I returned this weekend from a week’s holiday and for the first time in 2 years, I didn’t take my laptop with me on vacation. (The magic of Wordpress’ scheduled posts kept Get Elastic alive while I was gone). With 250+ blog posts chilling in my RSS reader, I couldn’t wait to catch up on what I missed in the world of retail, marketing and tech geekery.

One of the events that happened while I was away was SMX Advanced in Seattle (Search Marketing Expo). Fortunately there’s always a ton of liveblogging coverage, as often breaking news from search engines get announced at these events, like support for the canonical URL tag. Because search engines are constantly working on improving their own tools and minimizing search engine spam, the “rules” and best practices for SEO (search engine optimization) also change. It’s important for SEO professionals, marketers and webmasters must stay on top of these changes as not to give outdated advice, and for bloggers to update old posts that may contain outdated advice.

While catching up I learned 2 important things about how Google follows links on a website:

1. How Google Handles the Nofollow Attribute

In 2007, the SEO world was a-buzz with a new trick - PageRank sculpting. The idea was you could control the flow of PageRank between pages of your site by plugging up “leaks” to pages like Contact and Privacy, so more PageRank would be applied to your product and category pages. (If you’re not familiar with the PageRank concept, please refer to this video explanation).

I recommended Stephan Spencer’s concept of PageRank sculpting for retailers in late 2007 as a “Killer SEO Trick Only 1% of Online Retailers Use” and referenced the practice in 9 Privacy Policy Usability Tips, Tips for SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs and Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates.

What we understand now is that Google no longer treats the nofollow attribute the same, and the “trick” doesn’t have the same benefit as it had before. The nofollow attribute will still prevent PageRank from passing to nofollowed links, but there is no boost to links without the attribute - the juice just “evaporates.” If you’ve used the technique before, there’s no harm, there’s just no benefit anymore. The disappointing thing is that if you have a large number of links on one page (including links in comments on blog posts), they still dilute the link value of more important links on the page.

This is a perfect example why any internal SEO expert or SEO consultant you may be working with reads blogs, attends conferences (or at least keeps up with the event coverage) and stays on top of the industry, otherwise you may get advice that is either a waste of time or at worst, get you banned from search engines. It’s also important for bloggers like me to update old posts to reflect new information.

2. How Google Handles Javascript and Flash

Equally if not more important, your web developers should understand how Google and other search engines handle Flash, Flex, AJAX and Javascript. Google annnounced advances in searchability of Javascript and Flash at its own Google I/O event, and Vanessa Fox’s explanation is a must read for all of your Web developers. Whether you’re working with internal or outsourced devs, send them this article today.

Welcome to PPC Myth week! Today is the first installment of a 3 part series challenging common misconceptions about search marketing and analytics.

Myth #1: Organic search more qualified traffic than paid

I was surprised to see in print one of the most respected search marketing gurus state “Organic searchers who click on your pages are highly qualified visitors to your site. They are much more likely to make a purchase than some other kinds of visitors you receive.”

In fairness, the guru went on to explain that banner ad clickers are less qualified than searchers actively looking for a product in a search engine. Nevertheless — to claim that organic searchers are highly qualified is false. It also implies that organic search converts better than paid search, comparison engines, email traffic, affiliate leads and so on. This just ain’t so.

1. SOME organic traffic is better “qualified” than others.

Remember, in this context “qualified” means more likely to purchase. If you look through your organic search referring keywords, you’ll find a number of non-transactional terms, and transactional terms that are not necessarily close to purchase or even relevant to what you offer.

Examples from the 2010 Olympic Store:

• Non-transactional: “vancouver 2010 schedules”
• Transactional, not relevant to our offer: “how do i get tickets for the 2010 winter olympics”
• Transactional, too general: “business card holders” (may like our offering but is likely in research/comparison mode)
• Qualified: “vancouver 2010 sterling silver heart charm bracelet”

Also, organic conversion can vary by search engine. It’s possible for your market, traffic from Yahoo, AOL or MSN sends you more shoppers and Google sends you more information hunters.

2. SEO vs. PPC - it depends on the keywords.

PPC traffic “quality” also depends on which keywords get clicked - especially if you’re using the broad match type. In fact, broad match can trigger some really un-qualified traffic. If you were only bidding on a certain number of close-to-purchase keywords with the exact match type - you *could* argue PPC is more qualified than SEO if your conversion rates also confirm so.

3. Other channels - it depends…

Comparison engine traffic is *typically* closer to purchase since visitors have already evaluated your offer against competitors and the product against other alternatives, comparison engine traffic should convert better in theory. Your results may vary.

Similarly, email and affiliate referrals have been exposed to your brand and offer before clicking through - you’d expect better results for these channels than search. Again, your results may vary.

Type in traffic (no search engine or other site referred the visit) indicates brand awareness, and perhaps preference. Repeat customers, brick-and-mortar customers or people responding to offline advertising may convert higher than SEO/PPC traffic that’s also clicking on several other results to compare. But direct traffic can also indicate you should filter out your own staff’s IP address or you have missed Javascript tags on some pages (causing a null reference).

So what’s the point of this rant? I don’t want anyone making decisions to invest more into SEO than other channels because they heard that organic search is the most qualified traffic. I don’t want you to set the wrong expectations on organic search, and set goals like “increase organic visits” or “increase conversion for organic visitors.”

