Posted by randfish
By now, most of us have gotten around to doing testing of some sort on our websites, but testing specifically for SEO can be extremely difficult and requires extra vigilance. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains three major t… Continue reading →
Posted by malditojavi
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
Editor’s note: While the images in this post are free of graphic content, there are many suggestive references to potentially objectionable material.
It has come to my attention how PornHub is marketing itself. It is one of the biggest pornographic websites, and I have no idea who is behind their online marketing strategy, but hats off to their team because they’re stepping up the porn websites’ game to the next level.
Let me detail here some of their latest actions and you will understand why I’m so impressed.
‘The Internet has taken porn mainstream’ stated Aurora Snow, a retired porn star when EJ Dickson, editor from The Daily Dot asked her about sexting and amateur porn as causes that have contributed to not see porn as a taboo.
In her interview, in which the main topic covered is her participation as speaker in a conference at Harvard, she points out how many porn industry A-list names have jumped to commercial and mainstream channels (‘James Deen is in a movie with Lindsay Lohan, Sasha Grey is on Entourage’). It’s totally OK if you don’t know any of these names, but it can give you an idea on how p0rn is now more accepted in our society.
Global mobile traffic reached almost 800,000 Terabytes just during last year 2013 and it’s estimated to double that figure in the current year, according to the research provided by Statista/Cisco. If that wasn’t enough, increase of smartphone ownership went from 35% in 2011 to 56% in May 2013 (source).
Even if those figures are not specific to the PornHub’s specific business, we could take the latest statements from Hulu’s CEO pointing out that despite of starting as a desktop app, 50% of their five million subscribers are running their service only through devices (smartphones, tablets).
After many years of selling adult entertainment content through network TV channels, and from there going to home desktops, the porn business knows that nowadays mobile screens are becoming part of our daily routine. And what did PornHub do? Delete any kind of restriction for its mobile users by removing the five videos per day limit still enforceable in their desktop version. What happened then? Take a look to some of the reactions on Twitter.
Let’s not forget to mention the peak of 15,000 mentions in Twitter (you can see it in Topsy screenshot of the next section). On average they don’t go beyond 3,000 – 4,000 mentions per day.
If there are Twitter accounts for things as weird and eccentric such as one for the Big Ben tweeting what time is it, or accounts that only tweet once per year, why shouldn’t a porn site have its own bizarre Twitter account?
Would you be more likely to stablish a conversation between an impersonal company account or would you be more likely to talk if you know who is behind the screen? I guess the second answer is your choice, right? Instead of having a team account, PornHub in Twitter is ‘ PornHub Katie’, what is the name of its Community Manager. The same strategy adopted from its related website, YouPorn and Jude, YouPorn Community Manager.
By giving a quick look into their timeline you will see that they know how to play the Twitter game, and how friendly the conversation they can engage in. They are not they typical conversations that you would have in a open public space though. Not going to include here some of their latest tweets but you can nose around some of their idiosyncrasy (though not all of their tweets are appropriate for all workplaces).
To have deeper insights based on data and not only in my unbiased opinion (I’m more than a follower of their tweets, I’m a devotee!), let’s take the first three competitors for the ‘adult’ category provided by Similar Web.
By analysing them through Topsy, we can see that that effectively xVideos and xHamster can’t compare with PornHub in terms of Twitter presence. If there is another website that is starting to do great on it, that’s YouPorn. But oh surprise, YouPorn belongs to the network of PornHub.
Would you retweet a high-level erotic photo? PornHub knows that you are not likely to do that. Instead, they clearly know how virality works and images are their aces up the sleeves. These are some of their latest memes that you can find if you are following them through Twitter.
Are they not great? Do you think you could it better? Well, today’s your lucky day. Late in 2013 they announced a campaign in order to look for a Creative Director to join them for a year. Their goal? Launch an all-publics national advertising campaign that can be channeled through mainstream media.
Nonetheless, it’s not always sunny in Pornland. With such initiative any designer, or even non-designers, could blame them for doing a spec-based design contest. Spec what? No other thing but ‘ any kind of creative work (…) submitted (…) by designers to prospective clients before taking steps to secure both their work and equitable fees’, as described in NoSpec.com. In other words, they are using royalty-free content submitted that was created painstakingly by designers around the world. Pas cool.
Hijacking trends has also place in its timeline, no matter if it’s about the latest Cinco de Mayo festivity, Rihanna news or if it’s about the SuperBowl. They are pretty conscious about when a porn website might be more ‘needed’ in someone’s life, and that’s the reason they started to offer no video limit on…. Valentine’s Day.
Apple has a huge amount of people that spread their love for the products they make. Buffer is engrossing a community of startup transparency thanks to some of their latest initiatives like the open metrics dashboard powered by Baremetrics or their open salaries posts. Ryan and the team at Product Hunt really care about the power of a ‘true engaged community‘, and ‘not just acquire additional users‘.
