Detect Hacking attempts with Google Analytics

Monday, July 26th, 2010

If someone was attempting to break into YOUR site, use YOUR bandwidth, or even use YOUR site to launch attacks against OTHER sites, would you know? How would you know? When would you know?

Would you be able to detect the attack and stop it before it caused any damage? Or would you be stuck trying to cleanup after the attack was finished?

Recently at SEER interactive while examining some unusual traffic to a client’s website, we discovered that Google Analytics was picking up an attack against the site as legitimate traffic. With a little digging we found several key indicators which can help you determine if the traffic to your site is actually traffic, or if some of it is an attack against your site. Also included in this post, is a recommendation on how to handle an attack once discovered, and the end of this post is an Alert you can setup in Google Analytics that should email you if someone starts to launch attacks against your site.

The site we were examining recently had a dramatic increase in direct traffic without an outside event to explain the increase such as a newsletter, TV appearance or marketing campaign. Since direct traffic gives us very little information, the best place to start is the Visitor report. Once inside the Visitor report, we can take a look at the map overlay, drilling down to the city level to see which cities are responsible for sending the most traffic to your site.

Carefully examine the top cities in this report, do the top cities seem appropriate to be your top cities? Does the amount of traffic from these seem to be much greater compared to the rest of cities sending you traffic? This is the first sign that you are suffering from an attack, as these top cities can be the launching point for these attacks.

You will often see a sudden sharp increase in traffic, starting on the day the attack was launched.

(Image no longer available)

Hmmm… Does this graph look strange? It should!

Simply seeing an increase in traffic from a city is not in itself enough evidence to say that you’re site is being attacked. If you drill down into the city report itself there may be a couple more indications that you’re site is being attacked. These factors are also useful if the attack has been sustained for a long period of time you and there is no sudden sharp increase of traffic to alert you of the attack.

(Image no longer available)

• Pages / Visit will be closer to 0 than site average.
• Time on Site will be closer to 0 seconds than site average.
• % Of New Visitors will be closer to 100% than site average.
• Bounce Rate for your site will be closer to 100% than site average.

Why do these numbers indicate that your site is suffering from some kind of an attack?

Most Bots do maintain sessions.

Since bots do not maintain sessions, each time the bot queries your site it appears as a new visitor, who immediately leaves, resulting in a bounced visit. This is also why the attack shows up as direct traffic in your reports. If you receive a significant number of these visits your numbers will be skewed to look like the results listed above.

It’s important to note that depending on the amount of traffic your site gets, and the nature of your site, you may not see all of these trends. However if you see a significant difference in these stats compared to other referring cities there is a good chance that your site is being attacked.

What Next?

You have determined that you’re site is suffering from an attack, or you suspect that it might be what are your next steps?

Since Google Analytics is just a reporting system, and it cannot collect the IP addresses of visitors, Google Analytics cannot do anything besides alert you that your site is suffering from an attack.

Since you can’t use Google Analytics for this, the best idea is to contact your hosting company. If you give your hosting company the cities from which you believe the attack is originating from they should be able to determine what IP addresses the attacks are coming from and block them, thus ending the attack.

Google Analytics Alert

If you would like to setup an Alert in Google Intelligence to email you if any of this behavior is detected follow these steps:

• Login to the Google Analytics profile you wish to setup the alert on.
• Select “Intelligence” (beta) from the left navigation.
• Select “Create Custom Alert”.
• Enter an Alert name such as “Hacking Monitor”.
• Select Period -> Day
• Check Receive Email Alert

Now for the fun part, the alert itself! Do not include quotes when entering these values in Google Analytics.

• Select this applies to -> “City”
• Select Condition -> “Matches Regular Expression”
• Enter Value -> “.*”
• Select Alert me when -> “Visits”
• Condition -> “% Increases by More than”

Example Alert:

(Image no longer available)

The final two values of this alert will depend on your preferences and your website. If your website doesn’t receive much traffic you are probably safe putting a high value here (500%+ increase) as any attack will likely result in this increase in percentage. However if you run a larger website, you’ll need to decrease this number, since the attack will be a smaller percentage of traffic from that city. The last value is if you want to compare to the previous day, or to the same day the previous week, this will depend on the traffic patterns of your website.

