SEOMoz Explains Correlation and Causation

Understanding the difference between correlation and causation is very important if you want to be able to really find out what the factors are that make search engines tick. While factors that are included in search engine algorithms will surely show clear signs of correlation, not all factors correlated with rankings do have an effect in rankings, in fact it might be the other way around.

Still a lot of people go on jumping to wrong conclusions because of correlation data. To help us understand the reason behind the phrase “correlation does not imply causation”, below SEOMoz has come up with the insightful and easy to understand infographic below.

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Short Take on Google’s Ad Bias

Google’s penchant for giving advertisers even more help in increasing their paid link’s click-through-rates may be irritating some (actually a lot) of people, but the truth is that Google’s days of being a “sales engine” as Aaron Wall put it, is something we just have to get used to. After all, Google is still a company and what matters in the end when it comes to big corporations is profitability. This may be a far cry from the once goody two-shoes image of Google, but then almost everyone has seen this coming as Google evolved slowly right before our eyes. But to say that Google is on its way to becoming the next Microsoft, is something I haven’t really decided on.

Going back to the subject of Google and Ads, the latest show of bias towards its advertisers is the lack of delineation between premium Adwords and organic results in its results page. If you look at the image below, you will see that there the background colour for the paid results and the organic ones are the same. Aside from the tiny “Ads” at the top right of the page, there is no easy way of telling at a glance which results are organic, and which are ads. In fact, the “Ads” disclaimer at the top might even lead to more confusion since it only appears in one line, which a lot of users would take to mean that it is only the result beside it that is an ad, when it fact it the next couple results could be ads as well, as is the case in the results for the “smartphone” search I performed.

While I personally have nothing against ads, I do have to agree that this is very misleading and points to Google’s shifting priority from being a champion of users to a champion of their advertisers. However, instead of raging about the fact, I prefer to take a more practical approach by advising clients of Google’s obvious growing bias towards Adwords advertisers. This way, they can at least benefit from this fact instead of having to claw their way to the top purely through organic SEO.

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Is Having a High Exit Rate Bad

Is having a high exit rate bad? In pursuit determining whether Google is using analytics data to ranks SERPS, many marketers put undue focus and weight on factors like bounce rate and exit rate instead of taking a more holistic look at the statistics in relation to one another and what they really mean.

Is having a high exit rate bad? It depends. To understand the problem, we need to take a step back. Every analytics program will differ slightly, but exit rate technically means this is the last page someone visited on your website. The real question is whether someone left because they reached a logical conclusion or found the answer to what they where looking for–or whether they left because they didn’t.

As an example, if you have an article series on the top 5 places to visit in the Caribbean, and you did it head and tail style, it would make sense that tail piece number 5 would have a higher exit rate than tail piece number 1. However, if your head piece has a high exit rate, then you probably didn’t do a good enough job of creating linkbait that matched your title.

Another factor you need to look at is time on site.

These pages have a high exit rate but also have a high on site time. This usually means the people are reading the content and it is helpful. Compare that to the page below with a high exit rate of x% and low on site time of x%

Some pages will have a high exit rate because they are the final step in a process, like checkout confirmation, or email subscription. If you use affiliate links and mask them through a redirect, that redirect page will have a high exit percentage as well. I recommend blocking bounce/redirect pages in most cases, but sometimes there are exceptions.

Other factors to consider are advertising income, affiliate commissions, social interaction, bookmarking, and printing. For example, some tutorial pages or information pages have a high likelihood of being printed. Consider all these factors before rewriting, updating, or deleting a page.

You may also want to read is Is a High Bounce Rate Bad.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Try to identify pages with a high exit rate as part of your regular content audit.
• Try to determine if the high exit rate is because it’s part of the flow or natural process, like end of content series or checkout process.
• Look at other factors, such as time on site, social bookmarking, sharing, or printing.
• Only when you have determined that a page isn’t doing its intended function, should you update, rewrite, or delete the page.

photo credit: Shutterstock

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Is Having a High Exit Rate Bad

SEO Quick Tip: Keep Track of Search-Related Patents

One of the most challenging things about SEO is that you need to keep abreast of the rapidly evolving search trends. Search is so dynamic so that being laid back can lead to dire consequences. If you don’t believe me, you just need to look at what happened to the big article sites that took a huge hit after Google’s Panda update.

What is even more challenging that keeping up with the changes is being able to anticipate possible changes so as to be able to adapt your strategy even before search engines roll out the changes in their algorithms. This is truly important if you want to not only avoid getting blindsided by a major algorithm change that can impact your site negatively, but also if you want to have a real advantage over other websites that are also supposedly optimised.

