A few days ago (Thursday, June 26th), Iccan announced they approved a recommendation put forth by it’s stake holders that would allow businesses to purchase or even resell new, custom top level domain names.

What is a top level domain name (tld)?

A top level domain name is the portion of a domain name that appears after the “.”, so for example: if you had “business.com” as your domain then the “com” would be your top level domain name.  Icaan is now making it so that new top level domains can exist on the internet like .coke or .water, etc.  The new tld’s are expected to be available for purchase sometime in 2009. 

Will .com’s become less valuable?

It now seems businesses have many new ways to market their ideas over the internet with an expanded top level space.  If you take into consideration that there are already many other alternatives to the .com top level domain, we already know and can conclude that the demand for “.com” domains hasn’t gone down as some of the largest domain resellers, places like godaddy and register.com, still recommend “.com” as a first choice before doing a domain name availability check.  As famous domainer Frank Schilling put it:

adding more skim milk to the mix will not stop the cream from rising, and that cream is .com

What does this mean for Search Marketing?

• More websites and business ideas will be going up
• More people utilizing and depending upon search to find what they need in the expanding fray of websites
• Potentially less domain traffic to the .com’s

Shopify.com is an all-in-one ecommerce solution for users looking for a quick and easy way to begin selling products online. A simple and intuitive system, Shopify allows users to create and customize their own ecommerce website in minutes. Despite it’s appeal, especially among first-time web sellers, Shopify does present some challenges, particularly in areas of SEO.

In dealing with a template-based system such as Shopify, making SEO-friendly changes to your site can be a headache. The main problem in terms of SEO that many users report with Shopify is the difficulty in creating custom Title tags and Meta tags. We recently began optimizing a client’s site that was being hosted on Shopify.com and ran into some similar problems.

After scouring Shopify’s forums, piecing together bits of information, and tweaking the code, we came up with a relatively simple way to include custom tags on your Shopify site.

To create tags, you need to add conditionals to the “theme.liquid” file of your site (bold portion). Here is the technique that we used:

{% case page_title %}
{% when null %}
<title>{{shop.name}} - {{page_title}}</title>
{% when ‘Your Page Title’ %}
<title>Your Custom Title Here</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your Custom Keywords Here” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Your Custom Description Here” />
{% else %}
<title>{{shop.name}} | {{page_title}}</title>
{% assign maxwords = 20 %}
{% assign indexblog = ‘frontpage’ %}

{% case template %}
{% when ‘collection’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}{% if collection.description.size > 0 %}: {{collection.description | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}{% endif %}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content= “{{collection.title}}{% if collection.tags.size > 0 %}: {{ collection.tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}{% endif %}” />
{% when ‘product’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}{% if product.description.size > 0 %}: {{product.description | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}{% endif %}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”{{product.title}}{% if product.tags.size > 0 %}: {{ product.tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}{% endif %}”>
{% when ‘page’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}: {{page.content | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”{{page_title}}”>
{% when ‘blog’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”{{page_title}}”>
{% else %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{shop.name}}{% if blogs.[indexblog].articles.size > 0 %}: {% for article in blogs.[indexblog].articles limit:1 %}{{ article.title }}: {{article.content | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}{% endfor %}{% endif %}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content= “{% for link in linklists.Main-Menu.links %}{% if link.type == ‘collection_link’ %}{{link.title}} {% endif %}{% endfor %}” />
{% endcase %}

{% endcase %}

Use the bolded conditional statements above for each page that you wish to create customs tags for. For example, if your page was titled “Welcome”, your conditional might look something like this:

{% when ‘Welcome’ %}
<title>T-Shirt Printers | T-Shirt Customization</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”t-shirt printing, personalized t-shirts” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Create and customize your own t-shirt” />

This is just one of many ways to create title and meta tags for your Shopify site. There are also several other factors that go into making your Shopify site SEO friendly (internal linking, sitemap, url redirects, etc). Start by creating custom, keyword-focused title and meta tags, and your Shopify site will begin to climb the search engine rankings.

I just had to write this post about the explosive growth in the online advertising space. It seems our market is growing very fast even in these times of uncertainty.

