While we can’t be certain exactly what these signals are, it is widely suspected that bounce rate is an important ranking factor. In this post I’ll define exactly what bounce rates are and describe when a bounce isn’t actually a bounce.

Plus, you’ll discover why the bounce rate data shown in Google Analytics is mostly useless and see what you can do to fix this problem.

What is the Bounce Rate?

Here is Google’s official definition of bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
- Source

So, effectively – if someone visits a page on your site and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site (either by hitting the back button on their browser, by visiting another site, closing the browser, or by entering a new domain into the address bar) then that’s classified as a bounce.

When is a Bounce not really a Bounce?

Here’s where it gets slightly more confusing…Consider the following two scenarios:-

By definition, both visitor A and visitor B have bounced, however when used in conjunction with the time on site metric you can see that while visitor A probably didn’t find anything useful on the landing page (having spent only 5 seconds on site), visitor B has stuck around for over 5 minutes, probably found the answer the he/she was looking for and then bounced.

In the search engine industry, this time on site metric is called “dwell time” and dwell time has a very high positive correlation with user engagement.

Consider the example that we used in the “New Rules of SEO” webinar: If a user types in “USD to GBP conversion”, it’s likely that the user will land on a page with a calculator and bounce away when he/she finds the answer that they’re looking for.  In this example, the landing page catered exactly to the needs of the user, but the user still bounced (by definition).

However, when bounce rate and dwell time are used in conjunction with one another, a more reliable insight is gained into how engaged a particular user is with a piece of content.

There is significant evidence to suggest that search engines are looking very closely at dwell time and using it as a signal:

While it may feel like you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating the content on the website, quality is in the eye of the visitor, and short page dwell times can indicate the content is not capturing the visitor’s interest. Something about the content is not grabbing their attention.

- Duane Forrester – Public Outreach, Bing Search Engine

So, what we really should be doing as webmasters is paying attention to bounce rates in conjunction with dwell times.  If we find content that has a high bounce rate and low dwell time, then that is a good signal that the content is not giving the users what they expect.

Here in lies the problem….

Bounce Rates and Google Analytics

The most obvious way to track down content that is under performing in these key metrics is to use Google analytics and apply a filter across all your content.

However, Google analytics only tracks bounce rate and time on site metrics through pageviews.  This is really important to understand – if you don’t then you may start hacking out content from your site that you think is performing badly, but in reality may not be.

For example, if a visitor lands on one of your pages, stays for 8 minutes and 12 seconds before “bouncing” back to the search engines then two things will happen:-

1. The search engines themselves will see this as a positive signal because of the extended dwell time (high dwell time = good user engagement)
2. Your Google Analytics tool will show “100% bounce rate” and “0:00:00” time on site which most webmasters will interpret as a bad signal!  To reiterate: Even though the visitor has stayed for 8 minutes before leaving, it will be shown as “0:00:00″ time on site because the visitor hasn’t loaded another page on your site.

As you can see, there is a huge disconnect between what’s really happening and what’s being reported in Google Analytics.  The disconnect is so vast that less knowledgeable webmasters may end up removing content from their site that’s actually performing well!

Here are some more examples of the disconnect between what actually happens and what’s reported in Google Analytics:-

And here is the quote from Google Analytics themselves to confirm that this is what happens:-

When a page is the last page in a session, there is no way to calculate the time spent on it because there is no subsequent pageview. For this reason, when Page A is the last page in the visitor’s session, its time calculation is not counted for that view. In addition, when that page is the only page viewed in the session, no time on page is calculated.
- Source

Here’s something else that matters: Google does not use any data from your Google Analytics account to calculate rankings.  Sometimes, you have to take what Matt Cutts says with a pinch of salt due to the obvious conflict of interest that someone in his role is faced with – but on this occasion I’m very confident that Google don’t use Analytics data.

I can guarantee that the bounce rate  and time on site stats you see in your Analytics accounts are not the same metrics that the Google Rankings Team use to determine the best results for any given query.  The rankings team need far more accurate data than Analytics can provide.

What This Actually Means for Us

When you notice in your Analytics tool that a page has 100% bounce rate and a “0:00:00″ time on site, this doesn’t mean that the page is necessarily not performing well.  It could be that all visitors to that page stick around for more than 5 minutes before leaving, effectively sending a positive “dwell time” signal to the search engine.  In other words: we have no way of using Google Analytics to reliably determine the worst performing content on our site.

We need a better way of identifying poorly performing content pages.  A way that enables us to make decisions and understand what content is being appreciated and what content is holding our rankings back.

How do we Fix this in Google Analytics?

What we’d really like to know is:- “For each page on my site, what percentage of visitors stick around for longer than x seconds?”.  The value of x is up for negotiation.  Shane and I have agreed that for this site we think a suitable benchmark is 30 seconds.

If someone lands on a page and bounces within the first 30 seconds, that’s a pretty sure sign that they haven’t really found what they’re looking on an information site like ImImpact.  On the other hand, if someone stays for longer than that, then they’re at least somewhat engaged (started reading or watching a video).

Thankfully by using a feature called “Event Tracking”, we can set this up relatively painlessly simply by adding a line of code to our Google Analytics snippet:-

Synchronous Analytics Code (Old Version)

If you’re using the original Analytics tracking code (not the asynchronous version), then this is the code you need:-

Just add the following line under the pageTracker._trackPageview(); line:

Synchronous Analytics Code (New Version)

If you’re using the new version of Google Analytics tracking code (the asynchronous version), then this is the code you need:-

Just add the following as the last _gaq.push declaration in the script:

Thanks to padicode for these Analytics snippets

How Does this Work?

This script will countdown 30 seconds from when the page loads and then will “push” an event to Google Analytics.  Once the event is triggered, Analytics will no longer count this user as a “bounce” even if he/she doesn’t load any other pages on your site.  The net result is that you should see a decrease in the bounce rate on your site.

Here is a screenshot showing the bounce rates before and after the script is applied:-

The Best Way to Find Underperforming Content

Now we have set a bounce to only be recorded if a visitor stays for less than 30 seconds we have a much more reliable set of data that we can use to identify the pages that perhaps aren’t giving the end user what they expect.

To find these pages, I recommend navigating to content -> site content -> pages, clicking on “Bounce Rate” to sort from highest to lowest and changing the sort type to “weighted”.  This will give you a list of pages with the highest bounce rates to the lowest weighted by pageviews:-

With this view you can then sort through the pages to identify those with the highest bounce rates and the lowest average time on page.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

Of course, there are alternative solutions to Google Analytics.  Both Woopra and Clicky have a more accurate way of measuring both bounce rates and time on site through a process called “pinging”. Shane will be updating his Alternatives to Google Analytics post very shortly with more information about this and other new features.

In Summary

This is a mighty long post, so I wanted to write a very quick executive summary for you:-

1. If someone visits a page on your site and then exits that page without visiting any other page on your site then that is a bounce
2. Search engines use a metric called dwell time to determine whether a bounce is a “good” bounce (ie. the user found what they were looking for) or a “bad” bounce (ie. the visitor leaves within 10 seconds because your page sucks)
3. Google Analytics calculates bounce rates and time on site through pageviews.  This means that if someone “bounces” off your page then it’s always reported as 0:00:00 time on site no matter how long the visitor stays for.
4. Event tracking can be used to manipulate the bounce rate metric so that bounces are only recorded if a visitor leaves after less than 30 seconds (example script above)
5. Both Woopra and Clicky are great alternatives to Google Analytics for more accurate data.

We think that Google Analytics should do a better job of providing accurate time on site and bounce rate metrics because lesser versed webmaster may be misled into removing content that appears bad but is actually performing well.

What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!

I know you’ve been told otherwise. I know that “Google wants good content” is a phrase repeated over and over, often by people who should know better. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true and believing it could be dangerous.

In this post, let’s examine what Google really wants and what that means for you.

Correlation and Causation

Before you start calling me a hypocrite, I’ll admit it right away: yes, I have often talked about the importance of good content for your websites and your marketing in general (and I will continue to do so). In fact, it’s clear to me why people keep saying that Google wants quality content. A quick glance at my own portfolio of websites makes it clear that those sites with low-quality, cheap, outsourced content are not faring as well as those with higher-quality content.

So, what am I on about?

We need to remember that correlation does not imply causation. For example, in some areas of the world, there are more human babies born during times when storks are nesting in the same region. In other words, there’s a correlation between the number of storks and the number of babies born. However, we know that this isn’t a case of one thing causing the other. The data is incidental and does not prove that human babies are, in fact, delivered by storks.

Similar correlations are constantly paraded up and down the news media, in their relentless quest to classify all inanimate objects in the world as either causing or preventing cancer. It’s easy to forget then, that just because two things coincide doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.

And so it is with Google and good content. Right now, there is some correlation between low quality, badly written, scraped and spammy content and low rankings. And there is also a correlation between quality content and high rankings. But there are two reasons why it’s important to realize that these are merely correlations, not causations.

Reason Number 1: Robots

Google’s evaluation of the web is based on algorithms. Robots and maths, if you will. There is no way for them to automate the human process of looking at a piece of content and seeing whether that content is “good” or “bad”.

This is a very important thing to keep in mind. Even if Google are getting better and better at separating the chaff from the wheat, quality-wise, they can’t actually detect quality. They always have to find a round-about way to approximate quality.

The original innovation was their PageRank algorithm, which treated external links on pages as “votes” for other pages. This is a round-about way of crowdsourcing the impossible task of evaluating every web-page on the Internet to every website owner on the Internet.

PageRank is still part of what Google do and, along with many, many other signals, it’s now joined by social metrics. The idea behind using social metrics is basically the same as the one behind PageRank: crowdsource every active Internet-user to determine the quality of websites. Google are looking for human signals to help them separate good from bad websites.

The reason I bring up social signals is because they serve as a great example for the correlation/causation issue with quality content: to make social signals more relevant and less easily exploitable, Google take something like “author authority” into account. A tweet from a twitter account with no followers and little activity doesn’t count as much as a tweet from a highly popular, highly active account. If you have a ton of followers, you have more credibility and your tweets carry more weight (and the same principle applies to other platforms).

In some cases, people are popular on social media because they consistently deliver great, valuable content. On the other hand, you can also be a nonsense-spewing celebrity and be wildly popular on twitter an co.

If we understand some of these inner workings, we can see that good, high-quality content, endorsed by links from high-quality websites and reputable social profiles can lead to high rankings. But so can rubbish content, endorsed by hordes of fans and social media celebs. Some people are famous for being famous. Some websites continue being popular because they’re popular. Quality doesn’t always enter the equation.

Reason Number 2: Money

Here’s the bigger reason why “Google wants quality content” is simply not true: Google wants more money for Google. Period. That’s the purpose of the company: to generate more revenue and more profit for itself, without breaking too many laws, or at least not all at once.

This is the driving factor behind everything that Google does. Of course we all know the argument that follows: “Google wants to show good, relevant content because that’s what keeps the search engine users happy, which is what makes Google so popular, which is how they make more money.”

Sounds reasonable enough and it’s even partially true. As long as showing quality content helps Google, there’s hope for people who create good content. But what if they decide that showing mediocre content from big brands is more beneficial to their bottom line? What if Google keep pushing organic search results further below the fold and fill up as much of the results page as possible with ads and links to Google-owned sites and services or Google partners? What if they start scraping the web to display information directly in the search results, instead of sending users to a website?

At the end of the day, Google don’t care one bit about the quality of your content. You can have the best content in the world and you can have worked harder for it than anyone else, but if there happens to be more money for Google in not showing your content in the results than in showing it, guess what they’ll do?

Time to Panic?

This is not a “end of SEO” post. It’s also not a post trying to scare you or spread panic.

If you realize that Google (the search engine) is driven by algorithms and you understand some of them, you will be able to make better decisions than if you think “Google wants quality content”. “Good content” is a fuzzy concept. Social signals, links, user engagement metrics and content optimization are concrete and real and they are where real results come from.

If you realize that Google (the company) is driven by a pursuit of increased profits, you’ll be in for fewer nasty surprises in the future and perhaps you’ll see why I’m making such a fuss about the New Traffic Paradigm, lately. And of course I continue to advocate creating good, valuable content. But you do that for people and for your brand, not for a search engine (remember: traffic is people!).

Sometimes, the buzzwords and the simple-but-fuzzy concepts are as popular as they are misleading. Seeing things as they really are will help you and your business and that’s why I wrote this post.

Do you agree? Disagree? What does Google really want, in your own experience?

Image credit for the silly robot.

That might not be literally true, but there’s no doubt that Google’s main goal is to make more money for Google. Being nice to small businesses doesn’t enter the equation for any decisions they make. And that makes relying on them too much a bad idea.

What then, are small businesses and individual SEOs to do? Is there a way to break out of the cycle of constantly trying to adopt to Google’s latest change, only to get smacked down by the next one?

There is. And it’s called the New Traffic Paradigm.

Tough Times

It’s no illusion that the SEO game is getting more and more difficult. A few years ago, building up a profitable niche website was fairly easy. As long as you did your keyword research right, you could buy mediocre content and some simple backlinks, slap some AdSense ads on your pages and you had an almost guaranteed winner. Things aren’t that simple anymore. While the niche marketing model is still viable, it now takes more know-how to find just the right keywords, build just the right content and get just the right links, to make it all work.

And even then, you’re always one Google slap away from losing all your income.

To make things worse, even apart from Google, we’ve seen tightening nooses everywhere: facebook introducing more stringent advertising guidelines, twitter banning accounts (after a massive increase in automated twitter-spamming), YouTube banning accounts left and right…

Any online business is always reliant on third-party services of one kind or another. Because trends come and go and policies change, it’s simply inevitable that your business will be affected by changes made to those third party sites and services, at some point. There’s no escaping that. But you can make the problem worse: the more heavily rely on any one single service or traffic source, the greater the risk.

The key is to never be fully reliant on any third party. The key is to have something no one can take away from you.

The Solution

There is such a thing, that no one can take away from you: your brand.

In my post about how to start an online business, I emphasize the importance of focusing on building real skills and real assets and I recommend selling a product or service of your own. Exceed people’s expectations with the service you provide and you’ll be creating something that transcends traffic sources and other technicalities.

The same can be true for “just a blog” or other types of content-based sites. If you get involved and if you, as blogging-about-blogging bloggers love to say, give lots of value, people will relate to you and they will want to read, see and hear more from you.

The foundation of what you do online needs to be a real, valuable product or service (even if the service is providing great content). Engage your readers and be present wherever you can. Social media, search engines, podcasts, the news (if you can get featured), etc.

The crucial difference is illustrated by comparing two of my own websites. On the one hand, IM Impact and on the other Fitness Site X (not the actual name of the site). Fitness Site X was built to promote fitness related products, based on keywords that met a certain set of criteria. Most of its content was not written by me, but outsourced to writers who, while they do know their subject matter, have no personal involvement or vested interest in Fitness Site X. Almost all of Fitness Site X’s traffic comes from Google, from a small set of keywords that I’ve attained #1 ranking positions for.

IM Impact, on the other hand, was originally started because I wanted to provide honest, non-fake reviews in the Internet marketing space. The content started to resonate with people and based on feedback I got in comments, emails and surveys, it evolved into the site you see today. All of the products I’ve ever made and sold under this brand were based directly on feedback and user demand. IM Impact gets a significant portion of its traffic from Google, but much of the traffic comes directly from returning visitors, subscribers and, surprisingly from social media, even though my involvement in social media has always been minimal.

If Google makes changes tomorrow that lead to the total de-indexation of both these sites, Fitness Site X will become completely useless and will no longer generate even a single cent of income. IM Impact, on the other hand, would lose a lot of its traffic, but only a small part of its business. People would find this site by other means. I could start more actively pursuing different traffic sources and I could even get my existing readers to participate and help me out.

In short: a Google slap would annihilate my niche site, but it would only put a small, temporary dent in IM Impact’s armor.

No More SEO?

So, is this the end of SEO? Not at all. And neither is it the end of social media marketing, PPC advertising, email marketing or any of the other tools in your toolbox. In fact, all of these things are easier to do when you have an awesome product, service or brand to promote.

It’s just that the priorities have shifted. Before, I used to do SEO and that was my entire business. Everything I did was dictated by what was useful and working in terms of SEO. Over time, this shifted. I’m still SEO’ing IM Impact and other product and service sites. I’m still doing keyword research and doing deliberate work to get top rankings for specific keywords. But now, it’s not the be-all-end-all of my business. It’s simply something I do to support my actual business, which is selling awesome products and providing awesome services.

What are your thoughts on the New Traffic Paradigm? What will you do to shift away from an endless dependancy on Google and Co.? Leave a comment and let me know!

In this post, you’ll find a simple, straight-forward explanation of what the three match types are all about and exactly how this is significant to you.

Google Searches

I will be using “blue vintage car” as a randomly picked example search term. Please feel free to follow along with some Google searches of your own, with any kind of keyword. To illustrate the difference in match types, I recommend you use a search term with at least three words.

Broad Match

A broad match search is the “normal” and most common way of searching in Google. A broad match search for my example keyword looks like this:

With this kind of search, we are asking Google to return pages that contain the words contained in the search phrase, as well as synonyms for those words in any order and any distribution.

This means that along with pages that contain the exact keyword I typed (blue vintage car), the pages with the following phrases could also be included in the results:

• Blue classic car
• Vintage car: blue
• Vintage car with blue leather interior
• Blue skies, vintage comics and car models

In general, a page containing the exact words you searched for, in the correct order, is likely to show up further up in the results than one with synonyms and a different order of words. The further down you go in the search results, the more “exotic” the listed results will become.

Here’s an example from page 50 of the results for the example search term:

As you can see, “vintage” is not featured as a word on the page, but the synonym “old” does. In addition, the three words are quite far apart on the page and aren’t even in the same sentence. The point of this is simply to illustrate: with a broad search, Google will return absolutely any page with even a hint of similarity to your search term.

Phrase Match

A phrase match search is performed by entering the search term in keywords. In the case of our example, it looks like this:

You’ll see that the number of results found is now significantly lower. This is because for a phrase match search, Google will only return pages that contain the keyword exactly as you typed it in. In this case, the three words “blue vintage car“, in exactly that order. Also, synonyms are no longer used, when you do a phrase match search.

We can confirm this by looking at the last page of results. Even the very last page listed contains the exact search phrase:

Keyword Research

If you are using Google as a search engine, there is no such thing as exact match and this is perhaps where some of the confusion about match types stems from. Exact match only exists as a search type from the perspective of keyword research (either for SEO or for PPC advertising).

If you access the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can activate the three different match types in a small box in the left sidebar (see image).

Now, whenever you get keyword suggestions, you’ll always get three versions: the plain broad match keyword, the “phrase match keyword” in quotes and the [exact match keyword] in square brackets.

Here’s what the results look like for our example keyword:

The significant difference between the three match types comes into play when we look at the search volume numbers. As you can see, it’s estimated that our example keyword gets over 12,000 broad match searches per month, but only a dozen exact searches. What does this mean?

In this case, broad match indicates searches that include the words in the keyword phrase, as well as synonyms of those words, in any order with or without the addition of more words in the search. Examples of broad match searches for “blue vintage car” include:

• blue vintage car
• classic automobile blue
• pictures of a blue vintage car
• classic blue jeans jacket with car emblem

The phrase match search volume number only includes searches containing all of the words in the keyword phrase in that exact order, but can contain searches with extra words in them. Phrase match searches could include:

• blue vintage car
• pictures of a blue vintage car

Finally, the exact match search volume number only includes searches for the exact keyword phrase and nothing else. In other words, the number indicates the estimated amount of people who typed in the following phrase and then hit the enter key:

• blue vintage car

Search Volume and SEO

The search volume of a keyword is one of the important factors to take into account, when doing keyword research. In order to answer the question “how many people are searching for this keyword”, you have to always look at the exact match search numbers. Only the exact match numbers are an estimate of how many people are searching for that specific keyword.

An SEO campaign should always focus on one keyword at a time, since trying to get a top position for a dozen keywords all at once, for one and the same page is a surefire way of spreading yourself too thin and not getting any results at all. And when you are focusing on and optimizing for one keyword, all of the possible variations of that keyword that show up as broad match searches really have no relevance.

In other words: when you’re working to get the top spot for “blue vintage car”, it doesn’t matter how many people search for “classic blue car photo album”, “vintage blue jeans jacket with car emblem” and countless other broad-match variations, because you aren’t going to rank for those phrases.

Match Types Video

Here’s a video, illustrating the same concepts as discussed above:

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

Download Video

Note that what I’m talking about aims to go beyond the niche marketing grind. That grind being: you pay someone to create mediocre content based around a set of keywords, throw that content on a site, then pay someone to create some junky spun content and use that to build tons of backlinks from wherever you can. The grind still works, but if you’re looking to go further than that and looking to get more traffic, traffic that sticks and returns and looking to “future proof” your sites, then I think what I talk about in the above video is highly relevant.

I think that especially in the IM niche, there’s too much emphasis on the “factory produced” type of 800-word-keyword-rich-article content and there may just be huge potential for traffic and profit if you consider some alternatives.

Leave a comment below to let me know what you think.

If you looked at a typical Google results screen 5 years ago and compared it to a typical results screen now then you’d probably notice some rather large changes:

5 Years ago:

Now:

These screenshots aren’t actual representations of what the search results look like because unfortunately I don’t have any snapshots of Google five years ago, but they’re a fairly accurate representation.

The areas in Red are either Google Ads, Google products listings or other stuff that Google has chucked in that will worsen the click through rate of an organic listing.

The areas in Green are our sites – the sites that we’ve spent ages SEO’ing…

Notice how the “Now” screenshot contains a heck of a lot more red than it does green

That’s right – it seems every day there are new “Google properties” added to filter clicks away from natural search listings to other areas of the Google network.

So, How much has this affected our Click Through Rate?

A while ago I spent a long time researching, testing and writing about how it was

Part of this high CTR was undoubtedly because my PPC ad had a nice bunch of sitelinks underneath it.

Also, the title for my organic listing may not have been optimal for a high click through rate – it wasn’t a bad snippet, I just haven’t tested it to see if it could be improved.

Finally, this experiment was performed in a competitive niche with a full spectrum of 3 PPC ads above the natural listings which will undoubtedly dilute the CTR for the organic listing. However, there weren’t any Google places or product placements to dilute natural traffic. I expect the experiment would have yielded different results if all ads were in the ad position located to the right side of the natural listings where they generally attract a lower CTR.

