User Generated Content (UGC) can provide great value for your web properties.  In fact, Bazaarvoice reported that 80% of consumers are now seeking user generated content and reviews to guide purchase decisions.  (For the record, Bazaarvoice recently served up its 100 billionth piece of UGC).  However with the good comes the bad and user generated content can be easily exploited if not monitored.

If you are a large e-commerce site, or any site for that matter, that features substantial pieces of user generated content, you will want to take note that Google will be again looking to crack down on spammy user generated content to help clean up the Web. Google is also looking to clean up the Web from sites that have had their content hacked as there continues to be an increase in hacks from things such as Wordpress plugins and the like.  Sites are being hacked like never before, so this is welcomed news from Google.

Announced earlier this week, Google will continue to use Google Webmaster Tools to notify Webmasters of additional issues that Google has detected on their sites.  These issue include:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

 According to Google,

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.

Fighting spam and hacked sites is a large task that Google cannot tackle alone.  The fact that Google is taking steps to address these issues will help, but at the end of the day, Webmasters need to be responsible for their Web properties.  Again not always an easy thing to stay on top of. 

We have noticed an increase in what appears to be spammy user generated content on large e-commerce sites.  From a user’s perspective this makes it difficult to trust these sites knowing that due to fake profiles or “phony reviews”, our search for information is being tainted.  As Google illustrates, there are those people who create user accounts and will create accounts and “fill their profiles with gibberish, blatherskite and palaver. Even worse, they’ll add a sneaky link, a bit of redirecting JavaScript code, or a big fake embedded video that takes your users off to the seediest corners of the web.”  These spam profiles have caused issues with comments, communities and user generated content on numerous web site out there.  Quite honestly, Google said it best when they stated the fact that the social web is growing incredibly quickly and spammers look at every kind of user content on the web as an opportunity for traffic.

 Tips for Safely Leveraging User Generated Content / Hacked Content

1. Understand your CMS – CMS systems are great because they make it easy to deploy content to your site, but auto-generated pages can be abused if you’re not aware.  Ensure that you are aware of the possibilities of auto-generated content being populated on your site.
2. Be Aware – know what to look for.  Watch out for suspect behavior such as multiple user accounts being created from the same IP address, insertion of questionable links in comments or reviews etc.
3. Employ standard security features on your web properties – use things such as CAPTCHA to help crackdown on spam commentary.
4. Establish Rules for Publishing User Generated Content - make it clear that users may not upload infringing content to your web properties.  Work to follow the fundamental principles of user generated content services.  For more information visit: http://www.ugcprinciples.com/
5. Leverage Monitoring Tool - tools such as Google Alerts can be set up to help monitor questionable activity on your web properties.
   
6. Consider placing nofollow on comment links or on questionable user profile pages.
7. Allow users to report spam – empower your users to help control spam commentary and phony reviews.
8. Perform Spot Checks - do periodic checks on your reviews, comments and areas where user generated content is found on your site.  

There is no question as to the value of user generated content.  However, it really should be monitored to ensure that spam commentary is not dominating the conversation.

• Recognizing a need for information
• Accepting the challenge to take action to fulfill the need
• Formulating the problem
• Expressing the information need in a search system
• Examination of the results
• Reformulation of the problem and its expression, and
• Use of the results

(Marchionini and White in Hearst, 2009)

An interesting criticism of this model came out last year in a paper by Max Wilson called “The Tetris Model of the Information Seeking Process”. The standard information seeking model sees users as formulating their queries, viewing their results, and reformulated their query ad infinitum as needed in a circular process until they reach their desired result. Wilson argues that the stages of information seeking don’t necessarily occur in a linear process but can be better visualized as a Tetris layout where information must be fitted together to reach a goal. In this model, progression, time, and movement between the different stages of information seeking are tracked independently. This model visualizes the quality and complexity of information through the depth of a Tetris block:

While Wilson relates the increasing speed of the Tetris game to the deadlines and time constraints that people face when searching, I see it as also representing the rate which users become familiar and proficient with the search interface. A game that doesn’t speed up could be seen as a metaphor for usability problems. While the model doesn’t assist with aspects of the information seeking process such as query formulation, it does provide new and novel way to visualize how we piece the information of multiple search results together to find an ultimate result.

Developing an interlinking strategy is a key piece of optimizing your web properties. Quite often many site owners do not take the time to properly plan their interlinking strategy. The process outlined below is designed to provide some insight as to how you should proceed when establishing your interlinking strategy.  While this process can be modified according to how advanced your current interlinking strategy is, if anything else, establishing a process will at least ensure that interlinking is a line item as part of your overall optimization strategy.

1. Take inventory of your site pages – you need to have an idea of what you have to work with when it comes to interlinking.
2. Evaluate Current Internal Link inventory – using tools such as Google Webmaster Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools, can provide great insight into how your site is currently being interlinked.
   • Identify key pages to link from (i.e. donor pages)
   • Identify key pages to link to (i.e. recipient pages)
   • Identify current broken link inventory using tools such as XENU
3. Keyword Research/Anchor Text – become educated on which keywords you want to incorporate into the anchor text of your links.
4. Determine Link Type Usage – determine which types of links will best suit the needs of your audience factoring in SEO benefit as well.
   • Text links from within page copy
   • Top Navigation links
   • Breadcrumb
   • Sitemap links
   • Sidebar navigation links
   • Footer links
   • Image Links
5. Identify Engagement – which areas of the site are users frequenting the most?  Which areas of the site are the highest converting?  Use data from your site’s analytics and internal site search to identify user engagement.
6. Develop an Interlinking Map – Create a visual representation of how you want to interlink your site pages.  Quite often this is based on content silos or your site hierarchy.
7. Establish Interlinking Requirements – based on interlinking best practices for SEO and usability.
8. Finalize Interlinking Map – this identifies the approach that you will be using for interlinking your web properties.
9. Implementation – roll out Interlinking Strategy
10. Monitor – monitor internal links through tools such as your analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of search interfaces will be of interest. For SEO, Heart has some relevant chapters on personalization in search and emerging trends such as multimedia, social and mobile search. Interestingly, she cites research that shows that more content does not necessarily equate to better search results for complex queries – which has ramifications for mobile search. The section on multimedia search highlights some of the difficulties in using text-based queries to capture non-text results, plus the challenges of using non-text queries (like images, such as Google’s Goggles) to retrieve information.

One chapter to of note for both usability and SEO experts is her chapter on models of the information seeking process. Hearst gives a great overview of the most common models of searching, including the standard information seeking process, cognitive and dynamic models, and models for search in stages, search as a strategic process, and sensemaking.

If you are interested in Heart’s work, her university course called Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business is a available as a podcast and includes guest lecturers such as Hal Varian and Daniel Russell from Google, Marc Najork from Microsoft Research, and Jason Schultz from the EFF.

Before we dive right into the tips though, let’s make sure that we are on the same page when we refer to interlinking. Interlinking as it is being referred to here is simply the process of linking from one of your website pages to another of your own website pages. The purpose of interlinking at the heart of it all is really in terms of navigation, to take the user from one page to another relevant page. So as an example, if you are a website that sells hockey skates, you might have a page on how to properly tie your hockey skates, it then makes sense to link to a page about skate laces. Relevancy is a key factor when it comes to interlinking.

Of course there are those out there who are going to tell you that interlinking has to be a complex web sculpted in such a manner to maximize the linking that is taking place… blah, blah, blah. We are not going to get into things like PageRank sculpting and such.  I, personally, have never been entirely sold on the whole PageRank sculpting thing anyway.  Interlinking does not have to be complicated to be successful, it just has to make sense. The following tips can help you make sense of your interlinking strategy and the means to which you effectively interlink your site’s pages.

