I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting spam emails from my Gmail inbox. If my email is public and scraped, Gmail should still block the spam people send me. Since they’ve been horrible at stopping this for at least a year, and probably more like three years, I’m going to start posting these emails here and hopefully Google will improve its spam filters as a result. As I get more spam emails, I’m going to keep posting them here. And maybe these people will see their own emails scraped and rendered useless by their fellow spammers…

Up to May 22:

Two from this person:

Hi,

This is Jenni.

I own many websites across various categories where I am currently
providing Ad space and would like to know if you are in need of the
same. I can offer Text links, In-content links, Banner Ads, and full
page Articles for your advertisement needs.

Kindly let me know if my offer interests you,

Thanks,
Jenni.
jennicaseo@gmail.com
Skype: syl_mike

Hi,

This is Jenni.

I own many websites across various categories where I am currently providing Ad space and would like to know if you are in need of the same. I can offer Text links, In-content links, Banner Ads, and full page Articles for your advertisement needs.

Kindly let me know if my offer interests you,

Thanks,
Jenni.
jennicaseo@gmail.com
Skype: syl_mike

Up to May 20 2012:

Subject: Hi
From: Paul Keyes webguypaul@yahoo.com
Hi! I was checking out your website — you have an awesome website! However, I see you’re not ranking well on Google, which means customers can’t find you! I can fix this for you by getting you better rankings and a ton more traffic to your website — fast! If you’re interested, please let me know.

Ironically this next one got marked as being a priority message by Google. #Fail #SpamInYourEye

Subject: Partnership SEO proposal at 20% discount
From: sales@kanhupanda.com – KPI – SEO Team

Hello,

How are you, i hope you doing well.

We are very keen to build a long-term, working relationship with you and your company and provide you with an excellent SEO service at massively affordable prices. All our plans involve an offer of 20% off our listed prices.

Some background information

We have resellers from the USA, UK, CANADA, SOUTH AFRICA, & NEWZLAND but we are always looking to partner with more resellers who can provide us with regular SEO projects. As you know we are INDIA based seo company with a worldwide customer base. Our team of over 200 SEO professionals serve a vast portfolio of clients and have transformed their businesses by improving their ranking and the number of visitors to their site.

Some links of interest about our company

About us : http://www.kanhupanda.com
Our SEO Team : http://www.kpipl.com/secure/client-base/kpi-team.htm
Top 10 Ranking we Achieved : http://www.kpipl.com/secure/client-base/top-10-ranking.htm
SEO Packages : http://www.kanhupanda.com/seo-packages.htm
SEO Reseller Plans : http://www.kanhupanda.com/special-seo-reseller-plans.htm

We look forward to hearing from you and sharing a long and mutually beneficial business relationship with you and your company. If you interested in our services we can share you more informations like “Live access to look our employees”, “Client testimonials”, “Weekly SEO Report”.

Feel free to email us sales@kanhupanda.com or alternatively you can provide your best time and phone number to call you.

Thanks

Luvin M
Sales Manager
Kanhu Panda Infotech Pvt. Ltd.
India’s leading online marketing agency
Subject: Cheap Contextual Link and One Way Link
From: info@seoremoval.com

Hello sir,

I’m link builder services specialist, I have some blogs network, and have some
blogs list with different IPs,

I have company my own site, you can check http://www.seoremoval.com
I want to work together well for long-term with you.

Pricing per blog posts :
PR1 = $7
PR2 = $8
PR3 = $11
PR4 = $15
PR5 = $20
article provide by our team, 200 words based

I will give you :
* Articles authenticity guaranteed passed Copyscape
* Each article is made of at least 200 words
* Every article has a maximum of 3 links to your blog
* Each article will be placed on a related category
* Each article will be published on a different blog IP
* Each article can be Picture or Video (If you want)

Check our Price One Way Link http://www.seoremoval.com/services/one-way-text-link-building

I hope we can work together well for long-term
If you have any question or doubt please feel free asked me
I provide several my site list, so you know where I can placed your links
I’m waiting your good response

Thanks & Regards
SEO removal

Subject: Work Smarter, Not Harder For Top Talent
From: icims@active-hire.com

If you are having trouble viewing this email click here

Are you spending your morning sourcing top talent? Are you using your lunch break to sort through resumes? Are you working after hours tracking applications?

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iCIMS, Inc. | 90 Matawan Road | Parkway 120, Floor 5 | Matawan, NJ 07747 | p: 1.800.889.4422 | e: marketing@icims.com
© 2012 iCIMS, Inc.
ActiveHire occasionally sends messages about our own products and services or on behalf of our advertising partners.
ActiveHire, Inc.
1705 S. Capital of Texas Highway, Austin, TX 78746

To end email offers, discounts and news, please go to http://www.active-hire.com/end.html

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Steve recently got a warning from Google that a number of pages were returning soft 404s, and the next week, his traffic dropped 10%.

The following week, another 30% was gone. What are these dramatically harsh “soft” 404 errors? How do you fix them?

What is a soft 404? It’s when your content is no longer what was there but you return an http status code other than 404 or 410 (i.e. you don’t return an error code). For instance, you might return a 200 code. As Google says in describing such errors, you can label a giraffe a dog, but it’s still a giraffe.

If Google detects such errors, you can expect them to index less of your pages and to eliminate the rankings those pages might once have had. In Steve’s case, this was probably partly to blame, but an additional server crash certainly did not help. So don’t worry about as drastic drops as Steve experienced, but be aware that you can see traffic drops due to soft 404s.

The difficulty this client experienced is that contrary to the more common soft 404 situation where 200 status codes are being served, we had established 301 redirects.

Here’s my analysis of the problem affecting this client’s site, all of which essentially stemmed from a recent redesign.

With the redesign, the client also implemented search-engine-friendly URLs. Great!
The trick of course is how do you maintain the rankings? Standard SEO best practice is to 301 redirect the old URLs to new URLs. Great!

What about when some of the pages on the old site won’t exist on the new site? This client has a dynamic classifieds site, so products are constantly being sold and delisted by the merchant who advertised it.

During the transition from old to new site, a number of product detail pages became useless because that merchant sold out his/her inventory.

We couldn’t leave the pages in place and just label them as sold, with links to other merchants’ identical-product listings. While good for users and Googlebot, it would burden the server heavily given the size and volume of this site.

Instead, we had to redirect these expiring classified listings. The priority list for 301 permanent redirects was as follows:

1. Exact-Product overview page that links to listings from several merchants. So an expired Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s Shoe product listing would send visitors to the Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s product overview page.

2. If such a page didn’t exist, a redirect to the deepest subcategory (i.e. from breadcrumb navigation) would be shown.

3. In the absence of a subcategory, a category page would be the redirect’s target.

4. In the absence of a relevant category, the general “Pick A Category” page would be shown.

Google showed us three URLs that it said were soft 404s, and indeed they were right with regards to two.

Those two redirected to the Pick A Category page. While that used to be acceptable and even widely advised SEO practice for the sake of maintaining traffic, Google’s realized it’s not an ideal user experience.

So Google tells you that such redirects (in their example, to one’s home page) are no good.

Fair enough, we’ll change that to 410 errors and hopefully make up the lost traffic on any specific rankings with increased indexing and longtail traffic to other product detail pages.

But the third page was perplexing – it redirected from a product detail page to a page that listed classified ads for exactly the same product. It wasn’t clear why Google thought this was a soft 404? A false positive from Google, clearly.

This lead me to write the following analysis for the client:

Hi Steve,

I looked around, checked out SEOmoz Pro and Google help and used my noggin. Here’s my analysis:

1) Generally, soft 404 is when there’s a 200 response even though the content isn’t there.
2) Google’s help pages also talk about redirecting to the home page as being a soft 404 – so we know that it’s not just 200 responses but also 301 that can cause soft 404s.
3) How does Google detect that there’s a soft 404? It checks if the content of the page says that the file is not found or otherwise says that an error took place.

ALSO – It seems it can look for content that is too different – as in 2). So probably it’s looking at title tags, headers, images, and content similarity.

