Still Using Urchin?

May 5, 2010 · 1 comment

SEO Analysis

Google has been making lots of changes lately. Are you paying attention to your code?

Anytime I visit a website, it’s a reflex, I put on my SEO hat. I don’t even read the content anymore or look at the visuals, I hit {ctrl-u}.  (View Source Code on Firefox.  IE has no shortcut, its > View > Source on the pulldown menu)

This is my version of a first impression.  I simply scan for a few key SEO conventions.  re. Is the Title Tag at the top of the Header?, etc.

And I always look to see how vendors handle tracking on their dealer websites.  Why would I look for web analytics software installed in car dealer website when there are other more important items on the SEO checklist?  Because it shows a dedication to building SEO-ready websites. Only 7% of websites are truly search optimized!  Also, installing analytic is so darn easy vs the benefits, why wouldn’t you? (if a vendor claims to do any automotive SEO that is)

Installing internet traffic tracking software is a fundamental step in setting up a website.  It should be the first step actually.  A dealer would have to be completely indifferent to not care about those statistics. (OK, there are a few of them out there and they are not going to be reading this article about car dealer website SEO)

As a website vendor, what are you providing for your customer if you are not building-in those basic SEO features every dealer needs? You don’t provide an inventory module? OK, you truly only design websites.  (and you too, won’t be reading this article about car dealer website SEO)

Google Analytics is free, so why wouldn’t you at least install it?  I won’t even mention the implications of not using Googel Analytics while using Google Adwords (Vendors who offer PPC and don’t install Google Analytics…That’s a double penalty!). And I also wont go into why you don’t use Google Webmaster site verification.

Part II : Google has been making lots of changes lately. Is the tracking code up-to-date?  One of my pet peeves is that a dealer pays a hefty monthly fee. So I would expect those websites to be kept up-to-date rather than have to wait for a contract renewal to get the latest BASIC infrastructure.

Google stopped supporting Urchin in 2007 simply warning that it may not report accurately. Decommissioning Urchin means it will stop working altogether, but no deadline exists and Google had said it will be sure to warn when it does. With Google introducing a third generation of tracking methods, Asynchronous Tracking, it seems to me that using Urchin is not the way to impress your SEO peers.

If a vendor is still using the old Urchin tracking code, I think that reflects poorly on their SEO reputation.  Two years is plenty of time to change a snippet of code. 

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/04/08/40-still-use-old-google-analytics-script/

I setup Google Alerts so anytime someone writes something about automotive SEO or automotive internet marketing, I read it.  The more often I read the same broadcast, the closer I look. Today I got this in the alerts for the 10th time:

http://www.paschconsulting.com/automotive/automotive-digital-marketing.html

(Brain, you do an amazing job of blogging everyday and propagating them across dozens of other sites.  That makes you an SEO Blogging God.  But it also why you’re up.)

So I ran a quick SEO check of the car dealer websites listed there.  Of the 11 representative sites, only 1 is setup with current Google Analytics code.  Four (4) of the sites use the old Urchin code.  Three (3) of the sites have no tracking installed.  And bmwgeorgia 404′d! Ouch!  bmwcarsnc is parked, ouch!  losangeleshonda.org is an almost blank wordpress installation, ouch!

Every vendor knows its the biggest job to maintain their many car dealer websites, let alone upgrading to the latest technologies.  Its a big job for an SEO just to maintain a dozen or so websites for just one dealer.  But as mentioned, 2 years should be enough time to upgrade.

Installing the cornucopia of Webmaster and Analytics Codes on a car dealer website should be considered a best practice. These things preemptively inoculate a website (and an SEO) from a host of problems that one can encounter.  Upgrading Google Urchin to Google Analytics might be reaching the critical stage before Google Urchin is decommissioned.

***Google stopped supporting Urchin in 2007 simply warning that it may not report accurately. Decommissioning Urchin means it will stop working altogether, but no deadline exists and Google had said it will be sure to warn when it does. With Google introducing a third generation of tracking methods, Asynchronous Tracking.

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Cobalt Resolves Body Tag Issue

April 5, 2010 · 0 comments

Cobalt has resolved the issue concerning multiple Body Tags in their car dealer websites.  I published an article earlier about The Cobalt Group car dealer websites having a critical problem in their CMS (content management system) inserting Body Tags throughout the user editable text areas.  This was probably causing search engines to fail to index content properly on their website pages.    The obvious gravity of the problem got a lot of attention.  Cobalt has taken swift action to correct the problem.  I appreciate how much work is required to manage so many dealer websites, and the complexity of propagating those changes across multiple versions.

