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La semana pasada se creo un gran revuelo al salir publicado en varios medios la eliminación de las distintas páginas de AC Hoteles de las páginas de resultados de Google.

Tras unos pocos días de incertidumbre, parece que finalmente en AC Hoteles tomaron las medidas necesarias para modificar algunas pequeñas funcionalidades de su página web que habían provocado que Google les eliminara de sus páginas de resultados; y a partir de ahí, la discusión está servida.

En algunas páginas especializadas en buscadores han comentado que uno de los motivos que han provocado este problema ha sido el abuso de las etiqueta meta para intentar promocionar su página, otros han hablado de una técnica de cloaking (mostrar una página especial a los buscadores y otra distinta a los usuarios), también se comentó el uso excesivo de subdominios para posicionar sus páginas, así como la duplicación de contenido dentro de varios dominios.

Personalmente no creo que prácticamente ninguna de estas causas individuales hayan sido las que movieran a Google a banear la página web de AC Hoteles, pero la suma de todas ellas si que demuestran una clara intención de intentar engañar a Google para conseguir aparecer en las primeras posiciones de las páginas de resultados, y dificilmente se puede justificar como un error o un despiste del departamento web, ya que muchas de las acciones demuestran una clara intención de conseguir mejorar los resultados.

El caso de AC Hoteles es una nueva muestra de como puede llegar a ser de peligroso utilizar una estrategia de posicionamiento en buscadores que no esté de acuerdo con las políticas de Google, y pese a que probablemente AC Hoteles haya conseguido un gran beneficio durante el tiempo en el que estuvo bien posicionada, los resultados negativos que habrán tenido tras estar una semana fuera de Google, más la penalización que Google habrá impuesto a sus dominios, se notarán a largo plazo; siendoles más difícil volver a estar en esas primeras posiciones a las que se habían acostumbrado.

Veremos si han aprendido la lección, y como pueden conseguir volver a tener un buen posicionamiento sin engañar a los buscadores.

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A short post this, and an issue close to the heart of anyone who has ever heard an SEO practitioner tell you he knows how to get your site to the top of the “natural” Google search results. In fact, he goes further and says that you will only have to pay him some of the money he is demanding if indeed this is the case.

Fact 1: The only people who can guarantee getting your site to the top of the natural (or organic) listing in Google is, funnily enough, Google. And they never will.

Fact 2: The high traffic, generic keywords that SEO “agencies” have traditionally targeted are also the ones that generate the worst traffic from an ROI perspective.

Many SEO agencies, those people who sell the “black art” services of gaining listings in the “free” area of a Google or any other search engine, are on their death bed. Why? Because the smart people paying the bills at the larger companies are realizing that SEO is about creating pages, URL’s, tags and content that are relevant to the user shopping their site, and that paying for position is something that they do already…its called PAY-PER-CLICK. They can choose the keyword and position they want, and there is no risk whatsoever in their site listing disappearing tomorrow.

In my humble opinion, SEO services provided by agencies should be about helping website owners understand the foundation of how to get found by search engines, how to get indexed, how to provide relevant information and what aspects of content to focus on. Perhaps the age of the pay-for-preformance, SEO agency is over.

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La discursión sobre las “landing pages” o páginas de destino no es algo nuevo, ya que desde hace mucho tiempo es un tema de debate donde todo el mundo ha ido aportando su granito de arena; así que ahora he decidido que debía aportar el mio.

Cuando hablamos de “landing pages” generalmente estamos hablando de páginas específicas creadas para promocionar un producto o servicio concreto, y en muchas ocasiones, están creadas para una fuente de tráfico o campaña concreta, lo que acarrea tener en cuenta muchas variables distintas que si estuvieramos diseñando una página normal dentro de nuestra página web.

Un tipo de “landing page” muy típico son las páginas diseñadas especialmente para SEO, ya que suelen necesitar de bastante contenido y enlaces para conseguir obtener unos buenos resultados, y aunque desde Google se diga que no vale la pena crear páginas específicas para buscadores y que lo importante es pensar en el usuario, yo creo que se pueden hacer las dos cosas desde una misma página.

Los buscadores están orientados al contenido, y en la gran mayoría de casos, los usuarios que acceden a tu página web a través de los resultados de búsqueda, lo que quieren encontrar es información y contenido sobre aquello que han buscado, por lo que es normal pensar que en nuestro sitio web, podemos tener dos tipos de páginas, una orientada a precio (para campañas publicitarias y las visitas que acceden directamente a nuestra web), y una página orienta a buscadores que contenga información extra sobre nuestros productos y servicios.