A common SEO problem for ecommerce sites is CMS (content management systems) that create different URLs for a product that lives under multiple categories. The main reason this is bad for SEO is search engines only allocate so much bandwidth to crawling your site. If most or all of your product pages have duplicates, you’re less likely to get your site fully crawled and indexed — meaning lost organic search opportunity.

The above shows 6 copies of the product page for Abercrombie’s Clarissa skirt are currently indexed in Google. Half of the links lead to a 404 page, the rest look like this:

http://www.abercrombie.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=11306&catalogId=10901&productId=482314&langId=-1&categoryId=12280&parentCategoryId=12203&colorSequence=01

http://www.abercrombie.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=11306&productId=482314&parentCategoryId=12203&catalogId=10901&categoryId=12280

http://www.abercrombie.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_11306_10901_482314_-1_12280_12203

The best practice is to use a global alias for the product page URL for the UI to look up and render instead of the category-specific URL. If you wish to maintain breadcrumb trails, use a session ID or cookie to track which categories the customer clicked to locate the product. If the visitor lands on the page without browsing through a category menu (search engine referral, affiliate link, PPC ad, email, site search etc), default to a parent category.

Keep in mind that session IDs can get crawled and indexed by search engines, creating even worse duplicate content issues (and security issues with some ecommerce platforms). To block search engines from crawling URLs with session IDs, use this syntax in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

Other benefits of reducing duplicate content is it prevents Page Rank dilution and may simplify your web analytics (product page views and conversions aren’t spread over multiple URLs).

Last summer we did a collaborative post with fellow Vancouverites VKI Studios called Stop Google Analytics from Stealing Your Valuable Keyword Data. Google Analytics really isn’t “stealing”, rather “concealing” the actual search queries that trigger your paid search ads when you’re using broad match. It’s a “ye have not because ye ask not” situation.

“Ask and ye shall receive,” and by ask I mean set up a couple custom filters that will expose this data to you. I will be so bold to say that if you can not see exact keyword referrals you have no business using the broad match type! (<---And I rarely use exclamation points or blog the same topic twice!!!)

This trick has become the most important keyword research tool I use after a campaigns launch (I use a few methods of keyword research to set up Ad Groups including the Google Keyword Tool). Once the campaign is underway, I use the exact keyword referrals to discover negative keywords, uncover new Ad Group and product opportunities and to understand more about how people search. What's missing is transactional data for each keyword, unfortunately.

I decided to screencast the set up process for a few reasons.

1) To share this tip again with our new readers (we've almost doubled in readership last summer) and remind those who have put off adding the filter to set it up ASAP.
2) To show you how quick and easy this is and provide you with a resource (printable PDF) that will give you the confidence that you can set this filter up yourself!
3) To show you how to find your data in Google Analytics by AdGroup, so you can add apply the appropriate negative keywords at the Ad Group level.

If you bear with me to the end, I share some of the crazy matches we've been getting for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic store’s broad matched keywords. You’ll see why I value this information so much!

Can’t see video? View it here.

Companion Resources

Download “Cheat Sheet” Instructions (PDF)

Cut and Paste Values:

As with almost all multi-part filters, sequence is critical and must be ordered accordingly using the “Assign Filter Order” page for the profile.

First Filter:

Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (\?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Medium: (cpc|ppc)
Output To -> Constructor: Custom Field 1: $A3

Second Filter:

Field A -> Extract A: Custom Field 1: (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A1)

The “Big 3″ search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) broke big news last week with the announcement they will support a Canonical URL tag to help webmasters (and search engines) better manage duplicate content issues. Duplicate content refers to identical or near-identical blocks of text on more than one page in a search engine’s index.

Examples of duplicate content on ecommerce sites:

• A product is listed under multiple categories, each with its own URL
• The search engine crawls a site and is issued a session ID. It indexes links with the session ID
• A blogger copies a product link with a session ID or navigation tracking parameter like
  http://www.site.com/B00DK/ref=acc_glance_sw_ai_549_1_img and unwittingly pastes the link as-is in a blog post
• An affiliate link like http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Cordless-Laser-Mouse/?affid=1234 gets crawled and indexed
• Content is duplicated across sub-domains or sub-folders like canada.yoursite.com or yoursite.com/uk/
• The search engine crawls your print friendly version

Duplicate content problems include:

• When multiple copies exist, search engines want to choose one version to show in search results and filter the rest. They may not show the version you want (print friendly or worse, an affiliate URL so you’re paying commissions on organic search conversions!)
• Your SEO suffers because PageRank is diluted across several copies of a page (what is PageRank?)
• Your site might not get fully crawled by the search engine as search engines will only give you so much attention in a given session

Duplicate content can also occur across domains, like multi-stores with country-specific domain extensions like yoursite.co.uk or if many retailers are using stock manufacturer descriptions. The Canonical URL Tag does not remedy this situation.

Up until February, 2009, webmasters dealt with duplicate content by “sculpting PageRank” with rel=”nofollow” attributes, rel=”noindex” or using 301 permanent redirects. Now you can specify which is the original version of your content with the tag and rel=”canonical” attribute in a page’s head section, like:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://estore.com/womens/sweaters/esprit/B3H4H5"/>

Which *should* nudge search engines in the right direction when choosing which URL to display.

I say *should* because search engines consider this a hint rather than a directive - much like my hairdresser, you can give your suggestion but it’s going to do whatever the heck it wants. Nevertheless, I believe this will help a lot of online retailers’ SEO efforts and reduce the headache of duplicate content.

Bonus if you got the “canon” and “shot” pun in the title, yes I know it’s kinda lame.