Keywords Unavailable (Not Provided) jumped from 12% to 22% in March. What does Google want us to do?

Two sites I manage jumped from an average of 12% keywords not reported (January and February) to 20% and 26%, respectively, in March. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) queries reports only 40% of all of the actual natural clicks to these two sites.

What does Google expect honest search marketers to do when we can no longer accurately report the natural keyword segmentation of traffic? We search marketers are held accountable for the time and effort we invest in increasing site traffic for the most relevant keyword phrases. How will we be able to measure natural keyword traffic accurately in the future? At this rate, we’re only a few months away from most of the keywords being blocked.

Regards,

Betsy

Jill’s Response

Hi Betsy,

The first and most important thing to understand is that Google doesn’t care whether you or I or anyone else can measure their natural (organic/free) search traffic. Google is an advertising company that uses their search engine as a medium to show their clients’ ads. Period. The reality is that it’s of no concern to Google whether businesses can improve their visibility in the free search results.

For anyone who doesn’t look much at their analytics and isn’t familiar with the (Not Provided) phenomenon, this is happening because Google instituted a secure searching platform. Previously, all Google searches left a trail of what keywords were used in the search query, and this trail could be picked up in server log files and via web analytic programs. With the new secure searching, Google is blocking the search queries from being shown when people who do Google searches are also logged into any Google product. It seems that they haven’t been blocking them all, but blocking more and more every week. In addition, the Firefox browser recently announced that they’ll also be blocking all search queries. It can be assumed that the Chrome browser will soon start doing the same thing.

What all this means to website owners, businesses and SEO consultants is that they can no longer rely on receiving the same keyword information they were used to getting in their analytics program. Note that this affects ALL analytics programs, not just Google Analytics (GA), so it’s not as if you can just switch. And it’s not going to go away; it’s only going to get worse. In fact, for my High Rankings site, the percentage of (NP) keywords has doubled in just a month, with more than half my Google organic traffic coming in from them.

To see something similar with your own numbers in your account, create a Google Organic Advanced Segment. (Clicking that link will create one in your Google Analytics Account for you.) With that segment turned on, just click the Standard Reporting tab and scroll down to the Search Traffic area.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about it. With the major browsers soon to be not providing keywords, I would expect to see most sites with at least 75% of their keywords being NP’d very soon. Sites whose target markets are those who are typically logged into their Google account, such as those for my Google Analytics Custom Report Sharing (CRS) site, are already close to that number. While my CRS site is new and doesn’t receive a whole lot of Google traffic yet, its NP keywords are already at a whopping 72.5%!

Thankfully, I’m not relying on Google for traffic to this site, with most of it coming from Twitter and word of mouth at the moment.

What Does This Mean for SEO?

For now, we can still have some idea of which keywords people are using to find our sites by thinking of the keywords they do show us as simply a sample. You can also learn what some of the NP keywords are by looking at the search queries report in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account.

For instance, when checking the keywords that were used to find my “blog ideas” post, Google Analytics showed me 219 NP keywords. It also showed the following number of visits per keyword search:

212 blog ideas

69 blog topics

10 ideas for blog

7 ideas for blog topics

5 blogging topics

Plus many more similar phrases from fewer searches. By comparing those keywords and numbers to my GWT account, I was able to recover 65 of the NP keywords that were the same as the top 3 keyword phrases showing in GA. That still leaves 154 keyword phrases unaccounted for.

The Good News

The thing is, while many pages of a website may get found for hundreds or even thousands of different keyword phrases, they’re typically some variation of some core keywords. With pages that see lots of Google organic traffic, the exact numbers and keywords aren’t going to be missed terribly. In fact, you may not have ever paid much attention to them in the first place. You’ll still be able to see those core, high-traffic keywords in your GWT account, if not your GA one.

The Bad News

Unfortunately, for newer and/or smaller sites or pages that rely on highly long tail search traffic, things are looking more grim. While you may be able to recover a similar ratio of NP keywords for those URLs, the sampling of actual keywords is likely to be too small to be helpful. My hope is that Google will start showing more actual keywords in GWT, but as I said at the beginning, they have no incentive to do so, so I’m not going to hold my breath for it!

What You Can Do

Other than checking your GWT account more often and/or using your paid search keyword data (which isn’t a bad idea), there’s nothing you can do to recover most of the lost organic keywords. But you CAN still see which pages of your site people are landing on from Google organic search. And you can use that information to make some assumptions on keywords.

Eventually we may just have to stop thinking in terms of measuring keywords and instead look for overall traffic to any given URL. Obviously, if you’re getting lots of Google organic traffic to particular pages of your site, whether you know the exact keywords or not, you do know you’re doing something right.

You can look specifically at the landing pages that your NP keywords brought people to, by keeping on that Google Organic advanced segment I mentioned earlier, and clicking the (Not Provided) link.

Then click the “Secondary dimension” tab and add “Landing Page” (within “Traffic Sources”). This will now show you all the pages people landed on from Google organic searches that have the (Not Provided) keyword.

From there you can make sure that your usual highly trafficked pages are still getting traffic, and also see how any new content is faring. While you may not know all the keywords, you can assume they’re similar or some variation of those that you can see.

What you may have trouble with is what to write about in your blog.

With that in mind, I’ve brainstormed 67 blog ideas to get your creative juices flowing. What you write about in your blog will of course depend on your type of blog, your industry, whether you’re selling products or services, whether you have a local walk-in establishment, and a number of other factors.

When you browse through this list, remember that most blogs should have a wide variety of blog post types rather than always sticking with the same ones. While it’s fine to announce a new product or service on your blog, if that’s all you do, it could get pretty boring.

