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If you’ve been working in the SEO industry for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “Domain Authority” (DA), “Domain Strength”, etc. For those not in the know, DA essentially refers to the ability of a domain to rank in the SERPs based on its backlink profile alone with ALL ELSE EQUAL. If you’re interested in learning more, this explanation by SEOmoz will get you up to speed.

As a link director, DA is just one of many metrics I examine when looking for links or while crafting a backlink strategy. While there is some information related to how important DA is, what role it truly plays is still largely unknown. Remember, correlation isn’t causation, as the SEOmoz folks like to remind us.

This often leaves us SEO’s wondering what level of importance to place on issues such as developing DA for a site, or earning links from high DA domains. Common sense can take you a long way, but truly understanding the power that this metric represents takes some study.

My goal in presenting the following information is to shed some light on the level of importance we should be placing on DA. It certainly has backed up and informed our opinions here at RKG. If you’d like to stop reading now, I’ve summed up the message in the following sentences, but you will miss the good stuff :).

Domain Authority is so powerful, that it easily woos Google into giving up her prizes: rankings. DA is the Kavorka and Google cannot resist.

During some recent SERP analysis, I noticed a particularly odd result (from a metrics standpoint) ranking in the top 10. The more I dug, the more that result seemed to stick out.

While there are likely billions of examples similar to the one I came across (how do you think Amazon has such great rankings for so many pages?), this one stuck out to me particularly because of how the domain authority seems to have been achieved, but more on that later.

As a disclaimer, I performed the following searches while using private browsing in FF to help limit personalization. I did not go to all extremes, but I’m pretty confident in how these results were displayed based on having others in different locations perform the same query.

Take a minute to consider the following:

SERP: “Earth Shoes”
Order of results (by domain):

1. Earth.us
2. Kalsoearthshoes.com
3. Zappos.com
4. Shoebuy.com
5. Planetshoes.com
6. Planetshoes.com
7. Onlineshoes.com
8. Overstock.com
9. En.wikipedia.org
10. Sierratradingpost.com

URL Smackdown 1:

http://www.shoebuy.com/earth-shoes.htm (position 4)

VS

http://www.onlineshoes.com/kalso-earth-shoe-b_id84 (position 7)

This screen shot from SEOmoz highlights a few key metrics often looked at when examining perspective link targets. Clearly, the onlinshoes.com result ranking three spots lower (read “that shoebuy.com is significantly out ranking”) has the strongest page-specific metrics across the board. Beyond that, the mozRank to mozTrust ratio of the shoebuy.com URL displays a pretty odd discrepancy, making the result even more unusual.

It’s also important to note that the one link achieved to the shoebuy.com page is (according to Open Site Explorer) from shoebuyblog.com – a relatively weak domain. The page containing the link is relatively weak as well.

When performing a URL search in Majestic SEO, no results are returned for the shoebuy.com URL.

Examining the page will show you that there isn’t anything that noteworthy going on either.

Social Sharing? Not much to speak of.

Let’s look at the domains:
*Note: I included mT and mR metrics as points of further reference.  Since they are included in the DA score, that’s our focus.

URL Smackdown 2:

http://www.shoebuy.com/earth-shoes.htm (position 4)

VS

http://www.planetshoes.com/earth (position 5)

A similar story, except with an even more dominant set of page metrics. An on-page and social look reveal a similar situation to the first comparison as well.

Let’s look at the domains:

Clearly, the shoebuy.com URL appears to be very poor but is coupled to a very strong domain.  In both cases, this URL is outranking URLs that from a backlink metric standpoint are superior pages on very respectable domains.  Their results (in my opinion) are equally relevant from other viewpoints as well.

Time to get to the point. If you aren’t considering DA in your linking building strategy and working to understand how to harness and utilize it, you’re missing out big time.

So, we believe domain authority is good. No, GREAT. So how do we go get some? Well, let’s take a look at one example that might surprise some of you based on how we’ve all been trained to understand good linking.

