joi, 1 septembrie 2011

Why You Can Almost Guarantee Google is Using Your Analytics Data Graywolf's SEO Blog

Why You Can Almost Guarantee Google is Using Your Analytics Data Graywolf's SEO Blog


Why You Can Almost Guarantee Google is Using Your Analytics Data

Posted: 01 Sep 2011 10:40 AM PDT

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While many webmasters and publishers use Google analytics without a second thought, smart publishers, marketers, and SEOs are left to speculate… Is Google using this data? What might they use it for? And am I doing myself more harm than good using it?

if you aren’t paying for a product or service, you are the product being sold…
Truth be told, unless Google ever does a full disclosure about analytics data (which to date hasn’t happened), we are left to conjecture and guess. However, if we look at Google’s business decisions, especially since Larry Page has assumed control, the only conclusion you can logically come to is that yes, they are using it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Conference attendees have been using Q&A sessions to try and pin down Google engineers about whether or not they are using bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, or other specific factors. But, by asking these narrow questions, they allow the engineers to sidestep the real question with carefully worded answers. What we need to do is stop trying to figure out exactly what factors they are using so we can try and exploit them–instead, we need to get answers to the larger question: “Is data from Google analytics currently used in search engine ranking pages?” Why is focusing on Google’s use of one factor bad? Much like that kid in class who asked “Is this going to be on the test?” you’ve lost the plot. That kid has stopped focusing on learning and simply wants a good grade by regurgitating specific facts back to the teacher. It’s unlikely that Google is looking at any single factor; instead, they are looking at more than one aspect to determine overall quality. Engineers from Google constantly tell us to stop focusing on these narrow factors (like pagerank) and focus on the big picture and what it says about our website.

The question you need to ask yourself is at what point does it become easier to spend more time building these signals the right way and less time on faking it via black hat spam techniques … 
Ever since Larry Page has assumed control, one of his big focuses has been shuttering some of Google’s non profitable projects, like Google Labs. It’s not that Google is no longer innovating; it’s that they are taking a more pragmatic approach. Projects need to be cost effective, and they’re not giving them the same length of time as they did in the past to get to that point.

Let’s take a look at analytics. Maintaining uptime for the massive number of sites that Google analytics runs on requires a huge investment in hardware, software, and skilled engineers and technically skilled labor. Next we need to add in the programmers, Q&A, and resources associated with maintaining and updating the user interface/reporting side of gGoogle analytics. Simply put, it’s a huge investment of time, resources, and money. With Google’s recent shift in direction about projects needing to be profitable to stay alive, there simply isn’t any logical conclusion you can reach except that they are using the data. There’s a true saying about this situation: “if you aren’t paying for a product or service, you are the product being sold“.

There are multiple business uses for this data, including forcing up prices on adwords keywords, determining adwords quality scores, understanding consumer usage, and validating organic search engine ranking factors–to name just a few. Yes, Google adwords may have started as a supply/demand bid driven market system, but once adwords quality score got factored in, it became a black box model and prices could be raised artificially as needed. Don’t believe me? Try and explain why quality score forces me to bid $5 to display ads for my own name in adwords, but I can show ads for Matt Cutts for $0.30. Unless, of course, you want to defend the bizarro logic that I am more relevant for someone else’s name than I am for my own.

The real takeaway here is that Google is the data Borg. Without feeding the Borg signals that people are visiting, using, and returning to your site, you have little chance of ranking organically. These are the types of signals that real businesses and brands will send the search engines. These are the signals that become difficult and expensive to fake without large distributed botnets, malware, or hacking. The question you need to ask yourself is at what point does it become easier to spend more time building these signals the right way and less time on faking it via black hat spam techniques …

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Why You Can Almost Guarantee Google is Using Your Analytics Data

Seth's Blog : Thursday bonuses

Thursday bonuses

First, two signs, each telling a very different story:

Rmv

This sign says, "we're in power, we're going to use newspeak and double-talk and pretend we've done something to benefit you, which of course, we haven't." It also uses "conveniently" as an adverb, which is just annoying. Why not tell the truth, straight up?

