One of the most over-looked items related to your web site is a small unassuming text file called the robots.txt file. This simple text file has the important job of telling web crawlers (including search engine spiders) which files the web robots can access on your site.

Also known as “A Standard for Robot Exclusion”, the robots.txt file gives the site owner to ability to request that spiders not access certain areas of the site. The problem arises when webmasters accidentally block more than they intend.

At least once a year I get a call from some frantic site owner telling me that their site was penalized and is now out of Google when often they blocked the site from Google via their robots.txt.

An advantage of being a long time search marketer is that experience teaches you to know where to look when sites go awry. Interestingly, people are always looking for a complex reason for an issue when more times than not, it is a simple more basic problem.

It’s a situation not unlike the printing press company hiring the guy who knew which screw to turn. Eliminate the simple things that could be causing the problem before you jump to the complex. With this in mind, one of the first things I always check when I am told a site is having a penalty or crawling issues is the robots.txt file.

Accidental Blockage by Way of Robots.txt
This is often a self-inflicted wound that causes many webmasters to want to pound their heads into their desks when they discover the error. Sadly, it happens to companies small and big including publicly traded businesses with a dedicated staff of IT experts.

There are numerous ways to accidentally alter your robots.txt file. Most often it occurs after a site update when the IT department, designer, or webmaster rolls up files from a staging server to a live server. In these instances, the robots.txt file from the staging server is accidentally included in the upload. (A staging server is a separate server where new or revised web pages are tested prior to uploading to the live server. This server is generally excluded from search engine indexing on purpose to avoid duplicate content issues.)

If your robots.txt excludes your site from being indexed, this won’t force removal of pages from the index, but it will block polite spiders from following links to those pages and prevent the spiders from parsing the content of those pages. (Pages that are blocked may still reside in the index if they are linked to from other places.) You may think you did something wrong that got your site penalized or banned, but it’s actually your robots.txt file telling the engines to go away.

How to Check Your Robots.txt
How do you tell what’s in your robots.txt file? The easiest way to view your robots.txt is to go to a browser and type your domain name followed by a slash then “robots.txt.” It will look something like this in the address bar:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/robots.txt

If you get a 404-error page, don’t panic. The robots.txt file is actually an optional file. It is recommended by most engines but not required.

You can also log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and Google will tell you which URLs are being restricted from indexing.

You have a problem if your robots.txt file says:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /


A robots.txt file that contains the text above is excluding ALL robots – including search engine robots – from indexing the ENTIRE site. Unless you are working on a staging server, you don’t normally want to see this on a site live on the web.

How to Keep Areas of your Site From Being Indexed
There may be certain sections you don’t want indexed by the engines (such as an advertising section or your log files). Fortunately, you can selectively disallow them. A robots.txt that disallows the ads and logs directories would be written like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /ads
Disallow: /logs

The disallow statement shown above only keeps the robots from indexing the directories listed. Note that the protocol is pretty simplistic: it does a text comparison of the path of the URL to the Disallow: strings: if the front of the URL matches the text on a Disallow: line (a “head” match), then the URL is not fetched/parsed by the spider.

Many errors are introduced because webmasters think the robots.txt format is smarter than it really is. For example, the basic version of the Protocol does NOT allow:

• Wildcards in the Disallow: line
• “Allow:” lines

Google has expanded on the original format to allow both of these options, but these are not universally accepted, so it is recommended that these expansions ONLY be used for a “User-agent:” run by Google (e.g. Googlebot, Googlebot-Image, Mediapartners-Google, Adsbot-Google.).

Does the robots.txt Restrict People From Your Content?
No, it only requests that spiders keep from walking through and parsing the content for its index. Some webmasters falsely think that if they disallow a directory in the robots.txt file that it protects the area from prying eyes. The robots.txt file only tells robots what to do, not people (and the standard is voluntary so only “polite” robots follow it). If certain files are confidential and you don’t want them seen by other people or competitors, they should be password protected.

Note that the robots exclusion standard is a “please don’t parse this page’s content” standard. If you want the content removed from the index, you need to include a Robots noindex Meta tag on each page you want removed from the index.

Check robots.txt First
The good news is that if you have a situation where you accidently blocked your own site, the solution is easy to fix now that you know to look at your Robots.txt file first. Little things matter online. To learn more about the robots.txt file see http://www.robotstxt.org.

Check out how Visual.ly has grown content in the last few months:

Visual.ly's content has grown to over 5,000 images in just a few months.

