News Blogs: How They Rank in SEO Worldwide

JERUSALEM — As a former Boston newspaper-reporter and editor who now works in Israel in SEO and Internet marketing while still writing journalistic articles on the side, I have mixed feelings about both fields because I understand the benefits and limitations of each. In two prior posts here, I wrote how social-media guidelines have changed the nature of advertising and how social-media icons have made headlines extremely boring. Here, I will elaborate on why different Google results for “news blogs” — as well as all other SEO keywords — appear for different people at different locations in different languages.

Yes, I used the same word multiple times (which is usually a sign of poor writing) to emphasize the point that Google search-results are increasingly different as a result of geographical targeting, personalization, and the prominent role that social-media today is beginning to play in organic search and SEO.

First, I searched in Google for “news blogs” in Hebrew “?????? ????? (blogim hadashot)”:

Then, I searched for “news blogs” in Google in English from Israel (using an ISP that is associated with a Hebrew-speaking country — the locations of the searcher and that which is being searched are ranking factors). Here were the top-ten search-results for the term:

The Guardian blogs, The Huffington Post, Topix.com, Fox News blogs, CNN blogs, Sky News blogs, ABC News blogs, Reuters’ Africa News blog, Google News blog, The Telegraph blogs

Next, I asked friends in various countries to tell me the top-ten SERPs that appeared for the “news blogs” search in English from their countries.

An American searching from Washington, D.C.:

The Huffington Post, Topix.com, Fox News blogs, CNN blogs, ABC blogs, The Best of Blogs, Blogs.com, NPR’s The Two-Way blog, Reuters’ Africa News blog, Google News blog

An American searching from New Jersey:

The Huffington Post, New York Times blogs, Topix.com, New York Daily News blogs, FOX News blogs, CNN blogs, ABC News blogs, The Best Of, Blogs.com, NPR blogs

An American searching from Turkey:

The Guardian blogs, The Huffington Post, Topix.com, Fox News blogs, CNN blogs, Sky News blogs, ABC News blogs, Reuters’ Africa News blog, Google News blog, New York Daily News blogs

Although everyone should know that searches for a term in a given language (as in my Hebrew example) will return results in that language, there are additional significant differences between the search results listed above. The top-ranking site for people searching in English in the United States was the Huffington Post; for those searching in English outside of the United States, it was The Guardian (of the United Kingdom). British sites like Sky News and The Telegraph also appeared only to me and my friend searching from Turkey. This is likely a result of the fact that people outside the United States are much more likely than Americans to read news blogs — and news in general — from Great Britain and have those websites in their Google search-history (which influences the results that appear in organic search) as a result. (See an addendum at the bottom of the post for SEO-specific data on the results.)

The difference in results is one reason that the use of an SEO-software tool like SEO Rankchecker for Firefox by SEO Book is extremely important:

First, the tool returns the non-personalized rankings for where your website sits in SERPs neutrally for your targeted keywords. Second, as the Options window of the tool shows, one can receive the rankings in the major search-engines for any country.

Still, there are even more options. To see foreign SERPs, one can add a search parameter to the URL like this to return U.S-based results while in another country (see the part in bold at the end):

http://www.google.com/search?&q=news%20blogs&gl=us

(Thanks to Dennis Gal for reminding me of this method.) These were the top ten results personalized for me if I had been searching from the United States:

The Huffington Post, Fox News blogs, Topix.com, CNN blogs, ABC News blogs, The Best of Blogs, Blogs.com, NPR blogs, Reuters’ Africa News blog, Google News blog

Now, take a look at all of these lists of top-ten search results for “news blogs” and see what is different when you go from one query to another — that will tell you how Google search-results will be different from different people in different places.

And there is one last trick. The SEOmoz SERP-Control Planner for Firefox allows for the instant viewing of SERPs with or without the desired geographic and personalized variables:

What surprised me when I first used the tool was that it allows one to see SERPs that are non-personalized and configured to someone from a specific state and city — not just a country. Perhaps I missed the latest SEO news, but is Google now incorporating city and state to a higher degree specifically within general organic-search in addition to the obvious, specific places like Google Maps PPC, Google Places, and Google Maps? For another interesting insight, compare the non-personalized search-results for a keyword in your given location to that which appears when you personally search for the same term — that will give you an idea as far as what Google “thinks” about you based on your search history, Gmail, and other factors. (And for the business, legal, and ethical implications, see our prior post entitled “Google Watch: Is Google a Monopoly?“)

So, the search industry is becoming increasingly complicated. People and companies that offer SEO-consultant services are always asked: “How can we get onto the first page of Google?” Well, it is now time to answer that question with another question: “For whom and for where?” When one analyzes SERP data, one can include any, all, or none of the following variables (among many others), all of which will deliver different Google rankings:

personalized or notlanguagelocation — specified to a given country as well as possibly area and/or citypersonalized for what is popular in social media among one’s friends

For more information, I recommend my prior posts with general tips on HTML search-engine optimization and search-engine optimization URL tips for news blogs and journalistic websites.

