The Growth Of Direct Answers: How Should SEOs React?

More and more often, SERPs are including answers, not just links to answers. Columnist Mark Traphagen recaps an SMX West panel that explores the effects.

 

Remember that annoying student when you were in school? The one who sat in the front row and raised his hand for every question before you could?

In the eyes of many site owners, Google has become that student.

For an increasing number of search queries requesting factual information Google (and to a lesser extent, Bing) is returning answers at the top of search results pages that (usually) don’t require any click-through by the searcher.

This could be seen as a serious threat to sites that have been accustomed to getting organic search traffic by providing that kind of information. In fact, SEO Glenn Gabe documented a dramatic drop in traffic for several song lyrics sites after Google started displaying lyrics as a direct answer.

However, other webmasters see Google’s direct answers in search as a new opportunity to get a jump on the competition and become featured for free by Google.

At this year’s SMX West conference in San Jose, three experts who have been keeping a very close eye on developments with Google’s direct answers reported their findings and provided advice as to what site owners can do to take best advantage of a search feature that will only continue to grow in its influence.

This post will give you the main ideas and takeaways from each of their talks. You will also find an embed of each speaker’s slide deck so you can get further detail and see their examples.

The panel:

Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting @stonetemple (full disclosure: my employer)

Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing for Go Fish Digital,  @bill_slawski

Ehren Reilly, Director of Product, Growth at Glassdoor,  @ehrenreilly

Eric Enge revealed findings from a recent study he conducted, while Bill Slawski provided a deep dive into possible sources for Google’s direct answers. Finally, Erhren Reilly shared some ways his company has been using direct answers to their advantage.

What’s New With Direct Answers In Search By Eric Enge

Eric Enge shared the results from a recent Stone Temple Consulting study that submitted over 850,000 questions to Google and Bing search to see how many yielded direct answers.

Direct answers or “rich answers” are a special result at the top of the first search results page that provides a brief answer to a question query that (in most cases) does not require a click through to a web site.

The questions were generated as follows:

• 250,000 each came from Google’s and Bing’s auto suggest features
• The rest were generated via brainstorming by the Stone Temple research team

For the latter set of question, the team compiled a huge list of persons, places, and things, and then generated various questions a real person might want to know about those things. For example, for “Eiffel Tower” questions used might include “when was the Eiffel Tower built?” and “where is the Eiffel Tower located?”

Their finding: Google returned direct answers 19.4% of the time. Bing provided them for 1.1% of the queries used.

Enge remarked that they saw a great variety of answer types, including tabbed menus and movie times.

He reported that in over 3000 cases, the direct answer was incomplete, with an ellipsis that links to the originating site. For example:

Over 1000 were in the form of a table, such as this one for World Series Winners:

Other types of rich answer boxes found in the study included:

• Linked tables (or “sliders”) – 6,740 results: search Google for “what time zone is Russia?” on a desktop browser and click one of the displayed time zones. Notice that a knowledge panel for that time zone opens in the right sidebar.
• List or step-by-step – 1,871 results: Search Google for “okra boiled” and you get a three-step recipe. By the way,  all of the observed examples of this type linked to a third-party source. In many of these some of the steps themselves were incomplete, with a linked ellipsis, or a “more items” link at the bottom.
• Rich answer box plus a sidebar knowledge panel – 45,132 results: Search Google for “who is Rin Tin Tin?”
• A form – 5,356 results: Try “how many calories in a pepperoni pizza” or “mortgage calculator.”
• Charts – 33 results: Try “GDP of the USA.”
• Carousel – 4,284 results: Try “roster for the boston red sox.”
• Link to follow on actions – 172 results: These rich answer boxes included a direct link to a resource, such as an app download. Try searching “youtube account maker.”
• Image in result – 36,392 results: Try “when will Jupiter Ascending be released?”
• Related items shown: These results include a bar with thumbnail image links to searches that are related to the current search. For an example, try searching “capacity of allstate arena.”

Enge said about 75% of the direct answer boxes viewed in the study included attribution links to the original source. Example of types that didn’t included song lyrics and public domain info (such as “What is the capital of Washington state?”). A Google representative told Eric that Google only shows song lyrics for songs for which they have obtained proper rights.

Enge concluded with some thoughts about the potential impact of these direct answers on publishers:

• Don’t try to make a living on public domain info
• Even licensed info is vulnerable (e.g., song lyrics)
• Could be good if your site is selected for a partial answer with a link, which might actually drive traffic to your site

Eric Enge’s slide deck for this presentation:

What’s New With Direct Answers In Search from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

The Growth of Direct Answers: How Should SEOs Evolve? By Bill Slawski

Are query results better if Google provides a direct answer in addition to the regular results? Bill Slawski opened with this question. He noted that providing direct answers was listed as a positive in Google’s Q4 earning statement.

Google claimed that providing such answers “makes it quicker, easier, and more natural to find what you’re looking for.” Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, in “We Built Google for users, Not Websites,” stated that Google would be providing more or these direct answers because “it’s quicker and less hassle than the ten blue links” Google has traditionally shown.

Slawski also referenced a patent filed by Google Israel last year, titled “Natural Language Search Results for Intent Queries.” He found it interesting how the patent authors determined authoritative sources. In particular they cited as authoritative pages which:

• were frequently selected in search results
• consistently rank high in search results for related topics

The Israeli researchers built templates with different forms of the same question. They then looked for pages that consistently rank higher for all those forms. High ranking pages were put into a data store, listed by headings (such as “What are the symptoms of Mono?”) and answers (the concise list of symptoms).

What are the potential benefits of having your content appear as a direct answer? Slawski listed three:

• Additional chance to be seen in search.
• Opportunity to be seen as authoritative (since Google picked you as the best answer).
• The different formatting of the answer box compared to the rest of the results is sure to bring more eyes to the result.

Slawski drew from another Google research paper to come up with some possible sources for authoritative answers:

• Tabular data (example: a Wikipedia info box alongside a Wiki article)
• Relational tables that display related data in tabular format (such as a list of U.S. Presidents and basic facts about each)
• Colon-delimited pairs (such as “Check In Time: 3:00 PM; Check Out Time: 12 Noon” for a hotel)
• Structured snippets
• Knowledge bases
• Query stream data merged with knowledge bases and web documents (Biperpedia)

Some facts are just in the Knowledge Graph and need no attribution (“How old is Barack Obama?”), while others come from specific sources.

In some cases, it appears Google may actually reach out directly to trusted sources to gain information. For example, Google recently announced a partnership with reliable health sources such as the Mayo Clinic to obtain answers from real human experts, which are now being passed along for selected health-related queries as direct answers.

Bill Slawski’s slide deck for this presentation:

The Growth of Direct Answers – How Should SEOs Evolve from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

Winning With Direct Answers As A Content Site By Ehren Reilly

Reilly began by allaying fears site owners might have about publishing question-answer type content, namely that such content is “thin” and therefore could bring on a Panda penalty. But Reilly claimed that Panda is not really about thin content, at last not in the sense of the length of the content. Panda, he said, is more about quality. So content can be high quality but bite-sized.

However, many sites have tried to drive traffic by merely providing quick question-and-answer type information. That alone won’t work so well anymore. Google realized people want such info as quickly as possible, so why make them click through to a site for it?

So as more and more of those questions get answered by Google direct answer boxes, it is no longer a viable business model just to supply high quality but bite-sized information. Sites like isitraining.org or whatsmyipaddress.org are becoming superfluous.

Another endangered species, according to Reilly, is what he called “high quality, non-proprietary content.” This is content that is highly valued by searchers, but is either public domain information or easily-obtained licensed information. He gave examples of song lyrics, information available in Wikipedia or other public knowledge bases, or simple facts already in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Sometimes Google even provides answers directly in the query box auto suggestions!

But what if you have high quality, proprietary content? Is that safe from Google’s direct answers?

Even that type of content can be threatened by direct answers. Google may show what Reilly called “spoiler alert” results.

In the example above, Google grabs one fact snippet out of a much longer piece (a complete recipe) to answer a question.

The above examples make many publishers feel like Google is stealing their content. But according to Reilly, Google’s response would be that they are just doing what’s best for the user.

So what can publishers do?

Reilly said you should consider that getting your content in a direct answer box is good branding. The top organic result isn’t always the one shown in the direct answer box, so earning that place could be considered a win for a lower-ranking site.

Reilly provided an example of such a win achieved by his company, Glassdoor. They publish salary info for various jobs, which started showing up in direct answers. The problem was that while the information was theirs, from a report that took a large investment to produce, Google was showing in the answer box data and attributions from other publishers writing about their report.

They analyzed their page in comparison to those that were getting the answer box, and determined that the other publishers had a sentence that clearly and directly answered the questions, while theirs didn’t. They altered their page to include such sentences, and very quickly they began showing up in the answer boxes.

Takeaway: Make sure you have clear, natural language in your articles that directly answers the most likely questions about any factual information.

Reilly shared another benefit they discovered: when you get in an answer box, your regular result gets a fatter snippet with the same answer text. You get more search results real estate.

Every direct answer follows a formula. If you look carefully at the pages that get into direct answers for information your site provides, you’ll see the pattern. Find it for your pages and structure your content accordingly.

What about clicks? Webmasters are concerned about whether direct answer boxes result in click-throughs to their sites.

The classic search problem was getting more clicks than your competitors. But now it is more like getting a click vs. no click at all!

Some direct answers entice clicks better than others. For example, a list or step-by-step answer box which has abbreviated steps with an ellipsis link at the end, or an incomplete set of instructions with a “more info” link.

How do you earn those? Create large or exhaustive lists that Google can’t fit completely in an answer box.

Another trick Reilly shared is to provide teaser text right after your direct answer that hints there is more the reader would want to know. Chances are that text will get included in the direct answer, thereby enticing a click through.

What about rank tracking? Be aware that if there are direct answers, your ranking results may be thrown off. Some rank tracking software doesn’t handle direct answers well, counting them as one of the organic results, or even as the top several.

