This is a test. Pay no attention unless you want to try to figure out what I’m up to. If that is the case, you probably have too much time on your hands.
How to Trick Google and Hide Your Keywords
I recently had a great conversation with a really smart internet marketer. He was sharp and bright, but I vehemently disagreed with him on one point.
I mentioned a technique I’ve used to hide keywords from google.
Why would you want to hide words from Google? This short answer is that sometimes you need content on your page this is off-topic. Most of the time that is legal terms and service info. Or it could be a return policy. Maybe you just want to inject a political message into your cute puppy blog. Or maybe you have a black hat and can think of some more nefarious uses. Who knows?
My friend countered that Google has the ability to read text in images, OCR. And therefore it isn’t a legit method of masking your info.
I don’t doubt Google OCR capabilities. Just that they don’t heavily weigh that info and don’t really incorporate it into the main content.
But he had interesting point. So, when there is any question about the way a system functions, turn to the data, TEST IT.
I created new webpage with just a photo. No exif info. No file name of the text. No alt-image text. It’s clean except for the words in the photo.
Try this for yourself.
Search in Google or Bing for this unique phrase found here:
http://joshlevenson.com/test1/
Does it come up for you?
When it does, we’ll know Google has started counting image text more heavily as a “ranking” factor.
Until then, hide in the bushes an necessary!
UPDATED: Dec 20, 2017
Looks like this is no long a valid strategy. Google will index text in photos.
See here.
The Crazy Bag Lady That Doesn’t Want My Help & The Myth of Domain Authority
I’ve had a few conversations recently with Marketing leaders at startups here in the Bay Area. The conversation usually starts with them stating they need SEO help. That they know they should be ranking better than their competitors.
When I ask them how they know, they say they have a better Moz DA than their competitors. And they’re currently working on increasing their DA.
When I run into the subject of Moz Domain Authority, I find myself at a crossroads.
It’s as if I’m in the middle of rainstorm. And I see a homeless crazy woman out in the rain. I want to rescue her. Get her out of the rain. But she doesn’t see the rain as a problem. She’s happy where she is.
Do I find her some shelter even though she’ll fight me the whole time?
I’ve just conjured up this analogy for the discussion of DA.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is an aggregated measurement of Moz Page Authority and Moz Trust.
What is Page Authority?
Moz Page Authority was a metric conceived off the original page rank patent back in the 1990s.
Moz Trust score attempts to determine the quality of the Moz Page Authority. They have their own “seed set” of trusted sites and determine the distance from those sites.
What are the Problems with Moz Domain Authority?
Woo doggies, there are many.
Let’s start with the fact the Google has never actually talked about Domain Authority. Ever. Neither has Bing.
Or let’s look at one of the building blocks, Trust. This is based on a decade old Yahoo patent from to see how far your site resides away from a trusted seed set. Think New York Times, Stanford University, or the IRS. Does Moz use the same seed sets as Google? Has Moz ever updated their Trust seed sets? Are these seed sets the only way to calculate how Trusted a website is?
Next what about Page Authority(ie pagerank). It might’ve made sense to use this in 2000 when all links were created equal. But in today’s environment, they’re not. Thanks to the Penguin Algo not all “do follow” links pass pagerank. In fact many have implicit “no follow” tags because Penguin has determined they aren’t trusted sites. Moz Domain/Page Authority are completely absent of a Penguin link quality algorithm.
Also, going back to at least the Hill Top update, Google has different flavors of Page Rank. Your site about cars won’t rank if all your backlinks come from foodie cooking sites. Subject specific pagerank isn’t included in Moz’s Authority metrics.
Why do People Use Moz Domain Authority?
So why do people use a Domain Authority metric if it’s so flawed. This is what I believe:
- They are just really busy and they want an easy answer.
- It comes from a psychological concept called Uncertainty Avoidance. Essentially people tolerate ambiguity at different levels of comfort. If you can’t tolerate the unknown, you’ll gravitate to a label. Even if that label is wrong. It eliminates your own internal anxiety.
- Last, related to Uncertainty Avoidance, I believe it comes from a culture of wanting to forecast everything. Steve Blank talks a little about this. How startups are asked by VCs for these ultra precise growth projections that have nothing to do with reality. How can you know what growth will be if your startup has only been in business for 2 years. You have no steady track record to forecast growth against. But I’m getting off topic. The point is that there is a culture of wanting to assign imaginary metrics to your operations.
Is Moz Domain Authority Good for Anything?
