“Internet Marketing Ninjas, led by company founder Jim Boykin, is the ideal match for WebmasterWorld,” said Tabke. “I couldn’t have asked for a better situation than a long-time member acquiring WebmasterWorld.”

WebmasterWorld is just the latest in a series of forums Boykin has acquired. Other recent pick-ups include Cre8asiteforums, and the Developer Shed Network.

“2012 has been a major year for IMN and I feel privileged to be a part of WebmasterWorld,” says Boykin. “I’ve been a member of WMW for over 10 years, and I’ve learned so much from so many there. I have so much respect for the community members and it gives me the uttermost pride to be able to work with the community to move WMW into the future. I am very humbled and ready to listen to, and work with, this amazing community.”

WebmasterWorld Director of Operations, Neil Marshall, offered the following statement: “I’m delighted to be involved with Jim and his team at Internet Marketing Ninjas. This is an exciting new era for WebmasterWorld and I’m really looking forward to continuing to develop the site for the benefit of its members, and retaining the site’s world-renowned, quality discussion forum for webmasters and their businesses. Thank you to Brett Tabke, for giving webmasters an independent vehicle to meet and to discuss current hot topics, turning the site into a major brand for webmasters. I’m sure the whole team is ready to keep that going forward and to develop new ideas for today’s Internet marketing businesses.”

WebmasterWorld is a place where there is a great deal of discussion from webmasters dealing with Google various algorithm updates. Such discussions often give clues to new major algorithm changes that Google makes before they are officially announced (although there is often a lot of talk that leads to false alarms).

It will be interesting to see how the forum evolves under new ownership. From the sound of it, the community itself won’t be changing much.

Tabke says he intends to invest his future efforts into the PubCon conferences.

Cutts made comments at SMX Advanced back in July, indicating that a tool would be on the way, and it is now here.

In text on the tool itself, Google says, “If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.”

Here is Cutts talking about it in a new Webmaster Help video:

“You might have been doing blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, guestbook spam…maybe you paid somebody to write some low quality articles and syndicate those all over the place with some very keyword rich anchor text, and maybe Google sent you a message that says, ‘We’ve seen unnatural links to your site or we’ve taken targeted action on some of the unnatural links to your site,’ and so as a result, you want to clean up those backlinks,” Cutts says in the video.

First and foremost, he says, they recommend getting those links actually removed from the web. Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Google says in a help center article:

PageRank is Google’s opinion of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other sites. (PageRank is an important signal, but it’s one of more than 200 that we use to determine relevancy.) In general, a link from a site is regarded as a vote for the quality of your site.

Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. For example, you or a search engine optimizer (SEO) you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.

If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.

Update: Google has now put out an official blog post about the tool. In that, Webmaster Trends Analyst Jonathan Simon writes:

If you’ve ever been caught up in linkspam, you may have seen a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site. We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. If you get this message, we recommend that you remove from the web as many spammy or low-quality links to your site as possible. This is the best approach because it addresses the problem at the root. By removing the bad links directly, you’re helping to prevent Google (and other search engines) from taking action again in the future. You’re also helping to protect your site’s image, since people will no longer find spammy links pointing to your site on the web and jump to conclusions about your website or business.

If you’ve done as much as you can to remove the problematic links, and there are still some links you just can’t seem to get down, that’s a good time to visit our new Disavow links page. When you arrive, you’ll first select your site.

According to a liveblogged account of Cutts’ speech, he says not to use the tool unless you’re sure you need to use it. He mentioned that Google, going forward, will be sending out more messages about examples of links Google is distrusting. He also says not to disavow links from your own site.

Regarding those link messages, Cutts says in the video that these are only examples of links, and not a comprehensive list.

The tool consists of a .txt file (disavow.txt), with one URL per line that tells Google to ignore the site. You can also use it to block a whole domain by using a format like: domain:www.example.com.

Cutts apparently suggests that most sites not use the tool, and that it is still in the early stages. Given that link juice is a significant ranking signal for Google it’s easy to see why Google wouldn’t want the tool to be over-used.

