G.A.S.P. looks like a good idea, but some folks have had mixed results: G.A.S.P.: WordPress anti-spam plugin. Good idea, but does it deliver?, though on the whole it seems to work pretty well. G.A.S.P uses javascript, so that if a commenter has javascript turned off they can’t post a comment. Since most everyone these days has javascript turned on this isn’t much of a problem, but just for fun I did a php version (no javascript needed) of G.A.S.P. for WordPress, it doesn’t use a plugin yet, so you have to “tweak” the php code and edit some files by hand, specifically:

• comments.php
• your style sheet
• And you need to make a new file called: “pgasp-comments-post.php”

Modifications and Additions of WordPress Files for PHP GASP

Comments.php

Modify this line (about line 78 in comments.php) and change the file name to: “pgasp-comments-post.php” like so…

<form action= "<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/pgasp-comments-post.php"  method="post" id="commentform">

Then, just before the submit button line in comments.php (around line 100 or so) add in this line:

<p><input type="checkbox" id="comchk1" name="comchk1" value="yes" /> <input type="checkbox" id="comchk2" name="comchk2" value="yes" /> Check this box if you're human. (Dofollow, CommentLuv) No bots or spam, please! </p>

Note that there are actually 2 checkboxes in the code. One of the checkboxes is hidden (using CSS) and will remain unchecked if a human is involved. However, SpamBots will typically fill in all items in a form, so if the hidden checkbox is checked, we know it’s spam.

CSS Stylesheet

To hide one of the checkboxes, you need to add the following to your stylesheet file (at the bottom of the file should be fine):

#comchk2 { display:none; }

pgasp-comments-post.php

You need to create a file named “pgasp-comments-post.php” with the following code. This is where the spam check takes place. If the comment passes the spam check it is then passed on to WordPress (wp-comments-post.php) Place this file (using ftp, or cpanel) in the top level directory (or whichever directory wp-comments-post.php is in)

<?php
/**
* php gasp
 */

/** Sets up the WordPress Environment. */
require( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );

/* the next 6 lines is the spam checker... */
$comment_spamfilter = ( isset($_POST['comchk1']) ) ? trim($_POST['comchk1']) : null;
if ( 'yes'  != $comment_spamfilter )
  wp_die(__('Error: please check the box above the Submit button.'));
$comment_spamfilter2 = ( isset($_POST['comchk2']) ) ? trim($_POST['comchk2']) : null;
if ( 'yes'  == $comment_spamfilter2 )
  wp_die( __('Your Comment is waiting for moderation.')); // spam!

/* comment looks ok, so send on to wordpress... */
include ( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-comments-post.php');

?>

SpamBots, Mixing It Up

Of course, if enough people use GASP or PHP GASP, the SpamBotters will adapt their code, so you might want to mix it up a little. For example, make comchk1 the hidden checkbox, or add more hidden checkboxes (comchk3, comchk4, comchk5…) and so on.

Also GASP doesn’t stop human spammers, who fill up your moderation folder with comments like “Great post dude! Thanks for sharing.” (with a link to some spammy website) and the like, so you might need to try Akismet (which isn’t perfect either) or something. To be continued…

Sounds great you say, what could go wrong? Well, judging by the feedback from some of the people who have tried it, a lot.

Here is a list of some of the problems people have had with certain performance-based SEO companies. Watch out for these tricks…

Money for nothing

Some performance-based SEO companies will give you a range of prices depending on the performance goal. Here is an actual example for a VERY competitive keyword:

• ranking 1-3: $90 a month
• ranking 4-6: $72 a month
• ranking 7-10: $54 a month
• on page two: $36 a month
• on page three: $18 a month

At first glance it looks good. Suppose for example you currently rank #28 for the VERY competitive keyword, then for only 90 dollars a month you can rank in the first three. A bargain!

But look a little further. If you reach page three you have to pay $18 a month, but you’re already on page three! So even if the SEO company does absolutely nothing, there is a good chance that at any particular time Google will rank you #27 or #26 or even higher and you’ll be out $18 each month.

Now multiply that by a thousand or ten thousand customers. Pretty good income for doing nothing. And of course it’s even worse for the people who are already on page two or page one.

Paying for No Traffic

In terms of bringing traffic to your site, being on page two or three of Google is virtually worthless. And as if that’s not bad enough some performance-based SEO companies will actually charge you if you’re on page two or three of Yahoo or Bing, which have much less traffic than Google. (and they won’t let you opt out).

Google Dance

Here’s one that’s a bit technical.

One performance-based SEO company charges you based on what your rank is on the first of the month. But apparently, and this is the technical part, they pick and choose which of the Google Data Centers gives you the highest ranking.