Cobalt has also changed the robot.txt file to include the reference to the sitemap.xml  file.  I still found the sitemap.xml files are still missing the XML.  And there are no Priority or Frequency Tags.

But the cleaned-up HTML should be a big help to search bots, and hopefully helping Cobalt dealers to move up a notch or two in their SERPs.

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Linkfarming on the Rise in Automotive Internet Marketing

March 8, 2010 · 10 comments

Dealers take care where your websites are linked and with whom you are linking to.  Most dealers have no idea how to determine where their websites are linked and whether there is a risk.  But given the direction of Automotive SEO, you cannot afford not to know.

In the interest of providing more robust lead generation for their dealers, some automotive SEO vendors are moving into the very dangerous business of building linkfarms (large networks of linked websites).  This is a seduction all webmasters flirt with sooner or later.  To go over the line that search engines have drawn very clearly in the sand has grave consequences. Any SEO knows this. The question is, do the clients?

A linkfarm is a group of websites whose only purpose is to promote each other via interlinking.  The quantity of links is meant to trick search engines into believing these websites are more authoritative than others in the same “theme” (Theme is a term used in the search business referring to the business category of your website as understood by the search engine.  i.e. Ford dealer websites).

If your website is identified by a search engine as belonging to a linkfarm, and Google is the most sensitive, you will certainly loose significant page rank (position in the search results) and in some cases, your website may be blacklisted (deleted from the search results altogether).  You’ll need to discard your domain name and start over – very expensive.

That is why quality matters.  Thats why your Page Rank matters.  Linking to websites with no or lower page rank will cause search engines to lower your page rank.  An alert SEO will avoid linking your site to bad neighbors.

Linkfarming is a seductive path in SEO. Its like a stack of bills left on an unattended table. There is the chance no one will see you grab the cash.  Do you want to go there?  You’ll get away with it for a while, but linkfarm long enough and your chances of getting caught approach 100% – as seems to have already happened in this video.

Google’s webmaster Matt Cutts has mentioned that there is a threshold of about 10 interlinking sites. More than that and you could become noticed by Google as a linkfarm.  A dealer with a dozen dealerships all interlinked has nothing to worry about.  There are other little clues the search engines pick up on; too little content, keyword stuffing, the age of the websites as a group and the C-block of the host IP addresses.

Legitimate large dealers and even large dealer groups run no risk of having their interlinked sites perceived as linkfarms.  But joining a network designed for this purpose is a risk a prudent business person will not take.  Take care, and check your backlinks.

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You Think You Have a Search Optimized Website

March 4, 2010 · 0 comments

There is always something hyped. If its not Social Media, its SEO. But dealers need to know that most vendors don’t deliver on the hyped stuff.  Its too new.  They dont know anything about which they pitch. This video will give you an idea what passes for automotive SEO today from car dealer website vendors. In this video I take you through a typical SEO quick-check that any amateur SEO could do. What you will see does not even rate as SEO 101. There is no SEO here! (you should view in fullscreen – button is on bottom-right of video)

Maybe I’m obsessing about a small bit of text accidentally added to the website – it can happen. I’ve done it myself, proclaiming I’m the “The Best Damn Search Engine Optimization Guy”, only to delete it the next day when I realize I have much to learn – everyday. So I checked VinSolutions website and on their SEO product page http://www.vinsolutions.com/sem-seo.aspx

“VinSolutions.com provides a range of search engine marketing packages to help fit your internet budget.” And in the SEO Basic plan is a bullet “HTML Optimization” that leads me to believe that website pages are Search Engine Optimized when the “SEO powered by” line is on the dealers website. And this also leads me to believe that the dealer is paying for this (SEO). “HTML Optimization” is not exactly a term used by the SEO community. Either HTML is done according to W3C standards or its not. We’ll assume they meant something like “On-page SEO”.

But after this quick-check, maybe its me, who does not understand what SEO Basic > HTML Optimization means. Maybe the HTML is not Optimized for Search Engines. Ya think?

No matter how you slice this onion, there is no Search Engine Optimization happening on this website! Sorry VinSolutions, you just left me with nothing here. I can’t put lipstick on this pig. Pretty websites are a dime-a-dozen. Optimized websites are not.

The reader might think that I’ve uncovered one instance of proclaimed “SEO powered by…” where no SEO exists, but this is actually more commonplace than it is an aberration.

You need an SEO audit like this – if you are a dealer wondering if you are getting the SEO that you are paying for – or if you are a vendor wondering how to do SEO. Call me. I’m happy to take 15 minutes and look under the hood of your website. I’ll even make a free video of it if you like.

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