The question if only the first link’s anchor text to a page counts or multiple anchors per page has been tested and discussed for quite a while now by a bigger number of bright minds, (see below) but Johannes Beus shows some VERY interesting results – especially in relation to image links.

So last Monday Johannes Beus ran more tests on Google.de to find out how and if Google rates the first link text differently from the second link text.

—< Johannes’ results translated by Bernd & Christoph of “CEMPER.COM”:http://www.cemper.com >—

I elaborated on the fact that Google rates only the first link text � if there is more than one link directing from one page to another � a couple of weeks ago. In response to that post several e-mails and comments were written with special cases about that fact. I tested those cases and would like to present the results to you. All the tests are still available under online, so please feel free to check it out yourself.

Test 1: Standard case as tested a couple of weeks ago (1. Link / 2. Link)

The result is still the same � if there is more than link directing to a target page, Google rates only the first link text. Therefore it is still better to store the important keywords for the internal linking within the first link text.

Test 2: First Link = No Follow-Link (1. Link / 2. Link)

As you have seen at the first test but with the difference that this time the first link was provided/devaluated with the attribute No Follow.

The result is quite surprising: Google neither rates the first nor the second link text and additionally, Google neither crawls nor accepts the target page to the index. To make sure that this wasn’t a random mistake by Google, I waited a couple of days and attempts to crawl by the Googlebot after the admittance of the remaining sites but the result didn’t change. The focus of Google on the first link of a page seems to go so far that all other links on that page will be damned if the first link shows a link text with the attribute No Follow.

Test 3: First Link = picture; No title, No alt attribute (2. Link)

The first link was set with a picture as link text although there is neither a title nor an alt attribute within the picture. With this combination, Google rates the second link text.

Test 4: First Link = picture; No title, but alt attribute (1. Link / 2. Link)

As in test 3, but this time the alt attribute of the picture was implemented. The result is the same as in test 3. Google rates the second link text and ignores the alt attribute.

Test 5: First Link = picture; With title but no alt attribute (1. Link / 2. Link)

As in test 4, but this time the title and not the alt attribute was implemented. That doesn’t change the result from test 3 & 4: Google chooses the second link text.

Summary

Johannes Beus summarizes the test in a way that we can say that especially the treatment of No Follow Links by Google might cause a bustle for website hosts & SEO people. Although it was the general assumption until now that Google would rate the second link anyway and the management of internal linking was built on this thesis, the test shows the complete opposite.

As every piece of information on how Google treats links will be tested and reviewed, so did it happen with this assumption.

Some of the reviews were positive such as Branko Rihtman, David Eaves and some of them were negative such as (who took also a closer look on the testing itself). Michael Martinez review of that topic is also currently been discussed on Sphinn.

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What’s your take?

Today you at least get a normal search screen with no results,
but I remember that they had a “blank page” as result for WEEKS when you used those “forbidden” operators

I realize products change, and so do operators.

But this product line armageddon – first to talk big about cool new features and then break everything over night just made me think

I remember MSNdude bragging last summer about their “HUGE” infrastructure and all the shit they are able to do with it that Google and Yahoo cannot… LOL

I bet somebody found that the shared dipped some cents, so they sold some search server machines to generate fake-profits …

What’s going on those minds?

Hey Jim – send that wall clock over here

And you know what’s best about meeting good ole’ friends at those events? Yeah, meeting them, having booze and getting introduced to THEIR friends… it’s about networking and actually the non-plus-ultra is if your friends actually do the “elevator pitch” for you, so all you have to do is stand there are smile, hand out some cards and then get back to those folks actually

Shimon Sandler was introduced to me, and while I didn’t recall the name I found that this is actually a really respected SEO consultant in the scene … well- in fact I read on his blog and a ton of this comments eg on Jim Boykin’s link building blog.

