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8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better

Posted by randfish

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about design & usability topics, but I think we’re overdue for a revisit. Luckily, in my recent web browsing, I stumbled across some remarkably innovative, uncommon design elements that made me take notice.

#1 - News via the Logo

Sites like Google, Yahoo! & Reddit are famous for using their logos to promote holidays or commemorate important dates, but several creative designers have been featuring news about their companies or their industry right in (or near) the logo:

#2 - Narrative Top-Level Navigation

This concept certainly won’t work for every site, but I was impressed with how well it flowed and actually made me click on all the links to explore the site. The concept is to create a 1-2 sentence narrative as the top menu, and have the relevant navigation pieces as anchor text. I think that with solid design, micro-site architecture and a singular purpose, this could become a trend:

#3 - The Auto-Scrolling Multihero

This one’s not exactly new - I wrote about it back in ‘06. However, the multihero (so named because there are multiple “hero” graphics and headlines) is getting better over time. Several of my favorites have worked out the exact temporal spacing, hover-based slowdown and back/forward operations. I particularly like how it gets a number of “featured” pieces of content to the audience of the heavily trafficked homepage without clogging up too much space:

Just remember that if you’re doing SEO with these, you’ll need to use CSS (not flash) if you want the content and links properly indexed and followed.

#4 - Dual Tabs for Filtering

A basic principle of good web design is to limit yourself to no more than one set of top-level navigation items, which is why the dual tab system is so interesting to me. It breaks the rules, yet functions remarkably well and actually helps the user to better filter information:

#5 - The Product IS the homepage

A clear fault with so many business websites is their weakness in conveying the company’s purpose in those first few critical seconds. I’ve been impressed by a few designs from the folks at Logistetica, who boiled down complex engineering and technology products in less time than it takes to be amazed by the pretty graphics:

#6 - Screenshot/Image Overlays

One of my least favorite navigation features occurs when I click on an easily-embeddable image and am taken to a completely different page (especially when it’s just to the picture file URL). Designers have been solving this for some time with the pop-up overlay, and though technically it’s the same number of clicks to return to the page (either click the “x” to close the overlay or “back” from the image URL), it feels so much cleaner and smoother to have the transition take place seemlessly over the background page:

#7 - Conversion-Funnel Based Navigation

One of the more creative navigation systems I saw came from Carbon Made. It featured a sidebar nav that offered links based on the user’s location in the conversion process - ready to sign up, in need of a demo or already a member:

I have to wonder if it’s the beginning of a potentially successful way to bring visitors into the fold, or whether it’s merely an outlier that caught my fancy. Might be worth a try?

#8 - The “You’re a Winner” Beta Invite

As the concept of private betas have propogated from Silicon Valley VC-backed startups to Mom & Pop web apps in Skokie, IL basements, the promotion level of beta invites has grown from “waiting list” to “golden ticket.” I can only hope the products live up to the hype, but I will say this - it’s always smart to make your users feel special, even those who haven’t gotten to use anything yet.:

If you’ve got any design/UI elements that have struck a chord, please do share

UPDATE: If you’re a designer in the Seattle area (or a designer who wants to move to the Seattle area), we’re hiring right now! Please check out our job post - Do You Use Your Design Powers for Good?… Or for Awesome? If you’re not a designer, please pass it on to all your designer friends!

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Taking Note Of Competitors’ Mistakes & Successes

Posted by Jane Copland

Quite often, people ask me this, either to my face, via Q&A or in emails: how do I come up with truly unique, never-before-seen, shiny new ideas? What a question. It’s a rare thing to come up with something that’s really never been done before. Many of the novels on a bookstore’s shelves contain stories that have been told before in one form or another. Real originality is fantastic, but there is plenty to be made from taking a good idea and putting a new spin on it and making it better.

One of the first tactics I came up with when creating linkbait was to think of a relatively basic idea and run its various keywords through search engines. There were usually at least a few examples of my idea already in existence. If the pre-cooked versions of my idea were good enough, I usually went on to something else. There is nothing worse than a rehashed version of an already-good idea. Searching for a vague content or concept showed me where my competition lay and how advanced it had already become. It was usually readily apparent whether I’d be able to compete or whether I was better off thinking of something else. I don’t believe that this is cowardly of me; if you came across something like this, would you attempt to do it better?

Content is one thing, but entire website concepts are something else. To my mind, this seems even more difficult. As the person who went through the Web 2.0 nominees, I’ve seen a huge number of sites that attempt to do something new and exciting, as well as those who attempt to do an old concept better. Very few succeed.

This is because imitation, at least at a high level, is not as easy as it seems. Creating a barely-used Digg clone might not be hard, but inventing a functional competitor to Twitter that both Twitter fans and new users pick up (admittedly when Twitter was experiencing difficulties) is more difficult. I am not a fan of Plurk, but its features appeal to a growing number of people for a good reason. It did what Twitter couldn’t do at a critical time (provide Twitter-like functions and stay up) as well as appeal to a new audience who’d never liked Twitter. That it was essentially a copycat really isn’t a negative. Some of the best sites and products we have online were copies of other projects, but were done better.

I’d still argue that Twitter is far from beaten by its competitors, but once it fixes its downtime problem, it has a mountain of spam to cope with. Most Twitter users will have noticed that they’ve been inundated with new followers during the last few days. A great many of us don’t really check out who has recently added us on Twitter, but we should. Sadly, in influx of people isn’t because we’ve all suddenly become much more interesting. Clicking through to the profiles of the "people" who’ve started following us usually tells the real story: these accounts aren’t human but are bots, scraping the public timeline for content. My latest example of such an account is that of "Lisa Starkin." Twitter will probably ban the account in time, so here’s Google’s cache and, when that goes, here is a sample of what Lisa has been saying recently:

"Her" latest update says "Catching Up With Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn Spears 17 years old is speaking out for the first time since gi http twurl nl 5fawn7" and is possibly more obviously fake than these above.

The amazing thing is, "Lisa" has 179 followers, many of whom do actually appear to be real people. The messages look real enough (especially considering some people’s awful grammar) that 179 of the 1,458 people she’s followed believed that she was a real-life, underwear-clad college student from San Francisco.

I see this as Twitter’s main threat and the one that would spur me of if I were managing a competitor. I didn’t have to look far in order to find more examples. Basically every new follower I’ve received in the last few days is fake. Experience shows that an out-of-control spam problem is a threat. On the surface, it makes no difference to my interactions on the site, aside from putting even more strain on Twitter’s servers. However, look at MySpace: even those of us who never suffered from its outrageous spam problem will still cite spam as one of the things we don’t like about it, and will praise whichever service we moved to for its lack of the problem.

Twitter seems to be good at deleting the very obvious examples of spam, such as "sarah2323" and "heysexy", both of whom had one thing to say: "What do you think babe? Anne tried it and it worked. Testing it at d mo. Catch u late hon. http://www.the6figureteam.com." "Sarah" attracted quite a few followers, including people who should have known better. Both of these accounts were gone within a day, but the content-scrapers live on.

There are various theories about what the owners of these spam networks intend to achieve, one of which states that they’re all pointing followed links (i.e. profile links) to a queen account which will in turn point at an external site. This would have worked a lot better before all Twitter links became nofollowed, although with some engines’ ongoing in trouble with nofollow and the fact that some still use nofollowed links for discovery, there could still be an ounce of merit in the idea.

There is definitely nothing wrong with having a go at established businesses, websites or services, but being as good as they are isn’t enough. Facebook is successful because it was better at social networking at MySpace. If Plurk or FriendFeed are to succeed on a mass large scale, they have to be at least slightly better at serving feeds, information sharing and "microblogging" than Twitter. They have the distinct advantage of being able to learn from Twitter’s mistakes and steal its good ideas, which is the more irritating part of the imitation / flattery game.

