I wrote an article for the March 2011 issue of Business Eye magazine, that we’ve republished on the Pierce Communications website. Aimed at a layperson audience, the article is an attempt to pierce the hype surrounding social media and the proclamations of SEO’s irrelevance:

Pierce Communications: SEO and Social Media – Piercing the Hype

Websites don’t accidentally rank high in Google. It takes concerted effort to ensure a website performs well in search engine results, and SEO is a multi-faceted discipline incorporating aspects of web design and development, technical know-how, marketing and PR, and even social media.

My latest for Search News Central is about Google’s Farmer/Panda update, and specifically about how it has affected article marketing as a linkbuilding method:

Search News Central: The Panda That Killed Article Marketing

Article marketing is a tried and tested method of generating links. You find a topic, write an article about it that includes a link or two, and publish it on several article directories. Or, more accurately, you pay someone else to do all that for you, and you just provide the link destination and anchor text.

SEO and Social Media / Panda and Article Marketing is a blog post from Barry Adams.

With the volume of content I’m generating that can be interpreted as attacks on Google, it may appear I’m on an anti-Google crusade. But I hope you’ll believe me when I say that’s really not the case. I’m just concerned about the future of the internet and the power large corporations such as Google, Microsoft and Apple wield over it.

There has been a lot of publicity recently about the concept of search neutrality: the idea that search engines should provide neutral, unbiased results and not favour their own properties or those they have beneficial relationships with.

This debate has been raging for years, but it received a recent boost when Ben Edelman, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, published a survey which appears to show that Google does tend to prefer its own properties in its search results.

Since the publication of the Edelman survey a growing mountain of criticism has emerged, with many claiming the study was deeply flawed. The consensus amongst my SEO peers does seem to be that the study is misleading and inaccurate.

However the study focuses solely on the organic search results provided by Google, and that is only part of the picture. There are other aspects of the search result pages – such as the OneBox – where Google is blatantly promoting its own services, which might require proper scrutiny.

Adding to the search neutrality debate Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, published a blog post yesterday in which he refers to an essay by James Grimmelman, associate professor at New York Law School, which seems to dissect the concept of search neutrality.

I’ve left two comments on Matt’s blog – both ‘awaiting moderation’ at the time of writing this now approved and visible for all – but I felt my rebuttal of the essay as well as the points Matt makes deserve a separate blog post.

First, I don’t think the search neutrality debate is one about webspam as Matt seems to suggest. I think we can all agree that spammy websites are bad and need to be ousted from the SERPs.

Nor do I think the debate is about making the search algorithms public. These algos are Google’s intellectual property and thus deserve full protection. Making the search algorithms public will only play in to the hands of spammers and are likely to ensure the search results will be dominated by spam shortly afterwards, so that is definitely not a solution.

In my opinion the search neutrality debate is about Google and other search engines giving preference to their own properties over those of their rivals, and I think it expands beyond the listing of organic results and should encompass other elements on the SERPs, such as the OneBox and paid ads.

Having read Grimmelman’s essay I have to admit I’m not terribly impressed by it. The author starts off with his 8 principles of search neutrality, which I think should be labelled ‘elements’ instead – search neutrality encompasses several of the listed principles (though not all eight in my opinion) and by defining each individually I think Grimmelman is muddying the waters somewhat. It also makes it much easier for him to subsequently shoot them all down, having narrowed each down to easily falsifiable premises.

Additionally Grimmelman erects straw men arguments for some of the definitions. For example for the objectivity principle the author states: “The unvoiced assumption here is that search queries can have objectively right and wrong answers.” This is a weasel phrase and is a misrepresentation of the objectivity principle.

Also, by ignoring the interplay of the eight principles – and by including principles which are at best circumstantially applicable to search neutrality but should not form part of a serious debate (equality and transparency) – the author distorts the actual issue at the core of the matter.

Search neutrality is an important and topical issue. There are genuine concerns about dominant corporations abusing their power to consolidate their positions in the marketplace, and these concerns deserve proper investigation and debate.

In my opinion Google is abusing its power and does not have the best interests of its users in mind all the time. After all, Google is a publicly traded corporation and as such has one overruling legal imperative: to maximise shareholder value. Users don’t necessarily factor in to that.