The end result of this alert will be Whenever any city sends you a dramatic increase in traffic, the primary indicator of an attack on your site, send an email alert.

The last thing to keep in mind is that this alert will only let you know of hacking attacks that run Javascript. If the attacks do not run Javascript then the Google Analytics code snippet will not trigger and the attack will not be recorded as a visit.

Have you noticed this kind of activity on your site before? Do you make use of any other Google Analytics alerts to protect against foul play?

Comments and Questions welcome!

Posted in analytics | 12 Comments »

The 17 commandments of setting expectations in SEO (interview)

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

For all the difficulties SEO throws our way, one of the most difficult areas is in setting expectations. Whether you are in house or agency, consultant or team. Yet some people have figured out the right formula to attracting and retaining the right kind of projects by properly setting expectations. I figured I would ask them (both in house and agency folks) their thoughts on how they do their best to set expectations and share them with you. I have already talked about how I set expectations in SEO, so nothing form me on this one.

I got such great answers that I have taken the top 17 and made my 17 commandments of setting SEO expectations, then at the end of this piece I link over to the question and answer format for all of their answers. Thank you to Rhea Drysdale, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin, Scott Skurnick, Melanie Nathan, Lindsay Wassell and Garrett French.

Here are the questions I asked:

1 – Can you give me a time when you didn’t set a clients expectation properly and it came back to bite you, and more importantly how did you recover from it / what processes have you put in place to keep that from happening again?

2 – I have found that one of the hardest conversations to have with prospective clients is the “you don’t deserve to rank #1 for that keyword” conversation, do you ever have to have those conversations, and if you do, how do you handle them in a way that helps the client realize you are trying to help them.

3 – When a client asks you to estimate ROI on an SEO project or asks where do you expect us to be in 12 months how do you handle those types of questions.

4 – When someone says something to you like, I read a report that shows that 60% of the clicks go to the first 3 listings, so I must be in the top 3 spots – it makes all of us cringe, how do you address that logical concern?

5 – How do you set expectations about the number of links / quality of links you are going to be able to procure for your clients?

6 – How do you handle the situation when a prospective client comes to you and has the budget, but they have few linkable assets, doesn’t have time to create content, weak PR, etc, etc?

7 – Any recommendations on questions to ask a prospective client before you take on a project to sniff out if they have the resources to create GOOD linkable assets?

Based on those questions here are the responses I got and the commandments I developed: (here’s the PDF to print out!)

———————————————————————————————————————-
Can you give me a time when you didn’t set a clients expectation properly and it came back to bite you, and more importantly how did you recover from it / what processes have you put in place to keep that from happening again?
———————————————————————————————————————-

Rhea
Outspoken Media is a small agency, which means we physically do the work ourselves. As COO and a worker, I often have to re-evaluate the time I spend communicating with clients about work and time I spend actually getting the work done. I always want to address a client’s concerns and questions, but I’ve had to learn the hard way that it isn’t rude to explain to a client that the more they need reassurance, the less time I’m going to have to get the job done and demonstrate ROI. In contracts we now clearly state how often we will be available for calls and that if a client needs more time from us, they will be billed x amount per hour beyond their current services. It’s the only way we can ensure a happy balance between communication and work.

COMMANDMENT #1: Thou shall explain the balance between time spent talking about SEO and time spent doing SEO.

Lee
Early on when I was with another agency doing web development projects and web marketing, we’d take on a variety of projects that would involve new territory for us. That kind of scenario creates expectations issues and recovery deals mostly with owning up to capabilities and timeframes. However, with the agency I’ve had the past 10 years, we pretty much stick to what we’re best at, knowing our capabilities and limits. Processes are essential for expectations management with everything to how you market your company, public and media relations efforts designed to build influence and credibility all the way to hiring, training and implementation. Reporting makes a big difference as well and including mutually agreed upon objectives front and center of every program performance report keeps everyone on the same page.

COMMANDMENT #2: Thou shall stick only to what thou REALLY knows to avoid unforeseen client expectations creeping up.