One of Shimon’s interesting posts on his blog is that Job-Definition of what an SEO actually does… I love those posts (just like Todd/Stuntdubl also ALWAYS releases those posts where I just think RESOURCE… it’s a RESOURCE… man, it’s great and I’ll be back)

You know when I look at Shimons definition of what an SEO consultant does I actually have to remind myself to finally revamp, rewrite and (hell) get rid of the typos in the copy of my own SEO company site – and yes sure – I want to sync the content in AT LEAST two languages english and german, after all that’s one of my USPs here… and I even got some spain and italian domains for Cemper.Com as well last week …

Shimons’ definition will serve me well as a blueprint, an information architecture for my new copy… 16 points that describe the basis SEO process… very nice..

and best of all, Shimon even gives away a “standard proposal” he sends out to his clients, including specifications for deliverables and EVEN the charging model … he starts with a retainer fee of $2000 for his services, that’s 20 hours work … but still charges what is above that.. I think that’s pretty cool to buy… after all that’s just 4-5 hours a week … half a day… I bet he spends HALF of that already for communication and reporting on some clients…

(hint hint hint to all clients and managers – let your people work

What I’m missing there is some detailled spec on WHAT/WHEN Shimon reports on his link building, link buys, etc… my impression in general is that link building is a bit under-sized in the whole post – after all links are 95% of the game, once you made sure in the first month that the site-structure and content does not suck as it usually does in the beginning when an “agency” created that nice ALL-FLASH loaded site…

But where do these clients come from? … hehe.. Shimon is a nice guy… giving away a “sales blueprint” with some sort of checklists to ask prospective clients is definately worth a read…

The “questions for SEO clients” are even a bit sophisticated… assuming you KNOW you have an SEO client… you know which question saved me HUNDREDS OF WASTED hours over the last 3 years?

Nice site you got, promoting all your products, services, etc. blabla

So – what would it do in the bottom line for your business when you get from NOWHERE to number1 in Google? do you know much you actually make per sale? and how much can you spend to increase the number of sales?

Oh – you don’t know?

Frankly, I met/got called up by so many folks that do “internet marketing” just for some sort of “branding value” or their ego to be up in ranks that they have NO CLUE if they can spend 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 EUR per time interval… well – that’s where I usually end the call… sorry – but people that got no idea on their spends usually have no idea on their goals, or just don’t care… neither of these is a reason to do business…

But anyway, you know it’s REALLY funny – bumping into friends on conferences is one thing, but getting to know the next “indirection” of the network just by chance is in fact the MAJOR reason for me to go to these conferences and to to spend $350+ a night for that sneazy little room in the hilton… Staying as close as possible to the even gives you those extra 15 minutes AT LEAST twice a day where you can meet up with a lot more people that if you would stay ANYWHERE…

Too bad I’ll miss out on the SMX in June and the SES In August – but I’ll then have my studies and master’s finished (be sure to checkout the online survey !)

After this bit longer break I’ll do these

- DrupalCon in Barcelona (September) – NICE weather

- SMX social media special (October) in New York City again, YEAH - rocks

- WMW in Las Vegas (the classic in November)

and then maybe even some SES in chicago… or I might just hang out with my friends there… not sure

Then I’ll sing – “I just can’t get enough…”

Today I came across a post by Rand Fishkin who seems to have found out that you can see the sites to buy links on an Text-Link-Ads (only due to their image snapshot, not due having trusted advertiser privileges, those see all the urls anyway) while you do not see the inventory at Text link brokers (unless you got the trusted advertiser flag set)

Hmmm – so if I got the “trusted advertiser flag” on TLA and see all the sites’ urls and I got the “trusted advertiser flag” on text link brokers, then I see all the sites URL as well – what’s the difference? Congrats Rand on finding that out.

Well, it’s much better than those jerks from AdvertiseU that send out their spam to all domain registrar emails selling links on their “entreprenour.com” PR8 domain and other publicly announced and SPAMMED domains.

Long story short – Text link brokers claim to be the only text link sellers who do not disclose the inventory to buyers … they even got a claim on their site saying “No other broker or text link seller goes through such lengths to protect it’s inventory” … well – for simple text link sellers like LinkWorth and TextLinkAds that might be true, but not so for presell pages… so if you are into buying presell pages then definately the statement above is wrong… PresellPageMan is even forbidding to link back to the broker per terms&conditions or you will lose your presell page… and there doesn’t seem to be a thing like a “trusted advertiser” flag at presellpageman.com – nobody sees the sites.

The whole SEOmoz post looks like it’s made up just to promote the new partnership and discredit Text-Link-Ads … I mean the promotion could be done anyway… but probably nobody would care if Rand would post – hey, SEOMOZ got a new parter – text link brokers pay for our servers… I don’t like that type of hidden ads.

Anyway, who the hell is still buying links alone anyway ? I mean you need single naked text links in your mix – but definately that’s only a fraction of the advertising media you need to work with…

DON’T BUY LINKS alone, if the are simple footer links, cluttered together with other low-quality links

BUY PRESELL PAGES and get multiple links WITHIN the content of a page linking to you … the trust of the domain that this presell page is hosted on will help your site and the links to you

My ramble to answer James question is pretty clear:

The whole discussion if disclosed inventory hurts or not is actually just as side-aspect in my opinion. If you read up around 1,5 years back in my blog I spoke about the “VIPS” technology and got similar stuff confirmed by a google engineer at the Google Dance 2005 – they have the technology to LOOK at the page and anyone who believes that Google DOES NOT understand that a bunch of low quality cluttered links in the footer or the nav bar help the same way as links from withing the page content is simply damn wrong.

I’m refering to this post on confirmed block level analysis by Google or the MSN research paper on block level analysis for example

Whenever you want a test the effect of presell pages vs. text links, go out buy a normal “text link” and a presell page on say rather similar strong sites…

Maybe take two 5 year old sites, both PR5 and place a) a homepage link b) a presell page with deep links to you linked by a homepage link …

And you can do that test for a long-tail phrase, not “health insurance” or “bad credit” or “buy viagra” – I mean something reasonable to be changed after 3 months… then wait at least 3 months, unless your own site is super-old

Then judge on the results… the aspect of having an additional entrypoints for your site in the SERPS actually helps you even more and having multiple sites ranking pages to send you traffic certainly helps – those are LEAD GEN pages par excellence… they PRE SELL the client… hence the name presell page

Conclusion:

• if you believe that naked links are better because they are not disclosed it’s just half of the story
• if you are only buying naked links and never engaged in presell pages, then you are definately missing out on great opportunities for SEOing your site

Google Co-op is a platform which enables you to use your expertise to help other users find information. This is a work in progress. You can expect to see evolution in both the Co-op’s structure and the platform’s features.

• What Google Co-Op is
• Google Co-Op search experience for the user
• Implementation of Google Co-Op
• More details and further reading for Google Co-Op

So Google lets webmasters annotate and categorize the pages on their web sites. But hey – also other people can tag and annotate your web pages… this is not a webmaster-only feature like the sitemaps.

This is another step into the direction of social software, using the concepts of social bookmarking services like Digg or del.icio.us to enhance the search engine results.

Google Co-Op practical use for marketing?

Google Co-Op is a feature that allows YOU to bring your products, service and web sites in front of million users at the premium spots where top Google adwords are booked.

This is bound to a few implications and restrications that I will explain a bit right now.

Fact – at the moment it only works with a subscription.

This means

1) you have to create categories and labels for pages of your site and give them to Google.
2) Then your users have to “subscribe” to your co-op profile to
3) see the search results including (possibly) your pages using your categories and labeling finally

This means Google Co-Op works only IF, and only IF your clients and potential clients will trust you and subscribe to your profile.

What the Google Co-Op user will see

[img_assist|fid=6|thumb=1|alt=Search results with Google-Co-Op enabled|caption=Search result for the keyword "drupal" with Google Co-Op enabled for technology http://weblog.cemper.com enabled. The above green box links with the free premium result directly to the Good reasons for drupal #2 weblog post]

Live example for Google CoOp

Now you can test this very easily by

1. clicking to the Google Co-Op Profile I created for myself
2. then subscribing to it (you can reverse that a second later if you wish
3. then searching for Drupal in Google

do you see it?!?