In Conclusion

I’m finding it hard to argue that a PPC ad with aggressive bidding, when done correctly, can easily outperform the #1 listing in Google natural search.

It’s certainly making me consider introducing new PPC channels to a number of my sites because I can see that I must be missing out on a lot of volume in my competitive niches.

OF course SEO isn’t dying – I just write that to attract your attention ;) But, you have to admit, it’s pretty interesting to just how much volume PPC ads can take from the natural results!

Have you noticed this yourselves / have any data to report? I’d love to hear from you in the comments box below!

2. Ezinearticles reacted. Or perhaps I should say they over-reacted?

Why Care About EZA?

Ezinearticles have been a pretty reliable traffic source for affiliate marketers for a long time. In fact, they’ve been such a staple in Internet marketing, it’s almost impossible for you to be in this field for more than a few days before you learn about them.

So, what happened? If you want to get all the details, you can read up on them in this post about Ezinearticle’s reaction to the Google slap.

Here are the cliff-notes:

Basically, EZA’s reaciont to the change is to make EZA a much less attractive place to submit articles. Increase minimum character count, lower maximum allowed keyword density, disallow people from posting the same article to their website and to Ezinearticles (does that also mean EZA articles will no longer be open for syndication? not sure), more rejected articles, potentially longer review process…

Pretty much everything that would put people off of submitting articles in the first place. They also announced that they would nofollow all links, including the ones in the resource boxes. After much protesting, they seem to be reconsidering this position, though.

The goal is, of course, to increase the quality of the articles on EZA and hopefully regain their lost rankings in Google.

The Death of…?

Ezinearticles got hit hard and now their firing on all cylinders to try and recover, which is understandable. The problem is that they’re pointing the wrong way.

Their proposed solution is to increase the quality of articles submitted to EZA. Guess what? Google can’t detect the quality of an article.

Which brings me to the reason for writing this post in the first place. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see this happening. And who knows, maybe we can soon all finally write a “the death of…” article and not mean it ironically.

More importantly, there’s an SEO lesson in this. Yes, high quality, relevant content is the best kind of content to create, SEO-wise. Why? Because that’s what search engines want to deliver to their end-users. They can’t truly separate good from bad content yet, but that’s the ultimate goal. So by creating awesome content, you’re ahead of the curve, in a sense.

But awesome content does not equal SEO. And just because Google has made a change doesn’t mean SEO has changed.

SEO is this: Figure out what signals Google is looking for when placing pages at the top for desirable search terms and send those signals deliberately.

Martyrdom is not going to cut it. Google will not reward you for working extra hard and neither will it reward Ezinearticles for punishing it’s authors extra hard (unless they make adjustments specifically for EZA, which is possible but unlikely). I’m all for good content. But the bare essence of SEO still lies in finding the right tweak and has little to do with (human, subjective, elusive) “quality”.

What are the new tweaks? I don’t know yet. For now, just keep building those links.

Cheers,

On the other hand, us online marketers are often the people who own such sites and make money from them…

Slap: The Second Coming

It’s not too long ago that Google deindexed thousands of “MFA” (made for AdSense) websites and closed AdSense accounts of webmasters who were essentially spamming the search results with extremely low-quality sites, targeted at very specific, long-tail keywords. This might have cleaned up the search results to a certain extent, but it didn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. As indicated by the “search engine spam” blog post mentioned earlier, that first slap was only the beginning.

By now, the second slap has already happened (or is, perhaps, still happening) and once again there are many stories of de-indexed sites and decreased rankings circulating IM forums and blogs.

No one knows exactly what happened, although Dan’s post about the micro-site business model and Ben’s post on how not to make money online provide some useful insights. From talking to many fellow marketers about this and from asking my newsletter subscribers about it, I learned that this most recent slap seems to have affected far fewer sites than one might initially think, looking at all the buzz around the topic. It’s clear that whatever Google did, it didn’t affect thin, low-quality affiliate sites in general. Too many of those remain un-affected. For the record: I also have a few remarkably thin, low-quality and non-unique sites in my portfolio and none of them have suffered a slap.