———————————————————————————————————————-
I have found that one of the hardest conversations to have with prospective clients is the “you don’t deserve to rank #1 for that keyword” conversation, do you ever have to have those conversations, and if you do, how do you handle them in a way that helps the client realize you are trying to help them.
———————————————————————————————————————-

Rhea
We’re often brutally honest with our clients, which they usually love. Of course there are times when I do have to explain that their services/products/content just aren’t up to par and in some cases, it might simply be a matter of them not meeting user intent for a particular keyword. I’ve found that it’s easier to explain the situation to a client by letting the competition or search results speak for themselves. Instead of us voicing an “opinion” that the client needs to do x, we give them examples what strategy the competition is using to earn their placement.

COMMANDMENT #3: Thous shall be Brutally Honest! Use the current SERPS to explain what is/isn’t attainable.

Scott
Absolutely. When we were relaunching the Edmunds site a number of years ago there was a desire to rank highly for “Make” terms such as Ford or GM. Due to the competitive nature of these terms I didn’t think we would be able to achieve this even though our site is authoritative in nature. The easiest way to support your argument is by showing examples. When you can show people that the results are dominated by sites which you won’t be able to displace because they are either official OEM sites or Wikipedia it goes a long way in helping your cause. The other argument that can be made as that the quality of traffic going to such general terms won’t help your revenue goals.

COMMANDMENT #4: Thou shall stay focused on revenue primarily, not rankings, links, or traffic.

Lee
A prospective client once asked about pursuing the word “brain” using a new web site. It’s a pretty straightforward thing to share a few datapoints about the search marketplace for any given topic as well as a few specifics for the sites that are already in the top spots. Sharing the resource allocation necessary for uber competitive and broad topics in the context of the prospects online resources vs going after topics that better reflect an intent to buy is pretty useful. But the conversation isn’t effective unless you share alternatives that show how the company can reach their goals. Spend huge resources chasing a unicorn or spend moderate resources going after hundreds or thousands of catchable fairies. (Bad metaphor) but we get it Lee.

COMMANDMENT #5: Take a resource allocation approach – articulate the expected time and resources required to target broad words, which may never rank even with extreme effort.

———————————————————————————————————————-
When a client asks you to estimate ROI on an SEO project or asks where do you expect us to be in 12 months how do you handle those types of questions.
———————————————————————————————————————-

Lindsay
These are REALLY tough to answer and I doubt my answer is going to be very helpful. At SEOmoz we came across this question very infrequently. Most of our clients had already experienced success in SEO and were contracting us to take them to the next level. They already understood the ROI from experience.

Perhaps more helpful is my experience starting out as an in-house SEO. I had to work extremely hard to get my projects into the development schedule. 80% of my job at the time was education and communication. I eventually won over the executive team by convincing them to make an investment in a ‘pilot project’. I was sure it would make a big difference, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint how much of a difference. I got my pilot project and achieved more than 400% SE traffic growth in 6 months. That paved the way and I could always reference that case study as an example of the potential ROI.

COMMANDMENT #6: Thou shall have results that speak for themselves, even if you start with a small project.

Scott
Luckily I haven’t had to deal with a ROI discussion in a while. Once you are able to prove yourself as an in-house SEO, the doubters become few and far between. I have been very fortunate that I have had the support of upper management over most of my tenure at Edmunds. Regarding a 12 month outlook, I always do my best to give an honest estimate. Some projects are riskier than others and I make sure that is known upfront. I am also very clear that I will not make any guarantees and that every project has the potential to fail. If I think I can give a ballpark estimate I will, if I don’t think it is possible I explain why. As an in-house SEO I think we have much greater liberties when it comes to these types of questions vs. agency SEO’s.

COMMANDMENT #7: Thou shall prove thyself early, and always be honest about limitations.

Melanie
Firstly, I never estimate an actual dollar amount (cuz that’s impossible). Instead, I try to focus on what the SEO project will potentially do for their exposure and their website’s usability, which in turn can lead to more signups or conversions. I also offer a list of past clients, the results achieved and an invite to contact any of them in regards to their project.

In every case though, it’s better to promise little and produce huge than to promise huge and produce little.

COMMANDMENT #8: Thou shall always underpromise and overdeliver!

