Ask Kalena

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Dear Kalena…

I would like to know your thoughts on tag clouds. We would like to add one to our careers web site but are being told that this is not an acceptable practice for business to business web sites and we will be black listed by search engines. Is it true that only blogs and internal social networking type sites are “allowed” to use these?

Kerry

Dear Kerry

Whoever gave you that advice is talking bollocks. For starters, if you use tags or topics on your site, tag clouds are a useful navigation feature to help your site visitors find the topics they are interested in. Tag clouds don’t have to be limited to blogs.

The idea that you will be black-listed by search engines for using tag clouds is utter nonsense! If it makes life easier for your readers to have a tag cloud on your site, go ahead and use one. If anything, a tag cloud will probably make it easier for all your various pages to be indexed by search engines as they are similar to a site map.

Popularity: 95%

It’s a New Year so I’m rolling out a new blog feature: Search Industry Flashbacks.

Some of you new to this blog may not know this, but I actually started blogging about the search industry in July 2002. I was wading through the old blog archives today and having a good old chuckle at the stories that made search headlines back then when it struck me. Those old posts would make blogging gold today! Plus they’ll save me from thinking up new ones.

So without further ado, I give you the first Industry Flashback:

Date: 21 August 2002

Original Post: Overture Gets Greedy

Summary: It’s August 2002 and Overture (later to be bought by Yahoo! and re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing) is the main pay per click engine with Google AdWords still playing catch up at this point. As an Overture advertiser, I’m fired up about a new feature they’ve rolled out. I must have been pretty upset as I’ve even compared them to LookSmart:

Content:

An email from Overture to advertisers has sent some shock waves around the SEO community today. Not content to disappoint us with their sneaky Auto-Bidding tool, now Overture calmly announce that their Match Driver tool will ensure your listings will appear for search terms you haven’t even bid on!

That’s right - your ad will appear for searches that you haven’t blatantly specified, meaning you will end up having to pay for clicks you didn’t even want!

In their email, the spin doctors from Overture worded it like this: “The new expanded matching enhancement allows you to receive traffic from more complex user search queries. This feature looks at your term, title and description to match your listings to searches where we believe the intent of the user is to find your product or service even though they have not typed in the exact keywords you’ve bid on”. Makes me wonder if they borrowed LookSmart’s PR team especially for the occasion.

Search engine forums are already abuzz with talk of the so called “enhancement” and it’s not pretty. I’ll keep you posted on developments.

Postscript: The Match Driver tool turned out to be a pre-cursor to the Broad Match or Advanced Match keyword-matching options later introduced by most pay-per-click search engines. And I still don’t like them!

Popularity: 44%

Remember earlier this year when I blogged about Jennifer Laycock’s challenge to kick the four major search engines to the curb and prove you could launch a business online without them?

Well I just noticed that the site she launched, BentoYum has now opened the doors to search engines again. There’s no bot restrictions in the robots.txt, it’s got a healthy Google toolbar PageRank of 4 out of 10, Google has indexed 284 pages and it was last cached on December 3.

So I wonder when this happened? The last installment of the Hide and Speak series that I can find is Develop Very Thick Skin published at the end of July. Did something happen to prompt opening the doors to search engines? Did Jenn make a post about it and I missed it?

I’m guessing that Jenn and business partner Abigail decided that their point had been made, that you CAN launch a successful business online without search engine help and they’ve moved on. But clarification would be nice!

Popularity: 58%

Dear Kalena

I am currently using an SEO company and they are doing submissions for me every other month. They asked me if I wanted to do it every month, Will this be worth it to do it every month?

Thank you for your time

Darrell

Dear Darrell

I think your SEO company is ripping you off. Despite the hype, there is NEVER a need to resubmit to a search engine or directory unless your site is dropped entirely (which is a very rare occurrence). In fact, provided you have a link pointing to your site from a site already in the search engine’s index, you don’t need to submit your site to search engines in the first place. Search bots will find your site automatically as they sweep their database of indexed sites looking for new links to follow and new content to index.

Perhaps your SEO firm is talking about gaining new backward links for your site by submitting it to new niche directories and related sites each month? Ask to see the list of sites they are submitting your URL to each month. If the same engines are on the list month after month, they obviously have no clue about SEO and I’d ditch them quick smart.

Popularity: 44%