Dec

How to get Fake Reviews & 5 Star Ratings on Google… Even on Google’s Own Sites

Niall on December 18th, 2011

How to (mis)use Microformats & Rich Snippets for improved Click-through rates

It became apparent recently that Google is automatically whitelisting any microformat data which webmasters put on their websites – such as reviews and ratings. Google is giving these websites enhanced listings on the SERPs. While this is great for the user experience, this also means is that ANYONE can create fake reviews and put them on their website (hidden!) to benefit from stars and hugely positive reviews under their listing on Google.

The hack works also for users of third party hosted blog and CMS solutions such as on Google’s own blogger.com, Tumblr and WordPress too! This search engine optimizers wet-dream of an exploit allows unscrupulous webmasters and SEOs to effectively ‘steal traffic’ from their search-engine ranking page neighbours, simply by attracting more clicks via the results pages (due to the allure of those reviews and stars – it would be rude not to click that site with all the stars under it, right?).

Fake Google Ratings & Stars – Video

fake review data and stars on google organic search results pages

How to get fake ratings and stars on Google

In a nutshell, you can place specific structured data in your webpage markup (metadata) which can be read by user agents (such as search engine bots) to get ‘extra information’ from your page. This extra info can represent people’s contact details, reviews, events, & products.. the scope is limitless (an example is the hReview microformat used for specifying review data of a movie on a web-page for example).

Obviously any type of automatic rich snippet whitelisting is open to exploration and abuse.

The sites which had this data on their sites and which were “ok’d” or whitelisted manually by Google were lucky enough to benefit from rich snippet listings, allowing them to often “outclick” their Search Engine Results Page neighbours by having some funky stars / review info under their listing. What appeals more to a searcher than an instant positive indicator before they select 1 out of 10 sites to click on huh?

How to fake reviews to get rich snippet listings on Search Engine Results Pages via Microformats

Faking the above data is trivial! Simply insert the following html code into your homepage page:

<div class="hreview" style="color:white;z-index:-5; width=1px;">

Microformat Abuse for improved CTR
,
9.9 out of 10 based on 99,999,999 ratings

</div>

Wait until you get white-listed (probably when googlebot next crawls your site and discovers the extra on-page data), and enjoy a higher clickthrough rate than your rivals. Ho Ho Ho!

If you don’t want to abuse the system, but still want to leverage rich snippets and micro-data, there are many microformat review plugins available for the common CMS’s out there which can be used to generate the relevant microdata for your own (legitimate) enhanced search listings.

Update, 20/12/2011

This ‘hack’ also works on anythird party blog platform (e.g. Tumblr, WordPress, Google’s own blogspot – any site on which you can insert raw markup), resulting in those magical stars and a 9.9/10 rating / 99,999,999 ratings. BOOM.
Food for thought: If these microformat informed ratings have any real effect on organic rankings, blackhatters will be acquiring as many “reviews” on third party sites as possible (crack out automation tools such as LFE, controlled blog networks, or even a crude automation tools such as iMacros to do the work..)

It will sure be interesting to see how this issue can/will be resolved.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or check out my Twitter Page. Thanks for visiting!

Tags: click through rates, CTR, microformats

Uncategorized 1 Comment »

Dec

UK Newspaper websites selling links to online gambling spammers… Again..

Niall on December 15th, 2011

Despite the fact that selling paid links can hurt your search engine rankings, It seems that the Express group are selling BUCKETLOADS paid links.. to online gambling spammers. It’s not so long ago that other media / newspaper groups were caught, outed and punished for selling links.

e.g. Bingoport is buying links on the Express newspaper website and OK website (to name but a few) (notice the dofollow links, also deeplinking to pages so that the buyer can rank/brand parasite in the SERPs).

Manipulating google SERP rankings via paid links is nothing new – but it’s noteworthy because once again a big newspaper is doing it. No doubt, as usual nothing will happen because google is “broken” and spamming goes unpunished in 999999.999% of cases.

Maybe these newspapers will start selling to porn and pill sites too, if the price is right… Money is money right?

Have you seen any other newspapers selling gambling links? Name and shame! =)

Blackhat SEO, Search Engine Optimisation 2 Comments »

Nov

Technorati sells links to gambling spammers?

Niall on November 8th, 2011

- it seems that Technorati is selling links to online bingo sites / gambling spammers -example screenshot - ‘online bingo’ linking to onlinebingofriends dot com.

SHAME ON YOU TECHNORATI

Why a huge pr8 authority site such as Technorati is risking the farm by selling links is not clear – most probably it is the same old story of editors / content monkeys selling links to pay for xmas pressies. Huge companies seem to be untouchable these days when either buying or selling links.

Should techorati get a penalty for this? Should the buying site finally get de-indexed (SPAMVILLE)..

Will the buying site ever get banned/penalised/ de-indexed, I wonder - or is it just a case of “oh it’s gambling SEO, let’s ignore it” Google?

Linkbuilding No comments »

Sep

Linkbuilding: How to get great do-follow links for free on PR-9 WordPress.org

Niall on September 21st, 2011

I cannot overstate how getting a link from pr9 WordPress.org for free is a hugely worthwhile endeavour. Acquiring good links from (authority sites such as) WordPress.org is a beneficial in terms of search engine marketing in a multitude of ways, for example fortifying your backlink profile with trust and link equity, improving your site authority, driving traffic, driving targeted links and more).

In this post I show you how to quickly and easily get PR3+ do-follow links to your site(s) from WordPress.org, regardless of your chosen marketing vertical.

Like most things in life, you can do things the quick and lazy / bad way (risking loss of your links and plugin hosting) – or (my preferred option) the right way, so that your links and plugin remain intact, passing value to your site for years to come.

How to get short-term PR3 do-follow casino links on wordpress.org – the lazy way

Create a WordPress plugin. The plugin doesn’t need to do anything particularly swish. If you can program in PHP, easy game. If however, you are programmatically challenged – you can hire a cheap coder to put together a really basic plugin with very little actual functionality for next to nothing (e.g. on sites such as vWorker). The Alternative is to rip off someone else’s plugin, modify it, and then repackage it (yes I know.. see you in hell a**hole!).
Modify your plugin code/documentation so that it contains anchored links to your spammy casino/pr0n/insertverticalhere sites in the plugin-description
Get WordPress.org to Host it for you – (free distribution, zero bandwidth / hosting/setup costs for you).
Wait for a toolbar pagerank Update and smile at the green bar.
Hope that some SEO guy doesn’t rumble you by blogging about it cos it’s got a potentially good blog headline and is actually not a 100% stupid endeavour, if done ‘cleverly’ (we’ll come to that in a munute!)

Doing it Badly: Exhibit A: Pagerank 3 do-follow Casino links on WordPress.org

– source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/macks-nfl-news-feed/

How to get quality, enduring links on wordpress.org – the SMART way

Create a wordpress plugin. – You should create a GOOD plugin which adds VALUE to users, so that the plugin page attracts some inbound links, and a good # of installs from users, and also to make sure that your outbound linkdrop’s outbound link equity doesn’t solely rely on WordPress.org’s domain authority.
For extra link-value you will also probably make the plugin link back to the plugin page, or your own related domain when the plugin is active. Note: WordPress.org rules do stipulate that plugins with links back to the mother ship must have an opt-out option – so don’t forget to provide but ‘uncheck’ this option by default when your plugin is installed by end-users.
For an extra brownie point, you will try to weave your desired anchor text into your plugin name (e.g. Rugby News Plugin) when you wish to linkbuild for ‘Rugby’ related keywords. The benefits here are twofold: ensuring that incoming anchor text will contain rugby related keywords, and ensuring that your linkdrop on your wordpress.org plug-in page appears as natural as possible in the context in which it appears.
Get WordPress.org to Host it for you – (free distribution, zero bandwidth / hosting/setup costs for you)
Add your relevant, theme-related links to the description – perhaps linking to a new “plugin information page” on your site (since you developed it). This is probably the most natural looking link you can use, and one which won’t get flagged/deleted as spam. EVER (unless you use silly anchor text).
Wait for a toolbar pagerank Update and smile at the green bar. (Obviously real SEO’s don’t usually need to care about PageRank unless they manage huge sites).
Creating fake wordpress plugin reviews and boosting the download count, while perhaps being a bit ‘dark’ isn’t going to hurt either. You could well improve clickthrough rates if rating data is used in hReview style microformats in search engine results page listings for the hosted plugin page..

In the right hands – Marketing via plugins and widgets can be a powerful tool which brings long-lasting SEO rewards. The big emphasis is on a truly useful and quality plugin which will also attract organic links.

Linkbuilding No comments »

Sep

Lunch On Google – Free Adwords

JasonWilliams on September 5th, 2011

This is a Guest Post

As Chris Anderson pointed out in his Book “Free”, there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch…or at least there was when the concept began in a Chicago bar that offered free lunch with every beer sold.

Now how about free Google pay-per-click advertising with every voucher? Sounds farfetched but you can get free Google AdWords – and run your advertising as a free lunch on Google. It is possible to run AdWords voucher after AdWords voucher on the same domain, but with different AdWord accounts to enjoy free adwords.

In this post I shall tell you how to do it, and what not to do, so that your accounts do not get terminated. This is your pass to learning how to get AdWords without paying a £5/$5/€5 activation fee. That is 100% free Google AdWords.

Once you learn how to – a) get vouchers b) set up the account as manual, and avoid any activation fee c) rinse and repeat without getting ‘caught’ d) learn to export and import using adwords editor for maximum speed – then you will be dining out on big ol’ G.

It is not against any law, but Google don’t like it much and you might ruffle a few feathers. The most important message here is: All AdWords accounts are manually checked before going live so be “real”, no duplication, and mind your IP.

Google has long invited and enticed new AdWords customers with the lure of £50, €50 or $75 worth of AdWords. These vouchers are often presented as display advert, or a paper insert with a magazine. You might have been offered one when buying a domain name?

Where to get Free AdWords vouchers

From Google – look out for display adverts after reading this post (or here, here, here & here or search this)!
From Domain Sellers – Authorised resellers can issue Adwords with a domain sale
From Newspapers & Magazines – Subscribe to free marketing magazines
Google Engage – Register with Google as an agency to gain 50 free vouchers
Search eBay for “AdWords vouchers” – prices range from $3-$7 (so not strictly free in this case)

Step One – Set up Google Account

With a code – they look something like 5ZBC-4C4S-NZDB-2DQ9-WTYJ – the first step is to set up a Google account.

Best would be using a new, unique, non-Gmail account. The aim is to be a virgin account in all senses. Any old, established Gmail accounts should not be used.

Step Two – Join AdWords

AdWords is a separate service to your Google Account, so you need to join.

Once joined, the first thing you will see is that Google AdWords prompts to set up a Campaign. Create your campaign one time.

You can choose from the drop down to set up a “Search only”. Google AdWords offers quite a few types of campaign – mobile, search, search and search partners, content network and so on.

Limit your campaign geographical reach to your territory or city. By default campaigns are set to countrywide.
Perhaps set what times you want the campaign to run 9-5, 24 hours or such like.
At the bottom of the page, choose “Set up Billing”

Step Three – Payment Information

Select Your Country
Check “Personal” as opposed to “Business” to avoid incurring tax
Enter a real address, zip code and telephone number – you can find plenty of names, address and phone numbers in White Pages and Directory 192 services.

Step Four – Select Manual & Enter Voucher

The way to avoid activation fees, and get your free “lunch” is to select ‘manual’ (See image below)

By doing this there is the option to enter a voucher code. This is one of the most important steps. Should you select any other payment schedule the free lunch will disappear…you cannot change your schedule of payment once the account is live.

Once you enter the code….It’s not only Google employees who get free food – you can too.

Used AdWords before?

Previously run Google AdWords? Install AdWords Editor, go to FileFile > Export Spreadsheet (CSV) > Export Whole Account.

Log out of the old account, and add your new account freshly set up account details. From here select File > Import CSV > From File – select the previously exported CSV, import and upload. With this the AdWords account is now ready to go.

Confused? Watch this video.

What not to do

Never run two AdWords accounts simultaneously. For one site, run one account. Never duplicate. Pause account one, before submitting account two (with free voucher) for verification from Google. If you overlap the two, expect a slap.

Never do this on a valued site – take a copy of your money site (if need be using www.httrack.com), robots.txt out the domain from natural search, host it somewhere free e.g. 00.webhost.com, www.zymic.com or Google Sites. Your aim is to get free traffic. If you cannot copy the site, perhaps consider hosting an interstitial, landing page or exact match domain microsite.

Never use a catchall email to set up Google accounts. By this, don’t use a catchall to set up account1@tld.com, account2@tld.com, etc – you must have unique accounts. Hotmail or Yahoo will do. Be authentic with the account names joebloggs@hotmail.com etc.

Never over do it. By this it is meant; don’t try to use a few vouchers per day…or even one per day, limit yourself to one every other day. This method is for accounts which might incur £10-15 PPC costs per day. You might think of this method as a way to augment current traffic levels. Yes – Free traffic.

AdWords Account Banned

There are lots of reasons why your AdWords account might get pulled. To avoid banning your account or your IP here are a few measures to avoid detection:

Use proxy servers.
Regularly change your Computer Name
Clear utm cookies between each session, and between each login between PPC accounts you manage.
Create and administer your “free lunch PPC” account rotating using say IE9 rather than your usual Chrome/FF browser
Administer your “free lunch PPC” on more than one computer

This method is a great way to get free adwords vouchers to work for you. Of course, this method is clearly not for everyone. Like every marketing / SEO trick/tool, use wisely and at your own risk.

Need help? Post your comments and I’ll answer inline. Do you have another angle to gaining free AdWords (or Facebook or Bing ads?) – let us know. It’s good to share!

Adwords, SEM No comments »

Aug

3DTV – SKY TV Risking the Farm by buying links?

Niall on August 16th, 2011

The “dark underbelly of Search” (the world of deliberate search engine ranking manipulation) was recently big news in the mainstream, with the NYT openly snitching on JC Penney for link-buying which resulted in a very public Google penalty on the domain – which affected their search engine rankings detrimentally (effectively wiping them out) for 3 months.

Every internet marketer or search engine marketing expert worth a penny should have this information lodged in their subconscious – especially if they are managing the link acquisition initiatives of clients (especially large clients with a lot to lose if things go TITSUP).

Google is very vocal in the past and more recently about how it doesn’t like (or tolerate) link-buying or other search engine manipulation schemes.

So after the very public JC Penney linkbuying & penalty incident – which large corporation in their right minds would (knowingly) risk the farm by buying links? the answer appears to be (either knowingly or unknowingly) SKY TV.

Site: SKY TV.
Destination Page (Exhibit A): http://www.sky.com/shop/tv/3d/
Target Keyword: “3D TV”
Local Keyword Demand (montly): 246,000
Google UK Ranking for Keyword (04/07/2011): #8
Google UK Ranking for Keyword (16/08/2011): #6

It looks like Sky and LG have teamed up to sell some 3D televisions.. Time to buy some links?.

Some Sites Which Appear to be Selling Links to Sky

I’m 99.9999% sure these sites (and hundreds more) are selling these placements to SKY TV – let’s face it. they didn’t put them up for no reason, and there’s no revenue to be made or click tracking on the links.

http://www.eteknix.com/

http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/tags/netbook

http://www.shropshirelive.com/

http://www.slashgear.com/page/301/

http://3dtvreviewsblog.com/

http://www.totallygn.com/page/350/

Idiot Linkbuilders / SEO agencies

It looks that whichever idiot linkbuilders or lazy SEO agency [I mean 'top class & award winning of course] used for link-building for SKY decided to use ‘fake’ banners laden with text-links and styled with in-line css. Examples:

Watch 3dtv with Sky. Visit Sky for great deals & offers.

Watch 3DTV with Sky. Visit us now.

Spamtastic – and not even done cleverly. The spammers behind this linkbuilding could have easily made the ‘banners’ clickable via some JavaScript (while preserving the desired outbound links) and could have made the ‘banners’ look like affiliate banners to avoid arousing the suspicions of SEOs with too much time on their hands.

Why SKY has to buy links when they own one of the most powerful networks in the UK is baffling.

If I sold 3DTV’s, I would be PISSED. If i were SKY TV, I would probably also fire my link-builders for being beyond stupid. Will SKY or anyone else get massively penalised publicly for this stuff, I wonder – or is this just the way things are going until Google et al come up with a less-exploitable organic algorithm?

Linkbuilding 2 Comments »

Jul

Monster Cookie Law

JasonWilliams on July 27th, 2011

[This is a Guest Post]
New European laws for cookies have come into force in the UK, and threaten to pose a serious challenge to online businesses.

The new EU Cookie Directive, or “Cookie Law” applies not just online publishers, but will also extend to gambling clients – flash games for casinos, poker clients for card games – in fact any service which places any kind of tracking or cookie is affected.

From Opt-Out to Opt-in

Previous eu privacy legislation [.pdf] permitted cookies on a basis of informing the user, the new cookie directive states the user must give consent to the cookie.

According to the UK Information Commissioners office, the only exception to the new eu cookie law legislation is:

“If what you are doing is ‘strictly necessary’ for a service requested by the user … This exception needs to be interpreted quite narrowly because the use of the phrase “strictly necessary” means its application has to be limited to a small range of activities and because your use of the cookie must be related to the service requested by the user.”

The difference between reality and policy is this: many publishers will feel the product is diminished without cookie. For example, Amazon’s recommendation feature or a gaming client remembering certain information about your login region or such.

cookie law website example

Ironically, “Allow” sets a cookie to grant consent.

EU cookie law complainace example
Selecting “More information” reveals a accordion drop down which shows each of the cookies a site wishes to place.

The policy definition stops short at shopping carts, and accessibility features.

Terminal Approach

The obvious solution for many is a browser setting which grants consent on a broad brush approach, however this would not help in the case of gambling software clients.

Regarding how the new law might affect Gaming clients The EU directive [.pdf] says:

“Member States shall ensure that the storing of information or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent”.

The operative words being: “terminal equipment”. Terminal equipment might be construed as a poker or casino client. So far UK, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and Estonia have issued guidelines for adopting the directive, meaning much is yet to be decided. Not least the grey area of Isle of Man, or Gibraltar and their relationship as principalities.

Until now it has been permissible for an ‘opt-in’, disclosure of cookies to be buried within a software or website terms and conditions.

Gaming clients may need to adapt to gain an explicit consent for each of the 27 markets within the EU. That goes for .net clients too.

The argument brewing among the ‘cookirati’ is the need for a simple, seamless approach.

Counting the cost

The real threat is to analytics. All websites can coexist with and without cookies. The danger here is that should users click to reject consent of cookies, the publisher will have no analytics to go by. Of course, the regressive route may see companies revert to greater analytics of raw server logs to gain consent free intelligence on the users.

It’s certainly a dry, yet hot potato, and with enforcement on a back burner until May 2012 in the UK, it is “very much wait and see”.

Somewhat comically, when the ICO implemented a cookie consent header bar te site was found to place more cookies than the ICO themselves were aware of. One such cookie was for their CMS. Shame faced the ICO has admitted they are “working on” identifying the source.

Cookie Crunch offer a Firefox plug-in which counts and contributes cookie information back to an open database. You can query the cookie law website database now, and see what cookies sites are dropping.

Example cookies set by Gaming sites:

partypoker.com

pokerstars.com

888.com

betfair.com

ASP.NET
_SessionId

CCID

nitpvid

SITE_PARAMS

UID

WMID

__tempUTMID

date

gcl_id

promo

pti

RMS_ADMETA
_VISITOR_RMS

sti

wuid

ASP.NET_SessionId

MainCookie

ASPSESSIONIDC
QBARQSD

betexLocale_DE
_REDIRECT
_DONE

betexPtk

betexPtkSess

bftim

bucket

content

homepa
geredirect

JSESSIONID

NSC_mc-80-bddp
voutfswjdft
.efgbvmu

NSC_mc-80
-dpoufou
.sfejsfdu

NSC_mc-80-xbu
.efgbvmu

NSC_qpsubm

sess

userhistory

v1st

In time Cookie Crunch will offer a script for webmasters to install and become cookie compliant. Meanwhile you can help build a knowledge base of cookies by installing the FF plugin and contribute to tracking those who track….

What is changing?

This rule was set out in Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR):

(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal equipment -
(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that
information; and
(b) is given the opportunity to refuse the storage of or access to that information

New Rules

“(3A) For the purposes of paragraph (2), consent may be signified by a subscriber who amends or sets controls on the internet browser which the subscriber uses or by using another application or programme to signify consent.

Tags: cookie directive, cookie law, cookie legislation, eu cookie law

Search Engine Optimisation, Technical SEO No comments »

Jul

Google Major Brand SERP update?

Niall on July 21st, 2011

Possible Rollout of New Google Search Engine Results Page layout for Brands
I just noticed this exciting change in the Google SERPs while navigating to a forum which I guess has some “brand” value associated with. I’m not sure if this is just in testing, in rollout, or solely in running in UK at present – however here’s the result of typing in the name of a forum (‘often referred to by the acronym GPWA’) which I intended to visit.

Brand update on google 21 july 2011

It’s unclear at this point if this SERPs layout is exclusive to brands (perhaps any authority site with a lot of site-links will get all that valuable above the fold real-estate – I guess time will tell..)

If this update does only affect brands, it should reduce the negative effects long-suffered by brands in respect of affiliates and competitors parasiting on merchant’s brand names in organic search result. Certainly the #1 sites will see a huge increase in click-through-rates.

I’m hoping to see some interesting new SERP Clickthru data after some testing- but if this is the way things are going then building a brand is more important now than ever.

Is this live everywhere? Please post some examples and your Geo-location if you come across any live examples in your SERPs.

Uncategorized 3 Comments »

Jul

How Online Franchise Buyers Can Protect Themselves From SEO Problems

Niall on July 15th, 2011

Buying an online franchise can be a dangerous business in terms of SEO. How franchise owners and franchise-buyers can protect themselves.

Often when one buys an online franchise or a “white label” – the buyer doesn’t have 100% control of the content, the hosting, the architecture, the CMS and often other essential pieces of the components which contribute to making a successful web-site. As with any project – technical oversights and total dependency on the technical savvy of the software/site provider can make or break your site – and unfortunately the latter happens all too often.

There are a number of travel sites online which sell franchises to investors with local knowledge, contacts and money.The general business model is based upon selling franchises to local business people with a keen interest in making money by promoting local events, accommodation, and businesses in the franchise region they acquire.

I noticed yesterday on one of the largest travel franchises online [no names, no scandal..] had done a domain migration from multiple subdomains on domainA to one single domain domainB (due to a rebrand) – however someone somewhere managed to inadvertently break a number of the sub domains on the old site (and all pages hosted on them) instead of redirecting to the appropriate places on the new site (probably due to misconfiguration – the server returns an error).

If I had paid for one of these subdomains (via a franchise deal) and not known about this problem (and found out that the franchise seller itself was also unaware) – I would be pretty shocked / pissed – as this problem will result in a huge loss of inbound link equity and link context – which will undoubtedly result in reduced on-page authority and site-authority on the franchise’s area on the new site (because value from the old site isn’t passed on in any way when the old server is chugging out sub domain-wide Server error 500 codes, nor is any contextual or semantic value passed on from inbound links to the pages on the old sub domain), as well as a drop in organic or “free” traffic.

It’s not likely any of the misconfigured/broken sub-domains in question will help the franchise owners to be #1 for anything in organic search (although at least in the case of the site I identified, they reap the benefit of having been moved to the same domain as all of the other franchises which were all formerly on separate subdomains – so they share in the benefits of the link equity from other parts of the new 1-domain merged site).

I was nice enough to tell the site in question of their migration cock-up yesterday (it turns out that they were 100% unaware of the problem). I doubt that all the franchisees whose old subdomains were negatively affected via this technical problem have been informed [edit: 19/07/11 - The problems have been patched by the travel site - Fast fix! =)]

How to easily identify SEO issues from a site migration – as a franchise buyer

Demand daily statistics on referral traffic sources pertaining to your specific franchise area on the site
Learn a little about SEO – and get hands-on access to analytical data so that you can interpret the data for yourself and set up your own alerts should things start to go wrong. Early warnings > finding out when it’s too late..
Hire and independent SEO to do a quick audit of the techniques used by the franchise to acquire rankings – prior to stumping up your cash. If rankings are likely to collapse due to bad off-site (links) on-site (markup/architecture) or technical SEO later – you should probably consider backing out,
Be sceptical: test things out for yourself when things on-site change – and should you find an issue – get it resolved ASAP by contacting the right people / making heads roll / whatever means necessary.

How to protect yourself from SEO cock-ups as a franchise seller

SEO Monitoring: Monitor referral traffic sources on a per subdomain or per site area basis – every day. Set up automatic alerts if certain thresholds are met (for example, organic traffic falls by 40%)
If you see a large drop in organic traffic to a site region – chances are that something has gone TITSUP. Do a site audit ASAP.
Hire a team ~~of monkeys~~ with experience in technical aspects of SEO.
Do proper testing after any technical changes or site moves. Tools such as ScreamingFrog SEO Spider (a modern replacement of Xenu Linksleuth) can find any redirects / pages that went amok. The other obvious test is old page to new page mappings for any 404 or 500 codes. Once you have created these – a few lines of code can confirm that your 301′s are in fact working,
Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to check for errors on the original sites after the transition has been made
Be ready to assure franchise licence payers (with documentation if necessary) of your attention to detail with comprehensive documented procedures for integration, testing, bug-checking, documentation….and the rest. You have these procedures in place… right?
You can of course have a contract which states that you are not held liable for any technical cock-ups – but of course any wise investor will spot this a mile away.

Buying a part of a powerful online franchise is not a bad thing – however like any investment it has risks. Your job as a franchisee is to limit these risks by keeping your eyes wide open, and having 100% of the data you need 100% of the time.

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Can you think of any other ways Franchise sellers or buyers can protect or insulate themselves from these issues?

Travel SEO 1 Comment »

May

How to Build a Free Leads / SEO Dashboard Using Widgets, RSS feeds and iGoogle

Niall on May 12th, 2011

As an inhouse travel SEO managing multiple web-sites targeting specific regions, one of my goals is to assist staff my in-house content/copy-writing teams by providing them with tools which can provide real-time inspiration for content creation, as well as identifying invaluable organic link-dropping opportunities and potential sales leads.

Creating a custom travel SEO/Leads dashboard for our internal staff (copywriters, bloggers, tweeters and a handful of sales staff to perform SEO related processes) was one of my efficiency measures to assist with a number of link-building initiatives, including useful forum posting, tweeting, blogging and content/news/article-creation.

iGoogle -a Personalised homepage

If you have a Google account (e.g. a Gmail account) – you can log into iGoogle (iGoogle UK or iGoogle.com), and customize the page to create a dashboard which includes data snippets from various sources (e.g. twitter, forums, news sites).

You can import any RSS feed so that it displays on your iGoogle page. You will find that most web-sites and online services today have RSS feeds on their pages, which you can use to stream headlines / information to your iGoogle Dashboard.

Why You Need a Realtime Travel SEO Dashboard

- Inspiration for Local News/Events Pages: Awareness of local news as it happens – giving the opportunity to blog/write up the news, and then generate links to it by seeding it in appropriate places.

- RealTime “social” Search – drive content creation and leads: Know what your customers are really talking about – what language they use, what they think. Gives potential to generate relevant content, tweet it @ them and engage them in your content with aim to getting SEO value (via retweets/sharing) or sales value (potential conversion).

- Monitor Competitors Back-links and use as link-drop/content creation opportunities - By snooping on where your rivals are acquiring links, you see where and why people link to your competitors. Opportunity to write and post content which is related to the page on your own site, then getting them to post a link to your content (because your article is relevant, or adds something new to the conversation).

Features of a Travel SEO Dashboard

Custom daskboard for use by marketers SEOing a site selling ski holidays in the Meribel, France:

SEO Dashboard targeting the Meribel ski resort, France (Click to Enlarge)

A number of features can be added, with different benefits:

RSS Feed of Twitter search for Meribel – Find realtime goings on/mentions of the resort. Constant inspiration for content, and an opportunity to tweet relevant content/comments, and be re-tweeted
RSS Feed of Twitter Search for “Ski Holiday” – Chance to grab red-hot leads as well as inspiration for content, tweets, retweets
RSS Feed of Google Alert: site:articledashboard.com ski – Inspiration for article writing (SEO content Strategy)
RSS Feed of Google Alert: “Snowboarding News” – Content Inspiration
RSS Feed of Google Alert: “Ski News” – Content Inspiration
RSS Feed of Twitter Search: Whats on in Meribel -
RSS FEED: Ski Forum – Accommodation Wanted -Chance to get leads (by private messaging posters), as well as potential for link-dropping (as long as the link is relevant to the thread in which it is posted.)
RSS Feed of BackLinks to your competitors URL (via Yahoo Pipes) – a site links to your competitor. See why, and see if there is potential to get a link to your site (either by linking to existing relevant content on your site, or by creating and publishing content, then posting a link to it)
Weather Widget: Meribel – Blogging / commenting on current snowfall in your blogs/articles adds a bit of authenticity and credibility.

Example: Adding a Travel related RSS Feed to your iGoogle Page

Assumption: You are responsible for content & link-generation for a travel web-site selling hotel deals in a Ski resort, “Meribel”, in France. .

For this example we are going to use the “Ski Accommodation Wanted” Forum RSS Feed from the J2ski forums.

Log-in iGoogle.
Click on “Add stuff”.
Click on “Add by URL”
Right click on the orange RSS feed image on the J2Ski ski accommodation wanted forum
Select Copy URL or copy link to clipboard option
Insert/Paste the RSS Feed Address (URL) in the “add by URL” box on iGoogle form Click on “Add”.
Return to the iGoogle Homepage, you should now be able to see the new RSS gadget.

Click on the top-right small arrow, and then on “Edit settings” to select how many items you want it to display, and then click on “Save”.

How to add a Twitter Search RSS Feed to your iGoogle SEO Dashboard

Visit http://search.twitter.com
type in your search term in the search box and click on “Search”

right click on the “Feed for this query” link (it has an orange RSS image next to it, see screenshot below) and copy the link location (this is the feed address for the particular search query you entered)

Paste the URL into the Add stuff box on iGoogle (control+v or right click & paste, on a Windows PC to paste)

How to get a Twitter Search RSS Feed

How to add a Google Alert RSS Feed to your iGoogle Dashboard

getting a RSS feed of a google alert

If you wish to add a google alert to your dashboard, you need to firstly create the alert (at alerts.google.com), select the frequency (as it happens), and select deliver to RSS. On the next page you can get the RSS address of the alert by right clicking on the orange RSS icon and copying the link address. You can then proceed to add the link to your dashboard.

Other Useful additions to a SEO dashboard

Google Analytics Data Feeds (Via API or 3rd Party Plugins)
Realtime referring keywords Feed

The feature possibilities are endless! What elements do you have on your SEO / Leads dashboard?

Search Engine Optimisation, Travel SEO No comments »