Ok, yesterday’s comments were filled with questions on Ryan Deiss’s new report called “The Perpetual Traffic Report” where he discusses Google’s recent Caffeine Update and the increase of “Activity” as a ranking factor.
— time out—
(My original post was on another report on The truth about Page Rank and you can go see comments and report here: http://www.dorifriend.com/the-truth-about-page-rank-2/ )
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As I agree with Ryan on almost everything he said, especially about the fact that we give Google TOO MUCH CREDIT and that SEO is actually very simple and more cost effective then a PPC campaign. (I even did a short video report on THAT over two years ago called SEO vs. PPC! that looks a bit like his recent research lol 😛 )
But, I am on pause over this “Activity” thing.
I do agree that it would be an ideal trigger for Google to account for. BUT, unless a site is on page 1 of a major search engine or is getting “direct” traffic from members or others who know to type in the URL, or ah hem, clicking on a LINK somewhere lol, then activity may be hard to measure and achieve for a very well written piece of informative content that users may just LOVE if they new about it. And that is why I think Google has to CONTINUE to place more emphasis on the link vote!
But still, I think this idea of the “Caffeine” update has merit, but I for one, mostly change my seo methods from the results of my “experience” or regarded “test” results, not what Google tell’s me they are doing or how it is going to work. I would be chasing my tail if I did THAT!! lol =:0
What do you think of the report, the “Caffeine” update and this “Activity” thing?
Oh, and what do you suppose Ryan is going to sell us at the end of it? 😉
Ryan Deiss has a new angle to sell every week! Apparently his facebook PPC program didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped, so… why not jump on the SEO bandwagon!
Thumbs down!
Brian
It’s a toughy!
I am a firm believer that the core measurements in Google Analytics play a part in ranking, i.e. bounce rate, visitors, time spent on site, etc., which is basically “activity.”
I also agree that Google isn’t this “cumbaya” SE, but rather a business that’s in it for the cash!
Two things: The video is belaboring, tiring me out ….and, Your Explanations are a little confusing.
I hope I am in the right direction
I think in the future we are going to need a bit of everything to rank well. Links are so easy to manipulate that I cannot see them beating out a larger active authority site in the long run.
Maybe Ryan is going to follow Howie and, “do it all for you.”
Hi,
It is Csaba from Hungary.
It is incredible how much useful information is available from you. These days are really hot, not only due to the summer… 🙂
Thanks a lot,
Csaba
Be real easy for G to measure the click throughs without know the site server stats for the domain. (i.e. Analytics!)
But its a self perpetual loop, only the best ranked sites will do well in activity and enhance those sites only. Its common sense the best ranks get the most clicks therefore activity would be classed as content, updates, site content activity and possible blog comments. Forum sites could do well!
Dori,
I have met Ryan a few years ago at a networking event- He is a sharp marketer who is now doing well out of the contacts he has made.
Re: the activity thing- Yes and No
Its a factor, but believe (as you do) that links are a bigger factor. This is based on facts rather that “SEO opinion” – of which there is lot.
Early this year, I was looking to rank in my market for and SEO based keyword.
I creating incoming links from pages With PR (pages not sites) links were on the pages with the PR (3-5)
My site was listed bottom of page 3 for the term
2 months later, its now number 6. Nothing else was done, (I did rebuild the site after it ranked well- it didnt effect ranking)
Just like all internet marketing- lots of shiny things, people looking for the shortcut which is do the work!
Build the links, and know how many links the competition has (know your target) and take massive action.
Paul
http://www.InternetmarketingNZ.com
Question for Paul:
I’m working on a similar project. Just wondering did you create links over 2 moths or all at once. I don’t want to trigger Google penalty for over-optimizing my site by creating to many links in short period of time .
If you act from the basis of Google being a business intended to supply information, it’s pretty easy. Activity is important, and so are links. The importance of each may change, but both will always be needed. It’s good to have it made official.
What is frustrating about this is how much ‘press’ it’s getting. Ryan is saying nothing new – he’s just re-packaged concepts that have been understood for years.
The activity thing is disturbing at best. There are so many ways to interpret what he means.
If we take ‘activity’ to mean time spent on the site by customers – then google only knows data from someone who has gone via their search engine(s) and/or using chrome.
It would also mean that all the ‘big boys’ will come to dominate the SERPS. It will be the ones who spend the most money on external/brand marketing etc. If some company spends $1M on TV advertising to drive traffic to a new website and create a brand, it will get massive activity and do well in this scenario, so this system will reward the biggest companies with the deepest pockets and penalise the small guy (which is what SEO is really all about.)
Google are a company. Period. They’re not a benefactor. Much of what they do is highly anti-commercial to many of us and they can do this because they do what they want – it’s their company.
I, for one, feel that the quality of google serps has dropped significantly over the last few years. I have to look deeper to find what I want. Whereas I used to find a good spread of interesting results on page 1, I now have to dig to page 2-4 to find what I need. More and more, the top sites are tending to be large corporates and ‘buy/sell’ sub-search-engines.
I think google’s algorithm changes have definitely tended to promote the larger sites – which is what they seem to want. The trouble with this is, when I search I want to find out about the ‘other’ results – I want to ‘research’.
This whole report from Ryan is obviously another marketing ploy to build yet another email list to sell some over-priced SEO product to, which will simply re-cover the same ground that everything else does.
Of course activity is important – that’s why we do SEO etc in the first place. We want activity. To say to someone, ‘get some activity before you start building links’ is a little ridiculous. Aren’t links required to get activity?
At the end of the day, as SEO professionals, we have to try and do a bit of everything, so that as the algorithms change, we are future-proofed. If everyone just does what Stompernet started teaching years ago then they’d do well over time:
# Build good content: Forget google et al… Your visitors won’t stay without it!
# Update and add to your content/site: Keep your site updated – again, it may help with the SE’s, but your visitors will want info to be ‘current’ if you want them to consider you any kind of authority and build some trust and rapport.
# Build links through EVERY medium: To paraphrase Dori – ‘all links is good links’…
The more links you have from the widest possible sources/IP’s the better. Use low PR, high PR, Social sites, unlisted sites – all of them. And make sure you create a continous and consistent flow of links – not in huge stops and starts. (This is why an auto link-building network is really useful – for background activity and link ‘noise’.)
Spend your money on using high quality link building and content creation services – not on thousands of dollars of ‘how-to courses’. Do you realise how many links and how much authority etc. you could build with $2000 well spent!
Ryan’s peice is more ‘guru’ hype. But, while people pay $500-$3000 for every new launch that comes along, they’ll keep selling them. The content gets lower value – and the hype gets bigger!
The one thing that did interest me was the repeated ‘heat map’ viewing stats. I’d like to find out who did this report and when. My results certainly agree that PPC has dropped massivley in effectiveness at the same time as it has got dramatically more expensive. I think people are ‘tuning out’ to the adverts now, just like with TV.
Thats my few cents worth!
I like a lot of Ryan’s material, but this one has puzzled me.
Most of the report is a repeat of age-old SEO wisdom. The only bit that’s new is the focus on activity as the third leg of the triad. And that’s the bit that is pretty much unproven.
The report confuses different types of activity. In the activity bucket it includes updates to your site, comments etc. plus visitors and subscribers via feedburner. These are very different types of activity.
Now every blogger who’s gone a few weeks without posting knows that if you don’t update your site you may see a ranking drop. But despite rumours about google using clickthrough rates and other usage stats in ranking, we’ve not seen any real evidence they’re doing so – and Ryan doesn’t present any. He just claims it’s true “because otherwise why would google have bought feedburner or give away analytics for free?”
Maybe he’s right. But it’s a huge risk to put money and time into unproven SEO strategies. We know link-building works. We know on-site optimization has an impact. Every penny you’re spending on unproven “activity” strategies is a penny you’re not spending on proven SEO.
And, thinking about it, if “activity” really did have a big impact on ranking we’d have seen a huge uptick in the usage of pay-to-click services, expired domain traffic and the like.
And I’m really confused by the Cherry Picker software. it just seems like a very, very poor version of Market Samurai or SEO Elite. Now it’s nice he’s giving it away for free, but there are free trials of the MS and SE and the full versions hardly cost a lot.
The comments on the site do pay testament to the fact that despite Internet Marketing being a seemingly crowded market – there are still a huge number of newbie types without much of a clue who are incredibly grateful for being told pretty much nothing new. And many may buy the upcoming product. It shows the power of a big list and big JV buddies cross promoting.
Ian
Oh – And I tried to check out the stats he’s quoting, the heatmaps and the like and didn’t have much luck.
For example, on the graphic that shows that adwords ads don’t get many clicks these days he references an article on Aaron Wall’s site. But when you go to that article, the graphic isn’t there and the stats and sources Aaron quotes show a different picture.
While Ryan claims organic searches get 10-20 times the traffic of paid searches – the figures Aaron quotes range between about 3x to 5x. And he quotes studies showing that conversion rates are higher in b2b for paid clicks vs organic clicks.
I can’t make the two things tally at all, which makes me question the rest of the data he’s showing. Has he just made it up?
Ian
From my experience, you need three things to get your site or page to rank well:
1) CONTENT – keyword-rich content (and title tags and URLs) that provide meaningful information that both humans and robots find interesting; updating it regularly helps as well.
2) LINKS – both quantity and quality of links are important, but even with few links you can rank well in niche areas (see example below).
3) TRAFFIC – actual visitors to your site; here’s where Google’s Analytics (and YouTube and Feedburner) purchases DO have an influence your ranking in their SERPs as they track all of this.
4) I know I said 3, but Domain Age also has an influence, although its effect is harder to determine (and manage, unless you buy an existing domain name!)
Ryan Deiss’ “Holy Triad” is almost right – but he mingles updates in site content with inbound traffic in his “Activity” sector – two very different things to me!
Here’s an example where good content with few links and not a lot of traffic can still get your page ranked well: my “regular” business has evolved over the years into several different areas, and while website development and support for small businesses has become its primary focus, I’ve also worked in some niche areas involving security and encryption in IT products (especially networked devices).
If you do a Google search for ‘fips consultant’ or ‘common criteria consultant’, my page on Common Criteria Certification and FIPS 140-2 Validation comes up at or near the top of the rankings! It’s #1 for ‘fips consultant’ (out of 776K results), #2 for ‘fips 140-2 consultant,’ and holds #3 and #4 positions for ‘common criteria consultant.’ It has a PR of 2 and my domain has been active since 2005 – which doesn’t hurt, but is not playing a major role as I out-rank several large companies with higher PRs and older domains.
Why the high rankings? Google Webmaster Tools shows that I have NO inbound links to that page at all. (At one time I had 3, including one from a .EDU site, which DID help.) I do have over 1300 inbound links to my home page, but those are mostly from footer links that I put on the pages of my client websites (“Website produced by NetGreen Consulting, Inc.”) – not exactly what you’d call “quality” links. And for the past month, Analytics shows that my site has received 1600 “impressions” and just 22 clicks!
BUT – I have consciously gone back to my site every couple of weeks and changed a few words on the Home page and that FIPS/Common Criteria page so that it differs slightly from the previous version of the page. From my perspective, it’s been the focused CONTENT and updates to the page (part of Ryan’s “Activity” sector), not the links or traffic, that puts this page at the top of the SERPs for those keywords (albeit a small niche).
David G.
I forgot to add: I think Ryan will be coming out with a “Pro” version of his Cherry Picker software that automatically pulls in the missing piece that his video mentioned frequently: the stats on how many searches are made for a keyword so you know whether it’s worth going into that niche market, perhaps with “related keywords” suggestions like Google’s Keyword Tool provides.
I agree with the others: Market Samurai provides much better tools!
David G.
I agree that it is another product launch from one of the gurus. However I was interested to see his average bench marks for conversion for SERP #1 #2 etc.
Some good little titbits to take away and mull over.
@Brian, actually his Facebook ppc program sold hundreds of thousands worth (i hear anyway) Ryan is a brillant marketer! Watch him! 🙂
@Mona, “cumbaya” that made me laugh, and no they aren’t lol
@John, I’m so sorry I am confussing! I so try not to be!!
@Michael, Hmm, yes could be a “do it all for you” type of thing. More will be revealed! lol
@Csaba, Hi, thanks! and welcome from Hungary!! 🙂
@WEb, “But its a self perpetual loop, only the best ranked sites will do well in activity and enhance those sites only.” I totally agree!!
@Paul, Yes, build the links! build the links! You said it perfectly! 🙂
@Sittercity, hope paul answers! but in my expereince, it doesn’t matter, don’t over think it, just get the links!
@Walter, I still need to test it! 😉
@Jason, thanks for your few cents! Points taken! 🙂
@Ian, good points as well, and yeah, Ryan’s target market is not US! lol, but I have to say once again, he is BRILLIANT at his marketing!!
@Ian, it is true, I quoted that as well two years ago, but it was from marketing sherpa I think. I haven’t watched that video in a long time, but I think I give the source on it.
@David, thanks for giving us the example, and I will respond the same as in the other thread.
Your page has 20 links coming into it from your internal pages. And I’m not saying that on page factors can’t rank sites in very long tail keywords.
Good grief, if you put quotations your term “fips consultant”… I COME UP FIRST!!! =:0
And a pro version or cherry picker is a good guess.
@Lindsay, I like the little tidbits I get from the huge launches. It is great that they now give away some of the stuff they do. And, much is targeted to newbies (and it seems that market share is growing lol) but still, like you said, some good tibit take aways to mull over. 🙂
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