Their growth in numbers of fans on Facebook has been really good, too:

Visual.ly hasn’t grown search market share at the skyrocketing rate we’ve seen with Pinterest, but it has grown enough to be interesting and worthwhile for promotion of infographic images.

I’m suspecting most of its audience share is made up of search marketers and graphic artists at this point, but if they can make the social voting aspects more compelling it might leverage the potential hinted at in the Facebook Likes numbers more effectively.

Either way, this is one worth watching.

It seems unusual to see a new image-sharing type of social media site to be gaining so much ground, and so quickly. This could be happening due to beneficial attention from influential people who may be serving as “mavens” as Malcolm Gladwell describes them. With significant people such as Jeremy Stoppelman (involved in early PayPal, Yelp, etc) as initial investors backing it, it has gotten pretty good industry attention.

I have written numerous times about image SEO and leveraging social media image sharing sites in the past as a means for building PageRank when doing search engine optimization, so I may have to update my comparison matrix for image sharing sites for SEO value in order to rank it.

Pinterest’s homepage has a toolbar PageRank value of 6 currently, but nearly 16 million pages are indexed! Even more wonderfully from a search marketer’s viewpoint, the dreaded NOFOLLOW tag is not in use as of yet, so links included with images can pass PageRank. For instance, this page of wedding photos contains links which pass PageRank (although, arguably the links could be slightly more optimal if they weren’t opened into new windows with the target=”_blank” parameters in the link tags). Pictures from Pinterest.com are showing up nicely under image search results, too.

According to Google Insights, searches for “Pinterest” have climbed so quickly this year that it’s now on par with searches for “Flickr” and “Picassa”. While searches for the brandname do not equate with traffic/visits to the site, they typically do correlate pretty closely.

Some degree of Pinterest’s success may be attributed to its iPhone app, which has gained over 35,000 votes, and has 4.5 stars, indicating it’s well-liked by users.

The main detraction from the site right now is in terms of motivation — why do users wish to go here, versus merely sharing images in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr — or, even within Google+, for that matter? The main advantage the site has right now seems to be in terms of the user-interface featuring the pinboards, which allow for good browsing, compared with less compelling lists of thumbnails found in most sites.

The site also has a number of significant issues in terms of usability. If you sign up now, you can expect some clunkiness, depending on your browser. However, I would expect these issues to be addressed fairly rapidly.

For SEOs, I recommend that you enjoy the not-yet-NOFOLLOWed status, because it’s certain to come to an end really soon. I might also predict that as it stands now, I think Pinterest might make better longterm sense as a user-interface feature of some other social media service such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. It might make for a very good acquisition for one of those services.

So, what does this mean in terms of displaying dates on pages as I earlier explored? Does the recent algo tweaking change my earlier recommendation that displaying dates on webpages may help rankings?

As you may recall, Michael Gray and I differed on this point — he suggested that one should opt out of having dates on pages because Google displays them willy-nilly in snippets, and they may frequently prejudice users from clicking through if other content with more recent dates is available in the same search results page. In contrast, I argued that Google’s usability testing apparently found that users often prefer to see the dates in the SERP listing snippets, and that factoid makes it an element that Google’s algorithm might prefer slightly for ranking purposes. Even if the algorithm didn’t give advantage to pages with dates, their research indicates that it might still increase user CTR to the webpage, which can indirectly improve rankings over time. Both Michael and I provided caveats, however, and acknowledged that their are exception cases.

In that earlier post, I provided a decision matrix which I believe supports my general stance that having the dates is likely beneficial in more cases than not. In it, the green check marks are cases where having the date is probably advantageous, while the red exxes indicate cases where it might not be helpful:

Now that Google has apparently bumped up the “freshness factor” in ranking signals as slightly more important than before, I believe it further supports my stance that having the date on pages is beneficial for most types of content. By making this change to the algorithm (and announcing it publicly), Google has signaled that this is particularly important. Therefore, having the date in the snippet is likely even more important to searchers.

Now, you might be thinking at this point that you have older or even stale content, so you will opt out of the date in order to avoid some perceived penalty of the application of the freshness factor. I’ll tell you flat out that this particular reasoning is illogical: Google has a separate factor which they independently derive to decide a document’s initial publication date. It’s probably based upon the date when they index the webpage for the very first time. This document inception date is *not* affected by the date printed on the webpage, so you can’t fool the algo by declining to display the date or lying about the publication date! (Search Engine Land further verified this in chatting with Google about their freshness ranking announcement.) In fact, if you frequently change the date you print on the page without actually changing the page’s content, you could get dinged in your quality score — I would not try it.

