Just got a call from a client who is negotiating with a partner to put the partner’s content on their site.  The partner is requiring that each page with partner content link back to the partner site.  This is a typical deal point for “powered by” content-sharing arrangements, but the SEO implications could be profound.

SEO-wise content providers will make it a deal point that the link back to their site cannot be tagged as “nofollow”, which in theory would prevent the passing of PageRank to the content provider’s site.  The problem with this is that you will be passing PageRank to the other site, which helps their SEO and has real value.  My guess is very few companies have ever gotten an equivalent value in return out of this type of deal because either a) they don’t know how much the PageRank is worth – probably more than the main deal terms – and b) they don’t even realize they are providing the partner with this benefit.

So here’s what I propose:

1. Where SEO is concerned, this kind of biz dev deal is no different than buying links off a site.  So if you’re selling the links you need to figure out what they are worth.  There are no good benchmarks for this, but you could always call up a couple of linkbuilding companies and get an estimate from them as to how much they would pay for links off your site.

2. Since you probably don’t want to be passing PageRank over to the partner anyhow, you need some negotiating leverage.  As you may know, Google’s guidelines require that any paid link be tagged with a nofollow tag.  This will prevent the passing of PageRank via the link.  If you don’t use the nofollow tag here’s how Google words the potential consequences:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

So you can effectively argue that you can’t link to the partner’s site without tagging the links as nofollow, which will make the links worthless for SEO, which was probably the reason why they wanted them so badly in the first place.

This just in;  Yelp has removed the internal nofollow tags from their site.  If you had read my posts, Yelp SEO Analysis Part I and Yelp SEO Analysis Part II, you might recall that internal nofollows were a big part of their SEO strategy, most likely encouraged by SEOMoz, their SEO consultants, who were big proponents of the tactic as a way to stop the flow of PageRank to undesirable pages.  Earlier this year Matt Cutts of Google publicly implied that Google no longer honors internal nofollow tags.

I am not sure how long these have been gone, but if you believe the Compete traffic graph, Yelp’s traffic has been flat for the past couple of months, so they may be looking for ways to juice it via quick SEO fixes.

The thing I have not seen discussed on any SEO blogs is how this change in internal nofollows is being treated by Yahoo & Bing.

Key to the city goes to Jonathan Wegener, the most awesome guy ever, for tipping me off to this earth-shaking news.

From the Couldn’t Resist Department:

Tara Nelson of the Examiner.com, “the insider source for everything local”, wrote an article today called “Yellow Pages v. Social Media Marketing” on the subject of shifting your budget from print yellow pages advertising to social media marketing.  Now readers of this blog know I am all about positivity and sunshine, and I sure don’t want to knock Tara for trying, bit once you get past the catchy headline you quickly realize this is the insider source for, well, I am too much of a Christian to say what.

Tara’s argument is essentially that no one uses the print yellow pages anymore. To support this notion she reveals the following facts:

“AT&T has been allowed to cease delivering white pages to doorsteps in Missouri’s largest cities. Customers can call a toll-free number to ask for a residential book and it will be mailed for free. During similar pilot projects last year in Atlanta and Austin, it was noted that fewer than two percent of customers requested paper phone books.

Missouri Public Service Commission Chairman Robert M. Clayton III stated, “But we also have to recognize times have changed and many people aren’t even looking at these (yellow pages) anymore.”

Ok so first Tara, I believe the Missouri case is talking about eliminating white pages directories so not sure how you’ve made the case that no one uses the print yellow pages. And thanks for totally doctoring Chairman Clayton’s argument to make it look like he was talking about yellow pages when in fact here is the actual quote from Kansascity.com:

“I’m concerned that certain members of the community who use the white pages may be slightly inconvenienced,” said PSC Chairman Robert M. Clayton III. “But we also have to recognize times have changed and many people aren’t even looking at these any more.”

I think in journalism the technical term for this is “making shit up”.

Update: I just looked and they have removed the made up stuff from the article.  Good for them.  But just to make sure that they know that you and I know what they know let’s go to the trusty Google cache.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming:

And then there’s this gem:

“keep in mind that a vast number of (phone books) sit unused in a drawer or closet somewhere…This also makes tracking metrics and accurate conversion rates nearly impossible.”

Ok so let me get this straight – because most people don’t use their phone books you can’t track conversion rates of the people who do?

But wait, there’s more!:

Let’s say you were going to wipe off the dust and try to use one of those big, bulky phone books. Which one? Have you ever stopped to consider just how many different versions there are? Chances are high that your potential client will grab a book that you are not in. Building your online presence is infinitely more effective today.

