Mike’s Question about Google
Posted on April 13, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization |
Hi all,
Got this great question from Mike over on the “Ask me a question” section and I thought I’d make my answer a bit more prominent:
Nancy,
There is one thing I constantly wonder about with Google. For a lot of my keywords, the top spots seem to be taken by listings from shopzilla, bizrate, amazon, nextag, pricegrabber, etc.Why is it that preferential treatment is given to these discount listings rather than the legitimate sites that optimize for those keywords?
Take a look at the keywords “latex pillow” or “floor pillow”, 2 keywords that I try and optimize for and look at the listings on the first page of Google if you want to see what I mean.
I don’t notice this as much in Yahoo! or MSN…
Thanks,
Mike
Here’s what you need to consider. Google has as it’s top priority to bring forth the best web pages for any given keyword or phrase. While we can always argue that they got it wrong, it’s understanding their mindset that’s important. Google, unlike the other two search engines, has this concept of an authority site. So if a site is considered an authority site it’s more likely to have pages rank than would a site that is not considered an authority site.
So when you raised your question and indicated that an unusal number of sites of the Bizrate, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping and the like were getting prominent placement, that made me wonder why. And before I even checked I assumed that the answer was that there really was not much competition on that phrase - particularly from authority sites - so Google would give top placements to interior pages of shopping sites.
Then I took a look and here is what I saw:
So my hunch was correct, there really isn’t much real competition on those terms if you filter on sites that use the term in both their title tag and in anchor text in incoming links. This actually should be good news - right? However, I took a peek at your site’s standings and saw that your Google rankings were not in the top 50. UGH! OK why is your site getting no love from Google?
In a nutshell, you are not doing enough of what Google wants you to do and you are doing too much of what Google doesn’t want you to do. I’ll be happy to take this offline with you to get a bit more specific but my initial look at your site was that while you had a fair amount of backlinks, looked like most of them were obtained via reciprocal link trades which work just fine with MSN and Yahoo but not too well anymore with Google. Also your backlinks and title tag are too heavily laced with the word ‘pillows’ and/or ‘pillow’.
Finally I didn’t see where your site was targeting ‘decorative pillows’ but that phrase would be one I’d definately go after. Much more traffic than some of the other terms.
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Nancy,
Thanks so much for the advice. I did as you suggested and added a decorative pillow line. It definately does have a higher search rate than a lot of the products on my site….lucky for me one of my suppliers already carried a line of decorative pillows. I plan to expand that line in the future.
I’ve also tried to submit my site to authoritive directories that I may have overlooked in the past. I used to only try and get into DMOZ, but that has been a lost cause.
This morning I wrote an article on decorative pillows which I’ve posted on my site and embedded links into the text. Once its indexed, I will submit it to some of the article directories that I’ve submitted articles to before.
I also wrote about my new website additions in my blog, so hopefully, it will provide links and help these new pages get indexed quickly.
Thanks again for your help.
Mike
Hi Mike,
Good to hear that you are taking action to move forward. I would however suggest one minor change to the article tactic you mention below. When writing articles, write them either for your site or for directories.
Do NOT submit the same article on your site to a directory. This is due to Google’s duplicate content filter. In fact, once you write an article, only submit it to one good directory (ezinearticles.com is my favorite but GoArticles is also very good and there are others). You really want just one one authority site to host that article for the links to your site. You should not even care if the article is not picked up for use by other site owners.
I know you may have heard other advice but this (submitting only unique content to directories and keeping unique content on your own site) is what is working right now.
Nancy
Nancy,
I was surprised to hear you say to not submit my articles to more than one directory and not to any if I post it on my site. I get lots of emails and advice (I know most of it is fluff) about writing articles and blasting it out to hundreds of article directories…and to not trip Google’s duplicate content filter, you have to change the article and move words around for every 20 submissions…just sounds like a lot of extra work to me.