My suspicion is that AdSense sites were the main target and the reason for that is simple: Google has lots of data on AdSense sites. In fact, any changes made to remove crappy sites from the SERP are most likely to affect sites linked up to AdSense, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, before any other sites, simply because Google has the inside scoop on sites using their services. My second suspicion is a point that Ben also brought up in his post: having too many sites in your AdSense account puts them all at risk. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that one webmaster is unlikely to own 200 websites and fill all of them with quality, unique, relevant content, after all.

Niche Marketing is Dead (and all that…)

So, is this the end of AdSense sites? Is it the end of niche marketing or affiliate marketing all together? Of course not, despite the panic that tends to spread whenever Google makes any significant change.

Google’s main objective (apart from making bucketloads of cash) is to show the most relevant, useful results possible to it’s users. For example, for many search terms for physical products and product names, Google shows shopping results:

This doesn’t make owners of affiliate marketing sites for physical products particularly happy, but it is a great way for Google to serve it’s users better and connect them more directly to what they are looking to find.

Building small sites targeting long-tail keywords still works. Building all manner of spammy backlinks to these sites also still works for getting them ranked in the top spots. Basically, everything you already know about niche marketing still works. But, I believe that building thin sites is a short-term strategy, no matter how you look at it.

The Long-Term View

The long-term strategy is to build sites that provide the best, most relevant result for the keywords you are targeting.

This may mean that you have to go a bit further than grabbing some generic PLR and using it to fill five pages on a micro-site, as little more than a vessel containing your affiliate links. But it also means more earnings potential per site.

And let’s take an even-longer-term view: Building micro-sites and SEO’ing them is a low-leverage activity. It’s grunt work. It’s a fantastic way to get started, in my opinion. It’s a priceless way of learning some of the fundamentals of online marketing and of generating a good bit of income. In fact, it’s a great way to break away from a 9-to-5 existence and become financially independent (disclaimer: you’ll probably be working longer hours than at a day job to achieve this, but that’s not the point).

However, it’s not something you want to keep doing indefinitely. Sooner or later, you’ll be looking for ways to grow your business further. This could mean hiring some people to do the site building and SEO for you. Or it could mean building out bigger and better sites and services online and using your SEO and marketing experience to get them noticed.

What if you created a website that become a central hub of activity in your niche, because it provides real, unique value and doesn’t just act as a bridge-page to get the visitor to a product via your affiliate link? What if you offered a service that people in your niche just can’t live without? Do you think that will ever get slapped by Google? And if it did, how much of a difference would it make?

Understand that I’m still talking about niche marketing here. You don’t have to try and create the next facebook or the next zappos. If you can provide something real and unique to even the tiniest of niche-markets, that could be enough to build a very profitable business on. You know how they say that 1000 true fans are all you need to have a successful business? From my experience, I’d say that, if anything, that number is too high.

How are your niche-sites faring, since the latest Google slap? And what’s your long-term view for your online business? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

Whenever you see high PageRank backlink building services or link packets and aren’t sure whether they can be trusted, the video below is what you need to know about. When it comes to high-PR backlinks, much of what you read is misleading. Some of that is deception-for-the-sake-of-marketing, some of it is ignorance and some of it is just due to habit and convention of how we talk about links (i.e. we use the wrong expressions out of habit, even though we’d know better).

The video below should clear up some of the confusion caused by all this:

Let me know if you have any follow up questions or comments!

Cheers,

I’ve decided to take some of the SEO related questions I get in my inbox and make video replies to publish, so that more people can benefit from the Q&A.

Here’s the first video in the series, which is about transferring PageRank and search rankings from one existing site to a new site:

Quite interesting that I received this question right around the time I was moving from RichQuickReview to IM Impact.

All the best,