Guest Blogging - Enough is Enough

If your process chart looks like this, prepare for complete failure.

Guest blogging is not a strategy, and it’s not a generic solution that can be applied to every client or every part of your site. Guest posts can be an effective supplemental tactic to a fully-formed strategy, but giving this tactic center stage is a recipe for frustration and inevitable defeat.

The Guest Blog Bubble

On-page factors don’t pack the same punch they once did. Search engines have become much better at both compensating for imperfect site optimization and ignoring on-page tricks. Our collective focus began shifting towards off-page factors long ago; it’s all about those tender, juicy links.

There are as many ways to get links as there are people and pages, but in the aftermath of Penguin, guest articles are slowly becoming an industry default. I fear that the trend is driven by a lack of creativity, augmented by fear of failure, and then reinforced by poor communication.

I raised the issue of guest posting to someone who has done a lot of it - Distilled's head of Outreach, Adria Saracino:

"Guest posting is safe" ... "We're SEOs. We're metric driven. We like being able to see this consistent, targeted movement. Guest posting plays to our tactical strengths. And once we see it working once, we just keep doing it because it's safe. We fall into a routine of guest posting and the blinders slowly form over time, stifling innovation and big wins.

Guest posting in most cases isn't going to bring you direct traffic or conversions, it's not a "branding" play. There is usually no other benefit other than metric movement, and while it's short-sighted, it's also the easiest to defend to the higher-ups. So we become slaves to a redundant process rather than testing innovative ideas. I may even be so bold as to say guest posting is what will mark a slow death to the fast-paced innovation our industry is known for when it comes to link building."

Diminishing Returns at Best

Guest blog posts, all by themselves, do increase rankings. That does not necessarily mean they are worth doing.

It’s easy to forget about opportunity cost as an SEO when we have had past success with a given tactic. Far too often, we see results, and continue doing it as long as we possibly can. The value of an activity like guest posting is only worth doing if there’s nothing better we could be doing with our time.

Once more, just because something works does not mean we should be doing it – unless it is the best path to the fastest or most enduring results. Guest posting (by itself) is essentially never the best activity for an SEO, due primarily to the diminishing returns seen in long-term guest blogging campaigns.

Guest blogging’s strength is that you can launch immediately, avoiding that lonely feeling of blog posts that no one comments on. However, the guest-blog-only strategy has two fatal weaknesses: 1) there is an obviously fixed ratio of one linking domain per article placed, and 2) you reach rapidly diminishing returns. Furthermore, ideal blogs are a finite resource, and you can either lower your standards or post again on a good blog. Neither option is necessarily bad, but both have diminishing returns.

A pure content strategy can be frustrating simply because it takes so long to get rolling. I’ll be honest: I abandoned both a commercial and a philosophy blog in a past life because I got sick of writing posts no one read. But what if I had combined great content with other tactics?

What do I mean by a comprehensive strategy? I’m sure you remember this guy:

From Inbound Marketing is Taking Off by Rand Fishkin

With great content, your guest posts will be more effective. So will your email marketing campaigns, paid search traffic, and referral traffic. We can think of content as a multiplier that adds to almost any other marketing tactic.

The multiplier effect of amazing content happens two ways with guest posting (or any other channel, really). First, bloggers will be more likely to accept posts and talk about/to you if your target site has its own credible content. Second, users from the host blog will share and re-share your content if your site offers something they can be excited about.

Site Owner Fatigue

Link-based diminishing returns aside, the guest blogging bubble weakens further as site owners are continually poked and prodded by requests from acquaintances and strangers to allow them to guest post. Everyone is getting tired of the constant requests, especially when the requests are so damn horrible. I think Geraldine’s recent post on her travel blog captures that well:

“Hello! I am interested in writing a high-quality guest post for your site! All I require is two contextual links placed within the post.”

You know that song from the sixties that starts with “No-no no no no no no-no-no no?” That is now playing in my head. Because no.

Even if you actually read these blogs and really want to contribute something great, other people are making all but the most patient blog owners weary with their piles of requests.

What's Next?

Where are we headed, and what should we do next? SEO is not dying, and linkbuilding is not dead. I'm actually more optimistic than ever about the direction the industry is moving in. We're generally moving towards sustainability and making recommendations that are going to have a far bigger impact than raising the rankings for a couple tracked keywords.