If you look at the first soft 404 page (— edited to protect the innocent—), it’s more surprising because that category/search result shows exactly the products someone is searching for.

However, if you look at the html code, neither the title nor the headers (h1 h2 etc) reflect the product searched for. So for a robot, it’s not clear that the page it gets redirected to is about the same topic as the page it tried to fetch.

Therefore, the solution I propose to fix the soft 404 errors is:

—–Part 1—–

For products that are gone and redirect to perfectly accurate subcategories or model pages, to edit pages of that type (is it search results? something else? product-overview page?) and include the keywords in the important areas for SEO: title, h1 and let the on page content take care of the rest.

On a related note to the above, I suggest changing the css/coding around so that on category pages, not just product pages, the product name is in a large-font size h1. Currently they’re not in h1s at all. And other things that are not really important (e.g. non-category-specific sidebar headings) should not be h2.

Ex.: “Brand” “Color” etc should not be in h2, because that tells Google the wrong message about the page’s topic. They can still be in a larger font via css, but preferably not
h2.

Another benefit of making the category keyword a prominent h1 heading visible on the page is that this should hopefully help reduce bounce
rate.

—-Part 2—–

For product pages that are currently redirecting to the pick a category page, or a regular category page, let’s eliminate the 301 and just do a 410 gone .

In any case, Google is not treating them like 301s, so we may as well try and do what Google’s asking and show 410. On the 410 page, we can still show links to the relevant category page as well as the pick a category page.

For product pages that are currently redirecting to product-overview pages, let’s make sure the model pages have h1s set up right.

For product pages that are redirecting to subcategories, can we prioritize the same exact same product to show up first?

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http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q1_google_earnings.html

“Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.43 billion, or 28% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2011. This represents a 19% increase from first quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.04 billion. ”


What’s interesting to note is that roughly 70% of that goes to AdSense Publishers. That’s based on Google’s statement regarding Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC):

“The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.70 billion in the first quarter of 2011. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $337 million in the first quarter of 2011. ”

In a similar vein, average CPCs are up 8% year-over-year from Q1 2010 to Q1 2011. Yet another reason big PPC investors get fed up and eventually seek SEO services…

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http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html

1. “It’s best to do one thing really, really well. We do search.”

Yet look at Buzz, Wave, JotSpot, Chrome, Blogspot, Feedburner, Picasa, Talk, Jaiku, SketchUp, Gears, Android, Page Creator, Friend Connect etc… (see more at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products )

Granted, Android has been remarkably successful … but look at all the other things Google has branched out into and either failed at or been only average at.

Similarly, from the UX principles page (http://www.google.com/corporate/ux.html ):

2. “Focus on people[:] their lives, their work, their dreams. [...] Above all, a well-designed Google product is useful in daily life. It doesn‘t try to impress users with its whizbang technology or visual style – though it might have both. It doesn‘t strong-arm people to use features they don‘t want – but it does provide a natural growth path for those who are interested.”

Whizbang technology that tries to impress users … features they don’t want… Google Wave?

3. “Google teams think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important feature.”

Ditto.

4. “Add a human touch.”

When was the last time someone applauded Google for a positive customer service experience? Outside of times where Matt comes to conferences and answers questions, I can think of a variety of stories where people could not get through to a human rep at AdWords, or were told to get stuffed when they did get through. And that’s not just crummy affiliates, but ordinary people too. Or the rep who suggested to a PPC pro that they work together to increase the client’s spend by $1M/month ….

5. Roughly all the software principles (http://www.google.com/corporate/software_principles.html )

The Google Toolbar sends URLs back to the mothership for indexing purposes, the browser bar in Firefox searches with Google by default … Where’s the disclosure? What about installation of Google as the search provider? Is this not snooping?

If you liked this commentary on Google, you may like to read more in the search engines category, or add my rss feed to your reader.

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I recently failed to find things when searching by name. I tried looking up a foreign song by its name, and a restaurant by its name, address and city (all in one query). Both those searches failed.