One way to do this is by keeping track of the patents filed and bought by the major search engines. Since keeping track of patent filing, much less the exchange of hands of patents, is something that most people won’t relish nor have the time to do, what you can do instead is just read Bill Slawski’s blog. Bill posts patents relevant to search on his blog. More importantly, he breaks the information down for us so that we don’t have to exert that much effort to wrap our heads around pages and pages of boring patent papers. So next time you’re wondering what Google and the other search engines might be up to next (or are currently up to), you know where to get some meaty though headache-inducing information.

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Dealing with Ranking Fluctuations

The fact that life is full of ups and downs is something that we accept, so why should it be any different when it comes to your site’s rankings?

Fluctuations in your page’s position in search result pages are something that you should come to expect for several reasons:

• Google releases algorithm updates quite regularly – While not all updates are earth shattering, these algorithm tweaks can still affect your rankings both positively or negatively. Most often these algorithm changes in fact go unnoticed. In cases when an algorithm change does affect your ranking, it is best to seek SEO advice to see how you can adapt your strategies to accommodate these changes. If you know that you are already using sound SEO strategies though, perhaps you should rethink your overall website strategy because the competition’s site just might really have more relevant content to users than yours. Remember that though search algorithms are far from perfect, what they are striving to achieve is to give more relevant results to users, so that a competitor’s site that jumps up in rank, might really have made improvements that are deemed by search engines to be more important in terms of relevance.
• Competition is steep – As mentioned above, you should consider the fact that there’s always thousands of other site owners and SEOs trying to grab your current SERP position. So even if you are ranking pretty well, don’t take things for granted and keep your content as fresh as possible. Keep abreast of search developments so that you can also make necessary on-page SEO adjustments when needed. As for link-building, while you don’t have to put as much as effort as when you first started, don’t miss an opportunity to get inbound links.
• Hackers and spammers can wreak havoc – Having their websites hacked and malicious code embedded in their pages is every webmaster’s nightmare. True, you can just clean up the code later on, but with so many websites and so many pages to monitor, plus so many other more pressing and interesting matters to deal with in real life, it is no wonder that sometimes it is search engine bots that discover the malicious code on your site before you. This means that your page will get flagged by search engines, and of course will automatically affect your ranking. In cases like this, all you really need to do is to clean up your site, and submit your link for recrawling. If worse comes to worst and your site has been removed from the search engine’s index, you can contact Google to ask for a reconsideration. They really do manually add to their index sometimes, but since they are busy, it is perhaps a smarter idea to just submit your site’s links for recrawl since bots do their rounds of the web regularly enough these days for you not to worry about being out of the loop for too long.

In the end, just respond to fluctuations in your page’s rankings the way you do with life’s ups and downs – roll with the punches and just do the best you can.

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Why You Should Avoid Numbers in Your URL

While linkbait posts aren’t as popular as they once were, top 10 lists have been popular ever since Moses came down from the mount with his top 10 list of “thou shalt nots.” Magazines like Rolling Stone will always have top 500 playlists and AFI will always have top 100 movies lists. However, as a responsible publisher, marketer, and SEO with an eye for evergreen content, there are more responsible and better long-term URL options you can make for “top 10″ and list style posts than using a number in the URL.

Let’s take the following examples:

• Top 10 places to visit in Las Vegas
• 15 Free things to do in Las Vegas
• 20 Most Romantic Spots in Las Vegas
• 7 Best Celebrity Restaurants in Las Vegas

While there might be some volume for KWDs with the “top 10″ add on, in every case the number is an editorial headline component designed to draw users in along social channels. It has almost no value in from a keyword/search perspective. However, in most cases, blogging software will usually automatically add the numbers into the URL unless you manually strip it out. So you’ll end up with:

• Top 10 places to visit in Las Vegas – example.com/top-10-places-visit-las-vegas/
• 15 Free things to do in Las Vegas – example.com/15-free-things-to-do-las-vegas/
• 20 Most Romantic Spots in Las Vegas – example.com/20-most-romantic-spots-las-vegas/
• 7 Best Celebrity Chef Restaurants in Las Vegas – example.com/7-best-celebrity-chef-restaurants-las-vegas/

While you may write these posts with an eye to be evergreen content, they are an example of evergreen content that needs to be updated. For example, 5 years from now there may be 12 celebrity restaurants in Las Vegas that need to be on the list. If you follow a living URL approach, you will have a URL with the number 7 and a post title/meta/serp listing with 12.

