2 New Tools in Google Analytics: Real-Time Widget and Benchmark Tool was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Google Analytics is every Internet marketer’s best friend. The tools are always changing and updating, making the Google Analytics blog an important one to keep up on so you know the features, capabilities and data available to you. There are a couple new tools that got us really excited because of the intel they provide about how visitors are using our sites. Learn about the new Customer Journey tool and the Real-Time Widget now available through your Google Analytics account.

The Customer Journey to Online Purchase

Google is offering more detailed information to make marketer’s lives easier. On April 25, Google introduced a new benchmarking tool for marketers: The Customer Journey to Online Purchase.

The tool is Google’s response to:

• The increasing complexity of the customer journey and
• The increasing need of marketers to make sense of the contribution of each marketing channel in the final purchase so that they can improve their strategy accordingly.

Before committing to buy online, a customer may engage with a specific brand through many different media channels over several days (or even months, in some cases).

Based on the different sectors, different marketing channels come into play at different times and contribute to the final purchase decision.

The tool has been built on data gathered from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorised sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries (Australia is not included at the moment).

As it is explained on the Official Google Analytics blog, the tool includes benchmark data for:

• How different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
• How long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values. The length of the customer journey, in both number of days and number of interactions, varies widely depending on the type of purchase. Some decisions require substantial research, while others are made very quickly. Typically, more complex purchases lead to longer paths and larger purchase values.

Implications of the Customer Journey to Online Purchase Tool

• Online retailers need to understand their customer journeys in the context of how a broader data set does similar journeys.
• By understanding the different stages of the customer journey, businesses can evaluate the success or otherwise of online campaigns and the role each one plays in the conversion.
• Using this information will help to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase.

Google Analytics New Feature: Real Time Widgets

This is better than TV!

On April 16, Google announced four real-time widgets that can be added to any new or existing Google Analytics Dashboard, marking the first time real-time data has been possible in a dashboard widget.

The widgets make it possible for users to perform many types of real-time analysis and they can also be combined and customised with different filters to segment and compare data side by side.

To set-up a Real-time widget, webmasters simply need to click the +Add Widget menu option from the Google-Analytics dashboard.

Once a widget has been added, they can select Counter, Timeline, Geomap or Table from the Real-time section.

• Counters show the number of active visitors on the site, in a similar way to the prime “Right Now” counter on the Real-Time overview report. The major difference is that it is possible to determine what the dimension is, if any, to be shown under the counter. On the Real-Time Overview report it shows New vs. Returning users, while on the widget it is possible to select a different dimension to break out that counter’s numbers from the set 11 dimensions available in all the Real Time Widgets: Campaign, City, Country/Territory, Keyword, Medium, Page, Page Title, Referral Path, Source, Traffic Type, or Visitor Type.
• Timelines show the scrolling pageviews over either the last 30 minutes or last 60 seconds.
• Geomaps show visits on a map. It is possible to choose to display by country or cities, and drill down a region from a world map down to a national one.
• Tables show active visitors, with up to three of the dimensions listed above.

Another widget that has been recently added (May 5) to the real time reports is “Goal Conversions”.

Google Analytics real-time conversion widget

Implications of the Google Analytics Real-Time Widget

• This helps businesses to instantly see how traffic is moving around their website.
• This gives insight at a very specific level, enabling specific decisions to be made.
• Real time widgets provide a drill-down that immediately displays the data that matters.

Bruce Clay Blog

How to Build a Google Analytics Tracking Code was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Need more input? As an optimizer who is regularly looking to learn more about how my recipients are interacting with content, I find myself regularly consuming analytics reports filled with Google Analytics tracking code data like Johnny Number 5 eats the Encyclopedia Britannica in the above clip from the 1986 gem Short Circuit.

Google Analytics tracking codes —  also know as custom campaigns or UTM codes — are custom tracking parameters that communicate to Google Analytics granular information about how your referral traffic is interacting with your calls to action. To implement a UTM tracking code simply add your desired parameters to the end of the URL you want to track insights for, like this:

http://www.YourWebsite.com/your-CRO-landing-page-article?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=CRO-0513-JThompson

UTM tracking codes can help you analyze traffic from banner ads, email newsletters, social media content, and any other campaign that links people to a property that you own (such as your website or your blog). You cannot use UTM tracking to analyze clicks to external websites, like YouTube or Link-To-Related-Content.com. To track click activity on links that send people to properties you don’t own, Bitly is a great free resource.

How To Put Together a Google Analytics Tracking Code

Bruce Clay, Inc. does not recommend or condone using “awesome” as a Google Analytics UTM code parameter. (But we may or may not find it amusing.)

There are five possible parameters you can set for each UTM tracking code: Source, Medium, Campaign, Content and Term. You don’t have to use all of them. For this blog post I am going to show you show to create a UTM tracking code for a link that directs people from a blog post to a page on my website. To keep it simple, I am only going to discuss the parameters needed for this scenario — Source, Medium and Campaign.

Note: When and how to use Term and Content parameters is really a whole separate blog post; leave a comment if you are interested in seeing us write about it.

The Medium (&utm_Medium) is the most broad parameter and tells Google Analytics — big picture — how to classify the medium by which your link was presented to the user. For example, was the link presented in a Facebook wall post? Then the Medium might be “viral” because the link you posted to your Facebook wall is now spreading virally all over the Internet and, accordingly, was delivered via a “viral” medium. (If viral is too abstract for you, “social” could also work.) Was the link transmitted to the end user via an email newsletter? Then your Medium might be “email,” or even more specifically, “ConstantContact” or “CheetahMail” to identify the service that delivered your newsletter. In our example above, our link was a blog post, so we used &utm_medium=viral.

Getting one step more specific from Medium, the Source (&utm_Source=) tells Google Analytics where the click came from, where the person was when they clicked the link. In our example above (utm_source=blog) the person clicked on a link that was posted to my blog (so the Medium is “viral,” and the Source is “blog.”). Other Source options might include Twitter, Facebook or newsletter (Medium equals “email” and Source equals “newsletter”).

The Campaign parameter (&utm_Campaign=) is one step even more specific than Source, and the parameter where you can really start to get granular with your tracking. The Campaign is how you identify the specifics of a link, from the details of where it goes all the way down to the color and size of the call to action. In the example above I used &utm_campaign=CRO-JThompson-image because I wanted to identify which of my silos encouraged the most clicks, the longest time on site, and — at the other end of the spectrum — the most site exits. I also wanted to collect data to help me determine which of my authors are being read the most, and if an image call-to-action perform better than a text call to action. If this link was a banner ad I might have included the dimensions of the banner (for instance 320 or 160) to help determine which banner size encourages more clicks. If I wanted to test how well a link to free content performs versus how well a link to paid content performs I might have included “free” or “paid” as Campaign parameters.

Six Essential Google Analytics Tracking Code Details

•  Every UTM tracking code starts with a question mark. For example: ?utm_. This question mark tells Google Analytics where your link URL ends and your tracking starts. If you don’t include the question mark Google will think your link is http://www.YourWebsite.com/your-CRO-landing-page-articleutm_source which, as an alteration of the URL permalink, will result in a 404 error. The question mark is important.

• There are five possible parameters you can set for each UTM tracking code: Source, Medium, Campaign, Content and Term. The parameters you choose to use are strung together in one sentence (no spaces) and separated by ampersands (&). It doesn’t matter what order you list your parameters in, but your first parameter must start with a question mark and all the following parameters must start with ampersands. The & tells Google Analytics where one parameter ends and the next begins. If you forget the ampersand and write your code like &utm_medium=viralutm_campaign= Google Analytics will think that your Medium is “viralutm_campaign=” which, as you can imagine, will skew your Medium and Campaign data pretty badly.

• Since the Google Analytics URL builder makes it easy for any of your team members to create and assign UTM tracking codes it is critical to have a discussion about UTM parameter conventions before anyone on your team starts creating UTM codes willy-nilly. I highly recommend creating a spreadsheet or other living document (a Google Drive spreadsheet works great) that clearly outlines conventions for Source, Medium, and Campaign. (If you are using Content and Term parameters regularly, make sure to add conventions for those parameters as well.) You may even consider taking your spreadsheet to the next level to establish a record of every link posted and its associated Campaign allocations. While a spreadsheet that documents every link your company pushes out is a larger commitment, these resources become invaluable as associates join and leave your team.

Note: If you’re crafty you’ve noticed the links in this blog post have not been amended to include Google Analytics UTMs. This is because the Bruce Clay, Inc. content team is  currently developing our analysis goals and tracking conventions. Since I am a data-hungry Johnny Number 5 monster I have been using Bitly as my personal one-man-band interim tracking convention because I can’t survive a minute without data. I do not recommend this as it’s not scalable long-term. 

