OverStock Also in Google’s Penalty Box

How big a data center will Google need to house all the sites they are penalizing? Their Penalty Box sure seems to be growing fast.

It seems we just posted about JC Penny being penalized by Google for black hat link buying conducted by an outsourced SEO firm that violates Google’s long standing position on this method. Shame on that SEO Firm, but we also think JC Penny shows a serious lack of judgement and understanding about the importance of their Web site.

Our respected friends over at SearchEngineWatch.com has posted another in-depth article about Overstocks’s Paid Links at Universities and Colleges.  In some ways, this seems an unfair penalty. The gist of their violation stems from asking the sites to embed links to related Overstock.com product pages, such as “gift baskets” in exchange for offering a 10% discount to their students.

Why was this a violation? OverStock wasn’t penalized because they had a link on a college site saying something like:

“10% discount on gift baskets for all XYZ College students”

While they DID have those links, which are fine, OverStock asked the colleges to go a bit deeper into their site. For instance, there could be an FAQ section for new parents that states “Loneliness is the biggest reason for first year drop outs. Consider sending your child a gift basket near special occasions.” In this case, the link “gift basket” would take a parent to OverStock’s gift basket product page.

Once Google detected this similarity across lots of universities and colleges, they pitched OverStock into the Penalty Box. Another reason why businesses should consider having an SEO in-house expert or outsource they can trust.

JC Penny Penalized by Google

A great, detailed article was written yesterday on SearchEngineWatch.com about Google penalizing JC Penny for inappropriate link building by JC Penny’s SEO firm.

I’m mostly surprised by two things: JC Penny employing an SEO Firm that resorted to such a known “Bad Practice” and JC Penny obviously doesn’t have an internal SEO staff person overseeing and reviewing what their SEO firm is implementing. This seems like using an offshore contract manufacturer without and experienced person in the company being held responsible for managing that outsource. Seems insane. But, a company’s Web Site probably isn’t as important as building the products sold on it, right?

Here’s just a snippet from the article, “Bad Brands and Bad Linking: How to Avoid Google Penalties“:

JCPenney should have known what their SEO company was doing. You need a solid understanding of what your SEO firm is doing to “help” you, and how you can monitor SEO campaigns involving your brand.

Claim Your Business’s Google Places

I’ve posted previously about the importance of “claiming your Google business listing” on Google Maps. Last year, Google renamed this feature and created Google Places. Well, it is even more important for businesses to claim their Google Place and start improving or adding to the information that Google has chosen to include. This should help your search engine results on Google AND help customers learn about your business from YOU as well.

We recently added a new client that has been in business for a little over a year. They chose to start their company in a facility that houses other small businesses…which means they all share the same physical street address, except for their Suite number.

This client didn’t show up on Google Maps, even if you keyed in their phone number OR actual address. I was actually surprised they didn’t show up at all. Of course, in this case, Google’s authentication method wouldn’t allow the use of their phone number, because Google hadn’t put the two connections together within their indexing. I had to use the slower post card mail route.

Now, can you imagine the frustration of users today who might be trying to locate your business AFTER arriving close by. Now that they’ve claimed their Google Place, they show up correctly on Google Maps as well.

If you are a retail establishment that relies on foot traffic/local traffic for your revenue, I cannot stress how important doing this simple, FREE, easy process is for your company. If you need help, give us a call.

Are you By-Product curious? Maybe you should be…

I’ve recently had the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and spend time in the ‘low power/long range/long life’ wireless industry. I’ve found it very intriguing and am going to focus on this industry for the foreseeable future. Why? A five-year old company in my home town, Synapse-Wireless, seems to have quite the tiger by the tail and all the right gear to tame it.

But, rather than spend time on this specific company, I think it’s important for ‘my business owners’ to learn how Synapse-Wireless got to where it is today…or really where it started.

But first…a word from Microsoft:

Young Bill Gates, New Mexico, 1977

Hi, remember Me? Bill Gates! I first started Micro-soft (yes, originally, I used a ‘hyphen’ in our name) as a programming language company. My first product was a Basic Language Interpreter and my second was Xenix (a variation of Unix). My third product was a Tools application, called Word…which somewhat started the original What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) visually oriented word processor. But, my real bread winner was MS-DOS…several years after agreeing to create DOS for IBM in 1981.

So, Microsoft became successful on Bill Gate’s second variation of its FOURTH product. And MS-DOS was actually a by-product of DOS, which Micro-soft was contracted to develop. Due to IBM’s poor thought-out licensing deal AND several successful IBM-BIOS re-engineering from Compaq and two other companies, Microsoft’s ‘by-product’ sales exploded.

There are other examples of by-products actually being the big bread-winner for companies. In one case, the by-proudct producing billions in revenue was deemed ‘not viable’ by the founders. You may have heard of a small company called Google. Google has billions of dollars of revenue from a by-product idea that wasn’t even the company founders’ own because they were originally against the concept.

Google Founders Brin & Page

Sergey Brin & Larry Page developed their main idea, a better search engine for the web, at Stanford in 1996. They founded Google in 1998, the same year they had both published a research paper as students denouncing the use of an “Advertising funded search engine” model. Today, the overwhelming market leader in Advertising Funded Search Engine revenue comes from Google Adwords, generating 90%+ of Google’s entire revenue…but clearly a business model that cannot succeed. I wish them luck. 😉

At the start of this blog post, I mentioned a local company called Synapse Wireless and their snowballing success. What by-product has been generating their success? Really, the entire company is a ‘by-product’ of the CEO’s first company, an engineering services firm. One project he accepted exposed the limitations and constraints of developing applications for embedded wireless solutions such as industrial control, home lighting, long-range sensor monitoring and more. To complete the project, they ended up having to develop better development tools…which then evolved into a better architecture and superior mesh network operating system. It could end up being the “MS-DOS de facto standard” of the low-power, long range, long life wireless space. If the CEO had only published a paper totally denouncing the concept a few years earlier, I’d bet my house on it. Instead, I’m just going to bet a few years of my life on it. 😉 🙂

YELP CEO responds to class action lawsuit

I’ve been discussing the issue of online reviews, and in particular YELP in several articles this year, such as “no Sheriff in the Wild Wild ‘Net” and more recently about a class action lawsuit against YELP.

YELP’s CEO has responded to the lawsuit with his blog post. It does provide YELP’s perspective and emphasizes that the quality and fairness of the reviews is how they’ve built a large user base. Jeopardizing the integrity of that, he states, would negatively impact the company.

While that may be right, or may have been right before gaining 29 million users, he doesn’t address anything at all about their income and business model, other than referencing “no businesses that advertise on YELP have a perfect reputation”.

But, isn’t that where the issues lies? I suspect those businesses didn’t start off advertising when there were few users and great reviews. I believe the majority of those businesses advertised to get a more favorable review up top above a negative review…that seems to have only occurred after turning down an Ad deal from a YELP sales person.

Of course, I’m only speculating based on the range of multi-page articles I’ve read, several by investigative reporters. I could, of course, be as wrong as the YELP CEO contends all of these reports are wrong.

Why is my site not showing up on Google any more? Is Google Penalizing you?

Google does actually penalize sites that are attempting to use SEO tricks or short-cuts, or don’t abide by their Terms and Conditions. I’m about to briefly discuss and recommend a blog I just read from a Google employee that noticed portions of his site began disappearing a few weeks ago. He did some investigation and found a simple reason why, plus goes about telling how to fix it.

Why is this important to small businesses? The tool he used to figure out what occurred was simply Google’s Webmaster Tools. It’s a free toolbox that Google provides ‘authorized’ webmasters to use on their sites. It’s one of the very first things I setup for my clients…and NONE of my clients, include Web Design Firms and Fortune 500 companies were previously authorized to view that information. (Yes, my head is shaking sadly.) It’s not really their fault (most of them anyway), as business owners can’t know every detail from tax laws to accounting to marketing to sales. BUT, this is becoming more and more important, so my recommendation is to hire a small business marketing professional in the same light as their accountant. Someone they can ask for a quick review and recommendation, some occasional help and periodic conversations on at least a bi-annual basis.

