Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

Apparently this is something that the majority of SEO consultants are unaware of, as there have been a large number of posts in the past month or so singing the praises of responsive web design as a solution to an inherent link equity problem mobile URLs face. There have been so many that I have grown tired of repeating myself in responding to them.

What none of them seem to be aware of is that for mobile URLs in Google, which has 99% of the mobile market share by some estimates, mobile URLs that are properly redirected can rank ahead of traditional desktop URLs.

Unfortunately it doesn’t happen in every case yet, but the change that they announced is in the search results. For example, a number of restaurant queries display mobile URLs for smartphone search results. A search that I did for a restaurant in the Wicker Park area of Chicago, [mac's american pub], shows the www for the desktop…

And the tablet…

…but when you do the same search on a smartphone (smartphone pics from Galaxy S running Android 2.2 and Nexus One running Android 2.3) you get the same page in the first position, with its mobile URL:

If a mobile URL displays in the smartphone search results regardless of link equity, it means that link equity is not an issue when ranking these duplicate URLs.

As I explained in Search Engine Land, and more recently in this Mediapost interview, a hybrid of responsive web design and mobile first is best for SEO, as it accounts for mobile search behaviors that transcoding desktop content can’t offer, and brings more search traffic from mobile devices in the process. However, if you must duplicate desktop URLs on mobile URLs, Skip Redirect/Old Possum will allow you to rank those mobile URLs, regardless of link equity.

A few more shots of this phenomenon in action leave more questions than answers, but it’s clear that for some domains and queries, Skip Redirect/Old Possum isn’t something that will happen in the distant future, but something that’s happening today.

Results for Chicago restaurant [publican], for example, show a mobile URL from the Citysearch mobile site:

And two mobile URLs appeared for the query [street festivals chicago] for Metromix’s mobile site:

Results don’t just happen for local queries, as Old Possum appeared for the query [obamacare] as well:

For the most part, however, Old Possum was evident mostly for Yelp.com, Metromix.com and Citysearch.com, even if other sites had set up mobile redirects properly.

A few mobile URLs also appeared next to results that normally display mobile URLs in smartphone search, like this query for [tacos]:

This lack of uniformity indicates that this is probably a test before Google rolls these changes out to many more sites, but the big takeaway is: mobile URLs in smartphone search results are here.

Have you seen Old Possum in the wild? Please post queries and platforms you’ve seen it for in the comments.

For more on how this affects your SEO strategy, see my columns this week in Search Engine Land and Marketing Land.

For those of you who are new to the issue, yellow journalist, salesman of SEO training materials and apparently non-practicing SEO Aaron Wall and I have been arguing for over two years about his claim that brand “Dominate[s] Google’s Relevancy Algorithm”. It started during the Vince change, when Wall proposed this conspiracy theory, and unfortunately continued years after Matt Cutts publicly denied on YouTube that brand was any part of Google’s relevancy algorithm. In spite of this he continued wasting our time with this myth, releasing this wholly misguided infographic around Thanksgiving of last year.

I forgot how unreasonably and stubbornly he defends his theories even when they’re obviously inaccurate, so I made the mistake of gently disagreeing with him on the infographic. That led to me spending way too much time arguing with him on his blog/echo chamber about the many faults in his argument. When it truly seemed that I was talking to a Wall I offered to discuss it in a more impartial forum, or SMX West in San Jose. Danny Sullivan accepted my proposal, Aaron agreed to speak, and we both got ready for the show.

At the show Aaron presented the same old nonsense with the same quotes taken out of context and no clear evidence of Google’s alleged favoritism toward brands (let alone how brand dominates Google’s relevancy algorithm). I followed him and presented a lot of what I had already discussed with Aaron prior to the show, and what I had discussed in the session prep call that everyone attended but him. But additionally I did research on the top 100 brands and top organic traffic generating sites to see if I could detect a clear algorithmic bias. In fact, no such bias exists.

That’s also what most of the SMX audience concluded when they saw the presentations. After the panel, Danny Sullivan took a show of hands for audience members who believed there was a Google algorithmic brand bias and clearly more hands were raised who didn’t believe a brand bias exists.

This pissed off Aaron Wall, who is now grasping for credibility in his echo chamber, and doing his best to discredit me and my research with name-calling, red herrings and other juvenile stunts. Fortunately someone passed the link on to me, as I don’t subscribe to his SEO gossip rag.

I’m done talking with Aaron Wall. In my encounters with him he has shown himself to be either completely inept or intellectually dishonest, as he clings to his theories in spite of the evidence to the contrary. And the evidence is great. Though I’m no longer that interested in the issue and believe that small businesses would be better served by implementing rather than wasting their time complaining about an alleged Google brand bias, if you are still listening to the argument from authority over reason and taking Wall seriously on this issue here are my responses to his most recent claims. I doubt any amount of evidence will be enough to satisfy Wall or his most fanatical followers, but I try to teach my two young children to stand up for themselves if they’re bullied by someone, even if that person is louder and bigger than they are. I think I learned that lesson from Charlie Chaplin movies, Martin Luther King, and maybe to some extent ironically from an unknown Aaron Wall defending himself in court against a defamation suit from Traffic Power.

By the way, I addressed most of these issues on Twitter already, but he was apparently more interested in listening to himself.

