Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter: The Social Media Connection


Next in the SEO for Firefox lineup is DIGGS, DIGG’S POPULAR STORIES, STUMBLEUPON, and TWITTER.

Digg.com is a social news site meaning that they provide links to stories throughout the web that are presented in the order based on how many people DIGg the story. So, if you are looking for a place to find out what other people currently think is cool on just about any topic, then digg.com may just be the place for you.

Digg’s Popular Stories are just that…the stories that have received the highest ratings recently by the Digg community.  If one of your stories happens to make it to the front page of Digg, then prepare for a HIT STORM!

Stumbleupon is similar to Digg but they take a much different approach to how their members vote.  Stumbleupon members create filters based upon their interests so that you have distinct sub-communities within the Stumbleupon members.  Then, members can recommend sites using a browser tool bar add-on.  These sites are the fed to other users with the same interests.

Twitter and its mania is still a mystery to a lot of people.  Think of it as an Instant Messaging (IM) platform where all messages are open for the public to view.  This is how the “amazing” generation goes about promoting themselves and comparing their relative popularity to one another.

Why FACEBOOK is not included in the SEO for Firefox offering is a mystery which we are addressing with the author, because it fall right in line with the other sites being discussed in this post.

Regardless of how you feel about each of these site or social websites in general, the fact is that from a marketing perspective these sites all have one thing in common…the ability to drive targeted traffic to your website.

From our observations, it appears that all of these numbers are used by Google to a relatively small extent in comparison to other factors in determining where a given page will rank in the SERPs, We applaud Google for this because of what we see as the highly subjective nature of how social media works and how the numbers could be easily manipulated. Could Digg and Stumbleupon be taking a page out of the Google play book and promoting certain stories or sites to their front page for a fee? There are accusations out there that a small community of users are responsible for promoting the majority of the Digg front page content.  Could ‘Black Hat’ Internet marketers be using an automated tool to send TWEETS our to promote their web pages and/or products?  But regardless of how the numbers got there we at least know what the numbers mean and how we can use them.

The Numbers

The DIGGS number represents the number of people that have cast a DIGG vote for the specific URL that appears in the Google SERP. The DIGG’S POPULAR STORIES number represents the number of time that the page has appeared on the Digg’s Popular Stories list. The STUMBLEUPON number represents that number of users that have voted for a website using their tool bar button.  The TWITTER number is the number of ‘tweets’ that contain a reference to the domain of the page, (which includes email addresses!).  As of this writing, it looks like the twitter database only goes back about 1-week due to the massive volume they deal with.

Some web masters help these number along buy providing a button on their page for anyone that visits to  leave an entry on anyone or all of these sites. Being the smart company that Google is, they will most likely give a higher rating to social media numbers for pages that DO NOT have these self-promoting buttons embedded in the page.

The Down Side to Social Media Traffic

While the primary objective of SEO is to increase your ranking in the SERPS for specific search terms, the real objective is to get people to your website. The two are not synonymous. This is where the term ORGANIC traffic comes in. Which sounds more appealing to you, getting 1,000 hits per day regularly from Google traffic, or 100,000 hits in one day from social media traffic? This is what has been coined the Digg Effect and it has crashed many sites. While most call it the Digg Effect or the SlashDot Effect, I like to call it the Voyeurism Effect because the traffic is from people that just want to see what all of the excitement is about rather than people who are genuinely interested in the subject matter. Call it what you will, but the net result is that it could be keeping real revenue generating traffic away.

HELP...My Commissions have Disappeared!

The bottom line is that we feel that there are better metrics to focus on to improve your SEO rankings, but if you do decide that you want to promote your site using social sites, just be careful that you don’t Digg a hole you can’t climb out of.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (0)

Delicious: Bookmarks and More


Numbers 5 & 6 of the SEO for FireFox data items is del.icio.us and del.icio.us Page Bookmarks. Delicious.com is a place on the web where people can store their bookmarks so that they will be available to them from any computer connected to the Internet. Think of it the same way as an email account from yahoo, hotmail, or gmail. The benefit of using these services is that you don’t have to be on your desktop computer in your home in order to access your information. The popularity of this service has increased as people accumulate more and more bookmarks which become increasingly difficult to organize. Then top that off with a hard drive crash or two and people quickly look for alternatives to local storage for their important information. It’s easy to see how the leading bookmarking service on the web was able command a price somewhere around $15MM to $30MM when acquired by Yahoo in 12/05.