It can reportedly take weeks for Google to actually disavow links. In a Q/A session, according to the liveblog from Search Engine Roundtable, Cutts said you should wait 2-3 days before sending a reconsideration request after you submit a disavow file. When asked if it hurts your site when someone disavows links from it, he reportedly said that it typically does not, as they look at your site as a whole.

Danny Sullivan blogs that “Google reserves the right not to use the submissions if it feels there’s a reason not to trust them.”

Users will be able to download the files they submitted, and submit it again later with any changes. According to Sullivan’s account, Cutts said the tool is like using the “nofollow” attribute in that it allows sites to link to others without passing PageRank.

That’s good to know.

A lot of SEOs have been waiting for Google to launch something like this for a long time. Perhaps it will cut down on all of the trouble webmasters have been going through trying to get other sites to remove links. At the same time, we also have to wonder how much overreaction there will be from webmasters who end up telling Google to ignore too many links, and shooting themselves in the foot. This will be a different era, to say the least.

Just be warned. Google’s official word of caution is: ” If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.”

The information Google uses from the tool will be incorporated into its index as it recrawls the web and reprocesses the pages it sees.

Google currently supports one disavow file per site. That file is shared among site owners in Webmaster Tools. The file size limit is 2MB.

There are a few things Google mentions about it at the end of a blog post, I think are worth highlighting, with regards to international domains, subdomains and www vs. non-www.

Google ends its announcement with a Q&A section, and the last few are about these items. Here is what Google says:

Q: Do I need to disavow links from example.com and example.co.uk if they’re the same company?
A: Yes. If you want to disavow links from multiple domains, you’ll need to add an entry for each domain.

Q: What about www.example.com vs. example.com (without the “www”)?
A: Technically these are different URLs. The disavow links feature tries to be granular. If content that you want to disavow occurs on multiple URLs on a site, you should disavow each URL that has the link that you want to disavow. You can always disavow an entire domain, of course.

Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?
A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing “domain:something.example.com” will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.

To disavow an entire domain, you’ll want to use a format like: domain:www.example.com.

Here’s what Google says about the Link Disavow tool and negative SEO.

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WebProNews recently chatted with Tim Mayer, who left Yahoo back in August after serving as s VP of Search Products, VP of Search Business, and VP of North American Audience. 

"I think we’re seeing a much more competitive search environment," he tells us. "We’ve had Bing aggressively enter the marketplace, and Google’s been responding, and we’ve seen a lot of changes to the search experience. First we saw Google Instant launch, and then we’ve seen the local search experience change quite dramatically recently."

"I think those drastic, really prominent changes are going to continue to happen throughout different verticals," he says. "In the future I think we’ll see a lot more interaction with the search engine, especially as we move towards mobile where people don’t want to be typing in a lot into the search engine. There’s going to be a lot more voice interaction, which we’re seeing in some of the services. Bing offers that. Google offers that."

"When you ask a question, the search engine might ask you for more details to accomplish a task," he explains. "It will also infer a lot of information that it understands, such as your location, such as preferences based on some of your history, and who your friends are and taking a lot of the social signals into account to serve for recommendations or narrowing your search in the future."

Of course we’re already seeing Google making movies in this area, particularly with its recently launched Hotpot local, social recommendation engine. 

"I think we’ve seen since the beginning of the Internet that there were a lot of brands – offline brands or television brands that did not have a presence on the web, so people got used to going to a place like Yahoo, where they could basically accomplish all their needs," Mayer tells us. "It was more of a convenience play, where people would go to do their mail, and they might use News or Finance or Sports, and I think now people…all the big offline brands and television brands like ESPN and CNN are actually online, and people will go to a different place for news, a different place for sports, a different place for search, so it’s a lot less about convenience in the one-stop shop, and it’s move much more towards a best of breed-type environment."