What did work was looking for the category of the song. It’s no secret that if your search is too specific, you want to broaden it, but sometimes it’s difficult seeing how to make something broader when you’re already searching on a general term.

To give an SEO analogy, if you wanted to read about improving registration page conversions, you might look up ‘conversion rate optimization blog’ and then dig around sites on the topic. It may take a little longer, but it’s a way to find stuff in the longtail when Google’s algorithms suck too much.

With regards to the restaurant, it seems the Google Places listing hasn’t been claimed. Presumably that’s why the query confused Google, which gave me a country-level view of its map. Obviously useless.

What did work was just looking for the address itself, which Google somehow does know. So if you’re looking for directions to a restaurant or place, type in the street address… not the name.

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Continuing the SphinnCon deadblogging, here are the notes I took on Barry Schwartz’s excellent and fascinating preso on mobile and on ranking factors in the Apple Appstore and Google Android app market. (Barry Schwartz’s RustyBrick developed the popular iPhone Siddur and offer iPhone Development, and mobile web dev.)

What apps does Apple like to promote and drive traffic to in its mobile store?

- Look at their suggestion dropdowns.
- Check out the top apps in the store.
- Mobile apps that appear on app review sites
- Apps that get shared a lot.
- Apps that update often.

Some related tips
- Offer free review copies.
- Ask for reviews
- Keyword stuffing still matters … consider also piggybacking off the brand names of popular apps
- Cross promote between apps
- There are directories for mobile apps – they are worth submitting

On the Android Market:
- It’s got lots of junk, spam etc
- People aren’t interested in buying in anywhere near the proportions they are interested in the Apple App Store
- Update your app a lot to appear in the ‘This Just In” new apps section

Barry gave a remarkable preso with a lot more detail, but unfortunately he went through it very quickly and so note-taking was remarkably difficult. You can email him and try asking for a copy of the slides.

If you liked this post, you might also be interested in what the pros encourage with regards to mobile web design best practices.

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This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, an SEO at Virginia based SEO & Reputation Management firm MangoCo. You can follow Brian on the Twitter at @brianspatterson.

Many businesses may be confused or worried with all of the changes that have been happening in Google’s local SERPs lately.  Google literally turned local search on its head about two months ago, and as the dust settles, many of the long-term effects are becoming clear.  One specific change which I’d like to cover here has many of our clients filled with pride, and has helped us close some new local SEO client deals.

The change has to do with local listings being more aggressively inserted into queries that previously did not trigger a local 7 or 10-pack.  To illustrate my point, lets take the phrase ‘roofing’?  What is a visitor’s intent when they type ‘roofing’ into a browser?  It could be a few things:

1. To find out information about different types of roofing materials
2. To look for roofing supplies
3. To find a roofing company
4. To learn the skill of roofing
5. others???

Until recently, Google assumed it was everything except #3, and they displayed whoever was best optimized for the word ‘roofing’.  Now, however, local results are included in the mix.  See the image below (with my location set to Washington, D.C.) for the current SERPs:

You’ll notice that the local 7-Pack is inserted after the third listing.  Effectively, ‘National Roofing Contractors’ now ranks for the term ‘Roofing’ when that is searched in their locality.

What are the client implications of this?

Is this a particularly surprising behavior to SEO’s?  Probably not, but clients absolutely love this.  We’ve noticed that many of our clients love to have a keyword they can ‘show off’, and this result in the SERPs scratches that itch for those that are local-focused.  

We’ve had referrals call us saying, “Jenn told us that you were able to get her on page #1 for XXXXX” where XXXXX is a head term like roofing. Although we do compete for some really competitive terms straight-up, in this case the calls were coming from people referencing the local insertion we’re detailing here.

Because we’ve had multiple clients react in such a positive way as they are now starting to see head terms in their SEO reports, we’ve adapted our sales pitch a bit for local clients to include information on this.  

The main piece of this is educating the client on how this works and what it means.  

Teaching a client about the search engine results is tricky enough, so explaining local optimization and inclusion is even more tricky.  We try to explain everything in the most simple terms possible and use a lot of analogies to help them understand the concepts.

