I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves.

What they’re doing is pay-per-click, plain and simple — where you run ads on Google, which appear in the “Sponsored Links” section, and you pay a set amount “per click” whenever someone clicks on your ad. There’s nothing wrong with pay-per-click; it can be a powerful tool to get targeted traffic to your site. And there’s nothing wrong with paying a PPC expert to manage your PPC campaigns for you. But I’m skeptical about anyone who offers a PPC campaign on a fixed budget, while attempting to conceal exactly what they’re doing.

Despite their claims about being “featured on that first page 100% of the time,” they *have* to be setting a maximum per-month budget, which would be below what they charge you — otherwise, where would their profit come from? If and when you get enough clicks that the monthly maximum is reached, your ad would not show again until the following month. Period. There’s no other way they could make these offers and stay in business. Yet they don’t seem to want to tell you outright that your ad is running on a pay-per-click basis.

I haven’t had the pleasure of receiving any calls from NetBiz myself, so I can’t speak to the truthfulness of their sales pitch. But other people who have spoken with NetBiz reps report their experiences:

• An Austin, Texas, Realtor wrote a blog post nominating NetBiz as 2007′s Most Misleading Telemarketing Call.
• A Realtor in Hawaii reports on his blog that a NetBiz telemarketer claimed to be calling “on behalf of Google.”
• The Website Publisher blog also reports phone-spam from NetBiz and deceptive claims that they’re calling “on behalf of Google”

Furthermore, if you’re going to spend money on pay-per-click advertising, I’d recommend that you either hire someone who knows what they’re doing, or learn a little bit about it yourself and manage your own campaigns. For PPC advertising to be effective, you need to focus on carefully written, tightly focused ads, with very carefully selected keywords lists to trigger the ads, and with tightly focused landing pages on your site developed specifically as landing pages for your ads.

This slap-dash kind of offer from NetBiz, with no discussion of the value of the keywords, or any focus on writing the ad itself, and no mention of targeted landing pages — I just don’t think it’s a good way to spend your advertising money. NetBiz seems more focused on getting your money than on running advertising that will work for you.

PPC advertising isn’t rocket science, but getting a decent return on your advertising dollars requires more thought than NetBiz seems to put into their offers.

As always, do your research, gather the facts, and make up your own mind. But I recommend avoiding the NetBiz approach.

Read more about AdWords advertising:

• Maximize your Pay Per Click Return
• Eight Tips Every AdWords Advertiser Should Know

Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site.

The discussion at High Rankings opened with the story of a businessman who hired someone to design a web site for his business. The site was built in Flash, and, as might be expected, the businessman’s web site didn’t do so very well in the search engines. When he sought professional SEO help, he was flabbergasted to learn that an all-Flash site is likely to rank poorly, if at all, in the search engines.

He asked the SEO pro, “Why did the designer use Flash when he knew I wanted search engine visibility?”

A better question would be, why do designers design “search-engine hostile” web sites when they know clients want search engine visibility?

As things stand in the world of web design, anyone with some elementary graphic design skills can get themselves a copy of Dreamweaver or FrontPage and hang out their “Web Designer” shingle, offering their services for a fee to all comers.

Some of these designers do indeed have a lot of artistic talent with respect to creating pretty, aesthetically pleasing, visually attractive web sites.

What these designers lack is a fundamental understanding of the underlying code and structure of web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how search engines crawl and index web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how a web site needs to be structured in order to have a chance of getting search engine traffic.

So these web designers make a “pretty design” in Photoshop or Fireworks or Flash, and use the built-in export features from those programs to auto-generate the code or the Flash file. The client ends up with a very pretty site that hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of doing well in organic searches.

The web is still relatively new as a commercial medium, and there is still some level of technical knowledge required in order to build a crawlable web site. Daily we see self-labeled “professional” web designers creating all-Flash sites, or using fancy javascript-based rollover images for global navigation, or relying on other artsy-fartsy features that doom a site to search engine purgatory — a site that is uncrawlable by search engine spiders, and generally invisible in the search engines.

