Google Penguin Information

For those of you who don’t know about Penguin yet, it has caused quite a stir. Google originally dubbed it the “Over Optimization” Penalty. That threw much of the SEO world into a panic, so they retitled it the WEBSPAM update (a.k.a. Penguin). The thought is that they’d systematically drop sites that exhibit spammy behavior from the index.

What defines spammy behavior in this case? Some of the types of behaviors I’ve seen mentioned include:

1. Creating a link farm, or link circle
2. Having a link profile stacked with questionable backlinks to the website
3. Selecting a keyword-rich domain and launching just shallow content
4. Publishing low quality content that is clearly machine generated
5. Keyword-stuffing on the page or entire domain

Hopefully your website survived all these changes unscathed. If so congratulations, but don’t just sit on your laurels and enjoy it. You need to know what behaviors are out of bounds, so it’s crucial to read all you can about Penguin. There’s something called negative SEO that has been the buzz. That’s something you don’t want aimed at you.

Google Penguin Resources

Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo (SEOmoz)

Of course, I have to start with SEOmoz. They are my favorite source for interpreting pretty much anything Google says about SEO. Start with this article first, and peruse the blog listing for other related posts. They are all valuable.

The following are some of the more interesting and insightful posts from other sites that I’ve found covering Penguin. If you see anything else worth adding, let me know and I can update the post.

Original Webmaster Blog Post: Another step to reward high-quality sites

Here is the official announcement of Penguin straight from Google. They did a lot of advanced commentary, but this was when we knew it was set in motion.

Google Penguin Update: Don’t Forget About Duplicate Content (WebProNews)

This is both a refresher on duplicate content and commentary on managing it in the age of Penguin. There are a bunch of educational videos embedded at the end, so consume this one when you have time to watch all the Matt Cutts cameos.

Google’s Unnatural Links Messages: The Shot Heard ’round the SEO World? (Search Engine Watch)

This post does a great job of explaining what the new rules of backlinks are. This is a different kind of algorithm update. It’s the first one I can recall where they can penalize your website for the lack of quality of those who choose to link to it. The days of volume backlink campaigns is over, my friend. Quality is now a defining factor.

Google Crushes Spinners and Spammers (Website Magazine)

Website Magazine chimes in on everything with at least a high level overview. This does that and hits on a few areas where spammy behavior might be identified. Quick read if you don’t mind a more high level view of the situation.

Webspam And Panda Updates: Does SEO Still Matter?  (WebProNews)

First, this post is not advocating the belief that SEO is done, dead, or otherwise obsolete. It does cover some of how it will need to change moving forward, and also includes a list of sites that were impacted, either positively or negatively, from April 24 forward.

What to Do if Your Search Rankings Were Hurt by Google’s Penguin Update (Hubspot)

Hubspot does a good job of explaining how you can figure out if you’ve been penalized by Penguin. It also provides some basic tips to take into account if you do get hit. Most importantly, it links to the form you can submit to Google for their review if you think you’ve been penalized in error. Just be sure you’ve fixed whatever they told you to fix in Webmaster Tools before you submit, and your chances of success will higher.

Move Over Panda, a Penguin’s on the Loose (Site Reference)

This one has some good tips about how to address any concerns you have over Penguin. It also outlines some areas to start with if you are in remediation mode.

If My Content is “King,” Why Does Google Hate It? (Site Reference)

Google just wants everyone to remove the shortcuts and play by the same rules. This talks about some realities around content marketing. It also touches on how the white hat SEO practitioner can insulate against further algorithm jockeying.

Google Penguin Update: Impact of Anchor Text Diversity & Link Relevancy (Search Engine Watch)

This ties to the March announcement, which was a precursor to Penguin. They’re cracking down on shady offpage practices, and you need to alter your backlink efforts accordingly. Exact match anchor text is no longer the way to go.

Even the FTC is getting in on the fun

Have you heard about the FTC antitrust investigation surrounding this update? That is probably the only way we’ll ever see Google even consider rolling back an update. Although it’s a very long shot that this will be successful at proving any guilt, it’s worth watching. The last time we had a major investigation like this it was Microsoft, and that was quite a ride!

Thanks for reading!