The del.icio.us domain name was abandoned in 9/07 for the new delicious.com back in September 2007, but the SEO community apparently still prefers the novelty of the old name as seen on the SEO for FireFox display. A rose by any other name is still as delicious. Delicious.com takes bookmarking one step further by making it social, meaning that your bookmarks are available to everyone else on the site unless you choose to make them private. You can share your bookmarks with anyone else that has access to Delicious, meaning the entire Internet community.

What do these numbers represent?

The number presented by SEO for FireFox for the del.icio.us parameter represents the number of delicious.com accounts that have bookmarked the domain of the page being reported. The del.icio.us page bookmarks number represents people that have bookmarked the exact URL presented in the SERP. Basically, these numbers indicate the popularity of the site and page being presented in terms of the subset of Internet denizens that subscribe to the delicious.com service, and more and more are turning on to it each day. With the recent addition of delicious.com add-ons and plug-ins for the most popular web browsers which make the utility that much easier to use, the service is seeing exponential growth.

Are these numbers truly representative of the overall Internet?

This is an interesting question, because the answer is more enlightening than the question would make it seem. Although it is true that the numbers represented by the del.icio.us data could possibly be skewed in favor of techno-geeks, college students, or other classes of the overall Internet population that would have a higher tendency to use the Delicious.com service, the real answer from an SEO perspective is “Who Cares?” As long as we know what the numbers represent, we can determine how to best to use this information for the betterment for our sites, and how to analyze the numbers for our competitors sites.

Drill down to find the Gold

The information that we believe will become more important in the long run than the actual number presented are THE TAGS that people associate with each of the bookmarked domains and pages. The tags are used by Delicious.com subscribers in order to categorize their bookmarks. As the database of Delicious.com bookmarks continues to grow, the community is performing the hard subjective work that can not be done by computers as easily as counting numbers.

Now consider Google as a company which must rely upon continuous improvement in order to stay on top. Their SERPS must continue to be more relevant then their competitors. All of the search engines are constantly looking for ways to improve their results so that people will continue to use them.

The Delicious.com TAGS are becoming a valuable commodity to the search engines. They can help them to better evaluate a URLs relevance to a particular search term…in addition to the methods already in use. The additional information can only help to refine or improve the search results if applied correctly. Think of it in terms of MetaData…when you create a web page and assign metadata to the page you are helping the search engines to index or categorize the page. You are essentially telling the search engines one person’s opinion (albeit the most important persons opinion being the creator of the page) of how the page should be categorized. What if the search engines now had hundreds and thousands of other opinions of how the page should be considered? Don’t you think the search engines wold put that information to use? It’s something for you to think about.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (0)

Age: Your Site is Getting Older & Better


The 4th data item on the SEO for Firefox display is the AGE field. Age is quite simply the first recorded instance of a websites existence. This information is presented courtesy of a site called Archive.org. Which is a non-profit organization founded to build an Internet library. The organization was founded in 1996 and appears to be joined at the hip with Alexa Internet which is where the bulk for their information originates from, and also from DMOZ.org more recently.

Mr Peabody & Sherman in THE WAYBACK Machine

They have titled their database “The Wayback Machine” (remember Sherman & Mr. Peabody using the Wayback Machine in their segment of The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show?) which can be accessed for any domain directly from their site in order to view web pages in the state that they existed at defined points in time. Very cool, however not the most complete and efficient method for archiving web pages that I can think of, but then again they are a non-profit so efficiency is not a priority. The important thing to know is that NOT EVERY SITE ON THE INTERNET IS INCLUDED IN THEIR DATABASE. If you visit their site and discover that one of your websites is not included in the WayBack Machine, then go to their FAQ section and it will tell you how to visit ALEXA or DMOZ and the steps you need to take to get your site added. They claim that ther can be up to a 24-month lag before you see anything (as I said, efficiency is not one of their top priorities).

Why is the Archive.org AGE improtant?

Great question. In my opinion it is not important unless you are looking to sell your domain and need to use that data to help justify your price. Since Google is out there crawling the Internet on their own, it is hard to imagine they they would not store this information along with other data they collect about web pages. The SEO for FireFox tool uses the Archive.Org Age information simply because there is not a quick and easy way to obtain the same data from Google interactively. Given that information, there are some pros and cons to being included in The WayBack Machine:

Pro: An old age might scare off some ‘would be’ competitors

Con: A young age can highlight a weakness and attract vultures.

Pro: Provides you with a free backup of data that may have gotten deleted or purged

Con: Archived pages for a successful site gives your competitors a virtual road map of the sites progression over time.

Pro: Provides you with proof regarding copyright infringement issues which are becoming a problem.