The client doesn’t understand why his beautiful site gets little or no search engine traffic. The client eventually discovers, if he’s lucky or persistent, that he now has to pay for his site all over again, this time to have someone else tear apart his beautiful artsy-fartsy site and re-build it using underlying code and techniques that the search engines can crawl.

Does it have to be this way?

Should it be this way?

I say no, it shouldn’t. Some people might argue that a web designer’s responsibility is to design pretty stuff, not to perform search engine optimization. That’s true up to a point — I wouldn’t posit that it’s the web designer’s responsibility to do link building or write linkbait articles or do keyword research, unless those activities are explicitly included in the agreement.

But I do argue that anyone who holds himself out as a “professional web designer” should have a broad and fundamental understanding of the technology of the medium and the factors that are required for success in that medium. I do argue that the “professional web designer” is holding himself out as an expert, and the client is relying on the expert’s knowledge and experience.

The client shouldn’t have to have a specialist’s knowledge of the medium — that’s why the client hires a professional. When I hire a contractor to build a house, I shouldn’t have to become an expert on building houses, and I shouldn’t have to give the contractor explicit detailed instructions about how to run the wiring so it doesn’t burn the house down. I expect the contractor — ”the professional” — to have the knowledge and expertise to do that himself, even if the contract doesn’t explicitly state that the contractor will run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down.

In an ideal world, building contractors would always run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down, and in that same ideal world, web designers would always build crawlable web sites.

The only exception I would make to this general rule is when a client specifically requests features that will cause crawlability problems, and, after being educated by the web designer about the consequences of his request, the client insists that his aesthetic vision is more important than search engine visibility. The client is paying for the site, after all. But even then there are usually steps the web designer can take to mitigate and overcome the problems — including text links in the footer to complement the pretty Flash buttons at the top of the page, for example.

Meanwhile, we live in an imperfect “buyer beware” world where the web designers who understand the medium are competing against the web designers who don’t. Clients have to educate themselves sufficiently, and ask lots of questions of potential designers, in order to be sure they end up with a crawlable web site.

There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly.

Google’s pet nofollow tag is a non-standard bit of code, created by Google, supposedly to help combat link-dropping spam on blogs. At least, that’s what Google said about it when they first introduced this tag.

Then they expanded its “recommended” usage to telling us that we should put a nofollow link condom on all links that we can’t personally vouch for, or that we don’t want to pass link juice to.

During all of this, Google has been vague about exactly what nofollow does. Initially, Google told us that nofollow would simply cause a link to not pass link juice. The implication was that Googlebot would still follow the link and spider the target page:

Google’s Blog

“when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.”

Then they told us that nofollow had the effect of the standard nofollow meta tag:

Google Webmaster Help Center

Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page, but you can also instruct Googlebot not to crawl individual links by adding rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink.

Then they told us again that such a link simply does not pass link juice:

Matt Cutts’ Blog

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link…. In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links.

Then they told us again that it acts like the nofollow meta tag:

Matt Cutts’ Blog

At a link level, you can add a nofollow tag on the granularity of individual links to prevent Googlebot from crawling individual links

Google can’t make up its mind what the nofollow tag even does — and now Google is instructing us that we are to use nofollow on all paid links — and asking us to snitch on our colleagues who might be in “violation” of Google’s “guidelines.” Mr. Cutts offered no explanation of what Google plans to do, or may do, with respect to sites selling such links, or buying such links. He offered no explanation with respect to what Google may do with the “paidlinks” reports he requested. Will Google ban the sites selling such links? Ban the sites buying such links? Devalue the link juice of the paid links? Devalue the link juice of all links on the “offending” site? How will Google itself verify whether a link is a paid link?

Further, Mr. Cutts made no distinction between links that are subject to editorial review versus free-for-all paid links that a site will sell to all comers. Google’s own webmaster guidelines recommend that we pony up the $300 yearly fee to Yahoo for a listing in Yahoo’s directory. Google says the Yahoo directory exercises editorial review and that you’re paying for the review, not the link. But what about Joe Blow’s directory, in which Joe Blow exercises editorial review before accepting a submission? What about trusted, authority sites that exercise extreme discretion in deciding what paid links to accept, only accepting those that the site deems to be worthy and of interest to the site’s readers?

Mr. Cutts offered no explanation of what Google might consider a “paid link.” A link can be “paid for” in any number of ways: An outright exchange of money for links. A trade of links for links. A trade of services for links. A link from a charitable organization in acknowledgment of a donation. A link in exchange for a discount on products or services. A link resulting from a paid review of a product. A link resulting from a free review of a product provided free to the reviewer. This list could go on endlessly.

Google is revealing an unsurpassed arrogance in expecting the world wide web to change its linking methods for all links on all sites that are paid for. To use non-standard code in order to satisfy Google’s failing method of ranking pages in search results. To use a tag that is shrouded in mystery, with no clear explanation of what it does, or what it is supposed to do, or what it might do in the future.

Google even goes so far as to “suggest” that if we don’t want to use nofollow, we should use javascript to generate these links — which would create a usability and accessibility issue that most of us would prefer to avoid.

Google’s recommendation, in fact, is completely contrary to the original intent of linkage. Here is what Tim Berners-Lee wrote about links:

The intention in the design of the web was that normal links should simply be references, with no implied meaning.

A normal hypertext link does NOT necessarily imply that

One document endorses the other;

Source: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkLaw

I say, Google, fix your algorithm, but don’t expect — or instruct with heavy-handed arrogance — the webmasters of the world to change their standard linking practices to make it easier for you to clean up your act. For shame, that a company whose motto is “Do no evil” would commit such an evil.

• Join the YesFollow Project

URL (pronounced you-are-ell, or sometimes “earl” as in Duke of) stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It’s the technical name for the address of a particular web page. For example, the URL of this site’s home page is http://www.tropicalwebworks.org, and the URL of this page is http://www.tropicalwebworks.org/2007/01/18/infamous-canonical-url/.

It’s common that any particular web page may be reached at multiple URLs. If this site were not configured optimally, the home page might be reachable at both http://www.tropicalwebworks.org and http://tropicalwebworks.org (notice the missing “www.”). Normal people would logically think that this would be desirable: After all, you don’t want people to get a “server not found” error if they try to get to your site without including the www part.

But Google sees these as two completely separate URLs that just happen to contain exactly the same content. There are two problems with such a situation:

1. First, the “strength” of that page, and its ability to turn up in the search engine results, is diluted. Some of the page’s strength is allotted to one version, and some to the other, and neither “page” performs as well as it would if all the strength were concentrated in one page.
2. And second, Google attempts to filter out pages containing duplicate content, based on the reasonable logic that people don’t want to see multiple results in their searches for the exact same thing. Thus, since both of these “pages” contain the exact same content, one of them will suffer in searches due to the dupe content filter.

It’s a double whammy. It’s not that your site actually has duplicate content. No, we could possibly call this situation “virtual duplicate content.” But it’s all the same to Google: It’s duplicate content, period.

And if that’s not bad enough, many people link to their home page like this: http://www.example.com/index.html. Now Google sees yet another instance of duplicate content: http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html. So ultimately what Google sees is four “duplicate content” pages:

• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://example.com/index.html

And all this before we’ve even gotten past the home page of your site!

It’s easy-peasy to configure the server to do what’s called a “301 permanent redirect” from the non-www version to the www version of your site. This technique, which is recommended by Google, tells Google that the two are indeed the same and keeps the poor Googlebot from deciding that you have duplicate content and splitting your page’s strength among more than one version. “301″ refers to the status code that’s returned by the web server to the browser (or the spider, in this case), and it says, in effect, “Hey, the correct, permanent URL for the page you’re requesting is actually over there. Don’t index it at this URL.”