When evaluating your own site, no. If your site is a 65 or 72 or 29, what do you do with that information. There are so many incomplete and outdated inputs, it’s really no different than declaring your site is a Virgo, Sagittarius, or Aquarius. It’s nice to know your water sign but it doesn’t really change anything you’d do from day to day.
The only way I can think that Domain Authority might be useful is in evaluating websites for outreach. If you have limited time and a plethora of targets, DA might be tie-breaker if you’ve already evaluated relevancy, authority, trust, traffic, or visibility.
Conclusion
That crazy old woman getting rained on. I’m still trying to help her get out of the rain. But she does give me dirty looks every time I tell her Domain Authority is meaningless. She digs her heels in and refuses to listen to reason. But the ethical thing is to keep trying to help her. Even if growth stagnates because she won’t listen.
There’s a SEO Party in Your Pants, Bluma Zeigarnik and Steve Blank are Invited!
So my interests have recently turned towards direct response copywriting. I wouldn’t even call it copywriting per se as it is more psychology and influence. There is this concept call the Zeigarnik effect. Basically humans are pattern matching/finishing machines. The beginning of something always needs a close. For example take the nursery rhyme and try not to fill in the blank:
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a ______,
Did you fill in the blank. If so that is the Zeigarnik effect at play.
I was also thinking about a story Steve Blank told back in his B2B warrior marketing days. Basically he slaved over spec sheets for microprocessors his company sold. They were a work of beauty. After he presented it to management, they had an interesting reaction. They took his spec sheet, 16 pages long(remember this was the 80s), put it on a BBQ and burnt it. Horrified Steve asked what he did wrong. The CEO’s response was ‘nothing.’ Basically Steve’s data sheet would’ve stole the thunder of the whole Sales department. If that material was put out, and a customer lead was passed onto Sales, Sales would have nothing new to talk about. EVERYTHING was already disclosed in the data sheet.
This illustrates the tension in B2B companies between Marketing( SEO specifically) and Sales. As an SEO I want to get as much quality material as I can out there for Google to crawl and index; I’m thinking FAQ pages specifically. But if Sales gets a lead that knows everything, or worse gets no lead because this person’s questions were already answered, that Sales person is rendered impotent.
The answer to this came to me in reading about the Zeigarnik effect. If you strategically leave out finishing pieces of information for the FAQs, you can still set up Sales to be the hero while getting your content indexed and ranking. So what would that actually look like for your organization. Well, I’m about to do it right now. Use that contact form to ask me how.
Mastering a Lethal Dose of Influence: Reciprocation
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Matt. 7:12. I disliked even typing that sentence. It just seems so trite. It feels like The Golden Rule was artificially manufactured for social engineering. As if it keeps society from consuming itself. There is just something that feels completely false about it. “We’re highly complex humans. Surely engaging in social practices we learned in kindergarten doesn’t apply to the adult world.” WRONG. Despite its biblical declaration, The Golden Rule is hard coded into our brains from thousands of years of evolutionary reciprocation.
One of the first studies of persuasion and reciprocation as we know if came from Professor Dennis Regan of Cornell University. On the surface, the study’s purpose was to evaluate art. The real goal was to see if people could be persuaded through reciprocation.
Two people were present at each experiment. One was a lab assistant posing volunteer test subject. The other was a real volunteer test subject. Toward the end of the experiment, the lab assistant leaves the room to buy a coke. In half the experiments the lab assistant also buys a Coke for the other volunteer test subject. Later the lab assistant(test subject in disguise) asks the volunteer test subject to buy some raffle tickets. Regan found those test subjects that received a Coke from the lab assistant bought twice as many raffle tickets as those that weren’t given a coke.
Enslavement by Obligation
At the end of the experiment, the subjects receiving Cokes were secretly asked if they liked the lab assistant. Surprisingly, those that disliked the lab assistant bought just as many tickets as those who liked him. The obligation of returning a favor completely cut through feelings likability. Also interesting, all volunteer subjects that were offered a Coke accepted it, but not all drank it. So those feelings of obligation were felt by people who hadn’t even benefited from the lab assistant’s generosity.
Cialdini cites a similar example of the Hare Krishnas in the 1970s. A common scenario was for them to walk up to a business man in an airport and stealthy slip a dried up flower in his hand. When he tries to give it back they decline saying “It’s our gift to you.” After a couple iterations back and forth, the business man shrugs his shoulders, flower in hand, and proceeds to exit. This is when the Krishnas askfor a donation. The business men often complied, gave a donation, and threw the flower away.
