BUSINESS SENSE
BY RANDY MILANOVIC, KAYAK ONLINE MARKETING
Three Important Questions from the World of Online Marketing
duplicating, or “spinning” pages from your competitors is a great way to turn off customers and be banned by search engines and social sites.
3. Clean business websites have inbound links that make sense.
One of the surest ways to catch cheaters in sports is to look for “statistical aberrations”—things that don’t make sense in the context. The same is true with your business website. If you suddenly have lots of people linking to you from outside your area or industry, that’s a fairly clear-cut sign that you’re doing the wrong things to try to game the system.
How fresh does your website smell to Google? There are already lots of terms and buzzwords that factor into
search engine optimization, so it’s understandable if you aren’t quite ready to start thinking about new ones just yet. But, in the latest updates and changes to Google’s algorithm,
I
n the world of sports, we have seen a recent crackdown on champion athletes who have relied on performance enhancers
to extend their career, become a bit faster, or otherwise gain an illegal or unethical edge over their opponents. From big-name cyclists to baseball superstars, it seems that many have looked to get a leg up through unnatural means. While that might seem to have nothing to do with online
marketing, the reality is that the tactics used really aren’t all that different. In each case, they are trying to accomplish something rapidly that would normally take a lot of hard work… and often end up damaging themselves in the process.
So, could your business website pass a drug test right now? Here are a few ways to tell:
1. Clean business websites have content that has grown natu- rally over time.
Just like the NFL star who comes back from the off-season with 50 pounds of additional muscle mass, a business website that suddenly added a hundred new pages seems a bit suspect.
2. Clean business websites have their own original content.
In endurance sports, it isn’t unusual to hear athletes trying to swap blood and other fluids with others to enhance perfor- mance or beat tests. In the web marketing world, copying,
14 datia focus
one key term has been coming up again and again—freshness— and it’s one that smart marketers are starting to take note of. So what exactly is “freshness” in a search engine optimization
sense? It’s just what you would imagine: Having new and unique content added to your business website on a regular basis. In short, Google and the other search engines are begin-
ning to reward businesses that add fresh content to their sites frequently. This isn’t an arbitrary decision on their behalf. As the world becomes more and more focused on real-time break- ing news, and most industries are evolving rapidly, searchers are going farther to find new information. For that reason, it makes sense for the engineers at Google and the other engines to do what they can to incorporate these fresh results more thorough- ly. In other words, it’s a matter of the search engines giving their customers what they’ve asked for. But, as with all changes to search engine algorithms, it means
different things for marketers. Here is what you have to know about freshness and your search engine optimization campaign: 1. Freshness is not the biggest factor in search engine rankings… yet.
Google has been placing more weight on fresh content in the past few months, and probably will continue to do so in the near future. It’s worth noting that freshness is still a small part of their overall algorithm at this point, though, and ap- plies more to certain topics and industries (like technology, for example) than some others.
winter 2013
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