Sure, SEO is “free” and should be addressed for any website. But once you have optimized the on page and started driving backlinks, you really need to have patience as it all starts to pick up momentum.

Most businesses don’t have time to simply sit and wait. That’s when PPC needs to be taken more seriously.

Keyword Match Types: What Are They?

Google allows you to set the targeting you prefer for your keywords. Targeting is managed using match types. These designate the keywords you want to go after and how tightly you want to focus your ads within the SERPs. Here are the four top-level match types they offer:

Broad Match

Broad match is set by simply entering the keyword into the AdWords interface as a target keyword. If you do not add any modifiers to indicate it should be Phrase or Exact, it defaults to Broad.

Broad allows you to not only show up for verbatim searches of a keyword, but to also show up for variants, misspellings, and terms with similar meanings. While this sounds great in terms of ad impressions to those of us who were brought up in the mass advertising age, it is often the wrong choice.

Since you pay for every click, relevance is crucial. If you show up on a badly targeted SERP, you are guaranteed to pay for bad clicks. And to make matters worse, Google charges more for the same ranking on pages with high competition (meaning a lot of other people are bidding on the same terms), so a broad click is typically the most expensive of all.

Broad is useful for researching new variants of a keyword, but proceed with caution. I recommend you partition off a test budget of maybe 10% of your overall spend to find those new variants. Then go after those keywords using one of the below better targeted match types.

Phrase Match

Phrase Match looks for searches that include a pre-specified phrase, but also include other words around the phrase. You can set a keyword to phrase by putting quotation symbols around it.

For example, if you use “SEO services” as the keyword, your ad would appear on SERPs for “SEO Services in Memphis”, “Best SEO Services in Texas”, or “What to expect from SEO services firms”. As you may have noticed, the order of the words in the phrase must be the same, so “what services should an SEO offer” would not match.

This is useful for tighter targeting overall, perhaps based on location as shown above. Phrase match tends to be less expensive on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, as compared to broad match. At the same time, it also delivers significantly reduced impressions but is more likely to be relevant to a larger percent of the results on which the ad will appear.

Exact Match

Exact Match, designated by using brackets such as [SEO Services], will only serve up your ad on SERPs for verbatim searches of that term. No other words can appear in the search, which is why it is called exact match.

This is the tightest targeting, most likely to be relevant, and least expensive bidding option. If you know for a fact that a keyword has a lot of volume, is relevant as an exact match, and has low competition (based on number of advertisers bidding for the term), you’ve found yourself a bargain.

The best way to find what terms to target with exact is to start with broad or phrase match and see what searches drive results. You may have a very relevant keyword that never drives conversions or quality visits to your site. On the other hand, you will sometimes be surprised to see what words drive the best results. Target those with exact match to get more clicks with higher potential for success.

Negative Match

Another match type you need to know about is Negative Match. This is how you specify all the words you DO NOT want to match for.

At a previous company, we sold a product that attached to a device called a Network TAP (Test Access Point). Unfortunately, the IT community rarely included the word “Network” when searching.

We started out on broad match and found that a huge portion of our spend was on irrelevant terms! There are kitchen taps, beer taps, tap dance shoes, the song “Taps”, the list goes on and on. So we used negative match types on our TAPs ad group to remove any search including the words kitchen, beer, dance, shoes, song, etc.

More on Match Types

This is just a brief introduction. There is much more to figure out when working with PPC advertising.You can use modified broad match, which allows for more wide variants and misspellings to match. You can now use modified exact or phrase match, which allows for close synonyms to match. And once you get all that down, it will be time to learn about bid stacking to optimize your spend across the various keywords and match types.

Even after managing PPC for nearly10 years, I still learn something new almost every week. Just be creative and willing to learn, and you’ll see the massive potential of PPC to drive results for your business or cause.

Read more about Google’s take on these Match Types at http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6100

So here’s my swag at listing out the various types of social media, at least in my own opinion.

Social Networking

Social Networking gets the most attention overall, and for a good reason. This is the closest to a real world relationship we will likely ever be able to build in cyberspace. There are many types of social networking, but the main one is focused on setting up a profile and having discussions based on what one posts in the “stream”. Social Networking goes pretty far back, including sites like Friendster (the original), MySpace (who finally came to their senses and started branding themselves as “social entertainment” recently), and today’s darling, Facebook.