Penalties: Unlikely for Most

It seems highly unlikely that Google will penalize guest posts just because they are guest posts. It’s a perfectly legitimate strategy – at least, when it is legitimate. Just consider that a ton of links from spammy sites publishing poorly-written content is more of a liability than a benefit. I’m not arguing that Google will bring the hammer down on guest blog posts, but risk certainly rises as quality declines.

Communicate and Fix Misconceptions

Some clients and managers are under the impression that it’s your job to vanish into the nether, and return bearing all the links they will ever need to rank for their broadest pet phrase. They're probably in the wrong; that's not how SEO works anymore. It’s easy to blame the people who have the wrong ideas, but whose fault is it when points of contact have these mistaken expectations?

It’s our fault.

We know SEO. Presumably that’s what we're taking checks for. We understand the value of content. Regardless of how someone picked up their mistaken assumptions - and this is worth looking into - it's up to us to correct misconceptions.

We often get cornered into rote guest blogging when expected to solve their problems without interaction or support. Failure to communicate this fact; however, is not sufficient reason enough to head face first into the inevitable plateau of diminishing returns. For more on how to encourage cooperation, read Hannah's post on solving people problems. She doesn't use the phrase "managing expectations" even once, I promise.

Make Content a Pre-Requisite

I am not telling you to publish and wait. Links matter – that’s obvious. You can’t sit and wait, hoping that some white knight blogger is going to come along and raise your precious content out of obscurity.

Think of your site as a retail store selling widgets. You can perform your essential business function - selling widgets - out of an empty warehouse, but we know that the appearance, furnishing, ambiance, and customer service all matter. You probably wouldn't worry about posting billboards and local ads all over town until your retail space made customers comfortable. You want them to tell their friends and come back, so you get your store in order first.

Websites are no different in this regard. To make a potential customer feel comfortable, you need compelling design, good navigation, and good content. You want users to have a great experience - whether consuming your content or making purchases - so that they will tell others (hint: sometimes via links) and come back. If you want to invest in greater visibility, get your site in order and stop trying send people to the questionable warehouses of the Internet.

THEN Explore All the Channels

There's really nothing magic about the white-hat linkbuilding process. From the users and bloggers' perspective, it looks like this:

Sharing leads in turn to more awareness, and the circle of quality continues. In a recent webinar between Rand and Dharmesh at Hubspot, paid advertising was described as "renting attention." This is true, but until you have the free sort of attention, paying for it can be a worthy way of getting the process above started. Try running display ads to content. Try bidding on low-competition informational keywords that you have great content to match. Run PR campaigns to make people aware of the most interesting part of your business. And yes, do some well-thought guest posting to raise awareness of your content. Ann Smarty has a lot of great guidance on doing guest blogging the right way.

I've singled out guest posting intentionally because its prevalance and average quality indicate that we're losing sight of goals and strategy. Much of what I've said, though, could apply to any channel. Pick a channel from the graphic above, and it's not hard to see you how having a great user experience with great content can make that tactic more financially beneficial.

There is real danger in getting myopic tunnel vision about a link or two in a post. We cheat ourselves out of compounding and self-perpetuating benefits when we fail to lay the groundwork. We’re at risk of teaching a generation of bloggers that SEOs are just spammers out to trick bloggers. We’re at risk of teaching new SEOs that linkbuilding for linkbuilding’s sake is something beside foolish and short-sighted.

I understand the fear involved with taking a bet on the difficult links. It’s not easy to tell someone that their content isn’t cutting it, and it’s even harder to provide a clear vision and map to get there. Connecting the dots between strategy and tactics is mentally exhausting, but you don’t need to get it perfect right away. And please, let's stop with the crapstorm of throwing guest posts wherever we can.

Carson Ward

Source: http://www.seomoz.org

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Rank Modifying Spammers

My good friend Bill at SEOByTheSea has unearthed a Google patent that will likely raise eyebrows, whilst others will have their suspicions confirmed.

The patent is called Ranking Documents. When webmasters alter a page, or links to a page, the system may not respond immediately to those changes. Rather, the system may change rankings in unexpected ways.

A system determines a first rank associated with a document and determines a second rank associated with the document, where the second rank is different from the first rank. The system also changes, during a transition period that occurs during a transition from the first rank to the second rank, a transition rank associated with the document based on a rank transition function that varies the transition rank over time without any change in ranking factors associated with the document.