Reilly cautioned that we should expect flux. Direct answers are still new. Google is constantly testing new formats, and there are errors to be fixed.

If you’re a publisher, get over your frustration and see this as a new opportunity.

Ehren Reilly’s slide deck from his presentation:

How to Win With Direct Answers as a Content Site from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

Some Tidbits From The Q&A

• For Glassdoor, being in direct answers proved to be more beneficial than being #1 in regular result under a direct answer that used someone else’s site.
• Enge noted that Google seems to respond more often with a direct answer when you make a voice query as opposed to a typed query on mobile.
• Reilly said that direct answers give new life to FAQs. You can now rank for an individual answer on an FAQ page.
• Danny Sullivan noted that even searching “Zillow mortgage calculator” now returns the Google mortgage calculator. So even branding your generic info is not an advantage. However, he said that we should remember that after Yelp complained loudly when Google showed Google reviews even when queries specified Yelp reviews, the Google reviews for such queries disappeared after the Pigeon update. So it may be possible for powerful brands to reclaim their branded info-content.

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AMA: Common Local SEO Mistakes Made By Businesses Big & Small

Have questions about local SEO? Columnist Andrew Shotland has anticipated these questions and is answering them, Reddit-style!

Hi, everybody. I am Andrew Shotland, founder of Local SEO Guide. Seems like every day, we run into multi-location and small businesses having problems with their local and organic Google rankings. My guess is you are reading this because you’ve got some problems of your own. So go ahead. Ask me anything!

Note to the uninitiated: This post is done in the style of a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), in which users ask questions to people who are knowledgeable about a topic. Here, our esteemed columnist is identified as “localseoguide,” who is answering questions from hypothetical inquirers.

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[-] multilocomonsterbrand 
We grow by acquiring competitor locations. Seems like every time we do this, we kill the new location’s local rankings. Doesn’t exactly make for a fun honeymoon.

[-] localseoguide
Hey Multiloco, rebranding a location is one of the quicker ways to tank your local rankings.

You are likely changing the name of the business and the phone number which can cause a mismatch in your NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) across various services on the Web that Google looks at to help it figure out if it should rank the business for various queries.

Inconsistent NAP issues can lead to local ranking problems. While there’s no easy way around this, we typically use the following approach when rebranding a location:

1. Domain Name Changes. Avoid changing your domain name (see here, here andhere for why this process sucks and advice on how to do it). Do not mark your old brand’s GMB page as “permanently closed”. This can cause all sorts of problems if you can’t get Google Local Support to merge it with your new brand’s GMB page.
2. Up-To-Date Business Data. Update your business data everywhere, particularly at the main citation sources and data aggregators. Terminate with extreme prejudice any old NAP listings you can find, including any old inconsistent NAP Info for the acquired location (e.g., the name it had two names ago, the phone number it had five phone numbers ago, etc.)
3. 3. Rebranded Website. Update your business name, etc. on your website. Can’t tell you how many times I have seen this one.
4. Google My Business. Once you have fixed the citations and data aggregators, then go to your Google My Business page and update the NAP. We have seen the process of updating everything else before the GMB page can help speed the rankings recovery.
5. Rebranding. Make sure on all your citations and website you include some “formerly known as {OLD BRAND}” language as people may still be searching for the old brand on Yelp or Google and you want to make sure that your new brand shows up for these queries.
6. Changing Business Name. Check out The SMB Guide To Changing Business Names & SEO for more detail.

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[-] thanksfortherankingsobama!
I tried everything you recommended above and our local rankings still blow.

[-] localseoguide
While there can be many reasons for a business not ranking, one of the primary issues we see a lot of agencies and DIYers miss is that they didn’t do a thorough enough job of cleansing the NAP data. Are you sure you found everything, or at least every major thing?

For example, did you check Google Mapmaker to make sure there weren’t any problems? Did you squash all the dupes at the main aggregators? Did you update the Facebook page?

We often see these things overlooked. There are a lot of tools that can help you figure this stuff out. We developed NAP Hunter, a free Chrome extension to make it easier to suss this junk out.

You also may want to check out the Local Data Ecosystem tab on our free Local SEO Audit doc. And I really like Joy Hawkins’ & Phil Rozek’s Google MapMaker Troubleshooting guides.

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[-] imalawyerandusedtogettingmywaybutwtf
We have several attorneys in our practice and I hear that Google allows you to have listings for each attorney. Should I do this?

[-] localseoguide
Google calls these “practitioners” and there’s a good chance that if your staff are already listed in various industry databases that Google has already created GMB pages for them. This can be a tricky issue because sometimes these practitioner pages will rank well for good queries and sometimes they won’t.

But in general, our experience is that practitioner listings can act like dupes and we often see clients perform well if we “de-dupe” which basically means try to either merge them with the business’ main GMB page or remove the business’ branding from the listing and give them a unique phone number.

But before you start fixing the problem, make sure that none of these are ranking for anything as sometimes fixing this problem can do more damage than good. I really like Linda Buquet’s take on this issue in her Dr. Dupes & Google+ Local User Edits post.

