Did First Scribe save .travel?

A prospective client approached us in August to help with some Google ranking issues. Apparently their website was indexed by Google to roughly 800 pages and then promptly plummeted to about 15 pages. Needless to say, they weren't ranking on any search terms and they were at their whits end as to a solution.

My initial thought is that they were spamming, duplicate content, fighting with a new algorithm, or just plain new.

Then I realized something I hadn't before. They had a one of the new .travel domain names. With a little research I found that all .travel sites were dealing with the same situation.

A search in Google for "site:.travel" returned 113,000 pages. When I clicked on the "cached" link next to any of the returns - each page had not been cached. As far as Google rankings were concerned, the pages didn't exist.

The same search for pages in Yahoo found zero pages.

No PageRank

On further inspection of their home page I found that the page would load fine but it didn't have a cache and no page rank. Not just zero page rank, but a grey bar. I haven't seen a grey bar in 2 or 3 years.

Note: A 0/10 PageRank in Google generally means that your website is of little importance to them. For the PageRank bar to be gray generally means that Google is not even indexing the home page of the site.

My advice to these folks was to buy a .com domain and forget about the .travel domain.

All .travel sites blocked?

As far as I could tell, none of the .travel sites had a page rank. Grey bar for all - no exceptions. None of the sites had cached pages in Google or Yahoo.

The Canada.travel site: http://www.canada.travel had no page rank, no cache. The tourism board of Canada was blocked...

What to do?

After 2 weeks of intense investigation, I let the client know that he was out of luck and he had 2 courses of action:

1. Buy a .com domain and start over.
2. Contact Google directly and ask them to fix the problem.

Big Choices

The client obviously had some clout in the industry (and a great deal of budget invested in the new domain name) because they opted for #2. Turns out they are on speaking terms with Ronald N. Andruff, President & CEO of Tralliance Corp.

Tralliance Corp. was the sole purveyor of .travel domains and is a real company. (I.e. They don't appear to be a fly-by-night organization.)

Mr. Andruff emailed Vinton G. Cerf at Google directly. Mr. Cerf is Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist of Google. From my perspective, he is the top of the food chain and by all accounts a really nice man.
http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint


It couldn't be Google's problem - Please go away.

At this point I was very politely assured that I was mistaken.

Of course, I wasn't mistaken so we continued the pressure.

After another round of assurance that we were quite correct, Google conceded that the .travel was not being cached and engineering looked into the problem and subsequently fixed the problem.

Yahoo has yet to recognize .travel.

With Traffic - Less may be More

First Scribe is just like every other company out there with a website -- We receive a lot of spam. One recent piece interested me more than most - Qwestdex Online services has a running offer for guaranteed Pay Per Click traffic for a monthly price.

This made me think - I don't necessarily want more traffic; I want more qualified leads.

Does more traffic mean more leads?

Heavy traffic may lead to more leads. Statistically speaking, more visitors to your brick and mortar store will equate to an equal percentage of increased leads and purchases. But with websites that's not necessarily true...

One of our clients sells a natural head lice remedy (http://www.liceice.com/). A great deal of their traffic comes from free searches for "pictures of head lice" and other noncommittal terms. Frightened parents want to verify that their children have lice while they're hoping to learn otherwise.

This traffic seeks our resources, they do not necessarily want a product (or any product for that matter). As a matter of fact, they may call us to ask about identifying head lice with no intention of a purchase. Further sapping our resources without intending to purchase.

Do we want this traffic? Yes we do.

Qualified Traffic

What we are talking about here is qualified traffic and that is a very valuable commodity. While they may not be seeking your product specifically, at least we have what they need once they identify the problem.

We now have a client in our store with head lice, here is the chance to hit them with a "call to action" and ask them for the sale. Every page of your website should have an obvious statement of what you want the client to do next: "Buy our product" -or- "Contact us for information".

Qualified Keywords

We are "marketing to the tail" with qualified keywords. We may have only 3 or 4 main keywords that perfectly describe our product but there are dozens of similar phrases to support our product. Each of these visitors give us a chance to convert to a sale.

Optimize around all of these qualified terms and then practice converting a higher percentage.

Geographic qualification

Service companies often forget that the Internet is without borders but their business is not. Your hair salon in Minneapolis may capture search engine traffic from Houston but you will doubtfully convince people to travel to receive your services.

Be conscious of the fact that travel may limit your service-customer base.

Avoid unqualified keywords

In this example we have been talking about head lice. We want to target terms like "head lice pictures" and "identifying head lice" while avoiding terms that do not qualify our product. Terms such as "bug pictures", "body lice" and "children ailments" do nothing to support our content and should be avoided.

They may lead to more traffic but they will not lead to more sales.

Internet Explorer 7.0 Taking Hold

According to the latest at Dailytech (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5712) Internet Explorer 7.0 is starting to take off as a prevalent browser of choice.

The latest browser usage figures show IE7 has achieved 100 million installations to date. This number should climb rapidly once Microsoft Windows Vista is released on January 30th with IE7 as the standard browser.

IE7.0 was released on October 18, 2006 and reached the major milestone January 8, 2007 - quickly eclipsing the user numbers of FireFox within 90 days of release.

The current browser statistics stated by DailyTech show Internet Explorer holding a full 87% of all visitors to U.S. websites in January:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0 - 62%
2. Internet Explorer 7.0 - 25%
3. FireFox 10.7%

We are currently testing all of our new designs on IE7 and FireFox 2.0. Compatibility issues appear to be minimal with the latest upgrades inherent in IE7.

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing

Flash in Google

Rumors have floated around the web design world for some time regarding Google indexing text from within Flash .swf files.

For years web designers have repeatedly told clients that Flash looks fantastic but it isn't worth a lick in search engines because Google is unable to read the text. Well, now everything has changed.

What we have here is a run of the mill html page with a simple Flash show full of junk text. One keyword stands out above the rest "**keyword deleted**". It's a junk term with zero competition on the Internet.

One would assume that a single html page with this text string would quickly rank on the term simply because it would be the only page on the Internet containing that string. Historically speaking of HTML pages, that was the case. Historically speaking of Flash pages, no matter how hard you wished for it - Google couldn't read Flash so it would never rank.

Google Reads Flash

We posted the page as we would have posted any other. There is absolutely nothing special about this .swf file. Roughly 2 weeks after posting this page to our website Google cached the page; cached the Flash show; and ranked it on the term "**keyword deleted**".

We have our proof -- Google can index text within Flash.

The next step is to test to see if Google can index links from within Flash. We have a page cooking at the moment to test links. Go to our test page (above) and you will see the link to test that item.

Conclusion

We don't think it's time to run out and start building every site out of Flash. Certainly there are many wonderful uses for Flash and in some cases Flash sites are the way to go. More than 75% of all the websites we build have some element of Flash in the design. Obviously we find Flash to be a very important design element.

Feel free to look around the First Scribe site and look for Flash elements. I think you will find many more Flash elements on this site than meets the eye.

But, due to the cost overhead and the *many* remaining issues of search engine optimization of Flash, we will continue to build websites in HTML.

Remember - "Ugly websites work!"
More often than not the most effective website is the ugly one. Graphics and Flash continue to hinder the search engine optimization process. Look at Google, EBay, and CNN - each of them have a very functional look to them and they are the dominant leaders in their markets.

There may be a magnificent way to use Flash to make you look amazing and stand above your competition - but the whole thing is useless if it alienates search engines and visitors.

Our tests will continue...

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing

New Blog!

We have re-entered the wide-world of blogging.

Our previous blog at http://blog.firstscribe.com wasn't quite performing the way we would have liked so we shut it down and moved it over to http://www.firstscribe.com/wp-blog/ . This new home seems to be a more appropriate place and should perform.

Blogs are an interesting piece of this information age - A blog is a very simple tool yet it has vast power to build and disseminate information. Type, save and publish without any real knowledge of the Internet. It's great for those folks with something to say via a low-tech voice.

The Internet is supposedly the great flattening tool of the business world, presenting information without caste or borders, as it were. Now Blogs come along to flatten the world even more. Not only are they simple, free and pervasive, but they are a good idea. What could be better than that?

For one thing, it's easy to abuse.

Blogs have this mystery to them that enables a great deal of opportunity to apply "soft definitions" to their true nature. Blogs have become synonymous to the snake oils of old when it comes to Internet Marketing. Blogs are great for speaking your piece, they are not the answer to the eCommerce puzzle.

You're not alone if you've heard that a blog is the key to ranking #1 on keyword "X". Blogs will attract return visitors but they're not the only answer.

So, why do we have a blog?

Well, as it turns out we have a lot to say about the truth of web site design, hosting and Internet Marketing. As our business evolves; as we uncover tips; and as we find promising directories we will post them on our blog to inform our visitors.

Please visit often and leave us your comments!

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing