We start off by debunking a few myths. Ralph goes through them; only high PageRank links are good, all paid links are bad etc. Don’t obsess too much about high PR links. PR can go up as well as down.

Another golden rule – not all links are equal. A good link building strategy needs competitive analysis and expertise. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as your behaviour needs to look natural. What’s natural about 100 permanent links all a PR5+? Basically; don’t obsess about the “myths” or your behaviour becomes unnatural.

Our MC (conveniently Michael Caselli) asks – Is PR still important?

Ralph – yes. It is indicative of trust. Just don’t obsess and remember the toolbar PR is not the same as the Google internal PR. It’s “for entertainment purposes only”.

Marcus – it can be hard to find sites without paid links so monitoring drops in PR is a good way (when no other factor seems to warrant a penalty), to work out if a source is taking paid links.

Christoph – also be aware of how PR drops can identify linkbuyers. If you have a paid link source and that source drops 2-3PR and you remove the link, you’re identifying yourself to Google – yes, I bought that for the PR. Again Christoph echoes Ralph; don’t obsess about PR and don’t base your strategy on this.

A member of the audience brings up the “bad neighbourhood” term.

Christoph – look at other links on the site linking to you. Are they quality. Are they relevant?

Audience – is there a danger in having links from a site that takes paid links, even if your is not?

Marcus – Yes! (back to bad neighbourhood). Marcus given an analogy “if you’re sat in a bar next to Bob (Rains) and Dave (Naylor) – that’s a bad neighbourhood”. (LOL.)

Christoph – Great links are the ones your competitors can not get easily.

Sebastian – You need to start with analysis, backlink tools, your links, your competitor links. If you believe in white hat only in this industry, then Good Luck! Penalties are over-rated. Too much money in this industry and everyone is buying links. (Basically; they can’t spank the whole industry overnight.)

Ralph goes back to “bad neighbourhood” to give a different perspective – relevancy isn’t too concerning. A bad neighbourhood is more – cheap Viagra, buy Cialis – that sort of stuff. Agrees with Sebastian that this is a highly competitive industry, if you don’t go for black hat, you’re toast.

MC – when is too far?

Ralph – “When you fail” (I love this!)

MC – How many links do I need to get to position one for poker?

Ralph – (I’m paraphrasing) – “How long is a piece of string?” You can have a site with 7000 links in position 1 or a site with 150,000 links in position 1. Remember not all links are equal and your link strategy is just one part of over 200 factors. So many other variables in the mix.

Q from the audience – What is the one “Golden Link”?

Marcus had a great one from W3C. Essentially when they introduced the donation facility on their site, high donors got a link. Marcus was one of the first few – paid his $1k for a year. In his own  words that link was “better than sex”.

Christoph – points out that when such trust is transferred from a link like this, then linking to the next level down the tree is also of great benefit. Being a degree or so removed from that golden source is still worth it. Accumulating such links takes time and also why age/trust are inextricable.

Sebastian – if you develop a new domain, keep it clean, do your press releases. Buy a couple of great paid links; then when the site gets some trust and some traction, then you can really go for it.

Ralph – one of the problems with hunting for that “golden link” is often you can’t tell until after the fact.

MC asks the panel. If you want to rank for the term “Poker”, where is your golden link? Apparently this is a favourite question from Marcus and one he has previously offered money for the right answer for. Marcus thinks this time he could be out of pocket, but it turns out not everybody knows the answer. Which is of course “from the number 1 in the SERP for “poker”. Just ask Google who they trust, and that’s number 1.

Q from the audience – I have a German site and I’m building links from the UK – good or bad?

Sebastian – try to keep a 70/30 rule (70 being the country of origin). Be careful of link brokers here.

Christoph – A link has to pass the smell test. A site in a different country and a different language might make perfect sense; just thing about it logically, naturally and factor relevance.

Q from the audience – How does Google determine relevance? e.g. is “Sportsbook” related to “poker”?

Sebastian – don’t think of Google as a fancy sophisticated bit of .php. Google has been trying for years to emulate human behaviour. Human interpretation of relevance is probably much wider than a machine interpretation.

Ralph – points out that there are linguistic tools available that can assist with this. Also, do bear in mind that text around your anchor text is not ignored. Don’t drop a link with anchor text into a completely irrelevant paragraph.

In summary: Don’t obsess over any one factor in your link-building strategy or you risk losing sight of the whole. Don’t be too timid in this industry or you will sink. Don’t be too rigid or inflexible in your approach or behaviour. Make sure you don’t stink.

