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How Much Do SEO Consultants & Agencies Charge? A Survey that Needs Your Help

2012-01-20T03:23:00.000-08:00

In the past few months, a number of folks have brought up this old blog post of mine on SEO pricing. The now 4-year-old content there is in dire need of refreshing, but I don't think that my personal opinion and experience are of acceptable quality to make for a compelling, useful update. Thus, I've created the following survey.

If you own, manage or work at a consultancy/agency in the SEO or adjoining+overlapping fields, your participation is tremendously appreciated.

The results from this survey will be made available to everyone in a blog post that will replace the old one in the next week. Company names and websites will be removed to help protect the privacy of those who've participated (and we're not asking for any highly sensitive items like revenues or client lists).

It's my hope that this new resource can help agencies and consultants as they compare their prices to the distributions of others as well as helping buyers of SEO and inbound marketing services get a sense for the common cost structures associated with the field.

Thanks for your contribution!

p.s. As you might imagine, changing a survey that's been published and collected results is very hard. However, if you have feedback about the survey format or suggestions to improve it, we'll definitely take those into consideration for our broad industry survey, which we'll be launching again in early 2012.

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How to Launch, the Spotify Way

2012-01-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

It's all about the first impression. Whether you're launching a startup, product or feature, the launch can make or break it. It's the shining moment when all eyes are on you.

Better make the most of it.

There are stories of how some companies got it right, but one that stands out in particular: Spotify.

Looking at the success of Spotify, to the tune of over 2.5 million paying subscribers, there's one thing that sticks out in my mind… the launch. The fact is that many similar services existed long before. Folks like Rhapsody, Rdio and MOG had the coveted first to market advantage. They had it won. Spotify wasn't the first to market, at least in the US. Yet, everyone in the US was anxiously awaiting Spotify. Foaming from the mouth anxious.

Spotify are masters of the launch. Artists, aficionados, ninjas -- pick your favorite flavor. So, how'd they do it? How can you achieve the same launch success? Let's take a look at how they did it.

Exclusivity, it's the value that comes from launching in private beta. Spotify executed the private beta beautifully. The concept is simple; grant invites to a select few, those select few have a limited number of invites to grant to their friends, and so on, and so on. It's a process that inherently brings discussion, need and distribution. Just look at the buzz.

There's some subtle detail there, though. Beta invites are like a spigot, if you turn it on full throttle, the well will dry up quickly. If you open it slightly, the water comes out slower, and more controlled. Spotify only granted users a limited number of invites. It created scarcity, and allowed them to control their growth. Now that the service is scalable and distribution became widespread, they turned it on full force.

Faceook famously used geographic segmentation. In one of my favorites, The Social Network, Sean Parker uses the term "little big horn" to describe the strategy of planting Facebook at surrounding campuses of the one they were looking to target. Spotify launched in a similar fashion, however unintentional, just on a larger scale.

Being in the states, all we ever heard was that Spotify was coming. Again, again, and again. So we waited. Then, we waited some more. Finally, it arrived and everyone had to have their hands on it. I too couldn't wait to use it, even though I was already happily using Rdio. If they would have just opened the doors in the US without any prior buildup, that outcome would've been much different. Instead, it looked like this.

You don't need press to be successful, but it sure helps. Especially at launch. But there's a difference between press, and the "right" press. Most folks think that landing a few articles in TechCrunch is all you need to do to get that first wave of users that you can ride to the bank. Wrong.

Press is strategic, and you need to put your message in the hands of the right market. For some (including Spotify) TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and Mashable were part of the right audience. Their readership had those coveted, tech loving early adopters. That wasn't all they did, though. They got their message in front of music lovers through outlets like Rolling Stone, MTV, Spinner, etc. Press means nothing if your target user isn't reading it.

It's important to also note how they released their news. Apple infamously uses subtle hints for every single product they release. They give fanboys (like myself) just enough information to stir the pot, without spilling the beans. It causes a frenzied debate over what the latest and greatest announcement will be. Spotify did the same thing for their expansion into the US, and most recently with their announcement of a "new direction." A taste is all that's needed to make someone start salivating.

If the subtle hints and amazing press didn't draw you in, surely the breadth of celebrities boasting about the service did. Tweets from Ashton, Britney Spears, Trent Reznor, Talib Kweli and countless others constantly filled the interwebs. All of the right people in the music space were talking about Spotify. Influencers in a niche can provide the social proof and validity that many early stage companies lack, with the click of the tweet button. Spotify took care of their influencers, and the favor was returned.