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[-] napattack
I am getting hit up by listings management vendors. Some have automated solutions while others do manual claiming of citations. Which works best?

[-] localseoguide
This is one of the multi-million dollar questions in local SEO these days. Our typical answer is there is no perfect solution and it often comes down to budget, time, labor and other stuff particular to your business’ situation.

Automated solutions like Yext* are pretty great for what they do, which is to quickly get control of your listings on approximately 50 local directory sites and allow you to update them — many in real time.

These solutions also have a duplicate suppression service that we like. So if you want the work done fast with minimal effort, and you want to be able to update your listings whenever you want, automated is a good solution.

But Yext doesn’t hit all of the data aggregators and it doesn’t hit some directories that may be important to you. In those cases, you need a manual solution.

Moz Local has an interesting service that hits the four big local data aggregators. There are some vendors that have automated these tasks to some degree with bots that can login for you; but sooner or later, a person needs to touch these and often these are low-wage, high-volume operations prone to error. But if you have a lot of locations and/or are unfamiliar with this stuff, there may be no alternative.

One common question about Yext is what happens when you stop paying them. In those cases, your listings get “unlocked” and sites may overwrite your data and screw it up. Of course the same thing happens with manual listings management. We have seen plenty of claimed and deduped citations get overwritten, screwed up, etc. This is one of the many reasons local SEO at scale can be aggravating.

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[-] servicearea51
I do all my work out of a truck. How do I get ranked locally in cities where I don’t have a physical location?

[-] localseoguide
This is a tricky one. Google has been trying to tighten the radius on local results for a while and not having a physical location in your target city can make it hard to crack the local packs, particularly for high-density, competitive categories (e.g. restaurants, dentists, lawyers. etc.).

While many companies use virtual offices, P.O. Boxes, fake addresses and the like to try to game these results, we try to avoid tactics like these that we think Google is trying to snuff out.

In many cases, the best offense is to go for organic rankings (the non-local pack parts of the SERPs). I recommend How To Rank Outside of Your Physical Location in Google Places for further reading.

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[-] linklessinlouisville
How do I do linkbuilding that can help my local rankings without getting crapped on by the Penguin?

[-] localseoguide
Linkbuilding is a challenge for every business. But we continue to see, particularly post Pigeon, that backlinks can overcome a lot of local SEO problems. So here are some easy ways to get started:

1. Charity Sponsorships. List all of the charities you sponsor. If you don’t sponsor any, grow a heart and find some in your community and/or in your niche. Find out how you can get involved with them in a way that can generate a link.
   Often this means helping out an event, becoming a sponsor, writing content for their site, etc. We find these types of opportunities provide some of the best links and feel good at the same time.
2. Know Your Niche. Research all relevant media for your geo/niche and figure out which ones accept content. For example, our local newspaper site allows you to become a local blogger. Of course be careful with how you link back to your site, but that’s for another post.
3. Seek Link Opportunities. Put a list together of all local groups and businesses that you are involved with. Is your kid in a local theater company? Are you a member of the local mother’s club? Part of a regular MeetUp group? All are good link opportunities.
4. Local Citations. Make sure that you have all your local citations covered. These are often the easiest links to get and many get overlooked.
5. Grab Attention. Do something crazy. Like make a crazy car dealer website. Ask for one star reviews. Or just be born with a really bad name. It’s the Attention Economy. Get some.

Ok. Enough with the questions. Back to work…

*Full disclosure: Andrew does some consulting for Yext on occasion and is totally in their pocket. Can you say “conflict of interest”? Don’t trust a word he says. 

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Local Businesses: How To Get Good Online Reviews That Build Business

Online reviews can make or break local businesses these days, so columnist George Aspland shares his process for cultivating (good) reviews.

Good reviews on sites like Google and Yelp can entice people to check your business out, improve conversions, and potentially help organic search engine rankings. In this article, I’ll show you how to generate a continuous flow of good online reviews that should help your local business.

Why You Want Good Reviews

Reviews Stand Out in the Search Results. Good reviews on search engines like Google and review sites like Yelp can help attract more people to check out your business, as they often feature prominently in search results.

Local reviews are not just helpful for restaurants and hotels, but for most local businesses.

We focus on a number of markets including the legal market. I was showing a prospective customer its local results in Woburn, MA for one of the areas of law it focuses on.

A competitor’s listing appeared at the top of the local results with a 4.5 star rating (see the screen shot above). The star rating makes that listing stand out, and the reviews likely play a factor in it being the top listing in the local results. (I’ll talk about reviews’ effect on rankings below.)

Reviews Can Help Improve Conversions (Leads, Sales, Signups, etc.). Having a number of good reviews can make people feel more comfortable about doing business with you. In surveys such as this one on Marketing Land, 90% of the respondents said that positive online reviews influence their buying decisions. Perhaps even more importantly, almost as large a percentage were influenced by negative reviews.

People May Choose To View Only Highly Rated Or Reviewed Sites. Some sites, like Yelp and Google, allow people to only see listings with a minimum star rating, or to sort the listings by the most reviews.

