WebConnoisseur

Loss of Limb: What Radiohead could have done to improve their self-distributed King of Lambs Album web success.

Over three years ago I beat up Radiohead for the online execution of In Rainbows. I was frustrated because they had a great opportunity to prove the self-distribution model online, but made several simple mistakes that may have reduced their effectiveness. With their latest release, King of Limbs, which hit the web today, they made some similar mistakes.

Before I jump into the King of Limbs website improvement suggestions, I do want to applaud their music and alternative distribution experiments. They are still doing a great job changing the music industry–I just wish they partnered with a company that knew what they were doing online.

King of Limbs Site Improvement Suggestions:

Radiohead King of Limbs Album Website

Here’s what I wish Radiohead would have done with their King of Limbs Album Website from different standpoints.

King of Limbs Album Cover

• Splash homepage. Relying on Image map for navigation with poor alt text. Glad I’m not blind.
• But they want me to be blind. There is no description of what is on the album. How many tracks? What songs?
• No opportunity to preview any of the music. I don’t need to hear the whole song, but I would love to hear a sneak peek before drop $9-48.00.
• No help deciding what digital version to choose from.
• Newspaper Album terminology confusing.
• No links to any information about the band. No links to other sites about the band or other albums.
• Navigation comes and goes. Homepage has no navigation other then image map. Some pages have Home link, Order Tracking, Help and Checkout. Other have only Home link and some have Home, Order Tracking and Help, but no checkout.
• Checkout jumps to www.thekingoflimbs.com through strange transaction URL redirect. If you started on kingoflimbs.com, this may trip up some people, especially with higher levels of browser security.
• Not brought into a secure form until you fill out your email address and password. Order form being non-secure until this step may scare some people.
• No choice on the download options. Does it always come down as a zip file?
• The zip file came with no instructions whatsoever. Some people might want help loading the MP3s into iTunes, etc.
• The zip file included the album cover, but didn’t bother with a song list, lyrics, videos, art, or any information about the album

Social:

• No images to be used as thumbnails on Facebook or other sharing platforms when linking to the site.
• No sharing options on the site. Why not encourage people to brag about downloading the album?
• Completely reliant upon news organizations to point to the URL and share the news. No information about the release.
• No link or embed of the music video. The press felt it was worth sharing, why did Radiohead skip it?
• No evidence of interaction with fans on release day – other then a Tweet that says you can download the album.

SEO:

• A splash homepage with an image map. Seriously?
• Title tag is: “The King of Limbs : Where are you?” No mention of Radiohead, music, album, etc. “Where are you” not helping anything.
• The alt tags on the image map are not helping the site (The Americas, S.E.Asia, UK/Ireland, Europe, Rest of the World.
• No meta description. Guess they don’t care what their listing looks like in the engines.
• Used only an H2 and a H5. I’m scratching my head on why they chose those two.
• Had the search engines crawl the correct URL before the album launch. A search for “King of Limbs” has the following URL #1 in Google: thekingoflimbs.com/CC.php?ID=2.
• Both canonical version of the site resolve (thekingoflimbs.com and www.thekingoflimbs.com). Pick one!
• KingofLimbs and www.kingoflimbs also resolve – I can’t tell which domain they want to use.
• All the different domain variations clearly creates duplicate content problems, but each area of the map you click on generates the same content–only the price changes.
• Most of the URLs seem to push through a php page that uses a javascript URL rewrite.
• Passing a large amount of link equity to shop.sandbag.uk.com.
• The various SEO mistakes make it so search spammers, music resellers and bit torrents can potentially outrank Radiohead for their own album. Since they are self-distributing this could result in lost sales or unnecessary commissions.

Maybe it doesn’t matter?
Despite all the issues I raise above (and many more I didn’t bother pointing out), I’m sure the King of Limbs album will be highly successful. This site is still executed better than the In Rainbows site was. Again, I’m frustrated that they didn’t put the web to full use, especially if it is their primary distribution method.

Unnecessary disclaimer: I listened to the album while writing the post and must say that I enjoyed it. So far Codex is my favorite song.

Something caught my attention while in Gmail today. Google had an ad targeting SEOs to get them to use Google Adwords for their clients. Seemed reasonable, but I was a little surprised by what I found.