One thing you could do is periodically review your content and update it with postscripts or revision notes at the end, and THEN change the “last updated” date you display on the page to reflect the day of the change. This method is, of course, costlier, and requires some actual investment in ongoing quality improvement. But, I’d say that it’s the valid way to optimize in terms of date and freshness, and there’s likely no good shortcut for this signal.

Finally, if you’re thinking about abruptly changing all of the URLs of your article pages to periodically start the clock ticking once more for the document inception dates, you should know that one of the prime ranking factors that’s been in play for years now is an advantage given to pages with a longer legacy. Pages which have been around for a longer period of time on stable URLs have had some ranking advantage in Google SERPs. The question now is, how much advantage? Does the advantage of recency now outweigh the advantage of longevity?

If you dump all your legacy URLs you might find out — but the answer may not be to your liking.

In truth, I suspect that this freshness factor tweak is likely somewhat subtle and the actual impact may be fairly light for most sites. While the figure of 35% of searches being changed sounds impressive and impactful, it could be as simple as one page out of 10,000 getting bumped up to the first page. It doesn’t mean that 35% of the first page of SERPs will alter. Listings that are bumping in and out of positions ten and eleven likely wouldn’t notice a change at all.


Panda photo by J. Patrick Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0

For those of us who have been following Google’s evolution over time, the Panda updates actually weren’t all that surprising. For me, the emergence of Panda seemed very familiar, harkening back to perhaps as far back as 2006 when Google clamped down on affiliate sites. At that same time, Henk van Ess revealed how Google was hiring on temporary quality evaluation staff to rate search results. In Google internal documents which van Ess exposed, the evaluators were instructed to give poor ratings to spam content, porn ranking on inappropriate keyword phrases, and “thin affiliate content”. It became clear very quickly that the negative human ratings for “thin affiliate content” were related quite closely to the virtual penalization that many affiliate sites experienced at that time.

What Google was focusing upon in reducing the ratings of “thin affiliates” were instances where a search results page would be filled up with links to pages which all had virtually the same content, and where those pages often weren’t the final destinations of the people who landed upon them (obviously, with most affiliate sites one clicks-through to the actual retailer’s site where more information could be found and orders could be placed). From Google’s perspective, it was a poor user experience for there to be millions of pages indexed which had all essentially identical content and which often edged out other more-worthwhile pages which consumers might prefer.

From all of the information around the “Panda” Updates, it seems highly likely to me that Google is continuing to leverage their human quality evaluator staff, along with a number of other automated metrics which they could also incorporate in determining quality of pages. For instance, the numbers of people clicking back out of a page they found in the search results in order to select another page — this sort of a bounce rate metric could indicate which a page is of very poor quality for a particular keyword term.

Naturally, there are far more pages on the internet than what Google may reasonably have evaluators visit and assess, but there have also been developments in methods for using small numbers of ratings to be algorithmically applied across larger numbers of websites and pages. The TrustRank analysis technique is just one of these methods, and the research paper describing it shows how one could use a small sample set of rated webpages in combination with an automated analysis of the link graph associated with those pages in order to broadly apply ranking decisions to good content or poor content.


TrustRank Diagram

The combination of human interaction metrics is likely used by Google to determine a sort of “quality score” for pages, and some sort of mechanism similar to the TrustRank method is used to apply the quality score values across a broad swath of a site’s sections and pages.

While the Panda Updates were initially targeting “content farms”, or sites which specifically generated large numbers of pages to target user search queries, the criteria used to ding them could easily wreck many other types as well. Poorly constructed sites where users are confused about where to find what they were searching-for, or sites which make a bad impression by being too crammed full of ads, tricky links, or unsophisticated layouts might also fall under the treads of Panda.

The leaked evaluator documents from Google gave a few ideas of the sorts of things which could decide between a “thin affiliate” that got bad ratings versus sites which happened to contain affiliate content but which might otherwise get good ratings. Having additional content on the pages, particularly “value-added” content such as maps or user ratings or price comparisons could make a difference.

Here in 2011, I’d say the bar is even higher, though. You want your site to make a good impression when a searcher lands upon it, and you want them to have trust in your content. You need the site to be usable so that it doesn’t frustrate users, and you need to seriously consider removing impediments which annoy or hamper users in getting what they’re seeking. That gigantic interstitial ad that blocks them from the page, or all the cluttered fineprint and links may result in higher bounce rates which will translate into lower rankings for you.