Corn

On the other hand, this sign screams transparency and honesty. The farmer explained that on days when the corn was picked that day, he erases the scribbles on the bottom of the sign, but if the corn was picked just one day earlier, it's just not right to say 'fresh'. It's worth noting that instead of having two signs, one for each condition, he uses his own hand to tell the truth, quite vigorously. Guess who has the most popular corn stand in New York, even on days when it is not, apparently, fresh?

...and here's a fascinating, generous and over-the-top-in-a-good-way article on infographics by Ed Fry. Sometimes, earning attention is about being all three, not about gaming the system or getting lucky.

 

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Watch This: We the People

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, September 1, 2011
 

Watch This: We the People

Something exciting is coming to WhiteHouse.gov. It's called We the People and it will significantly change how the public -- you! -- engage with the White House online.

Learn more about it at WhiteHouse.gov/WeThePeople, and sign up to be the first to know when it's live here:

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Empowering Military Families and the Civilian Community to Work Together
Pamela Stokes Eggleston, a Founding Member and Development Director for Blue Star Families, a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting military families, shares what Blue Star Families is doing to help prevent military family suicides.

Small Business Summit in South Carolina
Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and they are providing important ideas and feedback to the Administration on how to increase hiring and spur innovation.

President Obama Calls on Congress to Pass Transportation Measures to Protect Jobs
Secretary Ray LaHood joins President Obama in urging Congress to pass an extension of key transportation programs as soon as possible to protect almost 1 million construction jobs and bolster roads, bridges, and railways.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:45 AM The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

12:00 PM The President meets with Secretary Geithner

1:30 PM Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

5:00 PM The Vice President attends an event for the Democratic National Committee

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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SEOptimise

SEOptimise


Ethics and SEO

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 06:10 AM PDT

Anyone who attended Brighton SEO earlier in the year (and didn't succumb to the lure of the pub before the last session) would have sat and listened, with varying levels of interest, to the panel debate on 'is there such a thing as ethical SEO'.  While I sat and took in the tennis-like back and forth discussion of a topic never likely to be fully covered in 45 minutes, I began to ponder my own views on both ethics and where they sit with SEO.

*

Ethics for SEO agencies

Working for an SEO agency, you end up working for a multitude of different clients, in a whole myriad of sectors, using an array of different techniques. By the very nature of doing so, you effectively become an extension of your client’s own company. So, as an agency, are you actually able to set your own ethics or do you end up adhering to those of your clients?

One of the main aspects of being an agency is that you commit to working in the best possible interests of your clients within the written or implied framework they provide. Do you have the right or obligation to enforce a different set of ethics upon them? Or are you just required to make sure they are aware of all the facts, leaving the overall ethical decisions to them?

Take, for instance, a situation where a client approaches you and asks you to buy a number links on leading newspaper sites (ignoring for now any discussion of the effectiveness of this tactic). For a start, is this unethical? It is certainly seen by most as a pretty shady area, but how far does this differ from paying for advertising? Is it merely the fact that it does not adhere to Google's guidelines that it is seen as bad?

Secondly, if you see this as an unethical tactic, should you then refuse or are you bound by the fact that you are being paid to carry out the wishes of another company? If that company is fully aware of the risks, and they are happy to accept them, are you really being unethical by buying the links?

Finally, if this is by far the best tactic to achieve the results that they desire, are you being unethical by refusing to use the best possible tactics available?

Some hard questions

This may seem like an odd question to most, but I'm sure the agency owners will have come across it on numerous occasions:  what are your ethics worth? Upon being presented with a request from a client to engage in something ethically questionable, there are some pretty big questions to ask. The first is:  what is your own ethical reputation worth? If you have built a company on the fact that you only engage in ethical practices, can you afford to be caught doing something unethical? And, if you were caught being unethical, would this reflect badly on the other clients that you work for? Finally, if you refuse to do it, are you going to lose the client to someone who will, and can you afford for that to happen?

Ethics are subjective

One of the main problems is that ethics are, by their very nature, subjective, and as a result it is impossible to have any ethical absolutes. Furthermore, what is seen as ethical evolves over time, meaning that what may be seen as ethical today may not necessarily be ethical tomorrow. It also becomes increasingly difficult when there are more factors than just tactics involved… would a completely ethical link building campaign, for a site seen by many as being unethical, be ethical and vice versa? I'm sure if you ask the guys at Bright Builders they would have some strong views (although that is more of a legal/illegal thing).

What can you do as an agency?

You'll probably have noticed that I have posed a lot of questions without really answering any of them. There are a couple of reasons for this, partially because I wanted to leave scope for discussion, but mainly because every agency and SEO will have their own opinions.

So as an agency, what can you do? To start with, I think you have to sit down as a team and discuss what approaches you are happy with and which you aren't. You will have to cover whether you have a ‘one size fits all’ ethical policy, or if it will be tailored to specific clients, and what you will do if any of your client ask you to step past the line.

Once this is done, you need to make sure you get it down in writing and make sure everyone is 100% clear about what it is and why it's there, and then make it part of your staff induction. There's no point in having a policy if even one person is going to ignore it.

Finally, you need to communicate that policy to both your existing and new clients so that you are both happy with where you stand.

Side points

There are a couple of points I consciously chose not really to discuss in the post, as they are slightly different applications.

The first is that, as an agency, you are both ethically and legally obliged to carry out the contracted work to the best of your ability. If you are knowingly employing tactics that you know won't be effective or you are billing for hours you're not working, then you can't really claim to be ethical. At the same time, if you have tried all the options available and you know the results your client is looking for aren't achievable, if you want to be considered ethical you need to be honest with them and let them know. This is something that as an agency we have done previously.

My final point goes back to some of the actual discussions at BrightonSEO, where a couple of people implied, and in some case actually came out and said, that SEO as an industry was unethical and likened it to the banking industry. While I'm sure there are SEOs and agencies out there who are obviously and unashamedly unethical and may rip people off, the industry as a whole doesn't. Having worked previously in both the mobile phone retail market and insurance sales, I can say that the SEO industry holds itself to much higher standards and, unofficially at least, is proactive at self-regulation. Personally I am reassured by what I see on a daily basis and at conferences and networking events, as it is clear that the vast majority of the industry is ethical and most work hard to provide both the services and results that they sell.

*Image credit:  That Dam Kat on Flickr.

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Video: Something big


The White House, Washington


Good morning,

We're about to change the way Americans engage with President Obama and his Administration by launching a new way for you to join with fellow Americans to petition the federal government on a range of issues. 

It's called We the People and you can learn more about it, and sign up to be the first to know when it's live here:

President Obama believes that government should be open and accountable to its citizens, and that's the goal of We the People. This online platform gives Americans a direct line to the White House on the issues and concerns that matter most to them.

Soon, anyone will be able to create or sign a petition at WhiteHouse.gov seeking action from the federal government on a range of issues. If a petition gathers enough signatures, the White House staff will review it, make sure it gets to Obama Administration policy experts, and issue an official response. President Obama will even answer a few himself.

While this is a big change for the White House's website, the idea is actually written into our founding documents. Throughout our history, Americans have used petitions to organize around issues they care about. We the People gives you a new way to join together with others to ask your government to address a problem, change a policy, or take action on a range of issues.

We the People will be launching very soon so start thinking about the issues that matter to you and the people you'll ask to join you.

We're looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President

P.S. Help us spread the word about this new tool by forwarding this email to ten friends. And remember, if you want to learn more about We the People and be the first to know when it is live, head to http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/WeThePeople

 




 
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Seth's Blog : Should the New Yorker change?

Should the New Yorker change?

For the first time in its history, the editors at The New Yorker know which articles are being read. And they know who's reading them.

They know if the cartoons are the only thing people are reading, or if the fiction really is a backwater. They know when people abandon articles, and they know that the last 3,000 words of a feature on the origin of sand is being widely ignored.

They also know, or should know, whether people are looking at the ads, and what the correlation is between ad lookers and article readers. The iPad app can keep track of all of this, of course.

The question then: should they change? Should the behavior of readers dictate what they publish?

Of course, this choice extends to what you publish as well, doesn't it?

 

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