SEO is a hot topic
SEO and internet marketing is finally catching fire in Finland – news articles are published every now and then, and some even break into the mainstream. That’s the front page, but on the back the situation is, IMO, still very immature and evolving.
It is estimated that the annual total SEO business turnover in Finland will exceed 3 million euro (roughly 4 million US$) this year and should increase heavily for several years to come. 3 million euros sounds small, and it is. When you divide the turnover with the number of companies in the business (20+ pro-level agencies/consultants and hundreds of web design agencies), the outcome is very unpleasant. It's no wonder that most Finnish professionals actively seek out larger European and US clients and take very few local customers. Another growth trend for the future is related to Russian search markets, which are expected to become major players over the next few years.
Like with any industry that’s booming, there are a plethora of growth-related issues. The concept of SEO services is really new to customers and even to most providers. There are issues of quality, pricing, etc.
Google opens Finland country office
Google has (finally) opened country office in Finland. The sad news is that it's merely a sales office at this point.
I just recently read an interview of Johan Kinnander, Google’s Scandinavian Country manager, and my eye caught a statement of his:
“Scandinavia is immature ground for internet search advertising compared to Great Britain or United States, tough Scandinavians are A-listers in broadband and internet search usage.”IMO this is a very precise notation of Scandinavian search behavior, but I can’t help wondering what makes this difference. Google has the search (and PPC marketing) dominance in Scandinavian markets, people use internet search very actively (if I remember correctly, Scandinavians are one of the most active search engine users in world), and the quality of SERPs is still relatively good (and people place perhaps too much trust with search engine results).
CEO of Finland’s largest SEO company caught cloaking - no penalty so far
The headline says it all – the CEO of Total Management (Finland’s largest SEO agency), Mr. Poutiainen, was caught cloaking search engines with his personal test site. This is a rather interesting topic to follow as several search engines have recently declared their intentions to fight spam in languages other than English. So far there has been no penalty or statement from any of the search engines though this broke some major news in Finland and Scandinavian SEO circles.
To quote Mr. Poutiainen (translated from original news article):
“This is my personal site, not of my business… I use this site to test and study how search engines and bots behave [ADDITIONAL NOTE by 2K: “This is a non-commercial test website for search engine algorithm tests” statement was added on domain front-page few days ago, after 3+years of “testing”]… This testing model was taken from similar services from United States… Search engine spamming or misleading consumers in commercial sense has not occurred. I’ve created thousands of cloaked test pages – they are still running and I will create them in future too. Similar tests run constantly on different domains and languages”.Very bold words that raise the question of studying / testing black hat methods in real life SEO … Is there a need to test black-hat / unethical methods? And, if one wishes to study/test, how to do it without breaking any rules. Is this kind of behaviour acceptable in any scenarios?
However, if Google and other search engines treat countries and pages equally, I would expect the test site and several other Finnish (and Scandinavian) sites to get penalized very shortly.
The first Finnish book about SEO has been published
Interestingly enough, it’s by the same person as above ;)
As always, feel free to add your opinions and comments.
Nice to know that SEO becoming localised. I manage a blog focusing on India - www.seotrends.in
I think the example by Rand, and replies from few finnish folks show extremely well some of the cultural differences that exist. Finland isn't by co-incidence called "The Canada of Europe".
Anyway, back to SEO issue I had also in mind when writing about the cloaking issue... I've always had "a theory" that specific niche-language sites get more "liberties" than english, french etc. sites. If considering "the famous cases" (bmw etc), there has always been either partial or full removal from index very shortly after the case has breaken the news... It will be very interesting to see a) does the site receive a penalty b) what kind c) and when? [could this be a more direct invitation to matt "spam killer" cutts to participate the discussion or maybe write foreign spam issues in his blog]
Pretty interesting to see the numbers on turnover from Finland - apparently Norway is far ahead, as the 9 men strong company I work for have an estimated 2.7 mill USD this year).
I was interviewed about SEO a little while ago, and the journalist told me that she had been told that the total SEO turnover in 2006 was estimated to roughly 9 mill USD.
