this change does not impact paid search (also know as PPC). Google will still pass all of the keyword referrer data regardless of whether the user is behind a secure connection in order to ensure that advertisers are able to track what’s working.

With so much of Google’s revenue driven by paid search, it’s no surprise they’d keep the data flowing for advertisers. Despite the discrepancy, I can’t really blame them. I know I’d be quite upset, if I was told I could no longer see how my ads were performing. While “Trust me” might be okay in traditional media land, it just doesn’t cut it in the online advertising world.

While advertisers will continue to have access to the data, those marketers who have built their businesses purely on SEO will find it more difficult to do so in the future. @MattCutts suggests the change will only affect a small number of users to start (in the single digits) but I imagine the percentage of encrypted searches will likely grow over time as encrypted search becomes more common and eventually the default for all search queries. Good or bad, the days of building a business purely off the back of SEO may be over.

Ultimately, this could mean more advertisers for Google as website owners and markets, especially for new sites will need to run some form of campaign to see exactly what works before investing in SEO. While marketers will still be able to build an optimised website out of the gate, it will become a lot more difficult to prove to the skeptics that SEO is a viable and profitable channel.

As a consumer, I support the move, especially knowing how much information is left behind from our daily activities. But as a marketer I’m left just a little frustrated that I’ll have to start relying a lot more on saying “Trust me, it works.”

For a more a comprehensive piece, see Danny Sullivan’s in-depth analysis at Search Engine Land, with quotes from Google’s @MattCutts and leaders in the privacy field.

What do you think? Do you believe this will kill SEO or just make it more challenging and drive more businesses to work with professionals?

First it was the New Yorks Time’s unmasking of JC Penney’s blatant link buying. Now Overstock.com, a dotcom survivor started in 1999, has also fallen afoul of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for excessive links building.

Overnight, the Wall Street Journal published the grim results of Google’s punishment on Overstock’s attempt to game the system.

The WSJ reported: “Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.”

So where did Overstock.com go wrong? Well according to a spokesperson from Overstock, their practice of encouraging college and university websites to link back to Overstock so that all their students could receive a 10% discount, likely put them in penalty box.

A quick search on Opensiteexplorer.com, a tool from SEOmoz for checking a website’s back links clearly shows the high number of educational websites linking to Overstock’s vacuum cleaners page. In addition, a quick glance at the anchor text pointing to the same page shows a high usage of “vacuum,” “vacuums” and “vacuum cleaners” over the more common brand related term such as Overstock.

For someone trained in SEO, seeing a high number of links coming from similar domains and using the same or similar anchor text is often a clear sign of over optimisation. Obviously, Google felt the same way and believed that intervention was needed.

Here’s an example from one of the Universities who took up the offer.

So if you’re not already convinced of Google’s intentions to stomp out excessive linking building after JC Penney’s recent woes, then this latest public lashing of Overstock.com should be a cause of concern, especially if you’ve been using similar tactics.

With the high levels of link buying that we’ve seen here in Australia and abroad I expect to see a few more public outings of other well known brands in the coming weeks. Whether it will help to turn the tide against those who go too far is yet to be seen.

Hi. My name is Tom and I have a problem. Actually I have a lot of problems, but none are more pressing or more relevant to you than how SEO has affected my perception of the Internet. More specifically, SEO has ruined how I use the Internet so I hope that sharing my story will keep you free from suffering my fate.

Everywhere I look, I see bad websites. I see hideous design, poorly designed technology, flash implementations that render websites invisible, information architectures based on a company’s organizational chart, copy that looks like it was written by my six year old, cluttered layout, garbled code, ugly interfaces, and worst of all, sites that forgot they were there to serve a purpose.

Read more at Search Engine Land.

A common challenge facing many global organisations is how to present and optimise content for local markets and to gain additional benefit without a substantial increase in costs.

While it may make business sense to centralize content in one data centre using a single Content Management System (CMS), doing so will make it more difficult to rank well in the geographic based search engines for each market.

If all of the content is hosted on one server using a single domain name, the search engine may ignore the content all together. Alternatively, if the search engines see that the geographic domain name is hosted in the same location as the other global sites (with country specific domain names) they may come to believe that the content is duplicate and ignore it all together.

Note: While the search engines have publicly stated that hosting in a local market is not necessary if you’re already using a local domain name, our experience shows otherwise. In cases where we have moved the website from a centralised server to a local host we have seen a significant improvement almost immediately.

To achieve success from an SEO standpoint we recommend the following steps be taken: