In 2008 SEO Trends (I) we looked at the market for SEO services from the firm’s perspective. Let us now turn the camera and focus on the Internet users because they are in fact the final “consumers” of the search engines optimization efforts. Understanding consumers’ behavior is critical to any marketing campaigns and don’t be surprised to find out that there is a new breed of Internauts roaming the Internet.

There are many aspects to be looked at when analyzing the behavior of people surfing the Internet; we will focus on two that are relevant to our case: searching patterns and ad fatigue. When looking at the search engines market leader, we see that Google’s current rate of growth is on a downward trend. I’m not saying that they are not growing; I’m only saying that the rate at which they grow has slowed down. Google is experiencing lower click rates on search results ads and especially on their AdSense partner sites. Not only the click-through-rates (CTR) are lower than the previous years but advertisers are also complaining of having lower conversion rates too. And the lowest conversion rates come from advertisements on social media sites. Why is this happening? There are a few reasons why:

• Not everybody surfing the web wants to buy products, and especially not the kids watching movies on YouTube.
• Ad fatigue. People now know that the top SERP placed results are ads and don’t want to click on them because they’ve seen enough commercials already. Have you wondered why so many customizations are available for AdSense? Google is trying hard to blend their ads in partner sites so that people don’t think they are clicking ads, but there are really no more possible tricks to combat ad fatigue.
• Ad clickers are now Ad publishers. People click on AdSense. Publishers talk too much about AdSense. People now apply for AdSense. People once in the market for clicks are now sellers and hoping for clicks.

The searching patterns have changed also. People usually search for the first three-four months. People learn about new web sites and bookmark the ones with great content. People stay on those sites. People now type directly the website name in the address bar (or select it form the bookmarks list) or search for the name of the website.

SEO Changes

The major trend with Internet marketing today is the rush to get some visibility. The problem is that sometimes the desire to be ranked on top overshadows relevancy. And Internet users don’t like that, because they go to the search engines to find something relevant. So I reckon for 2008, the search engines’ “fight” with spammers and black-hat SEO will continue and the ranking algorithms will be further tweaked to get the most relevant pages on top. However there will be some tweaking that is not spam-related but user behavior driven. With the new breed of Internauts surfing the web and the ad fatigue, the need for more relevant pages will grow. But ranking algorithms already use web page content relevancy, incoming links from relevant web sites, etc. so is there anything else that can be used?

There is still some data that can further improve results relevancy, data like: time spent on a page, user’s bookmarks, direct visits, CTR levels through SERPs, bounce rates, etc. The problem is that this kind of data is hard to collect. There are though ways to collect it and we speculate that one of the reasons behind Yahoo pushing their tool bar and Google offering free analytics might be just that. They are trying to collect, understand and map the data to users’ behavior. As more data is gathered and processed, link popularity will become less important in ranking results.

But, until that happens, the power and number of incoming links will still play a major role in the search engine optimization techniques. One of the factors that are expected to gain more weight in determining the strength of a link will be the text surrounding the link. Links inside the text with relevant keywords around them will have more “juice”.

Summary

Despite the fact that economy will slowdown the need for visibility and better ROI will possible make SEO to go mainstream in 2008. Regardless of when, integration of online and traditional marketing will be inevitable; SEO will merge with the “marketing department” or at least the two services will be offered as a bundle.

This is the first blog entry from the SEO Tips and Tricks series and today we will discuss about duplicate content. Duplicate content refers to large matching blocks of content within the same website or across different websites. The search engines are trying to keep their results’ relevancy high so they don’t want duplicate content in their databases. There’s no point in having and showing pages with the same text. It doesn’t help the user and it occupies disk space. Webmasters and SEOs should minimize similar content in order to avoid search engines penalties.

The “penalties” for having duplicate content are not harmful to the website, but are harmful to your position in the SERPs, because while the website itself will not be penalized or de-indexed, the pages will duplicate content will be moved to the supplemental index and will not be shown in the search engine results pages. How exactly do the search engines’ duplicate content filters work is not known, but is assumed that: the crawling date, the authority of the website and the links pointing from one website to the other are taken into consideration when determining which website has the “original” content.

Tips and Tricks

Duplicate content within the website.
There are some steps you can take to prevent duplicate content from appearing on your website:

• Duplicate pages. You decided to create a printer-friendly version of each page so your visitors can print the information in an organized fashion. Great added value! However, the printer-friendly version is considered duplicate content. There are two ways to avoid that:
  1. Add a ‘noindex’ meta tag to your printer-friendly versions of the pages.
     

     <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

  2. Put all the versions in a specific folder and use robots.txt to disallow search engines’ bots to index those pages.
• Minimize boilerplate repetition. By providing a link to a page that has the text rather than repeating it on every page. However, sometimes it is desired to be able to showcase the text (i.e. testimonials), so here’s a nice trick to do it: take a “picture” of the text and display the text on each of the pages as a picture (.gif, .jpg, etc.).
• Duplicate URLs. Usually, to access the website, we can use both the www version of the URL as well as the non-www version of the URL. For the search engines, the two URLs are “different”, so that’s duplicate content. SEO wise that’s bad also; you are dividing the number of incoming links between the two pages. How to fix it?
  1. Use a .htaccess 301 Permanent Redirect to redirect all the non-www traffic to the www version. Open and edit the .htaccess file with the following lines:
     

     Options +FollowSymLinks
     RewriteEngine on
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

  2. If you have a Google webmasters account, you can set a preferred domain for indexing (with or without www).

Duplicate content across websites.
There are two external SEO techniques used in web site promotion that create duplicate content: articles publishing and content syndication (i.e. RSS feeds on blogs). While these are useful in promoting your website, you must be careful with the duplicate content issues that may arise:

• Make sure, if possible, that each site that displays your articles or on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article or blog entry.
• Create short-versions or modified versions of your articles (around 60-70% modified text) and use them for articles publishing instead of the original articles
• Don’t copy text from others (that’s an easy one!)
• Use duplicate detection tools to find out who’s copying your content and if they are not allowed to do it, file a complaint with the search engines. For Google use this link: file a DMCA request

Duplicate Content Tools

1. CopyScape.com is a well-known website that offers services to detect and protect your content against online plagiarism. Go to www.copyscape.com and enter the URL of your web site or web page. The script will look and retrieve similar pages.




2. DuplicateContent.net has another useful tool that allows you to compare two web pages and calculates the degree of HTML tags and text similarity between them. Use the duplicate content detector below to check for duplicate content:

At least that is what all that email spam we are receiving is trying to tell us, right? As a web master, maintaining large websites can mean big headaches when it comes to broken links. Web pages get renamed, moved or deleted so it is important that the website’s web master or web developer makes sure that all the links are updated and there are no broken hyper links that lead to dead ends. It is important for your visitors, but also for your SEO efforts.

In a previous article, Good Web Design Practices – Handling Errors, we talked about how to handle broken links when visitors stumble upon one of them. This article is about finding the broken hyper links before the visitors find them. And it’s not that hard to do it; there are a lot of tools that check web sites for broken links, so bigger websites do not necessarily need to be bigger headaches. A free and easy to use tool to find broken links is: Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

The program checks web sites for broken hyper links and it checks not only the “normal” links but also style sheets, scripts, frames, local image maps links, etc. It supports SSL websites and detects and reports redirected URLs. You can download the program here and if you need more information there is also a F.A.Q on the page.

Here are some interesting and useful features:

• You can set, depending on your connection, the number of parallel threads before starting the search;
• You can select to exclude certain types of links from the search;
• Selecting Properties for a link from the list of broken links you can see the address of the linking page, the address of the page linked to and the actual code of the link;
• At the end it delivers a nice report which includes, besides the list of broken links, a HTML site map with pages’ titles.

Note:
If you are using Hotlink Protection for your images, you will get a broken link (403 – forbidden access) each time an image is displayed. But, if you have all your images in the same folder (i.e mydomain.com/images); a workaround for this issue is to add the web address of the images folder to the restriction list.

Broken Links and SEO

Because the links are the gateways to your web pages, most of the SEO efforts will concentrate on the links: optimize internal linking, get more “strong” incoming links, do not link to bad neighborhoods, etc. The strength of a link depends on several factors, some related to the webpage/website from which the link originates, and some related to the link itself.

The Out Links and In Links columns in the Xenu’s Link Sleuth’s broken links results table contain valuable SEO information. The number of incoming and outgoing links per page can be used not only to analyze your own pages but the web pages of your competition as well:

• Out Links – represent how many links you have on the page (images links are also included unless they are restricted by the user). Remember that the search engine bots do not usually crawl links in excess of 100 per page. The number of links also influences the strength of the link; the more links on a page, the less strength for each;

• In Links – represent how many internal links are pointing to that page, image, etc. Optimize internal linking; internal links can really drive a page but use this wisely, if every page links to every page, the “link juice” is diluted;

LinkTiger

I was doing some blog maintenance work the other day; I changed the permalinks format for the posts, and something, somehow went wrong, because I had no more “active” links. I didn’t know at that time, because the homepage of the website was working fine, but if someone would have tried to open a post or see the posts in a category, he would have seen a 404 error page (page not found). Luckily I was keeping an eye on the traffic so when I started to see the poor search engine robots getting 404s I knew that something is wrong.

This is something that I could have prevented with an “automatic” link checker, so I did some research and I found this tool: Link Tiger. It’s a free online website broken links checking service so you don’t have to install anything but the good part is that it can automatically run a broken link hunt on your website(s) and alert you via emails. Besides scheduled links checking, I also found a couple of useful features:

• It checks for broken links, not only in web pages, but also within PDFs and MS Office documents;
• Normal view and page source view with highlighted broken links for easy spotting;

The free version has some limitations (i.e. only 1 website, 1000 links maximum) but there are also paid versions of the tool with improved features. So, happy link hunting!

When it comes to search engines and search engine optimization, most of the people refer to the search engines as”the big 3″, because the majority of the searches are done via the big three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Although Google is #1 with a very comfortable lead in market share (it already controls nearly 60 percent of the U.S. search market), MSN and especially Yahoo! are still “players” in the market.

The Big 2?

Despite broader economic worries about an economic slowdown and a drop in online traffic, Microsoft (the owner of MSN) is attempting the biggest-ever technology takeover. Today (February 1, 2008), Microsoft Corp. has proposed Yahoo Inc. an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in an attempt to compete with Google in a market that may almost double to $80 billion by 2010. The offer includes a 62 percent premium to Yahoo’s closing stock price on Thursday, January 31, 2008. This is not the first time Microsoft Corp. tries to takeover Yahoo! Inc.; one year ago, Microsoft’s offer was rebuffed by Terry Semel who just resigned as Yahoo!’s chairman.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO wrote:
“Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers …”

No matter how this goes, I’ll just stick a note on my monitor to make sure I will not forget …

Note to self:
Invent something that can be later sold for around 46 billion

Update February 2nd, 2008:

How is Yahoo! responding to the unsolicited bid? Here is a comment from the FAQ issued by Yahoo press:

The Yahoo! Board is undertaking a deliberate review process. They’re going to take time to thoroughly evaluate the proposal in the context of Yahoo!’s strategic plans. This will include evaluating all of the Company’s strategic alternatives – including maintaining Yahoo! as an independent company. That process will take some time, but the Board will ultimately pursue the option that it believes can best maximize value for our shareholders.

Update February 3rd, 2008:

What is Google’s position on the issue? Here is a comment from the official Google blog:

… Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation. … We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first — and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.

Update February 9th, 2008:

Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion offer. The Wall Street Journal reports that:

… a Yahoo source says that the Board felt that Microsoft was trying to “steal” the company. The same source stated that Yahoo wouldn’t consider an offer below $40 per share which would cost Microsoft another $12 billion.

Update February 11th, 2008:

Microsoft responds to Yahoo:

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. … The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

Update February 19th, 2008:

In an escalation of its fight for Yahoo, Microsoft will authorize a proxy fight at the Internet company this week, people briefed on the matter told DealBook. Unless Yahoo quickly reverses course and enters into talks, Microsoft would then seek to nominate a slate of directors to Yahoo’s board by March 13, the final deadline for nominations, and pursue a lengthy campaign to oust the board.

The move, expected to cost about $20 million to $30 million, was Microsoft’s alternative to raising its $44.6 billion bid and is seen as a less expensive way to put pressure on Yahoo’s board. Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s original offer as undervalued.

To be continued …