I’ve put the types of information into a few different categories to make it easier for you to scan for the type that might interest you. So without further ado, I give you 67 ideas for blog topics that could interest your target audience:

Upcoming events:

1. Classes, seminars, conferences, webinars (and why you should attend).
2. Special events (wine tastings, 5-course dinners, open houses, etc.)
3. Introduction to new products or services.
4. Important company announcements (as long as this isn’t all you do).
5. Free stuff you’re giving away.
6. Special offers, discounts, coupons.
7. Gift ideas.

Contests or other promotions:

8. Photo caption contest.
9. Holiday theme contest.
10. Product naming contest.
11. Logo design contest.
12. Send in a video contest.

Tutorials, product support and how-to guides (in the form of text, videos, or infographics):

13. How to set up your products.
14. How to choose your products or services.
15. How to use your products.
16. How to fix your products.
17. How to assemble your products.
18. How to clean your products.
19. How to protect your products.
20. How to know if you need a particular product or service.
21. How to get the most out of your product or service.
22. Explain the subtle differences between your products (and/or those of your competitors).
23. Answer reader and customer questions.
24. Conference session summaries.

Show your expertise:

25. Do it yourself: For example, how to create a Title tag, how to unclog a toilet, how to file your taxes.
26. Provide your thoughts on industry news.
27. Take an opposite stand on an important industry topic.
28. How to avoid making mistakes (in whatever it is you do).
29. Industry myths.
30. Show both sides of an industry debate and provide your opinion.
31. Discuss industry trends.
32. Discuss the results of tests you’ve performed relating to your industry.
33. How to be a better…whatever.
34. How to avoid…whatever.
35. How to protect yourself from…whatever.
36. How to survive a…whatever.
37. How to recover from a…whatever.
38. How to become a…whatever.
39. How to create a…whatever.
40. How to change your…whatever.
41. How to calculate your…whatever.
42. How to beat…whatever.
43. How to improve your…whatever.
44. How to make your…whatever…easier.
45. How to save money on…whatever.
46. How to be seen as…whatever.
47. How to have the…whatever…you always wanted.
48. How to stop doing…whatever.
49. How to justify…whatever.
50. The problems with…whatever.
51. The importance of…whatever.
52. What caused…whatever?
53. How to understanding the subtleties of…whatever.
54. What not to do with…whatever.

Interviews (in the form of writing, videos, audio, or a combination):

55. Interviews with industry experts.
56. Interviews with people who work at your company.
57. Interviews with people who’ve used your products or services.

Miscellaneous:

58. Best posts of the year.
59. Breaking industry news.
60. Industry predictions for the future.
61. Provide an analogy between what you do and something in life that people can relate to.
62. Satirize your industry or products (could be via a comic):
63. Reader polls and the results.
64. Industry awards.
65. Product and service reviews and recommendations.
66. Quizzes or tests.
67. Expose bad things that are happening in your industry.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important.

The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.”>

If you’re using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that’s called Meta Description, or possibly just “Description.”

Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta description could slightly help a page rank highly for the words that were contained within it. Today, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! use it as a ranking signal.

In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, the position of your page in the search engine results will not be affected. So in terms of rankings, you could easily leave it out altogether.

But should you?

There are 3 important ways that Meta descriptions are being used today that make them an important part of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:

1. They can be used as the description (or part of the description) of your page if it shows up in the search results.
2. They are often used as part of the descriptive information for your pages when Google shows “extended sitelinks” for your site.
3. They are often used as the default description in social media marketing links such as Facebook and Google+.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Meta Descriptions in the Search Results

People often think that whatever they put in their Meta description tag will be the default description that the search engines use under the clickable link to their site in the search results. While this is sometimes true, it’s not always the case.

Currently, if you’re searching for a site by its URL, Google tends to use the first 20 to 25 words of your Meta description as the default description in the search engine result pages (SERP). However, if you have a listing at DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) and are not using the “noodp” tag, they may default to that description instead. (Do a search at Google for www.amazon.com to see an example.)

Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, don’t always default to the Meta description tag for URL searches. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. A search for www.highrankings.com at Bing or Yahoo! shows content from my home page as the description rather than the contents of my Meta description tag.

Of course, real people aren’t typically searching for a site by URL, so what the search engines show for those types of search queries is not as important as a true keyword search. So don’t get hung up on what you see when you search for your site by its URL or if you’re doing a “site:command” search to see how they’re indexing your pages.

Instead, go to your favorite web analytics program and find the keyword phrases that are currently bringing you the most traffic. Then see what your description looks like at Google when you type in those keywords.

And surprise! What you’ll find is that your search results description will be different for every search query! You may see any combination of the following used:

• Your entire Meta description tag text as the complete description (typically if it’s highly relevant and contains no more than 25 words).
• A full sentence pulled from your Meta description tag, but not the entire Meta description (if it contains more than one sentence).
• Text from one part of your Meta description mashed together with text from another part of it (if it’s more than 25 words long).
• Some text from your Meta description mashed together with some text from the page.
• Some text from your page mashed together from some other text from your page (nothing from the Meta description).

Some of the circumstances that cause Google to not use text from your Meta description may include:

• The information in the Meta description tag was not specific to the page it was on.
• The search query used some words that were not in the Meta description, but those words (or some of them) were used in the page content. This includes words that Google considers somewhat synonymous, such as “copy” and “copywriting” or “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”

But even the above are not hard and fast rules. Google doesn’t always use all or part of the Meta description even when the exact search phrase was contained within it – especially if the search query is also contained within the content of the page. Suffice it to say that there are no hard and fast rules for when Google will show it and when they won’t.

My recommendation is to always use keywords on any pages where you get search engine visitors (or hope to get them). Make them very specific to the page they’re on by describing what someone will find when they click through to the page from the search results, while also using variations of your targeted keywords.

Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters. In reality, however, you’re not limited to any specific number. Your Meta description tag can be as long as you want it to be because Google will pull out the relevant parts of it and make their own snippet anyway.