Ok, so, it’s easy just by looking at a few of their top links to start to understand why shoebuy.com’s DA is so high. But, how did a shoe company get links on sites like hotwire.com, hsn.com, and expedia.com? And on the their homepages!?! Let’s take a look…

Example: Hotwire.com

Example: Expedia.com

Takeaway? Partnerships with the right site can apparently be valuable.

If you’re interested in doing some more digging related to this, take a look at the page metrics associated with the overstock.com result or the token “informational” result from the always-popular Wikipedia. While these aren’t over taking the stronger pages listed above, I’m willing to bet there are results with quality domains that also have strong page metrics listed 11-20 on the second page that are being passed up. In my opinion, according to the various sources of information that guide us related to links, it’s interesting those pages rank at all.

Get the Kavorka. It can’t be resisted.

Technorati Tags: link building

The organic search result rendered a preview of the correct landing page:

Notice the different landing page when previewing the PPC Ad:

Thankfully it was discovered that the Google preview user-agent was being redirected to the mobile domain, resulting in the preview showing the mobile content.

Duh?! Right? Hindsight is 20/20.

In defense of all involved, Google previews weren’t clearly stated on how they actually worked.

Are they cached or on-the-fly?

Google states that they generally generate previews using cached content but if it is not available then they will generate one on the fly using the user-agent “Google Web Preview.” We knew there was something signaling a redirect but without full access to a client’s site, it is difficult to dig deep enough to find the culprit.

However, we were able to test the PPC ad URL against the Google Web Preview user-agent and voilà! There was the answer in a 2 second test.

The site was redirecting the desktop URL to the mobile URL for the Google Web Preview agent only.

Conclusion: Running the target URL against the user-agent string showed us exactly how the web preview bot was reacting to the URL. Interesting to see confirmation of Google’s vague explanation of how previews work. It seems that in this case, the organic results showed a cached version of the preview, but the PPC ad showed an on-the-fly version, rendering the mobile the URL.

The client was able to remove the user-agent redirect and the mystery of the incorrect preview was solved.

How to Test for This

So how can you test your site against something odd like this? We will show you! There are tools that can help you do this, but we prefer the manual way in order to remove any points of weakness (and to get our nerd on).

To test a URL against a user-agent string, follow the steps bellow:
*For this example, we will use the Google Web Preview, but you can replace this user-agent string with any other user-agent string you’d like to test. User-agent strings are easily found online.

1. For Mac OSX or Unix users, open a Terminal window. For Windows users, you can use Putty or your favorite SSH method…
2. Type: curl –head –user-agent “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/[WEBKIT_VERSION] (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/[CHROME_VERSION] Safari/[WEBKIT_VERSION]” www.domain.com
3. To be clear, there are single spaces separating the text entered in the curl command and two dashes (it is hard to see in this WordPress font). There are no tabs or enters (new lines) and the user-agent string needs to be placed within quotes
4. After typing the curl command, hit enter
5. Review results

The above example ran www.rimmkaufman.com against the google web preview user-agent. It returns a 200 header response code (perfect). Let’s see what a googlebot mobile should see when properly being redirected to a mobile site.

Notice the “302 Moved Temporarily” and the location http://m.cnn.com” (by the way, CNN should change that to a 301 redirect).

This curl command tutorial is handy for many situations, and it confirmed an annoying issue for our client. We often find clients serving different header responses and redirects to different user-agents. Performing this exercise can be a big find and easy win, saving your site potential problematic issues.

A big thanks to Jody O’Donnell and the RKG crew for helping with the discovery and testing of this situation.

Adding to the buzz around tablets has been Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which was released in November, but was the subject of intense speculation long before it was even announced.  While Amazon’s earnings report last week offered some nuggets of information, it didn’t exactly spell out how many units were sold or the impact to Amazon’s overall bottom line.  According to the release, all Kindle unit sales, including e-readers, were up 177% during the holidays while the Fire, specifically, has been the best-selling product on Amazon.com since its introduction.