We have seen a tremendous growth since 2005, and most of our clients are Norwegian as well.
When it comes to search quality, it is indeed still pretty good, but there are a few extremely low quality spam sites that pop up in the seprs now and then. I wonder how much longer that will last...
I couldn't disagree more. No individual, nor any company can set any morally or ethically binding rules. These rules are set by the people, you and me, who are involved in this. We together view with disfavour those who do not follow the jointly and silently approved guidelines. Of course, these rules are unwritten but they really do exist. If one does not recognize them, I guess obeying them would be mission impossible.
As for this Finnish spamming case, it had nothing to do with testing. Testing can be many ways without spamming or harming your reputation. Result of this spamming was thousands of meaningless web content which was actually competing with the real content. Risto said in the article that he is going to create more pages like these in the future if necessary. I don't believe he will do that because this time it seems that media and common people are actually buying this explanation. We who know better...what can I say
Is there a need to test black-hat / unethical methods?
Good question, 2K. In my humble opinion...Yes, there is a need to test behavior of robots and SE algos with all legal methods available. I don´t find it so black-hat or unethical.
What is the difference between guidelines and rules anyway?
One definition of a guideline:
A recommended approach, parameter, etc. for conducting an activity or task, utilizing a product, etc.
You can find some of the SEO test results from my new Finnish language SEO/SEM book:
101 Questions and Answers About Google Marketing
I guess I don't see anything wrong with the CEO of an SEO company testing the search engines for non-commercial sites. Isn't that what much of the search engine gaming is here? Black Hat techniques are certainly not recommended for any company that values their good name as the risks are high on the better engines. But the techniques do have their application for one time events like political elections. It's hard to argue with using cloaking to get good quick results for a throw-away site like "yes-on-81.com". No one is being cheated and this is not an ethics issue. Does anyone disagree?
Does anyone disagree?
Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." is likely the most quoted excerpt from Google guidelines. Based on this (and other search engine guidelines), cloaking is an issue.
Personally I do realize that useragent detection, and several other "black hat methods" can be legimitly usefull in specific scenarios, but IMO the line Google and other SE's draw is very clear.
As for non-commerciality it depends from what view one is looking at it. From one perspective his test site creates artificial competition to SERPs in (commercial) niches. This leads to increased demand of SEO services, and in that sense profits the site owner who happens to be owner of one of the largest SEO business in Northern Europe... I know this kind of artificial SERP gaming is nothing new in SEO world, but IMO it's far from being acceptable when it involves usage of "blackhat" methods.
No there is nothing wrong and if you want to be a good SEO you must run test sites. In this particular case we are talking about cloaking and violating Googles guidelines. That is something a SEO shouldn´t do.
The quality of the SEO work offered by the "20+ pro-level agencies/consultants and hundreds of web design agencies" in Finland is still very poor and unprofessional. Many marketing agencies that offer SEO services hardly know anything about SEO. They just stuff the Title-tag with relevant keywords, rewrite the text a little and that´s it. TrustRank - what is that? Finland needs more people like 2K (and me :-).
P.S. The Google office is for AdWords only and not for Google in general.
The quality of the SEO work offered by the "20+ pro-level agencies/consultants and hundreds of web design agencies" in Finland is still very poor and unprofessional. Many marketing agencies that offer SEO services hardly know anything about SEO. They just stuff the Title-tag with relevant keywords, rewrite the text a little and that´s it.
I think this is the required "evolution" to make real competition for SERPs, and to make real demand for pro-level SEO services.
If you consider english markets 4-5 years ago, they where in same situation. Now, this kind of "basic SEO strategy" works only with very limited niches, and there is a growing demand for advanced/professional SEO services.
There is also the question of optimizing for need. If less work is enough to provide what customer wants, why provide (and charge) more.
That is true. If a small business owner needs to get to the top on 2-5 keywords for a local search it can sometimes be accomplished with very little effort. And these kind of projects are ideal for small SEO firms.
It´s interesting to read about such a small market. The german market is interesting, too. Here we have the total Google dominance. Google has a market share of 86,2 %. If you add other sites that are using the Google index (AOL 2.1%, T-Online 1.6%, Freenet 0.3%) Google has a market share of about 90 %. Number 2 after Google is MSN with a market share of 3.4% and then Yahoo with 3.1 %.
The total revenue of german search engine marketing (only AdWords, YSM and Co, not SEO) was 200 million Euro in 2005. The growth from 2004 to 2005 was nearly 100%!
It´s interesting to read about such a small market.
...and Europe has many similar market areas like this (with the exception of few big ones like Germany, UK, France and Spain - I think especially US readers will value this image of Europe population map). It's kind of fun to realize that in some parts domestic/nationwide markets are about as big as local (i.e. los angeles) markets elsewhere.
Nice to see some Finnish folks here. Maybe we should take over SeoMoz ;)
What is the difference between guidelines and rules anyway? I think this is more of business/legal issue than anything else when it comes to search engines.
Search engines (like any companies) can't place rules / terms of service unless there is a contract between parties. For example ppc-programs have very strict rules in addition of guides because there is a legally binding contract between parties. However, inclusion for web search search is single-sided decision done by search engines.
With guidelines they are "kindly asking" site owners to follow some rules ; otherwise they are free to remove site from their index (or do any other options they feel like)....
Is gaming this kind of "open trust / system" wrong or unethical? And if one games, where to draw the line?
It's not wrong, nor is it unethical. Disobeying the "published guideslines" of a private business has no outstanding ethical or moral issues. Just imagine if Walmart said that a condition of shopping at their store involved not talking to employees about personal matters - if you did so, would that be unethical or immoral? Aboslutely not. A Walmart manager might have security escort you out of the store, but that's the limit of their control.
Google's terms of service are exactly the same - break the rules, get caught and be thrown out. But, once you're out, you can continue to break the rules all you want without fear of further retribution.
That is true, but just to clarify - If we are talking about not obeing common SE guidelines in general and not about a particular case mentioned in the blog post it´s unethical (and stupid?) not to obey the rules. This, by the way is also a basic moral issue, which might be different from country to country. As some of you might know Nordic people and we finns are well known for obeing the law and never walking across the road on red light :-). SEO in Finland is quite different from what we see in the US or Asia.
The Walmart example is maybe a little far away, but what about an example from the sports world instead? Isn´t doping unethical and against the rules? Isn´t it unethical towards other players and the whole sporting world? At least here in Finland it is. If you break the rules in the game and get caught you will be thrown out. Quite stupid also not to follow the rules?
In the SEO world using Black Hat SEO and doping your website is unethical not only against other websites, webmasters, SEOs or the consumers, but to the SEO community that gets a bad word on them.
It´s not good if common people think SEO is the same as spamming and this is what some people in Finland think.
We have been discussing SEO ethics in Finland a little and a little more in Sweden. This discussion is welcomed and needed, but as with other moral questions I guess not everybody can or should have the same point of view.
I like the comparison of randfish. Seems totally right to me. The comparison of black hat seo with doping is false. Doping is illegal. If a athlete is using doping, he can loose his places\medals or whatever. Some countries are even having rigor anti-doping laws, for example Italy.
Btw, I am a white hat seo.
Actually it is not. Using doping doesn't put you behind the bars, you won't get fined etc. You may lose your medals and reputation and some money, but isn't this the case with spamming too?
Maybe not in the USA and Germany. But in Italy you can go into prison for doping. And there are a few other european countries with laws around doping and in some countries laws against doping are a topic.
Just to make my point clear. I didn´t say Black Hat SEO is illegal, but it´s unethical. If an SEO is doping his sites, he can loose his place in Google. Just like the athlete.
I'm with Jojo - I really don't agree that doping and black hat SEO are similarly unethical. Black hat techniques could, conceptually, be used for unethical purposes, but that doesn't make the practice itself immoral.