Webinar Recap: JCPenney’s SEO No-Go–What Went Wrong and What You Need to Do

February 24th, 2011 by Cynthia Everson

In case you missed yesterday’s webinar about JCPenney partaking in blackhat SEO, or you’ve been hibernating for the past couple weeks, here is a recap of what happened to JCPenney’s SEO rankings and what exactly went wrong.

JCPenney recently received a penalty from Google for purchasing links on sites all around the web in order to boost their ranks on highly competitive keywords, including “dresses”, “area rugs” and “bedding”. The number of links being built increased drastically during the holiday season and eventually raised some red flags with Google. Matt Cutts’s Google Spam Team went in to investigate, saw blackhat SEO strategies in place, and penalized JCPenney’s rankings—dropping their keywords from the first page down to the sixth and seventh.

What Went Wrong? There were three main problems with JCPenney’s SEO strategy:

1.  Drastically increased rate of link-building during the holiday season. Building so many links at once is what signaled the red flags. Each site has its own natural rate of link-building (i.e. how many links are built to your site without you doing anything), and you don’t want to push too far beyond that. To be safe, we never recommend building more than 50 links a month. Even that is on the high-end if you are building legitimate links to your site.

2.  Built links on irrelevant sites. Tiny links for bridal sets and fashion jewelry tucked into the bottom right corner of a site about cars may not bother a user, but this is a big problem for Google. The irrelevance of the links is a blackhat red flag to Google. Links should only be placed on relevant sites where they make sense and have value to both the search engine as well as the user.

3.  The main website could not be optimized. Surprisingly, the actual URLs that were ranking were not from the main JCPenney website. They were actually from a proxy server. The original site could not be optimized (probably due to backend issues), so a mirror site with cleaner URLs and optimized meta descriptions and keywords was built. Using a proxy server in itself is not a problem. However, it definitely would have been better if the site they wanted to promote was something that could be optimized and rank well on its own.

What should they have done? More than anything, patience is key with SEO. The holiday season may have rushed everything, but in the end it wasn’t worth the SEO campaign backfiring. Real SEO should take months, if not years (depending on how competitive the keyword) to get you onto the first page. If appropriate measures are taken and you abide by Google’s Webmaster policies, you can still ensure great rankings and measurable results.

Cynthia | @cynniebug

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2010 Review of SEO Best Practices

December 21st, 2010 by Cynthia Everson

In case you missed last week’s and today’s webinar on the 2010 Review of SEO Best Practices, here is an overview of the best SEO practices we covered this year.

Always keep conversions in mind when optimizing. It doesn’t matter if your site is ranking number one if the user experience is horrible. Evaluate the usability of your website. Ask yourself what you want the user to do when he or she gets to your site, and make sure it’s clear what the next step is. Define what a conversion is (form fill out? direct sale?) and build your site to guide the user towards that goal.

Optimize off-site as well as on-site. Link-building makes up about 50% of SEO, so definitely be on the lookout for opportunities to place a link. Take advantage of social media as well, as more and more evidence is coming out that it affects your organic rankings.

Take advantage of free software to analyze your site. Set up goals in Google Analytics to see how people are using your site. What keywords are they using to get to the page? Where are they dropping off and exiting the site? Make sure always to look at non-paid, non-branded terms in order to most objectively see how your organic efforts are going.

See what your competitors are doing to optimize. One handy way of figuring out who your biggest online competitors are is to check Analytics for your strongest keyword. Then, search that term to see who your organic competitors are. From there, you can use Yahoo’s back-link command to see who is linking to your competitors’ sites. Once you find out who is linking to your competitors, you know where to look for new places to build your own links! You can also use your competitors’ sites to look for more keyword ideas in their meta tags.

Of course, these tips are meant for after you have done all of your on-page optimization. Be sure to optimize all SEO on-page elements: content, meta tags, and URLs, and definitely pick the keywords carefully to bring the most qualified traffic to your site. Here’s to starting 2011 with an optimized site!!

–Cynthia | @cynniebug

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Webinar Recap: How the Facebook-Bing Partnership Will Affect Your SEO

October 29th, 2010 by Cynthia Everson

On October 13th, Facebook and Bing held a joint press event to announce the start of their new relationship, working together to form what they are calling “instant personalization”. Twitter feeds and Youtube videos showing up on the Google SERP have become a standard sight, but now Bing has teamed up with Facebook to take the integration of social media into the search engines to another level: pulling data out of your personal account and putting it among all of the organic results.

Unfortunately, getting the actual results pulled from Facebook to show up on the Bing SERP is quite the challenge. The steps to syncing up the accounts are not obvious and have changed a couple of times since the press event.

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Currently, you have to go into Preferences to log in to Facebook, and until today I couldn’t find an option to sign in to Facebook without first logging into Windows Live first.
Also, there are only two types of information that Bing is pulling from Facebook:
1. People: Namely, your friends and your friend’s friends. Search their names, and get a lovely picture right at the top.

2. Things your friends “like”. Meaning, they click a button on Facebook that says they “like” something and become a “fan”. To be honest, I have yet to see this actually come up on the Bing SERP. Either it’s being rolled out reeeally slowly, or the algorithm needs some serious tweaking. I suspect results to come up more easily in the near future.

That’s me!?! Thanks, Bing!

That’s me!?! Thanks, Bing!

So what does this all mean?

At this point, I think it should be treated as more of a heads up that social media is on the rise. No, this won’t affect your organic rankings, but your organic results will be sharing the SERP more and more with social media results.

My SEO advice: Keep optimizing. And don’t neglect Bing just because Google is still taking the lead. Between this Facebook alliance and the Bing-Yahoo alliance several months back, it looks like Bing is taking some pretty smart steps to keep Google on their toes.

My social media advice: Get started on it now if you haven’t already. It’s still on its way up, so best to get on now.

My overall advice: Utilize both SEO and social media. The two go hand-in-hand (see last week’s Webinar with MarketingSherpa, The Real Truth About Social Media and SEO). Hey, get PPC going, too, and you could be dominating the SERP on three different platforms!

The main takeaway here: Nothing major has happened yet, but baby steps are being taken and new ways of doing search are being put out there. Get your Facebook account going and don’t forget about Bing!

-@cynniebug

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Here’s a Question: Does Anyone Use Facebook Questions??

September 10th, 2010 by Cynthia Everson

As you probably are well-aware by now, Facebook released Facebook Questions, a beta application, on its site at the end of July. The concept is similar to Yahoo! Answers, launched in July 2005, but the interface is, of course, very different.

I decided to go ahead and run a quick test. I asked the question everybody has been asking for the last 14-ish years:

“Is Tupac alive?”

Yahoo insisted that my question wasn’t long enough, however, and I had to edit it slightly. Let’s check out the different interfaces.

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Thank you, Yahoo, for the spelling correction. I guess Yahoo isn’t big on proper nouns.

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And here is Facebook, making me incredibly nervous about my ground-breaking decision to ask a question:

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Note: They also had a few pictures of friends to the left in that gap, giving it a very Facebook-y social networking feel, but I whited them out for privacy purposes.

Both platforms asked me to categorize my questions to get the most qualified people to find my question.

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Yahoo actually helps you out and makes some suggestions for you, while Facebook reserves its sweet simplicity.

The thing I found most striking about Facebook (possibly tied with its terrifying message about selling my soul to the world by posting my first-ever question) was how it tried to give the question-asking a more professional tone. As the question asker, my picture and job title were posted along with the question and I was automatically made a follower.

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Could this professional edge be a throwback to LinkedIn’s questions platform? Hmm.

Now how about the quality of the answers?

Within five minutes, I had 11 answers on Yahoo, mostly saying the same thing, with the style ranging from angry-sounding “NO!” to poetry about him being “alive in every word spoken by a white rapper as he attempts to become famous [and] … in the crazy as [sic] ghetto hairdos that sisters wear.” I also got some nice details of his death and a couple of links back to Wikipedia. Thanks, everyone. Now I know.