Blogging

Well, you’re reading a blog, so obviously you know what blogging is all about. At least the reading part of it. For individuals, blogging plays a similar yet more sophisticated role that enabled MySpace to flourish in its heyday. With a blog, you can create your space. Write what you want, design it how you want, interact how you want…you get the picture.

Of course, businesses and SEOs figured out how helpful blogs can be for driving traffic. So there’s that too. But don’t be fooled. Blogging is about putting your stamp on a piece of digital real estate. It’s about having a voice, and being yourself. Let the manipulators manipulate, and use it for what it was intended to be.

Microblogging

A lot of pundits claim that microblogging is a type of social media, and that’s hard to argue with. The issue I have is that it’s not really all that different from social networking. Sure, you can curate content, share links, and make commentary with only a certain number of characters. I’ll call it a type to be sure you know what it is when you see it. The most prevalent and well known example of this is Twitter.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking has been around for a long time. Essentially, this is about finding and literally bookmarking a piece of content via the cloud. Some services show most popular (Digg), some include social networking pretty aggressively (reddit), and others use a simple “show and vote” structure (StumbleUpon). You can follow people with good taste and are likely to see material they bookmark that you like. This has also been proven to help get new content ranked faster than submitting to Google direclty, so if you aren’t social bookmarking, reconsider that now. I, personally, like the convenience of the StumbleUpon Toolbar for rapid content sharing.

Both Facebook and Google+ have incorporated features that are very similar to bookmarketing, the “Like” and “Plus One” buttons. WIth these, you bookmark/share content with your social network and welcome conversation afterward. It’s like reddit, only with all your actual friends instead of your equally cool yet far more geeky friends. That’s my take, anyway.

Social News

Some argue that services like Digg and reddit, which allow you to vote on news items that are shared, should actualy be called Social News. I’m including it to be thorough, but at the end of the day, it’s just another name for social bookmarking with a twist.

Media Sharing

This is where you share audio, video, or other media freely. Viewers can friend or follow you, like or dislike the content, and even comment a’la a blog. YouTube is the most well known example of this type of service, although there are literally hundreds of them to choose from. If you know of a great niche media sharing site, please share in the comments!

Social Gaming / Fantasy Sports

Social Gaming is still in flux in some ways. Basically, it’s about mutually playing a game online with real people. Fantasy Sports is the most popular and longest lived social gaming platform I’ve seen.

That said, Google Plus built social gaming right into the interface from the start. Other platforms have dabbled with it, and I think they all still have a ways to go. I’ll be watching with interest, to say the least. Have always been a gamer at heart, all the way back to the TRS-80, Atari, and ColecoVision days. (Yes, I’m that old. Pic to the right in case you’ve never seen one.)

Conclusion

If this list holds true, that would mean that we have seven types of social media in 2012. What did I miss?

I plan to do a whole summary of the upcoming Google algorithm changes later, but for now, let’s see what else has caught my eye this month.

Are Over Optimised Link Profiles A Barrier To Top 5 Rankings?

SEO Wizz has authored a number of posts on backlink campaigns and how to handle anchor text. The standard direction from most SEOs is that you should acquire as many backlinks that use anchor text which is an exact match to your most important keywords.

This article not only questions that long-standing belief. It shows data to support the right way to do it. I’ve found some great content on this site, and most of the time it’s pretty spot on.

5 Things You Need to Know About Trackbacks

If you use WordPress or similar blogging platforms, surely you’ve seen trackbacks in the user interface. Ever wonder why those matter? It doesn’t just show who links to you or who you link to. There’s much more, and it even helps your site authority with Google. For anyone generating blog content, this is a must read even if just for informational purposes.

7 Facts Extroverts Should Know about Introverts in Business

Being an introvert doesn’t mean you’re just socially inept or shy. It’s a whole different way of generating internal energy and thinking. If the above is a must read for bloggers, this is a must read for everyone.

If you’re an extrovert, it helps you understand why everyone else doesn’t get their energy from interactions with you and others. If you’re an introvert, it affirms that there’s nothing wrong with you for being different in a society that rewards extroverted behavior. Seriously, take a moment to read and understand this and it will only help, no matter whom you are.

Extreme Homepage Makeover: How to Increase Your Conversion Rate 106%

Hubspot reviews how to massively improve conversion rate from the home page, with a nice list of the key variables they manipulated to make it happen. Good stuff.

17 Foolish Mistakes to Avoid as a Guest Blogger

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to build your name and reputation, network, and get backlink love for your own blog or website. But you can really mess it up if you don’t stop to think about your approach first. This covers the main areas that tend to happen with overall strategy, pitching your guest posts, and writing the content itself.

Google Analytics Social Reports Coming Soon

Google keeps beefing up the data available in some areas, just as they are removing some visibility to keyword-level data. They’re clearly pushing social over the traditional SEO practices. This gives you an idea of where their thought process is heading in the early going.

What Marketers Should and Shouldn’t Tweet

Hubspot shares some insightful research that advises the right ways to use Twitter, and what to avoid. If you’ve been struggling to get followers and build a network on there, this might help you understand why.

Link Karma: How Linking to Others Can Get You Lots of Links in Return

You hear the themes about “pay it forward” in social media all the time. Here’s one way to use social networking for search engine optimization link love. I, personally, found this to be a great post.

Summary

That’s it for March folks. If you see anything I missed this month that was ground breaking for you, share below so all can read it too!

So today you are looking at the first edition of “Return On News”. My goal is to share a similar set of recommended articles and blog posts at least once monthly. If there is enough volume, I might even do it more often.

How to Remove Your Google Web History Before The New Privacy Policy Change

This article from Melanie Pinola of lifehacker goes beyond just how to remove your web history; it offers some great reasons why you want to do it in the first place.

Pinterest is profiting off your ‘pinspired’ purchases without a disclosure

Molly McHugh of Digital Trends reveals her findings regarding how social media upstart Pinterest pays their bills. We already know they include dofollow links back to the various websites where the images originated. But they have a full affiliate strategy going on in the background. It’s working, but is it deceptive? See for yourself.

Someday, Your Reputation May Be More Important Than Your Net Worth

Boonsri Dickinson of Business Insider speculates about a possible future where who you are and what you stand for could one day be more valuable than money or “stuff.” He makes a darn good case for it. You’ve likely seen all the detractors beating up on Klout, but this is a rare article that envisions a more rosy future for them or whomever it is that figures out the personal branding / online reputation game.

Unofficial SXSW 2012 Guide

It’s no secret that I live in Austin, so I had to share something about the festival. This page gives a nice overview of the parties to expect outside show hours. Fun is part of the festival, so save up some energy for the afterparties. And welcome to Austin! [Thanks to Melanie Wise, who originally shared this with me via Twitter.]

Block Advertisers From Your Google Search Results

Cris Crum of WebProNews reviews Google’s new offering that allows users to block Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements from entire domains. Fortunately for advertisers, they are allowing users to manage their own web search experience without saddling those same advertisers with any negative ranking or quality score repurcussions. At least for the time being.

Conclusion

That’s the list for this week. If you find something you think would be a great fit here, please share with me on Twitter: @tommy_landry!

If you are one of the people who doesn’t “get” either of the topics, that is perfectly fine. Let me share my rationale for why the two have parallels that seem to work well with the way I think and operate

.

Reasons Why Search Engine Optimization is Similar to Fantasy Baseball

Data Intensive

Both SEO and Fantasy Baseball are extremely dependent on statistics and data analysis. They both require trending, deep dives into why things are happening, and deriving conclusions about what will happen in different possible future scenarios. Essentially, they both involve studying statistics, and studying an even deeper level of statistics than most people will both with. In baseball, there’s Sabermetrics and other similar analytical systems. In SEO, we have relevance, competition, and the like.

I’ll take your SEO competition score and Page Rank, and raise you a BABIP and a couple of FIPs.