In the past year, Google introduced Page Speed as a ranking factor — a major element which impacts consumer satisfaction with webpages. In their blog posts about Google they mention improving a number of elements affecting quality of a sites, including spelling and grammar (we previously highlighted how Google could use spelling and grammar in quality determinations and rankings). With the increasing attention to user experience factors in ranking determinations, it has become clear that if you’re not doing usability analysis, you may not be doing SEO at all.

Search engine optimization based purely upon clever technical tricks really appears to be on the wane with the Panda Updates. SEO may really decline in favor of much more sustainable longterm attention to User Experience and Usability factors. Unfortunately, I don’t see a whole lot of websites or companies positioned to take advantage of the trends. Most of the companies I’ve consulted with continue to base site design decisions more heavily upon arbitrary egos, expediency, and mere immitation of their competition rather than upon informed UX testing.

Quite a number of years ago, AOL got sued by some of their subscribers for not upholding service representations, and as a result, AOL began to automatically cache images and webpages from across the internet, keeping them in their servers in Reston, Virginia. This helped them to cut one leg off of the circuit for delivering content for their subscribers. As part of their caching process, they’d recompress images, knocking percentages of the images’ filesize off, reducing how much data needed to be transferred. This actually used to cause problems for some types of images, since their compression algorithm had one or two errors in it, causing big honkin’ artifacts to be left unattractively in the image.

(It’s very geeky of me, but I actually remember some of the image processes which would cause the compression errors, because I had to deal with cases at Superpages.com where our artists made ads for clients, and then the client might call us up and scream because the ad looked bad to them. Such calls could be confounding — imagine an irate attorney who pays many tens of thousands of dollars per year calling you up because he sees crap in the ad your team made for him, and when you pull it up on screen, you can’t see any problem! Then imagine trying to explain to him how he’s seeing the error because he’s on AOL, while the people in your company who create the ads are not on AOL… and you and up with an interesting conversation. Don’t EVER do tech support! But, I digress.)

Anyway, Google’s Page Speed service is taking AOL’s idea just a little further, because they’ve married a few of their services together in order to improve the HTML of the pages they’re caching. Some of that automated improvement will be stuff like rewriting the code to specify heights and widths of images, and minifying CSS or JS code. They might even be doing some of that image compression which was so troublesome with AOL’s rehosting of the entire internet.

But, I’m being snarky with the AOL comparisons! I actually think Google’s idea is a very cool one, and it’s one that I had previously predicted. It made sense once Google rolled out the Page Speed diagnostic (which helped webmasters find areas for improving their pages speed) to then roll out something that would cut down on the network travel time between web site servers and the endusers who request webpages.

This service also immitates other CDNs which came previously, such as Akamai and Amazon’s EC2. I’m a big believer in the power of CDNs, since they have long helped sites move content out closer to “the edge” of the network, reducing the time it takes to deliver webpages, images, Flash, videos, etc. I recommended a CDN for Superpages back when I was there, and it helped improve the user-experience for the millions of visitors we had.

Google’s deployment of this service is a great fit for them, since they already have an array of servers located around the globe, which had enabled them to essentially be their own content delivery network. Also, I wonder if Google couldn’t leverage some of their dark fiber to further reinforce their delivery network’s effectiveness.

The open question at the moment is whether integrating with Google’s Page Speed Service will positively influence search rankings. Since Google started using Page Speed measures as a ranking factor (another development we at KeyRelevance had anticipated), and since using their service would speed up a site’s delivery speeds, it’s easy to connect the dots to see that using such a service could provide a website with an immediate advantage for this ranking factor.

So, Google’s retread of a very old AOL idea may not be all that original, but it is cool since it’s a tool that could help optimize your site a little and improve your user experience very quickly.

For instance, if your place of business is located in an historic building, you might get it registered with the National Register of Historic Places or you might apply to get it designated a state historical marker. Doing either of those things would get the location intered into dozens if not hundreds of databases and directories, causing the address to get republished in numerous places, resulting in more prominence for the location and your business, by association. I’ve used this sort of tactic before to gain local citational references from Wikipedia.

This has been one of my secret tactics – most businesses may not merit an article in Wikipedia, but their building just might. And, Wikipedia content gets redistributed simply everywhere — even into Facebook! (Yes, Wiki links are nofollowed, but are local citations, hmmm?)

These round-about link-building ideas require some effort on your part to accomplish — they won’t happen in an instant click. However, they’re fairly robust and have some viral characteristics which can mean that you’ll focus on one project which may result in multiple high-quality links and citations.