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Here is some basic SEO data from the SEO Book Toolbar for Firefox for the various sites that were listed among the results. They will also give some insight into why certain ones ranked higher than others at certain times.

The Huffington Post (PR 8, Yahoo! link domain 16M, Majestic domains linking 516K)The Guardian blogs (PR 7, Yahoo! link domain 11M, Majestic domains linking 942K)Fox News blogs (PR 5, Yahoo! link domain 7M, Majestic domains linking 590K)CNN blogs (PR 7, Yahoo! link domain 31M, Majestic domains linking 2M)Topix.com (PR 5, Yahoo! link domain 2M, Majestic domains linking 156K)Sky News blogs (PR 6, Yahoo! link domain 3M, Majestic domains linking 222K)ABC News blogs (PR 7, Yahoo! link domain 17M, Majestic domains linking 165K)Reuters’ Africa News blog (PR 6, Yahoo! link domain 13M, Majestic domains linking 849K)Google News blog (PR 8, Yahoo! link domain 270M, Majestic domains linking 7M)New York Daily News blogs (PR n/a, Yahoo! link domain 3M, Majestic domains linking 352K)The Telegraph blogs (PR 5, Yahoo! link domain 5M, Majestic domains linking 675K)NPR’s The Two-Way blog (PR 7, Yahoo! link domain 5M, Majestic domains linking 530K)Blogs.com (PR 6, Yahoo! link domain 15M, Majestic domains linking 403K)The Best of (PR 5, Yahoo! link domain 30K, Majestic domains linking 3K)New York Times blogs (PR 7, Yahoo! link domain 23M, Majestic domains linking 2M)

Famous Blogs: How to Work for Yourself With One

If you ever wanted to know why it is more important than ever to work for yourself — online or in a similar capacity — just take a look at this recent piece of business news:

Lowe’s Cos., the No. 2 home improvement retail chain, is cutting 1,700 managerial jobs while adding up to 10,000 part-time workers in order to better staff its stores for weekend shoppers.

Sadly, I completely understand why Lowe’s is taking this action — essentially, the company is saving on the costs of benefits and related items by having fewer full-time workers and more part-time ones. (Ignore the PR reason “to better staff its stores for weekend shoppers.”) In today’s tough economy — and even before the so-called Great Recession, which might even lead to the return of the Great Depression — it is an all-too-common practice.

When I was an M.B.A. student, a finance professor asked my class a question: “What is the goal of any business?” Most of us responded, “To maximize profit.” That was only half-correct. The true answer? “To maximize the value of the company for the shareholders.” Usually — but not always — that involves the maximization of profits. (One significant exception is when analysts decide to focus more on revenue than profit as a sign of a particular company’s strength. But I digress.)

Perhaps I have become cynical in my young age of thirty, but I have been — to put it bluntly — screwed over by enough bad bosses and business owners since I graduated from college to realize that my finance professor’s axiom is indeed true. It is just one reason why I advocate that you should work for yourself using SEO wiki and social-media history. I do this by offering SEO-consultant services and being a professional blogger.

Now, it is important make a point. The modern, corporate strategy of maximizing profits by minimizing salaries, benefits, and related items will indeed provide short-term growth — but at the cost of long-term success. Studies on organizational and corporate culture have determined what creates positive and negative employees — and the results are not exactly the inverse of each other.

First, the factors that foster negative attitudes the most is poor compensation and a lack of job security. Understandably, it makes employees angry and frustrated. I have seen this personally at two companies for whom I worked — one in journalism in Boston and one of the Israel start-up companies in the Israel high-tech industry. People were (respectively) unmotivated to write good articles or increase traffic when they knew that their already-poor pay would never increase or that someone would always be fired every week because of the management’s impatience.

However, the factor that fosters positive attitudes the most is not the opposite (good compensation) because the good feeling that arises after a salary increase dissipates after just a few weeks. What keeps employees positive is the work environment — friendly co-workers and bosses, praise for work done, job security, and duties that are liked. Most people, according to research, would rather work for such a company with a slightly-lower salary than for a firm that pays very well but feels like a slave-labor camp.

If a company wants to maximize the efficiency of its work force, it should not pay poorly and create a positive environment. However, Lowe’s — among other firms — seems to be doing just the opposite despite the fact that the actions will hurt the long-term value of the company while short-term profits increase.

Personally, I think it all boils down to both greed and short attention-spans in the modern age. While it is obviously good for public companies to produce quarterly reports, investors give them too much weight. Quarter-traders (who are slightly better than day-traders) buy or sell based on short-term performance even though financial wizards like Warren Buffet have always correctly posited that the best investing strategy is to buy shares in companies with good business-plans and long-term visions — and then hold for years. A company that takes a quarterly loss from investing in capital will see more growth down the financial line. But firms, obviously, must do what will please their investors over the next quarter — since, as my professor said, the goal of a business is to maximize its value for the shareholders.