I subscribe to email blasts from a company called Mediapost. I get several emails each day with cool stats about the online industry including search and social media. Sometimes I just delete the emails based on the title, and sometimes I glance through the emails and try to glean some good nuggets of info. A couple of days ago I got an email that was titled: “Web #2 Ad Medium in 5 Years” Hmmm…that piqued my interest, so I opened it.

Recently the IDC (not sure what IDC stands for) released a study that forecasts and analyzes US Internet advertising for 2008-2012. Overall, the Internet advertising revenue is expected to roughly double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012.

There are some very interesting little tidbits in this study, which happens to cost about $4500 to purchase. I’m not crazy enough to purchase the entire study (Click Here if You Are), but the excerpts seem promising…here is the Cliff’s notes version:

Essentially they are stating that the Internet will rise from the number 5 advertising medium up to the number 2 medium by the end of 2012. This will make advertising revenue larger than cable TV, newspapers, and broadcast TV. Direct marketing will remain in the top spot, according to the study.

It seems that video advertising will be responsible for the single biggest revenue percentage gain; it is anticipated that video advertising on the Internet will grow sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012, which gives it an annual compounded growth rate of 49.4%. As any good rapper would say…”Unhhh…how you like me now?” A sevenfold increase in 5 years…all I can say is WOW…that is an industry that I want to be a part of. Just slice me off a little piece of that revenue and I’ll be happy. The IDC study also anticipates that brand advertisers will shift significants amounts of their budgets into video commercials; mainly taking away from their current efforts on both broadcast and cable TV.

What’s the reasoning behind this massive growth in the online video advertising space?? I think it’s because advertisers are starting to realize that people are sick of being told what to watch and when to watch it. The Internet allows people the freedom to choose what they want to watch and when…so why not cater to that desire?

Some other conclusions that the IDC study came to are:

- Search will still remain the king. Search ads hit $10.4 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to almost $18 billion in 2012. However, search advertising as a percentage of Internet advertising is expected to go down from 41% of the market share last year to about 34% in 2012.
- As stated previously, online video will explode over the next 4 years and it will expand its Internet advertising share from 2% to 7.4%.
- Another big mover in this space will be referral and lead-generation services. These services will see the second largest market share gain and will grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $5.9 billion in 2012.
- Surprisingly, the IDC forecasts mobile advertising to only grow to “just shy” of 1 percent of the overall market share. Although this is a fast growing market, I expected mobile advertising to be a little stronger.

As you can see, lots of good news in our industry. I’m excited about the prospects and the growth rate. This study just helps solidify my decision to operate a business in this industry…let’s just hope that the study is accurate.

Google has a tool called “Google Trends” in their arsenal of gadgets that allows you to view relative search volumes and seasonal trends between two or more keyword phrases. Why is this useful? Because we can use trends to help guide our paid and organic search marketing campaigns.

Last week, Tech Crunch posed the question wondering if Google could predict the 2008 Presidential election. Not a bad idea, I thought, and dug a little deeper on the subject. Google Trends will let you pull up search volume data for broad keyword terms - so that means the tool will return results for broad keywords that are one, two or possibly three words long that have a certain amount of search volume. This is great because we can compare two or more keyword phrases side by side to find trends that we otherwise would have to wait and dig up from our analytics data over time.

Predicting Political Elections

Take the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination in which Obama won over Clinton:

By looking at the above line chart, it’s pretty clear that Google captured more search traffic for “Obama” than it did for “Clinton” since the start of this year (2008) - and we know Obama eventually won out. When you think about it, Google captures a portion of the world’s search traffic (Google Trends also allows you to drill down to United States only search traffic) and their sample size is a good bet at being fairly accurate, seeing that they own around 66% of the U.S. market share. So Google Trends to me sounds like it is able to make predictions with a certain degree of accuracy. The wheels are turning now. Could we start to see Google predict other things as well?

Now let’s look at Obama vs Mccain:

From this data, it seems the race between Obama and Mccain is not as close as the Obama, Clinton match-up. For kicks you may want to watch these numbers until the election in November and I’ll probably do a follow up post to review my personal prediction based on Google’s numbers. Based on this data, Obama appears the winner.

Find Seasonal Trends and Steady Traffic Patterns

A lot of the time you can determine which keywords you will want to utilize for your PPC campaigns and which keyword you will want to market your site with organically by looking at seasonal search vs steady search traffic volumes.