It’s likewise easy-peasy to link to your home page without the “index.html” (or other directory index name, such as home.htm or default.asp). For index pages in subdirectories, you simply link to the directory: http://www.example.com/subdirectory/, again leaving out the actual filename index.html.

I apply an appropriate 301 permanent redirect to the www version of every web site I develop. It’s not something I charge extra for, or something that I tout to my clients as being anything special. It’s about a 20-second task to set up the 301 properly. And I never link to directory index pages by filename. I don’t know why some of the big companies aren’t aware of this issue, or, if they are aware, why they don’t care enough to do it properly. It raises the question, if they’re so ignorant, or uncaring, about a thing that is so simple to do right, in how many other areas are they incompetent?

First, a word of explanation for readers scratching their heads right now and wondering what the heck a sandbox has to do with Google: Since the spring of 2004, webmasters have been noticing that many new sites may take anywhere from 3 months to a year to rank highly in Google for their preferred keyword searches. No matter how well optimized the site, no matter how relevant the content, no matter how many inbound links. The site will rank in the top 10 in MSN and Yahoo, but is nowhere to be found in Google for the same searches. Then, suddenly, as if a dam has broken, the site starts ranking in Google.

This has become known as the sandbox. Or the sandbox effect. Or the “aging delay” or “aging filter.”

What is it? Where did it come from? Why does it exist?

In late 2005, after many months of speculation by webmasters, Matt Cutts said, in response to a question from Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld, that there isn’t a sandbox, but that “the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.”

Later, he amplified on that response to state that the sandbox effect wasn’t implemented intentionally, but that the engineers at Google, when they investigated the complaints, liked what it was doing. In other words, the sandbox is a side effect of one or more other factors in Google’s algorithm, probably those having to do with age of domain, age of inbound links, and other time-related factors.

I don’t care to argue about whether it’s called a sandbox or an effect, a filter or a penalty. I only care that sites, good sites with good content, often simply cannot rank well in Google for a period of months, no matter what they do. For the sake of simplicity, I’m content to call it a sandbox, but you can call it Aunt Dora if you like.

The sandbox apparently does not affect all sites. Word on the SEO street is that it affects sites attempting to rank for competitive or spammy keywords, or sites in competitive or spammy industries. Hey, I’m all for sandboxing the spam. Can we box it all up and send it to Antarctica on a permanent holiday? We don’t even want it back.

But does Google really have to ‘box the good sites along with the bad? Aren’t there enough geniuses working at the ‘plex to enable them to box the spammy junk sites but let the good ones bubble up?

Linkbait is the buzzword. Linkbaiting is the practice of placing something on your web site that is intended specifically to cause other sites to link to you. It’s baiting your hook with something so irresistable that it’s bound to get people’s attention and cause them to link to your site.

Linkbait can come in many forms:

Controversy: You can write an article for your site that takes a controversial stance on some topic that is of concern to many people. The thinking here is that other people will post something on their own sites disagreeing with you, and in so doing will include a link to your site. There’s nothing wrong with the spirit of debate — but be prepared to take some flak from all the people doing the disagreeing.

Humor: A cartoon, a Flash video, an essay. Self-deprecating humor. Poking fun at your own field of business. Humor is exceptionally difficult to do well — but great humor travels fast on the internet.

News: Be the first on the web to report something important. (Drudge comes to mind here.)

Do something newsworthy: Get arrested on trumped-up indecency charges. Run for office on some nutty platform. Get sued by somebody important. Sue somebody important.

Be an informational resource: Provide valuable information on a topic of importance that people can find no where else.

Reveal secrets: Post your tax return. Post the tax return of your boss. Reveal Google’s secret algorithm. Post the formula for Coca-Cola. Prepare to be sued — more linkbait!

Linkbaiting can be done at a local level, regionally, or nationally. You might have more success taking a controversial stance on that rezoning issue that’s a hot topic in your town, than trying to be the next Matt Drudge.

The above list is only a sampling of the types of linkbaiting that are possible. Use your imagination, and be aware of what people are thinking about and talking about. The gossip around the water cooler could give you your next great linkbait idea.

It used to be, for the average website owner, there was no easy, non-copyright-infringing way to display a map on a web site. Typically, the easiest solution was to link out to MapQuest or Yahoo, sending visitors away from the web site. Unauthorized use of map screenshots was rampant.

But Google Maps changed all that. On a site currently in development for an operator of whale-watching tours, I’m displaying a hybrid satellite/map of the Silver Bank of the Dominican Republic. Site visitors can pan and zoom the map themselves. Little pushpin markers show where the Silver Bank is and indicate the departure point for the tours. Google recently added an option to display the little overview map in the bottom right corner, too, so that you can have a close-up view while still giving the perspective of a larger-scale map. All this, without leaving the web site in question.

I never liked Google’s PageRank method of ranking sites based on incoming links. Google’s PageRank has been almost singlehandedly responsible for the inundation of blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, and even referer spam in every corner of the web.

Now, Google expects webmasters and bloggers to clean up the mess by lodging a vote of “no confidence” in every user-generated link.

Nope, that doesn’t work for me. I moderate comments to this blog, and spam won’t appear here because I won’t let it. I’m not part of the problem here, and it’s not my job to penalize people who engage in blog discussions by no-following their links.

Addendum: MaxPower explores and explains the NoFollow failure in more detail. I particularly like this line:

If you run a website with no comment spam, why would you discount your links? Why help Google penalize fellow bloggers?

NO No Follow has even more on the subject.

I inform my clients that this is how I work. To the extent that they want to discuss such matters, I talk to them about the importance of well-written text, headlines, custom titles, navigation and linking. I usually don’t even mention the “keywords” meta tag, because for some time now the major search engines have ignored it. The only known use of the keywords tag these days is that you can put misspelled keywords in there and Yahoo will apparently find them. Google and MSN ignore this tag completely.

I always include the keywords meta tag — it only takes a couple of minutes, and doing so helps me focus on the keywords the page is supposed to be about. But I don’t make a big deal out of it, because it really doesn’t matter. I usually don’t even mention it.

Yet …. on a fairly regular basis, a client asks me about keywords. They read somewhere that you’re supposed to put a long list of keywords in your keyword tag, and they believe that’s the secret to search engine success.

Then I explain to them that the keyword tag has no value, and that although I include those tags as part of my routine, everything else on their site is of much more importance.

I always have a sinking suspicion that they don’t quite believe me. . . . that they think they’ve sprung some super-secret, advanced SEO technique on me, and that I’m tap-dancing around the issue to cover up my lack of knowledge.

I sometimes think I should mention the keyword tag in my SEO discussions with my clients. I would inform them that the tag is virtually worthless, but that I include it anyway. But given that people imperfectly comprehend and imperfectly remember what they’re told, I fear that they’ll read somewhere that the keyword tag is valueless. Then they’ll remember only that I told them I include the tag, and they’ll again conclude that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I don’t imagine that phrase will bring much (if any!) paying work my way, but still…..

Standing around the coffee machine that morning, my boss was making a big deal out of it, joking about what an enthusiastic employee this new person was. It wasn’t until later that she had the heart to explain to him that she was a native of Puerto Rico and her bumper sticker was proudly proclaiming her national heritage, not her pride in her new job.

The webmaster forums are abuzz today with word that Google is doing one of its occasional ToolBar PageRank exports/updates. There is much discussion of the difference between ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) and Google’s real, or internal, PageRank.

I constantly experience a major disconnect between the technology- and internet-oriented people I encounter on the various webmaster forums, and the people I associate with in real life, who for the most part haven’t a clue what Google’s PR means, much less the difference between TBPR and real PR.