Users Want Brands

"I think we’re seeing that change in search, where brands are becoming more dominant, because that’s what the users want," he says. "For a particular task…when I’m booking tickets, I use Fandango. So if I search for a movie, I’d like to use that site. If I’m searching for a book, most people associate that with Amazon. They want to be connected to that brand. I find if I’m searching for a book, I get a much better experience on Amazon than I would on a horizontal search engine like Google. And we’re seeing that bear out in the numbers."

"The large vertical search engines are growing at a much faster rate than the horizontal search is, so we’re seeing YouTube grow incredibly fast. We’re seeing Amazon grow as a search engine incredibly fast. And the experience for those types of searches is just far superior to what’s offered via Google or Bing at this point, and that’s why we’re seeing…changes with local trying to compete with those big brands," says Mayer.

"We saw that mobile search by the end of 2012 was going to be one in five searches, which is quite a lot of the search market, and I’m sure in some future state, there will be more searches from mobile and tablet devices, so things will change, and that will have impacts on the query curve," he continues. "But we are seeing a lot of momentum in terms of people using more apps on the phone, and using the browser less as a percentage of time."

"There are a few problems with that, the first of which is how do I discover new apps is through browse, social, or search, and then once you’ve found a lot of apps, the difficulty is, ‘how do I interact with apps from a central location?’ I don’t want to go through a two-step process of figuring out which app to use for a particular query, and then go into that app and start all over again, and then doing another search," he says. "People want to interact very similarly to how they have in the past with Google – type in a query, and if I have an app on my phone that meets that need very well, send the search directly to that app or send it out onto the web to the best site that’s available there."

Are you doing more of your searching from mobile? 

In fact, we covered a report today indicating that only 6% of American adults are using Twitter. As Joshua Duncan noted, retweeting the article, "Don’t forget about the 94% that aren’t."

WebProNews recently spoke with Ted Ulle, the Senior Search Analyst for social media consultancy firm Converseon, who had a lot of interesting things to say about information architecture, comparing it to social media. It’s engagement," he said. "It’s actually promoting engagement, and that’s a big deal."

He had some other interesting things to say about social media itself as well. "The technology that allows you to connect to people in your marketplace should become invisible," he said. "It should get out of the way, and that is the evolution I see happening, and that’s one of the reasons that social media is so hot these days – because it’s people connecting with people."

"You can use social media sites without being geeky," he added. "My mother could use social media. She appreciates that kind of thing. She likes to talk to people. That’s what it’s all about."

Ulle’s not the first to suggest that social media’s always been around, but he brought up an interesting tidbit about the history of print. "Many newspapers around the Philadelphia area, even before the independence of the United States, used to print their newspaper with blank pages and blank space in it," he explained. "The idea was that you would buy a newspaper, read an article, write down your comments about the article and pass the newspaper onto somebody else. You had social media. It was print…it didn’t matter. It was exactly the same principle."

An article from Slate.com talks about this in more detail. 

"What you have is a return to humanity plus a whole new empowerment of the average person," he added. "There’s no question that any brand who thinks they can just push a message out and fool everybody is going to have to wake up pretty fast, because that’s not happening so much anymore."

"The techniques are evolving, but the principle was always engagement," he concluded. "Always, always, always."

His words echo another recent conversation we had with Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, who suggests simply treating your followers like people.

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 Having the right landing page is incredibly important in getting conversions. It’s one thing to get traffic, but if it doesn’t convert what’s the point?

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo at PubCon recently. She shared some thoughts on creating effective landing pages. "I think that there are a lot of great tools out there you can use, but there’s also some creative ways that you can implement what you already know about people," she tells us.

You need to focus on more than just the click. It’s what happens after the click that really matters. "That’s your entire return-on-investment," she says. "It’s your ROI, so what good does it do if people just click and cost you money, and they’re not actually converting for you obviously, so we’re finding that conversion rate optimization as a practice and a discipline is really growing. You’re seeing more and more people discuss it…there’s so many great tools out there…those test really accurately and really get the best information they can, and to make the right decisions about how to design their pages – what kind of information to put on them to get the most conversions."

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for landing pages. It’s going to differ depending on your goals, and what you’re trying to sell. 

"There’s a lot of other challenges with things like…with Google AdWords specifically or any search engine marketing, where you’re trying to target for your particular product, but you might have many different audiences who might search on the same term that need many different types or variations of your product," says Driscoll Miller. "I have a client, as an example, who serves home users as well as business users, but they’re two different products."

"So we use segmentation for that, where you have buttons on a page to try and segment those people down a path to get them to the right product very quickly," she adds. "And those types of things can really help your conversion rate."

"I think a lot of people put things below the fold, which is a mistake, and certainly not putting a form right there on your landing page is a problem," she says. "I’m seeing less people actually land people directly on their home page, which is good, because you know…a home page has a lot of stuff going on…I am seeing people try to create their own landing pages, which is a real positive."

Forms can be critical for landing pages, but you don’t want to go overboard, or you’ll lose the conversion. 

"We’ve done some experimentation where we’ve done like tiered forms where you ask for the absolute essential only on that first form, and then once you get to the thank you page, you might ask them for a couple different optional fields, and surprisingly in the tests that we’ve run a lot of our clients see anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people who fill out the first form fill out the second form with optional information," Driscoll Miller tells us. "What the beauty of that is, more people fill out the form when it’s shorter, so you get initially more people signing up, but then a lot of the go and fill out the secondary information."

"So the initial form can’t be intimidating," she adds. "It can’t be too many fields – everything but the kitchen sink. Try and make it as small as you can."

The same thing applies to the checkout process. 

"Things that e-commerce companies too can be focusing on are things like even the words on the button," says Driscoll Miller. "Sometimes something like ‘buy now’ is a little more intimidating, and seems like something that you have to do versus ‘add to cart’. It’s a little gentler. So experimenting with words and buttons and colors, and all sorts of things. There’s many, many options."

She also had some advice for landing pages on Facebook and Twitter. Read here for that. 

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As you may know, press releases can cater to traffic from search engines and social media, for one thing just getting them out there to be found and shared is huge.

Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group shared some other ideas with us in a recent interview. "It used to be with public relations that we were reaching out to the journalists with a press release and trying to get the journalist to do the story, and now with the optimization and the online opportunities with press releases we can actually reach our targets direct by optimizing our press releases and releasing them on the search engines, and then using social media to even get more exposure."

But just having press releases out there to be found and shared isn’t the only way they can be tapped for added value in PR. "You can use Twitter…as part of your PR program, as part of your news feed, so Twitter is like basically…we all know it’s 140 characters so it’s like putting out little nuggets of news via Twitter, so if you take your press release and kind of chop it up into four or five different sound bytes, and then put those out…over the Twitter news feed each day…"

"Statistics are great," she says. "Little factoids are also good, and trying to stay away from kind of being so ‘me, me, me’ and trying to give the end user what they’re looking for, so it’s those little sound byte nuggets of information to put out on Twitter that are coming from your press release, and even going back to old press releases…you go in your newsroom and look back at old press releases and old statistics that are still relevant, and that helps drive traffic back to your website and back to these deeper pages in your website that maybe you haven’t been to in a while."

The PR tweeting certainly doesn’t have to come from the same person, or even jut the PR department. Digital Dads co-founder C.C. Chapman says, "PR and marketing should not be separate departments anymore."

WebProNews also spoke with Victoria Harres, the director of audience development for popular press release distribution service PRNewswire, who said, "Social media (Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else you can do, especially video these days) actually has enhanced whatever you’re doing or were doing in PR before. This is a new channel. A new way to get your message out to a larger audience, so you still need the old tools and the old tactics, etc. but this is something you work in to really help amplify the message you’re trying to get out."

Her strategy for corporate twittering is pretty interesting. It includes dividing up different Twitter tasks. More on that here.

While on the topic of social media and PR, you may also be interested in hearing some of the things Lee Odden shared with us earlier this year about using SEO and Social for actual press coverage.

Do you think classic organic search is losing importance? Share your thoughts.

Local Rises to the Top

WebProNews spoke with well-known SEO industry analyst Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. at PubCon about search trends and where the search industry is headed. Local is only one facet of this, but it’s a big facet.  "Certainly the enhancements have been gradual…now, anybody that has a local result, the first organic link is down below the fold," says Clay. "I never expected that to happen…the organic links, they’re gone. For the last four or five months, I’ve been saying that the new page one in the search results is really positions one, two, and three. That is page one. And I think Google agrees."

"If you look at some of the results, our benchmarks have shown that commonly, there will be seven organic results on the first page, and sometimes as few as four results that are organic on the first page of the Google results set – right now," he says. "So does Google owe any loyalty to what is traditional organic? Of course not. Now, the argument I would say for Google, is that if they’re gonna throw up some local results, they’re gonna argue that those are organic, and that they’re more targeted to location, and therefore that they’re more relevant to the normal organic results, in which case they’re carrying forward with organic results. It’s just that they’re not organic like anybody in the SEO space has ever thought of before."

So SEOs, webmasters and businesses really have to consider how the SEO game has changed in this way. You can’t expect people to go past the first page of results. It happens, but I’m guessing it happens less and less as people adjust their queries to find what they’re looking for when the results don’t provide it. The addition of Google Instant has only fueled this.

Cracking the Local Code

"It [local] has its own algorithm," says Clay. "It’s based on certain kinds of voting systems. We’ve been able to effectively get people into the seven-pack almost all the time. The difference is that the placement within the seven pack hasn’t been deciphered yet. It seems to be random. It is to some degree an accuracy of data factor, and to some degree it’s a review factor. So both of those will play."

"I think that 30% (I think is the number right now) of all results show some sort of local flavor," Clay continues. "What we’re seeing is not so much that 30% have maps, but that the actual body of the search results change to have local sites intermixed. So if you look at a set of results and find positions one through ten, they’re all laid out. If I change my location (in the column, you can change where you’re at)…if I change it from California to New York, I get an entirely different set."

"I noticed just going from my office in California to Las Vegas I got different results, even for terms like ‘search engine optimization’ which is not a shopping term per se, I had a different sequence in the top ten," he explains. "So clearly Google is using geo-location of the searcher to bias the search results. That’s happening in almost everything I see."

The breadth of terms that Google thinks users want local results for seems to be expanding, or at least has expanded from years past. Google has an opportunity to increase its revenue significantly because of this, the way Clay sees it. 

"We’re also seeing that local’s showing up more for short terms like one-word phrases like ‘shoes’," Clay points out. "You search for ‘shoes,’ you get a map. That’s just the way it is. And you search for ‘tools’ and you get a map. And things that used to just be ‘what is it?’ are no longer ‘what is it?’. They’re considered to be…if you’re looking for shoes, you’re obviously looking for a shoe store, and they’re sort of assuming that as they go. That kind of a behavior when you see it in search results is really what we’re facing."

Google’s Motivation? 

"We’re facing a general shift towards local results, and Google is clearly motivated," he adds. "You would think, using shoes as an example, that there are only so many people that can bid on the word shoes. It’s a national term. If I go local, I have a hundred thousand different opportunities to sell shoes. Every region can have their own bidding on shoes, and people can make money and bid…it’s like local phone books. And it is. And everybody can participate and bid and get on the web."

"And if I do geo-targeted then the return-on-investment’s gonna go up," he continues. "As I make more money, I’m more willing to spend more on my pay-per-click. So on a per-click basis, Google has an opportunity to make 50% more doing nothing more than allowing it to be targeted by location. So Google, perhaps at a greed level or a business level or a democratic level is actually able to make more money the more they promote it."