Further:

During the transition from the old rank to the target rank, the transition rank might cause:
*  a time-based delay response,
*  a negative response
*  a random response, and/or
*  an unexpected response

So, Google may shift the rankings of your site, in what appears to be a random manner, before Google settles on a target rank.

Let's say that you're building links to a site, and the site moves up in the rankings. You would assume that the link building has had a positive effect. Not so if the patent code is active, as your site may have already been flagged.

Google then toys with you for a while before sending your site plummeting to the target rank. This makes it harder to determine cause and effect.

Just because a patent exists doesn't mean Google is using it, of course. This may be just be another weapon in the war-of-FUD, but it sounds plausible and it’s something to keep in mind, especially if you're seeing this type of movement.

The Search Engine As Black Box

In ancient times (1990s), SEO thrived because search engines were stupid black boxes. If you added some keywords here, added a few links there, the black box would respond in a somewhat predictable, prescribed, fashion. Your rankings would rise if you guessed what the black box liked to "see", and you plummeted if you did too much of what the black box liked to see!

Ah, the good old days.

These days, the black box isn’t quite so stupid. It’s certainly a lot more cryptic. What hasn’t changed, however, is the battle line drawn between webmasters and search engines as they compete for search visitor attention.

If there are any webmasters still under the illusion that Google is the SEOs friend, that must be a very small club, indeed. Google used to maintain a - somewhat unconvincing - line that if you just followed their ambiguous guidelines (read: behaved yourself) then they would reward you. It was you and Google on the good side, and the evil spammers on the other.

Of late, Google appear to have gotten bored of maintaining any pretense, and the battle lines have been informally redrawn. If you’re a webmaster doing anything at all that might be considered an effort to improve rank, then you're a "spammer". Google would no doubt argue this has always been the case, even if you had to read between the lines to grasp it. And they’d be right.

Unconvinced?

Look at the language on the patent:

The systems and methods may also observe spammers’ reactions to rank changes caused by the rank transition function to identify documents that are actively being manipulated. This assists in the identification of rank-modifying spammers.

“Manipulated”? “Rank modifying spammers”? So, a spammer is someone who attempts to modify their rank?

I’ve yet to meet a webmaster would didn’t wish to modify their rank.

Google As A Competitor

Google’s business model relies on people clicking ads. In their initial IPO filing, Google identified rank manipulation as a business risk.

We are susceptible to index spammers who could harm the integrity of our web search results. There is an ongoing and increasing effort by “index spammers” to develop ways to manipulate our web search results

It’s a business risk partly because the result sets need to be relevant for people to return to Google. The largely unspoken point is Google wants webmasters to pay to run advertising, not get it for “free”, or hand their search advertising budget to an SEO shop.

Why would Google make life easy for competitors?

The counter argument has been that webmasters provide free content, which the search engines need in order to attract visitors in the first place. However, now relevant content is plentiful, that argument has been weakened. Essentially, if you don't want to be in Google, then block Google. They won't lose any sleep over it.

What has happened, however, is that the incentive to produce quality content, with search engines in mind, has been significantly reduced. If content can be scraped, ripped-off, demoted and merely used as a means to distract the search engine user enough to maybe click a few search engine ads, then where is the money going to come from to produce quality content? Google may be able to find relevant content, but "relevant" (on-topic) and "quality" (worth consuming) are seldom the same thing

One content model that works in such as environment is content that is cheap to produce. Cheap content can be quality content, but like all things in life, quality tends to come with a higher price tag. Another model that works is loss-leader content, but then the really good stuff is still hidden from view, and it's still hard to do this well, unless you've established considerable credibility - which is still expensive to do.

This is the same argument the newspaper publishers have been making. The advertising doesn’t pay enough to cover the cost of production and make a profit - so naturally the winner in this game cuts production cost until the numbers do add up. What tends to be sacrificed in this process - is quality.

NFSW Corp, a new startup by ex-TechCrunch and Guardian columnist writer Paul Carr has taken the next step. They have put everything behind a paywall. There is no free content. No loss-leaders. All you see is a login screen.

Is this the future for web publishing? If so, the most valuable content will not be in Google. And if more and more valuable content lies beyond Google's reach, then will fewer people bother going to Google in the first place?

The Happy Middle

Google argue that they focus on the user. They run experiments to determine search quality, quality as determined by users.

Here’s how it works. Our engineers come up with some insight or technique and implement a change to the search ranking algorithm . They hope this will improve search results, but at this point it’s just a hypothesis. So how do we know if it’s a good change? First we have a panel of real users spread around the world try out the change, comparing it side by side against our unchanged algorithm. This is a blind test — they don’t know which is which. They rate the results, and from that we get a rough sense of whether the change is better than the original. If it isn’t, we go back to the drawing board. But if it looks good, we might next take it into our usability lab — a physical room where we can invite people in to try it out in person and give us more detailed feedback. Or we might run it live for a small percentage of actual Google users, and see whether the change is improving things for them. If all those experiments have positive results, we eventually roll out the change for everyone"

Customer focus is, of course, admirable, but you’ve got to wonder about a metric that doesn’t involve the needs of publishers. If publishing on the web is not financially worthwhile, then, over time, the serps will surely degrade in terms of quality as a whole, and users will likely go elsewhere.

There is evidence this is already happening. Brett at Webmasterworld pointed out that there is a growing trend amongst consumers to skip Google altogether and just head for the Amazon, and other sites, directly. Amazon queries are up 73 percent in the last year.

There may well be a lot of very clever people at Google, but they do not appear to be clever enough to come up with a model that encourages webmasters to compete with each other in terms of information quality.

If Google doesn’t want the highest quality information increasingly locked up behind paywalls, then it needs to think of a way to nurture and incentivise the production of quality content, not just relevantcontent. Tell publishers exactly what content Google wants to see rank well and tell them how to achieve it. There should be enough money left on the table for publishers i.e. less competition from ads - so that everyone can win.

I’m not going to hold my breath for this publisher nirvana, however. I suspect Google's current model just needs content to be "good enough."

Source: http://www.seobook.com

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5 Tips To Convert Website Visitors Into More Leads & Sales

Dear Business Owner, I Have a Couple of Questions For You:

1. Is your website producing the leads you want and think you deserve? 
2. Is your website a fine tuned lead machine keeping you so busy that you can not keep up with demand?

If so, read no further, you have cracked the code of the internets. If not, please keep on reading.

Before I started working here at SEO.com, I owned a web development company for many years. We were on the front lines of the conversion optimization revolution. Before companies even heard of it, trusted that they needed it. But there were the few who “got it” and killed their competition by learning how to convert website visitors into better leads as well as obtaining more customers.

When it comes to producing revenue from your website, there are two sides of the coin.

• One side is the issue of traffic or “how many people can I get to visit my website?” This could be through SEO, Pay Per Click, Social Media and (cough) traditional advertising.
• On the flip side is the issue of conversion or “how can I get these people to do what I want them to do once they get to my site?”

But are you actually asking yourself that question on the flip side, or are you building what I call a “spray and pray” site? Are you just posting as much content as possible, and praying the visitor takes any action?

Or have you planned the path you want them to take, the download, the registration, the sign-up, the purchase you want them to make. Do you have the roadmap to make it easier for your visitors to do so?

Studies have shown that average lead generation websites convert 4-8% of visitors into leads. Not very impressive, right? Well lucky for you, here are five tips for converting your website visitors into more leads and customers:

#1 Identify & Prioritize Site Goals

Increasing your conversion rate doesn’t happen by accident. You have to plan and design for it. Most “corporate” websites were never meant to be lead generation engines. It’s too bad, really, because a good conversion site can accomplish the typical goals of a corporate site just as well, and increase revenue to boot. As I talked to clients, most of them told me that they want their website to “project the right image,” “provide a face to the public,” “inform and educate visitors,” “support existing customers,” yadda, yaddaet, yadda. It’s as if it never occurred to them that you don’t have to actually sell anything on your site in order for it to produce revenue. Isn’t your website a corporate resource just like any other that should provide return on investment (ROI)?

Most CEO’s wouldn’t continue to spend money on a resource that wasn’t providing ROI. But because companies often believe ROI in online marketing can be difficult to measure, companies often lower their expectations. Instead of real ROI, they measure things like impressions, views, or hits and hope for the best. (Incidentally, if you think of your website as an IT resource and not a marketing resource you’re even further behind.) Instead of setting arbitrary goals, focus on things like these:

• Cost per lead acquisition
• Increase in revenue
• Decrease in cost
• Improved ROI

The Internet is the most measurable marketing medium in the world, if you know what you are doing.

#2 Understand Your Target Audience and Unique Value Proposition

Once you’ve established that conversion and lead generation are “what” your website should accomplish, the next question to ask is “who” are you trying to convert? Here is a list of questions to ask yourself to help you understand your target audience:

• What unique value do you offer?
• What are your visitors looking for?
• How knowledgeable are they about your products or services?
• What additional questions might they have?

Understanding your target audience is vital to formulating the right messaging, designing the right look and feel, and creating compelling calls-to-action. Your unique value proposition forms the core of your marketing message. It is the reason “why” people do business with you. Too often businesses explain themselves in terms of how they see their own business. Sometimes these explanations take the form of mission statements or business plan summaries and are often filled with “insider” language that only they understand. Your unique value proposition should be formulated by looking at your business from your target audience’s perspective. It should be developed with the intent to persuade, not just inform or educate. A visitor should arrive at your site and say “Ah hah, I am in the right place” almost immediately!

#3 Structure Your Site Like a Sales Presentation, Not Like a Brochure

Many companies think of their website as an electronic brochure or catalog – i.e., all of the information about their company is there, the visitor just has to browse around and find it. (Remember Spray and Pray?) To facilitate this, companies pay attention to usability guidelines and include the ability to search the site. If the goal of the site is to inform or educate, this type of structure is probably sufficient. However, if the goal is to persuade someone to take action, the typical structure is sorely lacking.

If you structure your site like a brochure, you are relying on the visitor to go where they think they want to go within your site. Inevitably, they are going to get elements of your sales presentation out of sequence and it is going to be less persuasive. Or worse, perhaps they will stumble across information that was intended for a completely different audience and therefore it confuses them and they bounce.

Rather than thinking of your site as a brochure, think of it as a sales presentation. Most sales relationships begin with some rapport building and needs analysis. Once a sales person has the confidence of the prospect and understands their needs, they can begin to present their solution to those needs. The presentation is usually something that the sales person has practiced and knows well. They knows that it seems to make more sense to people when they say; A, then B, then C. It has a logical flow and includes some stories of satisfied customers or other emotional elements as well. At the appropriate point in the presentation, the sales person knows when and how to ask for the sale, or ask them to take the next step. In your fine tuned website it could be something like downloading an eBook, attending a webinar, etc.

If you understand your target audience and what they are looking for, and have crafted a persuasive value proposition for them, you can structure your site like a sales presentation that guides them through a pre-defined series of pages that you know from experience has the best chance of persuading them to take action.

#4 Graphic Design Is a Support, Not a Strategy

A radio ad for a local web design firm talks about creating the right look and feel to help their clients project the right image. They claim “image is everything.” While look and feel, image, and graphic design in general are certainly important, they are by no means “everything.” In fact, good graphic design should accomplish three specific goals on your website:

1. Create instant affinity
2. Build credibility
3. Focus the visitor on the message.

If you are expecting more than that from your graphic design, you are asking too much.

Studies over the years have found that people make a general good/bad judgment of websites in the first 1/20th of a second. The other interesting thing that this study found is that those initial judgments usually last. That’s right, they wont be coming back. You really do have only one chance to make a first impression, and create a feeling of trust, rapport, and affinity.

Graphic design that is too busy, bright, and gaudy, or bare, bland and text driven can distract your visitor. Graphic design should be clean and not cluttered. Do some research about what colors and images:

• Appeal to your target audience
• Convey a feeling of professionalism, credibility and trustworthiness

You should summarize your unique value proposition into a prominently displayed positioning statement, and make sure you have a plainly visible call-to-action that directs the visitor where (they think/you want them) to click next.

#5 Utilize Effective Lead Capture Mechanisms

Finally, by strategically placing a proper calls-to-action on each page, you now can direct visitors through your site in a persuasive sequence. We called these calls-to-action “sign-posts.” Two things to keep in mind when creating sign posts are:

1. Offer something of high-perceived value to your target audience (yet low cost to deliver for you).
2. Offer something that helps qualify visitors as prospects. (For example, offering a drawing for a free big screen TV does not tell you whether the person entering the drawing is interested in your products or services, only that they are interested in a free TV)

Before the visitor can access your free offer, you should capture their contact information. The fields you include on your form should only include information you will actually use. In other words, don’t ask for their mailing address if you aren’t going to mail them anything. You can also use the form, however, to gain additional intelligence about the person including how they heard about you. This kind of information can be very valuable in measuring the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns (going back to tip #1). Also, ask questions that can better help you grade your leads. Stop wasting time calling everyone, call quality scored leads that ROCK!
While this post is not going to give you all the detailed knowledge and implementation processes, let it serve as an inspiration to get you and your business thinking about techniques you can use to turn your website into a lead generation machine.

A couple items to research, and truly understand is

• Analytics: Learn to set up your goals, track your traffic, your funnels, and make sure they are doing what you intended
• Split Testing: There are free services available for you to do this, as well as paid. But if you are not consistently testing and tweaking your site, you are losing precious leads
• Check your ego at the door: I know you may be tempted to make this a shrine of information and show how badass your company is. But at the end of the day less is more, and your site should be built for leads. When wondering if you should add a particular piece of content, ask yourself this: By adding this, is it 100% in-line with my site goals? If not, scrap it!

In future posts, we can diver deeper into specific ideas to help you with your site. If you have questions, or comments, please leave them below. That might help me decide where to take this topic next.

iGoByDoc

Source: http://www.seo.com

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Lost Your Google Reviews? Take A Proactive Stance!

Apart from a local business profile completely disappearing from Google's local index, few things cause more frustration and heartache than lost reviews. Unfortunately, lost reviews are one of the problems most frequently reported by local business owners, creating stormy weather in this whole region of Google land. Have you or your clients recently experienced an uptick in lost reviews? This post is for you!

Lost reviews are almost as old as Google's entrance into Local. As early as 2006, Local SEO extraordinaire, Mike Blumenthal, began writing about the important role reviews appeared to be playing in local rankings, and in 2007 about a sudden loss of reviews and suspicion of a review filter. This saga has continued month by month over the past 6 years, with countless reviews disappearing into a black hole and bewildered business owners begging for answers.

I now present to you: the #1 link you need to have if you've lost your reviews!

This will take you to a thread in the Google and Your Business Forum in which Mike Blumenthal is attempting to have all lost review complaints consolidated into one place. It is suspected that Google has either implemented a new filter or done an upgrade to an old one, causing many reviews (including totally legitimate ones) to be lost. Mike states:

"Let's consolidate the issues into this ONE huge post and see if we can get someone from Google to monitor all of these cases... If you are in, I will do what I can to get more Google eyes looking at this issue."

As a Top Contributor to the Google and Your Business Forum, Mike has the ability to communicate directly with Google staff, so this is the best place on the web to document your lost reviews in hopes of taking effective action. Fair warning: don't hold your breath on this. You may or may not see your reviews reappear, but at the very least you will be making yourself heard and signaling to Google the seriousness of the current issue, hopefully generating better future outcomes if not a return of specific reviews you have just lost. I'm encouraging you to take a proactive stance on an issue that has a genuine effect on millions of businesses. There are already more than 99 posts on that thread. Keep them coming!

Between August 6- 16, Google staffer Jade W. has provided several responses on the thread which I recommend you read in full. Consolidated, the responses include:

"Soliciting reviews is suspect behavior for our systems, so please please please make sure your reviews are legitimate and left by your customers of their own accord...The majority of the reviews cases that I have investigated from the forum and other channels are reviews being taken down for suspicious reviewing behavior...

It's fine if you reach out to customers to ask them to review, but I do not recommend that you do this in waves. If you want to reach out to legit customers and ask them to review, I recommend you contact them immediately after you have done business with them. ...In our ideas, the "ideal" review is by a customer who writes a review of a place completely by his or her own accord, on mobile during the experience or at home after. This would mimic the regular flow of the business. On the other hand, some SEO companies that resort to spam reviews to deliver "results" would exhibit different behavior."

As I understand it, Jade W. is indicating that the majority of reviews being removed are for 'suspicious behavior' and she mentions types of solicitations of reviews and also 'waves' of reviews. Local SEOs and business owners who have been following the review issue for years will almost certainly recall that Google has not only solicited reviews in the past, but also authorized the use of review stations in December 2011.