5 Keys to Interlinking Success

1. Take Inventory of Your Web Pages – the first thing that you need to do before you even start interlinking is to take an inventory of your site pages.  This becomes difficult for all of you large dynamic site owners out there, but really you should have some sort of idea as to the size and structure of your site.  If you do not, you may have made some mistakes with your site redesign.  Regardless, taking inventory of your site’s page is a good first step in planning your interlinking strategy.  In fact, taking inventory of your site pages is a necessary step when planning your interlinking strategy.
2. Determine Areas of Strength & Areas for Improvement – evaluate your current internal linking structure.  This is important to determine which areas of your site are currently well interlinked and which areas are not.  Again, let’s keep it simple, no need to complicate things here.
3. Map Out Your Interlinking Ideas - once you have taken inventory of your webpages and you have determined which areas of your site need some help, you can map out an initial plan for interlinking your site pages.  Is there a section of your site that the focus needs to be on?  Or perhaps there are certain product pages that require some lift?  Wherever the issue, mapping out a few interlinking scenarios can help illustrate where you can get the best bang for your buck when it comes to interlinking your site.
4. Leverage Proper Tools – there are a number of free and inexpensive tools that can be of great assistance when evaluating your current internal linking structure.  For starters I recommend using Google Webmaster Tools.  This is a great tool for performing link analysis (both internal and external).  Be prepared to review your internal links regularly with GWT.  Want to check for broken links, use tools such as XENU to determine where you need to tidy up and update some of your existing links.  Another tool that can come in quite handy is SEOmoz’s LinkScape tool.  While, we’re not big fans of MozRank and such, this tool can be used to gain some insight into your own interlinking status as well as that of your competition.
5. Remember the things that make a “good link” a “good link” – As a reminder, link quality is what we are all looking for.  A quality link from an SEO perspective is one that comes from a relevant page that features relevant keywords in the page title, in the linking text (anchor text) and in the page copy from the page that is linking.  When interlinking your own site pages, keep this in mind so that you can improve the quality of your interlinking practices.

Interlinking is an important part of optimizing your website, not just for search engines, but for your site visitors.  A link is like a teleportation device that can take your user from page A to page B with but a simple click.  Make that click meaningful.  Planning and mapping out an interlinking strategy can provide your site visitors with a cleaner and more efficient site experience

Google is currently in a six month transition making changes to the way Google news sitemaps are to be constructed. While in the past, news sitemaps needed to be divided into separate maps according to genres and languages, now all articles can be combined into one single sitemap. It is also possible to note your news sitemap location in your robots.txt file where as before your news sitemap would have needed to be uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools.

You will want to update your sitemap every time you publish a new article. Remember to only include articles published in the last two days in your news sitemap. You can have a maximum of 50,000 URLs in a sitemap and a maximum of 1,000 sitemaps. On the technical side of things, Google uses Sitemap Protocol 0.9. For a complete list of news sitemap tags, visit Google Webmaster Central.

Before I go on, I would like to say that I am by no means an expert on attribution. The purpose of this article is to really open up a dialogue and help take some of the confusion out of attribution as it pertains to marketing specifically online marketing.  People have been trying to figure out attribution for years and quite honestly, very few have a good handle on it.  Of course there are different types of attribution and with the digital age there are new types of attribution emerging such as last click attribution, 30, 60 or 90 days back attribution, multi-channel attribution, multi-campaign attribution and the list goes on.  Where to begin?

Let us start by sharing some common definitions of attribution:

• the process of awarding different marketing events different levels of commission
• placing value on various marketing efforts that lead to a sale
• the process of assigning value or credit to marketing sources that result in a conversion
• a method for assigning a worth to an action, a person or event

Really at the end of the day, attribution is about giving credit where credit is due.  The definitions above are all correct.  Attribution is about assigning a value to a marketing action that results in a reaction from your target audience (i.e. customer).  Again giving credit where credit is due.  Conversely, attribution is also about being accountable for.

The Recipe for Attribution

For attribution to work you need a couple of key ingredients:

1. Business Objectives – the clearer the better.  You need to know what the end goal of your campaign is.
2. Accurate Analytics/Tracking – you need to be able to accurately track all of the attributes that are present in your conversion process.
3. All Touchpoints Identified – if you miss one, and just one, your attribution distribution is negatively impacted and becomes less accurate.

Let’s look at a typical scenario.  This past weekend many of us watched the Super Bowl (congratulations to the New Orleans Saints, on a great season…).  Viewers are tuned into some of the most expensive advertisements ever produced.  So let’s say that you are looking to purchase a new car.  While you were watching the Super Bowl, you happened to the commercial for Hyundai Sonata.  You had previously done some research and Hyundai was one your shortlist as part of your consideration set.  Then you perform a search in Google for “Hyundai Sonata”then happen to click on the top organic listing which is for www.hyundaiusa.com/sonata/.  You bookmark the site.  You do some research and then jump off to another unrelated site.  Then on the weekend you meet with a friend who hands you a magazine with an ad or a review for a Hyundai Sonata.  You go back to the site that you bookmarked.  You then go online that night a perform a search for “Hyundai dealers” in <insert your town/city here>.  You happen to live in Seattle, so you click on a sponsored listing for Hyundai of Kirkland.  You then click back and find that there is a local listing for a Hyundai dealership not 15 minutes from your home.  You visit the dealership and obtain more information.  The deal presents you with a DVD outlining some of the features of the Hyundai Sonata.  You review and a week later you go back to the dealership and purchase a 2010 Hyundai Sonata.

As the marketing in this case, the folks at Hyundai can in fact attribute pieces of the sale to the various items that you were exposed to.  The original Super Bowl ad, your previous organic search tasks, the magazine ad, the sponsored listing(s) that you clicked on etc etc.  While this may be an extreme example, you get the point.  Attribution is complex at the best of times, so taking the time to clearly identify a typical conversion path becomes important for the purposes of attributing a value to each of the marketing efforts.

Something to keep in mind is that attribution may not ever be 100% accurate.  People are different and while there may be some common reasoning as to how or why they make a purchase, things like semantic mapping and experience are not the same for everyone.  As a result, it is hard to determine what influenced a person to make the decision they did at that single point in time.  Having clear business objectives, proper tracking and analytics and being able to accurately assign a value to your marketing efforts can provide a more useful method for attribution.  You will have a better idea of where your marketing dollars are best spent.

It seems as though there is always the question of where can we focus our SEO efforts?  This is a great question as there are many areas that may require attention.  Again, most clients are at different places when it comes to SEO.  However one area of SEO, for whatever reason that is often overlooked, is in the fundamentals:

• On-Page Optimization – title tags, meta data, on-page headings, page copy etc.
• Interlinking – mapping out where and when to interlink site pages
• Technical obstacles – coding issues
• Building links – improving your external link inventory

Quite often it means revisiting these elements to ensure that the site is fully optimized and providing the right messaging to the right people at the right time.  When it comes to SEO, it is all about focus.  An SEO roadmap helps the client focus on the activities that need to be addressed so that they can experience the greatest return with their online marketing efforts.

Focus:  Here and Now

Having a clear focus can make any marketing effort easier to act upon.  Focus simply means directing your attention towards something.  Students, for example,  focus their studies on a particular topic.  Restaurants focus their menus on specific meals. Olympic athletes focus on a specific sport.  The focus is clear and at times narrowed, but success is due in part to focus.  In business, it is easy to determine the have’s from and the also-rans based simply on focus.  Those businesses that have clear business objectives often perform better than businesses that have a lack of clear vision or focus. With online marketing and SEO, focus is just as important for success to be achieved.  From initial evaluation to the prioritizing of tasks to the implementation of recommendations to value justification to on-going maintenance, the ability to map out the “areas of focus” becomes increasingly important.

As a result, we established SEO roadmaps to help the client understand, and prioritize their SEO tactics and overall strategy.  The purpose of the SEO roadmap is many, but in essence, the SEO roadmap is used to assist  clients in:

1. Awareness – of the tasks that need to be completed to enjoy full SEO success
2. Prioritization -all of the items and tasks required to achieve organic success
3. Ensuring Accountability – SEO roadmaps illustrate who is accountable for a given task which is useful in identifying any potential hurdles or time management efforts that may be required to implement a given task
4. Illustration – of the overall goals and what the return we are striving for as they relate to the overall business objectives of the company.  To help tell the story.

The fact is that the SEO roadmap becomes a critical piece of intelligence for all parties involved.  It helps with the focus of where efforts need to be, where they should be and most importantly perhaps where they should not be.  (What I mean by this is, that we have seen companies who try to jump to the latest and greatest SEO tactic or buzz topic, when they in fact have not yet addressed the fundamentals or have even developed a strategy as to what they want to accomplish or achieve.

So what then should your SEO roadmap consist of?  Well this can vary but at the very least it should contain the following elements:

1. Action Items / Tasks
2. Description of Item/Task
3. Accountability – who will be responsible for implementation?
4. Estimated Completion Date

Quite often it is always a good idea to include a value justification piece as to what the result will be of acting on a specific action item or task.  Ideally the best SEO roadmaps are the ones that are not overly complicated.  The most effective SEO roadmaps are the ones that are simple, clear and concise.

If you want to refine your online focus, consider creating an SEO roadmap to help establish the path that you need to achieve your online goals.  From there, plug your SEO roadmap into your overall online marketing roadmap and continue to revisit your business objectives so that you remain focused towards achieving your goals.

The Search Industry has changed drastically during the past decade.  We have seen our fair share of SEO agencies and Search companies come and go.  In fact, we have seen our fair share of Search Engines come and go as well.   We have used a large number of search marketing buzzwords and we will probably continue to do so.  To produce thousands of articles about search and search engine marketing is no easy feat.  It takes a dedicated team and a lot of thought to post regularly.  Throughout the years Enquiro has seen some team members come and go, they have all left their mark on ASK Enquiro and all of the blogs associated with the Enquiro brand.  I apologize if I miss anybody, but thank you’s go out to:

Brenda, Rob, Gerard, Darren, Rick, Marina, Lisa, Chris, Jason, Petra, Rich, Manoj, Kyle, Ian, Krista, Tracy, Jordan, Charlotte, John, Barb, Cory, Tom, Andrew, Karl, Gord and Jody for contributing to the Enquiro blogs over the years.  Here’s to another great decade.

Here is a look at 100 memorable search marketing related  posts from Enquiro.  Happy holidays everyone!  See you next decade.

A Decade of Search Marketing Posts Part II

• Heinous acts of terrorism including September, 11, 2001
• Increased natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005
• Genetic advances never experienced before
• Soaring oil prices
• The Boston Red Sox winning their first Word Series title since 1918 (in 2004)
• The phenomenon of blogging and micro-blogging (Twitter anyone)
• Monster bailouts and bankruptcies
• The inauguration of the first African American President of the United States
• The death of the King of Pop with the passing of Michael Jackson in 2009

Newsweek has some cool images from the past decade that can be viewed here:
http://2010.newsweek.com/photo/visions-of-the-decade.html

Then there is the online world.  The Internet has transcended quickly and Search has allowed us access to information that we would have not been able to access otherwise.  Like the real world, the Search Industry has transformed drastically over the past decade.  Enquiro has been around for the entire decade and we have posted thousands of search related and marketing articles over the past decade.

Through various environments, blogs and websites, Enquiro has been on top of the latest in the Search industry since the start of the decade (and even prior to 200) and we wanted to share the past decade in the Search Industry with a look at 200 (yes I said two hundred) of our memorable posts from the past decade.  This is but a sample of how the industry has transformed during this time.  For thise of us who have been in the industry during the past ten years, the only constant we have experienced is change.

Some of the posts have been modified from their original version.  We apologize for any formatting errors or omisions.  Take note of the date of some of the posts and thik back about how different things are in the world of Search as we head into the next decade.

200 Memorable Search Marketing Posts from the Past Decade 2000-2009 – Part I
Presented by Enquiro