How can you make the most out of a massive influx of beta users? You build viral features that encourage sharing and new user acquisition, of course. Luckily for Spotify, music is inherently viral. People enjoy sharing the music they listen to. So, Spotify built features into thier service that made it easy to share the music you were listening to. They took it a step further to making it completely thoughtless with the new Facebook integration. But they made sure to encourage action from the other end, as well. Every song that gets shared on Facebook has a nice little play icon next to each song. When a user clicks on it, a Spotify registration action appears.

Fuel for the launch fire.

Not only did Spotify build new user acquisition into their DNA, but they made the platform sticky by continuing to innovate. The launch is only a means to an end. What you do after you get users in the door is a whole 'nother discussion.

Spotify won the launch game. They were strategic, precise and had all of the necessary pieces to the puzzle. They realized that a launch isn't just throwing up a blog post and callin' it good. There are deep, powerful implications that result from launching properly.

It made Spotify, will it make you?

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Social Media Metrics: Not as Difficult as You Thought

2011-12-29T03:23:00.000-08:00

When was the last time you were asked, “So what’s our average growth rate on Facebook?” Err... Whether it’s a client, a boss, or the CEO of the company, you get questions like this. Ok so perhaps you’ve never heard this exact question, but I can pretty much bet that you’ve heard something similar. They want to know how your social media efforts are doing; they want to know that you’re tracking key performance indicators. But social media isn’t as simple as “track these numbers and *poof* you’ve got it all figured out.”

Every social media marketer struggles with which KPIs are the best to track. We know as marketers that having metrics to guide you and measure progress against is super important, yet here we still stand somewhat weary of what to keep an eye on.

While there are many posts out there telling you the absolute best metrics to track in social media marketing, I’d like to take a different approach. Saying there is a top list of metrics we should all blindly collect for collection sake is a dangerous way to approach social media tracking. In fact, I feel strongly that every organization will likely want to keep a close eye on slightly different metrics throughout the lifetime of their social efforts.

I know that throughout my time at Moz, I have paid attention to a number of different social KPIs; some of them are always there, and some of them are project-based. My tracking process has evolved with our social media marketing, so I don’t feel comfortable telling you there is a one-size fits all formula for social media marketing KPIs.

However, what I can get behind is the idea there are pieces to social that need to be measured in an ongoing way to help us better understand the health of our social media efforts. Here at Moz, we wanted to integrate social analytics into our PRO software for this exact reason -- to help inbound marketers better know the health of their social media marketing efforts.

When I manage social here at Moz, I am always pushing for four things - growth, engagement, momentum, and results. What those four words mean to your social efforts versus mine might be completely different. However, the new social dashboard we’ve launched is there to help every marketer measure those four pillars more effectively. Let me run through each and give them a little more shape. But when it comes right down to it I truly believe, if you can check in on these four pieces and see progress, your social media marketing efforts are going well.

I know, I know... everyone always tells you that it’s not the number of followers that count, and for the most part, I agree with this sentiment. However, while it’s not the size that matters most, it’s a great starting point and base to measure your growth. Often times, this is the number that your boss or client (or whoever) cares about.

In about five seconds, I can track the growth of both my Twitter and Facebook accounts, download the data into a csv to track, or show an exact screenshot in my weekly/monthly report. BOOM.

“Social media is about engagement.” How many times do you hear that one? Well, it’s true. If you’re not out there engaging with your audience (and vice versa), then what in the heck are you doing? This isn’t the place to go into all the details around how to do that, but I want to show you how easily you can track retweets, mentions, and replies over a given time period.

Do you follow the SEOmoz twitter account? If so, you probably see that we engage with the community quite a bit. To us, monitoring the level of engagement is much more meaningful than how many followers we have. We want to see that our efforts are engaging the community and that our community feels they’re heard and are a part of the greater conversation.

Social analytics in Moz will continue to grow with this in mind. We want to show you not simply that there is activity, but whether it’s valuable activity. What you see right now is simply the starting point. :)

Whee! To me this is the fun one. Sure, sure, sure the numbers may increase, but showing that the increase each week is gaining momentum is far more important. This is why we track KPIs: to show momentum. You want to see that percentage increase go up!

As social media marketers, we’ve had to defend our efforts and worth since the beginning. What does a tweet do for us? What does an engaged conversation on Facebook do for the company’s bottom line? What is the lifetime value of a new set of engaged eyes? Whew... these are hard things to figure out. There are lots of tools out there trying to nail this down.

This is where Moz social analytics comes in... we track your traffic from social media sources. All you have to do is hook your campaign up to GA (which if you have a campaign already you’ve probably already hooked up GA).

Social analytics is our first step in this direction. We aren’t hoping to be your social management platform; we realize that is not where our strength as a company lies. Instead, we have data. We have a slew of data, and we get inbound marketing. We hope to show you how all of your time spent on social actually has worth. We’ve started with traffic. We wanted to show which of your social efforts are resulting in more traffic. This is a great place to start.

We have a goal here to show marketers important data to help them better prioritize their time. Time is a precious thing. We hope that our first stab at social analytics gets you closer to knowing how well your social media management is doing right now and help you better allocate your efforts in the future. We realize the limitations of our first launch, and we would love any requests/feedback/freak outs you have. Once you get a chance to check out the social analytics, please take a second to fill out this quick survey as this will help us build exactly what you want.

In the meantime, get on in there and check it out. No better time to start collecting this data than now.

About jennita — Jen Lopez is the Community Manager at SEOmoz and a devotee of the fine arts of Twitter, Facebook and all things social media. She has a background in web development and will always be an SEO at heart. Follow her on Twitter @jennita.

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Interview with Search Celebrity Gianluca Fiorelli

2011-12-15T03:23:00.000-08:00

SEO is one of the industries that has been misunderstood and underestimated by lot of people and businesses in the past. Many people have considered SEO as the alternate name to SPAM, but by the time businesses when see the great potential and greater ROI more and more people and businesses are now getting involved with this new model of advertizing and marketing.

Big brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi also understand the importance of Search and Social channels, example of Coke’s “Future Flames” and Pepsi’s selection of social media campaign over Super Bowl Ads are the prime examples.

Search and Social Industry is expanding all around the world like anything and, ethical companies with proven records are getting more and more business every day and they are looking for exponential professionals to get the job done in the possible best way.

There are lots and lots of great SEOs out there but out of them, I have selected one of the most honorable, prominent and tech savvy person and requested him to take some time out of his busy schedule, so that I can interview him!

Fellows! We have with us Gianluca Fiorelli and I’ll be asking few questions strictly related to search and social industry. Obviously, I cannot cover all the questions so you fellows can join me in the comment section. ;)

“Gianluca Fiorelli” is one of the amazing and helpful celebrities in the list of Search Experts and an active Mozzer with the Rank ‘#3’ which trust me is hard to get and maintain!

Let’s not get more in to introduction and get directly to the list of questions! ;)

Hello sir! How are you?

I am fine, Moosa. But, please, don’t call me a celebrity, as I am not. I am just an Inbound Marketer who is very active in the Community. But a celebrity, surely I am not.

Question 1: My question starts from the latest, we have recently seen Google eating its own eco system by including its own website in the organic listings! What is your take on this? And don’t you think this will hurt the user experience as well as fewer opportunities for businesses?

Answer: If we look this issue from the Google point of view, Google is feeding and not eating its SERPs with its properties. We must never forget that Google is a business company and not a charity organization; therefore it has to have a profit from its own products. On the other hand, Google, most of the time has the ability to create products that can be useful both for the final users and the websites. Let’s take Google Places: it can be the only opportunity for small local business to be visible in the first page for very competitive keywords.

Therefore, even if it undoubtedly a problem if we think just to organic search, on the other hand the fragmentation of the SERPs because of Universal Search is a great incentive and a real opportunity to diversify the organic traffic sources of a site.

Question 2: What is Schema.org and rel=Author and do you think this is one of the important ranking factors for 2012?

Answer: Both can be considered a way Search Engines can better understand what a page is about (Schema) and how authoritative is the source of that content (Rel=”author” and the soon to be Rel=”publisher”).

Then, both are showing the next future of the Web, hence of Search, which is clearly Semantic. What before was a “movement”, and a mostly a theory, is now promoted directly by the Search Engines. That’s why, especially Schema, will be a ranking factor. My suggestion: the sooner you apply Schema the better, even though it can be a real pain, especially for enormous sites.

Question 3: As you live and work outside US, so probably you have a better idea about International SEO as you might have dealt with the similar kind of clients in your day to day life, my question here is what the best practice is, in your opinion for International SEO, Local TLD, Sub-domain or Subfolder? And why?

Answer: Personally, I would suggest to before understanding what is goal your site has to achieve. Is the business locally present with offices, plants, shops, etc. or not? Are you focusing a specific market, or are you focusing a language-based market? What is the nature of the site? Is it an eCommerce or not?

Just when everything is very clear, then you can decide what to use, if a ccTLD or a Subfolder or, if for some reason you have no other choice, a sub-domain.

Hannah Smith of Distilled wrote a great post about this topic, so I invite you to go read it.

Question 4: Most people in the industry think that Google is one of the most important search engine and they should be ranking well for targeted keywords in Google. Do you think this is a right approach? And Bing and other search engine are ignorable?

Answer: In theory, that is not the right choice. When you optimize a site, you should optimize it so to make it rank perfectly in every search engine. But to concentrate just in Google sometimes it is a quite obvious obligation. For instance, in Italy and Spain Google represent almost the 98% of the search volume, so it is quite natural the SEO and Optimization for Google is practically a synonym.

Question 5: You recently took the interview to Avinash Kaushik, one of the amazing people in the search industry. So, my question is what do you think; is Data important for business? If yes, how important it is to have an eye on data?

Answer: Data is essential for SEO and for any business. Without a perfect analysis of the data, we would be like blind people walking in a dark room. We could guess how successful or how much a failure has been a choice we took, but that would be just that: a guessing.

Thanks to web analytics, we can know for sure what is going wrong and what is going well, but also why; therefore correct our strategy on the go and/or reinforce those tactics we are using and that are giving us conversions.

Personally, I believe that every SEO should learn to know Analytics as much as he knows coding.

Question 6: Let me quickly jump over to the Social side for a while and here is a question for you; Google+ have an impact on rankings and while Google+ was new, I saw people talking about link building is dead; social is the new link building. What’s you take on this?

Answer: I think that to declare that links are dead is incorrect. Surely, social signals are having an increasing importance as ranking factor, as simple citations. But the link related metrics are still important and, even if decreasing in percentage, it still represents the biggest ranking factor.

So, to think your site can rank without link building is a supreme stupidity.

Question 7: You are in the industry from quite a long time now, and this is obvious that you might have done some mistakes a various times, would you like to share the top three mistakes that you committed in the past related to search and social and advice people to avoid them?

Answer: I did and do still a lot of mistakes. In the beginning of my career as an SEO they were due to my inexperience and because I used tricks that caused me penalizations. But, apart those kind of mistake, the ones I learned the most are not technical, but organizational ones. To not be able to manage a project because of a bad organization and so not to be able to get things done, that was my biggest error in the past.

That is why, as a freelance consultant, right now I accept just those jobs that I can successfully manage, and I have learnt to be able to say no if I know I cannot assure the quality the Client deserves.

Question 8: Relatively an easy question, but I don’t see many people asking about this, so in your opinion what are the top 3 on-page factors that least affects the rankings? Like, they have an impact but no big impact?

Answer: Nice question, because us SEOs tend to magnify every little detail transforming it in the new holy grail of search engine optimization.

Personally I consider the Headings over valuated, as the use of bold/italic or the same repetition of that targeted keywords. Not that they are not important, but to get fixated over those kinds of factors is what makes content a bad one, the classic craft-for-bots content. Instead of stressing you about how to use them for SEO, stress yourself about writing a relevant content, a rich one, and an interesting one. Write for your readers, clients and prospects. Doing so you will naturally use those elements that can also add an SEO plus, but you will have done it in a natural way.

Question 9: This time I am coming straight! What is the number one technique you used to acquire high authority links for you and your clients? (Sorry for the direct question)

Answer: In my personal case networking, my secret is becoming familiar with those ones who are behind the high authority sites. And be able to present myself as an authority in my field.

This is a tactic I use also with my clients. First: build your own authoritative voice and at the same time start creating connections with other authoritative voices. With time, these relations will start creating links naturally, or make easier to propose to your contacts a content/service/tools... what so ever to link for.

Question 10: This is not a technical question, but I usually ask this from every search celebrity! How difficult it is to make people i.e. parents, friends who are not in this field and others to understand what SEO is? And what usually is their first reaction?

Answer: It is not an easy task… and usually I tend to explain it just if they ask me. I say to people who are not in the search industry that my job is to help users to find my clients sites on the web when they need them. The answer I give to my small kids: I try to make the web a better place.

Thank you sir, for your time and answering all questions. I am sure this is going to help people understand SEO better!

Moosa Hemani is an SEO Analyst and a continuous SEO learner. I don’t have any personal blog but I often writer on different search blogs as a Guest Writer. One can find more about me on my profile or follow me on twitter @mmhemani.

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Proving Trust on the Web

2011-12-14T03:23:00.000-08:00

For those of us who've been deep in the trenches of online marketing for years, the question of who to trust may seem inane. We've all gravitated to sources of one variety or another, and probably built up a few favorites based on past experience. I've shared some of my selected sources in the past and I (consciously and subconsciously) bias toward trusting news and advice from those over others.

But for those new to the field of web analytics, social media marketing, SEO or a myriad of other practices, it's a true challenge. Case in point, a Q+A question from earlier today:

How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice? Is it just simply trial and error? It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily. It's the whole, "You get what you pay for".

I've observed and heard this perspective dozens of times. Like the assumption that the "best SEO company in my city probably ranks first for cityname+SEO," it makes sense at first blush, but quickly loses any semblance of logic upon deeper analysis.

The reason is fairly straightforward; SEO at its core is about great content combined with earning great references. Sharing openly, honestly and adding value with that content is far more likely to produce returns in the form of links, reputation, references and customers than staying closed and secretive. Participation in a professional ecosystem almost always yields more value than hoarding "secret discoveries," particularly when those same secrets are being shared elsewhere on a gigantic, relatively level playing field (the web).

But let's say you're completely unfamiliar with the field. You need secondary cues - signals that help you sort the wheat from the chaff. On the web, these follow fairly consistent patterns:

When a piece of content (or an entire site) falls into the right-hand column of untrustworthiness, we tend to reject the information provided. When it falls into the left-hand, trusted column, our instincts are to assign credibility and all the positive associations that accompany it.

There's a lot of boxes to tick to earn trust, but also an incredible amount of value to be had in establishing it. Conversion rates rise. Links, citations, references and social shares increase. The propensity for virality improves. The likelihood of earning a subscriber or a follower or a fan (in all senses of those words) improves. Building trust is like adding an extra percentage on top of every activity web marketers engage in.

Thus, when an SEO reaches out for help earning top rankings or a social marketer wants to know how to get more Facebook fans or drive more traffic from Twitter on a site that looks like this:

(no offense, but they're ticking box after box from the orange column above)

I'm left wondering, why put the cart before the horse?

Users of the web have been trained through experience (online and off) to seek out indications of trustworthiness. When we enter a new field on the web, we'll use these same signals to evaluate possible resources and channels. So why is it that when we put on our marketing hats, we sometimes revert to paying thousands of dollars for a link building campaign, yet shy away from investing in the foundation of our success - the trustworthiness of the site and brand?

A wise man once said: "Let's stop putting lipstick on pigs and trying to rank 'em." I couldn't agree more (and, I suspect, neither could most of our bottom lines).

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Search Engine Algorithm Basics

2011-12-13T03:23:00.000-08:00

A good search engine does not attempt to return the pages that best match the input query. A good search engine tries to answer the underlying question. If you become aware of this you'll understand why Google (and other search engines), use a complex algorithm to determine what results they should return. The factors in the algorithm consist of "hard factors" as the number of backlinks to a page and perhaps some social recommendations through likes and +1' s. These are usually external influences. You also have the factors on the page itself. For this the way a page is build and various page elements play a role in the algorithm. But only by analyzing the on-site and off-site factors is it possible for Google to determine which pages will answer is the question behind the query. For this Google will have to analyze the text on a page.

In this article I will elaborate on the problems of a search engine and optional solutions. At the end of this article we haven’t revealed Google’s algorithm (unfortunately), but we’ll be one step closer to understand some advice we often give as an SEO. There will be some formulas, but do not panic. This article isn’t just about those formulas. The article contains a excel file. Oh and the best thing: I will use some Dutch delights to illustrate the problems.

Behold: Croquets are the elongated and bitterballen are the round ones ;-)

True OR False
Search engines have evolved tremendously in recent years, but at first they could only deal with Boolean operators. In simple terms, a term was included in a document or not. Something was true or false, 1 or 0. Additionally you could use the operators as AND, OR and NOT to search documents that contain multiple terms or to exclude terms. This sounds fairly simple, but it does have some problems with it. Suppose we have two documents, which consist of the following texts:

Doc1:
“And our restaurant in New York serves croquets and bitterballen.”

Doc2:
“In the Netherlands you retrieve croquets and frikandellen from the wall.”

Oops, almost forgot to show you the frikandellen ;-)

If we were to build a search engine, the first step is tokenization of the text. We want to be able to quickly determine which documents contain a term. This is easier if we all put tokens in a database. A token is any single term in a text, so how many tokens does Doc1 contain?

At the moment you started to answer this question for yourself, you probably thought about the definition of a "term". Actually, in the example "New York" should be recognized as one term. How we can determine that the two individual words are actually one word is outside the scope of this article, so at the moment we threat each separate word as a separate token. So we have 10 tokens in Doc1 and 11 tokens in Doc2. To avoid duplication of information in our database, we will store types and not the tokens.

Types are the unique tokens in a text. In the example Doc1 contains twice the token "and". In this example I ignore the fact that “and” appears once with and once without being capitalized. As with the determination of a term, there are techniques to determine whether something actually needs to be capitalized. In this case, we assume that we can store it without a capital and that “And” & “and” are the same type.

By storing all the types in the database with the documents where we can find them, we’re able to search within the database with the help of Booleans. The search "croquets" will result in both Doc1 and Doc2. The search for "croquets AND bitterballen" will only return Doc1 as a result. The problem with this method is that you are likely to get too much or too little results. In addition, it lacks the ability to organize the results. If we want to improve our method we have to determine what we can use other then the presence / absence of a term in a document. Which on-page factors would you use to organize the results if you were Google?

Zone Indexes
A relatively simple method is to use zone indexes. A web page can be divided into different zones. Think of a title, description, author and body. By adding a weight to each zone in a document, we’re able to calculate a simple score for each document. This is one of the first on page methods search engines used to determine the subject of a page. The operation of scores by zone indexes is as follows:

Suppose we add the following weights ??to each zone:

We perform the following search query:
“croquets AND bitterballen”

And we have a document with the following zones:

Café with delicious croquets and bitterballenOur restaurant in New York serves croquets and bitterballen

Because at some point everyone started abusing the weights assigned to for example the description, it became more important for Google to split the body in different zones and assign a different weight to each individual zone in the body.

This is quite difficult because the web contains a variety of documents with different structures. The interpretation of an XML document by such a machine is quite simple. When interpreting an HTML document it becomes harder for a machine. The structure and tags are much more limited, which makes the analysis more difficult. Of course there will be HTML5 in the near future and Google supports microformats, but it still has its limitations. For example if you know that Google assigns more weight to content within the tag and less to content in the

Social Media Metrics: Not as Difficult as You Thought

2011-12-12T03:23:00.000-08:00

In about five seconds, I can track the growth of both my Twitter and Facebook accounts, download the data into a csv to track, or show an exact screenshot in my weekly/monthly report. BOOM.

In the meantime, get on in there and check it out. No better time to start collecting this data than now.

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I'm Being Outranked by a Spammer - Whiteboard Friday

2011-12-11T02:31:00.001-08:00

What do you do when you are being outranked by a spammer? It's one of the most frustrating things that an SEO can face, but before jumping to conclusions it's important to understand what exactly is happening.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives us helpful advice with many important steps to follow if you discover that a spammer is outranking you. Let us know your thoughts on this challenging problem in the comments below!

Howdy SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a very tough problem, being outranked by spammers.
What I mean very specifically here is link spammers, because it is rare in the SEO world that today you are seeing other sorts of spam. Cloaking, manipulative redirection, doorway pages, they happen a little bit, but they are much less common. The most common forms of spam and the thing that I see people complain about all the time, the thing I get emails about, I get tweets about, we get Q&A about is, "Hey, Rand, I am being outranked by these spammers. Can you send this over to the Google webspam team? Can you tell the Bing webspam team? Who should I email over there? I filed my webspam reports. Do you think I should try and get it published on YOUmoz? Should I try and write to The New York Times and have them write about it because it seems like Google kicks people out when they're written about in The New York Times, at least for a little while?"
These are not always great tactics unfortunately, but I do want to walk you through some things that you should be doing when you think you are being outranked by spammers.
The first part is make sure, make 100% sure, that what you are looking at is really a ranking that's been earned through link spam. What I am talking about here is I will take you back. I will tell you a story of several years ago. This was probably, I am going to say 2007, and I was in the audience, I can't remember if I was on the panel or in the audience, and there was Google's head of webspam, has been for the last decade or so, Matt Cutts, on the panel. Matt was looking at some links using his special Google software where he is investigating a link graph right on his laptop, and someone from the audience had said, "Hey, Matt, I am getting outranked by this particular spammer." He looked and said, "No, you know, we see a few thousands links to that site, but we're actually only counting a few hundred of them, and they're the ones that are making it rank there."
So, think about that. We're talking about thousands of links pointing to a site. Think of all the links that might be pointing to a site here. Here are five different links that are pointing to this particular page. What the webspam team at Google is essentially saying is, "Hey, you know what? We know that this and this and this and this are spam. The reason that this page is ranking is because they do have some good links that we are counting." Remember it is often the case that Google's webspam team and their algorithm will not make these links cause a penalty against you, because then you could just point them at somebody else's site or page and make them drop in the rankings. Instead, what they'll do is drop the value of those, so that essentially it is like having a no-followed link for those pages. Yes, it's a followed link, but they are going to essentially say, "Oh, you know what? Our algorithm has detected that those are manipulative links. We are going to remove the value that they pass."
A lot of the times when you look through a list of hundreds or thousands of links and you see a lot of spam and you think to yourself, "Hey, that's why that guy is ranking. It's because he is spamming." It might not be the case. It could even be the case that person didn't actually build those spammy links. They just came through, you know, crap, junk on the Web. Not all the time, and usually you can tell the difference, but this is really something to keep in mind as you're analyzing that stuff. When you are, think to yourself, "Hey, how did they get the best-looking links that they've got, and could those be the ones that are responsible for making them rank so well?" Because if that's the case, you need to revisit your thesis around I'm being outranked by a spammer and think I am being outranked by a guy who's done some good link building who also happens to have lots of spammy links pointing at him. That's a completely different problem, and you need to solve for that.
If you are sure, so let's say you've gone through step one, confirmed that, you know what, this is a crap link too that Google shouldn't be passing value, but somehow they are. I want you to ask two more critical questions.
The first one: Is focusing on someone else's spam that's outranking you the best possible use of your web marketing time? You've got a lot on your plate. You don't just have to worry about SEO, right? These days you're worrying about SEO; you're worrying about keyword research; you're worrying about link building; you're worrying about content marketing; you're worrying about blogs and blog commenting and RSS and the traffic rating through there. You're worried about social media - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn - and the longtail of all these other sites - Quora and Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon. You're worried about web analytics and analyzing your success and making sure things are going through. You have to worry about crawlers and XML site maps and robots.txt. Make sure that thinking about and spending time on trying to flag somebody else's spam or trying to get them penalized is absolutely the best possible thing that you can be doing with your day. If it's not, reprioritize and put something else up there.
The second question is, which we don't discuss at SEOmoz here because we really kind of hate this practice, but are you willing to and does your site have risk tolerance to go acquire spammy links? If you see someone's outranking you and you're like, well, I could get those kinds of links too or those exact links too, do you have the risk tolerance for it? If you believe that it is an ethical issue, do you have the moral flexibility for it? If you don't believe it is a moral question, do you have the budget for it? Is it the best use of your budget? Is it the best use of your time? I almost always believe the answer is no, with the possible exception of some super spammy fields, PPC (porn, pills, and casino), which I have never personally operated, and so I don't pretend to understand that world. But virtually every other form of legit business on the Web, I can't get behind this. But maybe you can. Maybe you want to. Decide if that's the route you want to take.
Once you answer those two, you can move on to step three, which is, should you report the spam? The problem here is, you are going to go and send it through, let's say, your Webmaster Tools report, and there are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of these filed every day. Probably put it somewhere between tens and hundreds of thousands of these filed every day, spam reports. Google says Webmaster Tools are the best place to file, when you are logged into your account, to report spam from other folks. Those reports go to a team of software engineers who work on Google's webspam and search quality teams. Then you can see, they've done a video, where they sit around and they prioritize all the day's projects and they determine who is going to work on what and how much energy they're going to put into it. You can probably tell that over the last couple of years, maybe even three years, there has not been a ton of energy spent to try and devalue link spam. In fact, a lot of paid links are working these days, and it's sort of a sad reality. I think that many people assume that Google's actually trying to move beyond linking signals, particularly social signals, Google+, by using the signals of users and usage data that they're getting through Chrome's market share, which I think was now reported globally as over 25% of all web browsers, which is very impressive, from StatCounter.
So, I would say that this is a low-value activity as well. Not that you necessarily shouldn't do it. I mean, if you want to try and help Google make the Web a better place and you believe in their sort of mission and the quality of the people there, then by all means, spend two minutes, report them for webspam. It's not going to take a ton of your time. But please, don't think this is a solution. This will not solve any of the problems you're trying to solve. It might help Google in the long run to get better, to try and analyze some forms of webspam and link spam that they might not have otherwise caught if you hadn't told them. Is it going to help you rank better? Boy, probably not, and even if it is, not for a long time, because these algorithmic developments take a tremendous amount of time and energy to implement. Panda was years in the making. Most of the link spam devaluations that happened in '07 and '08 were years in the making. You could see patents that were filed two years, four years before those things actually came out. But reporting spam is an option.
Then I want you to move on to step four, which is can you - I think you almost always can - outmaneuver the spammers using their own tactics? What I mean by this is you might see where those links are coming from, but what's winning? Is it coming from high PageRank or high MozRank pages? Sort of home pages of domains? Is it coming from internal pages? Are they coming from directories? Are they coming from forums? Are they coming from blogs? Are they coming from .edu sites? Where are those links coming from, what are they pointing to, and what kind of anchor text are they using? Is it diverse anchor text? Is it all exact match anchor text? You want to find, you want to identify all the patterns. You're going to say, "Oh, this is anchor text pattern and this is the diversity of those patterns of where those links are coming from and this is a type of site it is coming from and this is the quantity or the number of sites I'm seeing and here's where the link target's pointing to." You look at all those things and then you find ways to do it inbound. Find ways to do it white hat. I promise you, you can. Think of one of the most common forms of spam, which is someone hijacking .edu webpages on student domains and then they essentially have all these anchor text links pointing to a specific page on their site from .edu pages that are buried deep in a site, but because it is an .edu it is a trusted domain. Usually there are only 50 or 100 of them, but they seem to be passing juice.
So how do you get 20 or 30 good links from .edu? I'll give you some great examples. Well, I'll give you one, and then you can figure out tons more on your own and certainly there is tons of link building content that you can look at on the SEOmoz site. But here's a great one. Go do a search like your keyword - whoa, that's a lot of smudging - your keyword + file type:pdf or xls or something like that and site:.edu. What this is going to give you is essentially here is a bunch of research that has been done on .edu sites that's been published, that's probably kind of buried. Now, I want you to go create some great blog posts, some great content, that references this stuff, that turns it into a graphic, that makes a clever video about it, and then I want you to email whoever was responsible for the research, and I guarantee half the time they are going to link to you from that website, from the .edu website. They're going to be like, "Oh, this is great. Someone turned my research into an infographic on a commercial site. Very cool. Great to see that application in the real world. Thank you. Here's a link . . ." from an .edu that's not spammy, that's completely inbound, white hat because it's making the Web a better place. There are ways to figure out all of this stuff.
Then I want you take this last and final step, step five. Beat them by targeting the tactics, the channels, the people, and the keywords that they don't target. Remember what spam does. Spam tends to look at, if here is the keyword demand curve and we've got the head in here with all the popular keywords, that's where all the spam is. You very rarely, extremely rarely, see spam down in the tail. So if you can do things like user generated content, building a community, building tons of longtail great content, having a blog, having a forum, a place where real people participate and are creating a kind of Q&A site, you're going to target all that longtail. Remember 70% of the keyword volume is in here. This is only 30% up in the fat head and the chunky middle. Great. Fantastic way to work around them. Or think about ways that they can't target, the channels that spammers, especially link spammers never target - social media, forums, and communities. Rarely do they ever target blogs. Those people don't take those sites seriously. They don't take them authentically. Think about the branding elements you can build. You can have a better site design, a higher conversion rate, a way better funnel. People subscribe to your email. To follow you, subscribe to your RSS feed. No spammer is ever going to get that, and those are customers that you can keep capturing again and again and again, because when you do inbound marketing, when you do white hat marketing, you don't have to just push your site up the rankings. You can approach it from a holistic point of view and win in all sorts of tactics and all sorts of channels. That's what I love about this field too.
All right everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you'll feel maybe a little bit less stressed out about that nasty spammer who is ranking above you. I hope you'll see us again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

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