If your business is in a market where a large percentage of your competitors have online reviews, your listing may not even be visible if you don’t have enough good reviews.

Do Reviews Affect Rankings?

While Google and Bing have never confirmed that reviews have an impact on rankings, anecdotal evidence suggests it’s likely.

In a 2013 analysis for the hotel industry, Digital Marketing Works found a strong correlation between reviews/ratings and positions, specifically between Local Carousel rank and average review rating and quantity. (Note: Google’s Carousel display is being retired.) We have seen have seen similar correlations in markets we focus on and others have reported correlations, as well.

In the 2014 MOZ Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey of industry marketers which focus on local search, respondents were asked to identify and assign a percentage of influence to ranking factors. Overall, the respondents believe that review signals — such as the quantity of reviews, review velocity, review diversity, etc., are a significant factor in rankings.

Is It Okay To Ask For Online Reviews?

Whether or not it’s acceptable to ask customers for reviews depends on the review site. You’ll need to check the terms and conditions for any review site you’ll focus on – some frown upon asking customers to submit reviews, while some encourage it.

For example, Yelp discourages businesses from soliciting customer reviews. It believes that solicited reviews jeopardize the site’s integrity, as users would eventually see the reviews as biased toward favorable ones, and therefore, untrustworthy.

Google, on the other hand, suggests that you encourage reviews for your business:

Remind your customers to leave feedback on Google. Simply reminding customers that it’s quick and easy to leave feedback on Google on mobile or desktop can help your business stand out from sites with fewer reviews.

It’s important to research the terms and conditions for any review site you plan to focus on so you’ll know what is allowed. If you can’t find this information easily on their site, try searching for “[review site] terms and conditions” in a search engine.

Now, I’ll show you the process we recommend to our clients to develop a continuous stream of online reviews.

Make Sure Your Customers Are Happy!

First and foremost is to ensure that your customers are happy. You need happy customers to get good reviews! Unfortunately, unhappy customers are the ones most likely to post reviews.

You should work to identify both your satisfied and unsatisfied clients. Depending on the nature of your business, you could send out a satisfaction survey or call your customers periodically.

What we do is to ask our clients, “Would you take a call from a prospective client?” If they say yes, we know they are reasonably happy. If we don’t get an answer, we may have a problem.

If you find unhappy clients, you should take steps to learn what you need to do to correct the situation.

Find The Best Review Sites For You And Your Industry

There are many review sites. You want to focus on the most important review sites for your business and your industry. Here’s what we do for our clients:

1. Search On Your Brand Names. Search on your company and brand names, with and without adding “reviews” to the search. You should find most of the public reviews you already have. Check those reviews. If you have some bad reviews, you’ll want to consider if and how you should respond.
   If you have a large number or bad reviews versus good reviews on a review site, you should consider focusing on this review site in order to build up more good reviews.
2. Search On Important Non-Brand Keywords. Let’s say you own a gym. You’ll want to do some non-branded searches relevant to your business, such as “gym new haven” and other important search queries. Scan the results for reviews, and make note of the searches you’ve done and the review sites you see on the first page or so of the search results.
3. Search On Brand Names Of Your Industry Leaders & Some Key Competitors.As with the non-brand keywords, scan the results for reviews and make note of the searches and the review sites you see in the top results.

After you have compiled the results of the above searches, make a short list of review sites to focus on by choosing the review sites that appear in the top search results for multiple searches along with the sites where you found you already have reviews. (Even if there are mostly good reviews, you may want to focus on these sites to keep a stream of good reviews as many people do look at the dates to see how recent the reviews are.)

Before you begin driving customers to any review sites, create or update profiles on any of the sites that allow it. You want clients and other users of the review site to see updated information. Plus you’ll have a way to respond to reviews.

Entice Customers To Submit A Review Online

Here are some tips to entice your customers to submit an online review. Again, check the terms and conditions of the review sites you plan to focus on so you know what you are allowed to do.

Create A Web Page With Links To Review Sites. You can create a web page that includes links to your profiles on some review sites, then encourage people to visit this page – for example, by putting a “Check us out on these review sites” link on most or all of your web pages and your email signatures.

Put Links To Review Sites In Your Web Pages & Email Signatures. Rather than creating a separate web page, you could put links to one or a couple of review sites on all or most of your pages. For example, you can add these links in the right or left column of the site with a headline such as “Check us out on these review sites.” Add similar links to your email signatures.

Create Business Cards With Review Site Information. Some businesses hand out a business card that includes the URL for an important review site.

I went to a surf school in Barbados a few years ago. When I was leaving (and they knew I was happy), they handed me their business card. On it was the URL to their TripAdvisor profile. Because of the number of great reviews they have (including one from me), this surf school was listed as one of the top activities in Barbados on TripAdvisor.

Hand Out A Flyer. Some businesses hand out a sheet with simple directions to get people started at a review site. However, the review process can change, so you’ll need to keep it up to date.

Just Ask. You could ask clients to submit a review on the phone or by email.

Add A Request To An Email About Another Topic. You could add a message to an email you send out to clients about some other topic.