So, what are some other, similar tactics you can use to nab some astonishing numbers of links and citations? Here are three more, in the same vein:

• Install weather monitoring equipment and become a weather reporting station. You’ll have to buy and install some hardware correctly, but once you do you can feed the weather data into the Weather Underground and other distribution channels, and they’ll begin showing your location on their sites!

  For instance, the JohnDory Vineyard in Sebastapol, California, has a weather station, and the weather data gets displayed on many sites, including KOAA, TV station sites, and newspaper sites. For instance, they’re listed on a weather page on The Post and Courier — a news site — which links straight to their homepage:

  

  Should I mention that many of these links back are nofollow-free?!

• Add a cellular antenna to your property. As with historical marker locations, there are websites out there which specialize in pinpointing cell sites where mobile phone antennas or wireless phone towers are located. Even more aluring, companies will pay you for the privilege of putting their cellphone antennas on your property! What could be cooler than having someone pay you to give you more local citations?

  For instance, see the CellReception.com page for the Prudential Tower building at 800 Boylston St. in Boston, MA:

  

  An even more striking example would be the Epiphany Lutheran Church in Lake Worth, Florida, which erected a 100-foot-tall cross at their building which camoflauges the cellular antenna inside it:

  

  Epiphany Lutheran further leveraged their unique wireless installation by sending out press releases about the cross antenna and holding a dedication ceremony for it. Their story got picked up and reported on by a number of news organizations.

  I also know of at least one church here in the Dallas area where I live that has a cell tower hidden in their bell tower, so this may be moderately common for churches.

• Install a webcam at your place of business. This can qualify you to get listed in a number of local and national webcam directories with links back to your business website. This is one of the easiest things businesses can do to attract links and also more site visits (and user interactions with your site can provide other rank-enhancing signals, too). For example, check out the Waikiki Beach Cam provided by Tiki’s Grill & Bar in Hawaii:
  

  Or, the cam from atop the Yamashiro Restaurant with fantastic views of Los Angeles:

  

  This tactic likely will require one to do the groundwork to register the cam with various directories. But, it also provides some other advantages in that the cam may provide video and photo content which may be used for additional optimization work.

You can see that these various local citation-building ideas have some characteristics in common. They give people more excuses to list information about your business and it’s location. There are more things like this which can be done for similar effects — can you think of any?

There are a lot of professional websites which have “borked” Instant Previews. For example, check out this Los Angeles dentist’s homepage, which appears with this jaunty giant jigsaw puzzle piece taking up most of its space:

Google has said that the Instant Previews were found to improve their users’ satisfaction with search results significantly during internal testing prior to rolling out the feature. Users can rapidly glance at the preview images to see if the webpages might hold what they’re looking-for, increasing their confidence and helping them select webpages to click upon which are more likely to hold what they want, avoiding clicking on stuff they don’t want.

If that’s true, then the opposite is likely also to play into users’ behavior: if a preview image looks bad and doesn’t look like what they’d expect or want, they might avoid clicking on it.

For anyone who has a site which doesn’t look right in Google Instant Preview mode, this is alarming, since their introduction of this feature could wrongly reduce your clickthrough rates. Even if you’re not worried about the collective effect over time, you still are likely not thrilled that the image representing you may not reflect a true picture nor show you up in the best light.

I’ve been asked before on how to optimize for Google Instant Previews, so here are a few tips I’ve put together:

• Although it was an unpleasant surprise when Google opted to ignore sites’ noarchive tags when launching Instant Previews, they did provide a protocol whereby you could completely opt out of it. To opt out, you may add a robots meta tag to your webpage, and in the content include “nosnippet”. You can also use “nosnippet” in the x-robots-tag HTTP header response sent by your server. (Note, this will also block the regular text snippets which usually appear beneath webpage links in the Google SERPs, according to their FAQ.)
• Similarly, you could instruct Googlebot from spidering the page by specifying in your robots.txt file that the site, section, or page is to be disallowed. Note, this may also have other undesirable effects, since if Googlebot doesn’t crawl through the page they won’t see all the keyword content on the page nor all the SEO-goodness you’ve already put into it. However, there are sites which have done this, such as Condé Nast, and as a result you will not find the Instant Preview magnifying-glass icon next to their homepage in the search results (an effect which I can understand them wanting, since the main content of their page is Flash, which Instant Preview won’t display):
  

  

• Of course, opting out of having Instant Previews entirely may be something of a Pyrrhic victory, since all the webpages around you may have it. If you don’t have it, users might be more skeptical of clicking through to your site. Alternatively, they might click through more, out of curiosity. Read on for options on how to improve your preview portrait instead of deleting:
• It’s important to diagnose why your page appears with chunks missing or with the gray puzzle icon in place of your core content. For example, I’ve run across a number of sites which have disallowed Google from spidering their images, perhaps under the mistaken belief that image search doesn’t help them. Image search can actually enhance your overall rankings, and your referrals from image search can be substantial over time. So, to get your images to appear in Instant Preview, go back to your robots.txt file and remove disallow rules which may have banned Googlebot from visiting directories on your server where you store your site images.
• For Flash content, you really should enhance your site’s overall user-experience by incorporating code which detects whether a visitor’s browser can use the content, and display some default content such as state images or image maps when the browser doesn’t support Flash. For example, you could put the static image content on the page and use Javascript and CSS to overlay the Flash on page load for browsers which support it. In this way, Google Instant Preview may display the image content, allowing the page to look right when previewed. I’ve actually used screen-grabs of the Flash interface itself in order to create these default images for purposes of graceful degradation.
• For YouTube videos, you might be able to do something similar. You can probably set up a static preview image of the video interface and then use Javascript and CSS layers to overlay the actual YouTube video embed code for browsers which support it.
• For Google Maps, instead of using their embed code which relies upon iframes to deliver the dynamic map interface, you could take a screengrab of the map and set it up as a regular static image, possibly linking that image back to the URL for the map.
• For site-wide applications using Google Maps, I believe their API also provides a static image option which could be used instead of the iframe delivery. Obviously, if you’re going for the dynamic functionality, these two options are not going to be preferable.
• Another Google Maps option would be to attempt to use NOFRAMES tags around a screengrab image of the map. You’ll need to test this to see if Instant Previews is correctly interpreting and displaying noframed stuff.
• Finally, for Google Maps you could also use the Javascript/CSS method I suggested for handling Flash and YouTube videos. Place the map iframe on a layer which will be made to overlay a static image of the map.
• Optimizing the call-out text in Preview Images is even more tricky. You may have noticed that Google magnifies portions of text, displaying these snippets larger in boxes on the preview image of your webpages, depending upon the search keywords used. To optimize for this, if it’s displaying badly for some reason, you would need to experiment with placing the page’s most-popular keywords in advantageous places on the page, and then waiting to see how Google highlights it later on in the Instant Previews. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
• I’ve also seen Instant Previews highlight certain images on a page, by drawing outlines around them. I believe this may occur when the search keyword matches the image’s ALT text. If this looks unattractive, you could experiment with adjusting the ALT text and see how it looks, just as with the callout snippets. However, I caution that removing ALT text from images could hurt your page’s overall keyword relevancy determination, and impair your image SEO work.
• It might be a daunting prospect, but another possibility for optimizing for Instant Previews is to redesign. Instant Previews is a very small wakeup call that website appearance matters, and will impact your effectiveness. Considering how Google likes to quantify userexperience and incorporates usability into rankings, website appearance may impact your rankings in search more and more — you could choose to get ahead of the curve now by making your site appear optimally in the little previews as well as when visitors come to the site.

I expect that Google will likely (hopefully) work upon closing the many gaps in how Instant Previews represent pages. Until then, these tips may be useful to you in optimizing how your site appears in Instant Previews.

For internet marketers, there’s a really compelling reason why one should seriously consider paying the fees and going through the steps for obtaining a trust seal: they can inspire consumer confidence.

Some of the more popular website trust seals include Trust Guard, ValidSafe, Merchant Safe, TRUSTe, VeriSign, McAfee Secure, and VeriSign.

There have been a number of different academic researcher studies which have found that trust seals can improve rates for online purchases. In one research paper from 2001, “Myth or Reality: Effect of Trust-Promoting Seals in Electronic Markets,” Xiaorui Hu, Zhangxi Lin, and Han Zhang found that the seals can encourage consumers to buy from storefronts they are not familiar with, and that the seals that consumers recognized more influenced them more. David Gefen’s earlier paper, “E-commerce: the role of familiarity and trust,” also found support for the theory that trust seals influenced online book purchase decisions.

However, online website trust seals decended from their offline counterparts, which already had a long history, if not track record. In 1894, due to faulty electrical parts causing fires, the National Board of Fire Underwriters started performing the first tests on the combustibility of insulation materials — their mark was the Underwriters Laboratory or “UL” seal of certification. But, even before that, seals of quality, certifications, trustmarks, and seals of approval have been in use by tradesmen or service providers. Royal seals of approval likely date back a few hundred years more.