I don’t know what goes on in Twitter’s offices, but it seems like they’re working very hard to improve speed and uptime with regular maintenance. I also don’t know how much strain the spam is putting on the service, but it certainly can’t be helping. In order to combat the possibility of spam becoming more prevalent than content at Twitter, I’d be working hard to remove all of these accounts as quickly as possible. If I were a competitor, I’d be putting some big road blocks in place to ensure that the spam doesn’t transfer over to my business instead.

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Treat Me Mean, I Need The Reputation

Posted by Tom_C

There’s been a fair amount of buzz recently about online reputation management and how to do it recently but one thing I don’t think anyone has really discussed is how a negative reputation can manifest itself online. After all, not all negative reputations are created equal. Sometimes it’s a page that looks innocuous but contains mildly negative negative things once you click through or sometimes it’s a page ranking 3rd calling you a C**T……

So rather than talking about a negative reputation as if it’s an abstract concept I’m going to show you what this evil beast actually looks like in the wild. The list below is a sliding scale, with the most innocuous stuff at the top sliding down to “oh my god, let’s change our company name and move countries!” at the bottom.

No reputation at all

While this is at the top of the list in some ways it’s the worst of all. This is when you can’t find any mention of the company at all online.

What you should do about it: Get a freaking web presence! It’s not rocket science….

Negative reputation by association

This is the most annoying negative reputation in many ways as your name gets tarnished simply by being associated with a negative story without doing anything wrong. This can happen with news stories where simply because your brand or personal name was somehow mentioned you can have a story ranking for your name which seems to implicate you with the negative event. Since news sites often rank well all it takes is being mentioned in the wrong article and it’ll rank for your name. Consider David Linley (edit - when I wrote the post this page was ranking first page but it’s not there now! stupid google) - who maybe isn’t quite so innocent but regardless of whether he is or isn’t that royal the search results have been messed up for quite some time!

What you should do about it: Do something else newsworthy and promote that instead. Often, while this page which ranks may have lots of links (if it’s a big story) it often won’t have your name in the title or header. Get a story all about you on the same website and promote that so it ranks instead. Depending on how strong the negative page is you might need two of these so the negative one doesn’t still rank indented.

Someone wrote something bad about you in a forum

Unlike the consumer complaints forums (see item below) regular forums can often rank as well for obscure queries. If a company does something bad (or someone *thinks* they had a bad experience) and they hang out in an online community they’re likely to post about it. Depending on how well optimised the forum is these posts can often end up ranking.

Here’s a quick example: a forum post about mfi on a PC forum and mfi’s rankings.

What you should do about it: Promote positive pages above the negative ones. This should be at the easier end of the spectrum as these forum pages often don’t have too much linkjuice.

Someone wrote something bad about you in lots of forums

Maybe they blog about it, post to consumer action forums. At this stage though, they’re probably simply trying to spread the word - they’re not trying to make something rank for your name.

Note that these kinds of pages can be legitimate (the search results for Zenith Windows are littered with these kinds of things) or fake.

What you should do about it: If it’s just one person writing bad things about you then your best bet is to get in contact with them directly and sort the issue out. Engage with them - have a frank conversation with them and see what their problem is and fix it. Even if there’s more than one person upset with you fixing the issue is the best course of action. Fixing the issue and letting people know you’ve fixed it can often provide the positive content you need to outrank the negative listings.

A bunch of people hate you.

They can create a website like www.who-hates-seomoz.com and put all their anger into it. Sometimes this will cross the line into libel (Sarah? Care to write about how far you can push that line? without getting into trouble?) but if they do it sensibly and so long as they don’t make too many false claims they’ll be ok. This kind of site will often rank very well and is hard to shift.

Here’s a couple of fun examples where there’s some serious malicious intent. Firstly, screw you fasthosts. Secondly, someone really doesn’t like barratt homes!

What you should do about it: engage and try and get them to take the site down. If this doesn’t work you can consider moving the conversation onto a property you control. E.g. testimonials.seomoz.org (note how sub-domains allows you to gain more real estate in the serps) which might still be negative but at least you can spin the content easier. Note that done well, this area will start off negative as the people who don’t like you will be commenting. By letting the conversation turn negative (but keeping the conversation on your site) you should be able to talk them around, engage, respond and deal with the issues and you’ll find the conversation becomes more positive until you have a healthy and vibrant testimonials page.