As one disgruntled user puts it, “You’re constantly in this circle where your rank keeps dropping, yet by some miracle, on the first of the month, your rank increases (while your wallet decreases).” Also see: Google Dance

Monthly Search Volume

Some performance-based SEO companies will provide monthly search estimates for your keyword. In theory, this would allow you to make a rough estimate of your ROI. The problem is their numbers aren’t very accurate. An example from a disgruntled user… “The estimate was for 8,000 monthly searches. It turns out the monthly searches were only 320 for this particular keyword. Needless to say, this mistake currently costs me $44 per month for a measly #22 spot in Google.”

Six Month Contract

One of the biggest problem with Performance-Based SEO is the long contract. Often times there is quite a bit of a delay between making SEO changes and seeing results on Google. So imagine a legitimate SEOer who works diligently for six months or so and finally gets the customer’s website onto the 1st page, only to have the customer cancel the contract. The legitimate SEOer works hard for all that and receives nothing.

On the other hand, suppose during that six months the websites ratings go down! The customer is locked into a six month contract, it’s a disaster.

So what’s the solution? Hire a legitimate SEO company with a proven track record. Here’s some good advice from a top five poster at forums.seochat.com…

Hiring an SEO company is not that hard.

1. Ask them to give you 6 keywords/phrases they’re appearing for on Google and what position they are holding. There’s your list of 6 references, call them, ask questions about what they did.
2. Go to Yahoo site explorer and look at the inbound links they have acquired. Follow them.
3. If they ask you to sign any contract that extends beyond month-to-month, find someone else.
4. If anything they say sounds too good to be true… it is. Anyone that says they can rank you for multiple competitive keyphrases for $100.00 a month, can’t.

In a previous article, Click Through Rates. The AOL Data Revisited, we looked at one of the historically important sources of “click through” statistics: the 2006 AOL Data Logs. SEOers have long been interested in the large 71% drop in click-throughs, between the #1 and #2 positions and the impact this has on potential Web sales. This large drop has motivated companies to strive to obtain the #1 position.

But how accurate are the AOL numbers? Does the ROI justify the costs involved in reaching #1? One of the problems with the AOL numbers is that they assume that all searchers search the same way and have the same click through patterns. Analyzing the AOL data in greater detail shows that this assumption is incorrect, the search patterns can be quite different, and this throws all the numbers off.

To get a better handle on click through rates, this article revisits the AOL Data Logs and breaks web searches into different classifications: Navigational, Informational, Goods and Services Searches, Comparison Shoppers and Buyers, and examines the difference in click through patterns between the groups.

The AOL Data in Detail

An earlier 2002 study, “A taxonomy of web search” by Andrei Broder (formerly of IBM Research), classifies web searches into three major types based on “query intent”:

• Navigational. The immediate intent is to reach a particular site.
• Informational. The intent is to acquire some information assumed to be present on one or more web pages.
• Transactional. The intent is to perform some web-mediated activity such as Web shopping or downloading.

The Broder study estimates the search percentages of the 3 groups as: Navigational: 25%, Transactional: 36% and Informational: 39%.

Building on this study, the AOL data logs were first broken into 2 major groups: Navigational and Informational, and click through values were determined for the 2 groups. A search was assumed to be Navigational if it contained any of the following: “http”, “.com”, “.org”, “.mil”, “.edu”, “www”, or “.gov”.

Out of a total 20,524,584 searches, 5,507,044 were deemed to be Navigational, this is 27% of all searches, agreeing fairly well with the 25% from the Broder study.

Table 1.0 (below) shows a breakdown of click through data for informational and navigational searches. The navigational numbers confirms that navigational searchers are not comparison shoppers. Over 80 percent of all click throughs are for the first two results, implying that navigational searchers have pretty much made up their minds about what they are looking for and if they don’t find it immediately they give up and try another search. Informational searchers, on the other hand, tend to look at a broader range of results.

Table 1.0. Click Through Data for Informational and Navigational Searches

Comparison Shoppers and Buyers

Of greater interest, from an SEO standpoint, is determining the click through patterns of active shoppers and potential future customers. After looking again at search demographics in the AOL data logs, three new categories were created. The first, named “Goods and Services Searcher”, selects searches for goods and services, focusing mostly on “brick-and-mortar” businesses. Some search query examples are:

• real estate in phoenix
• best new york restaurants
• richmond dentist
• best california ophthalmologists
• and so on…

As noted in the Broder Study it is often difficult to establish the “query intent” of a searcher by looking at the search query alone. There are times when someone doing a navigational search may use a search query that looks like an informational search. For example, someone looking for the webpage “shephardchiro.com” in Portland might use the search string “chiropractic portland” as a “lazy mans” shortcut. If the large drop-off between the #1 and #2 positions is due to navigational searches, it might be worthwhile to separate them out.

In an attempt to “weed out” navigational searchers from the “Goods and Services Searchers” a second new category, called “Comparison Shoppers”, was created. It selects “Goods and Services” searchers who visit (ie click-through) more than one site per search, which should hopefully remove the navigational searchers, or searchers who are not actively shopping.

Finally, the last category, optimistically named “Buyers”, selects “Comparison Shoppers” who after visiting several sites, return to a previously visited site, where in theory they make a purchase/conversion. Table 2.0 (below) shows the search and click through totals for the different categories. Note that the CTR of the Buyers is approximately 2 percent of the CTR of the Goods and Services. As a general rule of thumb the conversion rate for a website is assumed to be around 1-3% so the assumption that the Buyers category are making conversions may be a reasonable one.

Table 2.0. Total Click Through and Searches

Figure 1.0 (below) shows the percentage of Total Click-Throughs (CT/TotCT) for the Goods and Services, Comparison Shoppers and Buyers search categories. The “All” category is the original AOL data from Table 1.0 (All Searches). Table 3.0 (below) shows the data in greater detail.

In general, the percentage of click throughs decreases from the #1 position to the #10 position, but the large drop between #1 and #2 in the “All” category is less pronounced in the “Comparison Shoppers” category and appears to disappear altogether in the “Buyers” category. This could indicate that it is less important to obtain the #1 position when targeting buyers and active shoppers.

Figure 1.0. Click Through Percentages for Different Search Categories

Table 3.0. Click Through Data for Different Search Categories

Click Through Rates for New Customers

When attempting to calculate the return on investment for an SEO campaign it would be helpful to know which click through rate pattern best represents new customers. Although it’s probable that none of the patterns exactly match new customers it seems reasonable that some combination of Comparison Shoppers and Buyers would be the closest approximation.

To that end, a new hypothetical category labeled “New Customers” was created from a weighted composite of Goods and Services, Comparison Shoppers and Buyers. The resulting CTR Pattern is shown in Figure 2.0 and Table 4.0 (below) along with the original AOL data (ALL), Goods and Services, Comparison Shoppers and Buyers CTR patterns.

Figure 2.0. Normalized Click Through Rates for different Search Categories (in %)

Table 4.0. Normalized Click Through Rates for different Search Categories (in %)

Note: for comparison purposes, the click through rate data for comparison shoppers and buyers was normalized by dividing by their respective “conversion rates”, 2% for buyers and 60% for comparison shoppers.

Conclusions and Observations

The way people search differs dramatically depending on what they are searching for. Navigational searchers rarely look beyond the first two positions on a search results page. Active shoppers look deeper. The large drop-off we see in the original AOL Data between the #1 and #2 positions appears to be much less pronounced for active shoppers. From the standpoint of SEO this may mean that obtaining the #1 position is less critical than previously thought.

For SEO purposes, the hypothetical pattern “New Customers” may be useful for calculating click through rates and ROI. To be continued…

Notes and Limitations

The AOL data, while useful, has its limitations. The demographics are going to be different from those of Google. For example, there are probably very few Business-To-Business or .EDU searches.

Also, the data is from 2006. Search algorithms have improved since then. Google is much better at handling spelling errors. New features such as Google Tips, Instant Search and Universal Search have been added as well as changes in Local Search.

New Tools

Recently Google added the ability to its Webmaster tools to analyze Click Through Rates. Several studies have come out this year analyzing this new source of data. (see resources below)

Click-through Resources

• AOL Search Data Scandal (Wikipedia)
• AOL Data, techcrunch.com 8/6/2006
• Collection of sources of the raw AOL Data
• AOL Click-Through Analysis by Richard Hearne, 12/8/2006 (redcardinal) *
• Who uses AOL? New York Times, 9/10/2008
• Overview of Google Rankings, SeoBook, 2008?
• Google SERP CTR Data by Search Rank, SeoBook, 4/15/2010
• Review of the Broder Study, SeoBook, 5/28/2009
• A taxonomy of web search, The Broder Study, 2002
• University of Hamburg, Eye-Tracking Study, 7/26/2006
• Cornell University, Eye-Tracking Analysis, 7/25/2004
• Distribution of Clicks on Googles SERPs, Eye-tracking study, 10/26/2006
• AOL Data and Eye-Tracking, 7/12/2009
• CTR and Google Webmaster Tools, by Neil Walker, 5/11/2010, (seomad.com)*
• The Value of Google Result Positioning, Chitika Research, 5/25/2010, *
• Review of the Walker and Chitika studies, Patrick Altoft, 5/27/2010, *
• Webmaster Tools and CTR, googlewebmastercentral, 4/2010
• Accuracy of Webmaster Tools CTR, Andy-Heaps, 5/20/2010
• Organic Click Through Rate Analysis, Mark Edmondson, 6/1/2010, *
• Is Click Through Rate only 42% for the first ranking position?, RiseDigital, Aug 24, 2010, *

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

Established by the Payment Card Industry, non-compliant companies risk losing their ability to process credit card payments and being audited and/or fined

For SMBs looking to sell a moderate number of products online, we recommend either “outsourcing” the checkout process with a payment service such as PayPal, or host your web store on a PCI certified e-commerce hosting service… Read More