But ultimately, a potential client is interested and excited about the prospect of being on Page 1 for a head term in their locality (which is all that matters to them).  This added benefit makes selling a local-oriented campaign even easier.

So, how do you optimize your local site to rank in this way for head terms?

Optimizing for this behavior is pretty easy – just do exactly what you would for any other local SEO campaign.  Consider the screenshot below, which is a search for ‘Roofing Washington, DC’:

You’ll notice that the blue boxes in each of the images are identical.  The 7-pack did not change at all.  So, ‘roofing’ triggered the same 7-pack as ‘roofing washington, DC’.  Thus, to optimize for a head term that triggers local results, you just need to optimize for the ‘head term’ + your location.  If you need some resources on local SEO, here are a few to get you started:

1. Local Ranking Factors
2. The Local SEO Guide (blog)

When are the local results being triggered on head terms?

Google is getting more aggressive in including local results in non-local search queries.  In taking a closer look at what they selected to include local results in, it seems as if they are pretty simplistic in their implementation.  It’s as if they just chose the most obvious head terms where local results might help, the surface if you will, but did not dive any deeper (yet).  For example, the following obvious head terms return local results:

• Landscaping
• Moving
• Packing
• Stationary
• Picture Frames

The above terms are pretty straightforward words with local companies in almost all localities that provide related services and products.  Now, lets dig into some other markets that are also present in near every location, but are of a more complex nature:

• Executive coaching consultant
• Trade show exhibits
• Pressure washer parts
• Infrared hair straightener

Given Google’s track record of including local results in more and more queries, I think its just a matter of time before they get smarter and include local results for more complex terms such as these.  As they do that, local SEO will become even more important.

Conclusion

Local results seems like an active experiment for Google, with ranking factors and displayed results constantly being tweaked.  Staying up to date with the changes can mean the difference between the success of some local businesses and mom-and-pops, and the death of them.  What are some other interesting local changes you have seen in the SERPs and the resulting client reactions?

Brian and his team run SEO campaigns for their clients as well as a number of their own online properties, including niche sites such as a Vibram Five Fingers Review site, a roofing jobsboard, and even a hair straightener site, among a bunch of other random stuff

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What’s The Future of Adsense?

In the past month, I’ve noticed retargeting campaigns on a few quite random websites. Retargeting means targeting ads to people who already visited your site.

The remarkable implications for AdSense may forever change the AdSense publishing industry!

PPC company Webrageous has been following me all around the web because I read something they wrote about the content network.
A/B split testing company Unbounce has similarly shown me their ads as I watched streaming illegal video, err, porn, I mean, How I Met Your Mother.

What really made me notice how significant this could be was IfByPhone’s retargeting while I was on a camera review site.

If you’re in the digital camera adsense biz, or read about Darren’s Digital Photography School, you know that AdSense can be a good earner in that niche.

Speaking of which, I just saw this…

Digital Photography School with a retargeting campaign

When I was getting into internet marketing, I recall that people used to publish lists of AdSense niches with high CPCs.

(Ex.: “Mesothelioma,” a form of cancer that features tort lawyers advertising for class-action lawsuits.)

Now suppose retargeting via the Google content network (now renamed Google Display Network) becomes mainstream, or even default.

The results are wide-ranging.

For AdSense publishers, niche selection becomes virtually pointless.

If call-tracking ads show up when I’m looking for camcorders, and PPC management / split-testing when I watch How I Met Your Mother (instead of the more logical DVD sales/rental option) – what use is it to publish about camcorders?

Why not publish about something that requires less expertise and capital?

Political blogging may become profitable.

For AdSense advertisers, optimizing becomes more difficult.

- For ordinary content network campaigns, you can just look at an AdSense block and see who else shows up.

With retargeting, you can’t see who else is bidding for that ad space unless you happened to have visited their site before.

- Site exclusion tools may be less effective, because you’re targeting users and not sites/contexts.

- Category exclusion tools may be less effective for the same reason.

What results do you guys anticipate from this change? Will it last long term? Or will this be a temporary trend whose ROI won’t be shown to warrant wide adoption? Perhaps it will be adapted with impression caps?