For example, my family and I took a cooking class in Tuscany while we were there. A couple weeks later, we each received email messages with some free recipes. At the end of the message the site added, “Last pleasure to ask… can you write a review on TripAdvisor about our Tuscan cooking class?” Because of all the good reviews it had, that cooking class was ranked as one of the top things to do in that city on TripAdvisor.

About Google Reviews

If you have a local business focus you’ll certainly want some good reviews on Google Maps (Google+ Local).

However, Google requires a Google Account in order to post a review. Not everyone will have a Google Account, and those who don’t may not want to spend the time to set one up just to submit a review. So, have an alternative review site for them that is easier to post reviews on.

Also, look for customers who have a Google email account (such as name@gmail.com) since you’ll know they have a Google Account.

Get Reviews Over Time, On A Continuous Basis

It’s best to get reviews in a natural progression over time, so don’t ask all your clients to submit reviews at the same time. Make getting online reviews a part of your ongoing business processes.

You May Get Some Bad Reviews…

…and that’s okay. In fact, too many good reviews and no bad ones is unnatural and looks suspicious.

If you do get some bad reviews, you’ll need to decide if and how you should respond. Here are some articles about responding to bad reviews.

• 5 Tips For Responding To Negative Customer Reviews Online
• Handling Haters: How To Respond To Negative Online Reviews
• 4 Cool-Headed Strategies for Responding to Negative Comments Online

Got any other tips for cultivating reviews? Share in the comments!

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Google To Launch New Doorway Page Penalty Algorithm

Google will take algorithmic action on more doorway pages in the near future. The new algorithm adjustment will impact these pages trying to increase their search footprint.

Google announced they are releasing a new “ranking adjustment” to their doorway page classifier to better handle doorway pages in the search results.

In short, Google does not want to rank doorway pages in their search results. The purpose behind many of these doorway pages is to maximize their search footprint by creating pages both externally on the web or internally on their existing web site, with the goal of ranking multiple pages in the search results, all leading to the same destination.

Google’s Brian White said:

Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.

Google will be launching over this new ranking adjustment shortly and those who have created doorway pages may see them really soon.

How do you know if your web pages are classified as a “doorway page?” Google said asked yourself these questions:

• Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
• Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
• Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
• Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
• Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?

Yahoo Asking Firefox Users To Make Yahoo Search Their Default Search Engine

After Yahoo lost some Firefox users to Google, Yahoo begins notifying these users to switch back to Yahoo Search as their default search provider in Firefox.

Yahoo is now asking Firefox users to switch their default search engine to Yahoo Search. Yahoo is touting the message that Firefox switched from Google to Yahoo has their default search partner in November so all Firefox users should also consider making the switch as well.

Here is a picture of the Yahoo home page adding a bar at the top of the page that reads:

Yahoo is the preferred search engine for Firefox. Switch now.

It also seen on Yahoo’s other properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail and many others:

Earlier this month, Google began begging Firefox users to switch back from Yahoo Search to Google search as their default search provider in Firefox.

Last week we reported that Yahoo lost search market share as some Firefox users began to switch their default search provider from Yahoo back to Google. This is Yahoo’s effort to bring back those switchers to Yahoo Search again.

9 Key Points for Cleaning Up Your Online Reputation Nightmare Via SEO

Columnist Chris Silver Smith discusses how to highlight the positive and better hide the negative to improve how you look online -- without breaking the bank.

The Online Reputation Management (“ORM”) sector has been estimated to be a $5 billion industry, handling the development, monitoring and repair of the online identities of individuals and brands. While this is a robust industry, you don’t have to break the bank to correct a reputation situation for yourself or a business. It can even be a DIY project — it isn’t rocket science!

A straightforward defamation case can cost $10,000 in legal fees, just as a starting point — and, those cases can still require some amount of SEO work in combination with the legal efforts to get things cleaned up (publishers in the U.S. are not considered legally responsible for what others may post on their sites, so social media sites or search engines may choose not to remove damaging materials in some cases).

Also, some of the larger reputation repair firms can charge premium fees over the course of many months to get nasty stuff fixed. (In some cases, the shadier reputation firms can actually be the very same sites that are damaging your reputation, such as this revenge porn site operator!)

These tips are primarily for those taking a DIY approach to cleaning up their search results, but this information can also be of use to internet marketing agencies that are looking to mitigate a client’s reputation issue. When agencies ask me to look at the repair work they’re doing for a client, I usually find that they’re doing a number of very beneficial and capable things, but they may have missed a few of the basics (or just not gone quite far enough to push the negatives further down).

The SEO And ORM Relationship

As you may know, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of practices geared towards improving a site’s or page’s rankings in search engine results. Many e-commerce companies use SEO, for instance, in getting their pages about products and services to rank advantageously in search results. In online reputation repair cases, we’re doing a similar thing, although the focus is placed on a name or identity that is represented upon multiple pages instead of a primary one.

If you have one or two negative things that appear in search results when your name is searched upon — whether they are RipOff Reports, an arrest record, a defamatory statement or a negative review page — there will typically be a combination of other pages within the results that are either positive or neutral.

For an online reputation repair project, we’re looking to enhance the ranking capability of the positive and negative items appearing in search results so that they may improve and ascend, displacing the negative content. We may also create additional new, positive content to either help the other good stuff or to introduce strategically advantageous new stuff that might rank higher than the bad stuff.

Here are some basic SEO points to keep in mind:

1. Include Your Name Within Positive Content

There may be good content about you already, but if your name isn’t closely associated with that content, it’ll be less powerful than any negative content specifically targeting your name.

For the sake of search engine algorithms, you’ll want your name in the text on the pages of good content, and you’ll want it to appear in a number of advantageous places in the page code. Of course, this is assuming you’re able to influence or edit the page(s) in question.

2. Ensure Positive Pages Contain Your Name In The Title Tag

The page’s HTML title element is perhaps the most important item for zeroing in on your name and making the page rank well when that name is searched. The page’s title should contain your name — spelled exactly like you spell it, leaving out initials or additional titles (Jr, Dr., Mr/Mrs, etc.) if you don’t commonly use that when listing your name. (Conversely, it should be included if the people who search for your name online are likely to use it when conducting searches.)

For things like your social media profile pages, the user name or field where you specify how your name appears will automatically handle publishing this in the title – so you don’t necessarily have to have direct access to the page’s HTML code (or web development knowledge) to edit the title tag.

3. Ensure Positive Pages Contain Your Name In The URL

Ideally, the page’s URL should contain your name, just as the title should. Example: www.awebsite.com/Your-Name.html

As with page title elements, many social media services and online directories may automatically parse your proper name into the URL. In other cases (such as websites you control or have access to), dashboards or settings pages may require you to manually specify the page URL.

When including your name in a page URL, it does not matter if the name is in uppercase, lowercase or a mixture — search engines are primarily case-insensitive. Note that most websites will not allow one to have spaces in URLs, which makes a real difference in multiple-word names (ex: “John Smith”). Instead, they may allow dashes, periods, underscores or even parenthesis.

Google and other search engines treat some of these types of other characters as “white space” characters, essentially using them just like spaces and enabling them to influence rankings for multi-word searches. While visually appealing, underscores arenot treated as white space characters, so one should avoid them. It’s best to use a dash or a period, which are considered white space characters (ex: “john.smith” or “john-smith”). Your second best choice is probably a URL term that leaves out spaces (ex: “johnsmith”).

If those options are unavailable, you still might opt for using the underscore (ex: “john_smith”) as your third choice, as it may still enhance your search rankings some, albeit at a weaker level as a “fuzzy” match rather than the stronger exact match option.

4. Register & Build Out A Domain Containing Your Name

It’s good to have a website that has your targeted name as the domain name (ex: www.johnsmith.com). If you have this, it already accomplishes including the name within the URL — and, having the keyword as the domain name is a very strong ranking element in SEO terms.

Businesses will likely already have a domain name that’s a variation of their brand name, but for individuals that have common proper name combinations (like our hypothetical “John Smith”), there’s a high chance that an exact-match domain name will be unavailable or already owned by another person. In that event, one would hope that the other individual has a good reputation online and presents a positive identity on their site! If that’s the case, you could consider that other person’s site to be an advantage in your reputation repair struggle (see my note below about leveraging other, unrelated pages for a positive effect in your efforts).

What top-level domain (“TLD”) should you have? The .COM TLD performs the best in most cases, though .NET will work well, too. (For a nonprofit organization, it might be best to select the .ORG TLD.)

There are additional TLDs that are quite strong as second choices, such as .TEL, .BIZ, and .ME. I primarily advise against other, oddball TLDs, though research indicates that new TLDs can perform well in terms of searcher clickthrough behavior – however, I suspect these may not perform equally in other search engines. There can also be additional considerations regarding distinction, trustworthiness and professionalism, so proceed carefully if you go outside of the more common .COM and .NET choices.

Remember, it’s not enough to simply register a domain for your name. You also need to build out content on that domain.

How much content you’ll need to build out will vary from case to case, but it’s good to start small. Create some simple text that includes the target name, and be sure to include the name in your title tag and in HTML header tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) as well. This text is easily read by search engines and can increase your domain’s relevancy score for your target name, thus enabling it to more effectively rank higher for searches on that name.

5. Set Up Social Media Profiles In Your Name

It’s important that you have robust, public social media profiles on some of the most popular (and thus strongest) social services out there, like Facebook and Twitter.

Frequently, businesses or individuals may already have a few of these — if so, you should insure that they are set up optimally by including your name and claiming a custom URL containing that name as described above (ex: twitter.com/johnsmith).

Consider also that there may be many more social media services that could prove valuable in cleaning up your name online. MySpace, while used less these days, still has some ranking power. Other popular services can include Delicious, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Reddit.

In addition to creating a profile, it may also be necessary to develop those social profiles to some degree. For example, you may need to expand your numbers of followers, engagement levels, and influence on those services in order to give those social accounts the power necessary for them to rank well for your name. (As a bonus, this will also make them strong properties for helping your other content to rank.)