If Immanuel Kant was alive today, I think he’d be an SEO on the side. I think the combination of knowledge fuelled by common results of repeated experimentation, combined with the all- too- common Cartesian doubt (did we really drop a place – or did they gain a place) would seriously appeal to him.

So, it is with some sense of compassion that I wanted to reference this hilarious Google result for the search term “Google Ireland”. Have a look at the top ranking results…

Notes on a small Ireland

How good is that?

Maybe someone did a misspell in the meta keywords, cos – like New Zealand is an Ireland, right? Of course the search engines don’t use meta-keywords to inform the ranking algorithm though.

Regardless. My point is that SEO is an inexact science, though we can use learned inferences and experimentation to support our hypotheses, but when all is said and done – even Google can fall foul of their own algorithm.

Diddums.

The HTML format allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, most commonly keywords and description however it can be expanded to highly-granular information such as the Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.

Metadata is typically hidden from a user when they visit a webpage, however a search engine spider will be able to pick up the metadata. Metadata helps a search engine spider understand what a webpage is about, helps to categorise the webpage, and therefore helps to facilitate search and retrieval (NISO, 2001).

Four Key Reasons Why Metadata Matters

1. Meta data works on image-lead pages
It’s a bit of a cliché but there is some truth in the statement oft-used by search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, that “content is King”. Certainly having a lot of content, that changes and updates regularly is a key criteria in optimising for search engines; however there are many valid situations, web pages and entire websites that are very image-lead. As an example many web designer and artist’ websites would naturally contain a gallery of graphical and image lead work. Ensuring you have detailed meta-data describing the site and page content and the nature of your business ensures that search engines have something to get hold of other than just the image content.

2. Meta data expands on existing content
There is often more than one way to describe something – perhaps there is an incorrect way of describing something or there is a commonly used slang expression. If you want to keep your pages corporate and don’t want to include this alternate content however you’d like to rank in the search engine results page (SERP) for the slang, adding them to your metadata may help you rank well for text which doesn’t actually appear on your on-page content.

3. There’s more than one way to spell
There is sometimes more than one way to spell a particular word, for example English spellings tend to prefer the ‘s’ whereas American spellings prefer ‘z’ (e.g. specialisation vs specialization).

If you want to keep your website consistent, you will want to ensure that you keep your descriptions and spelling conventions consistent throughout all your webpages. However what if you run an international website and you want to rank for the alternative spelling?

Metadata can help by allowing you to add these alternate spellings into your metadata. Effectively this data is hidden from your user when they visit the webpage so there are no consistency issues; however it allows search engine spiders to potentially rank your webpage for a variety of other terms.

4. Good metadata increases click-through rates
Search engines will often use the title and meta descriptions of each webpage when they list the result in the SERP. Pages with good metadata are much more likely to be clicked on than ones with poor metadata for example:

Poor metadata – the title of the page is unhelpful, the description doesn’t say anything about the company.

Better metadata – the title of the page explains what the company does and includes keyword targets, the meta description gives more detail about the company’s services and what’s on the page.

If any of the contents of your metadata match up with the phrase the user has searched for, the keyword terms will be bolded up in the SERP. Research has shown that users are more likely to click on a result the more bolded keywords there are in the listing, thus it is important to plan your metadata carefully and ensure that every page on your website has unique, hand-crafted metadata.

However if you leave your metadata out, it’s not the end of the world – search engines will often try and use some of the on-page content in the SERP if you don’t have a meta description and there are “over 200” factors which influence a web page’s position in the SERP for a given keyphrase (that’s the Google secret sauce) therefore you may still rank well even if you leave this key information out. It does tend to be harder and take a lot longer!

References

Google (nd); Google Basics – Serving results
Available from: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&ctx=sibling
[cited: 25 August 2009]

NISO (2001); Understanding Metadata
Available from: http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf
[cited: 25 August 2009]

Google Base is an excellent way to advertise your products and if you own an internet based shop, there’s no excuse not to use it. First off – it’s free, and the results often appear on the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so uploading your feed can be a quick and easy way of winning new customers. The one snag is that just three shopping results tend to appear in the SERPs, although if users click through to the Google Base page they will be able to browse the full listings.

This means it is important to try and get each one of the products that you submit to Google Base into the top three listings to maximise your exposure. The Google Base algorithm is not as sophisticated as the full search algorithm and it relies far more heavily on the relevancy of the product feed than any other factor.