Here’s the Google Engage Ad I saw:

Google Enage Program for SEOs

I clicked on the link and ended up on the homepage for Google Engage. Immediately you are greeted with the following message:

Are you a search engine optimization (SEO) professional that helps small businesses with their online presence?
The Google Engage program offers search engine optimization professionals like yourself the training and tools that will help you offer AdWords services to your clients.

Clearly there is no SEO engagement here, but that is fine. They simply want more Adwords clients. Reading further through the page, I was surprised to see the page was written by someone who used English as a 2nd language:

“As a member, you will get the following benefits: Trainings to build and enhance your AdWords skills”
“By enhancing your online skill set and knowledge of Google products, you’ll be more attractive to potential clients and more beneficial to your existing ones.”
“Register today and begin further growing your business with Google!”
“Google Engage has already helped thousands of businesses and individuals around the world establish great business opportunities.”

Do I want to be trained on bidding for English words by an organization that uses “trainings” on the most important page for their program? Reading through the entire page, the choice of words reminds me of some of the poor content creation attempts I see on the web that were written by agencies based in the Philippines who will write articles for $0.05 a piece.

To make matters worse, the only customer quote they could come up with was from WEBSEM based out of Israel. They didn’t even list his name, nor did they link to his site. A search for WEBSEM agency doesn’t work, but WEBSEM Israel gives me a LinkedIn page. The only person close to being a “Founder” attached to the company is Asaf P who lists himself as the Operating manager. His link goes to www.websem.co.il which, according to Google, is completely in Hebrew. Of course, translating it to English produces poor results.

There’s nothing wrong with using a customer quote out of Israel, but I found myself looking at the URL several times to see if I, in fact, am on Google.com because there were very few signals that made me feel like the Google Engage program was legitimate.

But I did find this video:

/End Rant – Okay, I know I’m picking on Google Engage, but I do think they could get better “engagement” if they ran their homepage text through a fluent English-speaking editor & marketer.

Some SEM agencies will be put off by the Google Engage program (Is Google Trying to Steal their customers?). I specialize in only Organic SEO Consulting and a couple of my customers already spend over a million dollars each month on AdWords, so my participation would in the program would primarily be motivated by the $100 credit I could give to some of my smaller customers.

Over on my SEO Naturale consulting site I added a post about the little blue marker you may be seeing on Google SERPs. The little arrow or triangle was added to help with keyboard navigation on Google (which few people will probably use). The problem is that it will likely cause false paid search clicks, poor user experience, and extra weight to the number 1 listing in Google (whether it be paid or organic).

Read the full article to discover: Google Blue Arrow Issues

The Search Engine Journal was kind enough to interview me about various SEO topics, including: evolution of SEO, using UGC to drive SEO, Domainers vs. SEOs, and making the transition from in-house SEO to out-house SEO (working out of my house as an SEO consultant).

I didn’t realize it until now, but this is my 2nd interview with the Search Engine Journal–the first was over 3 years ago. If you dig reading about me 1/10th as much as I do, then I suggest you check out both interviews:

Dustin Woodard 2010 SEJ Interview
by Todd Mintz
Dustin Woodard 2007 SEJ Interview
by Jessica Bowman

Besides learning more about me, I think you’ll find some helpful SEO tips inside both interviews.

In the SEO community, there’s been debates as to whether you should bother using search engine webmaster tools. Thanks to the latest set of data Google is providing, there is more reason then ever before to create a webmaster tools account for your sites.

On the positive side of having an account were points like these:

• Ability to verify ownership – sites willing to verify might be more trusted in the eyes of engines
• Direct messaging & data from the search engines – the data to date hasn’t been very impressive & messaging typically only occurs if you’ve been hacked
• Help identifying issues – learn about crawl errors, robots.txt issues.
• Ability to submit things like sitemaps, canonical preferences, or report spam or malware.

On the negative side of having an account were things like:

• Giving the engines too much information – personal emails, IP, site network, etc.
• Most sites don’t register, and if you are properly optimized & crawlable there isn’t much reason to
• The information provided was far from spectacular, so why bother.

Thanks to the new types of data Google is sharing, visiting the webmaster tool area is worthwhile. Now you can look at things like:

• Natural search impressions
• Natural search clicks & ranking data, including breakdowns by rank and the pages that rank, plus sortable data
• Greater number of incoming links reported
• Site crawl speed.

The ranking & impression data I find the most interesting. I’ve long used analytics tools to pull out the page 2 queries, for example, but having exact ranking, impression and click through data helps webmasters better understand areas to make improvements, the meaning of dropping from a #1 ranking to a #2, how much personalized & geographical search components might affect ranking, and the wide variety of rankings & words any one page can have. It would be nice to see the data be more specific & reliable (right now clicks of less then 10 during the reporting period leave us with essentially no data).

Preferabbly, all the new data shared in Webmaster tools would be included directly into Google Analytics, but I’m happy to see the new data & hope they continue to expand the data set. Nice work Google Webmaster Tools team!

SEOs have long been preaching the importance of anchor text in links and have long pointed out LinkedIn as a great place to gain keyword-rich links. Hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn users have followed this great advice, but something changed late last year that no one else seemed to notice.

Note from Dustin: This SEO tip is a reward for those following my blog. I’ve kept this one secret since late last year so I could share it at Searchfest during my talk on Reputation Management earlier this month. I’m sharing it here as a reward for people who have been following me, but will not be actively promoting this tip as I don’t want it to be discovered by too many people, causing LinkedIn or Google to make changes.

Again, SEOs, including myself, have long been preaching that the links you share in your LinkedIn profile should use custom anchor text so instead of the link saying “My Website” or one of the other generic terms, it could pass along a keyword-rich link. For example, my link to this site said something like “Dustin’s SEO Blog” so I was at least giving Google or other engines a better indication to what the site is about–something that is deemed very important in their algorithms.

Well, my advice has changed. Why? Turns out LinkedIn went the way of Twitter & other popular UGC sites and no-followed all the links. Let me say that again, in case you missed it: LinkedIn links no longer count in the eyes of search engines!

This is unfortunate as I believe those links should count. There’s no need for LinkedIn to hoard their link juice and the links are limited, transparent, and attached to real people with real business networks. It also gives spiders a chance to discover small sites it may not discover otherwise. I’m not familiar with search spammers using LinkedIn to game the search engines, but I suppose it may have happened enough for Google to pressure LinkedIn. For those who link to their LinkedIn profiles a lot, the fact that LinkedIn is not linking back to your site (even though you specifically tell it to do so) might be enough reason for you to reconsider.

After some tinkering, I discovered there is a way to get followed links from LinkedIn. Here’s what you need to do:

Go into your LinkedIn profile and edit the links section. Your choices in the drop down should look like this:

You’ll notice that I highlighted “My Website” and “My Blog.” If you choose one of those two, you will get a followed link from LinkedIn. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to customize the text as you can with the “Other” choice, but at least the links will count.

If you are a person who has a lot of different sites, I’d recommend using both My Website and My Blog & using one of the other choices as you prefer (knowing you won’t get link love). Take a look at my profile for an example: Dustin Woodard on LinkedIn. And if you haven’t already done so, you should be using a custom URL (see settings – I used “woodard” so my link is http://www.linkedin.com/in/woodard instead of some random number).

There you go, a free SEO tip of great value to pretty much anyone on the web.

Searchfest Photo credit: seandreilinger

To better explain Wired magazine’s reference to mike siwek lawyer mi searches, I created this experimental blog post. Wired’s excellent article on Google’s algorithm links off to the search phrase: “mike siwek lawyer mi”, which sends you off to Google’s search results page for that query.

The mike siwek search phrase was used as an example of how Google is superior to Bing. Here’s what wired wrote:

The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.

The ironic part is that everyone who is reading the article gets a Google search page that is in no way superior to the Bing because the results have been flooded with coverage of the newly popular search.

Take a look at the current Top 10 Results for a “mike siwek lawyer mi” Google search:

• Mike Siwek Lawyer Mi – What’s Hot (a result from Alexa.com hot urls)
• Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates … (a blog post)
• Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates (tweet meme for the blog post)
• Siwek, Michael E. Attorney in Grand Rapids, Michigan MI (a crumby US Lawyers DB listing)
• Mike Siwek Lawyer MI – Google Search Theory Torn Apart (another blog post)
• Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine (the actual Wired Article this post is about)
• google | Tumblr (a tumblr page that links to the Wired article)
• High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype: How Google works (a PR company blog post summary of the Wired article)
• New Michigan law mandates safer cigarettes, but smokers complain (a newspaper article that quotes the Mike Siwek, the actual Michigan lawyer this whole query is about, but no way to contact Mike)
• How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | B12 Solipsism (another blog post)

Of course, this isn’t fair to Google as the results when Steven Levy was writing the article were probably completely different. However, you would expect Mike Siwek’s site to show up shortly past the media mentions. Not so. Mike’s official law practice site didn’t show up until result 110 on page 11 of Google’s search results–a place where few searchers would dare take the time to navigate to and if they did find it, the listing description doesn’t even mention Mike Siwek, so it probably wouldn’t get clicked on:

The fact that this listing is so buried leads me to believe the search engine result that Google’s engineers were so proud of was result 4 that I list above, which is simply an address database site that is borderline spam and riddled with Google ads.

I count 28 different Google adsense ad listings if you include the next ads arrow tabbing, or 11 without the tabbing. No wonder Bing didn’t want to list this page! The only thing that is slightly impressive about this search is that Google thought to replace Mike Siwek with Michael Siwek.

I don’t mean to beat up on Google too much. I could certainly come up with many examples where Google’s algorithm is superior to Bing, but as an SEO consultant who is paid to constantly monitor the ugly flaws of search engine algorithms, I find this example of “Google’s algorithmic dominance” humorous & worry about the simple mindedness of Google’s top engineers when it comes to evaluating improvements in their algorithm.

Something recently reminded me of an event early in my web marketing and SEO career. For me, it was a very pivotal moment of my career; for you, it might be an entertaining story of a consulting douche bag and how SEO battles don’t change much.

Roll back the clock to a little over a decade ago when cell phones were bricks generally seen only in movies and Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999″ was forward-looking. I graduated from the University of Washington with a couple finance-related degrees and began working for, surprise, a financial company. After quickly proving that my abilities went beyond filling out paperwork for clients and managing portfolios, I spent my time on “special projects”, which included things like investing research, Y2K compliance, & building our web presence.

I quickly discovered the importance of search engines and was quite successful at driving leads & press to the site & company. In 2001, I had increased their assets by over $50 million, was named “Best of the Web” by Forbes three times, and was even selected by Inc Magazine as the best marketer of the year using techniques that have changed little to this day (but now have names). How was this success rewarded? They brought in a consultant.

My boss’s friend was unemployed after his start-up went belly up. I won’t name him, but will describe him. He looked very much like the Comic Guy on the Simpsons – he was large, sported a red goatee, and a greased back pony tail. His previous occupation was as a conservative radio talk show host (seriously – I’m not kidding) and as you can imagine, he was a talker. He loved buzz words, though a true understanding of them was of little importance. And now he was a consultant.

Things seemed a little backwards. If you looked at our resume’s & track records at the time, you would have guessed I was consulting for him. Considering it was my boss’s friend and upper management was wowed by the fancy words and whiteboard drawing, who was I to question the new relationship?

To this day, I can’t recall a single person I couldn’t work with–other then this guy. He was a bully and I was his young prey. His big idea was to change our various sites to a single flash site. When I warned him that search engines have trouble with Flash, his response was that “no one uses search engines to find websites.” Apparently countless web analytics reports showing all our traffic sources wasn’t enough for him, nor was an export of our client referral source records, nor the daily stories of new clients who found us via a specific search query. Facts meant little to this talk show host, unless the facts or half-truths supported his cause. After much back and forth, it was clear that it was his way or the highway.

I decided to take a very large risk (especially considering this was during the dot-com crash & a troubling time for the stock market) – I crafted an email to the President and Vice-president of the company explaining that the direction we were heading in was going to hurt us and that I was ready to leave the company if they continued to use his “services.” Clearly my boss would want to fire me for going over his head and making him look bad, but it was a risk I had to take to restore my sanity and keep the company from driving directly into the brick wall in which it was undoubtedly headed.

The story does have a happy ending. They did get rid of him and I used the existing sites to raise another $200 million (doubling the 20-year old company’s assets) before I left a couple years later to take my boss’s job at a larger company. The irony is that I am now a full-time consultant and he became an anti-consultant evangelist.

From that point on in my career, I decided I would never stay silent when I saw the company I worked for start to take a wrong turn, even if it meant losing my job because I wouldn’t want to work for a company that ignored evidence and experience anyways.

Pubcon is always a great conference and tends to attract more practitioners then some of the other major search conferences, which is something I highly value. I’ll be speaking at Pubcon next week on UGC SEO (optimizing user-generated content to drive large volumes of natural search traffic). Surprisingly, this is my first time speaking at Pubcon and I’ll get to do it with the conference founder, Brett Tabke on the final day of presentations.

Besides the conference sessions, there’s tons of great parties. This year I plan to attend DK’s Poker Tourney and the SEOMoz 3rd Annual Search Spam/Werewolf party (went to the first, but missed it last year).

The Poker Tourney isn’t a charity event this year, but the intentions are still the same. This year Purpose Inc has asked that attendees post one of their favorite charities to a blog post. I’ve decided to mention Kiva, which is a non-profit that enables you to lend money to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries to allow them to get themselves out of poverty. You get to choose who you lend to by reading their profiles and what the money will go towards, then they pay you back so you can lend to another in need.

Hoe to see you in Vegas!

Twitter search seems fairly basic, which often leads to people using 3rd party Twitter tools for searching. Most people don’t realize it, but Twitter some handy search command abilities:

Basic Twitter Search Commands (no surprises here):

• Multi-word queries: if you search multiple words, Twitter’s default search will search tweets containing both (or all words).
  Example: big doggy would find tweets that contain both “big” and “doggy”, but not necessarily the words paired together.
• Exact match queries: if you use quotes, you can limit tweet searches to exact matches.
  Example: “big doggy” would find tweets that contain the exact phrase “big doggy”.
• OR queries: if you are looking for two related or interchangable words, OR queries work well.
  Example: dog OR doggy would find tweets that contain either words.
• Hash Tag queries: Hash tags used to be one of the only methods of putting a stamp on your tweet to help those searching in Twitter, but they not as critical these days as Twitter search has improved. Regardless, people still use hash tags (#), especially when attending events or joining in on a meme
  Example: #ff would find tweets that contain #ff (which stands for Follow Friday).
• At queries: when referencing someone on Twitter, you use @ (at reply), so it makes sense you can search for people doing so.
  Example: @webconnoisseur would find tweets reference me.
• Question queries: target tweets that ask a question.
  Example: web designer ? would most likely find tweets of people looking for web designers.

Advanced Twitter Search Commands:

• Combining queries: You can combine queries to really nail down what you are looking for.
  Example: “seattle startup” OR “seattle start-up” OR “@seattle20″ combines the simple search commands listed above and would be an excellent way to find tweets related to startups in Seattle.
• From and To queries: You can actually target tweets that are specifically sent to or from someone.
  Example: “from:GregBoser” “to:Graywolf” would show me tweets Greg Boser sent to Michael Gray. If you perform a query like this, Twitter will also include a link that will allow you to see the entire conversation, if there is one.
• Exclude queries: You can specify words you don’t want to see in your query.
  Example: hello -kitty would show me hello tweets, but exclude tweets that are reffering to hello kitty or someone saying hello to their kitty on twitter (trust me, you want to stay away from these people).
• Location queries: You can actually limit tweets by location.
  Example: beer near:Seattle within:15mi would show me beer tweets written within 15 miles of Seattle
  
  Note: it isn’t entirely accurate as it appears to go off the location the person has listed in their profile, which isn’t always where they are at the time.
• Date-based queries: You can actually limit tweets by date, both before (use “since:”) or after (use “until:”).
  Example: techcrunch since:2009-09-12 until:2009-09-13 would show me tweets about TechCrunch over the weekend on September 12th or 13th
• Attitudinal queries: Some Twitter users incorporate happy or sad faces into their tweets. You can search these to find attitudes about topics.
  Example: cloudy with a chance of meatballs :) would show me people who were happy to go see or enjoyed the movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
• Source queries: probably one of the least useful queries unless you want to research a 3rd party tool’s adoption, you can do query searches by tweet software source.
  Example: LOL source:tweetdeck would show me LOL tweets that came from someone using tweedeck.
• Link filtered queries: a great way to track down referenced links, this query will limit Twitter searches to tweets that contain links.
  Example: mashable filter:links would show me people’s tweets linking to Mashable articles.
• Jumping forward in older searches if you are hunting for something via Twitter search and want to save yourself from clicking “older” over and over, you can change the page number (after your first older click) in the Twitter URL to jump forward.
  Example: http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=3984008800&page=2&q=fight&rpp=20 is the result I get after searching fight in search.twitter.com and clicking on older once. To jump further back in time and skip a bunch of tweets, I can go up to the browser URL box and change the page=2 portion to page=35 to jump straight to page 35.

Hope you find these Twitter search commands useful. If you know of others, or would like to share your example uses, please leave a comment.