In the course of doing business it is a given that you are going to piss some people off. Hey we've all had that one client that you just can't satisfy, right? Consumers, now more than ever, have access to blogs, forums and other means to complain about services rendered.

With that being said, if you do a search for your company name and you see consumer complaints showing up, then this is the blog post for you.

Here are some Do's and Don't when it comes to repairing your brand.

Don't try and defend your brand by going in and declaring that you represent the company. participate in any forums or blogs where they are hammering your brand. Search engines love content and adding to the thread or comments is like adding wood to the fire. You'll end up cooking your own goose and making it a lot harder to repair the damage.

I was approached by a company that had participated in a consumer complaint forum. Not only was there 10 pages in the thread all about the said company but their user name when posting was their company name. Let's put it like this, the forum ranks higher than their company home page.

Don't try and sneek in a few posts that defend the company. You're not fooling anyone when you do that. You can pretty much gaurantee another page of flammage if you do this.

Don't start a thread and link to any bad publicity asking for advice on how to counter it. Raising awarness may fuel the fire as well. Forums are open and word spreads fast. You may not link to it, but a reader looking for a topic to rant about may not be so shy to drop a link or two to the complaint.

So now we know a few of the most important Don'ts lets move on to the Do's.

Do get your name out there. Submit as many good press releases as you can. Open the flood gates on your company in a positive way. Mediawire & PRweb will outrank the complaints since they have tremendous page scores that they pass to their press releases.

Do take the time to internally optimize your site. You should beef up the about us sections in your site (if you have one). Make your company name promenent in the title tag, and use it conservatively in the content. Add a link into the footer of your site using your company name as the link text. That link should go to the optimized page about your company.

Hey there are 10 rankings on page 1 so lets keep going...

Do write testimonials en masse! If you have any business to business partners write the best testimonial and get your business partners to put them up on their sites. You can even add some extra power by linking from your site to the testimonial your wrote for you business friends! Make sure you put your company name in your signature and in the testimonial itself.

Ok so it's all done, plan on it taking a few months, the more you aggressively push your company name, the more you keep the complaints from even reaching that first page!

Now if you are rendering crappy service then uhh April fools I switched the do's and don'ts around.

Cedric Beust, an engineer at Google, said: "I think all the pieces are there on the server side. But I think we'll get a whole new ecosystem around AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML]. It's like a bad cold. More and more people are coming to this thing and we have a whole new excitement for Web sites we never had before, with things like mashups." Source >>

Like flash however AJAX is invisible to the search engine's eyes. MSN's Live uses AJAX to display search results. GMAIL uses it to give you real time email updates while you are logged into the system.

Hopefully Blogs and CMS developers won't use AJAX as a way to feed content to their pages! They'll look cool but they won't rank for squat!

Thursday afternoon the Zunch crew gathered around in the conference room, beamed Eric Ward's Linking Webinar up on the Screen, dimmed the lights and popped open the soda. An hour and a half later we shut down and chatted about what we knew already, what we didn't know and what if anything was wrong.

Let me state at first that we thought this would be an advanced linking strategy webinar and that it was marketed to other firms/professionals in the SEO/SEM industry as such.

The webinar covered all the basics and gave useful information for those that are just starting out and trying to understand what linking and link popularity is all about. For the seasoned SEO however you may pick up a one or two things there that you may not of seen in the popular SEO forums.

Here are the things I found helpful:

• Sources for free one way links from authoritative sites
• Email subject and body copy suggestions that keep you out of the deleted folder
  
• Link Software Screen shots and personal analysis
  
• How to use blogs to further empower your core site's links

Here are a few things that I thought that may have been confusing to the attendees:

• It was stated that buying links could penalize your site, then later in the webinar strategy for buying links was discussed. Eric stated that he had clients that he had bought links for and no clarification was giving between buying links & and how they may penalize a site so it sounded a like a contradiction.
• Someone asked what an RSS feed was. I thought the answer was drawn out and confusing and probably should have been addressed after the Webinar in the Q&A time.

Here are some things that I know were stated and are actually wrong:

• It was stated that Spiders (specifically Googlebot) will not crawl deep folder structures. Therefore don't waist time getting links to a file burried in your site. His analogy was if the page is in a hundred foot deep lake and the link is only 50 feet of rope then you can't reach the page. This is wrong. IF the PageRank of the page that is linking has high enough PageRank to justify a crawl to a file that is being linked to then the spider WILL index the page and it CAN be reached.
• It was stated that "Undiscovered Links" or pages behind forms are unreachable by Spiders. In Googles case this is wrong. I recently built a site that had a simple 1 variable form containing 50 values. Google used the url in the action="" and then for each of the 50 values added the forms name to form a query"?state_id=" to the action url thus completing the url then crawled all 50 variations of the landing page. I posted this over in spider-food.net.
  
  Currently you cannot see the results of this in Google but I think the forum post and the responces to the post indicate proof that Google did infact index those pages and that there were NO links to those variable pages because the mod rewrite implemented in the bottom links were for the bots/users that wanted to click and link to a static version of the form page. The form was there for convenience/usability and was NOT suppost to be crawled YET it was.

I've tried to give a fair evaluation for both new and experienced webmasters. If you are just getting into links I recommend this seminar. If you are experienced with linking the price of the webinar for the little tidbits of new information may not be worth your time.

Eric has had a lot of success with his current clients I think he did a good job explaining linking and showed great examples of success and how powerful links can be to an SEO campaign. He is one that thinks outside of the box and has done his linking home work I would definitely heed any free advice you may find on his website.

Eric Ward's Website >>

While going through ranking reports today I noticed something that was just flat out wrong! I manage a client that has had previous SEO done to their site. As I went through the site I noticed some old spam in the page. About half the coding on the home page was spam.

I instructed the client to move it immediately! In the last two bi-monthly ranking reports I've noticed that the Google Rankings have steadily increased... Now here is the part that is just flat out wrong the MSN rankings have started to decrease...

Now I know that MSN backlinks are easily gamed, anyone can plop a site wide link up for a term and in 2 weeks start to rank for the link text. Now I'm starting to see that the on page content is very prone to spam as well.

Here's a good example:

A search for "Dallas Movers" pulls up a good example of spam in both search.msn.com and live.com

The site h2movers is about as bad as it gets... MSN has a very long way to go if they want to beat out Google. Google is what it is because they've held the #1 search engine position for so long. They have actively had people try and game their system because of that #1 spot. Everytime someone catches on to a loop hole in the Google system, the Google engineers have plugged it.

In conclussion, I can't put the spam back nor will I for the client. A drop in MSN rankings is a loss I'm willing to take for a gain in Google. As per MSN you've got a long way to go before you can over take anyone, I'm sure all the spammers out there are rooting for ya :)

There's been much said about http://search.live.com in the past couple of weeks, both negative and positive. As the Zunch "analytics guru", I'm not as concerned about the interface as I am about the absence of key phrases in the URL. From what I'm seeing so far, when as user clicks on a result in the SERPs, the referring URL that is passed looks just like this: http://search.live.com. There are no query string variables for tracking programs like zWebTulz to extrapolate keywords from, meaning marketers can't determine which keywords perform better than others.

Hmm...I guess this may be the one time in my life where I'm recommending dynamic URLs over static. :-)

To add to Google Earth and Google Moon, Google has launched the Google Mars page to show you a detailed view of the Marsian surface.

Google Mars >>

I see it everyday. Someone proposing a url structure in the forums and asking for advice on whether it'll get crawled or if there are any visual flaws. So let this be an end-all post on the subject.

Out of all the experimenting with urls, I've found that
.com/ to
.com/folder/file.htm
works the best at being crawled regulary and deeply. PERIOD.

Now let me go over the problems with the other structures that I see everyday as I cruise the forums.

The Directory Structure & PR Dither Rewrite
This is like the Camero Mullet (see 2nd image) of mod_rewrites, olds school and looked cool back in the day.

.com/ (PR5)
/folder/file.hml (PR4)
/folder/folder/file.html (PR3)
/folder/folder/folder/file.html (PR0)

In the directory tree structure the root links to the first folder, the file in the first folder links to the file in the 2nd folder and so on. Once you get to 3 folders deep you lose your PR in most cases. This is because a puny PR 3 isn't strong enought to warrant a crawl that deep into a site. You could even see this in some of the deeper sections of the Yahoo! directory. The further you went the lower the PR and some sections were just so deep off the root they didn't even warrant a cache.

Of course the solution to the above would be to link to every page in the site on every teir or use the high PR from a root sitemap to feed spiders deeper. This also dissolves if you have a large site. A good example would be a country: USA (1 page) >> State (50) >> County (~3250) >> City (17,500*)

Obviously no single page could hold 20,000+ links and be crawled. Plus browsers would strain to render that coding. Then deciphering all the navigation. Its just not logical.

Junk Rewrites
Like The Tron Guy, It Should be avoided at all costs.
Nice Moose Knuckle by the way Jay!

These are the cases where the developer stuffs every variable thats not needed into the url. So the effect is a nonsensical jump from Root to a file 3-5 folders deep.

.com/ (PR 5) | (PR 3)
/folder/folder/folder/folder/folder/file.html (PR 2-3) | (PR 0)

The problem is that a site has to gain a significant amount of PR on the home page just to push the spiders into the rest of the site. This is why there are many complaints when a developer that has switched to mod rewrite static urls and complains, "I can't get my new urls to get indexed". You could be waiting months or years depending on how fast you can get inbound links.

It's not that they can't get indexed it just that your home/root pages aren't powerful enought to warrant a deep crawl. I see this alot with shopping cart/cms add-ons for mambo & oscommerce. For windows servers I would suggest using ISAPI Rewrite. ISAPI Rewrite gives you the same functionality and control as the mod_rewrite application for Apache.

The Tried and True Solution

Short and simple and 1 step away from the root at all times. I've come to this because I did all of the above and learned the hard way.

For example the site ~www.sbdpro.com was patterned after the Yahoo! Directory. It has consitantly for the last 2 years had a PR 4 home page. But with that structure it could never get the spiders deeper than 2 categories or 2 folders deep. Since the deepest depths in that directory is 8 tiers down there really was no solution or point of keeping this url structure.

It was changed about a year ago. All links from the root go to /directory/file-name.htm It didn't matter how many tiers down you went, all categories were now 1 tier away from the root, all subcategories were one tier from the root. The crosslinking all stayed the site had no index problems as all.

The effect was astonishing the PR still drops out in the 3rd tier with a PR 2 yet the spiders still followed the links through 5 more tiers of crosslinking & PR 0 pages to reach the 8th tier down.

My advice to all new mod rewrites.

1. Don't get married to your first try at mod rewritten urls. Change them because you're in it for the long run (hopefully). The above site ranked for "small business directory" page 1 consistantly during the change in Yahoo and MSN. It even jumped to page 2 in Google for that term as well and did a stretch for a while.

2. Keep your urls simple and close to the root. You will see more spider activity and have less headaches.

3. Make sure you rewriterule syntax is optimal and you are not bogging down your server. See this thread here >>

Other Resources

Webforgers.net - Mod Rewrite Tutorials
Ilovejackdaniels.com - Mod Rewrite Cheat Sheets

~ = 3rd party database of counties I bought.
* = From spidering Yahoo directory for city names under the state sections.

It's the most common error I see with clients who have been running their own PPC campaign, and the bigger their budget, the more likely they are to make it: They want to be #1 - and they want to be there for anyone who might possibly be searching for what they offer.

I can't blame them. It does intuitively seem like being in the number one spot would be ideal. It does, after all, generate significantly more traffic, and often a high click-through rate. Just think, if you have enough money, of all the people you could direct to your site if you can afford to be in the number one position for your most general term! An auto dealer that's #1 for "car," or a home loan site that's #1 for "mortgage" - assuming they have enough money - surely would benefit tremendously from this kind of placement.

And because of this, it can be difficult to convince a client that their favorite position, as sexy as it seems, may just be the least fruitful. It may simply be scattering their seed on barren earth - and the results it produces may be so costly that they take away resources from more fruitful areas of the campaign.

It's easiest, perhaps, to explain why a general term like "car" is not the best term for anyone in a PPC campaign. Simply put, the percentage of people searching on that term who are looking for what you offer is too small. Even if you rule out, with your ad copy, those who are looking for a review or automotive history - there's still far too much variation in what people mean by "car" in their heads, which didn't make it into the search bar. Even if you do have dealerships across the country, chances that you offer every make and model of vehicle are slim.

People typing in general terms are also generally early in the buying cycle, and doing research. They don't know yet quite what they want, and are unlikely to decide on this visit to your site.

A little harder to grasp is why the number one spot itself is rarely ideal. I guess the main idea to get across is the behavior of searchers. People type in their search - then click on the first result, often without even reading it. Only after getting to your site, and costing you a click, do they stop to notice that it's not what they had in mind at all. People who click on the results further down are more likely to have actually read the ad, and be thinking about what they want before they click. In other words, lowering position, while it may reduce the number of clicks you get - also is more likely to let your ad copy do its job to pre-qualify those clicks.

A recent example - I took a client from the top spot on most of their keywords, costing them several dollars per click, and lowered them to #2 and #3. They saw their cost per click drop nearly in half - but were uncomfortable about the fact that the total number of clicks also dropped dramatically. However, those who clicked were far more likely to remain on the site - with half as many clicks, their page views went up from 37k per week to 40k. I have had several clients who found that once they moved down to the 4th - 6th position for most terms, their conversion rate went up. Yes, they were getting fewer visitors overall, but a higher percentage of those visitors were making purchases - and at a lower cost-per-click, the cost per acquisition went way down.

One other danger of being in the top spot - especially for a general or popular term - is that this spot is more likely to be a target for click fraud. It's simply easier for affiliate-type fraud, to click on the top spot. And for competitor-type fraud, well, everyone wants to take a shot at the big guy.

There are some cases, however, where being in the top spot makes sense. That's for the company's own name or brand. Potter Barn could benefit from being number 1 for all terms with "pottery barn" in them. It's not always as cost effective as a lower spot, but it is good branding - and if someone is searching for a specific brand name, especially if they offer their own product for service on their website, chances are good that they will be happy to end up on that company's website. I would, however, put a cap on the CPC for those terms, as it's not unusual for someone to try to make it prohibitively expensive for a well-known company to buy their own brand name, by making their max bid absurdly high.

But it can be scary for the client to let go of that top spot, especially when they see traffic dip - so just make sure you have your tracking in place and can demonstrate the benefit in terms of the bottom line... and be prepared to move them back into the top spot if, by some fluke of fickle search behavior, it turns out #1 really is the most profitable place to be.

It was just over a year ago that I remember standing in the SES NY expo hall talking with a guy (forgot his name) about personal search and its implications for SEOs like myself. I told him at that time that it was my belief that personalized search results en masse were not going to appear as quickly as one might think. "Within the year?" he asked. "No, I doubt it," I replied.

For the most part, personalized search has been slow to appear. But I can't help but notice that Google routinely provides personalized search results for me now when I'm logged in. Of course I'm always interested in the difference between personalized results and normal results, and typically there's not much difference. But how much information am I willing to give Google, Yahoo or MSN in return for "better results"? As a user, I prefer the idea of three independent, objective entities giving me their best shots as opposed to one entity knowing my deepest thoughts and anticipating my next move. I suspect I'm not alone in this one, either. With all that these companies are trying to build, there's no questioning their end goal. Just this week we hear more news that Google wants to host all of my computer files. Every website we visit must have an account with a profile,user preferences, favorite foods and, oh yeah...how do you like your coffee?

I've always said, the goal of every search is to stop searching. I'm just not willing to give up more personal info to cut down the time on my searches. With more practice, I'll become a better searcher on my own!

Funny when you try and sign up for a service and you have to jump through a few technical hoops just to get it done. Like when Tyson (SEO Specialist) this morning was trying to create an MSN Adcenter account using IE 7. Adcenter kept spitting out an incompatible web browser error.

Looks like you have to revert back to IE 6 if you want to get anything done in MSN Adcenter. I would suggest not to switch your user agent header to IE 6 using the FF UA switcher either, the styles on all the forms break and you get a lot of form layer overlap issues.

Short list of browsers that Adcenter doesn't support:

• Anything != IE 6

I thought the days of "you must conform" were past us...

I think the best way to describe this service is Froogle combined with Yahoo Store & Paypal. It's not opened to the public yet, but there are some vendors beta testing.

We're starting with a very small number of sellers and we expect to include more over the next several months. If you're a seller and you're interested in getting an announcement when this feature is generally available, let us know. And if you want to know how this functionality relates to Google's broader work in payments, read this update. We hope this feature will make it even easier for people to use Google Base to post and distribute a wide range of content, whether information for sharing or goods for sale.

You can read the official blog post here.

Google SiteMaps Update

(1) Your average position by your top search queries. This is basically a site ranking report for the your top keywords, the keywords people search to find you on.

(2) If you have mobile enabled site, you will also now see your top search queries on mobile devices.

(3) You can now download "details, stats, and errors" to a SV file that you can then do what you like with it.

More details at Google Sitemaps Blog. Source SEW Blog >>

Barry Schwartz posts an update about the Google Sitemaps program over on the SEW Blog.

Webmasters should note that this service is free and easy to use. Support on the other hand is still the well known Google Blackhole. If you can find the email address to be able to send a question don't be surprised if you get anything back :)

Yahoo announced that they will no longer allow bidding on competitor's trademark terms. This announcement has generated a little bit of confusion as to where Yahoo stands on allowing trademarked terms as keywords. I was asked, for example, whether this meant that agencies would have to start getting permission from clients to use the client's trademarks. Not according to my understanding of it.I feel qualified to answer this - since I was an editor at Yahoo, and was on the special team that was dedicated to reviewing trademark terms. As it stands, on Yahoo you can advertise under any trademarked name as long as you have content on your site supporting it – such as a comparison of your product to your competitor’s. There is nothing in the change which indicates they will not allow advertising under the trademark name associated with the website doing the advertising. This is designed to be sure that Geico can’t advertise under the keyword “progressive” – even if they have a page of facts comparing themselves to Progressive. This is designed to protect the interests of big name corporations who don't like PPC because competitors can use it to show up in search listings when a potential customer is looking for them. Geico, whether directly or through an agency, will still be able to advertise under “geico.” The place that trademark terms get sticky is on Google – where you can buy the term, but not put it in the ad unless you have written permission from each trademark holder – and while that is meant to prevent this kind of competitor advertising, often it ends up with situations where someone selling a product can’t use the name of that product in the ad. For example: MLB (major league baseball) is copyrighted. AcmeTicketReseller.com sells MLB tickets, but can’t say “MLB” in the copy. Or AcmeShoes.com - they are unable to use “kenneth cole” in the copy, even though they are selling kenneth cole shoes. If a shoe site sells 200 brands, getting written permission for each is somewhat prohibitive. These hardly seem like the kind of uses of trademark terms which threaten their integrity - since they make the trademark holder money, but that's how it's handled. On the other hand, on Google, Geico *can* advertise under the term “progressive” – as long as they do not say “progressive” anywhere in the ad copy or imply in any way that they are Progressive. Now, this seems to me to be exactly the kind of thing that the big corporations want to prevent - their direct competitor showing up when a user is searching on their brand name. Yahoo does not restrict trademark terms in this way – and it sounds like the limitation will ONLY effect competitors, not resellers. This has actually been a change they’ve talked about for over a year, as it was under discussion while I was still working there. The lawyers were evaluating it while I was there, trying to balance the choice between free speech and attracting large-name companies’ business. I personally would have preferred to see them lean in the other direction - as some legitimate consumer comparisons will end up getting shut out by this. (addendum - per Yahoo, sites that offer a comparison can still advertise under a trademark term as long as they don't sell a product that competes with this... this will mean that some sites will get sneaky and try to hide their relationship to the product sales - but should protect legitimate consumer comparisons - BUT it means they will rely on editorial review heavily for these decisions, and editors, being human and having quotas to meet, do make mistakes.)