Firstly, you will need to consider your product keyword terms. Many people who are looking to buy online will know the manufacturer and/or product code of the item they would like to buy so try and incorporate not just the broad search term, but also the manufacturer and product code into both the title and description of the ad. Google themselves have said in the past that online shoppers tend to search for product characteristics rather than use generic searches. This means it is important to have not just broad search terms in your ad, but also more product-specific information.

The title should contain both the broad search and the product codes for the product, as well as any generic information you can put in. The description should also include as much relevant information as you can. Product searches are often truncated therefore try and load the front end of your description with as many keywords as possible. Take care not to ‘keyword-stuff’ as this may not only see you penalised by Google, but can also put off prospective purchasers. It is important to be truthful when creating your ad – in particular, prices should always reflect the actual price on your site. Don’t be tempted to put lower prices in as this can result in you being penalised or even banned.

Google Base product feeds can also contain custom attributes so make use of this feature. Adding product characteristics will help increase the relevancy of your listing and therefore hopefully push your product’s listing up the rankings.

The same can be said of taxonomies. Google provides a taxonomy for retailers to use however you can also add your own custom taxonomy into your feed. By picking a strong taxonomy with high relevance, this will again increase the relevance of your products and therefore give your products the best chance of ranking highly.

Images are also useful as there is strong evidence that users are more likely to click on a product listing if a relevant image is attached. Online shoppers like to have a good idea of what it is they are buying so ensure that your images are of the product and are clear and of good quality.

Freshness is also a factor when looking at Google Base feeds. It is advisable to upload your feed on a regular basis to ensure that it is always fresh with the latest prices and stock levels.

Lastly, Google uses seller rating. Although seller ratings won’t impact on your SEO they are a trust factor. If two sellers are offering the same product for the same price and one has a five star average from a large number of buyers whilst one has no history, the user is far more likely to choose to purchase from the first seller as they look trustworthy. Therefore it is important to cultivate as many ratings as reviews from purchasers as possible.

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott, who you can follow on Twitter @NicholaStott

Wolfram Alpha (the self-titled computational knowledge engine) is officially slated to launch any minute, however they released a debut screencast tonight. Watch this first, pick your jaw back up from the floor then we’ll continue… http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

So what is Google’s cash cow and why is the Wolf a threat? Sponsored Search is by far and away the biggest cash machine in the Google arsenal of products. You know the links at the top of the page on Google, Yahoo! etc? Those links with the shaded background? Yep – they are Sponsored Search ads. Every time you click on one of those ads, the advertiser pays the search engine an amount of money. Such amount is set in a real-time bid ecosystem, taking account of the value of the product I am trying to sell and the amount of competition on the page and other such factors. Here’s how it works.

Comscore reckon that the average UK user searches 24 times a month. 24 x 30MM (UK online) = 720MM total UK searches a month. At over 85% of the search market share that gives Google at least 612MM searches that could potentially make money. Of course not every search has an advert attached to it. Some searches might be too academic or just plain weird to have an advert that is relevant, so let’s say for argument sake that Google shows adverts 60% of the time – that’s a potential of 367.2MM searches on which to show ads. Of course, the sponsored links will not always be clicked in favour of the natural search results, but let’s imagine this happens 15% of the time. 15% of 367.2 is 55.08MM clicks at an educated guess of 15p average = £8.262 MM a month

So how can Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine be a potential threat to this position?

At the moment, search engines allow advertisers to bid on all sorts of keywords that could be reasonably agreed to be relevant. So if my product is a low APR loan, Google will permit me to bid on terms such as low APR loan, cheap loan, low rate loan etc. My ad will only show up if a user searches for those words though. Now; with Wolfram Alpha, those searches that require interpretation or permit greater semantic intention, could be leveraged to serve appropriate and relevant ads to previously unmonetised queries. So that is the potential to hypothetically cover way more searches with a commercial result than Google. Additionally, the more relevant the ad is to the user search intention, the more likely the user is to click on it (click-thru rate). In the Google example above, if we imagine that instead of 15% of people clicking on the sponsored listing, there are 20% instead – then the revenue estimate would be over £11MM a month. Phew!

So anyway – whatever the plan for Wolfram Alpha in terms of commercialising the product, the volumes need to be there in the first place, which can only happen when people see it as a serious alternative to Google. I for one certainly can’t wait to see it live in action, and assess if this really is the future of web search.