For instance, if you’re optimizing a page for 3 different keyword phrases, you could write a 3-sentence Meta description tag, with each sentence focusing on a different phrase. You could probably even insert more than 3 phrases in those sentences if you’re a good wordsmith. The idea, however, is not to stuff this tag full of keywords, but to write each sentence to be a compelling marketing statement – a statement that naturally uses the keywords people might be typing into Google to find your site.

2. Meta Descriptions and Extended Sitelinks

These days, Google often uses the first few words from your Meta description tag when they create the “extended sitelinks” for your website. But this too is not set in stone and is highly keyword dependent. You’ll see different sitelinks and different descriptions showing up depending on the words a searcher used at Google.

As an example, if you do a search for “High Rankings” at Google, you’ll see my sitelinks for that search query.

At this moment, Google is showing my home page as the top result with 6 inner pages beneath:

• Forum home page: Description is from DMOZ/ODP. This page has the generic Meta description that is on every page of the forum.
• Link building forum home page: Description is content pulled from the page that uses the words “High Rankings” in it.
• SEO articles page: First part of Meta description.
• Newsletter home page: First part of Meta description.
• SEO/SEM resources page: First part of Meta description.
• SEO classes page: First part of Meta description.

For the most part, they’re using the first part of the Meta description as the sitelink snippet, but not always. You may have noticed that I optimized those Meta description sitelink snippets that are showing by front loading them so that the first 5-7 words or so are a short description of what the page is all about.

But here’s the rub. Do a Google search for “Jill Whalen SEO.” You should still see sitelinks, and you’ll even see some of the same ones as with the previous query, but some of the descriptions are different:

While the forum home page shows in both, this time Google has pulled text from the page rather than using the DMOZ/ODP description. This is likely because this search query had the word “SEO” in it while the other one didn’t. The SEO articles page also shows up here, and it is using the same Meta description snippet as the High Rankings query. The other sitelinks are different from before, with 3 out of 4 using the Meta description.

As you can see, while you do have some control over your sitelink descriptions via your Meta description tag, Google might not always use them (just as Google does with their regular search results). Your best chance of having them show is to use, close to the beginning of your description tags, the words that you know pull up sitelinks. Also, be as descriptive as possible within the first 5 to 7 words.

3. Meta Descriptions and Social Media Marketing

Ever wonder why some Facebook links have great descriptions and others don’t seem to make any sense? It’s because some site owners have taken the time to write a summary of the article and place it into their Meta description tag, and some have not. If your article has a Meta description, Facebook and Google+ will default to that when you share a link on your profile or “Page.” If there’s no Meta description, you’ll usually see the first sentence or so from the page being used as the default.

While anyone can edit the description that Facebook defaults to, most people don’t. And at this time on Google+ you can’t even edit the default description. You can either leave it as is or delete it all together. Let’s face it — most of the time the first sentence of an article is not a good description of the rest of it. It’s not supposed to be, because that’s not what a first sentence is for!

Therefore, I strongly advise you to always write a compelling 1- or 2-sentence description for all of your articles and blog content that may be shared via social media, and place it into your Meta description tag. This will give you a big jump on your competitors who haven’t figured this out yet, making your social media content much more clickable because people will know what the article is actually about before they click on it.

Overall, the Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site. The more compelling it is, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it’s certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to create interesting, keyword-rich tags that sum up what users will find when they arrive!

For one thing, they don’t know you.

It’s likely that they may even consider your helpful tweets to be spam. They weren’t asking you for a recommendation, they were asking their online friends. Why would they trust some random person who seems to only be on Twitter to promote their products and services? And their thoughts will be confirmed when they review the rest of your tweets and see that most of them are similarly self-promotional in nature.

Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone.

Surprisingly, this is a typical corporate social media marketing strategy!

You probably heard that you should be tweeting out your content without understanding what that means, or what type of content is even tweet-worthy. Twitter, and to a certain extent Facebook, will be helpful to you and your business only if you have specific content to promote on your site. That is, content that goes beyond just describing your products and services. Content that is interesting, quirky, funny or passionate. Content that teaches, makes people think or riles them up. In short, content that tells a story that’s in some way related to the products or services you offer.

The hard part is figuring out what kind of story you want to tell. Not to mention that you probably don’t have the time or money to tell it in a way that makes an impression. Again, you’re not alone!

I’ve run into this problem with many clients and potential clients. My SEO expertise has traditionally focused on the technical issues that often plague websites from being properly spidered, read and indexed by search engines. Once that’s all set, I’m usually done. I stay away from traditional link building because I find it detestable and spammy. However, in the past few years, social media has opened up countless additional marketing avenues that can bring lots of interested people to websites  and it can also help with SEO.

This makes an SEO consultant’s job much more like a traditional marketer’s job.

For example, earlier this year I did an SEO website review for a small company that compiles and sells gourmet cooking classes along with adventure travel tours that are available in various countries. It’s a cool idea and a great way to combine two passions that many people have – cooking and active travel. The classes occur in some of the most amazing cities in the world and they are taught by local chefs. When I first reviewed it, the website itself had tons of technical issues that were causing duplicate content and other SEO issues. Thankfully, the client took my recommendations to heart, hired a developer familiar with her back-end system, and got most of her on-page SEO in good order.

But as I’ve been saying a lot lately, traditional SEO can only take you so far these days.

Traffic and sales quickly went up, but not as much as she had hoped. She asked me what else she could do to make more sales. So I took another look at her website and realized that there wasn’t much more to do with the on-page SEO. What she needed now was to start doing some heavy-duty marketing to build up awareness, brand, and ideally, links. So I told her that she should probably get herself involved in social media marketing through Twitter and Facebook. I really didn’t give her any specifics beyond pointing her to a few articles I’d written about it, however.