So, I understand why Lowe’s did what they did. But that does not make it prudent over the long-term. Any retail store like Lowe’s will live or die based on the interaction between low-level employees on the customers who provide sales revenue. And every full-time employee who becomes part-time and loses his benefits will be unhappy — and that will be evident, if even in a subconscious way, to customers.

Happy employees benefit companies in long-term ways that are not quantifiable on a profit-and-loss statement. For example, a friend of mine in the United States earned a high five-figure salary before he was laid off in the Great Recession. Now, every open job in his field is paying tens of thousands less. While the company may be imagining larger profits by paying lower salaries, the fact remains that every person hired will not be happy — they will be less productive, and at least the good ones will jump ship to another firm (one the economy improves) that does not nickle-and-dime employees whenever it can. In the end, the company will lose.

Famous Blogs

Still, the financial reason is understandable — albeit short-sighted. And in such an environment, can people be blamed for giving the digital finger to the rat race and then working for themselves online? Companies may complain of a lack of quality employees at the moment, but I would hypothesize that many are starting their own small businesses rather than work as a slave to employers who no longer care about them. In the Internet Age, after all, the barriers-to-entry are low.

If you want to work for yourself, it will be important to establish an online presence that will be ranked among the top blogs and famous blogs. After all, no matter what product or service you offer, your efforts will amount to a digital nothing if people don’t know about it. So, it is important to choose good SEO marketing-software to market yourself online.

Lost Blogs: How NOT to Become One of Them

Second in an ongoing series

Here is a (unfortunate) rule of digital thumb: Ninety-nine percent of the content on the Internet is, to use a polite phrase, less than stellar. And your writings will become yet another one of the many forgotten, never-read, lost blogs on the Web unless you pursue the right SEO, blog-content, and online-marketing strategy.

In my prior post “5 Ways NOT to Become a Search-Engine Optimization Blogger,” I listed specific reasons why your blog — whether personal or business — will not become successful. At the risk of becoming too pessimistic, I will provide several more. (Do not worry — a future post in this series will offer advice on what writers should do).

Your Content is Generic and Essentially Duplicated. Google’s recent “Panda” update to its algorithm (see here and here) has been much-discussed in online-marketing circles, but this gist is simple: Google wants — with good reason — sites that offer original, researched, quality content to rank higher than so-called content farms that use anything akin to article-marketing automation. One blog post or article of the former is better than ten articles of generic content that insert a keyword into every few sentences. Prose quality is better than keyword-based quantity. (For more information, I recommend the analyses here, here, here, and here.)

The take-away: Why should anyone read your post or article on topic X rather than that by anyone else? Solve this problem, and you will produce quality content and gain better search-engine rankings as well.) I do not mean to toot my own digital horn, but I want to provide evidence that I practice what I preach. At my Considerations journalism group-blog, I wrote a lengthy article two months ago on the differences between how men and women communicate in dating. The post targeted the low-competition and high-traffic keyword “why women lie” (in addition to “women communication.”) According to my latest data, the post now ranks ninth in Google for that keyword despite any further SEM efforts on my part. I merely took the time to research and write quality content, and I do the same for every blog post there and here. Research and write, research and write — the same rules for writing a good doctoral dissertation or journalism article still apply online.

People Are Blocking Your Website. Try this example. Do a search for anything in Google, click on a search result, and then hit the “back” button in your browser. Your cached (saved) search-results will appear — but with this addition:

At the bottom of the organic search-result on which you clicked, the option to “block all [the domain in question] results” will appear (unless you are using one of the few browsers that do not support this Google innovation). The search-engine giant now allows people to block entire domains from future search results. (Google’s blog provides more information, and the company’s Chrome browser has an available blacklisting add-on.)

The take-away (though it should be obvious): Do not do any deceptive, annoying, or malicious. Do not aim to rank highly for a keyword that is entirely irrelevant to your website — for example, getting traffic by targeting a popular TV show to draw people to a forex or gambling website. Do not have so many advertising pop-ups that your website makes people never want to return. And so on. Once a person blocks your website in Google — for any reason — you will lose that person forever. Just imagine this one example multiplied by thousands or millions of online searchers.

You Are Not Using Your Time Efficiently. As I wrote in one of my first posts on this blog on SEM wikipedia, the entire field of Internet marketing can seem complicated and cumbersome — the entire process can involve content creation, on-page SEO optimization, link building, social-media marketing, and so on. Each part is important, and devoting one’s time entirely to just one aspect leads to less-than-optimal results. As an example of how I work each day, I recommend my post on “How to Become a SEO Blogger Over the Social-Media Week.”

Don’t Become One of the Lost Blogs

Still, as I write here to the point of possible redundancy, the goal is simply to write SEO-optimized, quality content on a site that encourages social-media sharing well. The rest — from Facebook “likes” to backlinks from authoritative websites — will then take care of itself. For more information, I recommend my prior posts “More-General Keywords: How NOT to Get Traffic” and “Famous Blogs: How to Work for Yourself With One.” There are many important considerations to know to ensure that your online work does not become regulated to the countless number of lost blogs whom no one reads and which deliver little benefit to your personal website or online business.