Although there is not as much research on the subject, I think there’s sufficient evidence to indicate that trust seals on websites probably will also translate into increased brick-and-mortar visitors. Trust seals or trustmarks and other visual cues are absorbed by consumers online as they are researching to decide which business to go to. If a consumer is comparing two different local businesses, a trust seal could potentially tip the scales if many other factors are similar.

We know that store owners are also concerned about various ratings and reviews websites — quite a few businesses even choose to proclaim their great ratings on their webpages by displaying the official ratings badge, such as from Yelp.

And simply having a “Zagat Rated” sticker on your restaurant window is likely to increase your walk-in customer traffic for restaurants. I’m always mildly impressed when I walk up to a restaurant with the Zagat sticker. In districts which have a lot of shopping and restaurants, the Zagat sticker could get more conversions as people walk from eatery to eatery, reading the menus before deciding on a place to dine.

For both online and offline, the Better Business Bureau probably has just about the best and widest degree of recognition. I suspect that placing your BBB badge on your site may directly result in increased referrals and increased conversions into paying customers because it increases confidence.

Now, is there any evidence that trust seals on websites can improve rankings for local brick-and-mortar stores’ online listing rankings? I don’t know of any study as of yet, but I suspect it would be very hard to isolate such an effect for certain, because I think that many sites which display the seals may tend to already be more-popular and more-successful businesses.

Now Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that he considers one of the future issues that’s critical to the future of the internet is the security of webservers (see video below). We know that Google has spent a lot of effort around alerting users who click on pages from sites deemed to be risky, as well as they’ve also alerted webmasters when they sense that their sites may’ve become compromised. So, it’s just possible that Google has pretty good data on whether some of the website security certification services are any good or not, too, and they might choose to use those services’ badges as a signal for trustworthiness of sites. But, there’s no absolute proof that they are doing this.

If I were Google, I might choose to add the presence of trust badges into assessments of trustrank and overall popularity assessments. While Google themselves already have a lot of data around whether a site has malware and such on it, they’re open to other security assessment data, and they might also decide that consumers tend to like sites that have such badges more as well.

But, you shouldn’t consider it just for search ranking purposes — you should consider it for improving consumer perceptions of your company. This is one way to inspire confidence and impress potential customers.

In fact, there are a few different badges that I’d recommend you consider beyond the BBB or industry-specialized badges such as Zagat’s. Some local chambers-of commerce provide member badges, or you could even have your graphic artist manufacture one, if you’re a member of your chamber. Also, there are now green business certifications, fair trade certifications, and more which could enhance your profile in consumers’ eyes.

Of course, some of the online trust badges really will not make much sense from a small business’s perspective, since they may be priced more for large online retailers than for a small, local, brick-and-mortar store. This advice is really more for higher-price product retailers and for businesses operating within hotly-contested business verticals. If you’re in a highly competitive business vertical, you just might consider leveraging a trust seal in order to help squeaze every last chance of edging above your competition in the search engine results pages. I could easily see this as being one of the many potential ranking factors in Google Place Search and Google Maps.

For those who’ve been following our articles and conference presentations for the past few years, none of these broad categories of signals come as any sort of a surprise.

Although Google LatLong declares in their post’s title that it’s about “How Local Search Ranking Works”, they’re still understandably obscure for the most part, and avoid providing all that many specifics. There’s a natural tension between informing businesses on how to provide Google with ideal information necessary for ranking, and providing so much info that search engine optimization specialists have “undue advantage” (from Google’s perspective).

So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to list out a number of more specific factors which could feed into Relevance, Prominence and Distance. Read on for a refresher on local search ranking factors which likely could contribute to each of these.

RELEVANCE

• Business Name matches the user’s search keyword phrase;
• Business Category (in Google Places) matches the user’s search keyword phrase;
• Business Description or additional data fields match the user’s search query;
• Keywords found on the Business’s website match the user’s search query;
• Keywords on the Business’s website and Google Places fields indicate a match for the user’s search location;
• Description text for the videos and images related to the Business include keyword phrases which match the user’s search query;
• Business Categories may be mapped to match related Categories. For instance, if the user seeks “Restaurants”, but you’re only listed as a “Cafe”, then Google would likely choose to display your listing due to thesaurus relativity.
• Fuzzy matching algorithms can also come into play for Relevance. For instance, common misspellings may be matched between the user’s queries and contents of your listing, website, and other data sources about your business.
• Keyword relevance also comes into play with all of the various data sources which Google associates with your listing. For instance, keywords found in your internet yellow pages listings, newspaper articles about you, and places where people mention your business — all of these could be matched up with the search keywords users supply when searching for local businesses.
• It should be noted that it’s likely that information on your website and directly in your Google Place page may be deemed to be more important and therefore more heavily-weighted in relevancy considerations than information on less-central pages such as internet yellow pages, articles, etc. However, having some level of keyword consistency among all the resources citing your business listing could additively help your overall relevancy scoring.