Con: Provides them with proof regarding copyright infringement issues in the event that you ‘borrowed’ an idea or two.

Why is a sites AGE important?

From Google’s standpoint (which is the most important standpoint), the age of a site directly plays into its natural popularity…natural being the key. It would seem unnatural to Google if a site first appeared on the Internet last week and already has had ten million endorsements from other websites. This is something that would create a ‘red flag’ in terms of determining a site’s popularity and ranking in the SERPs. Think of it this way: let’s say that you are filing your income taxes and you have an income of $40,000 and you are claiming a charitable donation deduction of $20,000. RED FLAGS, BUZZERS, and BELLS are going off at the IRS which say that you are BEGGING for an audit. Well, the same thing is true with Google. If a site is young in age and they have progressed in popularity along the same progression that 99% of the rest of the domains on the Internet have, then Google will let their SERP algorithm work as usual and your page will fall where it will fall. But on the other hand, if you fall into the 1% category that requires some additional scrutiny, there is a good likelihood that your web page will be FLAGGED and penalized in its SERP placement or worse. AGE tells Google where your site should potentially fall in relation to other sites of the same age given other factors like frequency of updates and quality of information presented.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (0)

Traffic Value: What Does the Number Mean?


Continuing with our breakdown of the SEO for Firefox tool, the next data element on the readout is TRAFFIC VALUE. So what exactly does this number represent? In order to figure this out to need to understand where the number comes from. If you highlight the link for Traffic Value and check out the address it points to then you will see that the number that is displayed for any given website is pulled form a domain called SEMRUSH.COM who specializes in Google organic traffic and AdWords keywords research. If you read through their FAQs, they state that all of their data comes from the Google US search engine database. That’s a good thing because all of your SEO activities should be geared towards Google. The other thing we notice about these guys is that they are some serious dudes! The quantity of data they have for each site and the presentation of the data is world class. And that is just the FREE information that is available to anyone that visits. They have a whole lot more that they make available to their paying customers. So back to the original question…what does Traffic Value represent?

If you click on the Traffic Value link for a website which takes you to the SEMRUSH analysis page for that website, and you look at the left panel right below the ‘Google SE Traffic” graph, you will see the SE TRAFFIC PRICE number which corresponds to the Traffic Value number presented by the SEO for Firefox plug-in. You should also note that the number on the SEMRUSH page is rounded (which begs the question ‘How many of the other numbers are rounded?”). Now if you put your cursor over the question mark next to the number you will get their definition of what this number represents which is “ESTIMATED COST OF PURCHASING THE SAME NUMBER OF VISITORS”. Hmmm, that may be a self-explanatory for some, but I’m going to guess that there are still some questions out there as to what their definition means. Lets dig a little deeper to see if we can get any clues.

We have a high level of confidence that this number is calculated by the folks at SEMRUSH.COM and that the formula is proprietary to them. We say this because if the same number was available from Google, why not pull it directly from them just like PageRank and Cache Date? Another clue is that we are able to find other companies on the Internet that claim to provide a better estimate of Traffic Value. Digging further, if you look at the definition of the GOOGLE SE TRAFFIC found right above the SE Traffic Price on the SEMRUSH page, you will see that the traffic reported is PER MONTH, so we kow that the corresponding SE Traffic Price is also represents a monthly figure. Now that we have all of our facts straight, lets see I we can piece together what the number means.

It appears that SEMRush is looking at all of the Google traffic directed to the website in question and then breaks down the organic traffic by the key word phrases used. Next it goes to the Adwords database to find out how much advertisers are paying for those key word phrases to generate traffic to their sites. Then by applying those prices to the website being analyzed they arrive at a DOLLAR FIGURE PER MONTH that represents how much that site would be paying Google if it were paying for all of the traffic that it is getting via key word searches on Google.

How is this number used? This is a great way to valuate a site if you are looking to buy or sell a domain. A common business plan for a lot of companies is growth through acquisition, so if someone comes knocking at your door asking if you would be willing to sell your DOT COM to them, now you have a publicly available figure to use as your starting point for negotiations.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (4)

Cache Date and SEO


The 2nd display item in the SEO for Firefox results is the Google Cache Date. This is simply the last date (D/M/Y) that the Googlebot crawler LOOKED AT the page in question. You can find out the actual time that the Googlebot came through by opening the cached page and looking at the page header. The date and time is displayed in GMT format. What the Gogglebot does when it visits your site is it issues an “If-Modified-Since” request for a page and then downloads the contents of the page UNLESS a 304 (Not Modified) is returned. Prior to mid-2006, if a 304 code was returned, the cache date WAS NOT updated for the page. Google received a lot of feedback from webmasters saying that it was difficult for them to determine the last time the Googlebot visited based on that method. Google then changed their practice to update the cache date whenever the Googlebot evaluates a page regardless of the 304 status. This is a very important change for SEO purposes because now a webmaster is able to determine both how often their website is being indexed and how deeply it is being indexed.