You see new versions of this today in cities like San Francisco or New York. I’ve been approached by fake buddhist monks beaming with large smiles. They walk up and try to slip a tin coin or medallion into your hand. When you ask them whats going on you don’t get much of a response. If you take it, they ask for a donation $20.
So whats behind all this? Why are people buying more raffle tickets when they don’t even drink the Coke. Why are business men giving the Hare Krishnas donations for flowers they don’t want and later throw in the trash. The answer is obligation. The minute you agree to accept something, whether or not you actually want it, you are obligated. That is how they hook you. You are in a sense your own worst enemy. Once you accept something, you can’t not want to repay it (unless you’re a sociopath).
Watch Gary Vaynerchuk reveal reciprocation as the basis of his whole promo strategy.
Reciprocation Quicksand
Cialdini cites an example from The Hidden Persuaders where a grocery store sold a thousand pounds of cheese in a day. The store did this by inviting customers to cut as many samples off a block of cheese as they wanted. What struck me was the participatory aspect of this promo. I think this was successful because shoppers weren’t just given a fixed amount but were allowed to take at their own discretion.
Obligation Glue
So if obligation is the goal, how do you how do you ensure all your gifts are accepted. You have to demonstrate that your gift took a certain amount of effort, time, or money. It would be rude to deny a gift someone worked hard on. It does have a range though. If a coworker gifts you a new car, kind of creepy. Someone buys you a coffee or lifesavers, within the realm of normal for that relationship.
Gotta Take to Receive – Concessions
Cialdini found concessions from negotiation actually produced stronger obligations than just an initial gift. Not only was the sense of obligation stronger, opponents were more likely to engage in successive deals. In a typical negotiation one party starts off high while the other party attempts to negotiate the price down. When the first party agrees to a lower initial price he/she has conceded ground in the negotiation. Essentially they gave up personal value to come to a deal. Cialdini calls this the Reject & Retreat Method.
The R & R Method produces an obligation for the winning party because:
- They feel responsible for winning the negotiation…big dopamine stimulus
- They feel satisfied that an agreement was reached.
One thing to note is that this can backfire if the initial offer is seen as unreasonable.
Reciprocation Persuasion Recipe
- Give something upfront, within reasonable range
- Have the opponent participate if possible
- Make it look like your gift took a modicum of effort
- Know the reserve price you want to negotiate to and make initial offer higher
- Negotiate slowly back to reserve price
Hacking Knowledge Graph Cards for Fun & Profit
If you want a fun trick to play around with the SERPS you can try messing with url parameters to hack the Knowledge Graph cards. Aaron Bradley is the first one that found this hack. I had so much fun with it I made a video of it below.
I picked on Chris Christie as it looks like he’ll be Trump’s VP nominee. The Washington Post did an interesting job highlighting his opportunistic-hypocrisy. Or this one with a little inner reflection.
But enough about politics, this is a Marketing blog. No need to make Google angry by shifting semantic focus.
So the key to all this is getting Knowledge Graph identifier (a digital Social Security Number for a Person, Place, or Thing). This is the KGMID for Christie:
This is what it looks like for NOW.
Who knows if/when Google plans to kill off access to kgmid paramters.
In the meantime have some fun with it. Share on social. Irritate your grand parents. Prank your boss. I’d love to see what you come up with.
Mastering A Lethal Dose of Influence: Scarcity
Everyone knows the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet: idealistic love, feuding families, and suicide. This has become the parable for modern romance. But what if Romeo and Juliet weren’t really that in love. What if they, and every teenage bad-boy or bad-girl romance is really just an unconscious reaction to a millennia old hack for survival. Robert Cialdini sees parental disapproval as a major factor driving teens together. When parents forbid teenage relationships, those parents threaten freedom and choice of their kids. And when something is scarce, even “Love,” we cling to it.
Channels for Scarcity
There are two main ways scarcity can be employed.
Deadlines-False Time Constraints
You’ve seen these:
- Newspaper Ad……“Sale only lasts for x days.”
- Radio Ad…..“Going out of business sale, once it’s gone it’s gone.” Except the business is still there afterward.
- In person car shopping…..“If you leave the parking lot, I can’t promise you these same price on a new car.”
- Any infomercial.
- I’ve even successfully used this tactic on landing pages for PPC. “Sign up by this date[logic=current day+2] and get a free X[minimal cost].
If we think our opportunities evaporate in the future, we attempt to reverse that by acting immediately.
Limited Quantity
This one is pretty simple. The less of something there is, the more valuable it is. This basic economic concept is built into our psychology. A great example is when Amazon or any other ecommerce site shows how many items are left.
Are there really only two watches left on this sale item. A watch that they are trying to get rid of and only has one vendor on Amazon? Only Amazon and Oris know. Even if the stock # is accurate, are you more tempted to buy it now than if Oris had 100 in stock?
Ways to Juice-Up the Scarcity Effect
Combine Scarcity of Items & Info
Psychologists Brock and Fromkin have developed Commodity Theory of information. Basically the lesser known a particular piece of info, the more valuable it is. Cialdini illustrates this concept with an anecdote of his former student.
The student owned a meat supply business. After a conversation with Prof. Cialdini, the student injected scarcity theory into his sales strategy. Three groups a sales teams tried three different approaches. Group A used the same old sales pitch. Group B used the old pitch but mentioned an upcoming scarcity of meat for the market. Group C used the old pitch but mentioned an upcoming scarcity. Group C also mentioned that they had a secret inside source for the scarcity info. After this trial period Group B sold twice as much as A. Group C sold six times as much as Group A.
Transitioned Scarcity and Competition
Stephen Worchel performed a study involving a chocolate cookies. There were four groups asked to rate the desirability of the cookies.
Group A= Had 10 cookies
Group B=Had 2 cookies
Group C=Had 10 cookies but then removed 8
Group D=Had 10 cookies but then removed 8 and was told others want them.
Group D rated their cookies the most desirable. What we can take away from this is that a transition of surplus to scarcity produces larger perceived value than a constant scarcity. When we introduce competition, that want surplus cookies, we see that value compounded.
I’ve seen transitioned scarcity occur even in SEO. One of the many upheavals in the SEO world was the (not provided) saga. Basically Google Analytics began phasing out organic keyword data in 2011. We’ve been without precise keywords for a while. And yet, US searches, presumably to find a solution to the missing keywords, are trending higher than ever.
Utility vs Perception
An interesting note to the Worchel’s study was that all the groups rated the taste of the cookies the same. So desirability was elastic but its functional results were static. I think the moral to the story is using scarcity can affect short term productivity. But, if your product or service is of poor quality, you’ll never retain your customers. You can persuade them to buy the first cookie and take a bite. But if you cookie sucks, you’ve just lost a customer.
SMX 2016 Ranking Talk – Paul Haahr
I just watched the latest SMX vid of Paul Haahr. He was surprisingly forthright. Some notes just to organize in my brain.
What google shows in response to a query is based on two basic scoring signals:
- Query Independent: ie……Pagerank, Language, Mobile Friendliness
- Query Dependent: ie…..Keywords, Synonyms, Proximity
Paul then shifts gears to talk about pages themselves and brings in quality raters guide. Paul says “If you wonder why Google is doing something[experiments] it is to make it look more like what the raters guidelines say.” Paul’s statement emphasizes that this is a document that was created with much effort and needs to be digested to fully understand current SEO.
So key metrics for scoring are broken down into two major categories:
- Needs Met
- Page Quality
- Time to Result(pretty simple, be fast)
Needs Met
Needs met translates to relevance. But the more Paul talks, the more he sounds like he is actually talking about intent. That seems to dovetail with what Roger posted on SEJ. Give searchers what they think they want, not what they ask for.
Page Quality
Paul gives an anecdote about 2009-2011 results being quite high in relevance but awful in quality. He calls that the definition of a content farm.
So page quality is then further divided into Expert, Authority, and Trust. Paul mentions that Trust is more heavily weighted with Your Money or Life pages AS WELL AS “buying a product.” The raters guide say legal and sensitive areas like child adoption or car safety are pertinent. My first thought was SSL. Probably not the only trust signals?
Some of the things that make High Quality content:
- Good Rep – Gotta be defensive and offensive with ORM
- Expertise – How to establish that your authors are experts? During a Q&A Paul won’t answer directly but does say that manual quality reviewers have the ability to determine that. I’ve got a few ideas on what that means.
- Authority – Thinking this has to do with site/theme historical topicality. Although citations may be in play as well.
- Trust – Too many factors to count. Suffice to say this is where you have to put your big boy digital pants on. Churn and burn sites don’t survive here.
- Sufficient helpful main content which means secondary content isn’t distracting. Oldie but goody of GOOPLA, h/t Gypsy Dave.
Rank Brain
In the Q&A Danny asks about RankBrain. Paul gives up the following:
- “[He] knows how it works but doesn’t know what it is doing.”
- Is part of the post retrieval adjustment segment
- “It sees webpages, queries, and Other Signals.”
What are these other signals? So far most people are only talking about unseen long tail query reformatting.
Brand Bias
Danny asks about brand bias by raters. Paul mentions that they have metrics to try to counter brand bias that aren’t built into quality. He gets quiet….almost somber for a few seconds. But then perks up and mentions that the raters do a great job rating small quality site.
I never paid much attention to Aaron Wall banging on about big company favoritism. Maybe he is on to something though. I don’t think Google is intentionally punitive to small brands but perhaps a flaw in their quality theory.
CTR
Lastly Danny asks about CTR being used in ranking. Both Paul and Gary Illyes squirm in their seats. Gary says engagement is hard to interpret. Neither outright deny the use of engagement for rank scoring. Again I think it’s one of those things that doesn’t have an easy answer and they’d rather not go down the rabbit hole. Many panda hit sites see steep increase in traffic before they fall. I’ve always thought it was Google measuring Quality engagement data before a demotion.
Artifacts for a Museum: Floppy Disks, Flip Phones, & Keyword Rankings
Gary Vaynerchuck advises people to jump on the newest social platform and master it as quickly as possible. Doing so gives a temporary first mover advantage. New users of the platform haven’t developed ad blindness nor grown calluses to spam. Eventually they do though. And when users reach peak marination in the new platform, they become immune to shitty marketing. Simply being there first isn’t enough to keep an audience engaged.
This is the way many still treat SEO. 10 or 15 years ago people were enamored with this thing called Google. They didn’t care what company was in the number one spot for “Buy _____.” “Hey it’s the internet lets choose the first website we see and buy from it.” With this impulse purchase attitude, ranking #1 carried lots of potential. You didn’t really have to be that popular or trusted of a company. You just had to be present in the SERPs. This mindset is how many business owners and C-suite still measure the effectiveness of SEO today. But as Wil Reynolds points out in his brilliant Conductor talk, ranking isn’t good enough anymore.
Now don’t get me wrong, there is a place for checking the rank of semantic keyword baskets. We want to squeeze as much juice from the SERPS as possible. But the addiction to keyword rank represents a overly simple measurement that soured years ago. Even if rank did guarantee revenue, not all SERPS are the same. These are just a few of the reasons a #1 rank isn’t universally achievable: personalized search when you are logged into google, different results for mobile devices, different results geographically(not only by country but sometimes by closest metro area). Add to that local results, one boxes, knowledge graph cards, “people also ask” cards, and were dealing with totally different real estate.
So if SEO black magic no longer works what does? Brand building is the answer you are looking for. Does this mean that you’ll have to spend more time and energy to drive revenue through your website? Possibly yes, sorry. Does this mean SEO is dead. Absolutely NOT. SEO is doing what it has done since the 1990s, it’s evolving. Good SEOs evolve with it. Bad SEOs complain how unfair Google is. To illustrate the intersection of SEO and good ole fashion Marketing/Branding, I’ll leave you with another awesome anecdote from Wil.
Rank Brain for Dummies: My 2 Cents on Google Recycling It’s Garbage
Ok so I’ve seen a resurgence of talk about Rank Brain chatter amongst the SEOs. I honestly wasn’t familiar with Rank Brain as I wanted to be and because Google is typically cryptic, I went to research. So Rank Brain is similar to Word2Vec as The SEMPost reports. Word2Vec basically attempts give words numerical values, vectors, or coordinates. So days of the week tend to have close numerical values. Verbs like can, will, may, and their contractions would have similar numeric values.
So what does this mean? Basically if we can give a numerical value to words, we can mathematically understand the meaning of a word, without the word actually being present. The closer the assigned value of two words, the closer the relationship.
Is this the death of SEO and Keywords? I don’t think so, at least not yet. This is just another step in the direction of Strings to Things. Things are covered by entities in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Rank Brain fills in the holes.
Ok so what are the takeaways. Not much has changed in SEO strategy. If you didn’t get the memo and you’re new to SEO or have time traveled back from 2005, the message is the same. Keywords aren’t enough. If you’ve got a page about [minimalist running shoes], it’s probably important to talk about subjects surrounding it: the materials it’s made of, injuries sustained by minimalist running shoes, the benefits, how to transition from a thick shoe to a thin one, some good places to take them out for a spin, yada, yada, yada. Even if Rank Brain hasn’t figured a query like “foot gloves that are great for strengthening plantar fasciitis injuries”, it will soon. Use your exact match keywords, stemmings, modifiers, and synonyms are for the present. Surrounding concepts for the near future. As Andy Grove said “Only The Paranoid Survive.”