• UTM codes are case sensitive so Google Analytics will collect data for potatoes and Potatoes as two separate reports. This means, since Google Analytics does not have the human sensibility to tell you that there is a capitalized version of your Campaign floating around somewhere in your referral traffic data, you may be analyzing incomplete data if your team isn’t careful about capitalization.

• Hyphens allow Google Analytics to understand each word individually; underscores are considered alphanumeric characters and connect words to make phrases (see dashes vs. underscores for more detail). For instance: sandals-coupon versus sandals_coupon. If you are building UTM codes for a newsletter send it might make sense to use an underscore to connect your newsletter identifier with the release date of the newsletter — for instance, DealerUpdates_2013July09-colorado. In this example you will be able to find data in Google Analytics for the specific term “DealerUpdates_2013July09” which will tell you exactly how that specific dealer updates newsletter that was sent out on July 9, 2013 performed. You are also able to analyze how every email sent to your Colorado demographic performed, but because “DealerUpdates_2013July09”and “Colorado” are separated by a hyphen the Colorado data will not be exclusive to the July 9 email.

• Worth noting again, you must own a URL in order to attach UTM tracking to it. In other words, you can only use UTM tracking to assigned parameters to links that go to your properties — your website, your blog, your app, etc. You cannot use UTM tracking to analyze clicks that go to external properties like Facebook.com or Other-Website.com.

Why Use Tracking Codes?

I consistently use Google Analytics tracking codes to measure where my referral traffic is coming from, which of my initiatives are meeting traffic goals, how my target markets prefer to receive communication, and the ebb and flow of industry based on seasonality.

They give you a granular snapshot of your referral traffic, how your consumers (and potential-consumers) are interacting with the calls to action you’re putting out there, and they are a great way to quench an unrelenting need for specific ROI data.

Are you a Johnny Number 5? How have Google Analytics UTM codes made your life easier?

Bruce Clay Blog

Happy April Fool’s Day from Google was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’s April Fool’s Day and that means that the Google team has been very busy planning pranks. For more than a decade, Google has been making millions laugh with fictitious products, fake announcements and make-believe services, bringing laughs to the Web every April 1st.

Among today’s gags, Google debuted Google Nose, which enables Google user to search … for smells! Google proclaims that their flagship smell search boasts a “mobile aroma indexing program has been able to amass a 15 million scentibyte database from around the world.”

Shiver me timbers! Google Maps introduces Treasure Mode, ye mateys.

Google Maps now features Treasure Mode. After discovering a 315-year-old pirate treasure map, Google has digitized the map so searchers can “work together to decipher the clues to Captain Kidd’s buried secrets.”

Instead of searching for hot searches on Google Trends, you can search for cold searches, like ” Y2K,” “prom scrunchies” or “step-by-step Macarena.”

Then there’s Gmail Blue. This revelatory version of Gmail features—wait for it—buttons, text, lines and even the background all in blue. Engineers explain “the inspiration of Blue came from nature. Ocean, sky, blue whales. A blue that was reminiscent of nature, but better than what nature created.”

The Google team was “faced with the challenge: how do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same? The answer is Gmail Blue …  It’s Gmail, only bluer.”

YouTube stars like Antoine Dodson are featured in today’s April 1st prank video announcing the end of YouTube.

And did you know today is YouTube’s last day accepting entries? YouTube (owned by trickster Google) has actually just been an eight-year contest searching after the best video ever. The competition ends tonight. YouTube released a video announcing its end, featuring some of YouTube’s greatest stars.  A staff of 30,000 technicians will review all the videos amassed over the better part of a decade. YouTube will return in 2023, when the winning video will be revealed … and will be the sole video on YouTube.

Need a little laughter in your day-to-day communications? That’s why Google came up with Google Levity. The levity algorithm optimizes content and visuals to be more appealing and fun, utilizing a repository of 50 years of comedic material from Chicago’s renowned improv group, The Second City. Drafting an email entitled “HR Memo?” Google Levity changes the title to “The New Hotness.”

Erik Murphy-Chutney’s Google+ photo, as optimized with emoticons for photos.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is an emoticon worth? And moreover, what is the value of a picture and an emoticon—combined? No need to wonder anymore, because Google+ has added emoticons to photos.

Need Google Fiber on the go? Google has a solution. Today, they have announced Google Fiber Poles. Google Fiber technology can now be found in utility poles. Pull up, plug in and download at Google Fiber speeds. Google Fiber isn’t just for the home anymore.

And in the Googler Spotlight, a new technology has been revealed: self-writing code. That’s right. Self-writing code.