Buscando por Internet y preguntando a otras personas veremos que existen muchas opiniones distintas sobre la generación de páginas web específicas, pero en función de tu tipo de negocio, probablemente necesites entre dos y tres páginas distintas para promocionar un servicio o producto concreto, ya que cada una de estas páginas estará cumpliendo una función específica y ofreciendo unos contenidos distintos.

Lo más importante a tener en cuenta una vez hayamos decidido que queremos tener varias “landing pages” para nuestros productos, es vigilar no duplicar el mismo contenido en cada una de ellas, ya que podríamos tener problemas con los buscadores a la hora de indexar nuestras páginas, así que recomiendo tener en cuenta que, si una página va a tener un objetivo concreto, redactar un texto que satisfaga esas necesidades, y no vayáis por el camino fácil realizando un copiar y pegar de las descripciones que se hicieron en un primer momento.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post here that gave some basic, but real-world, reasons why companies might want to invest in a paid web analytics solution rather than stick with Google Analytics exclusively. It was nice to see that Anil Batra, author of a great blog himself, made a comment shortly after this went live. He had the following to say:

Not all tools are created equal. Not all paid tools provide the same reports or functionality. What tool you should choose depends on your business goals and what extra features (report emailing etc.) you require. There are several businesses for which Free Google Analytics works perfectly and paying for a tool like Omniture is overkill.

Ummm, yes……

I was a little confused about this comment to be honest. Anil is absolutely right, of course, tools need to match requirements, and we are certainly not at the point where we could call the main WA tools available “commodities”. In addition I had written that .. “GA provides a lot of information in an easy-to-use way and integrates perfectly with Google Adwords; absolutely perfect for the small website owner.” I guess then that Anil found the article a little on the unsophisticated side, and you know what, I think he’s right.

The fact is that in Spain, were I am based, Web Analytics is a largely unknown area of internet business; the need for a basic and “unsophisticated” approach is critical. The adoption of GA in Spain has been huge, which is great, but now we need to convince the medium sized and larger business community of the need for sophistication in the analysis arena. I think Anil would agree that large traffic sites such as Vueling.com (a fantastic, medium sized, “low cost” airline operating out of Barcelona and selling 95% of its flight tickets online) might be better off implementing a more sophisticated solution than GA. (Google are so thrilled with this exclusivity that they are using Vueling as a case study here), and so they should.

So, back to the differences between paying and not paying, and why companies (in Spain and elsewhere) should only use GA as a part of their analytics solutions, not the only one. In my last post on this I looked at the areas of reporting (automated send of reports), segmentation (an interesting paper on this subject, compiled by Omniture, can be found here), and support. Today, briefly, I wanted to comment on one aspect of GA that I find poor to say the least - clickstream analysis.

Google is generally a very usable tool, however in this area it falls down completely. GA does provide some clickstream analysis, both navigational page to page and a pre-defined page funnel sequence. But the way the results are presented, and the usability of this whole area makes it almost impossible to cope with in a real world business situation. Any person seriously interested in understanding user clickstream behaviour onsite would be wise to go elsewhere I think.

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I like to think that I live and work in the real world. This is one where web analytics is still a growing (and small) part of most companies online business, and where the advanced concepts being discussed by the worlds web analytics guru’s just can’t be applied. (I refer to one Eric T Peterson’s series on Measureing Visitor Engagement as an example. Apology’s for picking on Eric here as he really is the worlds best web analytics blogger). So the talk of the page view being on its last legs in this article by Steve Rubel makes for fairly scary reading. Surely the page view is a stable, easy-to-understand and (normally) comparable measurement performance indicator, fitting nicely into a company’s monthly website performance sheet. Here’s my reasons why I think Steve R is wrong about this. (in fact Eric P has already published a great article on this subject here)

Fact 1: In most organisations, the success or failure of any business project is in its ability to prove success to the executive team who gave it the go ahead in the first place. In the vast majority of cases this means quoting numbers that executives understand. The humble page view fits perfectly here, and give rise to all sorts of nice, easy-to-understand KPI’s like PV’s per visit, and average time to view x (important) page.

Fact 2: In most organisations, web 2.0 type interactive pages (that negate the use of the page view as a useful measure) are less a concept than an impossible dream. Developing websites cost money. Investment demands a return, and without a proper understanding of the ROI of flash/Ajax/RSS developments, static HTML based websites will continue to be the norm for the foreseeable future.

Fact 3: In static HTML content areas, page views form a major part of the analysis of advertising success (number of ads served for instance) and clickstream analytics. This is especially true of “bounce rate” analysis where 1 visit = 1 page view. Without PV’s where would we be?

For me it looks like the early end to the page view as one of the web’s simpler to understand KPI’s is still some way off.

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