While this isn’t a catastrophic, all hands on deck problem, it’s less than optimal. Sure, you could 301 the post, but you run the risk of tinkering with something that’s working and that Google may re-rank. If you take an extra 30 seconds to adjust the URL before publication, you can save yourself hours of headaches down the road.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• When writing top 10 or numbered list posts, remove the numbers from the URL/permalink.
• Try to generate URLs in a format that makes them as evergreen as possible.
• If after a content audit you decide to update content, I’d leave the URL intact unless it looks really really bad.

screen shot via snippet generator

photo credit: Photospin

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why You Should Avoid Numbers in Your URL

Application Rich Snippets Now Supported

Google is serious about delivering on their promise of supporting more kind of content as rich snippets in their effort to help users more easily determine the relevance of a search result. In the past few months, not only did they announce the launching of Schema.org in collaboration with Yahoo! And Bing, but they also announced new Rich Snippet types such as Products and shopping, Music, and now – Software Applications.

Information that users will see at a glance for search results with application rich snippets include a thumbnail image of the app, app rating (number of stars and number of people who rated the app), how much the app costs, and the latest review on the app. As you can see below, having application rich snippets will obviously increase click-through-rates for your search results since it just looks more informative, relevant, and appealing. I even dare say that the increase in CTR might probably be significant enough to even steal the advantage of the link that outranks you by one or two places in search results.

There are a good slew of software application types, from security apps to games, which you can now mark up easily. Note that when marking up software applications you do not have to limit yourself to indicating just one type of property for that application, but can include nested Things to indicate all the different properties of that particular application.

If you’re wondering which pages you should prioritise for application rich snippets first, we suggest pages that contain in-demand apps like games and productivity apps.

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How to Mask Affiliate Links

How to mask affiliate links is one of the most common questions new affiliates often ask. In this post, we will take a look at the hows and whys of why you should mask affiliate links and how to do it effectively, with an eye towards maintaining long term low maintenance.

Should I Mask My Affiliate Links

This is one of the first questions people who start adding affiliate links have to deal with. As with most things in internet marketing, it depends. If the website is primarily a hobby website, not a money making or a business site, then the answer is no, you don’t need to mask affiliate links. However, what often happens is that people start with a hobby website, build nice traffic, and then look for ways to monetize it. I can’t tell you the number of hobby websites I’ve seen turn into $1,000 dollar a month sites. So, unless you are 100% positive it’s never going to turn into a money website, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Do it right and mask affiliate links right from the beginning.

Free Plugins to Mask Affiliate Links

If you are only going to be promoting a handful of affiliate products, or even less than 100, there’s no real need to use a premium product. There are plenty of free plugins like affiliate link cloaker, URL cloak & Encrypt, affiliate marketing tool. I’ve been a long time user of Go Codes. It has served me here without any issues or problems. Two recommendations,though: change the default directory to something other than “/go/” and block that directory from being crawled. This really is critical. The affiliate links are there for the users, not for the search engines. Until Googlebot gets its own American Express card, there’s no benefit to letting it crawl your affiliate links. In fact, the whole point of masking your affiliate links is to keep search engines from knowing what’s going on.

Premium Plugins to Mask or Hide Affiliate Links

If the primary goal of a website is to make money via affiliate links, then investing in a premium plugin is a smart investment. There are a few on the market like SEO Smart Links and Affiliate Link Cloaker Pro, but my favorite is Eclipse link cloaker (see Eclipse link cloaker review). A premium link cloaker has a lot of advantages such as:

• Masking all outbound links
• Working with datafeeds
• Importing a large number of links
• Direct naming of links
• Google Analytics integration

Subdomain Affiliate Link Masking

If your website is primarily focused on selling one type of product (like travel bookings) and you work with an established merchant, you can often set up a branded subdomain. This is a little complicated, but basically you set up a CNAME entry for your subdomain to redirect from your website to the merchant. This does require someone with some technical expertise, which is beyond the scope of this post. Usually the merchant will give you instructions, like this document from IAN. The merchant usually lets you upload a stylesheet, header, and footer, so the website has your branding. Again, the specifics are beyond the scope of this post, but you can usually get help from the merchant. You need to make sure to block this subdomain from being crawled by the search engines. I can’t stress enough how important that is. Blocking it via robots.txt is better, but meta tags are an alternate solution. I recommend setting up a Google alert for indexed pages in the subdomain so you will know if Google does somehow find a way in.