For example, on Google trends you can search for yearly events like “xmas gifts” that you think might yield seasonal trends:

As you might expect, people search for xmas gifts around christmas time. But notice how each year the search volume of people looking for xmas gifts keeps growing. Ever thought about turning on a few Adsense ads during that time?

Digging a little deeper on the gift subject I’ve decided to compare search trends for “xmas gifts”, “wedding gifts”, “personalized gifts” and “romantic gifts” to see if we can see any seasonal vs steady traffic trends:

“Xmas gifts” pales in comparison to the relative spike in “personalized gifts” so you may want to think about including the latter search term into your PPC campaign. Looking at the xmas trend, you could begin your PPC campaign early on while the curve is still relatively flat to test the market and snap up customers before advertiser volume and click price becomes too much. And since “personalized gifts” has a pretty large search volume throughout the year, a steady organic campaign might not be a bad investment.

We can also see, and I laughed at this, people tend to get married during the middle of the year or at least they are searching for “wedding gifts” at that time - again now you can see during what times of the year you’re going to want to invest into paid search when it comes to wedding gifts.

Another interesting point is the “romantic gifts” in green: people search for romantic gift ideas during the xmas period and Valentines day. I knew Valentines day was a big one but didn’t realize romantic gifts were that popular around the new year - and that’s what this tool is nice for, finding those otherwise hidden trends. Notice there is also a steady volume during the rest of the year, again probably not a bad organic search marketing investment.

Look at Recent, Hourly Data to Generate search Traffic

I was a bit surprised when I found Google trends now displaying the top 100 fastest growing or “hottest” search terms for the a given day. Google defines “hot” as keywords that “experience sudden surges in popularity… and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern“. You can even see search traffic by hour!

You might be able to look at the hot trends and see what other people find exciting at the moment, then write a quick blog post that caters to the interest at hand to generate a bit of search traffic in your direction. I know that Google has a feature within their search engine that allows new website pages to rank very quickly if the indexed information is relevant and seems valuable to searchers - Google calls this feature Query Deserves Freshness.

What is Google Trends lacking?

I’d like to see the tool:

• Include a feature to drill down and see keyword broad, phrase and exact match
• Include results for terms that don’t have large traffic volumes
• Compare more than 5 keyword phrases
• Display a larger, optional data graph (for now you can download data in cvs format to build your own charts)
• Display search volume numbers (yea right)

What to be weary of

• Google trends appears to return results based on broad matching keywords. This means the search volume results contain data for your keyword phrase but also contain data for other searches that happen to contain the same keywords in different order. For example: if you were to compare “home” and “homes” on Google Trends you will get a larger search volume for “home” than you would for “homes”. But if you view Google’s Traffic estimator that breaks down “home” and “homes” by broad match, phrase match and exact match, you will see that the exact match for “home” gets almost no search traffic compared to the same term in a broad match. The Adwords website has more information on keyword matching types. Just remember, Google Trends returns broad matching keywords which will need further analysis to determine if it is a good choice for your campaign.
• Use Google’s Traffic Estimator to drill down, analyze and see a keyword phrase’s broad match, phrase match and exact match to eliminate poor keyword choices among words you find that have good potential on Google Trends.

What can you take away from all this?

If anything, know that Google Trends in combination with Google’s Traffic Estimator can be used to find out which keywords are better suited for PPC vs Organic search campaigns. Google uses time as a factor in addition to relative search volumes to give you seasonal/steady search traffic trends but also gives you a tool to drill down and see broad match, phrase match and exact matching keyword data. Your PPC campaign can take advantage of seasonal keyword trends while steady traffic would be at least be a good candidate for organic search marketing.

How to Get Your Site Re-Evaluated by Google

First, The Background

One of my client’s has a very robust, enterprise level site. Thousands of pages, 50k plus inbound links, lots of original content, and a damn fine technical SEO structure (if I do say so myself). However, the client’s site was not showing up for any search queries in Google and only about 150 pages were indexed. Despite months of banging our head against the wall trying to figure out what was going on, we still weren’t getting any love from Google. We didn’t think that the site was being punished, we just thought that something was blocking the site from being crawled and indexed properly. We were getting crawled/cached regularly, but not increasing the number of indexed pages or the search rankings.