PROMINENCE

• Prominence would be composed of signals which could help Google assess your company’s overall popularity compared with other similar businesses. Google’s classic ranking assessment is therefore also one of their prime signals for local rankings: PageRank. PageRank involves the number of webpages linking to a webpage or website, and the relative importance of each of the pages which are linking.
• Citations are the new link where local search results are concerned, so having webpages that mention your company name, address, and phone number could help to build up your signal weight for relative popularity.
• Your business’s location itself may independently have prominence signals associated with it, somewhat independent of the reputation of your business itself, and this could theoretically influence your rankings. For instance, a Chinese Restaurant tucked away on an off-street in a residential neighborhood might be assessed as less-popular than an otherwise similar Chinese Restaurant which happens to be located next door to a major tourist destination. While this may sound like a proximity signal, it’s really more about the relative popularity of places themselves which then may apply to a local business or organization. So, if your company is located next to a place which merits an article in Wikipedia, or in a highly-trafficed neighborhood, or next to a popular amusement park, you may reap the benefit of the popularity coming off of it.
• Reviews and Ratings are an obvious indicator of popularity and quality, although they’re so obvious that Google has long stated that rating values themselves are not used for ranking purposes. However, there still appears to be some association between highly-rated/reviewed companies and rankings. It’s unclear if this is cause or effect, however, since the most-popular businesses (as assessed through other signals) are also often those which have the best ratings. Further, Google’s recent algorithmic tweaks in the wake of the “Decor My Eyes” story may now be incorporating some review sentiment analysis in determining negative ranking criteria — possibly using such info to penalize rankings of bad companies, while not really using them to influence positive rankings.
• Consumer Click-Throughs to a business from Google search results has been a controversial/theoretical factor among search marketing experts, although Google patent filings document this as a potential metric which could be used for assessing relative popularity/importance. Under this concept, if your business listing info were clicked-upon or otherwise interacted-with more than that of similar competitors appearing in the same SERPs, you could get a ranking boost.
• Social Media signals are likely to be an increasing Prominence factor. Social media interactions are already influencing real-time search as well as personalized search, and I’d bet they may be influencing even more than what the search engines have openly disclosed. For instance, the number of Facebook “likes” of a business and its associated pages should be a valuable signal to search engines. Increasingly, assessments of importance of social media mentions will also rely upon the relative importance/prominence of the person/account posting the mention.

DISTANCE

• Distance has been one of Google Maps prime local ranking signals since inception — so much so that I once jokingly suggested businesses might move locations in order to rank better. It used to be that businesses which were located closest to city centroids had a major advantage over businesses located further out from city centers. Over time, Google has adjusted the weighting of the various ranking factors so that proximity doesn’t have quite the overly-heavy influence it once did, but it still factors in. So, the main element of this has been the relative radial distance from city centroids. There really isn’t much one can do to alter your location, so the classic old business advice still remains valid in this respect: “Location, location, location.”
  

  

• Google has altered some from dependence upon the city centroids, however, and now they are factoring-in the outlines of cities, ZIP code region outlines, or using something like heat maps of population densities in order to figure out location associations according to geographic position.
• For businesses desiring to have a good Distance signal, there is overlap between this and Relevancy signals. It’s important to mention your location’s city name, neighborhood name, as well as various other location nicknames that people may be using to search for businesses in your area. For instance, many denizens of Manhattan use the abbreviation “NYC” when searching online.
• Finally, many service-based businesses provide work in major metro areas beyond the borders of the smaller city region where their listing is physically located. For instance, a Plumber located in Orange, California, might offer services to numerous cities in the greater Los Angeles region. For these types of businesses, it’s very important to mention the names of each of the cities where they offer service — mentioning the names on their Google Place page, website, and other citation sources.
• Downtown searches may still be one special case where centroid distance is particularly influential.

For more information, also be sure to read my “Local SEO Primer” on how to rank in Google Place Search Results.