Hybrid Solution

In some cases, you will want to mix approaches and use a hybrid solution. For example, I run a travel website with a booking engine on a subdomain. I then use Eclipse link cloaker to mask affiliate links for travel related products.

Dangers of Not Masking Affiliate Links

Letting Google see too many straight affiliate links is a dangerous game to play. Numerous quality rater documents have shown it to be something they are told to be on the lookout for, so it may work against you. Using JavaScript to mask links is also dangerous because Google is getting much better at crawling JavaScript, so it is not recommended. Using nofollow on straight affiliate links is much closer to a band-aid solution, so it is  not recommended as well.

What are the takeaways from this post:

• Showing affiliate links to a search engine are of little benefit to you. Unless you do it sparingly, masking affiliate links isn’t a good idea.
• If you will only have a few affiliate products, a free light-weight solution is fine.
• If you are running a serious website in which affiliate marketing is a primary goal, invest in a premium link masking solution (I like Eclipse link cloaker review).
• In some cases, a subdomain is a better solution. Be sure to keep search engines out via robots.txt or meta tags.
• You can mix solutions, such as a subdomain and masked links.
• The key here is to block the search engines from seeing/deciphering your intent and quality raters from easily detecting that links are affiliate links.

Disclaimer: If you purchase Eclipse link cloaker review from the links in this post, I do receive a commission; however, I use Eclipse link cloaker on this website and many others and am very comfortable recommending it.

photo credit: Photospin

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Mask Affiliate Links

Online Content Most Frequently Read by Mobile Users

Yahoo! and Ipsos’ joint study on mobile modes has surely yielded a lot of useful information, as you have probably read in Gary’s post on mobile Internet usage. However, aside from the usage categories, Yahoo’s Dianne Molina gives us more specific information gleaned from the study – the type of content most often read by mobile users online.

The image below (taken from Diane Molina’s post) shows the percentage of users that viewed the following content online using their mobile devices. It is important to note that the graph below pertains to content READ by the users, which means that the category movies and games specifically means information on them, and not viewing clips nor playing any games.

What’s interesting to me about the graph is that more mobile users like to read international news (39%), as opposed to local news (34%). Sports news is right behind the heels of local news in terms of reader with 33% of mobile users saying they read sports news, while political and financial news (21% and 13% respectively) significantly lag behind them. While you can’t do much about your content if have a very specific target market in mind, knowing the type of content mobile users are looking for will help you if you are still in the process of developing a site, or deciding on which of your sites you should work on first to be more accessible to mobile users.

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Will Google Author Accounts Become the Next Spam Tactic

In the last few weeks, Google has announced its support of Google Author Profiles. While the rollout and acceptance has been limited, for those of us who have been around the block a few times, it’s easy to see that this will become the next big spam tactic like link exchanges, article directories, guest posts, and page rank sculpting.

To be perfectly clear, at the moment this article was written, there is no evidence of any kind that having an author account in any way helps your website. However, if you watch this video, it’s clear that Google does want to use it as a signal in the future.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While it remains to be seen how important having a Google Author Profile linked to your website will be, it’s not a huge leap of faith to think it will play a role. What will be interesting to see is whether having multiple author profiles linking to your website will play an incremental role.

Once Google gets past the beta startup testing phase, it makes sense for them to try to get magazines and newspapers on board. Having multiple expert author profiles like the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest, or Motor Trend could be a huge indicator of trust. Having multiple authors linking to smaller sites would be something Google could look upon favorably. Once such a situation exists, it’s not a huge leap to see guest author requests coming to your website, and mentioning that they will link to you from their profile. We could even enter a paid scenario in which websites that are looking to build trust seek out authors who will write and link to a website in exchange for “compensation.”

What are the takeaways from this post:

• Work toward getting as many of of your current authors into the Google author program.  Have them link back to your website.
• When new guest author opportunities present themselves, give preferential treatment to authors who are part of the program.
• Only work with authors who are real and create good, high-quality content.
• Stay away from shady or fake profiles that are more concerned with the link than with the content.

photo credit: Photospin

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5. Link Building- Backlink Build offers customized link building services
6. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
7. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
8. RevSEO High PR BackLinks- Private High PageRank Homepage Link Network
9. The #1 ranking SEO software toolkit: get your free download
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11. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
12. Rouper.com - Buy & Sell Premium Websites
13. Blurbpoint - is reputable SEO link building service provider. Get quality one way links with our complete link building packages.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Will Google Author Accounts Become the Next Spam Tactic