We spent months trouble shooting this site, making changes, increasing site efficiency, only to see our efforts get smacked-down by Google. This site was only getting about 3-5 hits a day from Google…not what you would call a successful campaign.

We finally came to the conclusion that we had to have gotten punished or flagged somewhere along the way. We thought that maybe the person who owned the domain before our client had conducted some spammy practices and gotten the site flagged…that wasn’t it. Then we started digging into all of the backlinks on the site. When we took over the project, there were approx. 35K backlinks pointing at the site, a majority of them were from a very large affiliate who was running ads for our client. As we dug into these backlinks and ads we noticed that they were not redirected through a 3rd party like Doubleclick or any other ad tracking software. We thought that was kind of elementary and glanced over it. When we inquired about all of these links we found out that all of them were implemented on the affiliate site and pointed at our client’s site in a 1-week timespan. AH-HA!!! This is when it hit us! Our client’s site went from a hundred or so links to over 30K in just under a week…all from the same domain.

It was obvious at that point that our site had gotten flagged by Google and was being left out of the results pages.

What to do Next??
We had to convince someone at Google to re-include our site in the SERPs. So, we logged in to our webmaster account (Google Webmaster Tools) and clicked on “Request Reconsideration” in the bottom right of the dashboard screen:

I read the guidelines for submitting a reconsideration request and crafted a couple of paragraphs about the situation and why our client’s site should not have been flagged. I kept in mind that a human will read this and I tried to appeal to this person logically and from a business perspective. Here’s the exact request that I submitted:

We purchased the www.ExampleSite.com domain back in Oct 2007. Within weeks of launching this domain we 301 redirected www.PreviousDomain.com (a Page Rank 5 site at the time) to www.ExampleSite.com. Despite having a large, content rich site we have been unable to establish any PageRank or rankings in Google; we can only conclude that we are being penalized for something. Is it possible that there was a penalty levied on the www.ExampleSite.com domain by the previous owner, which has carried over to our ownership?

Also, within weeks of launching the new site we struck an affiliate relationship with a site named www.AffiliateSite.com. We believe www.AffiliateSite.com, at that time, may have been using a very primitive ad serving system and listed all of our banner ads on its site, but all of those ads were not re-directed through some type of intermediary, they were all straight links to our site. Since www.AffiliateSite.com has nearly 100k pages, we instantly received tens of thousands of links pointing to our site. We realize this could have triggered the Google algorithm to penalize our site. So, we have changed tactics and are now using the proper redirects for all of our affiliate ads.

www.ExampleSite.com is an ethical, legitimate business. We are running a valid business model that people find valuable; we are not using any unethical tactics. We believe that we have been penalized for actions outside of our control and are requesting an investigation into our site and it’s ability to rank well in Google. Any info you can give would be appreciated. Please feel free to contact me:My Info, email address, phone number.

The Results
After I submitted my request I received the typical confirmation statement, something like “we get a lot of inquiries and it may take us a while to get back to you and there’s no guarantee of getting re-included…..blah, blah, blah”. I never received any response from Google about my request, nor did I get any follow up (it’s been over 2 months at this point).

However, within about 2 weeks of submitting the request, the number of indexed pages skyrocketed. After about 1 month of the request we saw our client’s organic traffic take on an exponential curve. Here’s the analytics graph from Mar 1 through Jun 6 for our client’s Google organic traffic:

As you can see, the request appears to have worked. We’re now realizing the traffic that we should have gotten several months ago.

The Lesson
- Always investigate what has been done to a site before you take on a new client. We spent months trying to figure out how to get this site ranked, when all we needed to do was look at what happened before we took on the account.
- When you submit a request, make sure you write a compelling case for your site and try to leave emotion out of it. This is business and the receiving entity on the other end is a person. Appeal to their logic, make your case, and cross your fingers.

Despite never receiving a formal response from Google, seeing our traffic take-off is good enough. It’s nice to know that our request for reconsideration was taken seriously and that we actually got results.