You’re a negative reputation magnet

Some people can’t do anything right! Almost the opposite of the midas touch, everything they touch just seems to turn to shit. This could simply be a product of the industry you work in however. As Will mentioned in his whiteboard friday politicians are constantly suffering attacks on their character as well as quite often putting their foot in it!

Need an example? Just google any mid-sized politician, or celebrity and you’ll see what I mean!

What you should do about it: If you’re a negative reputation magnet then you’re probably getting a lot of press, both good and bad, Will covers some good tips in his WBF for just this situation.

Reputation Management - you’re doing it wrong.

Ok, something bad happened. It happens to everyone. Maybe you really did screw up - after all you can’t control all your employees all the time and you can’t always quality test every single product. What you should probably avoid, however, is making the situation any worse than it already is. Ways you could do this include, oh I don’t know - perhaps using the angry customer’s email address to create fake online dating profiles!

How you should respond: Well not committing fraud and signing anyone up to online dating would be a good start! But seriously, the best thing to do here is to engage the community head on. Apologise and be up front about what has happened - don’t try and cover things up. Make steps towards fixing the underlying issue or the root cause of the problem. Once this is done then you need to engage with the community - go above and beyond the issues and make your users like you again. This takes time and can be a painful process but can be extremely rewarding. Look at what Dell have done engaging with their customers - it’s paid them back many times over and actually won them a lot of fans.

On a related note - check out this list of the 5 most hated companies online for a nice example of how bad it gets when you really screw things up!

Disclaimer: To make the points in this article, I’ve had to link to some offensive and critical posts. I’ve used nofollow where appropriate and would like to emphasise that I am not endorsing the negative comments.

The title for this post comes from a great tune: Xploding Plastix - Treat Me Mean, I Need The Reputation (the dub version of the same track is worth checking out too!)

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3 Search Marketing Tools Worth a Look - Refined Ads, WordButler & Advanced Web Ranking

Posted by randfish

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve seen some very cool new (and older, but “new to me”) tools in the search marketing field that I think are worthy of testing to see if they make a good fit for your organization. I know I don’t cover 3rd party tools as much as I should, so to make up, I’ve got 3 in a row.

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The first, Refined Ads from Thomas Bindl’s Refined Labs is a game-changer in the PPC management space. The goals behind the project were to save PPC marketers time and energy through a more intuitive, more robust interface that took the pain out of the often tedious PPC management process.

I’ll walk through a few of the screenshots Thomas sent over to help illustrate:

An integrated keyword discovery and search volume estimator tool (using the AdWords API) lets you use the same software to select that you do to manage.

When adding keywords, this spiffy interface lets you select the keyword match type on the fly.

The report data tabs are completely customizable, so you can choose which metrics you want to see and order the results by virtually anything.

With some tracking code embedded, you can see the statistics from your efforts right in the software - no need to load up your analytics software or run to Google/Yahoo! to get the data.

For special instructions or to make transitioning between multiple parties easier, Refined even has a custom note adding ability.

Now, obviously, I’m not a PPC expert, but I know Thomas is, and he’s been working on this since I visited his new operation in Munich last spring. The buzz I’ve heard is that this is a top notch tool - the only information I don’t have is on pricing. You’ll have to talk to Refined to get that

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Next up is a new tool from the gang at MindValleyLabs, one of my favorite blogs on the web (and one of the few where I actually read every post top to bottom). The product is “WordButler” and it aims to compete in the space filled by other 3rd party keyword research tools like Wordtracker & KeywordDiscovery.

There’s three things you can do with WordButler. The first is keyword list creation:

It’s not a bad system, but it would be great to have the terms/phrases they list as keyword phrases sortable in some type of popularity order. The copy and export functions are pretty solid, though.

Next up is keyword traffic estimation:

This is my favorite of the features it offers, since it not only predicts CPC, but traffic on each of the engines. Unfortunately, as with all keyword tools, when I plugged in traffic for terms and phrases I’m familiar with, the estimated clicks (I’m assuming it’s for all SERPs) didn’t match up very well. It’s accurate in relative terms, but like the others, can be pretty wrong when it comes to precise numbers.

Finally, WordButler has a keyword suggestion system:

The keyword I used was “solar energy,” and in fact, when I tried phrases like “alternative energy” or even just “energy” I got a lot of “cheap flights” and “cheap hotels” suggestions. I think this is an area in need of refinement, but I suspect they’ll get better over time

As a special treat for SEOmoz blog readers, MindValley Labs is offering all readers the ability to download a free trial of the software here - http://www.wordbutler.com/products/promo/blogreaders. The trial lasts 7 days, after which it’s 7 per year or a month.

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Last up in the tools review, we’ve got Advanced Web Ranking, a rank tracking system from Caphyon. I don’t actually know anyone there - this was just a tool I stumbled across that kept getting positive mentions in the blogosphere.

The goal of AWR is to help you track rankings at the search engines for specific terms and phrases. As you probably know, Google in particular frowns on this practice because they don’t like automated rank checking. On a personal level, I’m actually opposed to rank checking as well, though for entirely different reasons. I don’t like to watch rankings primarily because they’re a terrible metric for progress when compared to your web analytics (which report actual search traffic visit numbers). I’ll go into a few reasons I’m so fundamentally against rank tracking:

• Rank tracking is inherently inaccurate:
  • Rankings fluctuate hour-to-hour, nevermind day to day
  • Universal search inclusion has made standard rank checking pointless on queries that include vertical results
  • Different datacenters show different results
  • Personalization means that many searchers aren’t seeing what you’re seeing
  • Geo-targeting happens even at the state and city level now, meaning that for tons of searches, you’re getting different ranking information than what other searchers see.
• Your rankings don’t actually tell you anything substantive:
  • If you were #3 yesterday and you’re #5 today, what action are you going to take? Other than being interesting, it does nothing for you.
  • If your rankings rise 3 or 4 positions, the same is true - it’s nearly impossible to reverse what you did right and be sure. Once again, visitor analytics are a far better tool to judge.
• Exception - I do like knowing what page I’m ranking on
  • Getting page-level rankings (e.g. page 1 for “seo tools,” page 2 for “seo,” etc) is great because I can use that to find low-hanging fruit and put a little extra effort into getting onto page 1
  • It would be great, technically, to see results grouped by 5 (top 5, 5-10, 10-15, etc.), but that’s a level of detail you can’t get from analytics, and with rank checking so inaccurate (see above), it’s not worth it, IMO.
• All that said, SEOmoz will probably be building some sort of rank tracking tool in the future, just because the demand is so high (but I’ll continue to rail against it even after that).

Ok, rant over. Let’s look at the tool:

The overview is pretty solid, showing the websites you’re tracking, the keywords being followed and the ups and downs of rankings. I’m not sure why they include Alexa, though!

The “Current Rank” report shows the list of websites and their relative positions for a given term/phrase. You’ve also got the date function at the top, which, while nice, would actually be better to show in the columns (IMO). The column view for rankings is good because then you can compare long term progress over time, rather than just one day vs. another.

This report tries to mimic the SERPs themselves with historical rankings changes you can see. It would be great to see an aggregated data function for this, but as is, it’s serviceable.

All in all, the Advanced Web Ranking toolset is a solid effort into rank tracking software, but it’s nothing game changing. I think there’s still a lot of opportunity to build a great tool in this space, but I’m ever mindful of the rank tracking issues I talked about above and Google’s public distaste and public statements about tools like Web Position Gold.

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Hopefully you’ve enjoyed peeking inside some of the latest tools for making SEO/M easier. Feedback is certanly welcome, not just by me, but, I presume, by the tool’s creators as well. If you’ve got some alternates to these that you want to bring up, feel free to do so (and to link) in the comments.

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Roundup Thursday for the Week of 7/6/08

Posted by rebecca

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Whiteboard Friday - SEO Site Reviews Step-by-Step

Posted by great scott!