A few weeks later I heard from her again as she was wondering if paying someone $500 to set up a Twitter and Facebook account was a good investment. That’s when I realized that she had no idea why she needed to be on Twitter and Facebook, and how they might help her business. I told her that setting up the accounts was the easy part – it’s what you do with them that’s difficult. Her $500 investment would be wasted without the knowledge or the time it was going to take to get anything out of her efforts.

I wanted to make sure she understood this, while also providing her with some creative sparks to get her thinking about what she could do if she pursued this form of online marketing.

Here’s part of the email I sent her:

“Do you ever go to any of the cooking excursions yourself?

“I’m asking because you need something to be writing about on a regular basis on a blog (or similar) area of your site. If you go to some of the excursions, that would provide you with great content. You could detail your experiences, perhaps even interview the chefs and maybe even create some videos. There are limitless opportunities.

“If you don’t go on the trips yourself, perhaps you could solicit others who do to write about their experiences. Maybe you could provide a discount on future trips for those who agree to post about their experiences in your blog. The whole blog could be like a travel diary from various travelers’ points of view.

“There are surely lots of other things like that which would be of interest to your target market and bring more traffic to your site while also making it more interesting and keeping people coming back for more. It would also make it more link-worthy in general. I’m sure if you start thinking about this some more, you’ll come up with even more ideas, since you’re more familiar with what happens on the cooking excursions than I am.

“The Twitter and Facebook part is simply a way of telling interested people when you have new content to read (or watch). So until or unless you plan to do that, there’s no sense in setting up your accounts.”

I also told her that while I could help her to brainstorm ideas, she was going to have to be able to implement them or have someone else who could. One simple way to test the waters might be to hire a good copywriter to do telephone interviews with some of the chefs and write those up. It wouldn’t be quite as powerful as first-hand accounts from someone who has experienced the trips, but it would be a start.

Social media marketing means having something worth promoting that goes beyond your products and services. It means being creative, thinking about what would interest your target audience, and then taking the time and manpower to start doing it!

More recently I saw another article on this topic by Nick LeRoy, a search marketer in the Minneapolis area. Nick talked about the same basic technique Melanie had mentioned, and added a real-life example email he had used. In his example email, he mentioned to the webmaster that he had a favorite site from which he liked to buy stuff for his son on birthdays and holidays. Nick again mentioned “his son” in a follow-up email, saying that he liked the products at this particular website because they made his son think.

All sounds good so far, right? Except that Nick doesn’t have a son!

I made the following comment on the post:

“Nick, I didn’t know you had a son (as per the emails requesting a link). If indeed you don’t, are you suggesting that people create a trust relationship with these webmasters by lying to them?”

Lots of comments ensued, which I encourage you to read over at Nick’s site. For me, what he did was certainly not ghastly, but the situation does bring up a ton of questions.

Was it necessary to lie? Isn’t that sort of thing exactly what gives marketers in general (not just search marketers) a bad reputation? Couldn’t he have done things exactly as he did without the lie?

I contend that he could have.

Nick claims that telling the webmaster that you’re looking for links on behalf of a client has less of a success rate for securing the link. It would certainly be interesting to test that theory, and it may very well be true. But even if you get fewer links out of it, that doesn’t justify lying in any aspect of business–or in life. (Are they really two different things?)

Lying in any form is deception.

Even if it’s just a tiny white lie. Even if it gets you more links. Even if it gets you more business. Even if it makes you look better in the eyes of your boss or client.

Which brings up another point: As the boss of someone using this technique, how would you feel about it? If your company culture is one of honesty, then any form of deception within your business should be a no-no. I can tell you that if I found out that an employee of mine did this, I would be very disappointed in them and explain why we don’t use deceptive practices. I would also wonder why I had to explain such a concept to an adult.

And what about the client?

Did they know that their search marketing company was using deception in order to obtain links? Is their company culture such that it’s not a problem for them? Or did they not even know exactly how their links were being obtained? If you’re being deceptive on your clients’ behalf, one would hope that you get their permission and written sign-off so it doesn’t come back to haunt you at some point.

Personally, if I hired a company to perform a service for me and they did it in a way that involved any form of lying, I would wonder what else they were doing that was deceptive. Were they overcharging me? Did they even have the skills they claimed to have?

Not to mention the unsuspecting webmaster on the other side who gave out the link.

How would they feel later to find out they were duped? Would they have a bad taste in their mouth for not only the marketing company, but for the company they were linking to? What if they felt so duped that they decided to go public on social media with the information? How would the client like the technique if they ended up with a reputation management nightmare?

Surely I’m being dramatic here, because we’re only talking about a little white lie. But does the size or color of the lie make it any less deceptive?

And we are talking specifically about link building here. There’s a reason that I dislike it and don’t do it. As far as I’m concerned, link building in and of itself borders on being a deceptive practice because it’s usually done to secure a fake “vote” for a website. It’s an industry that shouldn’t exist, and wouldn’t exist if Google didn’t place so much weight on links. If it weren’t for that aspect of Google’s algorithm, we’d have website owners giving and getting links for the right reasons, with a lot less deception (and payment) going on behind the scenes.

We can debate ethics forever and never come to a consensus because they are often seen as situational. What might be unethical in one situation might not seem so unethical in another situation. Certainly, life-or-death situations are not the same as marketing ones. If a lie is going to somehow save someone’s life, then by all means, please lie your head off!

But marketing isn’t a life-or-death situation.

Lying and deceiving to seek someone’s favor is generally agreed upon by most cultures as being wrong.

This is not a “black hat vs. white hat” issue.

It has nothing to do with hats. When it comes to search marketing, I don’t care what techniques you use or what methods you use to gain more targeted search engine visitors. I don’t believe that there are techniques that are more or less ethical than others. I don’t care what Google puts in their Webmaster Guidelines, because there’s no reason to need to know. If you fundamentally understand that all Google cares about is that your website isn’t being deceptive in some manner, then you can’t run afoul of them. They have to know that they can trust the information contained on your site and the information that you provide to Google. Nothing more, nothing less.

So many ethical conundrums come down to one simple question:

Is it deceptive or not?

I worry about search marketers who believe that deception is a necessary part of their job if they are going to get results. It’s not only incorrect, but a sad commentary on our industry and perhaps our world.

Leads and sales are also the reason why I’m a huge proponent of optimizing services and products pages. If a Google searcher lands directly on a page that is selling what they want, there’s a strong likelihood that this will convert into a lead or a sale.

Leads and sales often come with a high price tag and are what I call “large conversions.” Any conversion that potentially costs money is going to be harder to get than one that is free.

And let’s face it, not everyone is in the market to buy right now. Some are just looking for information about your particular industry. Others may be trying to learn how to do for themselves what you are doing. And still others may be doing research for some time in the future when they may be in the market.

Serve Them Value-Added Content

Adding value to your website through free articles, blog posts, videos, and any other type of content that may be helpful to those at the not-ready-to-buy-yet stage, is a great way to gain extra traffic. The problem (if you want to call it that) with all this “value-added” content is that it brings those very people who will rarely convert into a lead or a sale. They’re mainly there to partake of your free information. They want answers to their questions, and once they get them, they leave your website with nothing to show for it other than a “100% bounce rate” mention in your analytics report.

Converting the Freeloaders

Rather then having them bounce off your website, you should be trying to convert them in some small way. That is, providing your not-in-the-market-right-now site visitors (or freeloaders!) with one or more quick, painless (ideally measurable) actions they can take. These could be anything that keeps them connected to you and/or your website in some way – signing up for your free email newsletter, following you on Twitter, “liking” your FaceBook page, subscribing to your YouTube channel, etc.

Be sure to feature your conversion points prominently where your free content lives.

For instance, at the bottom of every article or post add call-to-action wording such as:

“If you liked this blog post, let us email you when we’ve posted others.”

“If you want to learn more about _____, sign up for our weekly newsletter.”

“If you want to stay abreast of what’s going on in ______, be sure to follow us on Twitter.”

Clearly State the Obvious

Another type of small conversion is to get the visitor to at least click through to your services or product pages. For instance, if you have a lot of how-to content that shows people the ins and outs of the very services you offer – make sure it’s extremely clear that you don’t just teach it, but that you also provide the service. (You’d be surprised how many people don’t realize it!) There will always be some people who decide that doing it themselves is too daunting a task.

Make sure those folks see prominent and simple directions to your services pages by saying something like:

“Learn how we can help you do ______ today!“

Small Conversions Keep You Connected

Of course, if you’re going to prominently feature small, quick and painless conversion points, it’s essential that you follow through with your promises. If you promise you’ll provide industry updates on Twitter, then you darn well better do it fairly often. If you told them you’d send email when you posted new articles and they don’t hear from you for 2 months, then you’re not keeping up with your end of the bargain. It’s important to continuously give them what you said you would. Nothing undermines your credibility faster than collecting their email addresses and Twitter handles and then giving them to your sales team to start breathing down their necks. (Remember, they’re not in the market to buy now anyway!)

Pay Attention to Low Conversion Rates

If you are prominently featuring small conversions on your website but not seeing much action, it could mean that your content isn’t providing what the visitor hoped it would. Or worse, it could mean that it’s just not very good. This is common if you’re creating your content for search engines, not people. After all, why would people want to be notified when you’ve added more crap content? Take your low conversion numbers to heart and invest in content that fulfills a real need.

Small Conversions Can Lead to Big Ones

The whole idea of having small conversion points where people sign up to hear from you regularly is so that you will always be at the top of their mind and not forgotten a few minutes after they leave your website. Today’s not-in-the-market-at-the-moment guy or gal may one day be a ready-to-buy-now guy or gal. When they make their Jekyll to Hyde switch, you want them to feel that there’s nobody they’d rather purchase from than the one who’s been nurturing them along from the very beginning of their quest – YOU!

While it was cool to be chosen, more interesting to me was how David characterized my Twitter account: “…an engaging Twitter feed where she makes the most of interacting with other Twitter users…With enough quips to make her feed personal and interesting, she maintains a mostly serious and professional Twitter persona.”

That does seem to sum up my Twitter existence, although I had to laugh at the serious and professional description, since I sometimes tweet some crazy stuff! On the other hand, I agree that the mix of personal and professional is a large part of the appeal of my Twitter account. In fact I think it’s key to nearly any good Twitter account. For more on that, Lisa Barone (also on the top 25 list) just wrote a great article: “The Myth of ‘Professional’ Twitter Accounts,” with which I agree 100% (see my comments over there).

I thought it would be interesting to look at and dissect both the professional and perhaps not so professional ways that I have used Twitter this month to see what exactly makes up a top-25 account. With that, I give you:

10 Ways I’ve Used Twitter This Month:

Expressing Extreme Emotions:

This is one of my most common uses of Twitter, and it really just amounts to venting. I find that if something pops into my head that I really love or hate, it makes me feel good to mention it on Twitter.

So far this month I have expressed love for Pandora adding comedy channels, my iPad, a spammy site I reported being nuked, and clients who no longer need me because they’re doing so well.

And I’ve expressed dislike for SEO getting blamed for malware, irrelevant blog and forum comments, Panera messing up my order (twice in a row), and email spam via my website’s contact form.

Creating Content:

This is an obvious one to anyone who reads the HRA newsletter regularly since I’ve been doing my “Twitter Question of the Week” (for a few years now). Asking my Twitter followers questions relating to the main newsletter topic is a great way to provide additional newsletter content, while also making them part of the newsletter.