At the beginning of May, Google announced the release of their new TV Ads Service. Spot Runner has been running a very similar program for over a year with great success. Here are some of the key differences between the two services:

GOOGLE TV ADs	SPOT RUNNER TV ADs
Customers can Select Videos from many Qualified Ad Creators, outside vendors will customize your video for around $2,500	Customers can select from a huge video library, Spot Runner charges a modest fee of around $500 to personalize your video
You own the ad, you can make future modifications	Spot Runner owns and control your ads.
The minimum amount for a television schedule is $250 per day	The minimum amount for a television schedule is $1000 per day
Google will place your ad according to a bid process. The ad spots are sold in online auctions 24 hours before airtime.	Spot Runner manage your ads according to your budget and preferences, you don’t have control on any negotiations.
You can buy your own airtime	Spot Runner control when and where your as will show. You can see where the ad was shown only after the ad was aired
You can block shows that you would not like to advertise	You are not allow to control your ad on any shows
You can buy local and nation wide ads, the local ads are only offered in a few selective areas.	You can buy local and National, the company is going after National Advertisers (see article)
Cannot run any political ads	You are allowed to run political ads
Ability to choose specific TV Program	You do not have the ability choose specific TV programs
Monitor in advance when your ad will air ahead of time	Spot Runner controls when and where your ads will show
You can control when and where each TV ad will show	Spot Runner cannot tell you when your ad will air ahead of time
Ads air only in 125 DISH Network™ channels, the fastest-growing pay-TV provider in the country since 2000 and currently serves more than 13.1 million satellite TV customers (see details)	Greater Broadcast with mostly cable providers which provide a bigger coverage. Dish Network and other direct broadcast combined reach less than 17% of U.S. households, according to Nielsen Media Research (source Spot Runner FAQ section).

Google seems to have a very affordable solution when it comes to placing, controlling and tracking your TV campaign performance, however they do not have the user-friendly video production capabilities of Spot Runner.

On the other hand you might say that, Google, acting only as an efficient broker on the video creation process, will begin gobbling up Spot Runner’s market share in the long run so long as nothing changes between the two - After all, Google’s specialty is to provide a user friendly interface to manage and control your Internet (and TV) marketing efforts, not to directly create or produce websites or TV ads. Spot Runner seems like they try to do-it-all.

Google TV allows many small to medium size companies to enter the TV media with a limited budget. Unlike Spot Runner, the management and control for TV commercials is also fully integrated with Internet marketing campaigns through Adwords, so a professional Search Engine Marketing firm can measure and control the effectiveness of your TV ads sending potential buyers to an online website, and further track in greater details your total return on investment.

Within the last 3 years Social Networks have taken the internet by storm. Startups have created enormous communities bringing millions of people together through user-friendly interfaces and applications. User’s can create profiles and share pictures, music, friends, comments, personal information, favorite sites, and much more. Social Networks like Myspace.com, and Facebook.com have grown at exponential rates and continue to grow.

In the past 10 years traditional forms of advertising have become a little more obsolete, and social networks have become an alternative route for reaching the masses. Large advertising agencies have turned to social networks as new marketing outlets because they have the ability to reach a large user base.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a term used to describe a network which gives you the ability to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Users can bookmark their favorite articles, websites, online tools, software, and much more at the click of a button. Social bookmarking users can easily share their bookmarks with designated friends and groups, making these networks very powerful. User’s with large numbers of followers can refer hundreds, or even thousands of new visitors to a website.

Social bookmarking sites use ranking systems to sort these bookmarked websites by relevance, placing the most important bookmarks on the front page. If you get your article or bookmark on the front page of the top social bookmarking websites, you could receive significant traffic, anywhere from 100 to 35,000 unique visitors in one day. Get involved with these social bookmarking networks and utilize them as a way to market your business, blog, or website. Social Bookmarking can provide great exposure for your company accross the web, and help you grow to achieve your goals.

Below I have provided a list of the top 10 Social Bookmarking websites listed by relevance. This relevance is determined by the following factors: Alexa ranking, google page rank, number of inbound links, and estimated monthly visitors by Compete.com and Quantcast.com.

Definitions of Terms:

• Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites.
• Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.
• Inbound links are hyperlinks which transmit domains. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).
• Monthly visitors refers to the amount of unique visitors a website receives on a global scale within one calender month. The details of your visitors can be tracked by using Google Analytics, which allows you to sort traffic by keywords, demographics, search engine, referring sites, and more. Please contact your webmaster for details on implimenting this system.