Why is Cache Date Important?

Cache Date has been largely ignored by the SEO community, but in my opinion it is arguable a more important indicator than PageRank of a sites relative IMPORTANCE in the eyes of Google. If you agree with the saying “actions speak louder than words”, then if Google uses its considerable resources to index site “A” once per week and they only index site “B” once per month, are they not saying through their actions that they consider site “A” to be more important to them than site “B” regardless of what their respective PageRank may be? If you do not agree yet then consider it this way…if you are trying to compete against a local businesses and you come up with an advertising campaign to grab some of their customers, wouldn’t you feel more confident in knowing that your competition could not respond to your attack for at least 1-month regardless of whether they are a ‘Mom & Pop’ operation (PR2) or a WAL-MART (PR7)?

Evaluating the Cache Date

It is great to know when Google came to visit your site, but the information is meaningless unless you know when their previous visit was. This is information that you will need to store locally and track on your own. Your goal is to win favor with Google and have them visit as often as possible. If you can get them to visit more than once per week, then you are on Google’s “A” list. If you are outside of 20 days, then you have a lot of work to do in mending your relationship with Google. This is true for your competition also. Keep track of their cache relationship with Google to find out it you have an opportunity strike.

What Would Google Do (WWGD)?

We will be seeing us use this term a lot because it is key to our philosophy in addressing SEO. Google is the undisputed king of search engines and if your SEO activities are not Google-centric then you are not optimizing for maximum exposure. If you agree with that statement then you should also agree that it is important to figure out HOW Google does what it does. Even though Googles methods are closely guarded secrets, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out certain things. One thing that we know for sure is that Google has to AUTOMATE the process of determining the frequency of indexing a site. Even Google doesn’t have enough people on staff to read and evaluate every site that they index. I’m sure that they have developed a very intricate algorithm which is refined regularly, but it is an algorithm none the less which means that it has to rely upon data collected from previous visits in order to determine when the next visit will take place. If I was in Googles shoes, the three key metrics I would be looking at would be:

  • The quantity and percentage of NEW pages (not yet indexed) since my last visit;
  • The quantity and percentage of EXISTING pages that have been updated
  • The quantity, percentage, and QUALITY of new and modified LINKS

My thought process is that I would want to know which sites are updated regularly versus which sites are relatively stagnant and index the updated sites more frequently. So by reasoning my conclusion is that NEW UNIQUE QUALITY CONTENT should be the primary factor in increasing the frequency if Googlebot indexing.

Other Ways to Use Google Cache

Besides for the cache date itself, there are some other cool things you can do with the cache information. Google is unique from the other search engines in that they not only store the last date that a page was indexed, they also store a copy of the entire web page. This may not last too much longer however due to Google cache copyright issues. But as long as Google stores cached content then here are some things that can and are being done:

  • Bypass Corporate Security Devices: Even though your company may not want you surfing as certain websites and have enforced that by filtering out those sites using security hardware and software, you can still view the CACHED VERSION of the banned sites web page because it is stored at Google, not the banned site (-;
  • Bypass Secure Sites: If you know the URL of a page that you typically can’t get to unless you have security credentials (i.e. Subscription-based sites), then try viewing the cached version of the page. The New York Times doesn’t like the fact that people can do that!
  • Analyze Your Competition: Compare the current version of a page to the cached version to find out the specific changes that your competition is making to their pages to give you insight into their strengths, weaknesses, and overall strategy.
  • Highlight Keywords: By using the format “CACHE:address kw1 kw2 etc”, the resulting cached web page will highlight the requested keywords to help simplify your search.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (0)

How to Interpret your PageRank


There are at least 200 different factors that go into determining what order your web page will end up at for a particular search term in the various search engines. One such factor that is constantly thrown out amongst Internet marketers is PageRank. One webmaster will claim “I’m a PR4” while another will reply “well I’m a PR6, so I’m better than you and I will come in higher that you in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS)”. If only life were so simple. Even though PageRank is not the bottom line determining factor for where you will place in the SERPS for any given search term, it is still an important measure that should not be discounted.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a whole number between 0 and 10 that is generated by Google for an individual web page, not your whole website. If you have 100 pages within your site, each page will have its own PageRank. The PageRank number assigned by Google to a page indicates the relative strength of the page in terms of LINKS (both internal and external) in comparison to the billions of pages available on the Internet. The actual formula for generating the PageRank number is a closely guarded Google secret and it is not a stagnant formula. Google refines the formula as it see fit so that the number best reflects quality as opposed to quantity. So with that in mind, it should be easy to surmise that all links are not equal in the eyes of Google.

How Do I Improve PageRank?

PageRank can be improved by linking to the page. The links that you can control are the ones internal to your website. Linking one page to another with Anchored Text Links using keywords that are relevant to the page you are linking to is the strongest method with the best results. The links that you can not control as easily are the external links that point to your page from other sites. This is the area where different webmasters play the game differently. Creating external links to your own web pages is just another way of saying that you are ‘advertising’ yourself on the web. This can be in the form of paid advertising, or articles written about your page, or blog comments referencing you page, or social media posts inviting people to read your page, or hundreds of other creative methods all designed to create hypertext links back to your page. Although the Google formula for determining PageRank is secret, that has not detracted determined players from trying to decode fragments of the formula, or at least nailing down the relative positive or negative effect that a given link has in determining PageRank. The consensus amongst successful players is that:

  • The AGE of your site plays a large roll in determining PageRank. The older the better.
  • Links coming from pages with higher PageRank help to improve your PageRank
  • Too many links too quickly will seem ‘unnatural’ to Google and have a negative effect.
  • Links from sites that Google doesn’t like for whatever reason will have a negative impact.
  • Advancing from one PageRank level to the next has been determined to be something close to a logarithmic function, so it will most likely take in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 times the number of good factors to go from PageRank 2 to 3 than it did to go from 1 to 2.

There are a lot more, but these are the heavy hitters. I’ll add the others if there is enough interest.

What is PageRank good for?

Even though PageRand is not the beginning and end in determining where your page will end up in the SERPS, it is still an important metric for the following reasons:

  • It tells others the relative importance of your page and increases their desire to obtain links from your page.
  • It is ‘collateral’ that you have built which equates to ‘value’ if you ever decide to sell your site.
  • The consensus is that even though Google has downgraded the importance of PageRank in determining a pages placement in the SERPS, it is still a large determining factor in the order, frequency, and depth of indexing (crawling) that takes place.

The Internet is constantly growing and evolving, which means that if you sit around and do nothing with your site for a period of time the PageRank can and will change, most likely for the worse. In order to maintain your PageRank and increase it over time, you need to continually update your pages and advertise.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (0)

Earning Commissions from Websites – Let’s Play


The name of the game is earning commissions and the winners are the ones that earn the most.  This is as simply as I can put it.  And that’s exactly what it is, it’s a game.  The people that earn a lot of money from their websites are the ones that know how to play the game and play it well.  The game has very few rules.  This fact alone can make it the easiest or hardest game you ever played depending upon your personality type.  There is no ‘instant gratification’.  The things you do today may take two or three months to show their impact.  Lastly, the game only ends when you decide you no longer want to play.  Are you up for the game?  If so then read on.

Over time I’ve gotten to know a lot of “The Players” and I’ve found that there are easy ways to play the game and there are not so easy ways to play it.  There are ethical ways to do and and so not so ethical ways to do it.  There are thousands of different approaches and permutations that I’ve seen succeed.  I’m not here to tell you that your way is wrong and another way is right.  I’m not here to be your preacher or to impose my brand of morality on you (especially if I can’t make a commission of of it).  What I am here to tell you is that the one thing that is a common denominator for all of the successful players is that they use TOOLS to play the game.

Now that I’ve completed the setup, let me introduce the next handful of post which will have to do with the most common tools of the trade.  Consider these as the HAMMERS, SCREW DRIVERS, and PLIERS of the Internet Marketing tool kit.  The tools that no tool box should be without.  Let’s start with the FIREFOX BROWSER and the SEO for FIREFOX plug-in.  First off, if you do not have the FireFox browser installed on your computer then do that first.  I don’t want to knock Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but the FireFox browser has too many 3rd party utilities available free of charge that are invaluable so we can’t ignore it.

Next you will want to search the Internet for the “SEO for FireFox” add-on.  When you have successfully installed that add-on, your Google search results page will look like this:

SEO for FireFox Sample

In addition to your standard Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), you will now see a lot of useful information pertaining to each of the pages returned.  In our next posts, we will look at each of the data elements that are available from the tool and dig into each of them to provide you with the most comprehensive and up-to-date information so that you can make an educated decision on how to best use the tool according to your game strategy.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Tools of the Trade | Comments (0)