Crowdsourcing to Help Clients:

Having more than 10,000 Twitter followers is a great way to get quick help when you need it. This month I was doing a review of a restaurant guide website and was able to ask my followers a few questions regarding restaurant sites in general. Their responses helped me, and ultimately my client. I had another client whose new website developer decided to blow them off, so they were in dire need of a new one. I took it to Twitter and found that a few of my Twitter friends whom I already knew and trusted online might be a perfect fit, so I passed along their info to the client.

Promotion of Myself and Others:

Other than this newsletter, I know of no better way to quickly get hundreds of eyeballs on any new article I write. It seems almost magical when you tweet a link to a new article and and within minutes see all the visitors, and often comments.

I don’t just tweet my own articles, however. When I read other great articles, I tweet them as well. This provides my followers with more interesting information than just I can give them, and also endears me to those whom I am promoting. I honestly don’t do it to get anything in return — it’s just good networking and a win-win all around.

Catching Up With Family and Friends:

I have a fairly tech-savvy family — my oldest daughter @coriewhalen, my cousins @acarvin and @ericcarvin, and my sister @bncarvin are all fairly prolific on Twitter. You may even have heard of my cousin Andy — he has made national news lately with his tweeting of the unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Aside from getting the international news from my family, I can also keep tabs on the fact that Corie was thinking of getting a new dog or let my cousins know I was having dinner with their mom and dad! Also, many of the friends I’ve met through events and conferences are on Twitter, and it’s a great way to keep up with what they’re doing. In fact, I’m having lunch with one such friend this week that stemmed from a Twitter chat.

Answering Questions:

Sometimes people just randomly ask me SEO or other questions on Twitter that I’m usually happy to answer if I can.

General Chatting:

When I first started using Twitter, I thought of it as a newfangled chatroom. I still use it for that purpose today because it’s comforting to have other people “around” during the day as I’m working. I’ll often see someone tweet something interesting that I reply to, and we can have a nice little conversation.

News and Information Gathering: This is where who you follow on Twitter is important (as opposed to who follows you). I follow those who will not only entertain me, but who will post interesting and newsworthy links, especially those related to the search marketing industry. I get a good portion of my news from Twitter.

And now that I have my iPad, I use the Flipboard app each morning to see a magazine-like view of all the articles posted by my followers. This catches me up on anything interesting going on and also provides me with potential stories to submit to Sphinn to fulfill my editorial duties there.

Ranting and Raving About Boston Sports: If you’re a Boston sports fan, you’ll understand this one. The gist is that all of our teams can be the best and the worst all in one night. It helps to cheer or scream with with others on Twitter!

Fun and Silliness: In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words: Me wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo.

Whether you’ve never understood how to use Twitter or are an old Twitter pro, I hope the ways I’ve used it inspire you to find new ways of expressing yourself online. I should also note that the mix of humor, authenticity and professionalism shouldn’t be limited to just Twitter. I am certain that it’s that same combination that has made the High Rankings Advisor Newsletter so popular for nearly 10 years.

The bottom line is that people prefer to do business with those whom they feel connected with. Twitter and other online communities provide us all with unique ways to make those connections – we just have to be willing to put a little bit of ourselves out there!

Since that time, a number of very public search result adjustments have been made by Google. JCPenney (one of the companies I referred to in my February link spam article) was publicly outed by the New York Times and subsequently penalized by Google. It took Bing a bit longer to respond, but the JCPenney website seems to be missing from there now as well.

Also in February, Overstock.com was outed by the Wall Street Journal for providing discounts for .edu websites if they would add keyword-rich anchor text links to Overstock.com. Their penalty seemed less severe than the JCP one as I continued to see Overstock.com pages show up for numerous competitive keyword queries at Google. Recently they claimed that they removed the offending links and their penalty has been lifted (it’s not clear how they know this for sure).

And then came the much talked about Farmer / Panda Google Update, which may or may not have been in response to all the negative press that descended upon them. While many sites lost a large percentage of their Google traffic due to the update, it has certainly not stopped all web spam from working.

A quick look at the Google search results for the search query I used in the Anchor Text Spam article shows most of the same sites (besides JCPenney) showing in the results — many of which still have lots of questionable links pointing to them. The good news is that the spammiest of them are on Page 2 or later in Google’s results. While it appears that link spamming can still work, it may not be quite as effective as it used to be — and that’s a good thing.

Web spam can take many forms, though, with anchor text spam being just one of them. Others include exact match keyword doorway domains, madlib spam pages, and keyword-stuffed content (either hidden, partially hidden, or in plain sight).

Today I decided to see if those forms of web spam can still bring high rankings to sites post–Farmer / Panda. I had a ready supply of spammy sites to look at thanks to many of you filling out my web spam report form. (Keep ‘em coming!)

Here’s what I found:

Exact Match Keyword Doorway Domains

This seems to be one of the easiest ways to get decent rankings these days, which to me is crazy — it’s 2011! One of the sites reported to me had teeny-tiny keyword-rich links in the footer of their main site that pointed to their exact match keyword doorway domains. The doorways looked as if they were straight out of the old Web Position Gold doorway page generator program from the ’90s! I was both amused and appalled to see such a thing still working. I know that Matt Cutts from Google has said they’re looking into the exact match domain problem, but I have to wonder when they’ll actually pull the switch, or if they simply don’t consider the technique to be spammy. To be fair, this technique seemed to work best for the less competitive phrases, which I suppose is some progress.

