OVERSTOCK.COM BUSTED AGAIN – USING BLACK HAT SEO
Once again, Overstock.com is suspected of playing dirty.
Last February, Overstock.com was penalized by Google for manipulating the search engines. The online retailer offered students and faculty discounts in exchange for posting links from college and university websites to Overstock.com. Their motivation? Ranking in search engines are, in large part determined by assessing the number of sites that link back to the site being ranked. In order to avoid artificial influence on search engines, Google forbids sites from paying other websites to embed links on their pages, and penalized Overstock.com for this unethical (“black hat”) practice. The Wall Street Journal quotes Patrick Byrne, Overstock’s chief executive, as saying, “We understand Google’s position and have made the appropriate changes to remain within Google’s guidelines.”
But they might be at it again.
I made this discovery while working on a competitive analysis for a client who wanted to rank for the keyword “kids’ bedding”. The top organic position was held by Overstock.com with this page: www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Kids-Bedding/5389/subcat.html. My browser tools indicated the page had a large number of backlinks, an unusually large number for even a large retailer. I looked further. Using Open Site Explorer I found they had some very suspicious backlinks, including:
- http://stevesloanmusic.com/3comp_.html
- http://essencenet.ca/mainp.html
- http://dvihome.com.au/wp-admin/includes/co_mma.html
All of the above pages follow the same basic format. They’re branded to look like part of Overstock.com and filled with anchor text links that guide users back to the Overstock site. The pages themselves, though, are hosted on sites that are unrelated to Overstock or its products, including the websites of a writer, a musical composer, and an Australian photography and printing service.
The pages listed above are not the only suspicious-looking ones. Many of Overstock.com’s top-ranking pages have similar backlink profiles. You can check them out yourself using keywords like “Egyptian cotton sheets”, “sateen sheets”, “bedspreads”, “kids’ bedding”, and “bathrobes.” You’ll find many more.
Based on my years of industry experience, this type of activity seems to be as “black hat” as it gets. I can imagine two scenarios that might explain these links:
- These are paid links, and the sites’ webmasters allowed Overstock.com to post the pages.
- The sites were hacked, and the pages were placed on the sites without the webmasters’ knowledge.
Either way, the Overstock pages on these sites appear very suspicious. Overstock.com, whether intentionally or not, is clearly violating Google’s webmaster guidelines again. Based on these guidelines, I am curious to see how long it will take Google to serve up another penalty.
Overstock.com may or may not be aware of these pages. The world of Internet Marketing is full of miscommunications, implementation errors, and newly developed techniques that might be considered “grey hat”. We don’t want to accuse Overstock of trying to manipulate search engines again, but only bring attention to these questionable SEM tactics.
What’s your take on this issue? I’d like to hear your viewpoint. Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
ANATOMY OF AN ORGANIC TREND, OR “WHAT I LEARNED FROM #ZEBRAGIRL”
I spend most of my day signed into Twitter (I hate leaving it behind when I leave my desk) and have my Trending Topics set to Dallas-Fort Worth. Cody our Internet marketing specialist pointed out to me that #ZebraGirl was trending, and neither of us knew what that was, let alone how it ended up the third-most popular topic on Twitter for DFW.
It took awhile looking through the search results for #zebragirl to figure out why people were talking about it, but Cody and I quickly discovered people were talking about a girl on the campus of the University of North Texas in Denton who was wearing a two piece black and white outfit in a psychedelic print, and they had nicknamed her Zebra Girl. People sent in “sightings” of Zebra Girl, and there seemed to be an unwritten rule that someone SHOULD tell her, but no one was going to.
In an hour or so since it began, it has become the second highest trending topic, second only to Promoted Trend #subwayfan. It’s trending higher than “Marvin’s Room”, the name of a new single by hip-hop artist Drake which was organically trending nationally. Someone was tweeting about this girl every ten seconds, and that’s not even at the peak of the trend.
The trick to this becoming an organic trend was that it was left alone, just like any other piece of bad PR. But in this case there was also a mystery- who was this girl? Where was she going? People were out on campus trying to spot her. If this were guerrilla marketing, she’d have some sort of reward for those who found her in the form of a promotion or free product. But the authenticity here is what’s keeping the trend going and why people have been talking about a pair of leggings all afternoon. This wouldn’t continue if people were trying to find the BRAND NAME Zebra Girl Spokesperson. It wouldn’t be fun OR funny to find her around campus. The allure is in the idea that her outfit looks insane and she ostensibly doesn’t know.
Authentic intrigue is the key to establishing a social media trend. Upset the ordinary and people will talk about you. Both Alamo Drafthouse and NYC restaurant Jo’s have figured this out recently by creating the best anti-texting PSA ever and writing a scathing rebuttal to a Yelp Review respectively. They threw out “business as usual” (some people might argue it flies in the face of “the customer is always right” to tell people their business isn’t welcome if they act up) and it got them serious attention. You’d think this would be an obvious proposition, but the common approach seems to be “sneak in the marketing and see if they notice” a la Virgin Mobile’s new “Sparah” campaign. You can’t tell me Ashton Kutcher was really excited about that.
No, the hardest thing to do in social media is simply to be interesting, and too many people afraid to be different. But go against the norm, and organic trends are yours.
HOW WILL SCHEMA.ORG AFFECT SEO?
Google, Bing and Yahoo announced today that they all were adopting a new extended markup called schema.org.
This extended markup allows webmasters to add additional markup to their site to help search engines better understand their content.
The elements of your site that you can use the schema.org markup on are:
- Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …
- Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
- Event
- Organization
- Person
- Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant …
- Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review, AggregateRating
Google has a rich snippets testing tool that will validate the code on your site.
We here at Globe Runner SEO anticipate that sites which utilize the schema.org markup will see increased traffic as the search engines more accurately place pages in search results. Search engines will give natural preferences to pages that give a clear window into their content.
Transcription
Eric McGehearty: Hi, it’s Eric with Globe Runner SEO, and I want to talk about something new, it’s Schema.org. Today Google Bing announced jointly that they were going to use Schema.org. Schema.org is basically very similar to what I’ve talked about before, which is microformats.
It’s a language system, it’s an add on system to an HTML markup that you would have on your page and your website page that Google, Bing, Yahoo have all agreed to use. It’s going to continue to grow, it’s going to be a library of markups that we can add to a webpage. The whole idea is to make search engines smarter so they can better engage with your content.
Honestly, it’s really not that complicated. There are extra codes, extra tags that I can put next to specific types of elements that allows a search engine a greater depth of understanding. So for instance, the example that they give on Schema.org is “Avatar”. If I put in my website a headline that said “Avatar”, how does the search engine know that I want to talk about the movie “Avatar” or if I’m talking about an avatar for representing a person’s face, right? How do they know?
Well, I could put in, from Schema.org, these additional microformats that would then tell the search engine, “This page is about the movie ‘Avatar’.” I want to also put in some extra text in there and I could in a person’s name and I could specifically label that name using the microformats and say, “And the director is,” right? So I’m able to actually tell the search engine all the nitty gritty details about the pieces of content on my page.
Here’s what’s neat microformats have been used been used for a little while, but the initial push of microformats was, for instance, reviews were a big push on microformats so that the search engine could put star ratings next to search results. That’s certainly still part of it, but now there’s an emphasis on people, places and things as well. Events are still part of it, that was part of the initial microformats rollout.
Today, if you have a company page and you have your employee page, you can add microformats in there to say, “This is a person. Here’s their email address, here’s their contact information,” things like that. If you’re a small business, a local business, or if you have locations of any kind, this is a really great opportunity to tag your location. You can tag your phone number, you tag your address, tag your business name, and you can really optimize that content so that the search engine really understands that you’re referring to yourself.
Also, let’s say that you had your address and then an alternative location on that same page. Well, you want to make sure that you tag your address properly so in local search results you come up, but that other addresses on the page are tagged differently to represent that those are representing other places on web, other things that you’re listing on your page. So there’s a lot of ways you might think about using it.
There was one that I found particularly interesting as an SEO person. There’s actually a way, using these microformats, to indicate a link without having a clickable link on your page. So, for instance, if I was referencing something, and I wanted to reference the Wikipedia article so Google knew that I was talking about this specific thing that Wikipedia is talking, I could do that without linking to Wikipedia.
I don’t actually affect the user experience, the user doesn’t even see a link, there’s no clickable text on my page, but Google sees that there’s a link out to Wikipedia. That would almost certainly affect search results in the same way that links now affect search results as a vote or passing credibility.
So Schema.org, visit it. If you’re a web developer and you’re interested in SEO, it’s a must have. You must learn this stuff if you want to stay on the cutting edge. Here at Globe Runner, of course, we’re staying on the cutting edge for our clients, and we’re excited to start integrating this in. It was announced this morning and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
SOCIAL SEARCH
If you’ve done a search on Bing or Google recently, you may have noticed the addition of “social circle” qualities included within the search results. For example, links that have been “liked” by members of your Facebook network may be pushed towards the top of the search results when searching with Bing. Or, if you’re using Google, you may see links that have been shared by members of your Twitter network included within the search results. This new feature of a social search allows a user to view more personally relevant results determined by the user’s social networks, making results unique to each person who has their own network of friends. Traditional search algorithms are used alongside the new social search feature, so search results will still appear normal if not shared or liked by anybody in your social network.
Through research, Bing states in a recent blog post that 90% of consumers look to their family and friends when making a purchase decision, and almost 80% of consumers will postpone a purchase decision until getting approval from a friend. Adding social qualities within the search results creates more of a conversational aspect to the search process, using the collective knowledge of the web as opposed to only facts and inbound links. Your friends, and the global community, can now help you discover information that is more relevant to you.
There was one issue with Bing’s social search that I found misleading when searching for a particular product. After searching for a specific product category, like cameras, it appeared on the search results page that a handful of my friends on Facebook liked some of the camera product pages on certain websites. In reality, that was not the case. My Facebook friends only liked the parent website that the products are listed under, i.e. Overstock.com, and not the actual product page. This may fool some consumers into making a purchase because they perceive they’re friends “liking” the product page when they actually have no interest in the product. Bing claims this will allow you to trust the source from which you are buying your product, but I don’t think users will view it that way.
Now you may be asking yourself, “What about Google?” Google still has a stronghold on the search process with a large following. Although Facebook and Bing have created a partnership to give Bing better access to Facebook’s information for search results, Google can also use your “social circle” to give you personally optimized and relevant results. Google uses Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, and other publicly available sites to show you results that people in your social circle have shared or recommended. It operates in a very similar way to the Bing social search, but without access to Facebook data. Google claims they will soon find a way to access Facebook’s data for similar search purposes, but I wouldn’t expect a partnership to form.
Google is also trying to implement a new social layer, called “+1”, which will allow a user to publicly approve of a link or website. This appears to be Google’s attempt to compete with Bing’s inclusion of Facebook data in their search results. Something tells me that it’ll be difficult for +1 to catch on with users, as there is already a wide assortment of social features and buttons on the web, and adding another might create more clutter for the user. Although, Google has surprised me in the past, so I can’t ever completely count them out.
I recently attended a seminar for the Dallas Ft. Worth Search Engine Marketing Association where they discussed these new social search features in detail. Their was much talk about creating valuable content that will entice viewers to like, share, or repost within their social circles. After all, content is the reason your brand gets shared. Finding the social “influencers” of the net and using them to share your content can help generate traffic and exposure. Conversations are happening right now about your brand, and real-time marketing should be implemented to be a part of that conversation. There is social relevancy in what is being said about your brand, and having a consistent presence in conversations will work in your favor.
How do these new social search feature effect your business? Are you going to have to change your current SEO tactics? Do you need a Facebook page? Will this benefit local search? Contact us today to learn how our team at Globe Runner can help your business adapt and benefit from these changes.
REMOVING CONTENT FROM GOOGLE
One piece of online reputation management is removing defamatory content from Google. Kenton J. Hutcherson principal attorney Hutcherson Law talks about removing content form Google with a Court Order. Also you can report other types of content that you would like removed, copyright, personal information and the like.
Hutcherson Law specializes in Internet Law
Transcription
Eric: Hi, this is Eric with Globe Runner SEO and today I’m with Kenton Hutcherson with Hutchersonlaw.com. Kenton is fantastic. We just had the pleasure of listening to him speak at DFWSEM. He talked about a lot of really interesting things. He talked about how companies can be harmed by information that’s posted by anonymous users on websites like the Ripoff Report. It was really fascinating stuff. And as a company, sometimes we help clients manage their reputation. Kenton, can you give me a little more insight into that that my clients might be interested in on how they can protect their reputation online?Kenton Hutcherson: Sure, absolutely. One of the key things, one of the most effective things that I’ve found out in terms of my work as an Internet attorney is if I can get a court judgment, a court order saying that a certain posting on a website is false and defamatory, I can take that judgment to Google, and Google now actually has a portal on their website where you can upload that court order. They will honor that, actually remove that link from their search index.
Eric: Wow, wow. That’s really big. But you can’t just go to Google and say, “This guy said something nasty about me.”
Kenton: Right. I’ve had a lot of clients that have tried to do that. And there’s a lot of frustration out there because people are like, “Look, it’s destroyed my business. These things are just blatant lies.”Eric: Right.
Kenton: And Google’s position, I mean I can’t speak for Google but my impression is that they’re not the Internet police. They don’t want to get involved between a speech screen two people about what’s true and what’s not. And so they need something to hang their hat on for them to take action. And it seems to me that they’ve made the decision to defer to the courts, which is what we have to validate these types of issues in our society. And so as long as you have a court that’s already made that judgment for you, Google will honor that.
Eric: So another question that I think clients may have is how do I sue somebody, how do I get a court order when the Internet is such an anonymous place and I can’t put my finger on who it is that made that statement on some random website? I can’t sue the website, you know? I would like to sue the website but they didn’t say it. I’ve got to find that guy, right?
Kenton: A lot of times, yes. There are three options. Number one, a lot of people that have been defamed have a pretty good idea of who defamed them.
Eric: OK.
Kenton: They may have one client that was really unhappy and they’ve already complained. Maybe they have a disgruntled former employee. Maybe they know a competitor that’s doing some things that they shouldn’t be doing. In those cases, a lot of times we’ll file a lawsuit against who we think it is and then in the discovery we can ask them in a deposition under oath whether or not they’re the ones that posted it. We can get computer records about what their activity was. You can also issue a subpoena to the website to verify who it might be.
The second one is to file a John Doe lawsuit and then issue a subpoena to the website to obtain the identifying information and get the IP address, and get the name they used when they logged in. About 50 50, 50 percent of the time that will actually lead you to the actual person.
Eric: OK.
Kenton: A lot of times it doesn’t take you anywhere. Maybe they logged in at a Starbucks cafe.
Eric: Right.
Kenton: Right, where it’s impossible to trace who the actual IP address went to. The third thing you can do if none of those options work, you can file a lawsuit against the name that they used in the posting, the street name. And in that case what you need to do, depending on the local court rules, you can serve them by publication which is where the court gives you the authorization to post a legal notice in the newspaper where the court is located for a certain period of time. And then after a certain period of time in that publication, they are deemed to have been served in a lawsuit.
And so theoretically, they’re going to get notice, they’re going to file, they’re going to defend themselves and the lawsuit will go on as it should. In a lot of cases they don’t show up and so you then essentially win by default.
Eric: Right. So even if you never find the guy, it doesn’t matter. You can get a court order, file that with Google and get the…
Kenton: Well, potentially. Of course you have to have a good faith pleading, you have to prove to the court that you actually have a legitimate defamation claim. But there certainly are options out there if you can’t find the person who made the posting.
Eric: Wow, fantastic. Well, I think that’s some really great information. And you could get really hit hard. If somebody online complains about your company, it can really hurt your reputation. And once you lose it, it’s so hard to get back. It’s great that we have guys like Ken that can help us with these really challenging situations and potentially lose millions of dollars to businesses. And now we have a way that we could recover our reputation if something like that happened to one of our clients or to anybody that we knew. I really appreciate your time, Ken.
Kenton: My pleasure.
Eric: This has been great. Thank you very much.
Kenton: Thank you.
GOOGLE MAKES SEARCH MORE SOCIAL
As more and more players enter into the search engine market, the only way to win market share is to innovate; come out with new features, or make your search engine faster. Recently Google did this, when it unveiled Google Instant, showing results as you search, shaving on average 2-3 seconds off of a search.
Though social media is being universally adopted and growing immensely in popularity, it has been relatively untouched by the search world until now. Bing recently announced a deal with Facebook to integrate Facebook’s data into their search algorithm.
Google is similarly introducing more social into its results. Now when you search a specific topic on Google, a link under each result shows how many people have shared the same link. In addition, Google will also show how many updates on Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook have the link in them.
The new feature between Bing and Google may seem similar – however, Bing only shows social results from your friends, whereas Google shows results from the whole web.
So what does this mean for SEO? It means there will be some changes, but nothing earth-shattering. The biggest change is that it gives more relevance to social media, and also makes the search experience more intuitive. It also means that embracing social media, especially “like” pages, all the more important. However, this will impact the SEO industry, but not dramatically. The SEO industry hasn’t been about simply reacting; for one to stay relevant in this industry, you learn to adapt to changes. In addition to adapting, SEO is about making search better and more intuitive. So even with Google’s new search integration, the search will go on.
IS AUTOMATION BLACK HAT SEO?
Is automation Black Hat SEO? well I will let you decide. But this is a great interview with social media expert Giovanni Gallucci and Dallas social media speaker J.R. Atkins. Just a FYI: Globe Runner SEO does not condone or employ black hat practices for their clients. Sites that employ black hat SEO techniques have been known to be penalized by Google, even de-listed, so proceed with caution.
Transcription
JR: Hey this is JR Atkins we’re at OpenCamp today and I’m with Giovanni Gallucci and Gio’s gonna give us a few tips that he mentioned in his talk this morning that were three sites that we might find useful in a black hat-oriented SEO
Gio: oh it’s so not black hat…..it’s blackhat.
JR: So tell us like…Tube Toolbox
Gio: Yeah so actually these are applications that, if you go to tubetoolbox.com you can download this application and basically tube toolbox is a swiss army knife for YouTube. It allows you to go in and find videos similar to the videos you have, find users who find those videos and comment on them, it allows you also to go in and do messaging in bulk instead of going in one at a time for messaging with people so there’s so much stuff that this thing does, I mean I literally use this tool every single day on several machines for different clients so like I said in there, if you’re not doing video, I don’t know why you’re not doing video and you can figure out a way to integrate video not matter what your business is, and you’ve gotta get out there and get smart and use tools like Tube Toolbox that make your life so much easier. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get through that learning curve it makes your life so much easier with online video.
JR: Next one was Bookmarking Demon.
Gio: Bookmarking Demon is similar to Tube toolbox but it’s for Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious and StumbleUpon, Mixx and things like that. You go and plug in all your usernames and passwords for yourself, if you have employees that are part of your social media campaign or other affiliates that you work with, you plug in all their authentication information and then you go in and create a list of your search engine optimized titles and descriptions and links for the things you want to promote, you click a button and walk away and bookmarking demon will randomly go through and bookmark these sites for you. The reason why this stuff is so important is that these let you stay within the terms of service of the platforms you’re working with, and it also looks more natural than if you just sat down for 40 minutes bookmarking all these sites. It looks spammy so it’s really important that you’re using something that runs in the background and waits three minutes and updates something then waits eight minutes then updates something because then the platforms don’t get angry with you for just overloading their system all at once and it sits there and does that work for you while you’re off doing other things so you’re billing here, billing there.
JR: OK, last one was TweetAdder.
Gio: same thing, guess what? for twitter! The biggest thing I use Tweetadder for is to look for local users on twitter- I work with a lot of hyperlocal businesses like onehere is youplusdallas.com and we really focus on people in the dallas/ft. worth area that’re looking for things like entertainment and nightlife and restaurants and things like that so I’ll go on TweetAdder, look for names and look for keywords I wanna search on but putting in a zip code to only find people within 50 miles of the central business district in dallas. Then I can take those people, add them to the company account instead of going out there and randomly following anyone on Twitter talking about sushi and then you find out that 90% of your users are in Canada or outside the state of Texas, where we’re at right now, TweetAdder is another one of those tools that allows you to be really efficient, really focused and a lot cleaner about the way you go and do marketing because before these tools were around you kinda went out there and you threw whatever you could against the wall and would walk away, and that’s not good for anybody, it’s a waste of time for your clients, a waste of time for you as a specialist and for the users that are getting messages that aren’t targeted so it’s a waste of their time. You need to go in there and invest in these tools so when someone in dallas mentions a restaurant in dallas and they get something from us they’re like “oh theres an association there, maybe i actually want to follow them” and not some mechanic up in canada who’s complaining about a bad hamburger that he just went and ate.
JR: Well thank you for your time I know all these are $100 or less and if you want more go to GlobeRunnerSEO.com we’ll keep the videos coming.
SECRETS OF SEO TRAFFIC FROM YELP
I got to attend OpenCamp this weekend- a conference in Addison dedicated to developers, bloggers, Social Media and all things internet. Of course it’s always great to share knowledge with like-minded professionals, but I would have to say one of the highlights of the conference was talking to Nikki Bonds, aka Yelper Nikkanore and Yelp Employee Extraordinaire, who writes the Dallas Weekly Yelp Newsletter. I love the newsletter because every week there’s a new subject- the last one was about who has the best potatoes in town– but Nikki herself combs through all the listings on Yelp to find the best companies to showcase in the email. So of course I had to ask- how does a business find its way into the inboxes of thousands of DFW Yelp members?
Nikki works with a different theme each week, but some repeat- for example, in the past there’s been “spa week” and “drinks week” that come back from year to year. But Nikki goes for both mainstream choices and destinations off the beaten path, so don’t be concerned that your mom & pop operation won’t find its audience. Make yourself easy to find with great descriptions including key words and terms.
The main thing is to have a fully fleshed-out profile- Nikki looks for profiles with correct, complete information about the venue, quality pictures, and good reviews. So taking the time to really complete a business’s Yelp profile and encourage your patrons to post reviews can pay off in big traffic increases when Yelp takes note. So go ahead and Yelp away!
BLOGGING YOUR BRAND: ARE YOU POSTING ENOUGH?
Whenever I work with a company who complains that they don’t get enough traffic, my first question is “How often do you post?” Because if it’s not at least once a week, then you’re not posting enough. No one routinely checks websites that never change. If you establish a pattern of new content cropping up every week (more than that is even better), people will learn to check your blog more often, bringing you more traffic. Keep it somewhat unpredictable though, that way you keep your readers on their toes.
If you don’t know what to write, look through your inbox. Do you consistently get the same questions over and over about a particular product or service from your customers? Your blog is a perfect place to spotlight that with an informative and useful post. Take a look at your analytics: does one of your main keywords need a rankings boost? Create a blog post with optimized links and anchor text back to your website. If you have an interesting take on a current event related to your industry (i.e. a software company’s opinion on the iPad) that’s a great topic too. You have a lot to say, but you may not have considered blogging as a marketing/PR channel for your brand. That should change.
If you simply haven’t got the time each week to sit down and blog, consider writing a few posts in one sitting and then using your Content Management System (what you use to manage your self-hosted blog, but we’ll get to that) to schedule the posts and stagger out the days they actually publish. That way your readers keep coming back all month long for new content, even if it only took you one morning’s work. If you’re just not the writing type, consider an audio podcast or video blog/vlog. These mediums can be used to great effect and can easily go viral if the content behind them is solid. Get creative! Post consistently on your company blog and new visitors and potential clients are sure to come your way.