A look back … 

Google began play April Fool’s jokes in 2000, and it’s a tradition they’ve kept up every year (except 2001 and 2003). Here is a history of Google‘s gags:

Last year, one of Google’s fictitious rollouts was “Google Street Roo” which equipped kangaroos with cameras in an effort to document the Outback through the eyes of a kangaroo.

• Google Street Roo
• Go Ro
• Google Maps 8-bit
• Google Fiber Bar
• Google Multitask
• Jargon Bot
• Gmail Tap
• Google Racing
• Google Voice … For Pets
• Googler Spotlight: Staffing the Canine Team
• Interplanetary Reporting Comes to Google Analytics

2011

• Comic Sans as Google’s default font
• Google Motion
• Google Autocompleter
• Chromercise
• Meow Me Now
• Google Transportation

2010

• Google changes name to Topeka
• Upload and store anything in Google Docs
• Wingdings font for Adsense

2009

• 3D Version of Google Chrome
• Gmail Auto Pilot
• CADIE
• gBall

2008

• Gmail Custom Time
• Virgle
• Adsense for Conversations

2007

• TiSP Toilet Internet Service Provider
• Gmail Paper

2006

• Google Romance

2005

• Google Gulp

2004

• Google Copernicus Center

2002

• Pigeon Rank System

2000

• MentalPlex 

Bruce Clay Blog

Posted by RachaelGerson

When Google Analytics doesn't know where a traffic source comes from, it assumes the traffic is direct and lumps it in with your direct visits. This happens frequenly with social shares, as many of us make the mistake of not tagging our links accordingly.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rachael Gerson sheds some light on "dark social" and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your referrals. Take credit for the work that you're doing, and tag your links!

Video Transcription

"Hi, everyone. I'm Rachael Gerson. I'm the head of analytics at SEER Interactive. We're a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, although we are growing and spreading across the world. Although we're primarily known for our SEO, we actually have an amazing paid search team and a really talented analytics team. I want to share our story with you. The timing on this story is actually really convenient because it ties with what I wanted to talk to you about.

My sister wrote a blog post last night. She has a new blog. No one ever goes to it. I think I may be the only person who knows it exists. She wrote the post. I read it this morning and went, "This is really good content. I'm going to share this." And I put it out on Twitter.

She saw me share it, and she put it on Facebook and thought, "Okay. Let's see what happens." In the last 8 hours, she's gotten 74,000 page views to this one blog post. I'm looking at the real-time traffic right now, down here. There are 1,500 people on the site. This thing is blowing up. It's going viral.

We can see it spreading through Twitter. We can see it spreading through Facebook. We can see it being referred by random sites, but we're also seeing a lot of traffic come in as direct. Since no one knows this blog exists, I highly doubt they're typing in the 40 plus characters of the URL to go directly to this page. They're not. It's being shared socially. This is the idea of dark social.

It's not a new idea, but it's a fascinating idea, and that's what I wanted to talk to you about today, was this idea of dark social, that content spreads, if it's good content, socially, organically.

Dark social sounds like a bad thing. It's not. It's actually really awesome and really fun to dig into. Let's say that someone read this post earlier, and they shared it on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. We kind of know where that came from for the most part. They may have texted it to a friend or copied a link and sent it in chat. In both cases, when the person clicks on the link and goes to the site, they come in as direct.

Direct is Google Analytics' version of, "We have no idea what this is, so let's call it direct and throw it in that bucket." We know it's not direct. That's our dark, organic social. It's spreading organically in all different ways, and we're getting traffic because of it. It's pretty amazing.

I wanted to talk to you about the analysis I'm doing on the dark social side because it's really fun stuff. Unfortunately, in talking to a lot of people, I found they're not there yet.

Here's the problem. When we say direct it's our catchall bucket and we need to look at direct to get an idea of our dark social, organic social, whatever we want to call it, if things are not tagged properly, we can't dig into to what's [out] to this dark social side. Actually, we can't do anything. If things aren't tagged properly, you're not taking credit for the work that you're doing.

For your paid search, for your social media, for email marketing, whatever it is, you have to tag your links. Otherwise, you're not getting credit for the work that you're doing.

You know what really sucks, by the way? When you work really hard on a project and, at the last second, your boss takes credit for it. That was your project. You did all the work for it. Why is he taking your credit? It sucks!

What we're talking about right now is the digital marketing version of that. It's the online version, where you're giving your credit away for the work that you're doing. Honestly, you need that credit to keep your budget, to keep your job, to get a promotion, to get any of these things. You need to prove your value.

When we talk about tagging, it's using UTM parameters. Dark social, organic social, that's really sexy. It's fun. We can dig into that. UTM parameters are not sexy. They're not fun, but they're necessary. If you're not doing this, you're wasting your time and you're wasting your money. Now that sucks.

How are you wasting your time? If you're not doing this, you're putting all kinds of time, hopefully, into analysis, if you're looking at what you're doing, but your analysis is based on data that's not accurate. You're putting your time into marketing efforts that may not actually be working as well as you think they are. You're putting your money into marketing efforts. You need to know that your stuff's actually working. Keep doing that. Make your well-informed decisions to help the business and drive it forward.

Again, time is money. You need to make sure you get all this stuff right, so you can do all the other stuff.

Let's talk about a few examples of where tagging actually matters. If we're looking at Twitter, if you don't tag your links, things will still come in. You'll see t.co showing up. In your real-time traffic, you'll see Twitter as social coming in, and you'll see some of that in your multi-channel funnels as well.

If you tag your links, you're going to always know it's Twitter. You're going to know which campaign it was. You're going to know all the information you put into it. You're also going to be protected from the other side of it. That's when people use Twitter apps. For example, HootSuite doesn't come in as Twitter unless you've tagged it. People clicking on a link that you post on Twitter that's untagged in HootSuite are going to come in as HootSuite referral usually.

If you posted on TweetDeck, they're coming in as direct. By the way, I'm still playing with all of this, and it all changes. I've played with stuff that's changed before. So if this is different by the time it comes out, I apologize. Just keep up with it all the time.

That's our Twitter side. On Facebook, if we don't tag our links, they'll come in as Facebook referral. It's nice and easy. It's clean. We know what it is. The exception to that is if someone's trying to open a link in Facebook, they click on the link, it doesn't load fast enough, they're probably going to click Open in Safari if they really care about it. Once they open in Safari, that's a direct visit. We just lost the Facebook tracking in it.

There're also a missing piece here, and that's if you do tag this stuff, you get an extra level to your analysis. You can say, "This is all the same campaign. It's the same effort, same content." You can tie it together across all these different platforms, and that helps.

We get to email. If you're putting time and money into your email marketing, you want to take your credit for it. If you're not tagging your email, it's usually going to come in one of two ways:  One as a referral from all the different mail things that can come in or as direct.

At least with the mail, where is says mail.yahoo.whatever, we know it's mail. We can't track it down to what you did versus what someone sent. We have some analysis on it. If it's direct, you lose everything. So tag your email.

Paid search. It's nice. AdWords actually makes it really easy for us to tag our paid search. We can connect Google Analytics and AdWords very easily, and they play really well together. It's awesome. The problem is when you don't tag your stuff. If you don't tag your paid search, either through AdWords or through your manual tracking parameters on other platforms as well, it comes in as organic.

This actually happened to us at SEER. One of our SEO clients, we were watching their traffic, and organic traffic spiked. The account manager went, "Hey, guys, this is awesome." To which the client responded, "Oh, we forgot to tell you we launched paid search," and the account manager discovered they weren't tagging their paid search. This paid search manager accidentally just gave away their credit. We don't want to have that happen.

Let's say you've actually tagged everything properly in your URLs. All this is done. These are just a few examples, but all of the other stuff is taken care of. Let's look at the tracking on the site itself. We see this happen pretty often with paid search landing pages, where we have to put this on our checklist that this is done immediately.

We'll create brand new landing pages that are optimized for paid search for conversion. They're different from the rest of the site. They're a totally new template, which means that if the Google Analytics code is in a template already for the site, it may not be in here. If we don't have someone add it back in, what's going to happen is paid search will drive all this traffic to the site, they'll get to that page, go to page two. Page two has the Google Analytics code, but they don't know where it came from. This is going to show up as direct. Paid search just gave away their credit. We can't have that happen. You worked too hard for that credit.

I've also seen it where people make little mistakes with the tracking on the site. Spotify did this a few months ago, and I sent them a message to help them out with it. They were tagging all of the links on their site with UTM parameters. When visitors would hit those different links, they'd reset the visit ,and it would be a new visit with each one. Spotify, all their marketers were giving away their credit through that.

Let's say you've got all this other stuff right. Good job. That's awesome. There's still stuff that you can't control unfortunately. There are a lot of things that can cause traffic to come in as direct when it really isn't. I have a short list that people have been adding to at [bitly/direct-rome]. If you have others, keep adding them because I want to have a giant list of all the things we can tackle and fix, but the list just keeps growing.

If you look at mobile traffic, for example, iOS 6, we can't tell if it's search or if it's direct. That's a problem. For me, if I'm doing an analysis and I really need that part, or I really need to know that part for sure, I may cut that out so it's not throwing off my data. There are different ways to deal with that, and that's a whole other topic.

The point is control whatever you can. Where you control the spread of information, make sure you're doing your part. If you're sharing a link socially, tag your links. That way, if people want to share it or retweet it, the tracking is already in place there. If your posts on the site have social plugins, put the tracking in your social plugins too. It makes it easy if someone wants to hit the share on Facebook or to share on Twitter. It already has the tracking. It goes through, people get to the site, your tracking's in place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Now once you've done everything else up here, your tagging is right on your URLs, your tracking is right on the site, there's nothing you messed up by accident, you've controlled everything you can with these other issues, you kind of have to accept what's left. You know that there's stuff that you can't account for. There's direct in there that may have been shared through a text, through a chat, through any other thing. You don't know where it actually came from.

First off, that gets a dark social. We can now start doing our awesome analysis, like dark social or other things, because we have confidence in our data. We can trust that we're making the right decisions for our business, and we can save our time and our money this way.

If you have questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or in the comments below, because I love talking about this stuff. Maybe another time, we'll talk about this organic social idea."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Disavow Links in Google and Bing: An Instructional Guide was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

To help our clients who would like to use the disavow links tools from Google and Bing, this is an instructional guide.

It’s important to note that Google strongly advises against using the disavow links tool unless it is the last available option and will be implemented by a highly technical power user of Webmaster Tools. Incorrect use of the disavow links tool can harm Google’s evaluation of that site’s rankings and is a difficult process to reverse.

Introduction to Disavow Links

In this 9+ minute video, Google’s ambassador to webmasters and SEOs Matt Cutts tells us why a disavow links tool exists, who might need to use it, and how to use it. It’s a helpful introduction to the topic of harmful links.

Who Might Consider Using Disavow Links Tools

1. You’ve received a bad link warning in Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Your SEO has identified that your site is affected by the Penguin Update or manual action penalty removing you from search results.
3. Or you may have identified negative SEO waged against your site.

In the video above, Matt gives some specific examples of the actions that could put you in category #2 in this list. If you’ve paid for links or used spammy comments or article directories to build backlinks, this is you.

First Course of Action: Link Removal

If inbound links are harming a site’s search engine standings, those links should be removed, or at least, an effort must be made to remove them. Bruce Clay, Inc.’s link pruning process is a vetted link removal method that we have used with success for many clients.

The following resources explain our link removal process, from identification of harmful links to contacting linking domains to tracking and reporting the process to Google for reconsideration:

• Link Evaluation and Removal Flow Chart

• How to Remove Link Spam for Google Penguin Recovery: Described on our blog in brief
• The Step-By-Step Guide to Link Pruning: Extensive process outlined in our newsletter

Google and Bing’s Disavow Links Tools

After having exhausted your link removal efforts and made necessary reconsideration request to Google, the Disavow Links tools in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools may be a viable option for your situation.

Bing Webmaster Help and How-To use Disavow Links tool

1. Go to “Configure my site” in Bing Webmaster Tools and then go to “Disavow links” in the following navigation.
2. Use the Disavow Links tool to select a page, directory or domain you wish to disavow, and then enter the corresponding URL in the “Enter a URL” field.
3. Click “Disavow”.
4. The disavow submission will be listed below.
5. You can delete disavow submissions by checking the box to the left of the listed selection and clicking the “Delete” button.

Google Webmaster Tools explanation of the Disavow links tool

1. Create a text file (.txt) containing the URL of the links you want to disavow.
2. Include only one link per line.
3. To disavow all links from a whole domain, add “domain:” before the link URL of the domain home page (for example, “domain:example.com”)
4. You may include additional information about links in a line beginning with “#” (for example, “# this webmaster won’t return my requests for removal”).
5. Signed in to Google Webmaster Tools, visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main.
6. Select the domain from a drop down menu for which you are submitting a disavow links list and click the “Disavow Links” button.
7. Click through the pop-up warning (Google warns against the dangers of improper Disavow use throughout the process) and upload the text file of links you want Google to ignore and click “Submit”.
8. You’ll see your .txt file listed here. Click “Done” to finish the process.

Expect it to take weeks before the disavow is no longer a calculation in your site’s search engine valuation. Again, we stress not to use the Disavow Links tool without guidance from an expert.

Bruce Clay Blog

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Turns Out, Google Is a Dude was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Google has crossed over to theatrical arts. Over the weekend, I caught a one-man show led by Craig Ricci Shaynak in Los Angeles at Theatre Asylum called: “I Am Google.” And this time, Google wasn’t just a search engine; Google was a dude in a bachelor pad.

With a cool mix of improv, performance and audience participation, this show had everything from Google’s nerdy counterpart, Bing, to his ex-girlfriend Twitter and his crush on Siri. Without giving too much away, I’ll let you in on a little of the fun.

Upon entering the theater, you see Google hard at work answering a multitude of calls from telephones reminiscent of the 80s, while frantically looking up answers in the dictionary and sometimes phoning a friend “Wikipedia” when he wasn’t quite sure what the answer was (although Wiki proved to rarely be right). And at the end of the call, he’d always report how long the search took.

Craig Shaynak of “I Am Google.” Photo courtesy of Shaynak’s Google Plus profile.

Google confessed his innermost thoughts to us that night, from the fact that everyone thinks he’s so smart, but he’s really just organizing information that’s already there from sources like books — sources, he infers in so many words, that we could all use if we weren’t so lazy.

He talked about his breakup with Twitter who just didn’t think he was “funny” anymore. And he defended himself by reminding us about the “tilt” search and the directions Maps gives us for getting across the ocean to Japan. Then he complained about all the hashtags Twitter left in the apartment when she moved out.

And every once in a while, he’d dress up in a costume and serve us up an ad from Crate & Barrel or Uggs or something no one in the audience wanted. And mid-sentence, every few minutes, he’d change the sign around his neck to reflect a new Google Doodle.

In the end, he gave us some food for thought. He suggested we don’t need to find the answers to everything that pops into our head the moment we think about it. And that most of the searches we perform are based on useless information anyway.

The stage at “I Am Google.” Photo taken by Jessica Lee.

He challenged us to go “70s style” and make a date with a friend without the use of any technology … just tell them where to meet you and show up at the time you said you were going to. That’s a novel idea, eh?

We had a great time at the show that night, and turns out, Shaynak is refining his act over several more shows before he performs in front of Google.

I talked with him after the show about slipping in some SEO stuff like Panda and Penguin, so we’ll see if those makes the cut.

Shaynak welcomes SEOs, digital marketers and Web developers to come see his show; the technical stuff they throw at him during the act proves to be a hilarious basis for his improv.

So if you’re in the LA area (or inquire for details on what I think they said was a traveling act), check out “I Am Google.” You’ll enjoy it.

Bruce Clay Blog

Posted by junseth

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

When we started Alarm Grid we struggled with how we were going to stand out in a world of like a trillion other security companies. We were late to the game, no doubt, and in a world with as much competition as there is in an old industry like home security, it seems like there isn't much you could do to compete with the million minds that have come before you. Since then, we've done a lot of fun things that have helped us to gain traction, but my favorite strategy we've executed on thus far is our security FAQs strategy. We have built an amazingly large database of super relevant Questions and Answers, and our users love them. Before we begin, let me introduce you to our executive team: Eric is on the left, Sterling is in the middle and I'm the guy on the right.

Like anything done in marketing, there aren't a whole lot of "new" ideas per se. But the question needs to be how to execute it based on what's available to you. As I've seen Q&A strategies executed previously, I think there are two main ways to put them together. The first is the way companies like SEOmoz or Trulia have done it. Both use their base of strong, engaged communities to answer questions. Trulia relies on users looking for homes to ask, and realtors looking for business to answer. SEOmoz is generally relying on its community members who are interested in seeking experts or being experts to answer and ask questions. This model works really really well. I can't tell you how many times I've had an SEO question or an analytics question and ended up on one of the SEOmoz pages with a good answer from some person I've never heard of or met. Very helpful, extremely engaging. The other method is what sites without much of a community do: a bunch of old guys who know their product too well get together in a room and think of 100 questions about their products. Then they answer the questions in 30 words or less, brush off their hands, and call it a day.

When you know too much about your product, you can't know what questions users will ACTUALLY find useful

So we needed a method that sat between the community approach and the stodgy old-men-in-a-room approach. Since we don't have an engaged set of users and we're not that old, we needed to figure out a method of populating the database that sat in between the two approaches, and I'm proud to say, I think we figured out a great way to accomplish this.