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Trying out Google instant, I saw a particular query on which Google blanked. Notice the size of the below screenshot.

Yeah, Google ain’t got nothing. (And I got double negatives and great grammar.)

p.s. Wonder how many searches (percentage wise) come from browser search bar, where Google Instant doesn’t apply.

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While googling around to help my sister Dahlia because her Gateway PC broke down (again … I think she got that 1/1,000,000 that makes it through QC when it’s a lemon), I saw the following search result. It’s entirely made up of forums, which is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing (at least, when not searching for forums or info about them).  Screenshot after the jump.

A few thoughts come to mind.

1) This is a response to longtail queries. Forums have traditionally been a great place to learn subjects in depth, online. The first social media I really got into were forums around 2002-2003, when I was really into hiphop and Counter-Strike. Both had some amazing forums around where you could soak up information to your heart’s content.

2) I think this is part of the May Day update. It’s interesting to see how effective the update probably is in some cases, as I explained in point 1.

It’s also interesting how ineffective it can be.

- I still have no idea what the hell a RAID access failure is, except that it’s something to do with the motherboard, graphics card, or hard drive. And that’s virtually the whole computer, so not narrowing things down much.

- I’m also not sure really how to fix it. I got some idea it’s to do with the drivers, so I had my sister get the latest ones, but the other points were about reconnecting SATA cables etc.

- All these forums are by techies – for techies.

It’s like expecting my mom to come here and understand this post.

I don’t blame the forums mind you – they claim to be for an advanced audience and that’s fine.

- Any search engine that directs a non-techie to them, however, has some important questions to ask.

“How technical is a particular page?”

“Does this query need a more technical or more generalist response?”

3) I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Nvidia’s #1 ranking is [mostly] because they have the most posts/authors and thus the richest discussion. By extension, that would often make it the most authoritative thread.

Two arguments suggest that other ranking factors may be predominant, here.

a. From reading other forums, I think this is something that specifically has to do with Nvidia hardware, so it may be some kind of brand association. I could be totally wrong on that – please correct me in the comments if I am wrong.

b. The PC Help Forum has more posts and authors than HP’s forum – yet it ranks lower.

(The counter argument to “b” is that HP.com has both a load of link juice and brand factors pulling for it, which overcomes the lower post/author count.)

3.2) Recency also does  not seem to be the driving factor in rankings here, though Google does seem to find it important enough to display.

My guess is because this is not a query that deserves freshness, though some people may have a slight preference for it.

Consider the low – and constant – search query numbers – a newsy item would have seen a spike in searches.

This also supports my earlier suggestion that this is to do with solving the constantly refreshing long tail …

Raid access failure doesn’t even chart on Google Trends…

What do you guys make of this search result?

Have you seen it before? If so, how long?

What explanations for it do you have, and do you think it ties into May Day?

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Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation.

Seen in a Google AdWords account I manage:

Gotta love bloopers .

This is part of my Friday photos and fun categories. Like it? Get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.

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“One way to fight this sort of strategy [Google's strategy of playing in every market] is Yahoo!’s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy.” (-Google As A Publisher)

Amongst other moves listed there are the closing/selling of the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo’s answer to AdSense, and the outsourcing of Yahoo shopping to PriceGrabber. If you take that along with Yahoo’s failure to ever take the analytics company it acquired out of beta, you see a pattern emerging:

Yahoo doesn’t stick by its products.

It launches divisions only to let them die later. It buys companies and does squat with them.

It’s well known in sales that large companies like dealing with large companies because they’re associated with greater stability. Stability is code for reliability / trustworthiness.

If you see the above pattern, and Yahoo offers to buy your company or partner with you… what’s your response going to be like?

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In response to Google’s efforts to block access to Latma’s We Con The World parody, which is another proof of Google’s political bias and unreliability, I am going to go a month without Google search. I look forward to seeing how this works, and will report back. If you want to make a widget to this effect, or do the same, please feel free, and do let me know.

