What Brand Marketers Should Ask Their Search Agencies

Google considers its search algorithm a rather nimble moving target and makes prominent public mention of the fact that the formula it uses for calculating which pages come out on top in organic search undergoes approximately 500 annual revisions, large and small.

The small changes may go unnoticed except by the professional Google-ologists of the search marketing industry, but a few very big online brands have recently been very publicly notified that they and their SEM agencies have overstepped the bounds of what Google considers acceptable behavior for raising one’s PageRank.

In each case, the penalties were apparently the result of actions taken by outside search marketing agencies employed by the brands. But those penalties have also been severe enough to beg the question: What should brands know before they hire an SEM agency, and how should they monitor the search tactics being deployed on their behalf to guard against the wrath of Google?

Retailer J.C. Penney, the first brand to get caught up in Google’s recent dragnet, alleges it found out about the investigation in the way most brands would like to avoid: through a two-page Feb. 12 story in The New York Times, which paid a search marketing firm to analyze some of the tactics that had kept Penny coming up on top for a large list of keywords all through the 2010 holiday season.

The finding, by both the Times’ contracted search analysts and by Google, was that Penney was getting the benefit—the “link juice”, a shot of credibility from the automated bots that roam the Google index– of a lot of inbound links from Web sites that turned out to merely exist to create links. For example, the keywords relating to dresses showed up along with a Penney link at the bottom of sites with names like nuclearengineering.addict.com and bulgariapropertyportal.com.

Google, which maintained that its search cops had already noticed Penney’s surprising strength in holiday searches, promptly corrected the retailer’s keyword search results, knocking its former top-spot organic listings for terms such as “living room furniture” and “Samsonite luggage” into the 60s and 70s—far beyond the territory most online searchers ever go to find what they want.

Ten days later, Google also took action against online seller Overstock.com, although for a different search-based infraction. Overstock.com had been compensating university webmasters to include links back to overstock’s Web site in their pages. Much of the content appears to have been relevant—for example, blog posts welcoming new students with advice about the furniture and supplies they’d need, terms that were also pulled out as keywords and linked back to overstock landing pages for laptops, bedding, etc.

In return for their efforts, Overstock offered the webmasters and bloggers discounts on merchandise. In exchange, overstock.com got a lot of links that at first glance made its pages look really authoritative. Even better, most of those links came from .edu domains, reputed to carry extra link love with the Google bots than the average .coms. As with the Penney example, a lot of incoming links created the impression that Overstock’s pages for these product categories were considered really valuable, and that got them ranked high for those keywords in organic results.

But Google doesn’t look favorably on paying for links as a way to improve page rankings, considering paid links as advertising and thus not reflective of the real value users ascribe to a page. And it tends to suspect that anyone using paid links is actually trying to game the system. Accordingly Google corrected Overstock’s organic results, and as with Penney, overstock.com dropped far back in the results for terms ranging from ‘laptop computers’ to ‘vacuum cleaners”.

For its part, Overstock.com did not say it had purposely intended to enhance its page rankings with collegiate links built for compensation. All the brand would say, in a statement ascribed to CEO Patrick Byrne, was that Google had decided those type of links “should not factor into their search algorithm… We understand Google’s position and have made the appropriate changes to remain within Google’s guidelines.”

In the J.C. Penney case, both Google and the brand were a bit less tight-lipped. Google search guru Matt Cutts went on the search engine’s YouTube channel to explain the procedure for getting your site un-penalized—although without referencing Penney.

Meanwhile, the retailer maintained that it had no knowledge its search firm at the time, SearchDex, was pursuing this link-based strategy; the company fired the firm when the Google action came to light. But Penney also said it had not received any notice from Google that it was part of what’s known as a “portal scheme”.

“We have no record of ever receiving a violation notification from Google before last week when the unauthorized links came to our attention,” read an email from JC Penney corporate communications vice president Darcie Brossart quoted in press reports. “If we had, we would have worked quickly to remedy the situation, as we are doing now. Obviously, we are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings.”

Brands Nervous about Content Demotions

Nevertheless, the demotion of two major brands in the course of ten days has suddenly made many CMOs and their bosses nervous about what’s being done in their brands’ name to improve ranking in search.

“In the last few days, I heard from one CMO of a large retailer who said he and his boss just had their first conversation about search,” says Eric Papczun, vice president of SEO and feeds for digital agency Performics. “SEO is definitely getting a stain on it once again that we’re going to have to address with education.”

Papczun says that although Google is purposely vague about the rules that govern page rankings, in order to guard against gaming their process, the tactics deployed by SearchDex for Penney were undoubtedly suspect. In fact they were almost the same as those that got BMW’s German site banned from Google’s search index entirely back in 2008.

Nevertheless, professing ignorance of Google’s rules didn’t keep Penney from getting downgraded, and it’s no excuse for bad SEO practices. “I’d fire someone for not knowing,” Papczun says. “It’s more of a crime to me if they didn’t know.”

But how can marketers—who may have outsourced search marketing in the first place because they didn’t have the time or in-house resources to handle it themselves—be reasonably certain that they’ve hired an SEO firm that will work responsibly and stay away from so-called “black hat” search tactics?

“The good news is that it’s not terribly hard,” Papczun says—although it will involve the marketer getting his or her hands on some actual Web tools.

In this era of aggressive link-building tactics, he says, marketers looking to keep tabs on their outsourced SEO should head for Open Site Explorer, a link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool from SEO software provider SEOmoz.

“Use it to look at your domains and the links pointing to them, and ask yourself just how ‘Google-compliant’ your link portfolio looks,” Papczun says. “See if there’s any smoke. This would have shown what Penney was doing, what Overstock.com was doing.”

Rebecca Ryan, search expert and co-founder of LiBeck Integrated Marketing, says checking an agency’s linking practices should be part of the interview conversation when a marketer is still shopping for SEO help.

“Before hiring an agency, ask who their other clients are, and check the links of their current clients to see if they’re quality links,” she says in an email. “Quality links are organic links from merit-based sites that show up easily and have high [Google] PageRanks.”

Bad links, she says, come from pages with low PageRanks, or tend to come from easily link-spammed sources such as forums, blogs or comments to other writers’ posts.

However, Ryan points out, the Overstock.com tactic falls into a grey area that mingles search optimization with viral marketing. This may be an instance where Google may apply one standard today but another tomorrow, or may at least be compelled to express more clearly what’s allowable in terms of compensating others for building links.

Part of the problem between brands and their SEO agencies, Papczun says, can arise when those two have different tolerances for risk. “There are a lot of agencies out there that don’t mean harm, but are driven to push the envelope to get added performance in ways that most marketers just would not be comfortable with.”

In considering a relationship with a new SEO firm, brands need to make explicit whatever their limits are for risky search behavior. Ryan recommends avoiding any agency that quickly and constantly offers to buy links to improve your brand’s search standing, or one that can’t seem to come up with a holistic, long-term strategy for improving your organic performance.

“Above all, avoid SEO agencies that don’t understand the goals of your company and the needs of your industry,” she says. After all, it’s your brand that will pay the price on the search pages.