At the end, it seems ‘easy’ to grow a community if what you do is good enough. But what happens if your product is porn? What in the beginning seems to be a difficult challenge, growing a porn community in the 21st century is now easier than ever. People are not afraid of showing what they like, even if it’s porn. Sexuality is a dish present in everyday TV shows, parents are aware of sexual education to their children, sex is not a topic to avoid any more in many cases.
Would you invite your followers to send you nude pics? Would you take a send a nude pic that you know is going to be shared to 300 K porn fans? PornHub jumps right in when it’s about talking to the community and make them participants of PornHub history.
In case you feel curious, you can head off to Twitter to get some of the most imaginative and sexy responses and replies to these kind of contests. Totally NSFW, everyone. You were warned.
How does a porn site earns links from ‘normal’ sites? By ‘normal’, I mean non-erotic or non-sexually explicit at all websites.
On one side, PornHub seems to take the role that OkCupid started a while ago with their blog. OkTrends was a blog collecting all original researches and insights from the dating site by giving shape to the ‘hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions’. PornHub has named it ‘PornHub Insights‘ and it’s delightul if you love data and some erotic references.
Extra points: spotted what are two of their favorite tools for visualization: Infogr.am and Tableau
And on the other hand, they have partner up with the Mother Nature by promising to donate one tree for every 100 videos viewed in the ‘Big Dick’ category. Result? 2294. Trees? No, no yet. 2294 referral external backlinks according to the data from MajesticSEO.
I tend to think that everyone does things right, but do we really believe they care that much about nature, or it’s just a ‘gimme some backlinks and promo’ kind of thing? I have my doubts, but by taking a look to the backlink profile from PornHub and the previous mentioned competitors, it seems Mother Nature is great for some link-building. In comparison with its competitors xVideos and xHamster, there is no presence in their 20 best performing backlinks of other content different than p0rn.
‘Translate me this into other words, Javier’. Well, it’s not about the trees is about getting the attention of Cosmopolitan, BetaBeat, Gawker, Huffington Post, Vice, GQ and a long list of mass media audiences.
Type ‘pornhub + justin bieber’ into the search box of your preferred search engine, and check it out. Certainly a SERPs output quite different from similar search queries featuring other famous like ‘pornhub + paris hilton’ or ‘porn hub + kim kardashian’ (not going to link them, but you can look up by yourself).
‘ We are not interested in hosting any Justin Bieber’s sex tapes (…) It’s nothing against Selena Gomez, we just don’t approve of all of Bieber’s gross behavior – spitting on fans, driving dangerously and endangering people, and just being a real jerk‘ were some of PornHub VP’s comments when he was asked about what position PornHub if it was offered to buy or license a possible video leak.
Respectful approach… or just another marketing strategy? Because they might not be interested in such a great asset for their video collection, but they don’t hesitate to target the beliebers, hordes of Justin’s fans no doubting on go to your jugular if you address no nice words against their Messiah.
By the way, were you impressed with PornHub’s performance against its competitors on Twitter? Wait to be speechless when you see the analysis between the 35 million-visits/day-porn-website vs the canadian singer personal account (54 million Twitter foll… Beliebers).
Great marketers have pointed out the importance of setting up the personas you are trying to target within your marketing strategy. A great piece about understanding who is behind the screens can be found also through this same site, written by Mike. Don’t bookmark it, all we know you won’t end up reading it, so do it now.
‘ Research and develop who are my personas will take some of my time‘, you say. If it’s well done, for sure. But have you thought what such a great resource are you going to have? You establish who is your ideal user / visitor / reader, and you create a plan to get his attention. And by ‘attention‘, I mean their clicks, their time to spend on your site, their comments, etc. Let’s be precise, their money.
Does Machinima mean anything to you? It didn’t to me until I watched one of their Youtube videos (kind of NSFW) promoting PornHub. I typed ‘pornhub’ in Google’s famous video platform to check out what other content PornHub was hosting besides their interviews of personalities within their industry.
Machinimia‘s h1 tag describes its business as ‘next generation video entertainment network for the gamer lifestyle and beyond‘. Their services go from ‘monetization of your channel, grow your audience and expand your reach to new platforms‘. With most of its partners belonging to the video-game industry, they are able to deliver and work with these impressive figures.
‘Ok, now I know a bit more about these video-gamers, but how does it is relate with PornHub?’ Glad you are wondering that too. I must be honest, and say that I have been quite reluctant to the vloggers thing – I just prefer written content where you can read or scan what’s being said at your own pace – but after seeing that in just two days Machinima had 700,000 views in a video only featuring PornHub’s initiative, I might change my opinion about vlogging.
After watching the video, and seeing more about what’s the kind of audience Machinima is targeting, don’t you find so many correlations and similarities with Pornhub’s audience?
A quick analyis of search queries made by their visitors and daily sharing the weirdest ones? They got it.
Some ‘machine learning’ to create a porn search engine that guess what kind of videos you are likely to enjoy? They have it too. Not PornHub main site, but a little brother.
I don’t know if it can be considered as ‘innovation’, but as I have pointed out before, posts researching, analyizing about what kind of sexual genres are the most viewed, what are the sexual preferences for certain USA regions and football matches impact their visits figure depending if you team is winning or losing, is certainly something you don’ t expect from a porn site. And yep, they are on that too through PornHub Insights.
In terms of marketing, promotion, buzzing, if all the porn sites out there would take their business as seriously as the PornHub is doing, marketing friends, we would have such a big pool of opportunities to learn. Because as I read while ago in Jordi’s post, ‘porn sites are the best places to learn about conversion‘ and I would add about online marketing too.
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Posted by randfish
Recently, Moz contributor Scott Wyden, a photographer in New Jersey, received a warning in his Google Webmaster Tools about some links that violated Google’s Quality Guidelines. Many, many site owners have received warnings like this, and while some are helpful hints, many (like Scott’s) include sites and links that clearly do not violate the guidelines Google’s published.
Here’s a screenshot of Scott’s reconsideration request:
(note that the red text was added by Scott as a reminder to himself)
As founder, board member, and majority shareholder of Moz, which owns Moz.com (of which YouMoz is a part), I’m here to tell Google that Scott’s link from the YouMoz post was absolutely editorial. Our content team reviews every YouMoz submission. We reject the vast majority of them. We publish only those that are of value and interest to our community. And we check every frickin’ link.
Scott’s link, ironically, came from this post about Building Relationships, Not Links. It’s a good post with helpful information, good examples, and a message which I strongly support. I also, absolutely, support Scott’s pointing a link back to the Photography SEO community and to his page listing business books for photographers (this link was recently removed from the post at Scott’s request). Note that “Photography SEO community” isn’t just a descriptive name, it’s also the official brand name of the site. In both cases, Scott linked the way I believe content creators should on the web: with descriptive anchor text that helps inform a reader what they’re going to find on that page. In this case, it may overlap with keywords Scott’s targeting for SEO, but I find it ridiculous to hurt usability in the name of tiptoeing around Google’s potential overenforcement. That’s a one-way ticket to a truly inorganic, Google-shaped web.
If Google doesn’t want to count those links, that’s their business (though I’d argue they’re losing out on a helpful link that improves the link graph and the web overall). What’s not OK is Google’s misrepresentation of Moz’s link as “inorganic” and “in violation of our quality guidelines” in their Webmaster Tools.
I really wish YouMoz was an outlier. Sadly, I’ve been seeing more and more of these frustratingly misleading warnings from Google Webmaster Tools.
Several months ago, Jen Lopez, Moz’s director of community, had an email conversation with Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. Matt granted us permission to publish portions of that discussion, which you can see below:
Jen Lopez: Hey Matt,
I made the mistake of emailing you while you weren’t answering outside emails for 30 days. 😀 I wanted to bring this up again though because we have a question going on in Q&A right now about the topic. People are worried that they can’t guest post on Moz: http://moz.com/community/q/could-posting-on-youmoz-get-your-penalized-for-guest-blogging because they’ll get penalized. I was curious if you’d like to jump in and respond? Or give your thoughts on the topic?
Thanks!
Matt Cutts: Hey, the short answer is that if a site A links to spammy sites, that can affect site A’s reputation. That shouldn’t be a shock–I think we’ve talked about the hazards of linking to bad neighborhoods for a decade or so.
That said, with the specific instance of Moz.com, for the most part it’s an example of a site that does good due diligence, so on average Moz.com is linking to non-problematic sites. If Moz were to lower its quality standards then that could eventually affect Moz’s reputation.
The factors that make things safer are the commonsense things you’d expect, e.g. adding a nofollow will eliminate the linking issue completely. Short of that, keyword rich anchortext is higher risk than navigational anchortext like a person or site’s name, and so on.”
Jen, in particular, has been a champion of high standards and non-spammy guest publishing, and I’m very appreciative to Matt for the thoughtful reply (which matches our beliefs). Her talk at SMX Sydney—Guest Blogging Isn’t Dead, But Blogging Just for Links Is—and her post—Time for Guest Blogging With a Purpose—helps explain Moz’s position on the subject (one I believe Google shares).
I can promise that our quality standards are only going up (you can read Keri’s post on YouMoz policies to get a sense of how seriously we take our publishing), that Scott’s link in particular was entirely editorial, organic, and intentional, and that we take great steps to insure that all of our authors and links are carefully vetted.
We’d love if Google’s webmaster review team used the same care when reviewing and calling out links in Webmaster Tools. It would help make the web (and Google’s search engine) a better place.
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Continue reading → Posted by evolvingSEOThe perception of success
The following screenshot is from an actual blog post. Based upon what you see here, would you call it successful?
I think it depends on perception.
The optimist might see this… Continue reading →
Posted by shannonskinner
One of the biggest challenges for SEO is proving its worth. We all know it’s valuable, but it’s important to convey its value in terms that key stakeholders (up to and including CEOs) understand. To do that, I put together a process to calculate an estimate of ROI for implementing changes to keyword targeting.
In this post, I will walk through that process, so hopefully you can do the same for your clients (or as an in-house SEO to get buy-in), too!
There are quite a few parts to this recipe, and while the calculation part is pretty easy, gathering the data to throw in the mix is the challenging part. I’ll list each section here, including the components of each, and then we can go through how to retrieve each of them.
There has been quite a lot written about keyword research, so I won’t go into too much detail here. For the Keyword data list, the important thing is to get whatever keywords you’d like to assess into a spreadsheet, and include all the information listed above. You’ll have to select the preferred URLs based on what you think the strongest-competing and most appropriate URL would be for each keyword.
For the Preferred URLs list, you’ll want to use the data that’s in your keyword data under the preferred URL.
Once you have the list of de-duplicated preferred URLs, you’ll need to pull the data from Open Site Explorer for these URLs. I prefer using the Moz API with SEOTools. You’ll have to install it to use it for Excel, or if you’d like to take a stab at using it in Google Docs, there are some resources available for that. Unfortunately, with the most recent update to Google Spreadsheets, I’ve had some difficulty with this method, so I’ve gone with Excel for now.
Once you’ve got SEOTools installed, you can make the call “=MOZ_URLMetrics_toFit([enter your cells])”. This should give you a list of URL titles, canonical URLs, External & Internal links, as well as a few other metrics and DA/PA.
For the Where the competition sits list, you’ll first need to perform a search for each of your keywords. Obviously, you could do this manually, or if you have exportable data from a keyword ranking tool and you’ve been ranking the keywords you’d like to look at, you could use either of these methods. If you don’t have those, you can use the hacky method that I did–basically, use the ImportXML command in Google Spreadsheets to grab the top ranking URLs for each query.
I’ve put a sample version of this together, which you can access here. A few caveats: you should be able to run MANY searches in a row–I had about 850 for my data, and they ran fine. Google will block your IP address, though, if you run too many, and what I found is that I needed to copy out my results as values into a different spreadsheet once I’d gotten them, because they timed out relatively quickly, but you can just put them into the Excel spreadsheet you’re building to make the ROI calculations (you’ll need them there anyway!).
From this list, you can pull each URL into a single list, and de-duplicate as explained for the preferred URLs list to generate the Strength of the Competition list, and then run the analysis you did with the preferred URLs to generate the same data for these URLs as you did for the preferred URLs with SEOTools for Excel.
Once you’ve got these lists, you can use some VLOOKUP magic to pull in the information you need. I used the Where the competition sits list as the foundation of my work.
From there, I pulled in the corresponding preferred URL and its Page Authority, as well as the PAs and DAs for each URL currently ranking 1-10. I then was able to calculate an average PA & DA for each query, and could compare the page I want to rank to this. I estimated the chances that the page I wanted to rank (given that I’d already determined these were relevant pages) could rank with better keyword targeting.
Here’s where things get interesting. You can be rather conservative, and only sum search volumes of keywords you’re fairly confident your site can rank, which is my preferred method. That’s because I use this method primarily to determine if I’m on the right track–whether making these recommendations are really worth the time to get implemented. So I’m going to move forward assuming I’m counting only the search volumes of terms I think I’m quite competitive for, AND that I’m not yet ranking for on page 1.
Now, you want to move to your analytics data in order to calculate a few things:
I’ve set up my sample data in this spreadsheet that you can refer to or use to make your own calculations.
Each of the assumptions can be adjusted depending on the actual site data, or using estimates. I’m using very very generic overall CTR estimates, but you can select which you’d like and get as granular as you want! The main point for me is really getting to two numbers that I can stand by as pretty good estimates:
This is because, for higher-up folks, money talks. Obviously, this won’t be something you can promise, but it gives them a metric that they understand to really wrap their head around the value that you’re potentially brining to the table if the changes you’re recommending can be made.
There are some great tools for estimating this kind of stuff on a smaller scale, but for a massive body of keyword data, hopefully you will find this process useful as well. Let me know what you think, and I’d love to see what parts anyone else can streamline or make even more efficient.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
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