“Gray hat SEO” is that fuzzy area of search engine optimization between ethical SEO (i.e. “white hat”) and the really naughty stuff that you’ll get banned for if you get caught (i.e. “black hat”). Some say that white hat SEO is idealistic, whereas gray hat SEO is pragmatic, employed by SEOs with keen business acumen. I say it’s simply pushing one’s luck.

The difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO is profound and obvious. But the gray area in between the two is not so easy to define. Cloaking and pagejacking are obviously black hat. But what about stuffing the same keyword dozens of times into dozens of links on a web page? Or tucking a keyword away in the top left corner of the page in order to maximize its keyword prominence?

Consider the following examples, illustrated with screenshotted excerpts of three different homepages…

HOMEPAGE #1:

• Are there too many links?
• Is there too much repetition of the same keyword in the anchor text of these links?
• Is the link text too light? (the rest of the text on the page is markedly darker)

HOMEPAGE #2:

• Are there too many keywords stuffed into title attributes of links? (an example of which was made visible in the above screenshot by mousing over one of the links)
• Are there too many links?
• Is the color of the text too similar to the background?

HOMEPAGE #3:

• Is the keyword phrase in the top left of the page too obscured?
• Was it excessive for them to have applied this tactic to over a thousand pages?

Clearly these companies are into aggressive SEO. But have they crossed the line? What do you think??

What I find most interesting is the fact that all three of the sites rank really well for keywords they’ve targeted, and it appears due, at least in part, to these aggressive tactics. Top ten rankings in Google for many of the keywords targeted by the anchor text of homepages #1 and #2, and for many of the keywords targeted in the top left corner of a thousand+ pages of site #3. I can see the allure of these tactics — after all, they seem to work!

Technorati Tags: black hat, google, gray hat, gray hat SEO, search engine spam, SEO

Posted by Stephan Spencer on 11/17/2006 | Permalink | Email This Post | Print This Post

           

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I’ve already shared some of the benefits of incorporating discussion forums into your ecommerce site. Now let’s delve deeper into the concept of user-generated product review content.

Intuitively it makes sense that your customers would convert better if they could read credible product ratings and reviews from your other customers before buying. Indeed, studies back this up (stats excerpted from bazaarvoice.com):

RoperASW reports the value of word of mouth as the best source of information on products has exploded from 67% in 1977 to 93% in 2001.

BizRate found that 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.

The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion.

So now the question becomes, what’s the best way to implement customer reviews? There are hosted third-party services like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews that offer a managed solution and host the content and technology for you. Or you can host and manage the ratings and review technology and content in-house. Both approaches have their merits. Certainly if you have limited IT resources, a hosted solution would appeal.

But you should be aware of the SEO impact of a hosted reviews solution. The review content gets inserted into your web pages using JavaScript, and as such, that content is invisible to the spiders. So if you expecting that content to augment your existing product page content with additional keyword-rich user-generated content, you’re going to be disappointed. You’d have to do some pretty clever workarounds, like scraping the product content and inserting the review text into your HTML, if you want to realize fully the SEO benefit of this product review content.

Publicly viewable customer feedback can take other forms besides the standard ratings and reviews. For instance, you could offer a wiki, like some other retail sites have done. Just imagine having buyer’s guides written and maintained by your visitors, like ShopWiki has. If you can pull it off, I think that would be pretty cool.

Another non-standard approach to incorporating user-generated content is to get customers to tag your products. I’ve already made a case for tagging as a SEO tactic for blogs. And I’ve discussed auto-tagging.

But what about social tagging (user tagging), where you get your visitors to do the work for you? Frankly, I’m dubious. My preference here is to accept tags only from employees and/or a small trusted group of customers. A thousand monkeys randomly pecking away at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years may eventually output Shakespeare. But in the meantime, it’d be a whole lot of useless noise. If you’ve got the time to weed out the useless noise from the tags contributed by your visitors, then social tagging could be a valuable addition to your ecommerce site.

Amazon.com rolled out social tagging. How’s it working for them? Well, according to one contact I have at Amazon.com, the benefits of these user-contributed tags to create a “folksonomy” (i.e. alternative categorization and navigation) has been limited. That’s because the tags added to products are often self-serving and relevant only to the person applying the tag (e.g. “birthday gift for betty”).

Finally, I want to circle back to the topic of discussion forums. If you have forums on your site, consider more tightly integrating them with your product catalog. For example, link directly from your product page to the relevant section/page of your forums. And highlight the most relevant posts to help influence the buying decision. One of my favorite ecommerce sites, Woot.com, does both of these things to good effect.

Technorati Tags: best practices, Ecommerce, online retail, product reviews, reviews, SEO, user generated content

Posted by Stephan Spencer on 11/16/2006 | Permalink | Email This Post | Print This Post

           

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The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, provides you as a website owner with a useful hammer you can use to beat on copyright infringers.

As a content producer, you have the right to enforce your copyright. When your content gets “re-purposed” on other’s websites without your permission, you can file a DMCA Infringement Notification to the infringer’s web hosting provider and get that infringer’s website shut down (like Ian McAnerin did recently). In DMCA legalspeak, this notification is also known as a “Takedown Notice”. In addition, you can get the naughty infringer de-listed from Google and other engines. (I can hear you saying “Ex-cellent!” in a Mr. Burns voice right now).

It is not a daunting procedure. It might take an hour of your time, and it is well worth it.

Here’s what to do…

1. First, look up the web host and the domain registrar of the offending site, using lookup tools such as this one from Netcraft and this one from Domain Tools. You can usually ascertain who the web host is from the Name Servers and/or the Netblock Owner.
2. Next, check the official directory of designated DMCA agents for the host and the registrar. (Hopefully they’re listed!)
3. Then you prepare a letter to send to the designated agent of the web host. The notice you write should include: your contact information, the name of the content that was copied, the web address of the copied content, a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is not legal, a statement that under penalty of perjury you are the copyright holder, and your signature. Some web hosts will allow you to email your notice to them, making it all that more convenient.
4. Also be sure to send a similar notification to the seach engines. That will cut off their air supply, in case the site doesn’t get taken down right away. Here are instructions and contact details for each engine: Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search). Note that Google requires you to mail or fax your letter, whereas Yahoo and Microsoft (Live Search) both allow you to email your notification.
5. If the web host doesn’t take the site down promptly, then submit a DMCA notice to the infringer’s domain registrar. Note: It might be worth sending a notice to the data center that the web host uses before you try the registrar, as Dan Richard recommends.

Ian McAnerin posted some handy DMCA notification letter templates to make this process even easier: for the web host, for Google, for Yahoo, and for Live Search.

Then there’s the other end of the stick, where someone could use DMCA unfairly against you! It happens. Competitors do use the DMCA to silence competitors. You, as a website owner, need to protect yourself from unwarranted (or at least unwelcome!) prosecution. If the potential exists for you to inadvertently host infringing material on your website(s) — for example if you are hosting online forums, group blogs, blog comments, or other types of content that can be submitted from others besides yourself — then here are some actions you can take to help protect yourself…

1. It’s helpful if you can qualify as a service provider that can be covered under the Safe Harbor provision. For example, you may qualify if you offer a search engine or a bulletin board system.
2. If so, notify your customers of your policies regarding copyright infringement and the consequences of repeated infringing activity. One way of achieving this is by making it part of your Terms of Use.
3. Also, publish a page on your website with DMCA filing instructions and state that, if and when you get a DMCA notification, you will act on it. Here’s an example of such a