My latest article (on decorative pillows) was posted on my site just over a week ago, and we’re just waiting for it to get indexed now. I expect it to be listed any day now in the big 3…
Hi Mike,
As you said, it’s fluff advice. Some guy out there gets an idea and then it’s overdone to death as the rest of the guru wannabes pile on. And no one is actually testing and none of these guys ever shows you real results.
Today we are down to #38 for ’softball gloves’. Not bad for just over 3 months effort. We don’t submit to the masses we submit an article to one directory and then we re-write. We don’t use spinning software. We never post the same article on our own site although we do have a blog with posts and articles on our site.
Consider this, Google is not an arms race. By that I mean it’s not really about how many links you get, it’s about the quality of the links that point to your site.
If the same document is out there on 20 directories and gets picked up on average just 5 times, you’ll end up with 100 versions out there. And what’s the chance that, even without a duplicate penalty filter that Google has introduced, your article will reside on pages that have any significant PR.
There was another Google patent document released not too long ago. While I won’t try to summarize it here let’s just say that Google will become more and more able to detect similar documents (spun articles) and if it can, it will likely discount them.
Your site will benefit by quality links PR pages with fresh content, not re-shaped, re-used content on hundreds of sites.
Stay with the larger high PR directories and make fewer but original submissions and you’ll see an improvement.
Nancy
Mike,
You kind of given yourself the answer to get targeted traffic without being on the first page of Google for the phrases you’ve mentioned in your post. That answer is buy the traffic! It’s a dirty word, but I feel you want to be where the crowd is going. And as the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them join them. Get yourself an account with Shopzilla, Price Grabber etc.. and shelll out a few sheckles a click. The end result is that customers will see your name in different shopping venues and you’ll become a trusted source!
Ed
Ed,
You bring up an excellent point on paid traffic. I don’t think anyone should consider it a dirty word, however. It’s more just a business decision regarding whether buying traffic is an investment you can get a return on or not. Google Adwords can be a great source of traffic if you do it right.
We currently use Shopzilla and Bizrate as a traffic source on a few very targeted terms on our flagship site, TheGolfCollection.com. One thing I’ll point up on those specific sources is that we find they don’t convert well. We get lookers, not many buyers. And this does not surprise me a bit because those environments are focused on helping their visitors find the lowest cost providers of a specific product. So unless you want to be the discount source (not our USP), it may not convert well. But it will still get your business name out there further.
Nancy
I actually use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search marketing quite a bit…and I agree with Nancy, we get a lot of lookers, but we don’t convert well. As far as shopzilla, bizrate and others like them, do people really use them? I don’t know anyone who does…but maybe its the way to go.
Mike
Hey Mike,
Just to be clear, we do actually convert well off of Google Adwords, I was saying our traffic that comes from Shopzilla and Bizrate does not.
If you are not converting on Google Adwords you are probably making one or more of the following mistakes:
1) You are targeting too broad a phrase for Adwords to work. Your Adwords approach should be just the opposite of what you try to do with SEO. In SEO you go for the big traffic phrases (provided they have some conversion potential - like the word ‘diets’ is not a converting phrase but ‘diet pills’ is) because there is no monetary penalty for lower conversion. But in PPC, all visitors cost you so you need to be very focused in what phrase you go after.
2) You have a poor match between keyword phrase and landing page. Do not send traffic to your home page. Once you’ve refined your campaigns to target more selective phrases, then your traffic should land on a page that has content that matches the search.
3) You are not testing enough. Adwords is a continuous testing and improvement process. You should always be testing several ad variations for every ad group. You should also be testing different landing pages to see what works best. You need to have the code on your site to ensure you know which ad is converting for you.
If you really think you are doing all three elements correctly, email me off line and we’ll take up the conversation there.
Nancy
Well Nancy, after a lot of hard optimization work, I got my “floor pillows” keyword to be number 1 in Google…I’ve jumped over my competitors and even jumped over Brand Name powerhouse Crate and Barrel.
Mike,
Most excellent! Keep up the good work.