Digg.com

You’ve spent weeks getting your new website up and running. The content is good, the links work, and the site looks great. Now, how are you going to get people to visit? As far as online marketing goes, your two major options are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and “organic” or “natural” search engine optimization (SEO). Each provides a unique list of advantages that can be leveraged to improve your site’s visibility and popularity on the web, depending on what stage your website is in.

The problem is that too often, PPC and organic SEO are viewed with an “either/or” mentality, rather than a cooperative one. In fact, most information regarding PPC and organic SEO on the web presents the techniques in opposing, comparative, or “versus” viewpoints.

According to some, choosing PPC as your online marketing platform means you must sacrifice the positives that organic SEO can bring (and vice versa). But why can’t you have your cake and eat it too? Well, if you play your cards (and plan your budget) right, you can. By implementing both PPC and organic SEO tactics to their online marketing campaigns, many website owners have found a winning combination.

Here are a few of the advantages that each online marketing technique can bring to the table:

PPC

• Instant Gratification- your ads appear instantly and bring traffic to site quickly
• Easy to Set-Up and Implement- getting a PPC campaign started takes a short amount of time and is a simple step-by-step process
• Easy to Track- PPC allows you to see how many clicks each keyword is receiving, where clicks are coming from, and how much each click is costing you

Organic SEO

• Provides Long Term Stability- investing in organic SEO ensures that your site will receive quality traffic over a longer period of time
• Its Free- unlike PPC, where you pay for each person who clicks on your ad, organic visitors cost you nothing
• Trusted More By Users- because organic listings are gathered and organized by search engines based on relevance, users are more likely to trust these listings over PPC advertisements.

By looking at the advantages that each technique provides, it is not difficult to see how using both can be beneficial to your site. The ease-of-use and immediate impact that a PPC campaign can provide is perfect for getting traffic to your site now. It can also act as a testing ground for keywords which can later be included in your organic SEO campaign.

While your PPC campaign is bringing your site instant traffic, you can also begin building the foundation of your organic SEO campaign. Although it takes time to build your site’s organic rankings, you will eventually be able to spend less on your PPC campaign for certain keywords that you are ranking for organically. The continuous stream of quality traffic that you can get through organic SEO will be well worth the wait.

Cloaking defined by Wikipedia

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.

From Google’s FAQ section for webmasters you can also find the following statement:

To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or authors who engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.

Webmasters have many different opinions when cloaking can be used and when it should not (you can read more cloaking threads at webmasters.com). In one particular instance I was looking at a website from a Fortune 100 company that I really liked (bcg.com), and it surprised me to find a cloaking technique in their H1 header text.

Are they really cloaking? Yes they are.  A person visiting the website only sees a logo on the top left corner, while the H1 tag is what the search engines index.

How are they doing it?: The company’s cloaking solution uses a simple css technique: they wrap a link around a div (named “logo”) which is then wrapped around an H1 tag.  Here is the html code:

<a href=”http://www.bcg.com” style=”cursor:hand”>
<div id=”logo”>
<h1><span>BCG - The Boston Consulting Group</span></h1>
</div>
</a>

Then they use CSS in order to hide the text behind the logo (so that only the picture logo displays to the user:

#logo {
width: 260px;
height: 111px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
background: url(’/img/logo.gif’) top left no-repeat;
text-align: left;
float: left;
}

h1 span {
display: none;
}

Why not separately display the image logo and H1 tags?  Having a visible H1 tag on every page may not look aesthetically pleasant to the end user and some companies would prefer to show just a well recognized logo to their uses.  Cloaking H1 tags under an image logo provides a way to show the logo to the user while still have each page’s H1 tag include their brand name.

Are they alone? No.  Many other Fortune 100 companies (like Qualcomm, Quicken Loans, Ohio Health, Gore Tex, SAS) are also using this particular technique. I don’t believe Google will ban any website from cloaking their H1 tags with their image logo as long as it is clear that they just want to provide a better user experience and not distort search rankings.  In most cases all the companies that I’ve searched and found are just cloaking H1 tags with images for their brand name.

Recomendations on Cloaking Images: Because the sites in question are not already banned from Google’s search index, it’s probably the case that cloaking H1 tags with your brand image logo should be ok and won’t get your site banned.  In this case, it should be clear to Google engineers that you are not trying to change the message you give to people vs search engines,  but want to provide a better user experience.  They keyword here is “should”, so keep in mind that any form of cloaking in the long run is probably not going to be worth the effort - only the search engines know what is acceptable when it comes to what is considered “cloaking” and what is not - so it can become difficult to guess.

Also keep in mind that it’s usually not too difficult for a site to rank well for their brand name because normally there isn’t going to be a large number of competitors with the same company brand name out there.  Keeping a brand text in visible H1 tags, in the site’s title tags and or in backlink anchor text might be a better option instead of cloaking on any level.

I get a lot of questions on Google’s page rank meter. I was asked by a friend of mine:

Question 1: Based on the Google Page Rank, the highest rank I’ve come across so far has been with latimes.com (8 out of 10) and nytimes.com (9 out of 10). Besides Google, Yahoo and the rest that calculate page rankings, do you know of any sites that have a perfect 10 ranking?

Question 2: Last week I saw the LATimes.com site ranked 9 out of 10, but this week it’s back to an 8. Any thoughts on why they dropped?

To be short and sweet, I don’t know of any sites that have perfect 10 page ranking. But should you even care?

Page Rank is one small portion of Google’s total algorithm and only looking at one small portion of a larger picture often times doesn’t give you the best point of view. A site can rank in different positions for many different keyword phrases, so PR isn’t going to, in itself, indicate where in the results you will show up for a given keyword - since your positioning is based how a person searches for your site along with many other factors that happen to include Page Rank in the equation.

Well, what does the Page Rank (PR) meter indicate anyway?

You could say PR tells you how “networked” your site is. PR is thought to be a logarithmic function of the number, and possibly the total quality, of in-bound links a site has accumulated. So, the more in-bound links you have, the higher your PR. But it gets harder and harder to climb up the PR ladder since the equation has a logarithmic base.

Page Rank meter, Not Always Accurate

You may have noticed: the Page Rank meter that you might have installed on your FireFox or IE web browser is not always accurately reflecting Google’s internal Page Rank numbers for 2 reasons:

1. Google updates their PR values once every 3 or 4 months - so the PR value you see for any given web page is not always going to be up to date.
2. The Page Rank meter has to guess a page’s value some times, for example, the meter PR shows a value on the Gmail interface page (which shouldn’t have a rank since your private email messages don’t appear in public web results) - so we don’t even know which pages the meter is guessing on!

With all this said, Page Rank should probably be taken with a grain of salt in that it can be very misleading piece of information.

OK, but how can a site’s Page Rank drop?

A site’s Google PR can drop for a few reasons that I am aware of:

1. a reduction of in-bound links to the site
2. a Google engineer manually penalized the site in question for spammy web practices
3. the meter might actually be “guessing” a page’s PR value to a certain extent, almost like a random number

Is there any value to the PR number of a web site?

Yes. Since the Page Rank number of a web page is updated every 3 months or so, we know we are looking at historical data (an image from the past). For this reason we can usually judge the past activities of a site in terms of in-bound links and how much “link” juice a site receives in general - and if all else equal (the site has not participated in any type of known web spam activity since the last update) then we might even be able to determine the current health of the site - weather or not we want to acquire a link from the site or if we want to link out to the site.

Why does Google make the Page Rank numbers public?

• When you think about it, Google wants to do everything in their power to stop people from gaming their search engine. So why make an internal number from their algorithm public?? (It’s possible that they don’t even use PR in certain ranking calculations, but that’s another story)
• Google uses the PR meter so it’s user population will learn to value sites the a high page rank and devalue sites with a low page rank.
• If they can get you to think in their terms, they can control your fear: what do you think Google does to sites with a healthy page rank that commit “spammy” practices (such as selling links), or anything else they deem as “bad”… they drop the site’s page rank down or even to zero as a scare tactic - sort of like a slap on the wrist and “let that be a lesson to the rest of you!” - even though the site’s rankings, and traffic don’t change - the things they can’t obfuscate with a simple reduction in PR.
• Google uses the “Page Rank” (PR) metric as a means of controlling the behavior of the population when it comes to judging the “quality” or the ability of a site to rank in the search results - that’s why they make the information public.
• The PR meter helps prevent people from spamming their search engine, so they can generate cleaner web search results, make it harder to perform organic SEO and drive more money to their adwords program.

And no, other than Google’s home page, I don’t know of a web page that has a perfect 10 PR, do you?