• Wall is obsessed with telling people that I classified Wikipedia as a small business, trying to claim that my lack of judgment here is reason to suspect the truth of my conclusion. In fact, I used three classifiers of big brands and big business in my study. One was the definition of a small business according to the Small Business Administration. According to this definition, in general businesses with less than 500 employees are considered small businesses in the United States. So with 80 employees, Wikimedia Foundation, who owns Wikipedia, meets the Small Business Administration’s definition of a small business. They’re also not a big brand in terms of revenue, as the #500 company on the Fortune 500 had revenues 177x larger than them in 2011. At the end of the study I had classified the top Google organic traffic generating sites according to the Small Business Administration’s definition of a small business, and this gave me a percentage of large and small businesses by this definition. If you do not agree that large and small brands should be classified according to employee size, and/or do not agree with the Small Business Administration’s definition of a small business, I also classified the sites by revenue, using the Fortune 500 to see which percentage of the sites in the top 100 SEMRush list were in the F500. 61% are not. And finally I classified the sites according to what a brand equity firm determined were the top 100 global brands for 2011. If you consider yourself more of an authority on small businesses than the small business administration, and more of an authority on big business than the Fortune 500, I don’t know what to tell you.
• Wall is taking issue with the brands included in Interbrand’s top 100 global brands list, saying it’s suspect because it doesn’t include nonprofits like Wikimedia and questioning their methodology. What he’s never really argued against is that all of the brands listed in Interbrand’s research are top global brands. They may not be the only top global brands, and you can argue that they’re in the wrong order, but you can’t argue that Coca Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Google, GE, McDonald’s, Intel, Apple, Disney, HP, and the other 90 brands on the list are huge global brands.  If, as Wall boldly stated, brands “dominate Google’s relevancy algorithm,” all of these obviously huge brands should be doing a lot better than they are right now in Google’s search results. For those of you paying attention, Conductor came to a similar conclusion back in 2009 after the Vince change, when they uncovered that the Fortune 500 is paying for keywords that they have no natural visibility on. The fact that he’s attacking a straw man with this methodology question rather than addressing the issue of how one of the biggest brands in the world, Coca Cola, does not rank first for terms that are obviously relevant to who they are, in spite of the fact that brands “dominate Google’s relevancy algorithm” is evidence that he can’t argue the issue at hand.
• Wall claims that Danny made the Ron Paul comment to demonstrate how obnoxious I was, but to me it seemed like a joke to lighten the mood of the conference, which a great emcee like Danny Sullivan is a master at doing. He also set up the session to be point-counterpoint for the first two presentations, which Wall would have known had he bothered to attend the session call or read the session emails from Danny. He also had access to my presentation on Basecamp weeks in advance, so if he wanted to review it prior to the session he would have been able to do so easily. If he was blindsided he has only his own lack of preparation to blame.
• I did not say that because brands are inefficient and slow moving that it makes sense for search engines to compensate for that. What I said was that even if there was an algorithmic brand bias at Google, it wouldn’t matter to large brands for whom natural search and SEO are not always a priority and who suffer as a result. It’s a shame that Wall feels that he has to put words in my mouth in order to win an argument.
• Wall said “He also put out a painfully fluffy “white paper” / sales letter which stated that since Wal-Mart has a page about SEO they should outrank seobook on “SEO” related queries if my theories of brand bias are correct. That misses the point entirely. I never stated that garbage content on branded sites always outperforms quality content on niche sites, but rather that a lot of smaller websites were intentionally being squeezed out of the ecosystem. Sure some small sites manage to compete, but the odds of them succeeding today are much lower than they were 3 or 4 years ago.” Actually what he said was brands “dominate Google’s relevancy algorithm,” as the subtitle of his infographic with evil sounding quotes from Google leadership taken out of context to make it seem as though brand is more important to Google than relevance. If this were the case, Wal-mart’s garbage content would rank because brand is the biggest factor in determining relevance to Google. But this isn’t the case at all. It’s not just some small sites that manage to compete. A lot of them do. Furthermore he’s coming to that conclusion about change in the market without producing a shred of non-anecdotal evidence that there has been any kind of change. Look, everyone knows that Panda hit a lot of mom and pops, but that doesn’t mean that Google is squeezing out small businesses for big brands. Big brands were also hit by Panda (About.com, eHow.com, etc.), and as I’ve demonstrated plenty of small businesses, non-F500s and brands other than those 100 named by Interbrand as being top global brands of 2011 are outranking and getting more organic traffic than huge global corporations with well-known, trusted brands. This can only mean that brand does not dominate Google’s relevancy algorithm, and that something else is helping these smaller sites and smaller brands to outrank their well-funded behemoth competitors.
• Wall seems to believe that I’m doing this not to get at the truth of the matter, but to get new clients. While we do love new clients and I think that many of Wall’s clients could do better, we’re also a top search agency having a record year and turning away clients who don’t meet our monthly minimums. This role of me as a salesman was invented by Wall to discredit me. In fact, I’m just tired of listening to him go on and on about this nonsense when he’s obviously wrong, and since no one else was calling him out for this lunatic theory that’s not based in reality I took the lead. Honestly many of our large brand clients come in through our Omnicom sister agencies and not through conferences. If we gain new business as a result of the conference I obviously won’t complain, but the idea was not to speak for business development, but to uncover the truth that no one at that point was brave enough to say.
• Wall has painted me as the corporate shill brand advocate SEO consultant, which works for his position. However, it doesn’t jive with reality. Those who know me and have worked with me understand that in my ten year SEO career and 12 years in online marketing I’ve worked with large brands, small brands and no-name mom and pops to help them make their content visible and relevant to search engines. In the presentation I didn’t act as an apologist for brands, as Wall wants to believe, but as an advocate for relevance, in spite of brand. His characterization of me as a brand shill and lies about my alleged claims that Google should compensate for large brands’ inefficiencies in search results, suggests that he really wasn’t listening to what I was saying because he had made up his mind about me prior to the show.
• Wall is fond of pissing contests and has called me out for not being a real SEO. Not sure what this means exactly as I’ve been a full-time SEO longer than Wall has and have seen success for clients large and small, including no name brands and Fortune 10s alike. I lead a team of 25 SEOs in three offices in the US and collaborate with Resolution Media offices globally. Historically I’ve been too focused on doing SEO work to promote myself as much as Wall does, but surely not being as well known in the SEO community doesn’t make me any less authentic. I’ve lived and breathed SEO every day of my life for the past ten plus years, which is more than even Rand Fishkin or Aaron Wall can say. Wall took issue with a case study I presented to demonstrate that small businesses can generate traffic from organic search, saying that the amount of traffic was ultimately negligible; but I presented the case study to show rapid growth over six months for a small business without a known brand, not to demonstrate the volume that I can bring as an SEO. Furthermore, my one case study used to demonstrate a lack of Google bias against small brands, even if the volume was unimpressive to some, was more than Wall produced. The man is a blogger who writes about Google conspiracies and spammy tactics, and the only site he seems to optimize is his own.
• Wall closes with an uninspired rant about brand SEOs, and how he “like(s) to share the trends in the ecosystem as they are, rather than as a hack warping [his] view to try to pick up consulting clients.” This may be because he tried SEO consulting for mid-size and large businesses back in 2006 and apparently failed. Might explain some of his ire toward big brands.
• I know when you’re an SEO it can help to be inspired by SEOs, and that’s why many in our industry rely on argument from authority in choosing who to believe. But as I said at the show, sometimes you need to look beyond someone’s reputation and think critically about what they’re saying. This is one of those cases. Aaron Wall may have said some intelligent things at some point in the past to get him the following that he enjoys today, but as SEOs we should demand that he keep saying intelligent things in order to retain his reputation as a trusted source. In this case, he’s clearly wrong, and someone has to stand up and say it.

But now that I have I’m afraid I’ve wasted enough of my time. Good luck to Aaron Wall and those of his followers who believe on faith that brand dominates Google’s relevancy algorithm, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. For those of you who have seen the light, make sure to read the white paper (PDF) and view the presentation for tips on what this lack of a Google brand bias means for your business.

Wanted to clarify something I said during Q&A, as there were some incredulous comments in Twitter and during the session. If you weren’t there, Tony Wright had mentioned Coca-Cola as a site with high domain authority in Open Site Explorer. This is true. They are also the world’s top brand according to Interbrand– a firm that measures brand equity. However, they often don’t rank in Google for relevant terms, in spite of having high domain authority and high brand equity.

For example, I mentioned the keyword [cola], which they’re on the first page for but not above the fold. Many people remarked that no one searches on [cola], but Google seems to disagree, estimating 122,100 searches per month globally. The more common keyword, soda, has 124,800 searches per month globally, but Coca-Cola is even less visible for the keyword [soda].

In fact, as the above graphic demonstrates, if we were to look at the top non-brand keywords that are highly relevant to what Coca-Cola is, we can clearly see that Coke, by not being returned for relevant non-brand terms, is missing out on an opportunity to connect with a highly qualified audience who has identified themselves as being interested in the product that Coca-Cola sells. In fact, if we use Google’s US Market share to estimate global reach, the total market for just these six keywords annually is over 5 million searches; 3 million in Google alone.

But the point is not only that people search for soft drinks online. The point is that domain authority doesn’t mean much if you’re not getting traffic from highly relevant non-brand keywords. If you’re not getting traffic from highly relevant, non-brand keywords, you could have all the link equity on the planet and you wouldn’t be optimized for search. That was my point. Hopefully the figures here and the lack of search visibility for the world’s number one brand have helped me clarify my position.

If you missed the session, here’s the deck; and here’s the white paper with all the details of the study.

Here are the questions:

1. Is mobile SEO an imperative right now in terms of capturing significant traffic, or are we in a stage where we are currently laying the groundwork for something coming soon in the world of mobile search?

2. If a company had time and resources to do only three things right now, what would be the three mobile SEO tactics you would recommend doing that would have the most benefit?

3. What will be different in mobile SEO/mobile search a year from now? What should mobile marketers be prepared for in this area?

Click through to see our answers!

Unfortunately the Google Keyword Tool doesn’t currently break out tablet queries separately, but lumps them in with smartphones in the category of “mobile devices with full internet browsers.”

I’m trying to change this, and give marketers a more useful tool. I’ve suggested this to both the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Webmaster Tools product managers, but things happen faster at Google when they have popular support.

If you agree with me, please voice your support in the Google AdWords forum, where I have posted an official feature request.

Actually found a few resources that were new to me, so I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

Click through to the PDF for a larger version with working links.

The purpose here is to do some basic reverse engineering of the smartphone search results to try to get a better sense of what ranking factors are driving placement in the top three listings of Google smartphone search.

As with any Google reverse engineering exercise, you’re chasing a moving target, so these results could become outdated with any significant algorithm change. Also, Google search results vary by query, so larger, more diverse sample sets could yield slightly different results. That said, the exercise is meant to present a more objective picture of Google mobile search results in order to reduce guesswork for businesses looking to improve their standing in mobile search results.

Of course, as a white hat SEO I believe the only way to build long-term rankings in Google is to follow their webmaster guidelines and compete fairly with your fellow webmasters. My hope is that Google will create such detailed guidelines for mobile, smartphone and tablet users, as indexing, ranking and user experience can differ for these users from the standard desktop Google user experience, and the Google advice on how to approach it has been inconsistent at best. However, in the short term this study should give webmasters a better sense of what they need to focus on in order to do well in Google smartphone search.

Subscribe to this blog or follow it on Facebook or Google+ to get updates on when the complete whitepaper is available. For now, here is the section on mobile sites and their impact on Google smartphone search:

With Google releasing their Go Mo tool recently for mobile web site creation, many webmasters have wondered if having a mobile web site would help them appear in search results for mobile searchers. Since Google has long told webmasters to think of the user first, providing mobile content to a mobile user would theoretically be thinking of the user first. Google also has a blended ranking algorithm to present mobile content to mobile users, but it doesn’t seem to be very powerful in US smartphone search, as only one of the sites listed was a mobile site.

Update: since this study was done in December 2010 and May 2011, Google has launched an update to smartphone search that uses the destination URL in search results for websites that redirect smartphone users to mobile content, so the results would likely be very different today—resembling more closely the percentage of sites that redirect to mobile content.

Being a mobile site isn’t the only way to cater to mobile users, however, and mobile formatting or mobile redirects could indicate to the engines that a mobile site exists, should a user want to access it, which could be enough to bump the site up slightly in the rankings. However, the great majority of the sites in the sample neither redirects to mobile content nor reformat it for mobile users.

Oddly, the great majority of the sites in the sample do offer mobile content: either mobile sites or desktop content reformatted for mobile users. This might indicate that having a mobile site is a ranking factor for smartphone search.

However, when we looked at whether these mobile sites were actually indexed by Google, it appears most of them aren’t actually indexed, and even fewer of the sites that Google knows about are labeled as mobile-friendly with a green phone in feature phone search results.

Clearly being a mobile site is not necessary for smartphone ranking, as most of the results presented are desktop results. Furthermore, having a mobile friendly icon in Google feature phone results is not a strong indicator of ranking in smartphone search results. However, given that most of the sites returned do have mobile versions of the sites, having mobile content could somehow produce a lift in smartphone search results.

For businesses looking to define their mobile strategy and wondering whether building and optimizing a mobile site could help them become more competitive in smartphone search results, it’s clear that the great majority of the sites in our study do offer mobile content. In our view, the percentage is likely to grow, as providing a mobile user experience is in line with Google’s user-first philosophy.  As with the early Web, businesses and webmasters who think of the user experience and design content that will delight rather than frustrate mobile users are likely to be the long term winners in the rankings when it comes to Google mobile search.

I’ll be there discussing practical tips for marketing in a social local mobile (SoLoMo) world. Including the pitch below if you want more details. Be sure to register soon, as there are worse places to be in December than a resort in Arizona and you get to learn bleeding edge social media strategies and tactics from some of the brightest minds in the business!

More details here:

Keeping up with digital marketing can be challenging: there are so many different channels to tap into, such as Social, Local, and Mobile. But smart marketers are mastering these emerging channels and leveraging them for competitive advantage. Are you? Like many marketers, you’re probably interested to know more, but aren’t quite sure where to begin. Or you might be wondering: How can I best leverage these new digital channels to drive results? Or how do I know if Mobile is right for me? Or how can I get Social and Local to work together?

During this session Bryson Meunier, Director of Content Solutions at Resolution Media, will provide marketers with an overview of each of the three channels and how these channels are earning consumers share of voice and engagement with marketers’ brands. Additionally, his presentation will go a step farther, diving into the actionable techniques marketers need to take, such as:

• Prioritize social network activity based on mobile reach: For example, Facebook and MySpace, are more than just social networks, but are prominent platforms for the mobile channel. MySpace has over 25 million mobile users and Facebook has over 7 million (grown 150% since Jan 2010).
• Understand consumer behavior on all platforms – How to develop appropriate content for overlapping channels:�Messaging to mobile users in social environments
• App introductions
• Surveys
• Mobile coupons
• QR codes
• Social messaging to mobile users:�Like us on Facebook,�Place Pages QR Codes (going away)
• Check-ins – How to use check-in analytics platforms like Kenshoo to understand the impact of search and other channels on driving online users to check in.
• Mobile Deals
• Accurate Budgeting – Organizations often have a budget for social and a budget for mobile, but not a budget for SoLoMo. Understanding the overlap and setting aside a separate experimental budget for SoLoMo can give marketers more leverage than just carving budget from either social or mobile.

Meunier will also include optimization best practices and highlights from client campaigns that demonstrate the convergence of Social, Local and Mobile. Overall attendees will walk away with a solid understanding of how these channels overlap, how to develop an integrated plan, and what actionable techniques are needed to effectively and efficiently manage these digital assets.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/116830155226800059190/116830155226800059190/about

Of course there’s always Facebook if you’re old school:

http://www.facebook.com/mobileseo

And RSS if you’re prehistoric like me:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NSEOMSEOBlog

As always, thanks for following the natural search and mobile SEO blog– now in our fourth year of bringing you the truth about mobile and SEO.

http://www.seobook.com/brands

Many people will believe this because of Aaron Wall’s personal brand, as he was one of the first to expose the closely guarded secrets of SEO to the masses with his SEO book web site, and he writes detailed posts that are sometimes thoughtful even if they’re misguided, which have gained him a reputation and the nickname “The Professor”. He has a loyal following of SEO geeks who are probably upset that I’m even asking this question, but is it true? Does Google search have a bias toward brands?

I work with businesses large and small doing white hat SEO, and some of these engagements over the last ten years were with the biggest brands on the planet: FedEx, Apple, Lowe’s, Groupon, Gatorade, etc. I know the challenges that small businesses face when trying to appear for relevant queries in Google, and I’ve worked with enough large brands in my career to know that large brands have challenges too.

Affiliates Dominate the Organic Listings

If Google favored brands, brands would come up in the search results ahead of affiliate sites a large percentage of the time, no? But have you used Google lately? The results are often filled with small businesses and affiliate sites. Take, for example, the query [deal of the day] or [daily deals]. These are high volume queries that brands large and small would love to rank for, and a lot of them have content that is relevant to the query, but only one large brand appears in the search results for [deal of the day] (Amazon), and only two well-known brands appear for the query [daily deals] (Target, eBay). Groupon or LivingSocial are some of the hottest brands in the daily deal space, but they don�t show up for the terms. Who does? Affiliates, mostly; and small businesses with exact match domains and content that’s highly targeted to that query.

How about Black Friday? It’s coming up in a few days, and Walmart and Target are spending millions to get people in the stores and online to entice consumers to buy with them. Yet, most searches for black Friday terms are dominated by affiliates, and Walmart and Target are nowhere to be found. If trends are any indication, it looks to be bigger this year in the US than ever before, and many brands with Black Friday sales would love to appear for this query. But Google doesn’t show brands at all.

Thanksgiving is in a few days, and cranberry sauce is currently number 20 on Google’s Hot Trends at the time of writing. When you look at the results, SEMRush shows that the first result is not a major brand, but SimplyRecipes.com, which is owned by one woman in California.

The first five results, in fact, are not large brands, but advertising-driven publishers: simplyrecipes.com and allrecipes.com.

Searchers won’t generally look past the first five results, but if we do we see that smaller brands make up 60% of the top 20 listings, according to SEMRush.

Another of the hot trends queries this week, [green bean casserole], has a branded website as the first result– CampbellKitchen.com, a site owned by Campbell’s Soup Company that showcases related brands. But if we look at that site compared to SimplyRecipes.com, it’s clear that SimplyRecipes.com– the affiliate site– is the more powerful domain:

Click to enlarge image of organic strength of Simply Recipes versus Campbell's Kitchen

You can see Simply Recipes is clearly the smaller of the two brands, as the search volume for its brand terms is a little over 21,000 searches per month, while Campbell’s Kitchen brand terms get over 790,000 searches per month. In spite of that, Simply Recipes shows on more than twice as many non-brand keywords with 15x the search volume. According to comScore, this gives Simply Recipes (the affiliate site) about 13x the organic traffic of the brand site Campbell’s Kitchen.

Tell me again how Google loves brands?

What is a Brand, Exactly?

One problem with the Google loves brands theory is that one’s definition of brand could include these smaller brands like Simply Recipes. They’re definitely not a large brand, as they’re not listed in lists of the top 100 global brands, and it’s unlikely that most searchers are aware of Simply Recipes before their first visit to the site. In terms of navigational search volume, which is how search engines can determine brand strength, Campbell’s brands are much stronger than Simply Recipes in terms of brand recognition and search volume, but Simply Recipes still has 21,000 searches per month, and it could be argued is still a brand. However, where do you draw the line? How would Google, in Aaron Wall’s theory, determine what a brand is in order to give it preferential treatment? It would almost have to be in terms of navigational search volume, and in this case the opposite of Wall’s theory occurs: lesser brands get more traffic from Google. Does it matter if it is a brand with search volume if the search volume is so much less than a brand that it’s trouncing in the search results? At some point it becomes impossible to prove or disprove the theory, as any web site with a name could constitute a “brand”; and of course that includes just about all of them.

Still, I keep running into situations in the search results where large brands are getting trounced by affiliate sites for high volume competitive informational, non-brand keywords, and I wonder how many instances like these I can demonstrate before it’s clear to everyone that Google doesn’t give brands more visibility in search results than affiliate sites.

Google as Democratic Enabler

In the comments of the post Aaron Wall says that this theory isn’t about brands appearing in the organic search results 100% of the time, but appearing in the six other places on the SERP he mentions at the close of the infographic. But really, anyone with a local business, a paid search budget (however small) or a shopping feed can appear in any of these slots. What do these have to do with brands?

And visibility in search suggest and on the search results query refinements is about search volume, not about brands, per se. People search for brands because brands spend millions promoting their wares, and create demand. Google sees the search volume around brands and common keywords and wants to give people what they’re asking for faster. That’s why they also list types and stores in the search refinements. People search by stores, types and brands for certain general queries, and Google includes quick links to these queries to get users to the results they’re looking for faster. It’s not a conspiracy against affiliates. It’s a search engine creating a better product that serves its users better.

There’s a reason Google released the Panda on the SEO community: because they were getting killed in the press for providing low quality results. When sites come up that don’t match a searcher’s intent, and don’t solve that searcher’s problem, Google fails at its job and runs the risk of having its users defect to Bing, Blekko, Facebook, Twitter, or some other source of relevant information. Users search for brands, and Google is giving them what they’re searching for. It’s really as simple as that.

Enterprise SEO Challenges

What Wall’s infographic doesn’t get into is how difficult it is for brands to appear in search results because they’re frequently shooting themselves in the foot. Affiliates often have an advantage over large brands because they can move faster and implement at will. In large organizations promoting large brands it can often take months to change website copy because it has to go through multiple departments and stakeholders in order to get implemented, and sometimes positive change on a website is overridden because of turnover or another department with another initiative and no knowledge of the positive change that has occurred. I once had a client with more than 100,000 authoritative links being prevented from passing link equity because of a temporary redirect and no one to care. Small brands don’t have these problems. It’s common in enterprise SEO to have to come in after a redesign in which the entire site was designed in Flash or AJAX and go through months of education and project management in order to get the site indexed again, let alone returned in search results for relevant keywords. Affiliates may have problems with Panda or generating link equity, but large brands have issues of their own. Even if Google wanted to move every large brand to the front of the search results (which they obviously don’t, given the results I’m seeing), many big brands would be making it difficult for them to do that by splitting their link equity a thousand different ways and accidentally removing their sites from the index.

If you don’t represent a large brand and you want search visibility, don’t cry about it with infographics about how evil Google is for doing their jobs. Do what Wall did back in 2004 and align your brand with something people are searching for that you sell. I’ve been doing SEO long enough where I remember seeing Aaron Wall do his own branding by buying paid search ads for queries he wasn’t ranking on in 2004 when no one really knew who he was. But because SEO was new and one of the top queries at the time related to SEO was [seo book], Wall was savvy enough to make it his brand. Large brands spend millions on advertising to create or stimulate demand, but if you align your brand with a keyword that already has demand, the playing field is leveled.

Bottom line is, brands have problems, just as affiliates do. They’re just different problems. If you’re an affiliate marketer, stop wasting your time complaining and move quickly and experiment, because many large brands, for whatever advantages they may or may not have in search, will almost always be at a disadvantage there.

My latest column in Search Engine Land looks at how to use keyword research and the mobile percent of total volume metric to identify keywords and concepts that are most important to your mobile users.

Beyond that, there are many suggestions for branded mobile content based on mobile keyword usage, such as ringtones, wallpaper, television commercials, mobile coupons, and other content smartphone and feature phone users are interested in.

The following appears in full on Search Engine Land.

Consider Mobile Content Carefully For Users & Better SEO

I�ve spoken a lot in these columns about the�differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO, often warning webmasters to�do more than just reformat their desktop content�for smaller screens. But if you�re in the process of creating a mobile site, you may be wondering what to put on your mobile site that�s different than what is on your desktop site.

What content (if any) would be interesting to users of a mobile site that�wouldn�t�necessarily appeal to a stationary user on a desktop or laptop?

As search marketers, we should already understand the power of keyword research in letting your users tell you what they want and how they want it said on your website, and keyword research can help prioritize what content goes on a mobile site as well.

For example, you may sell car insurance to an English speaking audience in the United States, and you want to see how users are interacting with that type of content on mobile devices versus desktop devices.

Using the�Google keyword tool in AdWords, you can filter by mobile volume in the advanced features, and select category data for insurance keywords for mobile users and desktop users.

If you put that data in a table like the one below, you can quickly see opportunities for content that mobile users are looking for en masse.

Continue reading on Search Engine Land.

Take Amtrak.mobi, for example, which is a Usablenet site and one that a Usablenet representative mentioned to me in a call a few years ago as being a satisfied client. When I looked at the number of pages indexed in Google, the total is three; and two of those are error pages. For non-SEO people this means there aren’t many pages available to compete for relevant queries. What’s more, the title tags are branded, so Amtrak isn’t even attempting to let the engines know that their site is relevant for anything other than their brand. This is likely to result in primarily branded traffic, if they get any at all.

Sure enough, when I used SEMRush to check the overall health of Amtrak.mobi, I found that all of the organic traffic that they get is branded, and they’re not even ranking first for the navigational term [amtrak mobile].

Likewise, Staples’ mobile site, which Taylor highlighted as a Usablenet client that follows two of his three tips for better mobile SEO, is only ranking for four keywords that aren’t navigational in nature, and those are long-tail queries with a combined total of 27 searches per month.

By any definition these sites are not optimized for search traffic, let alone optimized for search traffic from mobile devices. It’s not that Taylor gives bad advice in the Mashable article (though it’s really too vague to be useful). It’s that there are some inherent flaws in the Usablenet platform that prevent content from being properly indexed and ranked.

There are some brands that use Usablenet’s platform in spite of its shortcomings. If you find yourself in this predicament, don’t assume that your content is search-friendly just because a Usablenet VP wrote an article on the subject on Mashable. Follow these three tips from a recent article I wrote for Search Marketing Standard to make your Usablenet content a little more search-friendly, though still not completely optimized for mobile search, I’m afraid.

One of the questions I get most often about mobile SEO is this: I�m already doing SEO� do I really need to do mobile SEO separately? What�s the difference between the two?

There are some who would say that there is no difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO. It�s a topic that often garners friendly debate � Andrew French, �a fellow Mobile Mondays columnist, has even gone so far as to say�there is no mobile SEO, just SEO for mobile search.

To me, this is like saying �there is no oncology, just a branch of medicine for cancer.�

On the one hand, yes, oncology is a branch of medicine for cancer, just as mobile SEO is a niche within SEO that deals with SEO for mobile search.�On the other hand, if my general practitioner thinks I might have cancer, my next step is not to have him or her diagnose and treat the cancer. My next step is to a specialist, an oncologist, who will help me diagnose, treat, and hopefully remove that cancer.

Likewise, SEO for mobile sites can be done by SEOs, or even webmasters without an SEO background, who apply general SEO principles about accessibility, relevance and marketing to mobile search. But there are nuances and differences in optimizing mobile sites that don�t apply to desktop sites, and some that apply more to mobile sites than they do to desktop sites.

Sherwood Stranieri covered one of these differences in�The Mobile Content Dilemma: Brevity Vs. Optimization. When it comes to text on a website, SEOs in general are going to push for more keyword-rich text to convey the relevance of the page to search engines, and Web designers are going to push for less. This applies even more to mobile sites, and it becomes harder to justify the SEO best practice of putting at least 250 words of relevant text on a mobile webpage.

There are different standards for mobile sites because of the different user experience, and SEOs who try to apply general best practices to optimize these sites are generally going to fail at implementation. Someone who has done mobile SEO regularly, however, will understand the nuances and attack the problem with enough precision to make a difference.

Mr. Stranieri�s is one example of a difference between mobile and desktop SEO, but it�s not the only one. In an�upcoming seminar, I�ll be presenting 18 differences between mobile and traditional SEO, and there are probably even more than that. Let�s focus on a few of the more crucial differences here.

Continue reading on Search Engine Land.

Though I believe these are the best of the best practices available, take them for what they’re worth. Best practices are fine for DIY projects and those with smaller sites just trying to compete, but if you represent an enterprise-level organization and you actually want to be optimized for mobile search, the best practice is to consult a professional. I’ve been at this since 2005, am writing a book on mobile SEO, am teaching a course in mobile SEO for MarketingProfs University’s Search Marketing School and am available for hire by contacting Resolution Media today.

These are my top 25 mobile SEO best practices:

1. Avoid transcoders (e.g. Usablenet) and hosted mobile solutions that don’t allow you to customize things like under which domain the site is hosted or which pages get indexed. This could add a lot of irrelevant content to the index which will make it difficult for engines to index your entire mobile site.

2. Don’t develop an app until you’ve developed a compelling mobile web site. Apps have limited reach, are only returned in search for app-specific navigational keywords and the link equity for the app benefits app stores rather than your site.

3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Webmaster Tools search query data and keywords in web analytics to better understand your mobile user. Compare mobile search volume, impressions and traffic to desktop search volume, impressions and traffic to determine which keywords and concepts are most relevant to a user accessing the site from a handheld device. Mobile users search differently, and if you don’t do separate keyword research, you could be missing opportunities.

4. Use Quantcast or other demographics measurement tool to understand the demographics of a mobile user in your industry or on your site, which could differ greatly from the desktop user. Case in point: Major League Baseball’s mobile site is older and less affluent than their desktop site. Putting targeted messages in front of their mobile users based on assumptions about desktop demographics is unlikely to be effective.

5. Develop a searcher persona of a mobile or tablet user based on keyword, demographic, technographic and/or psychographic research. Motivations and interests of this user should be the basis of mobile wireframes. This will allow you to build content that will be of value to this mobile user, as that’s the only type of content that is able to be optimized for smartphone search. Wireframe the mobile site, identifying which content is relevant to mobile users and which content is being reformatted for these users from the desktop.

6. Build mobile site at domain.com/mobile. Buy and permanently redirect .mobi domain and permanently redirect all popular variations of mobile URLs to this subfolder. While m.domain.com subdomains are the most popular variations of mobile URLs, and any variation (including dotmobi) can be optimized for search, adding a subfolder instead of a subdirectory is the only option that uses the full trust and authority of the root domain, which could help in ranking. Not building a mobile site and only formatting desktop content could make your brand less visible in search engines for navigational queries from users looking for branded mobile content.

7. Develop mobile site in HTML5 for smartphone and tablet users. Site should be text-based, with enough keyword-rich text to convey the relevance of the page to search engines. Use progressive enhancement mobile design strategy to ensure content is accessible to feature phone users and search engines. Mobile boilerplate is a standards-based HTML5 template for creating mobile web apps that works well for optimized mobile sites.

8. Desktop pages should be made accessible to mobile searchers through handheld CSS. If desktop pages are transcoded on a separate URL, use canonical tags to pass link equity back to desktop pages with equivalent content. I believe there’s value in creating pages specifically for mobile users in addition to presenting desktop content, but if you decide to format your desktop content for mobile access, use canonical tags or handheld CSS or you may split the link equity between two URLs.

9. Create unique and keyword-rich title tags for your mobile content that doesn’t exist on the desktop. This is a best practice in traditional SEO, but agencies who build mobile sites are usually not focused on mobile SEO and often miss the most basic building blocks of SEO.

10.�Do not block your mobile site from desktop or mobile crawlers with robots.txt. Identify duplicate content with canonical tags and allow both crawlers total access. Blocking a mobile site from traditional Googlebot with robots.txt could make it invisible to smartphone searchers entering navigational queries.

11. Use canonical tags for all necessary duplicate content, including carrier-themed pages, which are common in mobile design and development. Not doing so could split a site’s link equity and make it more difficult for relevant content to rank.

12. Build links from other mobile sites and desktop sites that discuss mobile content. Link equity is a ranking factor in mobile search, and not building links could make content less authoritative and less visible in search. The following are tactics for building links to mobile sites:

• Link out to mobile content to increase awareness and incent organic reciprocation.
• Link to mobile site from desktop site. Many sites say “visit our mobile site from any mobile browser”, which is a missed opportunity to help the search engines understand where the mobile site is located.
• Advertise mobile content to mobile specific audience on mobile sites and in a mobile context
• Use mobile domain, URL or QR code when appropriate in offline advertising in mobile context
• Include footer link to desktop site. Don’t force users to view mobile content

13. Use tel link and unique mobile 800 numbers to track conversions separately on your mobile site. This won’t help in ranking, but it will allow for proper monetization of mobile search, which can help secure additional funds and facilitate the mobile SEO process.

14. Avoid black hat tactics and schemes designed to artificially inflate ranking. True in white hat SEO, true in white hat mobile SEO. Black hat or gray hat SEO carries a high degree of risk for people who look to SEO best practices lists for their optimization advice. Doing it incorrectly could result in de-indexing, lost revenue, and public humiliation.

15. Avoid Session IDs. Session ids are a major indexing problem, whether mobile or desktop content, but it’s more prevalent in mobile SEO because of the problems with tracking mobile feature-phone traffic. If you must use session IDs, use parameter handling in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to exclude the session IDs from the index.

16. Avoid drop down boxes without text equivalent. This is not just a mobile SEO best practice, but it’s more prevalent in mobile sites since designers are more text-averse.

17. Create mobile sitemap(s) for mobile-specific content. It’s not necessary to put transcoded pages in the mobile sitemap. Some research (epub format) indicates that mobile sitemaps could help with faster indexing and ranking of mobile sites.

18. Use robots.txt file or password protection to exclude secure content, and include a link to mobile sitemap in robots.txt file. This could help the mobile site get indexed faster.

19. Verify site in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and exclude extraneous parameters that cause crawl problems. This could help the mobile site get indexed faster and reduce crawl problems.

20. Include enough on-page text to convey relevance to search engines. Mobile usability gurus are in favor of eliminating text on mobile sites, but some keyword-rich text is necessary to convey the page’s relevance to search engines. Reduce, rather than eliminate on-page text.

21. Optimize page speed. This is a best practice in traditional SEO as well, but Google sees speed as even more critical in mobile search. Additionally, this could result in a better user experience, which will result in more links, word of mouth and conversions.

22. If possible, validate the site using Ready.mobi or the W3C Mobile OK validator. Validation by itself is not a significant factor in ranking, but can make the site more usable, which (like #21) will inspire repeat visits and links.

23. Create and optimize mobile applications before submitting to Android Market and the App Store. Because apps are discoverable in Google search when users enter download and apps along with popular non-branded keywords, optimize using variations of these keywords. Use Chomp top search queries and Yahoo! app store search suggest to understand app store search behavior and keywords.

24. Optimize social media profiles, images, maps (e.g. Google Places page(s)) and other mobile content for mobile-specific keywords. Optimizing images will help with Google Goggles and other mobile visual search or augmented reality search engines. Social users and local users are often mobile, so optimizing these assets for the words that mobile users are searching on increases relevance of the content and could make it more visible to this growing social local mobile (SoLoMo) segment.

25. Find information sources you trust and test new best practices to validate their efficacy. Because mobile search is a newer and still emerging field in 2011, there are many “experts” who give false information that sometimes does more harm than good. The field is also changing rapidly, and has evolved from meaning “how to optimize a wap site” to “how to market effectively to tablet, smartphone, featurephone and other users of mobile devices who search” in four short years. Subscribe to this blog, read Mobile Mondays and see my updated list of trustworthy mobile SEO resources for the most accurate and timely information on mobile SEO.