What’s good for Google is also good for users though. The fact of the matter is that location does matter a lot, when you’re talking about relevancy. It’s one of many factors, much like social (which we’ll no doubt see a great deal of emphasis from Google on as well, going forward) that caters to the individuals searcher, and as location tracking is becoming the norm, these results can get pretty fine-tuned to where the user is at any given time. 

Moving Forward

"I think that local is here to stay," says Clay. "I think it’s big, and I think you either play in the local space and either figure out how to get into the seven-pack or you’re not gonna get the clicks, even if you’re number one."

While there is no question that SEOs and marketers are going to have to continue to adapt to this ever-changing landscape, it may actually mean great things for people working on the web including SEOs, but also designers, developers, etc. 

"It turns out that 92% of all businesses in the United States – serve a 50 mile radius from where they’re physically located, and that hardly any of these…are on the Internet," says Clay. "That means, especially when you couple it with the emphasis of Google to start doing local kinds of results, that means we’re going to see a massive influx of websites. Brand new websites are going to enter…they’re going to star showing up, they’re going to start ranking, they’re going to start competing. These are sites that have never been here before."

"There’s going to be a multitude of web designers now getting involved, a lot of SEOs or wannabe SEOs are going to be getting involved," he adds. "We’re going to see a lot of people wanting a quick hit – ‘Hi, I built my site, how come nobody’s beating my door down?’ There’s going to be a little bit of a two steps back approach to SEOs – a bunch of people ripping us off. There may be some attempts at spam, although I think Google’s going to be fighting that."

There will likely be new kinds of spam, as he suggests. 

Read this for more interesting commentary from Clay regarding the search market in general. 

Do you think this shift towards local is a good thing for Google? For users? Tell us what you think.

"The pace of change is frightening," New York Times tech columnist David Pogue told us. "In the last three or four years…it’s becoming overwhelming for me. I mean, it’s my job. I eat and breathe keeping on top of tech, and people will say ‘what do you think of…’ something I’ve never heard of and everyone else has, and it’s like oh my god, now I’m behind. So I don’t have any idea how a CEO is supposed to keep up."

"Obviously there’s people like me and websites, whose job it is to filter stuff for you, and bring to you what’s important," he added. "That would probably be one way to do it, but I think it explains why in general business is always behind the curve." 

A similar subject also came up in a conversation with well-known consultant Chris Brogan, who says, "What I look at is, I try to stay with a product or sale solution mindset, and I say, ‘Is there a reason this is gonna add to what I’m working on right now?’ and if I go try this new social network, is that likely to be where my new target audience is gonna be?"

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"Honestly, it’s really interesting," he adds. "Everyone’s always chasing the new thing. I think you go backwards and look at the old things. I’m amazed at who’s not searching inside eBay or who’s not searching inside of Amazon or whatever…who’s not really working their email marketing lists, as opposed to just beating it over the head with automated stuff."

That’s a great point. The rate at which all of this stuff comes out is unreal, and a lot of people try so desperately to stay on top of the latest and emerging trends, that they leave behind proven and established opportunities. 

"I think with time management, you just have to keep going with the mindset of what you real goal is, and keep paring away," says Brogan. "It’s like I’m a priest and I give absolution all the time. I’m always like, ‘You don’t have to try Quora just because everyone’s always inviting you to it.’ I haven’t said yes to that invite yet. I’m sure it’s gonna be great. Whatever. You know what? I stopped reading TechCrunch and Mashable because my friends will tell me when something really cool’s coming. I read their sharing of TechCrunch and Mashable, because then I get the story I really care about."

Brogan is certainly not alone, which is why social search is bound to become much more integral to the way people interact with information on the web (good news for Microsoft, given its recent deal with Facebook to integrate social data into its search results). 

"So then the other thing with time management is – I keep telling people this – in the Internet space, there’s more work than there is time in a day, and there always will be," Brogan adds. "If you don’t put the gate down and you don’t say, ‘Time is up,’ it’s you. It’s your doing. You know, if you’re missing out on family life, it’s your choice."