My Recommendation: In light of what I’ve seen with this type of web spam, I’d have to say that if you don’t mind that it could be a short-lived traffic generator, it’s probably a great technique if you’re starting a new website, especially if it’s going to be an affiliate site or drop-ship type of site. I’m even considering trying it for myself if I ever get the time. My hope is that Google will close the loophole before I ever get started, but it’s been working great for so long now, it’s hard to imagine they’ll be killing it any time soon. [Side note: Yes, you just heard me recommend a spammy SEO technique...hey...if you can't beat 'em! That said, I would never recommend this tactic to my clients or anyone with a "real" company.]

Madlib Spam Pages

I talked about this a bit in last week’s article on getting found locally. A number of the spammy sites I looked at were using this technique. To review, “madlib spam” is when you have the same exact content, but just switch out a certain keyword phrase to create hundreds of nearly duplicate pages. For instance, many do this to target different geographical areas by simply substituting the city and/or state name. And others may substitute a certain make or model of product.

In many ways, these sorts of pages make sense. After all, most people will only see the page that has been targeted to what they’re looking for and not all the other dupes — which is most likely why it often works. Matt Cutts has spoken out against it for many years, however, which leads me to believe that Google is simply looking the other way on these. That said, they aren’t as effective for local search now that Places Pages are featured so prominently in Google’s results. But that doesn’t stop the make/model madlib spam from working.

My Recommendation: As with the exact match domains, I would only suggest trying this if you understand that it could eventually come crashing down on you. I’d also suggest that if you do it, you pair it with Google AdWords so that the pages serve as paid search landing pages. That way, you can at least play dumb if you get caught.

Keyword-Stuffed Content

A few weeks ago, a client pointed out to me a business that “must really know their SEO.” Turns out it was an all-Flash site that had hidden keyword-stuffed content. I was quite amazed that this old trick still worked and felt compelled to report it to Matt. To me, hidden content and keyword stuffing are the worst sorts of spam. Therefore, my recommendation will always be to never, ever, ever, ever do it!

As of this writing, I haven’t yet reported any of the Rat Out Your Competitor sites to Matt, but when I checked today for the keyword-stuffed one I had reported, it was completely gone from Google! I’m assuming that Matt agreed with me on that one and took action against it. While I appreciate the fact that he will do something on a case-by-case basis if I personally submit something, that’s not going to make a dent in cleaning out most of the web spam.

I should also acknowledge that dealing with web spam has got to be a monumental task for Google. In reviewing the supposedly spammy sites that were submitted to me, many were not all that spammy. I’d say maybe only 20% were ranking highly in Google due to their shady SEO techniques. In many cases, there simply weren’t a lot of better sites to show instead, which meant that the reported sites were likely ranking despite their spam, not because of it.

Unfortunately, spammy SEO techniques are so common today that it’s hard to find decent sites in competitive industries that aren’t doing it to a certain extent. Until or unless Google catches more of it on their own, spammy SEO is going to be a sad fact of life.

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can remove from your personal knowledge base and/or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

1) Meta Keywords: Lord help us! I thought I was done discussing the ole meta keywords tag in 1999, but today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it’s easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines – and it always will be.
2) XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn’t going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won’t help your pages to rank better in Google either!).

3) Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your “click here”link’s title attribute? (For example: <a href=”page1.html” title=”Spammy Keywords Here”>Click Here</a>.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee’s knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that’s great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.

4) Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time in, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren’t, and they aren’t. They’re simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it’s always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it’s wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.

5) Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn’t going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it’s especially not going to be helpful if that’s the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)

6) Keyword-stuffed Content: While it’s never been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today’s competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you’re having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you’ve used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.

7) Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You’re not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You’re just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, and find the phrases that answer the searcher’s question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren’t putting the one word “lawyer” into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word “lawyer” all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you’re providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don’t even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do “just in case” someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they offer. You won’t rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won’t make you any sales.

8) Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you’re offering there.

9) Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use this form of marketing – just don’t be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.

10) Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may offer lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it’s not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it’s a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, I do sometimes still see this technique work, but it’s still not advisable to do it.)
11) Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It’s the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you’re linking out to. ‘Nuff said.

12) Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can’t provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) is never seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there were something magical about doing this, again, you’re only talking about one keyword phrase.

13) Republishing Only Others’ Stuff: While it’s fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that’s all your blog consists of, it’s not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your own posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what’s good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It’s all about adding value.

14) Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.

15) Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you’re not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That’s all well and good, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won’t.

16) Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn’t. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don’t do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they’re in the category sections themselves.

Did I miss any? I’m quite sure I’ve just touched the surface on waste-of-time SEO tactics. How about you? Do you agree with the above? Disagree?

For those who don’t know what anchor text is, here’s a quick explanation:

Anchor text is the words in the clickable part of any link. For instance, when someone links to my site, they typically use either my name or my company name in the anchor text, which looks like this:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Or…

Visit High Rankings for SEO consulting.

But those links are nojavascript:t all that valuable in SEO terms. What would be better (for search engines) is for the links to be more like these:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Visit High Rankings for SEO consulting.

…with the keywords that people might type into Google (or Bing) as the clickable anchor text link.

Search engines assign a lot of weight to the words that are in that clickable link. It does make sense because you’re telling both people and search engines what they’ll get when they click the link.

The problem is that it’s not a natural way for people to link unless they know a bit about how search engines work. It’s more natural to link using the company name, even through links that just say “click here” or “more information.”

Part of what I do as an SEO consultant is to train clients to think like a search engine. I teach clients to link more descriptively on their own sites via “internal” links as well as linking to other “external” sites. But to get honest-to-goodness natural links – that is, links from others just because they really like you or your company – it’s unlikely that the link will have the best anchor text for search engines. And yet, natural links are exactly what Google claims to value. It’s what their PageRank algorithm was originally based on.

But today, natural links and true citations are nearly useless in helping search engines show the best sites for the search query at hand.

For instance, this past Sunday I was quoted in a Washington Post story about Google’s less-than-stellar search results.

I spoke with the reporter for quite some time and also emailed him numerous examples of how some companies easily manipulate Google. He was kind enough to mention me and my company (on page 2) in the article, which was great — but there was no link. I don’t know if it is the Washington Post’s policy not to link, or if they just don’t think about it, or if they have never been taught to link. It seems to me that a mention in the Washington Post in this context provides me and my company some credibility, because the WP is a mainstream news outlet. Yet any credibility I may have gained with the people reading the article is completely lost on Google because there’s not only no descriptive anchor text link, there’s no link at all!

Instead, the links that Google (and Bing) end up valuing the most are those where people control the anchor text. Unfortunately, when anchor text can be controlled, it often means that the link:

was purchased

was traded for

was added to a site that is controlled by the owner

was added to a site in a network controlled by multiple stakeholders (like a link farm)

was added into an article or bio of an article and posted to an article directory or similar

was used in a blog comment

was part of a forum signature

was obtained naturally, but the linker had to be asked to edit the anchor text.

Only the last one of those is truly in line with what search engines want to value, and even that one is sketchy because it becomes somewhat unnatural by virtue of requesting different anchor text.

May the Biggest Spammer Win

Most reasonable people would agree that it doesn’t make sense that the companies who own or take part in a network of interlinked websites should rank higher than those who don’t. And why should the websites that have people “writing” boatloads of blog comments outrank their competitors who have no desire to spam others’ blogs? If you’re commenting because you’ll possibly get some link value rather than because you feel the need to add to the conversation, it adds unnecessary clutter and should be considered spam by the search engines (in my opinion). I wouldn’t be surprised if 90% of blog and forum comments fall into that category, as do most articles submitted to article directories.

Here’s the Rub

All of the above types of links still count very highly in Google (and Bing). While links and their anchor text are by no means the only ranking factor for how sites show up in the search engines, they are a very large one at the moment. And surprisingly, neither the relevance nor the quality of those links appears to play as big a role as search engines would like you to believe.

You can take any product search query (both highly competitive and somewhat competitive) and review the backlinks of the sites that show up in Google’s (or Bing’s) top 10 to 20 results and see what I’m talking about.

Random Example

Let’s look at the search query “baby furniture,” which I just randomly thought of as I was writing this. I’m not going to call out any of the sites by name, and your results may differ slightly from mine, but you should get the picture.

The first site to show up in Google is a big brand, which makes sense. In fact, I wasn’t even going to check the backlinks because I figured they likely deserve to be there based on their brand. But then I noticed it’s just a random catalog page from their site. So I looked at their backlinks, and sure enough, there are 357 links pointing to that one page, most from completely irrelevant sites. Some are even hacked sites and porn sites. But they’ve got keyword-rich anchors that Google (and Bing) love. Many of the links are in blog comments and others in “partner site” areas (paid links). Wonderful.

Let’s check the #2 site that shows up in Google (which for me was the #1 site in Bing). Looks like there’s a whole network of interlinked baby-related sites that use keyword-rich anchor text links to get all the various sites to rank well for those words. While it’s possible that all those sites have different owners and they really just want to recommend (using juicy anchor text) all those other baby product sites, it sure smells fishy to me! At least in this case they seem to be on relevant sites, unlike the big-brand one above.

The #3 site that I see on Google is also a big brand, and it looks as if many of their links are purchased from mommy blogger-type sites, based on my random clickthroughs of their backlinks. While they at least seem relevant, most are anything but natural. I would consider them akin to ads, aka paid links. Nothing wrong with them purchasing ads on relevant sites, but it’s Google’s job not to count paid links, and yet they do.

The #4 site is owned by a big brand, but is separate from the brand’s main website. It looks as if this one may not be spamming…yay! They seem to do well based on links from their parent company site and actual recommendations from other sites. I am basing that assertion on the fact that the links are mainly the website name, not a keyword phrase. So Google may have gotten that one right! (That site doesn’t show up in Bing’s top 10 for me, however.)

Spammers Rule – Google (and Bing) Drool

I think I’ll end my backlink checking here because it upsets me to see how easy it is for link spammers to get pages ranked for highly competitive phrases. Remember, this was just ONE random phrase I checked. I have no clients in the baby furniture space or anything like that. You can type in any type of product search for yourself and see similar results. Seriously, I’d be shocked if you could find a Page 1 general product SERP in Google (or Bing) where most of the sites WEREN’T link spamming their way there.

The conundrum for Google (and Bing), as I mentioned in my Google Sucks article, is not that the pages or websites that show up in the results for these searches are necessarily bad or irrelevant. Those top 4 results for baby furniture all seem like good choices at first glance — which is what makes it so sickening that someone felt the need to link spam on their behalf. On the other hand, can we fault them for using techniques that work?

My Question Is, Why?

Why would Google (and Bing) allow companies who spam to show up anywhere in their search results, never mind in the top slots? I can spot the spam quickly and easily in just a few minutes; surely with Google’s fancy tools they could do the same. Are there really not enough sites that don’t link spam that are worthy?

I’m not saying that the search engines should penalize the sites in question. That would leave things open to rogue competitors who might spam on their behalf. But why doesn’t Google stop counting the spammy links? And why not stop counting anchor text so heavily, since it’s nearly always contrived? I have a feeling that Matt Cutts from Google may tell me that they aren’t counting those links already, but I just don’t believe it. In most of the results I looked at, there were not enough other factors to explain the Page 1 rankings.

I’ll leave you with one additional thought…

If Google doesn’t want to (or doesn’t know how to) not count spammy links, perhaps this is an opportunity for Bing to set itself apart and become the better search engine. I can’t help but think that completely discounting unnatural links and anchor text could only be a good thing for the search engine that eventually implements it.