Meanwhile though, Amazon’s net income fell a whopping 58% year over year in the fourth quarter.  With the Fire losing a reported $3 dollars or so on every sale, Amazon is clearly thinking long-term and hoping to draw new users into its larger ecosystem of products and services, including e-books, digital content and the $79-a-year Amazon Prime.  That logic is reasonable enough — although Apple manages to hook users into iTunes quite well with hardware that is highly profitable per unit — but for it to work, they are going to need to gain traction with the Fire.

The Kindle Fire Jumps to Second Place in Tablet Traffic

As we reported in our Q4 Digital Marketing Report, the Fire is indeed succeeding as a low priced alternative to the iPad and gaining appreciable traffic share where a slew of big name competitors have failed.  Shortly after its launch, the Fire became the second biggest tablet in terms of traffic share, generating a little over 4% of tablet ad clicks in late December, before declining a bit to 3.5% at the end of January.

The iPad still generates the overwhelming majority of tablet traffic though, with a commanding 88% share, and it’s widely expected that the next iteration will debut within the next couple of months.  Still, it’s clear that consumers are buying and using the Fire in numbers that no one, but Apple, can claim.  Exactly how those consumers appear to be using them may be of particular interest to marketers.

Not All Tablets Convert Equally: Kindle Fire vs iPad and Other Devices

Looking at conversion metrics across tablets, phones and desktop, we found that clicks from shoppers using the Kindle Fire were far less valuable in January than those from users on almost any other device:

In terms of revenue generated per click (RPC), the Kindle Fire ranked worse than all other tablet classes, and even the iPhone.  RPC for the Fire was 83% lower than desktop and 84% lower than the iPad.  The Fire does run a version of the Android OS, but still fared poorly compared to other Android tablets, which themselves did not hold up well to desktop computers or the iPad.

We see a greater variance in conversion rate than average order value (AOV), which may speak to some potential reasons for our findings here.  AOV for the Fire is just 28% lower than that for desktop, but conversion rate is 76% lower.  Both metrics put Amazon’s tablet closer in league to a typical Android phone than an Android tablet.

Why is Kindle Performance so much Worse than the iPad?

Some hypotheses:

• Demographics:  While the iPad is becoming more and more ubiquitous, there’s reason to believe that its users skew toward higher income brackets.  Last year, comScore found that about half of iPad owners made more than $100,000 a year.  With conversion rates and average order size both running above desktop, the iPad owner is not only more likely to make a purchase, but they spend more when they do.  Conversely, with the Kindle Fire costing less than half of the cheapest iPad 2, we may be able to assume that it’s users fall into lower income brackets, or are at least more price-conscious.  Other Android tablets in general are cheaper than the iPad, but more expensive than the Fire, with AOVs and CRs in the middle of the two, pointing to a correlation between product price and conversion potential.
• Smaller screen size:  It’s an old story at this point, but the tinier the screen on our device, the more challenging it is to go through an online checkout process.  So, many users of smartphones may browse for products, but ultimately complete their purchases on a desktop.  The Fire has a 7″ screen versus the 9.7″ screen on the iPad 2, and while that difference doesn’t sound huge, it can have a big impact on web browsing.  Most of the other Android Tablets in our segment adopt a form factor very similar to the iPad’s and, again, their higher conversion metrics may be evidence that smaller tablets simply convert worse.
• Performance issues?: Although Amazon has provided updates along the way, early reviews suggested the Fire was considerably more sluggish than the iPad despite similar-sounding internal specs.
• More Local/Offline Intent: Because of its smaller size and price tag, users may be more inclined to actually take the Fire with them when they’re out and about, something traffic patterns suggest isn’t as common as you might think for larger tablets like the iPad.  Truly-mobile users frequently have different intentions and are more likely to search to aid an offline purchase.
• Users buying online, but buying from Amazon:  Lastly, if Amazon is having any luck, the entire ecosystem around the Fire is driving its users to buy products from the online retail giant even if they found those products somewhere else first.  The device plays content available from Prime, which also comes with free two day shipping at a sunk cost and it’s already set up for 1 click ordering, etc., etc.  This line of thinking has been expressed over and over at this point, but the poor conversion metrics we see may actually be evidence for it working.
  