This week our good buddy and SEOmoz Global Associate, Tom Critchlow, is back in the hizzy for an awesome installment of WBF.  In this video, Tom will walk you through all of the important components to look at when conducting a basic SEO Site Review. This is the bread and butter of most SEO consulting so for those of you new to the game, it’s a great primer; and for those of you witha few miles behind you, it’s a great reminder of all the things you should be checking.

Feel free to participate in the comments and share any other information you typically include in a site review, or any great methods or tricks you’ve found to make site reviews easier to conduct or more valuable to the client. Enjoy…

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-SEO Site Reviews Step-by-Step from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Tom wanted me to add:

"Vanessa (Fox) pointed out a post on Jane and Robot which is has some really useful guides on search friendly development as well as some good checklists for diagnosing website issues. It’s developer focused but I urge you to check it out: search friendly design patterns for web developers"

Here are links to a couple of the tools Tom mentions in the video:

• Live HTTP Headers
• SEOmoz SEO Tools

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What To Do When Google Bans Your Site Because Of A Bogus DMCA Take-Down Notice

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

If you already know what the DMCA is and how take-down notices work, skip this section. It will just be review.

The DMCA is a US federal law entitled the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was designed to provide quick and cheap remedies for people who’ve been victims of copyright infringement. Basically, if someone steals your content and posts it online, you can send a Take-Down Notice to the owner of the infringing website, the hosting company, and the search engines to request that the infringing material be taken down. Most people find that it is much easier to send a take-down notice to Google rather than deal with everyone else. After all, if you’ve got the infringing content off Google, no one is likely to find the infringing content anyway. This is why I am focusing on Google in this article. It’s not because Google is somehow bad or more aggressive about the DMCA than other search engines; It just receives more take-down notices because of its market dominance. Anything I write about Google here can be equally applied to any other search engine or online service provider.

Once someone sends a DMCA take-down notice to a search engine, the SE will remove the allegedly infringing content from its results pages. Unfortunately, people send bogus DMCA complaints regularly. Thus, this could happen to one of your clients some day!

Remember, the search engine doesn’t make the complaint. A third-party sends a complaint to Google about your website. Google then must quickly remove the content or face potential liability for copyright infringement. Google responds because the DMCA is designed to give it incentive to quickly remove the content without conducting any independent investigation. It’s not personal. It’s just how the law was set up.

What To Do If Google Removes Your Content Because of A Bogus DMCA Complaint

The US congress made it very easy to ask search engines (and other Online Service Providers) to remove allegedly infringing content. However, congress also created a simple way for you to fight back.

All you have to do is send a counter-notification to the company that removed the content, usually Google. The Counter-Notification is just a letter that informs Google that the copyright infringement allegations are false and demands that the removed content be restored. A counter-notification is often called a "put-back notice."

After you send your counter-notification, Google will notify the original party who complained against you. Then Google will wait no more than 14 days to restore your content, UNLESS the original complainer files a lawsuit against you. If the original complainer (the third party who sent the take-down notice) files a lawsuit against you, then Google will refuse to restore the content. If the original complainer doesn’t file a lawsuit, then Google will restore your content within 14 days.

So basically, if your site was removed because of a DMCA Complaint, the ball is in your court now. You’ve got to inform Google that it made a mistake by filing a counter-notification. It will restore your site, unless you get sued.  

You’ll see in the links to samples I provide that there are certain things that your put-back notice must include. Required information includes things such as

• a denial of the allegations against your site
•  your name
• your address
• your consent to jurisdiction
• your oath that everything you’ve stated in your counter-notification is true.

Please visit the following sites for information and samples of counter-notifications:

Google’s instructions on filing Counter-Notifications (scroll down a bit, it’s after notifications. You’ll find a fax number, an address, and specific instructions on the information to include.) 

Sample Put-Back Notice to Google by Neoteric (this is a great example of a classic and simple put-back notice.)

Future Quest Sample  Put-Back Notice

 Do It Yourself Counter-Notification (very detailed article with great sample language! May be a bit over kill.)