If you're a business owner, you're probably wondering if this FAQ business is a good idea for you. When we gave the strategy a try on Alarm Grid, we had the same question. I poured through Google Analytics (GA) data and saw that users had already started coming into the site with questions. They weren't getting them answered, but they were asking them.

So, what I did was I used GA to power our entire Q&A engine. When we started, we honestly thought we'd be able to keep up with the questions that came in. We now have a backlog of over 10,000 questions we want to get to… and that's with just Honeywell products in our catalog. Our goal is to get 80% of these questions answered before we add more brands to the catalog. Wish us luck.

I'm presuming that you already have GA installed on your site, and that you know anything about how to log in to your account… so here we go:

1) Click on Advanced Segments in the standard reporting section of your Google Analytics.

2) Select the button on the bottom right side of the drop down entitled "New Custom Segment"

This button unveils a glorious land of powerful analytics possibilities wherein you can create enormous value. The first thing you're going to want to do here is to make sure that you select "include" on the rule.

3) Select Keyword from the list of variable segment.

4) Then select "Matching RegExp"

5) Put this cute little chunk of code into the text box

(It's different looking than it is in the pictures above because I cleaned it up for this post so I didn't have to be so embarrassed about posting it).

\b(adding|does|do|who|what|where|when|why|how|will|can|\?|am|is|are|was|were|be|being|been|versus|vs|vs\.|best)\b

Now I ain't no RegExpert. I am terrible at Regex. And most of you probably don't even know what Regex is, so I'm sure there are more efficient ways to write this. But so you understand what you've done, let me clue you in. You're filtering for anyone who comes to your site using the keywords within the parentheses including any query that a user makes that contains a question mark. The regex idiot proofs it so that you anyone can add weird capitalizations and still have their search filtered (at least that's supposed to be how it works). If you want to clean up the regex, feel free. I would love to see it done, it just doesn't matter that much since this works pretty darn well.

6) Give your filter a cute name. We call ours "Add to FAQ" since that's what is supposed to happen.

7) Save your segment and turn it on.

8) In the left-hand column click on "traffic sources" then "sources" then "search" then "organic".

8) Now, set the date range to show only one day – yesterday.

9) Scroll to the very bottom of the page and select the dropdown next to the words "Show rows" and select 500.

Now this is a bit optimistic. You really only need the maximum possible number of results from each day. The number starts small, but if you execute this strategy correctly, you may be seeing 500+ visitors each day asking questions and getting to your site.

10) Go back to the top of the page, and select "Email," and fill the email(s) you want the daily spreadsheet to go to in the pop-up.

Also make sure to change the "Frequency" to "Daily." You can actually make it as frequent or infrequent as you want. I recommend daily, because, particularly when you are only seeing a few FAQs a day, it's better that everyone gets a few FAQs in the morning before things get hopping. Think about it, if you have two employees pumping out two FAQs every morning, first thing, you will have 1460 FAQs in by the end of the year. The average FAQ, in our case, bumps our average daily uniques by 1/3 of an user. Each FAQ takes an average of 15 minutes to write. At the end of the year, we'll have used about 730 hours of our employees' time to grab an extra 5,000 unique visitors each and every month. That's a huge boon for an ecommerce site.

And that's that.

What I like to do is once a month, dump the spreadsheets into a big, master list. Then I can filter on the spreadsheet by keywords within the questions, which allows us to manage our more than 10,0000 outstanding questions. We generally attack them by subject. So, for example, we do a week of Vista 20P (which is a Honeywell product we carry) questions only or some weeks we answer all the questions people have asked about Alarm Grid's alarm monitoring. This is the most effective kind of inter-linking we could possibly put together. The Q&As are relevant, and the anchor texts are surrounded by perfect semantically relevant writing. We require all articles contain 300 to 500 words, even if it's just a simple answer. We also find that it's best not to bury the lead. So when a user lands on a page, start by answering the question, then put more text below it that will expound and further explain why the answer is "yes" or "no."

You can do a lot of other fun stuff as well with this strategy. For example, to root out duplicates, you could only have questions where the user doesn't land on a URL with /faq in it. Our system is accurate up to about 87% when we do this, meaning this uproots 87% of all duplicates. There are a ton of other fun ways you could run this engine, but there isn't enough time in a day. If you do something fun that is hugely helpful for you, I'd love to know about it.

So give this all a try! And then report back, Let me know and the rest of the Alarm Grid team know how it works for you!

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