What Should Advertisers Do?

For most advertisers, it is probably not worth the trouble to further segment their traffic beyond: tablet combined with or distinct from desktop, and smartphones.  The traffic from non-iPad tablet sources likely still comprises less than or around 1% of total traffic for most.  RKG pegs it at 0.8% for the month of January.

That said, since last July Google has provided an option in AdWords to target tablets by OS and now even allows segmentation by OS version:

Our figures suggest that the OS distinction makes a significant difference to expected conversion rates and thus the price we are willing to pay for that traffic.  If tablet traffic is particularly heavy for a site, that’s one line that we might one to draw.  It doesn’t appear possible to segment or filter out the Kindle Fire specifically at this time, but again, it is still a tiny piece of overall traffic (~0.2%), even if it has a much larger share of the tech world’s attention.

Technorati Tags: ipad, kindle-fire, smartphones, tablets

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Google’s move into the social world seems to be rockin’! Larry page, CEO of Google, announced that Google + users reached over 90 million, doubling the amount of users just three months prior.

Companies who have yet to jump on board with Google + should be paying strong attention to this social avenue and amping up their +1 presence with quality content.

Focus on the User
The launching of Google’s Search Plus your World ruffled feathers around the Internet. Most publicly was Twitter slamming Google for not including Twitter content, aka tweets. In revolt of Google’s eclectic search results, some smart engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace (among others) teamed up to create “Focus on the User,” a tool that instantly “googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.”

The Focus on the User bokmarklet works in Firefox and Chrome, and temporarily enables the functionality to show additional social results that are available.

The bookmarklet is super easy to use and pretty fun. Check it out.

SEOmoz Directory Database

Looking for quality directories to add your site to? SEOmoz updated their directory database, saving lots of time researching for niche directories. The only bummer is you need to be a pro member to access the full database.

Google Page Layout Update

Google made an algorithmic change that evaluates a page’s layout and the content-to-ads ratio above the fold. Although this change will affect less than 1% of searches globally, if you have a site that contains many ads above the fold, then you should strongly consider reducing or removing them and adding quality content above the fold.

Additionally, different screen resolutions or sizes will come into play. You can use Google’s browser size tool to help visualize the ratio on your pages.

Guest Blogging

Ethan Lyon from SEOmoz created a fabulous tool that scans Twitter for the queries “guest post” or “guest author” and automatically parses the data into a nice, organized report of guest blogging opportunities.

This is a helpful tool for any link builder or in-house SEO looking for guest blogging connections. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/want-guest-post-links-find-them-via-twitter-tool

Broken Links Do Not Penalize

We actually have been asked this question before from clients if broken external links can negatively affect a site, and if you too have ever wondered about linking out to 404 pages, then you might be happy to know that they won’t. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, confirmed this on a Google Webmaster Help thread.

It is however a lame user experience and consideration should be taken to clean them up or minimize them.

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One tactic that has paid off for Sweetwater has been the appropriate segmentation of tablet and smartphone traffic.  RKG was one of the first to point out the vastly different conversion rates for the two segments — nearly two years ago — and Sweetwater quickly took action to segment its paid search bids in light of those findings.  As Matthew Mierzejewski, RKG Vice President of PPC put it, “We were able to leverage iPad user data to increase our bids on that segment of the mobile audience. By leveraging this segmentation, we’ve been able to increase iPad CPCs by close to 90% compared to bundling smartphone and iPad devices together, efficiently driving more revenue for Sweetwater.”

The Google post includes a number of other tips and metrics and we encourage you to check it out.  Also, MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan adds some additional perspective to the study in an excellent article here.

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There are two other hypothetical scenarios/elements that I considered, both focused on the “Top” of the ad auction. Top ads are those that Google “promotes” to appear above the organic listings.

Since Google provides data on Top vs. Other ad position performance, we’re able to see the impact of ad position to CTR and ad spend in Google Auctions. For many clients, it is generally the case that over 85% of clicks and spend are incurred by ads in Top ad positions.  One might gather then that the answer to the question, “How much do you matter to Google?” largely resides in how many Top auctions each advertiser qualifies for. The severity of the impact a Top individual advertiser’s exit from the auction is judged by their Level of Bid, Level of Quality or Both.

Mark Ballard previously discussed the elements of Top auctions in two contexts. First, he called out the Top of Page Bid Minimum Threshold. Later, he identified where automated rules to push to such a minimum would be a risky endeavor. In this last piece, he gave some hypothetical auction scenarios. I’ll springboard off of the auctions used in that discussion for the purposes of this post. There, Mark constructed a model of QS and CTR correlation which is helpful in these hypothetical auctions. If you’d like details about those assumptions, read them in that post, and see the application in my tables below.

Scenario 1: High Max CPC Bids at the Top:

Where there are one or more advertisers with significantly above average Max CPCs, the impact of those advertisers to Google’s revenue is significant.  First, the initial auction:

By eliminating Advertiser C, we see a sizable hit to Google’s revenue (a 15% decrease). The reason for this is there are no new advertisers eligible to appear in the Top ad spots. Since Advertiser D does not have a high enough Ad Rank to be eligible to be promoted to the Top ad positions, Advertiser D will remain the first listed, right-rail (side) ad:

Note, we’ve even made the assumption that Advertiser D moving from position 4 to position 3 will experience a higher CTR, and therefore ultimately pay more to Google, without changing physical positioning on the page. Overall, however, Google still loses significant revenue due to the exit of a key advertiser.

Scenario 2: High Quality Advertisers at the Top:

Where there are one or more advertisers with significantly above average QS, the impact of those advertisers to Google’s revenue is also significant, by similar reasoning.

Google needs high quality advertisers to capitalize on Top ad slots. Take an example where 3 advertisers have a 10 QS, while the remaining set have 5′s and bid levels are tightly packed.

Here, we see a similar divide in Ad Ranks, and with the removal of advertiser C, no new advertiser is able to claim the now-vacated third Top ad spot. This costs Google greatly, to the tune of 14% in this example.

What this proves is that absent high-quality advertisers (those with high QS) Google loses it’s ability to “promote” ads to Top ad slots on the page. This reduces overall Ad CTR and ultimately costs Google revenue. Furthermore, if the ‘Top of Page Bid Minimum Threshold’ (in this example set at 50) were higher, the impact would be more severe in all cases.

Remember, that only Google controls this dial, and can set it to whatever they wish. Google can lower the Top of Page Bid Minimum Threshold in this auction, and regain some of the loss, but definitely not all of it. Would they do this though? Their Top of Page Bid Minimum Threshold is meant to allow only the most qualified advertisers to be promoted, so shifting it around willy-nilly seems contrary to that assertion.

For the sake of argument, I wanted to show the impact of a different advertiser leaving. If Advertiser B exits, as opposed to Advertiser C, the impact to Google is greater (16% decrease), but relatively similar to the previous example.

Conclusion – A special focus must be given to Top (promoted) ad positions when measuring the impact of a single advertiser on Google’s revenue. Highly aggressive bidders running away from their competitor’s bids, and high quality advertisers amongst a set of average or lower ones are very important to Google. More important still are high-quality advertisers with aggressive bid strategies!

RKG would also like to recognize Martin Roettgerding for his comments and development of the discussion on his blog – PPC Ephiphany. Please consider reading his analysis, and Martin, thank you for adding to the discussion!

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That sequence of thinking is completely logical. The use of iframes is widespread and there is nothing inherently wrong with the practice; but they just don’t feel quite right from an SEO point of view, especially when there are lots of links and content in the iframe. One good example of this is with PRWeb.com, a site our team audited several years back. Our recommendation at the time explained that “… press release pages are seen as linking to the customer URLs within the iframe and thus could be negatively impacting rankings for the individual releases. For any given iframe, there may be 20-100 links featured (or more, depending on the content of the iframe).”