Facebook, on the other hand, got me virtually zero answers. Technically, one. But from somebody I already know, which makes it hardly count if the point is that, as Facebook so loudly declared, it’s visible to “the world” to help me out in my quest for knowledge.

So what’s the conclusion? Well, first of all, I’ll admit, it’s not the most perfect test since the nature of the question is one that most people wouldn’t take seriously. But it was an interesting test run just to see which would rake in the most responses and to see if people are catching on to Facebook questions at all yet.

And of course, according to my 12 respondents, we can further conclude that Tupac lives on in our hearts, but not in body. Rest in peace, Tupac (June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996).

- Cynthia

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Yahoogle? A New Alliance of Search Engines in Japan

August 3rd, 2010 by Cynthia Everson

A week ago, I wrote a blog entry chronicling Google’s gradual move into Japan. I was living and working in Tokyo from April 2008 to April 2010, and in that two-year time-frame Google started popping up all over the place in a country that otherwise had been dominated by Yahoo Japan.

Fortunately, we hadn’t gotten around to publishing that blog post yet, because in it I concluded that Google would never have the presence in Japan that Yahoo has. Then last week I found out…they’re teaming up, forming an alliance of sorts. Not a merger (Yahoo will keep its logo and interface), but the organic search and paid results will be based on Google’s technology. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Google will take over Yahoo’s presence, per se, since the logo will remain Yahoo’s, but it does mean that they will hold a virtual monopoly over what you can find on the Internet in Japan.

As someone who has lived in Japan, I believe the real power of Yahoo Japan comes from their partnership with SoftBank, the largest cell phone provider in the country, that owns a 40% stake in Yahoo Japan (compared to Yahoo Inc.’s 35% stake). I used Softbank while I was in there and found myself, always a loyal user of Google in the US, slowly switching to Yahoo. I never had the chance to sneak into a Japanese person’s house to track their search engine usage, but the feeling I got was that most people used the Internet more on their cell phone than at home from a personal computer. Trains in Tokyo are an odd site. They’re jam-packed with people to the point that you can barely move at rush hour (and rush hour, by the way, is more like eight hours), and still most of the people are glued to their phones, either text messaging (a major Japanese pastime), surfing the web, reading the news, or even watching TV. With the default browser of the biggest cell phone provider set to Yahoo, the Yahoo search engine maintains a very high status.

I think the affinity for SoftBank in Japan goes beyond what we as Americans can understand as brand loyalty to a cell phone provider. Because mobile phones are such a way of life in Japan and marketing is as amazing as it is, it’s not uncommon to see the mascot, a big white dog who used to be a human father of a family of normal people, dangling from people’s bags or worn as slippers at home. I follow the dog on Twitter. He has a separate account from actual Softbank. Furthermore, Softbank sponsors a baseball team, the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, which plays at the Fukuoka Yahoo! JAPAN Dome. Sweet deal.

As proof of Softbank’s status in Japan, here’s a fascinating commercial, featuring Brad Pitt carrying a gigantic sumo wrestler.

Anyway…

I think the biggest concern among Japanese people that are keeping up with the news of this alliance is that the organic search results are going to be really different. It always seemed to me that when I ran a search in Japanese on Google, the results weren’t as relevant as the ones Yahoo Japan pulled up. But I’m not a native speaker, so I’m not really the person to ask.

So what does the future hold for Google Japan? Probably a lot. But with the Yahoo logo still staying up as the SoftBank default browser, I don’t know that their presence will surpass Yahoo’s dominance as the most popular search engine in Japan. Yahoo is pretty settled into the Internet world there and I highly doubt Google could take over the dominance of their weather reports, auctions (did you know they had auctions? I didn’t! ), and aforementioned train schedules. It would be pretty cool, though, if they took over Yahoo! JAPAN Dome and painted it multi-colored…

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Posted in Google Updates, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »