Accuracy of search engine results called into question

Posted By Ron Miller

There's been lots of news lately about consumer search engines that bring into question the accuracy of the results. Recently, reports surfaced that Bing was copying Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) search results. Then, last week there was a New York Times article suggesting that an eCommerce site was using search engine optimization tricks to rise in the rankings. It may lead you to wonder if you can trust the results in these search engines to deliver the best and most deserving links. It's hard to know and that is making website owners a little crazy.

Let's start with the Bing story. As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explained in a Computerworld blog post last week, it seems that Google got an inkling that Microsoft was copying its search results. So Google laid a little trap for Bing by embedding its results with nonsense searches, which then showed up in Bing. Oops.

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Even more disturbing is a story in last Saturday's New York Times, which suggested that for several months, when you entered searches such as 'skinny jeans', 'dresses' or 'area rugs' into Google, JC Penney was consistently showing up at the top of the results. The article explained this was the result of some Search Engine Optimization tricks including buying oodles of paid links to the JC Penney site to enhance its place in the results (a violation of Google rules, which JC Penney denied being involved in).

If you try these searches today (as I did), you won't see JC Penney on the first page because the New York Times reporter blew the whistle on them and Google took action. Still, it's disturbing that it took a reporter to find the problem before Google did. Google's Matt Cutts was quoted in the article and said given the billions of links they deal with, Google does the best it can to prevent this type of abuse.

These two stories of search engine abuse involving two of the major search engine players (and don't forget that Yahoo! now uses Bing's results) has to be troubling to the people who in the words of Bill Clinton, "work hard and play by the rules."

My advice is, in spite of these stories, to keep on keeping on. If you have good content, I've found you really do rise to the top of the search results. I like to use the example my own blog for those who doubt that.

My name is rather common, but my personal blog, 'by Ron Miller' still appears in the Top 10 results on Google if you enter 'Ron Miller' and in the top two if you enter 'Ron Miller blog.'  Yes, maybe some sites pay to play, but in my personal experience, just producing what I hope is quality content for over seven years has earned me a place in the Top 10.

And lest you think Bing is copying everything Google does, I'm chagrined to report that I cannot repeat the results on Bing. In fact, in Bing, I find my blog doesn't appear until the second page using the 'Ron Miller' search (although it's worth noting that entering 'Ron Miller blog' does produce exactly the same results as a Google search). If Bing actually is copying Google, I'm not seeing it consistently in terms of placement of the results.

In the end, whether someone is gaming the system isn't going to matter much to end users so long as you find what you're searching for quickly (and I know in my experience in most cases I do, regardless of the search engine I'm using). As a website owner, however, you want to know that you have a fighting chance to get to the top, and while there are no guarantees, my feeling is that if you produce quality content on a regular basis, chances are you'll see results--no matter what you've read. - Ron

Source  http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/

J.C. Penney Incurs Google SEO 'Action'; How to Protect Your Own Company

Posted by Jill Kocher
Search-engine-optimization agencies often play a vital role in ecommerce sites, where winning and converting organic searches to sales directly impacts the e-tailer’s bottom line. But how far should a company trust an SEO agency to act on its behalf? The SEO community erupted this weekend after The New York Times published "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search," an expose on retailer J.C. Penney’s paid link campaign.

The reporter worked with an independent SEO firm, Blue Fountain Media, to unearth the reason J.C. Penney ranked highly in Google for many valuable search phrases like “area rugs” and “dresses.” Their search quickly uncovered thousands of links from topically unrelated and in some cases abandoned sites. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, pronounced the tactic, on Twitter, "blackhat" and stated that “manual action” had been taken to lower Penney’s rankings.

Who Is Responsible?

 

To be clear, it doesn’t appear that Google has banned J.C. Penney, because Penney continues to rank for searches that contain its own brand. Instead, the links that violated Google’s webspam guidelines have been devalued, which removed Penney’s advantage in the rankings and lowered JCPenney.com to a more algorithmically accurate level.
It’s possible that an additional penalty was applied with that manual action, given Google’s presumed file on Penney’s previous brushes with guideline violations.
A Penney’s spokesperson said the company was "not involved with or aware of" this link building campaign, and that they — employees of the company — are working to have the links removed. Penney also fired its SEO agency, SearchDex, which hasn’t yet commented on the matter. Penney loses rankings, traffic and revenue, and SearchDex loses a big-name client and the revenue it brought in.
There has been no proof as yet that SearchDex was responsible for the paid link campaign, just as there is no proof that someone inside Penney didn’t initiate the campaign. It’s theoretically possible that a competitor paid for the campaign to "frame" Penney or SearchDex. But it’s unlikely that someone would pay thousands of dollars over a period of months to generate a campaign of this scale as a frame.
In the grand scheme of things, the answer to the question of whom to blame is irrelevant, unless you’re J.C. Penney or SearchDex. The important question for other merchants is, "How can I prevent this from happening to my business?”