Oh really?  Tara, have you ever stopped to consider how many local search engines, online yellow pages, SEM firms, SEO firms, web developers and yes, social media marketing firms, are trying to sell your reader a presence on their fabulous system?  Chance are high that your potential reader will drop his yellow pages ad, invest in a website, blow a bunch of money on Google ads before he figures out the ROI blows, forget the login to his Twitter account and angrily hit the spam button every time one of his buddies from fifth grade Facebooks him.  Oh yeah and then when his yellow pages rep calls him up he’ll be so desperate for leads that he’ll pay even more to get his “seniority” position back in the book.

Now readers of this blog know that I am not a cheerleader for print yellow pages, but the truth is that for certain categories the print book provides fantastic ROI.  “Boring” categories like assisted living facilities,  signs, bail bonds, etc.  But knowing that stuff would require a journalist to actually do a little research, wouldn’t it?

But let’s give Tara the benefit of the doubt and agree that the printed yellow pages are dead.  Again she lays a foundation of reason as solid as concrete bubble wrap:

“Social media allows you to arm yourself with more precise analytics.”

Really?  So x Tweets = y leads and x friends on Facebook = $y?  Like that kind of stuff?  Cool. Well, no actually this:

“TMP Directional Marketing indicated 61% of search inquires are made online as opposed to in print. Social media is the clear answer for standing out in the crowd and announcing your presence to the world.”

Oh, now I get it.

There are too many marketers out there trying to sell businesses on fuzzy, hard-to-understand stuff because it’s shiny and new.  Normally sane business people can succumb to the peer-pressure hype of this fabulous new world of social media marketing and the education can be expensive.

That said, there is a strong case to be made that many types of businesses can get a great ROI from social media marketing.  But to make that case, you actually need to make the case.

Some sites that make the case for social media marketing:

10e20

Aimclear

97th Floor

Collective Thoughts

Twitter 101 for Business

Part 4 in the SEO Death series.

If you look at your robots.txt file, you usually don’t want to see this:

User agent: *

Disallow: /

Because if you see this, then you usually see this:

Here endeth the lesson.

or perhaps here

Back within two weeks with hopefully something interesting to say.

I am not the first blogger to claim that the NYT has some questionable editorial practices, but the use of links in a recent article by Claire Cain Miller on the how Lifestyle Lift got busted for faking online reviews caught my eye.

The author presents two external links in the article, one to the NY Attorney General’s press release on the matter and the other to RealSelf.com, the site where Lifestyle Lift posted the fake reviews.  There also are three internal links to the Times’ Topic pages on Andrew Cuomo, Amazon.com & Yelp.com. These are the pages that the company uses to try and rank for search queries related to these subjects.

So how come there are zero links to Lifestyle Lift’s site?  The company is clearly the main subject of the piece and the providing the link would definitely help flesh out the story for readers. NYT.com does not tag their external links as “nofollow” therefore they are capable of passing a considerable amount of pagerank.

One, that one being me, can only conclude that the writer and/or the editor was making a judgement call to withhold providing Lifestyle Lift with any SEO benefit perhaps because they had been naughty.  Doesn’t seem very objective to me.

Just caught this article in the NYTimes about how Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had fined Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, $300,000 for ordering its employees to write fake reviews of its face-lift procedure on sites like RealSelf.

Let’s put aside the ethics of faking reviews for a minute and reflect on how effective a strategy this was for Lifestyle Lift:

Pros:
They probably didn’t factor this in, but because they got caught, their site is now generating a lot of links.  Variations of “facelift” or “cosmetic surgery” are not hugely expensive to buy ($5-$10 CPC), but I guess if they could translate those links into some page one rankings it could easily be worth $300K.

Cons:
Page one of Google for “lifestyle lift” is already littered with results about this story.  My bet is unless they do some reputation management SEO these aren’t going away anytime soon.  So even if they do rank on page one for some great terms, sooner or later a prospective patient is going to Google them, see this story and likely bail.  Hmm, something like this could tank their whole business pretty quickly.  Maybe it wasn’t worth the page one rankings?

It’s too bad Lifestyle Lift went down this route, but it’s understandable.  There probably was a lot of negative word of mouth about them already in the cosmetic surgery communities.  Here’s the first thing I saw after I clicked on the third SERP result for “lifestyle lift” – “Lifestyle lift for jowls, turkey neck – unsure if it was worth it”

While it’s hard to overcome a bad product or service, perhaps if they had consulted with a knowledgable SEO/Reputation Management pro at least they could have come up with an alternate strategy that would not have cost so much, or if it had, at least it would have had a better ROI.  Some tips for Lifestyle Lift in the future:

1. SEO your site!  At least update your title tags with some good keywords.  Hell update your whole site.  It’s a bit of a tired, hard-to-read thing as is.  If you can’t control what people are saying about you online at least try to get some traffic for valuable keywords and bypass them.