Upload service links with the Subscribed Links API of Google Co-Op

The Google Subscribed Links API is the API I used for above sample screenshot. With it you can add your services directly into Google search.

This can help make those services more accessible, giving your users another entry-point to them when they’re making a related search on Google.
via www.google.com/coop/docs/guide_subscribed_links.html

The link above leads you to a pretty straightforward API description where they explain how to generate such service links.

Great tool – implementing RSS for Google Co-Op

I found this great RSStoCoop Converter beta today !

It allows you to upload an RSS xml file
and returns you a fine Google Coop file.

(note that this site currently displays a bandwidth exceeded error
I would love to mirror that tool …

Then you just upload that file to Google subscribed links map and a few minutes later when crawling is finished, you’re done !

From first testing I found some bugs, e.g. my project management weblog wasn’t converted properly

but anyway, a great start!

PHP Codesample for uploading service links to Google CoOp

Pierre, the author of the RSS2coop conversion tool above has a similar goodie – a PHP code sample on how to provide a huge list of subscribed links (maximum 1000 currently) to Google – based on some MySql data you have in a database

You can find the code on his weblog as well (as soon as he has bandwidth again)

Ok – now for the more advanced topics

Adding page tags (annotations) to existing topics (contexts) in Google CoOp

You can annotate web pages for Coop just as you tag pages in del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services.

For that you just need to upload an XML or tab separated file exported from an excel sheet… Google has a small tutorial about that adding to existing topics like Health, Travel, etc

Implementing own labels and topics for Google Co-Op

Very interesting is the fact, that you can actually create your own taxonomy – made up by labels in Google Coop – which is essentially the same as the tags in del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services.

So if you are an industry expert in your field, Google asks you to tag the web for them to improve search quality

Google provides a detailled description on creating a CoOp labels and topics

Creating Coop labels

For creating labels (the tags in del.icio.us) they even provide naming-conventions to use thruout the XML file – so hard-to-catch aspects in search like the target audience, the source type (i.e. government or cooperations) can be labelled (tagged)

Creating topics and search triggers

For creating and labelling search triggers they have a pretty complex syntax that allows you to define search events on a meta data model level.

For instance you can define that Earth, Mars and Venus are planets.

Then you can define query triggers for the following schemes

planet [Planet] learn about [Planet] teach about [Planet] learn about planet [Planet] teach about planet [Planet] [Planet] rover [Planet] missions [Planet] mission facts

while [Planet] is replaced by Earth, Mars, Venus each time, giving you a total of 8 × 3 triggers … of course if you add all the planets in this sample you are going to save even more specification time…

More details and further reading for Google CoOp (beta)

Google Co-Op mandatory for health and travel

Google already subscribes every Co-Op user to the experts in health and travel – obviously to improve the search results for those markets. Both have a lot of high margin keywords and I wonder why they didn’t add Financial products and services (yet) ?

Update 6/1: people already noticed different serps for pharma products

Google Co-Op supported well by Google

Google engineers even started answering all sorts of detailed technical questions on Co-Op in the Google Co-Op group , for example on

• How Google Co-Op Labels Work
• How Co-Op contexts and topics are associated
• … and even already a Google Co-Op FAQ

Google Co-Op commented on the web

• Google Co-Op – The beginning of the end for the search algorithm?
• Digg and Coop now live
  you can now also subscribe to the Digg profile and add those Digg links to your vertical Google results as well … cool
• Matt Cutts wants to build a spam blacklist with Google Co-Op

Google Co-Op outlook

I am expecting a lot of new and innovative ideas and aspects to use in search marketing from this innovation… just like a lot of plugins for generating Google sitemaps were developed, the CMS systems will deliver additional meta-data export tools – and people started implementing or designing already – just like the Drupal-Community

This is yet another feature that sets Google apart from it’s competitors, as a true interactive and community based approach was started…

This feature (let’s call it methodolody)outbeats so many other currently launched products lik Google Pages, Google Trends and that funny little Google Notebook tool…

Keep an eye on it! I’m keen to see this develop… and expect some future posts about this soon…

BeginBiz Affiliate Marketing Blog has a nice post were he found a great web site for called "The Web Credibility Project" – it's part of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

This is an ongoing project that is doing the following:

"Performing quantitative research on Web credibility.
Collecting all public information on Web credibility.

