23

Nov

By Dennis R. Mortensen
13 comments
Search Engine de-Optimization ..and the bogus celebration of yet another Google organic search lottery winner

I am preparing my Search Analytics talk for Search Engine Strategies on December 7th at 10:30 in Chicago – which includes smart folks likes Jim Sterne and Matthew Bailey on the panel. This is the outline in which I am asked to talk:

“Cut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the specific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.”

I know this is the usual promotional event pitch, and that’s OK. The easy response (presentation) would have been a focus around the magic, one can pull out of behavioral data in conjunction with search data. And that would be OK as well. I was, however, reading an article from Jacques Warren [1], who as a web analyst is as smart as they come, and during the post he concludes the following:

“Google organic accounted for 65% of all visits, 89,5% in December, 87% in January, and 84% so far in February. That’s only one search engine (and its various properties)! In a word, we LOVE Google.” [2]

I decided to use that as my outset and I in particular focused on what I bolded above (the capital letters are his). Before I move on, let me be clear that this is not a bashing of Mr. Warren, by no means. His post, and specifically the above comment, in combination with my talk in Chicago, just happened to trigger something in me, to finally utter my concern around the unfair relationship between content owners and search engines. This includes, what I believe to be a set of unhealthy search success metrics, or for some people, even a naïve belief in a search engine friendship.

Any other person, might just agree on how fantastic the traffic influx from Google is, in the above example, and continue to thrive on the euphoria of that – and perhaps even apply additional search engine optimization processes across multiple search engines and aggregators in regards to new content. But doesn’t this seem wrong to you, that we celebrate yet another winner of the Google organic search lottery ?

If I ran a business where most my revenue, if perhaps not all of it, depended on visitors to my site, I would be very dissatisfied to the extent of concerned by the fact that my life was in the hands of a random search engine.

To marginally illustrate my point, but mostly for us to continue the debate, let’s have a look at Figure 1 and Figure 2, and the apparent question that’s comes with those two data sets, such as; which of the below two trends would you describe as more successful (forget all about the usual ‘it depends’ and just assume that all the stars are aligned to your satisfaction).

figure1

figure2

My point is that, in the scenario of monetization being most successful around returning visitors (as we see with a lot of content owners), figure 2 is the more successful trend. AND the accompanying suggestion could very clearly be that by the introduction of Search Engine de-Optimization one might be able to force such a pattern. One action could actually be to remove some of your content from search engines all together! Drastic, yes, and this is certainly not for everybody, but think about it twice, before you conclude that I am completely crazy. :-)

Conclusion
It seems fair to debate whether or not search engines and other content aggregators extract too much the webs value, leaving less for the content creators (originators) – if this is true, one should introduce tactics such as Search Engine de-Optimization to destress the dependency!

I’ll prepare myself for the bashing and first hit in this blog post – it might mentally prepare me for Chicago. So there you go! Dear search engine, I don’t Love you anymore. – and it’s not you, it’s me that changed ;-)

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

[1] If you are coming to Chicago Jacques, Diet Cokes are on me! :-)
[2] You can replace Google with any other content aggregator and the above critique still rings true

  • http://www.gilliganondata.com Tim Wilson

    Thought-provoking post, Dennis! I’m hoping you will tighten up your point — specifically the paragraph immediately following the two figures — to drive a little more clarity in your presentation. It took me a few read-throughs to figure that out, and I’m still not entirely sure. To make it more specific, if, say, you’re looking at a site for a traditional newspaper, then the newspaper wants to drive a loyal base of visitors, which means they’re likely to be more interested in growing repeat visitors than overall traffic. Is that right?

    If I’m understanding your point, then it would be good for you to be ready to answer the “OR” vs. “AND” question. Wouldn’t this hypothetical site really want to see both overall traffic grow AND return visitor growth? To understand whether they’re really being effective, they may want to look at the % of traffic from return visitors to gauge whether they’re improving the engagement (oops…dirty/inflammatory word) of the site, or whether they’re staying pretty much the same but driving increased overall traffic, which is leading to a larger base of people who “stick” to the site and return.