The Search Neutrality Debate is a blog post from Barry Adams.

I was invited to join presenters Bas van den Beld and Roy Huiskes on their regular State of Search radioshow on WebmasterRadio.fm, and apparently they liked me as I was invited straight back for their next episode!

In my first guest appearance we chatted about SEO in 2010 and 2011, the Goldman Sachs investment in Facebook and the potential of a new dotcom bubble. In the second show we discussed Google and their stance towards affiliate marketing as well as some odd google.com pages popping up in search results.

You can listen to the shows and download them as mp3 files here:

1. State of Search radio – ep39: Bubble coming up, 2010 and and the future
2. State of Search radio – ep40: Google testings, Google the affiliate and Twitter transparancy

Guest Appearances on State of Search Radio is a blog post from Barry Adams.

I started off my SEO blogging in 2011 with two posts published on the same day. For State of Search I wrote an opinion piece about the decline of Google’s search quality, and looked at the similarities between what’s happening now and what happened a decade ago when Google was just an upstart search engine:

State of Search: We’re tired of Google, it’s time for a change

It seems history is doomed to repeat itself. Google now takes the role of the lumbering and slow-moving giant of the web, incapable of dealing with the growing mountains of webspam. Its SERPs are cluttered and filled with spammy websites, and users are losing their trust in the accuracy of the big G’s search results.

And for Search News Central I wrote an article detailing two important aspects of doing SEO for large-scale ecommerce sites: site structure and xml product feeds:

Search News Central: Two Great SEO Tips for Large-Scale Ecommerce Sites

Something that many SEOs have known for a long time already, and recently endorsed by Derrick Wheeler (Microsoft’s SEO architect), is that for large-scale websites site structure is king. I.e. the way the site is set up and structured – assuming a healthy link profile and good content are in place – is probably the single most important SEO aspect that you should focus on.

Tired of Google / Ecommerce SEO Tips is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Prompted by yet another hopeless ‘SEO is dead’ article I wrote a lengthy rant for Search News Central in which I try to explain that writing such blatant falsehoods is not only detrimental to your own credibility – you’re also damaging countless businesses.

Search News Central: The Dangers in Proclaiming the Demise of SEO

It is more than just confusion though that makes this type of hyperbolic blogging and ‘reporting’ the height of irresponsibility. It is not just online marketing professionals that read these controversial articles. Inevitably this type of content will reach the eyes and ears of entrepreneurs, senior managers, and key decision makers.

I gave a presentation about SEO for Google News last week, and in my latest post for State of Search I highlighted one aspect of Google News that I mentioned in my talk: the simplicity of Google News matching for universal search results:

State of Search: Google News in Universal Search

What it comes down to is that when you manage to get a news article – be it a proper news story, a press release, or even a paid advertorial – on to a proper general news site, you’re going to be dominating the uni SERPs for that query for a couple of days.

Dangerous Blogging / Universal SERPs is a blog post from Barry Adams.

We didn’t have to wait long. Within minutes of Google’s announcement of their latest feature, Google Instant, the blogosphere was abuzz with the news that this would really mean the death of SEO.

Naturally this was a total fabrication. People who understand search engines, SEO, and user behaviour, actually realised that this made SEO all the more important. At most SEO would have to shift its focus somewhat, but ranking high for popular search terms has only become more vital for any online business.

Since we SEO professionals have had to defend the existence of SEO for years, I decided to build a small site dedicated to end the ‘SEO is dead’ argument once and for all. Inspired by Mark Bronlow’s ‘Email is not dead‘ site, I launched SEO is not dead:

The site contains a number of statistics on internet and search engine use, links to and quotes from industry specialists talking about the life of SEO, and videos and quotes from senior people working for major search engines.

So the next time you hear someone proclaim the death of SEO, send them here.

SEO is not dead is a blog post from Barry Adams.

On the Fire Horse Trail I wrote an article about the impact of the continued ‘appification’ of the Internet on the SEO industry. Will there be SEO when there’s no more World Wide Web?

The Fire Horse Trail: The Death of SEO

The content contained within apps is invisible for search engines, and app builders intend to keep it that way. Content creators want to tie users in to their apps, and making sure their content is only accessible via the app is key to accomplishing that. This means that SEO, making sure websites (content) get found through search engines, is obsolete in the fully applified Internet landscape of tomorrow.

By popular demand I wrote a blog post for State of Search explaining what you can do to optimise your images to appear in Google’s Image Search:

State of Search: The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation

The filename, alt-text and caption of an image of a website combine to form an impression of what the image is showing. For maximum impact these three factors should be aligned, containing the same or similar keywords. The three factors can be seen as descriptions of the image, increasing in length.

The Death of SEO / Image Search Optimisation is a blog post from Barry Adams.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 21 May 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

Google seems to have a global stranglehold on the internet search market. With market shares ranging from 60% to 95%, depending on what country you’re in, Google is the preferred search engine for users from Warsaw to Hawaii.

But there are some big gaps in Google’s global dominance. Take Russia for example. A Russian company called Yandex has monopolised the Russian internet landscape for years with its own Russian-language only web portal, yandex.ru.

On May 19th Yandex launched an international version of its search engine on yandex.com. Search engine professionals around the world fell on it like sharks, trying to find faults with it. We search engine optimisers love to complain, and we were fully expecting Yandex’s foray in to Google’s territory to be buggy and flawed.

We were wrong. As it turns out the yandex.com search engine is good. Really good. The results Yandex provides are amazingly relevant, accurate, and spam-free. It easily beats Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to undermine Google’s dominance, and might even be better than Google.

Google initially came to dominance because its results were more accurate and cleaner than those of its rivals at the time. Serious internet users quickly adopted Google as their preferred search engine, and it spread virally from there.

But over the years Google has kept adding features and functionality to its engine, which have ended up cluttering and distorting their search results. Add to that the pervasive presence of ads on Google – 99% of Google’s revenue is from its advertising platforms – and you end up with a search engine that perhaps has lost a lot of its appeal.

Yandex seems primed to fill Google’s shoes as the new favourite search engine for serious internet surfers. Its results are clean and accurate and lack the clutter that has come to characterise Google.

It will take much more than just a strong search engine to overthrow Google. But I for one welcome the added choice and hope that Yandex, as well as Bing, can nibble at Google’s market share. Competition is good for everyone.

Is Google’s biggest threat Russian? is a blog post from Barry Adams.

A term often busied by web developers and also SEO agencies is W3C compliance. I’ve written about the benefits of W3C compliant code before, but my perspective has changed a bit over time and I feel it’s important to point out that full W3C compliance is not a definitive requirement for an effective website.

W3C compliance basically means that the HTML and CSS code that a website is built with is fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short).

The W3C is an international standards organization, founded by the inventor of the web. They develop the standards on which the world wide web is run.

You’d think that making sure your website’s code complies fully with these standards is pretty important. And it is, up to a certain point.

You can easily find out if your website’s code is W3C compliant – simply submit your website URL to the W3C Validator tool and you’ll get an overview of all the ‘errors’ in your code. And you’ll almost certainly get a lot of ‘errors’. It’s very unlikely your website’s code complies to all of the W3C’s standards.

I say ‘errors’ because often they’re not really errors. The W3C standards are extremely strict, with no room for interpretation. So every little niggle in your code, every small deviation from the W3C’s strict standards, will generate an error in this validation tool.

W3C compliance for browsers

But most web browsers are flexible pieces of software that are built to deal with a wide range of different sorts of HTML and CSS code, and will probably render your website perfectly regardless of how many errors the validation tool shows.

Often web developers have to use shortcuts and non-compliant code to make something work in a particular way on a website, and while this results in validation errors it doesn’t hinder a website’s functionality at all. Quite the contrary, sometimes you have to break the rules of the W3C to get something to work exactly how you want it in every web browser.

W3C compliance for SEO

There is also the misconception that search engine crawlers require a website’s code to be 100% W3C compliant, or else they will rank your site lower in the SERPs. A lot of SEO agencies recommend you make every webpage on your site fully W3C compliant.

This is often a costly endeavour, and quite unnecessary. Search engine crawlers, like browsers, are sturdy and flexible pieces of software that can index almost any type of code, regardless of the errors it contains.

For proper crawling and indexation a search engine will need to be able to distinguish the different elements of a webpage – style, navigation, and content – and will need to be able to interpret the meaning of the content, which it does through analysing the content itself and the mark-up code that is used to style the content.

Clean, compliant HTML and CSS code help in this process. Compliant code makes it easier for search engine crawlers to identify what the content on a webpage is, and what that content means.

But 100% compliance, meaning zero errors in the W3C validation tool, is not only often hard to achieve (especially if your website has advanced functionality) but is unnecessary as well. The code just needs to be sufficiently well-structured and tidy enough for search engines to be able to distinguish style, navigation, and content.

So bad code is OK?

No, bad code is not OK. It’s still a good idea to strive towards compliant code. A website with hundreds of W3C validation errors is not a good thing. It’s likely that these errors cause the site to display differently in some web browsers (or worse, not work at all) and can cause all sorts of trouble for both users and search engines.

But if your website’s code only shows a couple of handfuls of non-critical errors, especially if they’re only small warnings, there really is little need to fix them.

For on-site optimisation your time and resources are better spent on making sure your website’s title tags, content, and other factors are fully optimised.

W3C compliance – is it a requirement? is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Social media is the current Big Thing, or so we’re told. You have to Tweet! Be on Facebook! Get Linked In!

But do you really? Is it necessary to be on every social media site and shout your message as loud as you can in to as many microphones as you can find?

Social media websites are not ends in and of themselves – they are a means to an end. For most users social media sites are channels to connect with friends, relatives and colleagues, to read relevant news and keep up to date with stuff that interests them.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the digital equivalent of conversations with friends and acquaintances. This means that commercial messages aren’t really welcome. It’s important to realise that on social media websites the user controls the content – what they read, what they share, what they ignore.

Commercial messages are considered interruptive and unwelcome. That’s why as a company, when you do decide to build your presence on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website, you need to adapt your voice to the medium.

People who are interested in Ford cars don’t want to read loads of hyped sales tweets straight out of car dealer brochures. What they might be interested in is advance information about upcoming Ford cars, inside knowledge of Ford’s R&D, or just to see a human face behind that monolithic corporate image.

The people at Ford know this, so their Twitter account isn’t just a faceless PR machine. It’s run by actual people who have conversations with their followers and provide tweets that are interesting.

This has proven to be a successful approach for them – the Ford Twitter account has over 25 thousand followers.

On Facebook the overall tone is even more informal and social. Where Twitter is becoming a networking tool, people ‘hang out’ on Facebook with friends and family. That’s why success on Facebook depends mostly on how you approach your audience.

While some companies have the benefit of a corporate image that lends itself well to Facebook (Nike for example whose various FB pages boast tens of thousands of fans), for other companies it can be quite challenging to build a strong presence.

They key is to deliver what your fans want. Nike uses Facebook to share cool videos, ask for user input, and launch contests where participants can win great swag.

If all you’re pushing on Facebook is the same sales material as you send by email, you’re not on the right track. Get personal, be authentic, and ask for feedback. Listen to your fans and give them what they ask for.

When you do decide to start tweeting or build a Facebook page, make sure you define for yourself what you want to get out of it. Your goal can be anything from fuzzy marketing stuff like brand-building to solid ROI metrics such as more visitors to your website that convert in to customers.

Sometimes you’ll find that a certain popular social media site just doesn’t work for you. And that’s OK. Social media sites, for all the hype surrounding them, are just channels that you can use for the benefit of your company’s bottom line. If you can’t get any value out of them, don’t use them.

For every social media site that you think can add value, ask yourself the following questions: Is my target audience present? And do they want to hear what I have to say?

As long as you set your expectations and manage your social media presence accordingly, you’ll be OK. Just don’t be social for social’s sake. Whatever you do with social media, make sure it means something.

UPDATE 16 Feb: I came across an excellent case study from Microsoft Advertising on how they successfully deployed social media. It’s a great read and definitely worth your while:
» Microsoft Social Media White Paper – Learn & Earn [PDF]

Use Social Media sites effectively, or not at all is a blog post from Barry Adams.