Again, this censuring of Latma shows the problem we have with Google’s dominance in search. If you rely on the information highway for access to information, and people put roadblocks up on certain branches of the highway, the highway’s very essence is undermined.

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Caroline Glick and others produced a parody regarding the flotilla that’s been covered by most major news organizations worldwide. Google – which owns Youtube – decided to censor it from Youtube, which shows you the danger of having a single player controlling so much of the information highway.

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I’ve just been reading some of SEOmoz‘s Pro member tips and seeing their suggestions to use affiliate URLs that use hashtags, also referred to as the pound sign, number sign or hash mark.* For example, site.com/#aff123 .

One of the justifications given was that  search engines ignore everything after the hash tag. As exemplified by Wikipedia and certain other sites, this is no longer the case. Google’s search results provide sitelinks on some Wikipedia articles. This has implications for affiliate links, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Sitelinks are those 4-8 deep links that go directly to a particular page on the site, or in Wikipedia’s case, subheadings within a long article.

The subheadings on Wikipedia are linked to using the corresponding hashtags. Ex.: wikipedia.org/article/#subissue1 . Therefore, it’s clear that search engines are considering hashtags. 

Anyone using an affiliate program that relies on hashtags to track  the source of the visitor should consider using 301 [permanent]redirects, rel=canonical or other equivalents to make sure they avoid duplicate content problems. Each of these solutions – permanent redirects, rel=canonical etc. – are designed to tell search engines what is the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ page. I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary and that search engines won’t figure it out otherwise, but I prefer a proactive approach where possible.

If you liked this idea on affiliate tech geekery and analysis, add my rss feed to your reader.

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And that means tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for a variety of companies participating in the program, for aggregate savings to SEOs in the millions of dollars!

For those who are unaware, Yahoo bought out Altavista a long time ago. With that purchase came Altavista’s paid inclusion technology.

With paid inclusion, you paid Yahoo to include a list of URLs submitted in a special format (XML if memory serves?). If you were small, you paid a flat fee, or if you were big, you paid on a cost-per-click basis for every visitor sent to your site via their search engine. It was argued that this could benefit sites that had poor architecture, the same way submitting a sitemap could be beneficial.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader. You can also check out my search engines category for more posts like this. It’s mostly about Google, but I also have written items like this one, “5 Things MSN Must Do To Gain Search Share.“

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by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post:

“Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay[...]“

“In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.”

Actually, it appears from the Seattle Times story that I was wrong on the margins point, because Google will allow publishers to set their own retail price, while apparently Amazon is already selling e-books at a slight loss. Presumably, Google will take a commission on each sale. But Google is trying to steal market share…

This fits in with what I was saying about Google’s affiliate network and how they are going to become the biggest affiliate around in the next little while.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products. [...] Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide.”

Replace Google Base with Google Books – whose rapid rise to prominence I noted at SEO Book – and you get today’s announcement [Ed: It actually was in Monday's paper, but I didn't have time to edit this post].

This isn’t the first time I’ve been ahead of the mainstream seo community.

Longtime readers will recall how, I picked up on Google’s new submarine crawling, 4 months before the announcement that they were querying site search forms.

Others will remember my presentation of how to use trusts to buy sites at SMX Advanced last year – which also came months after I shared the technique on this blog…

And my SMX Advanced presentation was based partly on a year-old post! Yet people loved it…

So if you want to stay ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage, you should add my rss feed to your reader.

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On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that

“Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest. And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything.

So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects. And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others.

It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.”

Here’s the screen cap, so you know I’m not inventing stuff.

Have to tell the truth? Why did it take action by the Florida AG before Google started making ringtone advertisers list prices in their ads? Why are the prices on other mobile content crap landing pages still hidden in nearly invisible text only an SEO would notice?

When you get to this landing page on most people’s screens, the huge headline and graphics (and occasional animation, depending which version of the ad you see) naturally draw your eyes … not the “subscription sent to your cell $9.99 per month” bit.

And why do they let so many scams and snake oil products run on their network?

This next one took in my sister, as it happens, and she’s one of the brightest, most critical-thinking people I know. This shadier side of affiliate marketing has developed the art of lying and deception to a standard the KGB would be proud of. They don’t just take advantage of gullible people. They manage to trick highly rational people with serious IQs (I know, the IQ quiz thing makes this particularly ironic).

Google needs to come clean. From a business perspective … For their users to keep trusting their ads. For the sake of showing the government that they don’t need to be regulated (though the above obviously shows you can’t trust them to self-regulate). And from a simple moral perspective, because it’s the right thing to do. (P.s. Inspiration hattips: Diorex (on scammy aff) and Aaron Wall (spam if you don’t pay G) and Danny Sullivan (Sphinn).)

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Then you’re way ahead of the curve and understand what Matt Cutts is talking about, late in this video, on getting crawled and indexed more rapidly and deeply. If not, it’s time to understand search like Matt Cutts and read up on submarine crawling. This also goes back to what I was writing about thinking like search engineers and what Google wants. These are not merely abstract ideas, despite appearances. Grasping these notions puts you a step higher on the ladder, closer to “SEO Director” and further from “SEO data entry monkey,” because you can solve problems rather than merely execute other people’s solutions.

On a related note, my Tuesday class in Statutory Interpretation with Prof Klinck lead to an interesting observation on critical thinking. My prof pointed out the assumption underlying a provision of some labour law. I asked how he’d gone about identifying the assumption, because I would not have been able to.

His answer was as follows. To identify an argument’s assumption, try asking what is the stereotypical situation it has in mind. What is the paradigmatic example?

Then, alter one fact at a time. Will the situation still fit the paradigmatic situation? In marketing terms, a/b test each variable in the situation and see if you still get a paradigmatic situation or arrive at the same conclusions. By taking a concrete example, you can deconstruct what is necessary for it to fit the paradigm.

There are infinite ways to apply critical thinking like this, and search marketing in particular is rife with examples. Commenting on a blog post, improving existing techniques or practices, assessing whether or not to use a promotional method for a given client…

The possibilities are endless. I’d love to hear what situations this critical thinking could help you with!

(P.s. If you liked this post, you may find interest in link buying even Matt Cutts could love, and link buying’s evolution in 2009. You might even add my feed to your rss reader .)

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Google has officially announced first-click free, it’s new attempt to fist clueless fools for all they’re worth.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Huh? What? Read on to find out how Google is encouraging content producers to lose a little more control over their content in its ongoing efforts to fight copyright.

First-click free is Google’s new offer to webmasters: share subscriber-only content with it in exchange for us sending you traffic to those pages. In Google’s own words:

“To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google’s search results and that Google’s crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content.”

So what?

If you do a site:subscribers-only.com search on Google, you see all the pages Google has indexed from that site. You can modify this if you’re clever to show the results from a site on a given topic, by adding keywords to the query. E.g. site:subscribers-only.com pay-per-click

So if I wanted to, I could access all of a site’s private content – or have a bot do that for me – simply by visiting through Google results repeatedly. And if that’s the case, then why subscribe? CD sales tanked at the turn of millenium and have continued to tank since then because many people cared little about the packaging and mostly about the music.

Well, people probably won’t be too bothered by having one tab open with Google site:subscribers-only.com search results – throw in a &num=100 to the end of the query so you get 100 results per page and thus need to click less – and open the results in new tabs as they deem them interesting.

I note that Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped asked if you could block people after they’ve visited a few times in the day. John Mueller of Google responded,

“When a user comes in from Google, he should be able to see the full content, always, every time he comes in from any search on any Google site. However, when that user clicks around within the site after viewing the first content, you are able to limit the available content.

“Again, if a user comes in from Google multiple times a day, he should be able to see the full content of the article (as it is crawled and indexed by Googlebot) every time he comes in from Google. It is not limited to the first time that the user comes in from Google.”

I’m sure Aaron Wall will be thrilled.

On a related note, you might like to read the Independent Webmaster‘s Manifesto, and consider starting a search-independent online business in hiring / recruiting, data filtering.

Because in the medium term, it looks like affiliates and ecommerce-only sites are going to get killed off by Google. Get off webmaster welfare already!

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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