Chilling Effects Frequently Asked Questions on Put-Back Notices 

Special Jurisdiction Issues for Foreign Websites

Before I close, I want to cover one important topic: consent to jurisdiction. This is mostly important for foreign website owners.

When filing a counter notification, you must consent to jurisdiction of the US federal district court (see samples in the links above).

If you’re based in the US, then you would be consenting to the US federal District Court where you live. Because U.S. citizens and businesses can always be sued in the district where they live, the consent-to-jurisdiction-requirement doesn’t have an impact for U.S. citizens and businesses.

However, if you’re a foreign owned and operated website, you must consent to jurisdiction either where Google is located (Santa Clara, CA) or where the original complainer is located. Consenting to jurisdiction can increase your risk of being sued. It is more difficult to serve people in foreign countries with a lawsuit, unless they consent to jurisdiction in the US. Thus, before a foreign owned and operated site issues a put-back notice, it should seriously consider the risk of suit.

If the original complainer doesn’t really have a good case and he was abusing the DMCA for censorship or business reasons, then your risk of getting sued was probably slim in the first place. Thus, consenting to jurisdiction wouldn’t increase your risk that much. However, if the original complainer is very serious and thinks it is worth filing a lawsuit against you, then your foreign residence may be helping to protect you from a U.S. lawsuit. In this case, you wouldn’t want to consent to U.S. jurisdiction. It may be better to start a new website with new, non-infringing content.

Thus, before a foreign entity sends a put-back notice, it is very important to step back and make sure that you’re not at serious risk of a lawsuit or that you don’t mind potentially defending against a lawsuit in the U.S.

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This post should give you the tools and information you need to get your content restored after a bogus DMCA complaint. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about DMCA put-back notices. I look forward to hearing from you.

Respectfully,

Sarah

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Headsmacking Tip #2: Top Level Navigation Naming Conventions

Posted by randfish

Tonight I’m continuing with our headsmacking tips theme (see #1 from June) with a piece of SEO advice that’s been around the industry for longer than Google but still doesn’t get the traction it deserves.

When it comes to top-level menu navigation, most of us are thinking about which broad subject areas best encompass the content we have to share with users. We’re considering usability and user experience and ease-of-navigation, all of which are excellent. But sometimes, in this process, we forget about SEO and how perfectly it can tie in with these other goals.

Just think - if you have broad subject areas under which many niche topics, products, articles, etc. fall, chances are there are some fairly competitive, high search-volume keyword terms and phrases you could target with those top-level navigation pages. Here’s an example:

British Petrol’s got this nice micro-site on their alternative energy program, and in it they have a number of top-level navigation links like "who we are," "what we do," "where we are," etc. The sad part is, while many visitors might want to learn about "who they are," not very many are performing searches around those topics. Instead, they might be looking for things like "renewable energy," "climate change," "low-emission fuel," "fuel alternatives," etc. many of which BP could be targeting in their top-level menu.

The thing is - top level menus exist throughout a site, and when you name a section of your website something, that’s how it get referred to across the web in link anchor text and blog mentions and directory listings. All that external reference, combined with your internal focus can produce some pretty terrific results.  Not convinced? Go check out a few of the sites you work on or their competitors and see how well they rank for the names of their top-level menu items. It’s uncanny, right? If your domain is generally strong, those top-level pages are almost always in the top 20 for the names you’ve given them.

Here’s an example of a site generally sticking to this advice:

Their reward? Try searches for car reviews, car buying guides, road tests, even the incredibly competitive used cars. They’re in the top 10 across the board. That’s not to say they’re doing everything perfectly, but they are a testament to the power of top-level nav menu naming.

So, next time you’ve got an opportunity to re-design the top level menu or launch a new site, consider the searcher. They’re telling you what they want through keywords, both broad and specific. If you can find ways to get creative with your naming while remaining usable and user-friendly, you’ve got a big win.

p.s. Notice how SEOmoz names our SEO Tools section and our SEO Services Marketplace (just moved into position. Imagine if we had been really smart and called one of our top level tabs "Buy Viagra… AKA How Blackhat SEO Works."