3 Steps to Protect Your Company

First, always practice ethical SEO, link-building campaigns and paid links. Make this abundantly clear to whoever manages SEO and link building. With so many people bombarded by email spam and banner ads promising amazing SEO benefits and thousands of links for a single low price, who’s to say someone in the organization won’t act on it thinking they’re doing good?
Second, if the SEO experts are in-house, ensure that they communicate their strategies to management. Typically, paid link schemes like these require budget. Examine any links proposed for SEO benefit carefully, especially if they come with a price tag. Now that most directories have lost their power, there are fewer and fewer completely ethical sources of links that require payment.
Third, if the SEO expert is an external consultant, make 100 percent certain that the consultant is clear on the company’s SEO and link building guidelines. If the consultant is prone to wearing "black hats," this admonition won’t stop him. But it sets the stage for focusing on ethical SEO strategies and taking corrective action if unethical actions come to light. In addition, ensure that one person bears the responsibility for managing the SEO consultant, even if multiple people in the company are involved with the SEO efforts. Appointing one person with this oversight responsibility, even if he or she also has to wear other hats, ensures that it won’t fall through the cracks. That SEO manager needs to actively manage the SEO consultant. Check into the strategies, poke into the research and data, peek into the sites recommended for link building, and scrutinize additional budget requests. This management is critical to ensuring that a company’s SEO resources are well spent.

Use Webmaster Tools, Too

What else could J.C. Penney have done to identify the issue before The New York Times did? Regular data collection and analysis could have uncovered the existence of the paid links. At least once a month, task someone with downloading data from Google, Yahoo! and Bing webmaster tools, in addition to the usual SEO data from the company’s analytics package. Webmaster tool data is not archived, and will not be available for analysis unless it is collected regularly. For example, if J.C. Penney had analyzed its Google Webmaster Tools link and anchor text data month-to-month, it may have seen an increase in the number of links and a suspicious consistency of anchor text. For companies the size of Penney, it’s impossible to track the changes to every page. But then again, black hat techniques aren’t usually bothered with unimportant pages and phrases. Monitor the pages and phrases that matter most to the company’s bottom line, and sleep soundly at night.

Summary

Think long and hard before giving an SEO firm carte blanche to implement SEO changes on a site or build links without oversight. No successful business would hire an ad agency to create and publish a campaign without close management. No successful business would outsource IT, hosting or customer service without close management. SEO requires the same management and oversight.

 

 

 

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Source http://mainlinemedianews.com/

JC Penney Fires Back at Google and New York Times Over SEO Controversy

Posted By Sara Yin
Over the weekend the New York Times published a damning expose of how JC Penney allegedly gamed Google's page-ranking algorithm, which artificially made the retailer a top search result. On Monday, JC Penney fired back at both the New York Times and Google for misrepresenting the company.


"The characterization of JC Penney in the New York Times article is misleading and unwarranted," wrote Darcie Brossart, vice-president of corporate communications at JC Penney, in an e-mail
Responding to Google's reaction of burying links to JCPenney.com in its search results, she added, "We have no record of ever having received a violation notification from Google before last week when the unauthorized links came to our attention. If we had, we would have worked quickly to remedy the situation, as we are doing now. Obviously, we are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings."

The original story, "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" by David Segal, details how JC Penney allegedly manipulated unpaid, organic search results to make itself the top listing for numerous generic terms like "dresses" and "area rugs." The New York Times hired a search engine optimization firm, Blue Fountain Media in New York, to show how this was done.

Using a well-known trick called "black hat" optimization, JC Penney's now-fired SEO firm SearchDex apparently created artificial websites that linked to JC Penney's site. The links helped push JC Penney pages to the top of Google search results; one known aspect behind Google's top-secret page-ranking algorithm is that the more times your website is linked, the higher up you rank in a search result.

Google told PCMag that even before Times reporter Segal contacted the search giant with the results of his investigation, it had already discovered the issue and changed its page-ranking algorithm after spotting suspicious activity from JC Penney and other companies. Google has an entire team, the Web Spam Team, devoted to detecting search-result spam and amending its page rank algorithm.

However, after looking at Segal's findings, Google concluded that JC Penney had also violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines. The company reacted by burying JC Penney's search results, and as the NYT notes, now when you search for something like "Samsonite carry on luggage" JC Penney is the 71st search result instead of the first.