Your influence scores, as reflected by services like Kred and Klout, can be used to give you an idea of how you’re doing as you engage with those services and develop them out.

6. Post Images That Represent Your Name

Post some images representing your name! If you’re building a page or site to focus on your name, you should post a few key images on it to further focus in on your name. For a business site, the key image is the logo. For a personal site, the key image should be a portrait of the individual.

Ideally, the filename will include the name, formatted like I outlined above for the page URL (ex: “john-smith.jpg” or “acme-products-inc.jpg”), and the image’s ALT text attribute will also feature the name (ex: <img src=”john-smith.jpg” alt=”John Smith” />).

Beyond your site or page, it’s also ideal to post a few images of the subject on image sharing sites, using similar image/file/URL naming conventions. Where possible, link those image pages back to your main site or page. Some good places to share images include Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

7. Build Links And Reference Citations

Links still comprise an important part of Google’s search engine ranking algorithm, so it’s a good idea to build links to the properties you’d like to be ranking well.

You can validly interlink among your social media accounts — it’s quite common for blogs and websites to list out links to their official social media accounts, or display a set of icon link buttons to those accounts. You may also periodically post links to your content on various services, such as images you publish, blog posts, videos and even status updates from other social media accounts.

Note: You may need to read up on developing links and how to go about it, because if you go overboard or do something that runs counter to search engine policies, it can negatively impact the rankings and presence of your website in search engine results. Generally speaking, though, it’s fine to interlink your social media accounts and post materials on them so long as you are not automatically publishing tons of material, such as dozens of status updates per hour, etc.

For small businesses, one method for rapidly building out links and reference citations is to distribute your business information (name, address, phone number, website and social media links) through a listing distribution service. Some of these include: Localeze, Neustar, UBL, and ReachLocal. (Disclosure: I am an advisor for UBL.)

A listing distributor will send out your information to many online directories, internet yellow pages, local search engines and other directory services so that all of these data sources will refer back to your main web presence components.

You can set up your information for free at all these places, too, but it can take hours – thus, your time might more effectively be spent if you have a distributor to deploy it on your behalf.

8. Create A Video In Your Name

Videos use up a lot of real estate in the search engine results pages, so it’s a great idea to leverage video content if you can. You could create a brief video resume, a biography for an individual, or a sort of lowkey advertisement for a business.

Don’t be intimidated — this is not a complicated thing to do, and it’s become increasingly easy with the ready availability of phones, tablets and laptops that have built-in cameras.

If you don’t want to shoot a video, you could alternatively use a number of images and text to compose a video sequence, using free online video creation tools or slideshow presentation software.

Once you’ve created a video, you should then share it – again, naming it with your primary keyword and adding description information that mentions your keyword. The best place for you to share the video is likely to be YouTube, because of its built-in popularity and search-friendly site design. However, there are other video services that rank well in search, such as Vimeo.

A video is almost a slam-dunk in a reputation repair project, because most reputation-damaging materials are typically not video content — and, Google likes video content that targets a keyword, giving it special power to rank high in search engine results.

9. Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Don’t expect results fresh out of the box. Building and establishing a website, social media profile, or other web property/asset takes time — it can take weeks or even months for all of your efforts to pay off.

It’s often the case that one must steadily and consistently publish blog posts and post status updates for some time in order for each asset to accrue enough ranking power to offset sometimes-stickier negative content.

A Note On Checking Your Progress

It’s a good idea to take screengrabs of your search results in Google and Bing for the first few pages of results right before you do anything, then compare with new screenshots periodically afterwards.

Be aware that you may be making progress without seeing it! Search engines personalize and change the order of search results based upon a number of factors, such as your location and search history. Thus, you must attempt to get an objective view of how others may see search results containing your name.

Many browsers have a private browsing feature which sidesteps personalization somewhat. If you use Firefox, CTRL+Shift+P will open a private browsing window; for Google Chrome users, CTRL+Shift+N opens an “incognito” window. Use these private browsing windows to check your progress.

I should also warn you that the searches you yourself conduct may affect your search results reputation, too, because Google may use number of searches, revised searches, and click-throughs to listings in search results as yet more ranking factors.

In other words, if you search for your name and click on a negative item a lot, you may be reinforcing and expanding its ranking power. If you need to keep tabs on the content of a negative page, I suggest that you click through to the page once, copy the URL, and then just navigate directly to that URL thereafter. This will allow you to avoid clicking on it in the search results.

Similarly, you should avoid searching for you name and combining the keyword with negative-sounding terms (ex: “John Smith, Jerk” or “Acme Products Scam”). If you search with your name too often in combination with a negative term, the entire phrase can start appearing as an Autocomplete term or a Related Searches term.

Whatever you do, don’t despair! Reputation repair on your name is not a fun prospect. However, using these basic steps, you should reasonably expect to get a few more positive assets to begin appearing on the first page of search engine results, where they may begin to push down the negative content. Even moving a negative item down one row in the search results page can equate to a 15% reduction in visibility — or more!

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