I just had a phone call with a company interested in using our SEO services.

The following is an almost word-for-word transcript of part of the phone call – as best as my memory and notes can handle.

Bob: “Okay this all sounds good, just we’re looking for. But can I ask you a question?”

Me: “Of course – fire away.”

Bob: “I get the whole ‘white hat’ approach, and understand that you have to stand up and say these things. But I assume you’re going to be going beyond that, right?”

Me: “……….. um….. actually no. Not at all. If you’re looking for tricks and black-hat techniques, we’re not the company for you.”

Bob:  ”I get that, I get that. But off the record, I can tell you that I don’t mind if you push a few boundaries. Everyone’s doing it, right?”

Me: [inadvertently using an incredibly snooty British accent] “Probably less today than a few weeks ago. Are you familiar with the Penguin update, and what’s been happening over the last couple of weeks?”

Bob: [laughing gently - flaming my British snooty attitude] “Hey come on, you don’t really believe that shit, right? So they crap all over a handful of high-profile websites to scare everyone. Big deal. This stuff has always worked and nothing’s going to change any time soon.”

So we’re not going to work with this particular company – not because of any principle that I have, but because he thinks we’re naive and I have “some growing up to do”.

To clarify: I don’t think that dodgy SEO techniques are immoral, they’re just stupid.

The Penguin update has one goal: to significantly reduce the quantity of spam in Google’s organic search results.

Users of Google gain – as they see sites that are more relevant to their terms.

White-hat SEOs gain – as many of their sites are seeing a slight increase in traffic due to the garbage that’s been removed.

Black-hat SEOs lose – as many have seen their traffic drop quite dramatically.

Learn from this.

If you use black-hat SEO techniques you may benefit from doing so, you may even benefit enormously, and you may get away with it for a long time.

But sooner or later Google will catch up with you.

And when they do so, the results could be catastrophic.

Matt Cutts from Google gave some useful advice on what to do if you’re hit by penguin, including one chilling comment:

“If you’ve cleaned and still don’t recover, ultimately, you might need to start all over with a fresh site.”

Do yourself, your business and your website a favour. Dismiss black hat SEO as a viable option.

Notes:

(1) He wasn’t called Bob but sounded like one.

(2) This was written on Friday May 11th, but not posted until a few days later. Isn’t technology amazing?

(3) I’m attending an SEO conference in London on the day that this is posted. Bob probably won’t be there.

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Something unexpected has happened to me. I’ve finally seen the light.

I now understand how to use Twitter for my business.

Three years ago I wrote Twitter Flu – Win a $100 Amazon gift voucher, where I offered a $100 Amazon voucher for anyone who could tell me how to use Twitter for my business.

Four months later I raised the incentive to a $250 voucher, but the reward remained unclaimed.

But I’m now claiming the prize for myself. Actually that’s not really fair. Let me explain.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at MicroConf in Las Vegas. A truly horrible city, but one of the more exciting conferences that I’ve been to for some time.

What set this event apart was the number of moments when an idea suddenly clicked into place.

Sarah Hatter of CoSupport gave one of the best presentations I’ve seen in a long time, and her views on using Twitter have turned my cynicism into respect, and made Twitter a part of my workflow.

Turning British cynicism into respect is a serious achievement, by the way.

Oh and so far I have two potential sales leads from Twitter. That’s two more than I’ve ever had before.

So in fairness, Sarah deserves the $250 Amazon voucher, and she’ll probably notice this blog through Twitter, so should claim her reward.

See – Twitter works in other ways too.

And when I sat down after my presentation, the first thing I did (after breathing) was to look for feedback on Twitter. And there was lots of it.

In days gone by you’d finish a talk, and everyone would tell you how great it was. Even when it wasn’t. After all you’re not going to tell the person who’s just been on the stage that you spent the last hour catching up with email and trying not to fall asleep, right?

Now you get good feedback – and it’s more or less live.

For now I’m going to continue using Twitter to share what I know and feel, to vent and rant, and to pull in people interested in our services. I may even complain about being tired from time.

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Most SEOs are today breathing a sigh of relief. The long-awaited over-optimization algorithm update is now live, and if our client’s sites are anything go to by, there’s little to worry about.

The reason that our clients are more or less unaffected, aside from generally seeing a gain in organic traffic is simple.

We only employ what are considered to be White Hat SEO techniques. In other words when we optimise a website, our goal is to help Google recognise the content of the pages, without in any way affecting the usability of the website.

But not everyone is so happy today.

The Google Webmaster Help forum, for example, is full of complaints:

This post is not in any way gloating. Many of those affected negatively are now in trouble, and this has the potential to have an enormous knock-on effect on their businesses.

But there is an important lesson to be learnt here.

Google have gone to great lengths to explain what they consider to be acceptable SEO, for instance in their Quality Guidelines.

I know of many people and companies who blatantly ignore this advice.

Many feel, for example, that the risks of Black-Hat SEO are outweighed by the benefits.

Yet the risks continue to get increasingly higher.

This is not a one-time effort by Google to improve the quality of their results.

Today might be a good time to reassess the risks of Black-Hat SEO, and perhaps consider the very tangible benefits of playing by the rules.

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The more we need a website, the more we’re prepared to put up with a poor design.

Amazon’s layout is famously basic but effective. Consider the following after a search for paper towels:

And the appearance of the results for the same search on eBay also won’t be winning any design awards:

Amazon and eBay both offer clear and tangible benefits to their users, and so in a sense don’t need to develop the appearance of their websites.

Amazon seem instead to devote their efforts to cross-selling and upselling, while eBay offer more great (and safe) deals than any other website.

Which is why they can get away with ugliness and a dated design.

Yet both websites offer a far prettier front end. Both sites have better-designed and more attractive home pages.

If you rely on your website to impress visitors and turn them into customers, then an ugly interface and design simply won’t do it.

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I’ve spoken to a number of people who found the There’s a war on data post a little worrying, and in particular wanted to know how to how many of their organic visits are being recorded as “not provided”, and how to see the rate of increase in this trend.

It’s very simple.

Go into your Analytics account, then choose Traffic Sources, Sources, Search, Organic.

Change the view mode to percentage to see what how much of your organic traffic is being recorded in this way.

Find (not provided) in the list of keywords and click on it.

Then select the date range to be something like the last five or six months.

From there select the data to be presented on a weekly basis.

Sit back and enjoy the trend.

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Your website’s data isn’t abstract, academic or a goal in itself.

It’s a means of understanding your visitors – where they come from, what they’re looking for, what they do once they arrive and more.

If you’re against the concept of analytics, you’re effectively against understanding how people interact with your website and your business.

Which is why many businesses have come to rely on this information, using it to expand their products and services, respond to the needs of their visitors, and make their website perform better – both in terms of sales and from the point of view of their visitors.

Yet the accuracy and volume of the data you have access to is slowly but surely being eroded away.

Worse still, it’s under attack from three different sides.

Google’s stupidity:

In October 2011 Google announced that anyone signed into a Google account would be automatically redirected to https://www.Google.com – note the s. Anyone searching on Google and clicking on one of your organic listings would be recorded as a visitor from Google, but the keyword would not be listed.

In other words if your website receives 1,000 visitors a day from Google organic listings, and half of them are logged in to a Google service when doing so, you would only receive the keywords for 500 of them. Note that being signed in to Google includes Gmail, AdWords, Analytics, Google +, Google Docs and a wide variety of other products and platforms.

At the time Google’s estimate was that most sites would see this affecting less than 10% of their visitors, but in some accounts we’re seeing the lost data as being over 40%.

The European Union’s stupidity:

From May 26th, all UK websites must offer their users opt-in consent tools to allow cookies that pass information about your browsing activities to 3rd parties.

The important bit here is opt-in.

On our website, for example, we use Google Analytics, Get Clicky, Visual Website Optimizer, SnapEngage and more.

In 37 days time we’ll only be able to do so if our visitors opt-in.

Here are two examples of two websites making use of such a system. Both display the following at the top of their pages.

The obvious question is why would anyone choose to opt in, unless they had to? I wouldn’t, and I suspect that you wouldn’t either.

The likes of Amazon won’t have any problems, but many others will. Unless we restrict the functionality of our websites, and force our visitors to choose between no content or having to opt-in to something that may be a little unnerving.

Neither of which are appealing options.

Firefox’s stupidity:

As reported by Danny Sullivan (Firefox To Use Google Secure Search By Default; Expect More “Not Provided” Keywords To Follow):

“The popular Firefox browser is on track to use a secure method of searching Google by default, a change that will help prevent potential “eavesdropping” of what people are searching for. It will also further reduce the ability for publishers to know how people find their sites in Google…”

So what can you do about this?

Very little, unfortunately.

At the time of writing this, many UK businesses and websites appear to be waiting to see what everyone else is going to do.

And don’t even think of obvious solutions, for example switching to another platform instead of Google Analytics. The data isn’t being passed from Google, so there’s no way around it.

The whole situation is an unhealthy mix of fear, ignorance and stupidity – a lethal combination for businesses and people in general.

And the hypocrisy would be laughable if the issue weren’t so serious. For instance Google keyword data is still being passed along when someone clicks on one of Google’s ads.

Google clearly wouldn’t want stupidity to stand in the way of their business after all.

Things may get a little interesting in 37 days.

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Making a great first impression is misunderstood.

When you meet someone for the first time, you’ll probably make some sort of instant judgement based on what you see. What they’re wearing, how they hold themselves and so on.

But this first impression can be forgotten.

Perhaps you weren’t initially impressed by the guy you were introduced to at a conference. He may have looked a little shabby, and seemed ill at ease and awkward.

But then you saw his presentation, and the content of his talk and his depth of insight dazzled you. You saw him in new light.

But still nothing has been permanently etched. Perhaps after the talk you spoke with him with a view to using his services, but his arrogance and general disinterest annoyed you.

So the first impression was overshadowed by the second, and this in turn was dominated by the third and possibly final impression.

The chronology of events isn’t anywhere near as important as the significance and scale of each.

If the presentation wasn’t of interest to you, you might still think of him as awkward and uninteresting. Or if he’d been only slightly disinterested in your proposal you might have been able to overlook this.

When you sell software online there are many chances to make a good impression, and some are more relevant than others.

The appearance and clarity of the website are important. Get it wrong, and users may go no further.

The installation/signup process is also important. Get it wrong and the exasperated user may simply give up.

And let’s not overlook the product itself , the quality of which determines whether the user buys or walks away.

But every single interaction between the product and user creates a new chance to create a lasting impression.

Consider the Screaming Frog SEO Tool as an example.

First impression: a cool name with a basic & clean page, but it’s all features; no benefits.

Second impression: the video was basic and  the content technical.

Third impression: the software looked clunky and ugly.

Fourth impression: the software blew me away. Five minutes after running it for the first time I paid for a pro licence and will no doubt continue to renew each year.

For me the fourth impression was the one that stuck, which is why I keep using and recommending the software.

But the more important point is that any of the slightly negative experiences may have been the last. The website may have put me off the trial, and I may have walked away never to return.

But as mentioned earlier, the significance and scale are important.

The website wasn’t terrible, the video made some good points, and the interface wasn’t of great significance to me.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, but every interaction has the opportunity to be the one that lasts.

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Click Fraud poses one of the greatest threats to the future of Google, a company whose 2011 unaudited accounts show advertising generating over 96% of their total revenue.

If Click Fraud were to spiral out of control, and advertisers were to realise that a significant percentage of their ad spend was fraudulent, it wouldn’t take long for a significant number of advertisers to either dramatically scale back or even close their accounts.

This poses a very real and credible threat to the future of Google.

Google have far more to lose from Click Fraud than their advertisers, and are therefore constantly devoting significant resources to hold it at bay.

When it comes to communicating this to their advertisers, Google have to be extremely careful.

As the recent self-perpetuating petrol/fuel crisis in the UK demonstrates, telling people not to panic has the complete opposite effect.

Google therefore have to tread a fine line between showing their advertisers that they’re aware and responding to the threat, without generating fear in the process.

Their techniques for doing so are questionable.

For instance you may have noticed entries labelled service adjustment or click quality adjustment in your billing:

Google are vague as to what this might be, and it’s impossible to say how much of this may be down to fraud.

And at the campaign level you can now add the column Invalid Clicks, suggesting that Google believe invalid to be more palatable than fraudulent:

The problem? It’s impossible to do anything remotely useful with this information.

The number of invalid clicks is only provided at the campaign level, so there’s no way of determining where they came from – no way of tracing this back to the keyword, placement or even geographic location.

If, for example, you were able to identify that the majority of invalid clicks came from a small number of countries, you could consider excluding them.

But as it stands, Google are providing you with useless information that is impossible to act on.

Google’s help on the matter – What can I do to help monitor or prevent invalid clicks? - includes the following advice:

“Your first line of defense against invalid activity is to optimize your account so that your ads receive only the most targeted clicks and impressions.”

Good advice, if it wasn’t for the minor point that there is no way of doing so.

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Remember the days when canny website designers used to suggest what web browser you should use to view their site?

Few dare to do so today, but I’m still coming across online services that don’t work well with certain browsers. Only yesterday I was told by PRWeb that I should probably avoid using Google Chrome with their service; a browser used by around 1 in 6 users worldwide.

And the problem is only starting to develop.

I just looked in the Google Analytics accounts of 25 different websites and companies, to see what percentage of their visitors are using a mobile device.

The figures ranged from 0.5% to 10.3%, with an average of 4.9%.

Most companies, ourselves included, choose to ignore the problem. A few force their mobile visitors into ugly WAP-like versions of their web pages.

Mobile usage will continue to grow, and the profile of your mobile visitors may go from bored-on-the-train to people who are actively interested in what you sell.

And catering for the growth in mobile usage involves more than basic presentation.

Your visitors may be browsing your website on their iPhone, but be interested in downloading your software on their Windows desktop.

They may not know how to send a link from the device to their email client, or they may not bother trying to do so.

A good starting point would be to see how many of your visitors currently use mobile devices to view your website.

From there you can decide how (not if) to cater to them.

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Don’t ask me how this started, but I’ve become very intrigued by spam.

It’s hard to find any solid data, but it’s estimated that there are around 130 – 150 billion spam sent every day.

And it’s thought that a spammer only needs a 0.0001 per cent response rate to make a profit.

Spammers have two main obstacles in their endless game of cat and mouse: products/services that block them, and recipient’s reluctance to open and act on their emails.

One in ten thousand and you’re making money.

So how do you get your one in ten thousand?

You need well written content, the technical expertise to get through the filters, and quantity.

Your website, by comparison, also needs well written and effective content, a sound product, and people who are interested in what you sell.

Yet unlike the spammers you probably need a significantly higher conversion rate.

But you can improve the odds.

More effective content is achievable through split and multivariate testing. I find it incredible that all websites don’t do this on an ongoing basis. It just works.

And more targeted visitors are available through better marketing.

Spammers need to fight the ever-changing obstacles to their business models.

Yet many online businesses choose instead to concentrate almost completely on their products, and neglect their marketing entirely.

Spam will never go away because the spammers adapt on an ongoing basis. Many online businesses, sadly, fail to do so.

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