"When someone is looking for information on Google, we want them to find the most relevant answers possible. Our search algorithm relies on more than 200 signals to help people find the answers they're looking for, and when websites violate our published webmaster guidelines to try and game the system, that's bad for users and we are willing to take manual corrective action," a Google spokesman said.

JC Penney denies involvement with the black hatting techniques of SearchDex.

"JC Penney was in no way involved in the posting of the links discussed in the article. We did not authorize them and we were not aware that they had been posted. To be clear, we do not tolerate violations of our policies regarding natural search, which reflect Google's guidelines," Brossart wrote.

Google Let JC Penney Spam Search Results For Months (GOOG)

The New York Times exposed the dirty side of search engine optimization this morning with a long article about how JC Penney spammed Google so it would appear at the top of search results.

Somebody created thousands of fake pages with the keywords that Penney wanted to game, like "black dresses," and a direct link to Penney's site. This messes with Google's PageRank algorithm, which assumes that a site is useful if it's popular. (A Penney spokesperson denied that the company knew what was going on -- it was probably a guerrilla SEO team or agency working on Penney's behalf.)
The amazing part of the story isn't how Penney tricked Google -- this kind of "black hat" SEO has been around almost since Google began.
The amazing part is that Google let Penney get away with it for MONTHS, and did nothing to stop it until the Times presented its findings to Google.
Matt Cutts, Google's anti-spam head, told the Times that Google had caught wind of several previous efforts by Penney, most recently in November. But Google apparently didn't "circle back" to see if Penney was still breaking the rules.
Finally last week, Google manually demoted the gamed results.
Here's the thing: if Google was unaware of a huge high-profile site like Penney doing this, can it possibly be aware of the tens of thousands of smaller sites that might be doing the same thing?
Google has been on the defensive about search spam since early this year, when articles began appearing in TechCrunch and other publications questioning whether Google was still useful. Google tried to change the subject to how Bing was cribbing from Google search results, but the search spam problem simply isn't going away -- a recent study by Experian Hitwise showed that 35% of Google searches offer results that are so bad that users don't click a single one of them.
In a fitting bit of irony noted by search expert Danny Sullivan, the New York Times article actually used an SEO tactic itself. The headline of the article is "The Dirty Little Secrets Of Search." But title of the Web page is "Search Optimization and Its Discontents." Those two words -- "search optimization" -- are among the most searched-upon keywords in Google.
Source http://www.sfgate.com

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Kuno Creative to Present Inbound Marketing With SEO

Kuno Creative, an inbound marketing agency, will be presenting "Building Leads with SEO" at 1:00PM EST on Thursday, February 17th via a free webinar. This webinar will answer the question, how do you use SEO for inbound marketing?
Join our guest Jeremy Dearringer, Chief Research Officer and Co-founder of Slingshot SEO, and the Kuno Creative Inbound Marketing team to learn how to build leads using SEO.

Reviewed in this free webinar:

The State of SEO -- 2011 & Beyond
On-page Factors for SEO
Off-page Factors for SEO
Social Media -- Its effect on SEO and why you should care
Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)
A look at how Kuno Creative uses SEO for Inbound Marketing
Registration for the webinar is limited so reserve today at: http://www.kunocreative.com/landing-pages/webinar/building-leads-with-seo

Jeremy Dearringer is the Chief Research Officer and Co-Founder of Slingshot SEO. Dearringer has fifteen years of research and Internet marketing experience involving search engine optimization, website design, eCommerce, conversion rate analysis, analytics, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing. As CRO, Dearringer's core responsibility at Slingshot is to stay on the leading edge of SEO research. Dearringer and his partners began reverse engineering search algorithms in 1996 with a strong focus on the most popular search engine at the time, Yahoo.

Dearringer has presented his knowledge on Internet marketing to many organizations, including the Masters of Business Online Conference, the Blog Indiana Conference, the Indianapolis and Indiana Chambers of Commerce, the Public Relationships Society of Indiana, the Manufacturers Association of Plastics Processors, the NTMA, and the IU Kelley School of business, among others. Prior to co-founding Slingshot SEO, Dearringer used SEO to help his father's business experience explosive growth during the post-9/11 recession. Dearringer also runs the nation's largest forum on Buell Motorcycles that ranks for tens of thousands of keywords.

Since 2000, Kuno Creative has specialized in Branding & PR, Marketing Strategy, Print, Outdoor, Direct Mail, Website Development, Internet Marketing and Inbound Marketing throughout the Country and is a Certified HubSpot Partner. They can be contacted at 1-800-303-0806 or kunocreative.com.
Source http://pr-usa.net/