2. Participate in social media without faking it.  If Ms. Turkey Neck is not saying nice things address her concerns.  Maybe you need to redo her turkey neck.  I guarantee if you turn her turkey neck into a swan neck, she will be your loudest supporter in these communities.  And what would that cost you?  My guess is the margins on turkey necks, among other things, are pretty fat.

3. Work with a reputation management pro who can help you move a lot of those pesky little negative links off of page one.

4. Better yet, give your customers reasons to say nice things about you online.

Even if you don’t have a problem with the ethics of fake reviews, they do often violate the terms of service of the reviews website.  And as Lifestyle Lift discovered, that little fact can cost you.  So next time you are thinking it might be a good idea to post some fake reviews of your business on the Web, remember you might be blowing all the cash you saved up to fix your damn turkey neck.

For more points of view on turkey-neckgate:

Unethical Customer Reviews Can Cost You Big – Search Influence

Plastic Surgery Co Settles With NYS Over False Reviews – Blumenthal’s Blog

will be back soon

IAC/Citysearch just announced a contest for third party developers to come up with “the next hot local guide app for the Web and mobile devices” on their Sidewalk.com domain.  It’s called the “Sidewalk: Right Here Right Now Contest”.

BTW – banana peel, fire hydrant & pigeon?  Subliminal messages?

Greg Sterling thinks this is interesting because it will help CitySearch come up with ideas that it never could do on its own.  This is probably true, but if I were a gambling man I would buy Zynga poker chips and bet there’s more to it than that.

As part of the contest, qualified contestants “will receive a link to download the developer kit so you can start building your prototype.”

Now please correct me if I am wrong, but if you’re CitySearch would you spend time building a SDK just for a contest?  Doesn’t seem like a very good use of company resources if you ask me.  So what’s really going on here?

As I mentioned in my previous post about Yellow Pages APIs, I think the next big innovation in local search is going to come as the publishers that control all of the yellow pages listings data release that data via APIs and let the volcano vaporizer users come up with cool applications that sit on top of that data.  Right now I think the majority of Web marketers don’t have much of a clue as to the value of local search traffic.  Clicks for DUI attorneys are certainly worth more than those for ring tones and acai berries.  But if the data is suddenly easily available and new sites start cropping up that appear to be making $, you will start to see even more local search sites than we have now.  This will make for a very crowded field, but if you’re the data publisher and your ads are riding along with the data, you may not care who ranks #1 in Google, as long as the ad clicks belong to you.

So my suspicion is this whole Sidewalk contest thing is merely a Trojan Horse for CitySearch to ease into the listings API strategy.  I would not be surprised that upon the announcment/launch of the winner, IAC announces that now anybody can build their own local guide app.  And that would be a pretty cool announcement.

Geodelic, a local mobile search start-up, just went public with its funding and some screenshots.  I had the opportunity to get a demo from Geodelic CEO Rahul Sonnad about a month ago and I really liked what I saw.  While there is nothing really new about the basic idea behind Geodelic – find something local on your mobile device, what is new is their attempt at being a one-stop shop for local mobile search on your phone.

As anyone who has had a conversation with me about Web-based local search knows, I generally think all players in the IYP world have done a fairly poor job of creating a truly innovative user interface to help me accomplish my local search tasks in a way that is easy, useful and satisfying.  As anyone who has had a conversation with me about mobile local search knows, I generally think there are too many apps trying to solve different pieces of the puzzle (Yelp, YellowPages.com, Google Voice Search, etc.) and as a user I think I just want one.

The first thing that struck me about Geodelic’s service was the design.  If you think UrbanSpoon had a cool design, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Geodelic.  The thing is smooth.  I think that’s best word for it.  Smooth.

Beyond design, the concept as I understood it, is to start the experience by providing the user’s current location information and then allowing the user to explore from there.  One of the example’s I recall is the idea of being in a maternity ward. The service knows you are in a maternity ward and can prompt you to provide assistance for all the things you might want to find related to being in a marternity ward (diapers, nearest pharmacy, a cigar to pass around maybe?, etc.).  It wasn’t exactly rocket science, but it was useful.

While there are several local mobile search apps (e.g. Where) that have baked in a lot of other niche local services like Yelp Reviews, GasBuddy, OpenTable, ServiceMagic, etc., it seems like Geodelic’s ambition is for these services to be presented to you in a more relevant, contextual fashion.

While I didn’t spend enough time with the service to say that they have achieved this, I did see how the UI was interesting enough to make me want to give the service a try.  And at this point in local mobile search, that’s good enough.

I really don’t want to have to use multiple apps to find what I am looking for.  If Geodelic solves this problem, they will truly become “my precious”.

Geodelic’s Sherpa service will be coming soon to the new T-Mobile Android phone.