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The PageRank Hierarchy, As Defined By Celebrities

Posted by Mitch Turck

A PageRank layman recently asked me how Google decides what site gets what ranking. Rather than bore him with technical tidbits from last decade’s abstract, I thought I could better express the concept through a medium we can all appreciate: celebrities.

The metaphor is a simple one: PageRank is all about the quantity and quality of inbound links, right? Well, the value of a celebrity is often defined by the quantity and quality of people interested in that individual. As you read on, understand that when we talk about people "linking" to celebrities, we’re talking about fans trampling other fans to get a candid photo, or people constantly asking them for money or trying to book them on their crappy talkshow… the more interest the celeb generates, the higher their PageRank equivalent. If you have a beef with the selections, or want to fill in the gaps, you know what to do.

 

 

There’s no argument here – The Pope is a PR10. He doesn’t report the news, he makes it. He doesn’t ask for favors, he pardons sinners. He doesn’t express his linkage to any particular individual or company, and yet the most powerful people in the world would be happy to kneel in front of him at a moment’s notice. Nearly every human being on this planet loves him, respects him, or has some sort of agenda against him. In some form, he’s been around for centuries, and he’s been the authority on one of the world’s most prominent religions for that entire period. There is no one else like him… he’s the friggin’ Pope.

 

 

Jay-Z is a PR8 because of two words: persistence and transcendence. He’s been in the public eye for nearly 20 years, and has been grinding his way to the top the entire time. Starting from nothing and slowly building natural public attention and linkage over two decades is pretty much Google gold, and anyone as persistent as Jay-Z is will see similar results. But it’s not just hard work that gets him to a PR8… it’s the fact that he has moved beyond the bounds of music, developing linkage in other arenas. Just think of all the subdomains Jay-Z has: there’s Jay-Z/clothing, Jay-Z/record label, Jay-Z/vodka, Jay-Z/sports team owner, Jay-Z/Beyonce… the list goes on, and each subdomain carries with it another huge chunk of link juice (some of which, like the sports team owner aspect and Beyonce aspect, involve other high-profile people whose linkage to Jay-Z is highly respected by Google – after all, if millions of people are linking to Beyonce, and Beyonce is linked to Jay-Z, then surely some portion of Beyonce’s linkers have an interest in Jay-Z as well).

 

 

Anne Hathaway makes for a great PR5. She’s got a lot of appeal and her name is very well-known nowadays, but most of her fan base consists of teeny bopper nobodies and disgusting old men like me. Both of those stereotypical "linkers" are the types to latch onto any passing fancy on the web that amuses them at the time, which means their linkage to Miss Hathaway doesn’t impress Google all that much. A lot of people love her… just no one who matters. P.S.: Anne, if you’re reading this, I didn’t mean all those things. You’ll always be a 10 in my book. Also, Anne, if you’re reading this, please please please go out with me. Give me just one chance, and if it’s not the most fun date you’ve ever been on, just let me know and I promise I’ll untie you.

 

 

Remember Willie Aames? No? Well now you know why he’s a PR3. He’s useless to 99% of the population, but still, you have to respect the fact that if he sat down in a bar, at least one person would say, "Holy crap it’s Buddy Lembeck!!" And that makes him a better man than you or I, as far as Google is concerned.

 

 

If there were any justice in the world, Paris would be a PR0. How can this be, you ask? She’s known all over the country, from redneck town A to redneck town Z… surely she has some juice with Google? But my friends, have you forgotten about the repercussions of link buying? Paris has made her name by whoring her soul out to anyone with a camera or a microphone – she has blatantly attempted to gain popularity by trading her ability to keep the paparazzi employed for the public’s continued attention and linkage. This is a no-no for Google, and with good reason: if you could increase your PageRank simply by being the biggest slut on the block, then we’d end up with a ranking system that rewards desperation for attention, rather than rewarding deserved attention. Google succeeds where Entertainment Tonight fails, and thanks to that, the web is a bit more decent.

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