Back to our story… Jason Morrison has several sites hosted with his hosting company. His blog began disappearing from Google search pages and he investigated why. After using Google’s Webmaster Tools he found they had stopped crawling due to tons of crawl errors:

Jason's site's Crawl Statistics from Google Webmaster Tools

Simple answer to the problem? He had allocated a certain chunk of his overall monthly bandwidth to his blog…and his readership has grown beyond that limit, so the hosting company drops traffic…which INCLUDED Google’s index bot. Thus, Google thought he had shut down the site and began removing pages from their search results.

My first question? How long would it have taken you to realize YOUR site’s traffic had disappeared from Google’s index? Do you check enough of your site periodically against search engines? Do you check your webmaster tools accounts at least once a month?

Oh…Bing has a webmaster tool as well and if they keep gaining ground, you’ll need to set that up and check it too.

Yelp sued for online reviews

I just noticed a news item on TechCrunch.com that mentions Yelp is being taken to court over their online review & ‘pay to remove’ practice.

On this previous blog post, I mentioned how Yelp, and other online reviews, can be a real challenge for small business owners trying to keep up with all the information overload and online ‘sites’ they have to monitor.

I’ll keep an eye on this case, as many in my part of the industry will do I’m sure, and let my readers know the outcome (though I’m sure it will be several years).

But does Yelp Love Us if We Don't Pay?

SMB Online Reviews: Still no Sheriff in the Wild Wild ‘Net

Do you know what your customers are saying about you online?

If you’re like me, you are more frequently searching for businesses or products online…and reading reviews that people have posted about it.

Click on

I started spending hours on Amazon reviews back in the 90’s when I realized you have to somewhat figure out the perspective, and ‘likes’, of the reviewer before you can really make a decision based on it. Matter of fact, I learned that you can only educate yourself better, but not decide anything, if there are only a few reviews.

For several recent years, I’ve accessed Star ratings and associated reviews on Google and Yahoo search engine pages (SERPs). And I’ve actually caught “fake” reviewers on a few businesses that were obviously their competition or an angry ex-employee, once you look at when the account/profile was created, what other reviews they’ve posted (frequently, it’ll only be for that business), unusual misspellings that are common between posters that seem to support each other…and were created on the same day, etc. Further investigation on one I was doing for a client actually drilled down to the same exact person using four fake accounts, something I’m certain happens MUCH MORE than many ‘lay people’ small business owners realize. It’s even rampant on Apple’s App store, especially in the $.99 apps market. (Access the iTunes store on your computer, not phone, and click on reviewers names to see their ‘other reviews’. You may easily notice a pattern that suggests whether this is a paid reviewer because all his reviews are 5 stars and only for apps from the same company. And competitors will be the opposite of that pattern. Seriously, how often do you make an effort to award 5 stars to a company, but have NEVER posted a 1-4 star with a complaint.)

And now…there’s lots of smartphone apps that HELP people review your business right after finding out that last sale item is no longer available. Yelp, Foursquare, Urbanspoon…and really TWITTER is just a big megaphone shouting out how bad your business is to anyone that might ‘hear it’.

Many business owners I talk with haven’t even tried searching on their own company and accessing the reviews. But when they do…that’s when the pain can really set in. Bottom line? Business Owners cannot do anything about negative reviews, except to proactively promote good reviews in various ways.

If you want to know how NOT to handle bad reviews…plus some positive ways you should handle them, read this long Inc Magazine article, “You’ve Been Yelped“.

So, if you’re now thinking you need to take action, what steps should you follow?

I’d start by searching for your business on Google’s, Yahoo’s, Bing’s and Yelp’s sites and review what people are saying online. DO NOT post right away, rather read them all, have a trusted peer or co-worker review them. Consider if valid issues have been resolved, maybe you can email the reviewer and ask them to check back and update the review. Maybe you need to start some type of ‘loyal customer’ campaign where you ask your customers to consider posting positive reviews.

When I last visited my GP, I mentioned to the Dr that they have some people complaining online about the long waits. I suggested he should add wi-fi in the lobby as well as promoting his new appointment system that significantly reduces waiting and really communicating this with signage in his lobby to both reduce waiting times and making it more productive while waiting. If nothing else, it will show he is listening and cares about his customers.