Acting as a clearinghouse for this information.

Facilitating research and discussion about Web credibility.

Helping designers create credible Web sites."

Great numbers, great bullets of do's and don'ts that were statistically researched … I guess I'll print this whole article on Web Credibility and read it completely…

Back when I wrote about Revenue – the affiliate marketing magazine in September, I didn't know about the real service those folks could provide.

After subscribing the Revenue Magazine I noticed that something went wrong with the cc payment.

In fact, none of my credit cards were accepted – because Address Veriication is not supported in Europe's / Austria's banks – my bank people asked their CC company and those claimed they didn't even know it exists..

Well – last resort for paying my subscription offered by MRI Research (the publisher) was to send a check to the US - ouch… something I really couldn't do, as Austrian banks charge you like 20$ for a check … that's 20+% for a 92$ payment for the subscription and the back issues.

John from MRI finally found out that the Austrian Trade Commission (WKO) has a subsidary in LA and that they can send the check – and receive a normal Euro wire in Austria – without any fees…

COOL!

Not only did they send the current issue and the back issues on time (arrived within 4 days from San Francisco to Vienna!!) prior to the finished payment.

Not only will I learn a lot from their great mags about Search Engine Strategies, Design Ideas, Marketing Industry News, Legal Issues, Interviews With Industry Leaders, cool new affiliate programs and in general many ways to raise my level of revenue…

No – John & Yvonne from MRI research actually helped me to learn how to cope with the cultural difference between the old and the new world when it comes to payments… Even tought there are credit cards, paypal-like online payment systems there are still most of the US folks used to receiving their money via check… which has died 5-10 years before in Europe…

And they just helped me to find a cost-effective yet fast and easy (electronic) way to issue checks fast (locally) in the US…

Great … and another point – get the magazine! Very very interesting!

Revenue , is the first magazine dedicated to affiliate marketing. Montgomery Research focusses on the convergence of business and technology. Offering industry news, product reviews, cases studies, education, guidance, tutorials and real-life sucess stories.

Update 1/27: I have not yet received my January Issue yet but I am looking forward to a great support response from them…

Update 2/21: John resent me te issue 5 … I am reading it now

Pull-Strategy

appeals directly to consumers who demand the product from retailers. In turn, retailers will demand the product from wholesales.

Pull-Strategy

A firm markets its product to wholesalers and retailers who then persuade consumers to buy it.

Many large firms combine pull and push strategies. Companies advertise to create consumers demand (pull), and at the same time, it pushes wholesalers and retailers to stock them.

Some recent updates I found on the push strategy and the pull strategy

The shift from push to pull strategy in R & D

A nice marketing essentials presentation

Where are we – push or pull?

Price lining

Companies selling multiple items in a product category often us price lining – offering all items in certain categories at a limited number of prices. The store’s buyers, therefore, must select suits that can be purchased and sold profitably at one of these prices.

Psychological Pricing

Psychological Pricing takes advantage of the fact that customers are not completely rational when making buying decisions.

odd-even pricing is based on the theory that customers prefer prices that are not stated in even dollar amounts. instead of $ 1.000,- we tend to use 999,-

Discount pricing

Often, a seller must resort to price reductions – discounts – to stimulate sales
(Cash discount, quantity discount, trade discount, seasonal discounts, allowance)

Promotional pricing (Loss-Leaders)

Geographical pricing

Based on the geographical location the same product must be priced different, according to demographic trends (average income, social aspects, different taxes, etc..)

Discriminatory pricing

• based in the customer (regular customer, adults, soldiers,..)
• based on the time (seasonal princig, off-season, peak -season)
• based on the place

Update: I just came across two nice powerpoint presentation on price adjustment strategies by

Dr. Karen E. James

and

Gail H. Kirby, Ph.D.

and a nice paper on A Longitudinal Investigation of Price Dispersion and Price Adjustment in the Electronic Computer Commodity Market