@bignameseocompany.com

No-one get’s unsolicited mail from these guys.

@owndomain.com

Fair chance you actually know something about websites.

Quite probably mention the fact that you are based in India as a selling point.

You know how to “maximise brand effectiveness by leveraging the Web 2.0 Socioshpere” and hope your clients will be too embarrassed to admit they don’t have a clue what you are talking about.

@hyphenated-domain-with-seo-in-it.com

You have a directory submission script you paid $79.99 for and are willing to use to “boost” your clients’ rankings.

Guest book entries & blog comments for just $1 each.

@gmail.com

Won’t actuall say it, but you’re rather hope the client will think your having a Gmail account means that you either work at, or have some kind of insider knowledge of Google.

Client has never heard of anyone you have done work for before.

@yahoo.com

Similar to Gmail, but you also hope the client doesn’t realise no-one’s searching with Yahoo! any more.

@hotmail.com

You use Hotmail because then no-one can trace back your IP to your bedroom office.

I get dozens of these, through my own sites, and even more at work. The best ones have lines like:

“We’ve noticed your website is not ranking for it’s most important keyphrases” When it is!

“Your website is not appearing in the major search engines” Oh really? How did you find it then.

Some are even brave enough to include a url to their own websites. Oddly, none of them ever seem to rank for any word or phrase on their homepage. I wonder why.

Normally I’d join the conversation on there and pop in a comment or two, but in this instance I want to save myself the flames as I know there’s a high likelyhood lots of people will disagree.

First up, when the topic of facted search comes up, Matt firstly tries to suggest it’s a bad thing that users don’t “get”. Personally I love faceted search – and I think most users do too. I think what Matt really means here is that GoogleBot has some trouble with it. For all it’s cleverness, GoogleBot simply cannot mimick human behaviour that well, so a site using a navigation system like this presents it with a problem. How can it tell which content is good, if it doesn’t understand how to get to it?

For instance, if you and I were to arrive on a site with a good facted system (I’ve always liked the way dabs.com implemented theirs) and assuming we’re going to try and find a new laptop, we’d click the laptop category link, then use the facteted search to drill right down to get a list of the products that have the features that are important to us. GoogleBot’s problem is that it doesn’t arrive on a site with a view to finding something specific – it arrives at a site with a view to finding as much as it can.

When Matt is told by the interviewer about a site that has great faceted search that users love, he’s got nowhere to go. He absolutely can’t speak against anything that users say they like because (and quite right too) Google’s mantra has always been headed up by “build sites for users, not for search engines”. So he simply says “absolutely” in response to the statement “It’s actually a good user experience…resulted in much better revenue per visitor which is a good signal”.

The trouble is, the interviewer has also mentioned that this website with facteted search, has seen it’s rankings drop alongside it’s conversions increasing.

My problem here (if it’s not clear already) is that this idea of building sites for visitors and not for search engines sounds like it’s breaking down. Google is now such a huge source of traffic in percentage terms for almost every website it’s becoming the victim of it’s own success. If you make a site and only think about users, you’re unlikely to have any users because no-one will find you. If you build it for a search engine everyone will find you, but they’ll also leave just as quickly.

I was looking into facted search for a site, and have decided to abandon it having read what I’ve read this weekend. It’s going to be simple category structures going no further than 2 levels simply because I have to find a balance between what will work for a user, and what will work to get traffic – a website is worthless unless you have users and search engines interested.

On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for the world to see? Now they probably aren’t alone of course, but since I’ve spotted it may as well name and shame:

chainreactioncycles{dot}com (can’t put a link – keep reading….)

They have an alluring “Exchange links with us!” page. There’s a load of gumpf about how echanging links with them will benefit your site. They’ll even pop your link on their homepage for a day or so. Sounds great! But wait….what’s that in the header of your “Partner Links” page. Some appears to have mistakenly added an extra meta tag:

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />

Hmmmm – it’s also mistakenly been pasted into the headers of all the other link pages – the ones listing the 800 or so gullible webmasters who fell for this. I just love the way the noindex and nofollow are in all caps to – maybe they are really hoping that’ll make sure Google knows how little these guys think of their llink partners.

On the off chance you don’t know what this meta tag means:

NOINDEX – they are telling the search engines NOT include these pages in their results.

NOFOLLOW – they are telling the search engines they do not vouch for the quality of the sites they are linking to. That’s a bit rich since their “exchange links page” states they check your site to see that it meets their guidlines – I mean, are they doing that or not, and if so, why the nofollow?

They do, it seems, put their newest “partners” on the homepage, but they seem to habve missed out the NOINDEX meta tag. Not to worry, they found a solution to that by cloaking the link with redirects. Fiendishly inventive.

Honestly, this whole “hoard your PageRank” and ongoing battle to trick other webmasters in to thinking they are getting something when they are not is really cheesing me off. The blame has to lie at Google’s feet as they started this whole nofollow nonesense. The initial idea was sound enough – the tag should be used for UGC and I agree with that. I don’t, however agree that it should become a tool for webmasters to manipulate their ranking in the search engines and I’m pretty sure it’s intention was to try and put a stop to that anyway. The most laughable example of course is Wikipedia “nofollowing” the links to their sources. Shame on you Google.

Footnote: chainreactioncycles may well be, in all other ways, a reputable company selling quality kit to lots of satisfied customers. I have no experience with which to comment on that though.