It would appear that if you followed Google's lead on this and ran a contest to solicit reviews (thereby generating a wave of incoming reviews) or set up a review station in your shop to solicit reviews, you could be in danger of losing those reviews. Not trying to be a smart aleck here, but I honestly don't believe I will be alone in seeing a bit of irony in this scenario.

If Google has now decided that legitimate reviews don't come in waves, I hope they will read the comment in the same forum thread from Top Contributor Linda Buquet of Catalyst eMarketing. Here is an excerpt:

"Here's a common example that I think often happens and is totally legit. This could be a local store, restaurant, Dentist, or whatever...Monthly email newsletter goes out. At bottom it says "Check out all our great reviews on Google and please leave us one if you have any feedback to share"...Then due to that newsletter going out to all customers, they may get a bunch of reviews all at once. Then next month another big rush."

I have to agree with Linda on this. There are so many instances that could generate waves of interest and, thus, waves of reviews. How about a blowout sale at a store, a special foodie event at a restaurant, or a high profile news piece on a local business? In the 17th century, Issac Newton and Christiaan Huygens had conflicting theories as to whether light is a wave or a particle. Eventually, the theory of wave-particle duality was postulated to support the idea that all particles have a wave-like nature and vice versa. I find this applicable to the review scenario. Legitimate reviews can come along one-by-one, but it's easy to think of lots of instances in which they could legitimately come in waves.

Honestly, what Newton and Huygens think, what you, and what I think isn't really this issue here. The issue depends on what Google is thinking and how their thoughts are going to directly affect your business' ability to hang onto the reviews you get. Right now, Google is indicating that they have become suspicious of waves. Good to know.

So, if you've taken step one of reporting your lost reviews on the Google thread linked to above, here's an interesting second step to take. I recommend reading Joy Hawkins' article on avoiding the review filter. Joy is careful to note that her test is small and that she is only sharing a theory, but that the usage of a mobile device when leaving a review apparently enabled Joy to get two formerly 'lost' reviews to appear. It would be great if some of the Local SEOs reading this article could take this ball and run a little further with it, creating a larger test. Can your clients solicit reviews that 'stick' by utilizing a mobile device for the transaction? I'd love to know!

For my third resource, I will again cite a Mike Blumenthal post (which he's actually published and then re-published because of the recent upsurge in lost reviews): What Should You Tell A Client When Google Loses Their Reviews- A 4 Part Plan. Two things are especially noteworthy in this post: 1) a warning to the auto industry that they are under keen scrutiny right now for heavy spamming, and 2) encouragement to copy any reviews that you do receive. In case they disappear in future, you'll have a copy and can post the 'lost' review to your website as a testimonial, salvaging at least some of the power you have to share with others your good name in your community.

My personal position in all this is one of empathy. I know you work hard for your reviews. More importantly, I know how hard you work to run a business that offers such excellent service that you generate good feelings amongst your customers. It's a genuine loss when documentation of your satisfaction rate vanishes through no fault of your own.

I understand that it can be hard for Google (or anyone) to tell whether a review is legitimately earned, or if money has changed hands in exchange for a positive false review, but I encourage Google to treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves. Every day, countless business owners are spending their valuable time trying to educate themselves about the Google system that has so much power over the fate of their businesses. They are taking this very seriously, and most are trying to play by the rules. This effort should be rewarded with transparency and fair treatment, and it's totally up to Google to provide this, since they are calling the shots.

If you've recently lost reviews, post the details in the Google and Your Business Forum thread linked to in this post.

In Sum

• Be aware that Google appears to have become suspicious of waves of reviews. Getting reviews slowly may be good insurance against loss. 
• It's always been a best practice to diversify in your review gathering efforts. If you let your customers pick their favorite review platform rather than guiding them towards Google, you will end up with a more diverse profile. If this means reviews come to you through Google more slowly, it appears that this may actually be a good thing. 
• You might like to try soliciting reviews on mobile devices, per Joy Hawkins' experiment, to see if they 'stick.' 
• Know that you're not alone. Lots of businesses are experiencing lost reviews now, and if you're in the auto dealership industry, there appears to be heavy scrutiny going on. 
• Create a document on your computer to save any review you see come in. If it disappears tomorrow, you can still get some leverage out if by using the saved copy as a testimonial on your website.

I hope this article has empowered you to proactively participate in this issue and has brought you up-to-date on the latest news on this front. Leave your comments or other advice below!

MiriamEllis

Source: http://www.seomoz.org

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