Those words were written nearly 3 years ago. So you can imagine our intrigue when we read about a test that Michael Martinez had conducted over on SERoundtable.

Michael found that links within iframe elements were indeed crawled, also raising the question of whether or not equity passed through them (anchor text and PageRank). This got us sufficiently curious, so we conducted a test of our own.

The Setup: Two tests were conducted: one to determine if search engines grab information from the iframe tag itself, and the second to determine if the search engines will crawl the source of an iframe; follow links from that source URL and index the page with the attributed anchor text from the links found on the source URL.  Let’s see how it all went down…

Test 1

Page A – A trusted, frequently updated, and regularly crawled blog. This is the page where we added the HTML iframe tag: http://shoedigest.com/rants-raves/kushy-flats-to-go/

Page B – A small traffic, long established website page that has high-ranking terms for its subject matter.

Anchor text – “Sammy loves hiking south sister”

HTML Snippet on Page A

<iframe> src=”http://www.gimpslice.com/Hiking/Oregon_Hiking/South_Sister/index.html” frameborder=”0″>
<p><a href=”http://www.gimpslice.com/Hiking/Oregon_Hiking/South_Sister/index.html”> Sammy loves hiking South Sister
</a></p>
</iframe>

HTML on Page B – Legacy blog post about hiking south sister.

Prior to implementation, we tested the anchor text phrase against three search engines: Google, Bing and Blekko.  No search engine ranked Page B for the phrase “Sammy loves hiking south sister” in the first 50 results.

Additionally, we used a small traffic site that has been up for at least 7 years and hasn’t had changes in the last 4 years.  We took a page that ranks relatively high for a particular local query.  We created anchor text that doesn’t actually show up in the HTML source of Page B.  This should make the phrase unique to the anchor text.

Our results were very conclusive.  The search engines easily picked up on this link and the anchor text ranked on Google, Bing and Blekko for Page B.  In Google, Page A (the blog with the iframe) also ranked for the phrase on the first page for the query.  It picked up on the new link within three days of posting the iframe information.

Google

Bing

Blekko

Google Webmaster Tools was able to pick up on the link:

The test basically showed that the search engines are able to crawl the text within the iframe tag, but this wasn’t exactly the test we were trying to check.  This lets us know that they do crawl the HTML within the iframe tags.  Not only will it crawl the HTML within the iframe tag, it will attribute the anchor text to the proper page.  However, these are not surprising results.

Test 2

The second test was to determine, through a steel-tight iframe call with no HTML text between the iframe tags, if the engines will crawl the iframe source links.  And, would a link from the iframe source be followed and pass link equity to link’s landing page?

Page A – the same frequently updated blog
http://www.shoedigest.com/rants-raves/bitten-deercows-love-affair-western-boots/

HTML Snippet on Page A
<iframe src=”http://www.gimpslice.com/touch.html”>You need a Frames Capable browser to view this content.</iframe>

Page B – the same small traffic, long established website with a page newly created for this test (Page B).  It has no prior traffic nor existed before we posted the iframe HTML on Page A.  Prior to the test, this page did not exist on the server and would have returned a 404 page: http://www.gimpslice.com/touch.html

HTML Snippet on Page B
<p>check out <a href=”http://www.bettylife.com/Contributors/cara.html”>Cara rides 100 days at Bachelor</a></p>

Anchor text – “Cara rides 100 days at bachelor”

Page C – The target page of the anchor text on Page B: http://www.bettylife.com/Contributors/cara.html

Prior to beginning the test, we checked the anchor text phrase “Cara rides 100 days at bachelor” which does not show up anywhere in the source for Page B.  No search engine showed this phrase ranking in the first 50 results.

Results: After 14 days we could see Page B now showing up in the index for Google, but not Bing or Blekko.

The other search engines didn’t have the page indexed:

Bing

Blekko

Google did show the causal link between the anchor text, Page B and Page C. Remember, the only way that Page C could have been associated with the anchor text was through Page B which is only referenced through an iframe src= call from Page A.

Furthermore, Google did not show the iframe source URL (Page B) unless the anchor text was put in quotes.

The other search engines wouldn’t show the phrase even when looking for an exact match:

Bing

Blekko

Conclusions: For Google, it does indeed appear that it is following the source calls in iframes.  Because of the links in the second test we can draw the conclusion that it crawls the source, follows links and passes link equity to the final destination page. However, we are not able to draw conclusions as to how much equity is passed in relation to the portion similar to a 301.

This indeed backs up Michael’s test, but we would like to hear from you about your own tests and experiences!

Special thanks goes out to Ben Goodsell for help writing this post!

There’s an old adage online, by now so used up and tired I’m surprised how often it’s still envoked: content is king. I heard it whispered in 1996 by the pioneers, when it was still a fresh and novel concept, when it held promise and hope; when the web was still tiny. Content is king they said, when Google came on the scene with that clean, empty search box and bubble gum logo. They said it again when the web grew larger and noisier, when it got more difficult to get noticed. They said it before the content mills started to churn, turning out their feckless (and wreckless) acres of worthless words every hour. High quality content is king they said, once Panda lay her surprisingly deft paw on those capitalizing on Google’s vulnerabilities (and a few hapless good actors caught in the middle).

For the first time, I saw this axiom get turned on its head. Amit Singhal responded to a persistent barrage of pointed questions from Danny Sullivan about Search Plus Your World. The kernel he kept uncovering was that content is only part of the picture.

“…it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content.” – Amit Singhal

Content WAS king. Now Content is a knight at the round table along with Identity and Relationship.

This marks a seminal change in the way Google (and the web in general) are moving: towards the social graph. The social networks are the link profile – and the PageRank – of the future. The problem is, the social graph is splintered, proprietary, and held by competing forces. Forces holding tightly to data that will never be open to Googlebot’s crawl.

More from Amit,

“There’s a lot more. It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl.”

The ironic secret is that, while Google has the marketshare in search, Bing is already in possession of social data from Facebook and Twitter, and blends it into their results. Without a social platform to call their own, Bing blends social well using data from the category leaders. If users truly want social integrated with their search experience, then shouldn’t we all be using Bing instead of Google?

Then again, when Google set a honeypot for Bing and claimed the latter was stealing their ranking data, I bet they didn’t realize the future benefit of pushing Google+ so hard in search was getting it featured prominently in Bing’s results!

I kid because I love. Bing is a good search engine. It’s also got a long way to go if it hopes to displace Google. But boy, we need it now more than ever.

It’s Not Just About Content

So what does this all mean, anyway? Is it just a scrabble of ramblings from a slightly cynical SEO? I’m still trying to figure it all out, myself. But I’m pretty sure the stuff Amit told Danny is important. Something about the fact that “it’s not just about content.” Something about identities and relationships. As online marketers we need to look closely at social and link relationships (yes, links aren’t going away). We need to form alliances with important people and organizations, and we need to create content that is so stunningly spectacular that it gets attention from the influential identities out there.

Identity and relationships are fundamental to search, according to Amit. Identity and relationships are just as important as content. But identity and relationships cannot be found in a link profile, per se. You can spot relationships in that data, but you can’t know identities (apart from authors, and isn’t it interesting how Google’s pushing those?), and you can’t know influence outside of the domain authority or brand. Domain authority is associated with the link profile, and brands are how you “sort out the cesspool” as Eric Schmidt famously quipped.

Google wants Twitter and Facebook data, but only if they get signficant access to the data, enough to understand relationships, influencers, hubs, etc. They need the link profile of social media; they need the social graph. Think Facebook will give that to them, for any price?

Key Takeaways

• Content isn’t king anymore. Content used to be king. Now it’s a knight in the king’s court. The king is the user. Content serves the king (the user) with valuable writings, videos, images, graphics, resources, or whatever else Content should be. The best content wins. Anything else rolls downhill collecting at the base of the Mountain of Mediocrity, which makes the web. The best content wins, because the web is built with mediocrity.
• Relationships are another knight. Relationships allow us to connect with important people, companies, and organizations online. They are what the web (and the world) are built on, too. Consistent contribution makes healthy relationships possible. Consistency is key.
• Identity is the last knight. Identity grants “known-ness” to those lucky enough, smart enough, talented enough, or hard working enough to wear that crown. Identities can be powerful allies on the web, in the never-resting tussle for attention.

Focus on gaining attention from strong identities online (the influencers). Do this by leveraging relationships (your social network), and by producing content of distinction. Stunning, uncommon, exceptional content.

Easier said than done? Of course it is! But the recipe is right here. It’s up to you to execute, to stay ahead of the curve. This is where Google is headed. Don’t believe me? Then listen to Amit:

“A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content. Anything else trivializes a very hard product.”

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Yext Calls started in 2006, providing a pay-per call network to serve local businesses. Yext got businesses the right placements, businesses only paid when they got relevant calls.

But Yext has expanded its offering with PowerListings, a mechanism for businesses to control their local search listings from a single place.

One challenge brick and mortar businesses face is getting accurate, comprehensive, compelling listings to appear in local search results across the myriad of different local listing providers:

Every month, 6% of companies need to update something about their business: the physical address, the phone number, the hours of operation, and so forth. When any of those bits of information change it can take a LONG time for the correct information to work its way across the 100+ databases that need to be updated. Fixing them manually is next to impossible.

Moreover, many of the local search results providers have all kinds of additional fields available for categorization, descriptions, images, and even promotional text that are often unused because the algorithmic scrapers can’t find the information and the advertiser doesn’t have any good way to feed the relevant information to each different local data provider in the format they’re expecting it.

Now they can.

Yext has built API integrations with all the above players to populate, update and re-index their listings from a single input screen. Business owners now have a one stop shop for getting maximum value out of their location data.

Moreover, chains have all kinds of flexibility in giving controls to individual store owners to make their own updates. Particularly useful for a company like State Farm with 10s of thousands of independent agents, each wanting to be found. But also useful for Sears, whose store managers in NY could roll out “Giant’s fans save big” promotions, while their Wisconsin stores ran “Discounts for the Disgruntled” pitches {PS: I totally made up those examples, so no implication that anyone actually did this…just that they could, which is cool imho.}

There is one big hole in Yext’s net. Google, representing ~50% of the local search market, doesn’t work with them. Google so fundamentally enjoys the challenge of trying to solve all the world’s problems through algorithms, that they seem uninterested in allowing us mere humans to feed them info.

It’s Google’s loss, at this point. For example:

The Power Listings maintained by Yext in this case offer a far richer result: better for the advertiser, better for the user, and ultimately better for the local search engine.

The challenge for Yext may be in pricing. The per location pricing model probably makes sense for Mom and Pop, but for a major chain, that might work out to be a heck of a lot of money annually. How often does your local JC Penney’s move or change their phone number? Why should JC Penney continue to pay?

The answer to that last question may lie in the level of success in traffic generation. Yext has case studies showing a 2x to 10x increase in local listing traffic produced by the richer listings. Those are big numbers!

However, more important to the perceived ongoing value may be the text snippets that can be managed at the store level. Case studies showing the power of these “enhanced listing” call-outs as a marketing and CTR improvement tool could make the price seem like a bargain.

I’d be very curious to see what fraction of local page traffic comes from brand search versus competitive non-brand search. In the above example — a brand search for K-Mart — the various store managers might have an interest in stealing traffic from each other, and certainly that would be the case for franchises, realtors, etc, but what is the value for the parent company to have franchises fight for prominence, given that the parent is ambivalent to which child gets the credit?

For non-brand search the value is obvious, but I’m not sure how big a fraction that represents.

Neither RKG, nor I, have any partnership/advertising arrangement with Yext. This is not an advertisement. I had a couple of great conversations with some very sharp folks and just wanted to share.

Love to get your thoughts on Yext’s business model.

Based on the experience we’ve had using the feature with a variety of clients, Google invited us to share a bit more perspective over on their AdWords blog and to answer any additional questions readers might have here in our comments section.

So, fire away!

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