———————————————————————————————————————-
When someone says something to you like, I read a report that shows that 60% of the clicks go to the first 3 listings, so I must be in the top 3 spots – it makes all of us cringe, how do you address that or other logical concerns?
———————————————————————————————————————-

Rhea
We usually don’t cringe, it makes sense. However, is the keyword right? Before we start with a client, we need to see their conversion reports if they’re doing PPC and we need access to their analytics. We want to know what’s driving visitors to convert for them and we prioritize which keywords we go after from there. If a client is starting from scratch we do our homework and make educated decisions on which keywords we will target. Based on performance of those keywords we’ll tweak our strategy over time. When we’re billing a client for so many hours, it simply doesn’t make sense for us or them to go after keywords that won’t convert and we tell them that.

COMMANDMENT #9: Thou shall be practical and consider the other person’s point of view, they don’t know what you know so take time to educate and explain.

COMMANDMENT #10: Thou shall not make ROI judgments without conversion data.

Scott
Funny enough I haven’t had to deal with these kinds of comments. I have avoided using rankings as a success metric for a number of years now. For us it is all about driving unique visitors to the site, giving them the best user experience possible and then getting them to convert. It is much easier to optimize your conversion rate than search rankings because conversion is 100% within your control. Obviously good rankings and traffic are highly correlated but we drive so much traffic via long tail terms that it is nearly impossible to accurately track rankings. Luckily we do rank in the top 3 for many of our core terms but even a slight drop or increase in these rankings doesn’t have a large affect on our overall traffic.

COMMANDMENT #11: Thou shall always optimize conversion rates because that is 100% within your control.

Lindsay
I work really hard to steer clients away from keyword and rank focus and towards overall search referral traffic growth. That said, I have to agree that top three placement is the only place to be. Even the traffic difference between second and first position is substantial. Most of my clients obtain traffic from 10s or 100s of thousands of unique keywords every month. Looking at rank for individual terms isn’t real common amongst these folks. They are (thankfully) more interested in top level figures like the SE traffic volume overall.

COMMANDMENT #12: Thou shall never focus on only one individual keyword.

———————————————————————————————————————-
How do you set expectations about the number of links / quality of links you are going to be able to procure for your clients?
———————————————————————————————————————-

Rhea
Clients that have prior experience with paid links, sponsored posts or article syndication often expect a large sum of links with exact match anchor text. In those cases we again have to be brutally honest about the fact that it is going to take more time for a natural link development strategy to gain competitive rankings, but they will have built a defensible brand. We tell them that they are going to see less links, but better quality and there isn’t the risk of being smacked with a penalty or worse. We don’t require six or twelve month contracts with our clients, but we explain from the start that for us to demonstrate return, they need to stick with us for six to nine months. Of course time depends on the industry, so highly competitive terms will take longer than less competitive longtails or smaller industries.

COMMANDMENT #13: Thou shall create a DEFENSIBLE brand that any human could review and approve of.

Lee
We’ll work with companies that are focused on outcomes from marketing. Links are measured, no doubt. But the emphasis is on moving the conversion needle. Some programs call for simple linking programs and others are more like media relations engagements. It depends on the nature of the program, industry and audience we’re trying to reach. All that said, goals are important and they must be set in order to achieve efficiency so past performance tempered with the level of competition in an industry become useful for link quantity/quality expectations management.

COMMANDMENT #14: Thou shall articulate that different goals require different effort. Start with goals THEN develop your linking plan.

Rand
My take on link quantities and quality is generally based on the types of queries the client is seeking to rank for and the competition in those search results. As you know, we do lots of work here at SEOmoz to build a web crawl and metrics about links that can be leveraged to make competitive SEO more of a scientific process.

When we look at a given set of search results or a site’s position amongst a field of competitors, we can look at a number of metrics around quantity of links and linking root domains, raw importance (metrics like PageRank or mozRank), quality of links (via proxies like mozTrust & Domain Authority) and anchor text distribution. This helps inform us of where the missing pieces lie and what we need to do to catch up (or stay ahead).

I did a WB Friday on this topic.

COMMANDMENT #15: Analyze competitors linking before setting expectations on your linking efforts.

———————————————————————————————————————-
How do you handle the situation when a prospective client comes to you and has the budget, but they have few linkable assets, doesn’t have time to create content, weak PR, etc, etc?
———————————————————————————————————————-

Lindsay
Don’t use poor content as an excuse to fail. If their content stinks, be sure to include content creation in the scope of work.

COMMANDMENT #16: Thou shall include content creation in the scope of work!

Rhea
To be honest, we probably wouldn’t take them on. We’re in the business of building high quality, natural links. We need something to work with to do that. If there’s absolutely nothing available to us and no room for improvement, we’re being setup for failure. You can’t tie our hands and expect aggressive results.

COMMANDMENT #17: Thou shall set expectations on what is possible based on what you have been given to work with.

———————————————————————————————————————-
Oh and here’s a special part: a ton of questions you can ask clients before taking on projects:
———————————————————————————————————————-

Rhea (wow, thanks Rhea, these are awesome):
Do you have a media plan? If yes, we’ll need to see it.
Do you have a newsletter? If yes, how do you determine topics? If you have a calendar, we’ll need to see it.
Do you have any videos (interviews, commercials, how-to’s, etc)?
Do you have photos or graphics? If yes, how are those created?
Do you have a blog or podcast?
Who currently writes content for the site/blog or runs the podcast?
Do they have an editorial calendar? If yes, we’ll need to see it.
Do you speak at conferences or other industry events?
Will you be exhibiting at any conferences or industry events?
Do you donate to non-profits/charities or are you a sponsor of an organization?
Have you run or do you have plans to run a contest or giveaway?
Have you sent out or do you plan to send out any press releases?
Who is your target demographic? What questions do they typically have about your company/products/service?
Do you have client testimonials or reviews?
How do you manage customer service online?
Do you manage any social profiles? If yes, what is your approach with those?

Garrett
I like starting with: “what’s working for you now?” …in terms of both link building and of larger markteting initiatives.

We spoke with a link building prospect recently with not much content on site. We asked how they generated prospects currently and they off-handedly mentioned their 10k+ email list that they’d been building over the past 10-15 years. They estimated that 10% or so of the list were active, industry-facing publishers (bloggers/site owners etc). We recommended they begin engaging the list, publishing conversations (with permission) and start leveraging the conversations for links.

We’ve found that it’s usually easier to build from what’s working already in some way than to generate something brand new. Another important aspect though is how well positioned in the company is your immediate contact… If they have networked well internally you will have better success, whereas if they’re new or not well trusted or respected yet you will have trouble getting to the appropriate resources.

Lastly, it’s vital to have a sense of what’s actually linkable in their market space. You can look at what assets have been proven to attract links on competitors’ sites, as well as industry-facing publishers’ sites.

Melanie
What unique value does your web site offer? What needs does it satisfy better than your competitors?

Are they part of any groups or associations? Are they acquainted with owners of any related businesses? Do they volunteer for or contribute to any charities? You’d be surprised at how many link opportunities most sites are already sitting on yet they simply don’t realize it.

A question I sometimes have my clients ponder: “Who are the specific group of site owners that directly benefit when they link to my site?”

Lee
If their resources are online, it’s pretty easy to find those. Otherwise, ask what public relations, advertising or interactive marketing they’re doing. Inventory digital assets and find out what the marketing plan is for the next 6-12 months. If a company isn’t doing any of those things, maybe they’re not a good fit for SEO.

Huge Thank yous again to:
Melanie Nathan – “Canadian SEO” | @melanienathan
Rhea Drysdale – outspoken media (I endorse for reputation management) | @rhea
Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org – Go check out their link analysis tools | @randfish
Garret French – Go read the link building book, I got a ton of good tips | @garrettfrench
Lee Odden – Toprankblog.com @leeodden
Lindsay Perkin Wassell – Keyphraseology.com | @lindzie
Scott Skurnick – Edmunds.com | @sskurnick

Posted in SEO | 20 Comments »

Bing Updates Webmaster Tools for the Worse

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

On 7/2 I posted about some fixes Bing needed to make before they start showing results for Yahoo. While I can’t take any credit for the update (nor would I want any), Bing webmaster tools was updated last night…for the worse.

The old webmaster tools lacked in link data, error reporting, & really letting you know the valuable pages on your site/those linking to your site. The new Bing webmaster tools are lacking. Below is a hot list of changes:

1. You have to install Microsoft Silverlight or you can’t view the data.

When your webmaster tools are bad to begin with, why make everyone download Silverlight & create another hassle for users? Below is the data you’ll see if you don’t download Silverlight:

(Image no longer available)

You can add urls you want Bing to crawl, add a sitemap, view pages in Bing’s index, & alerts if you’ve received a message from Bing.

So to see your actual data, you’ve now downloaded Silverlight. What next?

2. Reporting % Changes Day to Day

Priority can be set to your websites through alerting you of daily changes in % of clicks, % of impressions, pages indexed, pages crawled. This is one semi-useful change I’m seeing so far. When we log into our account and see dozens of clients, we’re able to quickly see which ones Bing hated or showed the love. This defaults to day vs previous day rating, so it’s not going to be helpful when comparing low volume days like weekends vs weekdays depending on the industry.

3. History of Crawled Pages

You’re now able to see 6 months worth of data for pages crawled & pages indexed. While they are only showing back to June 3 right now, if it’s rolled out this data will be useful in troubleshooting or helpful when launching a site.

(Image no longer available)

Fingers crossed we’ll be able to view more than one month at a time, something you’re not able to do right now.

4. History of Pages Indexed

Slightly different from crawled pages, where the bots could visit a single page numerous times during the day, indexed pages refers to the number of unique pages Bing has indexed. Unlike the history of crawled pages, indexed pages does not state that a certain time period will be available. Current history goes as far back as June 3.

5. THERE IS ZERO BACKLINK DATA

Biggest shocker is the lack of any backlink data WHATSOEVER.

(Image no longer available)

Dashboard, Crawl, Index, & Traffic show ZERO backlink data points. I thought I had gone through it too fast & missed the backlink tab. Nope, there’s nothing about the number of links, trending number of links over time (more important to me than number of pages crawled daily), quality of sites linking to your site, quality of sites your site is linking to, etc.

Forget my complaints about the vagueness of the green bars in my previous post. I’d take the green bars back compared to no data at all.

While Yahoo has a better backlink analysis, Bing needs to use that or come up with a 2.0 release of their webmaster tools with link data. Without it, Bing Webmaster Tools remains obsolete compared to GA.

Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »

Are Seller Rating Extensions A 5-Star Feature?

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

At the end of June, Google announced new Seller Rating Extensions for AdWords that will show merchant ratings below eligible ads. Since all eligible advertisers have been automatically opted in to this new feature, we thought it would be helpful if we provided a detailed explanation of what Seller Rating Extensions are, whether or not a business is eligible and how they can help (or hurt) you.

When & how do Seller Rating Extensions appear? The Seller Rating Extension will automatically append a store’s rating from Google Product Search if you meet the minimum requirements of a 4-star rating and 30+ reviews. There is no need to sync your account with Google Product Search, as the ratings are pulled based on the display URL.

If your ad has an extremely high quality score and shows in the top panel (above natural results), the extension will also display the number of qualified reviews next to the rating. Note: New reviews can take up to 10 days to appear in product search.

Currently, the ratings will only show to English speakers in the US. It is our understanding that the ads will NOT show with other extensions (i.e. product extensions or SiteLinks).

(Image no longer available)

Where do the ratings & reviews come from? Google Product Search ratings are compiled from a variety of sources including (but not restricted to) Epinions, Google Checkout, Reseller Ratings, Bizrate & PriceGrabber.

How much do they cost? There is no additional charge if a user clicks on an ad featuring a Seller Rating Extension, and there is no cost if a user clicks through just to read reviews.

How can I take advantage? Assuming you’re already registered for Google Product Search (it’s free!) the most important thing you can do is to keep serving your customers well and encouraging them to rate your store. The ratings will show automatically for all eligible queries unless you explicitly opt out here.

Are seller rating extensions a good thing? That’s for you to decide. There are a number of huge advantages to the new extensions, but you will never know if they are truly helping your business until you test. To help decide if the extensions will help or hurt you, SEER has outlined a few pro’s and con’s/potential pitfalls below.

Pros

• The extensions put a new emphasis on online customer service. We always knew that your reputation can have a huge influence on your store. Seller Rating Extensions only increases the influence by putting the ratings front and center.
• Assuming you have a great customer service rating, you can stand out from competitors who may have had a few issues from time to time.
• Having a 5-star rating show for a challenging non-brand term can enhance your visibility & help you stand out from the competition.

Potential Pitfalls

• While you don’t pay for clicks to the review site (and Google claims the review links receive less clicks), these clicks take the user away from your AdWords landing pages and your planned conversion funnel.
• If you have a new or small business, you may be trumped by a store with more reviews or simply may not be eligible.
• The ratings extensions appear (based on preliminary testing) to be trumped by other extensions. If you have SiteLinks, Location Listings, or Product Listing Extensions, the Seller Ratings Extensions will not be shown.
• The Seller Ratings Extensions could punish those who aren’t registered for Google Product Search (or other Comparison Shopping Engines).
  • While Google Product Search is free, it does require a certain amount of maintenance to make sure your product feed is up to date.
  • Other CSE’s that provide Google with reviews (PriceGrabber, BizRate) aren’t cheap and may not be right for your business.

The Seller Rating Extension is certainly a very compelling new AdWords feature; perhaps even more compelling is that Google rolled it out automatically and with almost no notice. Whether or not you are eligible for ratings extensions they provide an always welcomed reminder as to how important customer service is, especially in the E-Commerce space.

SEER will always recommend that you test, test, test to find out what works for your business; Seller Ratings Extensions are no exception! So what do you think – are Seller Ratings Extensions a 5-star feature??

Posted in ecommerce, google, PPC | 4 Comments »

5 Traits of Successful Internet Marketers

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The SEER team has recently started an internship program aimed towards current college students. The goal of the internship is to help us find the next SEO Rookie of the year, or PPC rising star to add to our growing team. The need may not be immediate, but the goal is to have a crop of talent to pick from when a need arises.

I have been interviewing a bunch of potential hopefuls and I have started thinking how lucky these college students are to have the chance to enter the internet marketing world fresh out of college. If I would have had the same opportunity, it would have saved me a few years of few years of ‘aimlessness’, so to speak, figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

After my first gig in the Health Insurance Industry, I took a job with the marketing team of a startup online dating site. The dating site never took off, but the experience gave me my first taste of internet marketing. At the dating site, the clouds parted, and I found my path towards a career in internet marketing.

If your struggling to figure out what you want to do when you grow up, below are 5 traits that if you possess may mean that internet marketing is a good fit for you.

1. Possess a Competitive Spirit: In the summer of 1992, when I was 11 years old, I wanted to be an Olympic Gymnast. The one problem was that I had no formal gymnastic training, but that did not stop me from practicing by doing flips over my couch. For Amanda my colleague at SEER, who is 5 years younger than me, it was the summer of 1996, when she too dreamt of Olympic gold. Ok, so it is not necessary to have had the Olympic gold dream, like Amanda and me, but you do need to have a competitive spirit and an internal drive to be the best. Both Paid Search and SEO is about beating your competitors to maximize web real estate on the coveted first page of Google.

2. Love Puzzles & Games: I know when I was a kid, my mom could not buy puzzles fast enough for me. Now I love a good game of Scrabble. Aaron another fellow Paid Search member enjoys a good game of poker. Games also tie into a competitive spirit, as I still hate to lose, but have matured a bit from throwing the cards in my brother’s face and leaving the table crying. Both SEO and PPC are big puzzles. For SEO, you are spending your time figuring out how to understand the Google Algorithm. PPC is a puzzle in itself. Try fitting a keyword, benefit, distinguishing feature and a call to action into an ad of just 95 characters.

3. Enjoy(ed) and Excel(ed) in Analytical Classes, such as Economics, Math or Science classes. Wil actually wanted to be economics teacher before he found his way into Internet Marketing. For Paid Search you can’t be afraid of numbers and have to be comfortable analyzing data. Sure, you need creativity to write ads and help wireframe landing pages, but we are data junkies and spend a great portion of our day determining statistical significance, analyzing trends and calculating ROI. For SEO sure you need creativity to come up with link bait ideas, but you have to enjoy analyzing a sites architecture, monitoring your sites traffic and monitoring your site’s conversions. We know colors and design have their place, but as a team we care more about calls to actions, usability and content with relevant keywords.

4. Love using Excel to figure out better ways to do things: This is similar to number 2. If you actually enjoy learning about pivot tables and neat new Excel formulas, then you will probably also enjoy a life as an internet marketer.