Balances Analytical with Creative Thinking

Balance between analysis and creativity is another area where both disciplines (and yes, both are disciplines in their own way) mirror each other.In SEO, we find high leverage keywords with low competition, then gear our targeting and messaging around it. In Fantasy Baseball, we identify those players whose stats do not truly support their level of performance, and manage our team in a way that exchanges overperformers for underperformers. Essentially, it’s using numbers to come up with creative ways to extract value where no one else sees it yet.

Changes Daily

The rapid rate of change is possibly the biggest parallel between the two topic areas. In any sport, injuries are simply part of the game. Rotations / starting gigs change, players retire or get suspended, and in many cases players are added from the minor leagues or elsewhere mid season (or demoted back down). In business, the competitive landscape can change not only daily, but hourly! In both cases, the changes ripple through in many ways, and it’s up to you to figure out how to respond in the best way possible.

Social Media and Content Heavy

SEO and Fantasy Baseball are both very visible topics around the social media properties. Both are generating content on a daily basis and looking to share that content, then exchange opinions and ideas. There are fanatics in both camps, folks who will spend every waking hour thinking about new ways to win the game. Social is the best way to spread content and talk about it, and both groups have figured that out in short order.

Deep Level of Expertise Required

There are many times where someone finds out I’m into either or both of these topics, and my standard response is, “I’m a geek. I love this stuff.” And sadly, that’s 100% true! I’ve spent years reading every piece of analysis I could find, trying to work out how to apply it, and even generating my own creative ideas for handling the different challenges that crop up. To get really good at either practice, you need to have a depth of knowledge that is unrivaled by generalist types. And you have to absolutely LOVE collecting that information and using it.

Summary

There you have it, my take on why SEO and Fantasy Baseball aren’t really different. I brainstormed at least a dozen different angles on this spin, and the above are all that made the final cut. Are you into both topics? What commonalities do you see?

Anchored Links vs. Anchor Text

Before diving into this topic in detail, I want to point out the distinction between anchored links and anchor text.

Any good SEO can tell you what anchor text is – the actual words you use when hyperlinking to another website or internal web page. For a long time, anchor text has been known to impact SEO by matching backlinks to keywords overtly.

Anchored links are completely different. Did you ever click a hyperlink, only to watch the page load and immediately jump to the most relevant spot on the page? If you did, you clicked an anchored link.

Anchored Links: How They Work

You can always tell you are looking at an anchored link if you see a URL with a pound sign (#) and a word after it. For example (sample only, non-working link):

http://returnonnow.com/Sample-page#Anchor

This URL tells the browser to first load the page, and then move it so a pre-specified location moves to the top or main real estate of the viewing area, depending on how far down the page is. How does it know where to anchor?

Before assembling the above URL, you will need to define what the anchor point on the page is. This is done using the “name” tag. To do so, assign a value to “name” that is the same as the “Anchor” in the above URL.

Example Anchor Code:
<a name=”Anchor”>Sample Anchor Point</a>

In this example, the anchor will point at the location on the page where the phrase “Sample Anchor Point” is placed. This is a rather basic HTML command that even the most inexperienced of webmasters (even marketing folks with very limited HTML knowledge) can employ.

Anchored Links and SEO: Answering the Question

Anchored links are most useful for enhancing user experience. By loading the most relevant content on the page right upon click, you provide the reader with immediate access to the content they are seeking. The fewer clicks and less confusion you have site visitors go through, the better.

As for SEO, anchored links do have an impact. The impact is not on the web crawler as the aforementioned question suggested. Anything after the “#” is considered a browser-only command, and is completely ignored by spiders (probably to prevent partial indexing of pages). The browser merely uses it to route to the content for UX reasons.

Anchored links, however, do provide two useful SEO benefits:

1. The keyword used as the anchor is noted by the web spider much like anchor text is. It is a much lesser indicator of relevance, but taken into account nonetheless.
2. For longer or more complex pages, search engines frequently create direct links to the anchored locations. These are positioned very similarly to sitelinks in function. You can see a sample of anchor links showing as sitelinks below. Click on each of them and see where it takes you for reference. I’ve hyperlinked to the SERP directly if you click the image.

Summary

That should give you plenty to think about for anchored links. Surely there are some nice tips and tricks that others have identified. If you have any great ideas that I overlooked, feel free to share in the comments below. All ideas area welcomed!

While SEO is most important for presenting your best game face to the search engines, it is not the only variable at play. You also have to keep a close eye on usability.

Usability: What is It?

Usability is a very intuitive concept. Essentially, it answers the question of how easy it is for the average web user to navigate around the website?

Usability includes:

1. How easy or difficult it is to learn what the site is about on first entry
2. How quickly it is to navigate to the most relevant content on the site (faster nav and fewer clicks is the goal)
3. Whether buttons, navigation, and other interactive objects are placed where most users will be able to find them without undue frustration

Well managed usability provides the best possible experience for the readers. This is what we refer to a User Experience (UX).

Balancing User Experience with Search Engine Optimization

There are some common misconceptions about this topic among marketing types. The worst one is that you cannot balance UX and SEO without one of the two (or both) suffering in some way. This is simply not true.

The objective of building a site for both readers / users as well as the search engines is both reasonable and achievable. Sure, you may have to make some tradeoffs in how you architect your site or structure your content to accommodate both needs. But the key point is that minor tradeoffs between the two can result in major gains in user satisfaction, without causing undue negative impact to traffic volumes.

Here are the 3 keys to balancing SEO and UX:

1. Design your site layout, templates, and architecture for the REAL users. If the site provides a stellar user experience, traffic will come back and grow over time via word of mouth, sharing, and other means. It will also grow via SEO, as one of the factors in Google’s algorithm measures the overall usability of the site.
2. Structure the content – the title, headers, body content, and image alt-tags – in the best way possible for the search engines. I’m not saying to write a bunch of keyword-stuffed gobblety-goop either. Write to communicate clearly to the average reader, but also be sure you are speaking in the language that people use to search.
3. Craft your overall site content strategy to provide high value, regularly updated material. Particularly with a newfound focus on timing via the Google Fresh update (October, 2011), you cannot build a site and never touch it again. If you want to move up in the rankings, you need to offer relevant, timely, and shareable materials. Did I mention that you need to write for the readers and not the search engines?

Summary

You may hear from various sources that it is difficult or even impossible to balance SEO and user experience / usability. Those sources are simply misinformed. If you follow the guidelines above, you should be able to deliver on both goals.

Have you found it challenging to balance the two? Let me know what your biggest frustrations are below and I’ll see if I can help.

Let’s take a moment to look at this topic in more detail.

Definitions

Subdomain

While your root domain will show up as domain-name.com or www.domain-name.com, a subdomain shows up as subdomain.domain-name.com. Good examples of subdomains are:

• https://adwords.google.com/
• http://support.tigertech.net
• http://thwack.solarwinds.com

As you can see, a subdomain is most freqently used when a specific area of the website is targeted to a very pointed topic or audience. AdWords is focused on Google’s PPC offering, the second link is the support site for a company called TigerTech, and the last example is the community website for my current employer, SolarWinds.

Subfolder

A subfolder is essentially a directory on the overall hierarchy / structure of your root domain itself. In your browser address bar, this shows up as www.domain-name.com/subfolder/. If you click on any of the keywords in my navigation, you can see what subfolder each of those tag items sits in.

Subdomain vs. Subfolder: When to Use Each

Let’s start with subfolders, since it is very straightforward to understand when to use them and how they work.

Subfolders are integral components on your root domain. When in doubt about where to put new content, ask yourself how important that content will be to getting your root domain ranked.

If it is a crucial piece, put it in a subfolder. It will serve to help increase your keyword coverage, grow your site page volume, and position you for relevant backlinks deeper than your home page (which we all should be chasing).

Subdomains can be a tougher challenge. For several years now, Google has given direction that subdomains are not considered part of the root domain. However, earlier this year, they advised that some changes have been made to how they handle subdomains.

This post led to quite a bit of confusion. Many practitioners, and even SEO experts automatically read this post to say that subdomains are now being considered as part of the root domain. Those individuals are dead wrong.

If you read it carefully, this is changing nothing about subdomain vs root domain ranking except for one thing – links between various subdomains and a root domain are now considered “internal links”.

This is a great modification in reality. Previously, gray hat SEOs could simply buy one domain for $7 – $20, and roll out a slew of subdomains on similar topics. Then, they could create a link farm by cross linking all of the various properties. That was a great way to cheat by hyper-optimizing the on-page and then providing relevant backlinks across the sites.

Now, each subdomain counts as a separate website for ranking purposes, but links between two subdomains are counted as internal.

No more games, no more link farms. Take that Gray Hat!

How to Use Subdomains for SEO

So now that we’re on the same page, you can see why the subfolder is the obvious answer for generating content and receiving direct benefits from it. But why would any reasonably cognizant SEO recommend using a subdomain? I’m glad you (I) asked!

In today’s web-heavy world, a new field called online reputation management (ORM) has emerged. A large piece of this practice is managing the SERPs for your name and/or brand terms (e.g. company or product names).

Without going into to much detail on ORM (which actually deserves a full post of its own), here’s the key point: subdomains can rank independently for a keyword. Google often hides multiple pages on one domain that rank for the same keyword and forces you to click “view more results” to see them. They only do this for same-domain URLs.

Many people worry that having multiple sites trying to rank for one keyword is too much work, and that very well may be true. But how much is it worth to own the two of the top 5 SERP positions for your most important terms or brand names? The only two ways to do this are to roll out a subdomain or launch a new website on a whole new root domain. At least the latter gives you external links, if you don’t mind managing a split brand (not recommended).

Summary: They are Not the Same for SEO Purposes

There is a long standing confusion that subdomains are considered part of your root domain, like subfolders are. This is simply not true. Subdomains are separate sites that are considered internal to your root domain only for counting backlinks. Subfolders are the best way to drive SEO for the root domain.

What other uses have you found for subdomains? Any creative ideas I missed here?

White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO: What's the difference?

This week I received an inquiry focused on White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO from a college student in MIS. This inquiry was part of an e-business class assignment he received, in which he was to write a report on what White Hat SEO is.

Having taken the time to respond thoughtfully, I believe it is useful to share my quick-hit answer about what they are and how they impact SEO success. I’d very much like to hear any feedback you or your favorite SEO may have, so please share the post freely and comment at will!

His specific questions:

1. What do you think the most challenging aspect of white hat seo?
2. Is SEO really ethical? I mean. white hat/black hat…..It´s all about gaming the search engine to get better placements. Don’t you agree that SEO practices are in constant change as the Internet evolves?
3. Who is responsible to drawing the line between white hat SEO and black hat SEO?

My answer:

Let me just respond to the three questions in aggregate.

First, there is a huge divide between white hat and black hat SEO techniques. Black Hat involves using any method possible to game the system, not following SEO best practices as outlined by Google, and most often, using shady means to leap ahead of other reputable sites in the SERPS.

The whole Google Panda update was to draw a line between white and black hat (i.e. spammers in most cases) practitioners, and they actually did a decent job of doing so. That said, they overshot their target and ended up hurting some fully ethical, white hat sites. This was mostly collateral damage or by association, since part of Panda is to compare your site, content, etc. with “like” websites on similar topic areas.

White Hat SEO is not rocket science. It is about building reputable websites without an ounce of deception involved. It is about generating high quality, share-able content that readers will want to read and spread to their network. And it is about truly adding value with that content.

Black Hat SEO is easy to identify. It might include keyword stuffed, hard to read material. It might have bad grammar or punctuation. It might thinly mention the topic of what it wants to rank for, sticking the keyword in all the right “on page” areas, but really just thinly veiling a pitch for some spammy/scammy product. Most of all, if you search for a term and get to their site, a reasonably intelligent consumer would quickly want to bounce away from it or even be offended at the bait and switch. And they often acquire backlinks through paid or other mistrusted means (in Google’s Eyes).

The hardest part of White Hat SEO is two-fold:

1. Being disciplined and focused enough to stick to your guns with standards, and to execute on a well-thought out and constructed content and linking pursuit strategy.
2. Convincing other stakeholders in your company or organization to avoid using questionable techniques.

#1 is a ton of work and requires a lot of focus. #2 is political in most cases.

Last Words

How would you describe White Hat SEO, or answer these questions if posed to you? I typed this out in a matter of minutes, so it is my natural, quick response. Anything I missed?