    Maybe I’m missing your point entirely. It just doesn’t seem right that you’d want to “hide” content as a means of forcing visitors to return to your site — I don’t think consumers in the 2.0 world would stand for that.

  • http://www.superwebanalyst.net Ed

    Interesting post, Dennis. What might be even better for content owners is to get paid to de-optimize for Google. See Steve Ballmer’s plan with News Corp.

    http://bit.ly/7bym3W

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Tim,

    I know that the post doesn’t suggest outright what’s wrong – and moreover how to fix it. My idea (with the post) was to spark the dialogue of search engine de-optimization not just being crazy talk. Once we accept that, we could develop suggestions for how to execute on that. BUT Perhaps I do mumble my way through that (we have to give the Danish dude some slack) :-)

    >>To make it more specific, if, say, you’re looking at a site for a traditional newspaper, then the newspaper wants to drive a loyal base of visitors, which means they’re likely to be more interested in growing repeat visitors than overall traffic. Is that right?

    As an example. Yes! I agree and that’s the thesis of the post.

    >>If I’m understanding your point, then it would be good for you to be ready to answer the “OR” vs. “AND” question. Wouldn’t this hypothetical site really want to see both overall traffic grow AND return visitor growth?

    In the perfect scenario the publisher would probably like to see both of those metrics grow, however, imagine the scenario where I through search engine de-optimization (forcing a change in visitor behavior) could increase DIRECT return visitors to my property – by sacrificing some of my flyby search engine visits.

    >>To understand whether they’re really being effective, they may want to look at the % of traffic from return visitors to gauge whether they’re improving the engagement (oops…dirty/inflammatory word) of the site….

    I absolutely agree – in the sense that the analysis that have to go into a de-optimization practice need to be sophisticated enough to take into consideration the true nature of the impact created.

    >>Maybe I’m missing your point entirely. It just doesn’t seem right that you’d want to “hide” content as a means of forcing visitors to return to your site — I don’t think consumers in the 2.0 world would stand for that.

    I think you are spot on in regards to my commentary. AND I do agree with you that in a “web 2.0″ world one have to be very cautious in how any potential de-optimization process is executed. But we could image (NOT tested) a scenario where I as a news media would have ALL my content visible to the search engine, but I would delay (de-optimizate) current news 24 hours. So that the only way my visitors could get access to that, was by subscribing to my RSS, Twitter, Facebook etc. feeds OR go directly to my Front Page.

    Thank you very much for a very valid feedback.

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Ed,

    Thanks for the thumbs up.

    >>What might be even better for content owners is to get paid to de-optimize for Google. See Steve Ballmer’s plan with News Corp.

    Yes! I am not entirely sure this will happen though – unless – the content owner has “control” over a HUGE part of the page 1 SERP’s for the most popular search phrases. Which is why I get surprised every year when Wikipedia asks for Donations. They should promptly send an invoice to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – as any of those three engines would be heavily amputated without their content. I am not sure I see any of the individual news papers being able to do this, so unless they create a coalition, I don’t think it will happen beyond perhaps a test. BUT I am excited! :-)

    Cheers
    d.

  • http://www.whencanistop.com Alec Cochrane

    Interesting thoughts – I’m going to add something that you might want to add into your mix for your presentation:

    We did some analysis for a large science based consumer magazine in my previous job on the visitors who came in to the site from search. We grouped people into those that arrived at new content from search engines (ie within the last month) with those that arrived at the home page, from RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc into a large group of consumers with similar habits. Those visitors would come back time and time again, regardless of how they found the content – because they’d been hooked.

    We grouped those that came in from Search engines to older content (older than a year was the baseline I took, I think) and they turned out to be unlikely to stay on the site, but also significant in volume (up to 20%) and quite steady over time.

    Our recommendations were that the site should revisit high volume content from the past and add links to newer content to encourage users to stay and become more brand aware. Ideally this would be done manually within the content itself, but if not then another solution would be to make sure that right hand panels and bottom panels were automated to be able to provide the relevant related content. This meant, of course, making sure that their automated system was clever enough (a step that wasn’t easy in itself).

    It led to a number of questions across other sites that we ran analytics for, most prevalent was why did this site get more visits to its old content than some of the other sites? The answer, almost always was that the science website had genuinely interesting and well written content, whereas the other websites had ‘news’. Our recommendations to the other websites was to write ‘evergreen’ content and analysis for long term gains, rather than churning press releases for ‘news’ and instant gratification. The ‘news’ the users could get anywhere, the stuff they were producing had to be unique and value add. Maybe the ‘news’ should not be put up for the first 24 hours and the value add should be pushed as premium (as in the eConsultancy website which you just gave an interview for :) ).

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Alec,

    Great input. I assume I can quote you on the above? (My slides are mostly back drops, so it will be verbally)

    >>Maybe the ‘news’ should not be put up for the first 24 hours and the value add should be pushed as premium (as in the eConsultancy website which you just gave an interview for :) ).

    ..and this is actual a model which seems to work very well for them.

    Cheers
    d.

  • http://www.waomarketing.com/blog Jacques Warren

    Hi Dennis

    I’m very happy to see you took one of my posts to start this discussion. Rereading it, I see that the sarcasm part of the “We LOVE Google” phrase could not necessarily be seen. The phrase was meant to be a double entendre about the fact that Google is bringing the vast majority of traffic to my wife’s site (thank you!), and that we are SCARED shitless of Google (what if it stopped indexing it well??).

    Hence our shouting “We LOVE Google” the same way people in some countries salute their “Dear Leaders”…

    As for the Diet Cokes, I won’t be in Chicago, but I will certainly figure out a way to get them someday, somewhere in the world!

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Jacques,

    I am happy to see that you are not completely offended by me using your post as a starting point – and ever happier to see your conclusion: “that we are SCARED shitless of Google” :-)

    Seems like we are on the same page after all.

    Cheers
    d.

  • http://www.whencanistop.com Alec Cochrane

    Hi Dennis,

    Of course you can use it in your presentation, although I would struggle to back it up with data given that I don’t work there any more. :)

    RE News Corp and Bing – I read an interesting comment on Slashdot that stated that Ballmer was calling Murdoch’s bluff. The Bing offer does everything Murdoch claims he would like, but with the disadvantage of not being linked to in Google. Really he wants Google to make this offer, or force them to make the offer through the courts on legislation of ‘stealing’ their content so that they don’t have to be removed from Google. The Bing offer just puts him in a difficult situation of either waiting out on Google to make a similar offer; admitting defeat and staying with the current model; Going for the fremium option that has been talked about (and possibly failing). Interesting times ahead.

    Cheers,
    Alec

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Alec,

    Anyone can apply a disallow in their robots.txt file, making money off of the action is an entirely different thing – and if nothing else, we should give Mr. Murdoch credit for trying.

    cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://www.contentmetrics.de nic

    Hi Dennis,

    but people can get the news you want to delay very easily from other sites.

    Instead of trying to achieve a graph like figure 2, why not ignore the “Total visitors” metric, but make “Returning visitors” and – maybe more interesting as a short term metric – “2nd visit/1st visit” the KPIs?

    I would concentrate more on Alec’s “that the science website had genuinely interesting and well written content, whereas the other websites had ‘news’. Our recommendations [...] was to write ‘evergreen’ content and analysis for long term gains”

    An analysis of the top seen (top rated if available) content of the 2nd visits could be quite insightful.

    so long
    nic

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Nic, :-)

    I essentially agree with you. I just believe it is healthy to think out the extreme scenario, which for some is; for all intents and purposes, removing content from the index, as a test to see if that could change visitor behavior (which could be measured on a KPI such as Returning Visitors). AND – for some, this might actually be true.

    Cheers
    d.

  • Pingback: Visual Revenue | Where in the World is Dennis Mortensen ?