5. Enjoy being a lifelong student: The web is constantly changing. You have to enjoy continual learning because what works well today may not work well tomorrow. Everyone at SEER loves learning about the web and staying on top of industry trends and news. We are constantly sharing blogs and ideas. We even started a SEER Internet Marketing book club, so that we are always growing and learning together.

I hope this helps provide a good gut check to help you figure out if a career in Internet Marketing would be a good fit for you. To other experienced Internet Marketers out there, please add additional traits that you think are common among you and your colleagues.

Posted in PPC, SEO | 5 Comments »

Sorry Bing, You’re No Google – 5 BIG Issues Bing Needs to Fix Before the Switch

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

With the upcoming switch to Bing SERPs coming sooner than expected (August/September), there are a number of great things this will bring about for clients. In the same breath, there are numerous items, specifically in Bing webmaster tools, that make absolutely no sense. These are some major issues that should be reviewed before the transition.

1. Returning Accurate Results

You’ve Googled yourself. Possibly several times over the course of a year. For a Google search for some guy like Wil Reynolds, you would expect SEER Interactive to show up as a top result. It does, and has for years. Only since March has Bing brought back www.seerinteractive.com in the first 30 results. This is one instance of many where Bing brings back tons of fillers like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, even Classmates before the company website.

While Rand posted an extremely detailed good read that concluded with Google & Bing being extremely similar, results do not always show this trend.

2. Handling of 301 redirects

With cold hard facts in our hands, we can absolutely say Bing has trouble with 301 redirects. It could be that more value is lost through the Bing algorithm. Bing could be having trouble accurately following 301 redirects. Bing may have extreme difficulties accurately following multiple redirects. Whichever the reason, after @marklavoritano pushed out his 301 redirect post we know there are big issues.

3. Site Domain Scores

These are a joke. It might as well be a 1-5 bar scale of how many preschoolers think the screen looks shiny when the website is loaded.

Just as SEER has a 5/5 score, all of the outbound links from our site have a 5/5 bar score. Going through Bing Webmaster Tools for 10 clients, I have never seen a score that was less than 5/5 bars. PR0 or PR8, two inbound links or 10,000, 5/5 is the score we’re seeing. It looks like the only qualification for your site to receive a 5/5 is to not have white text or you don’t give your visitors spyware.

While another pagerank type of score would not be very helpful, giving every site a 5/5 score has no use at the moment.

4. Blocking a Site and Indexed Pages

I have a client who doesn’t rank for their own name in Bing. WMTools shows the following information:

The site has been around for ten years. It ranks on the first page of Google for the industry’s most competitive keyword. They have links from credible resources. They link to credible resources. They publish fresh content. Bing hates them.

If you do not rank for your own name, Bing has 2000+ pages indexed, and rankings fell from being superb to nothing, it sounds like the site is getting blocked. After contacting support three times, Bing definitively said that the site was not being blocked or penalized. The issue was that validator.w3.org reported numerous errors with the site and if those errors are fixed, the site should be indexed more thoroughly.

a. the site used to rank extremely well
b. it is not doing anything shady, especially compared to others in the industry ranking well
c. the site has history, backlinks, & links to credible sites (all 5/5 bars, so they must be credible?)
d. no major changes were made to the site architecturally

So Bing suddenly flipped a switch because errors were reported at validator.w3.org? Strange.

Being more helpful with information would be great for the indexed pages & the “blocked” notification area. If there are 2000+ pages and zero show up for ANY searches, there is something very very wrong with Bing indexing the site.

5. Select Issue Type

Bing has a terrible time reporting 404s. There are a handful of clients with some major 404 lists in Google Webmaster Tools and it has been extremely helpful to find a few of these with some major links pointing to them. Bing reports the same sites as having no data available. One site had 300+ 404 pages reported by Google, but zero were reported in Bing.

Finding site issues & identifying them in WMT would be extremely beneficial. Is Bing currently unable to find these, or just unwilling to thoroughly report on them right now?

These are five big items that came to mind where I experienced Bing to be lacking. While a monster upcoming change like using Bing SERPs is exciting for SEO, it could just exacerbate the issues we’re already seeing.

Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »