Much has been said about Yodle lately in the legal community. The company in engaged in paid search engine marketing, and I won’t speak to their services here in terms of quality. But it is important to recognize certain questions that you may be unaware of.
What Yodle does is create a replica of your website on a another domain name. they do this so they can track visitors, provide an alternate phone number and assist in tracking leads.
This may be a problem for your “real” site’s organic search results.
It’s important to realize that the creation of duplicate content online may cause an issue with Google. There is some suggestion that duplicate content may harm your organic (i.e., non-paid) placement on the search engines.
According to Google:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:
* Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
* Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
* Printer-only versions of web pages
Check out this page for more information on the problem and how to minimize the impact.
So let’s say that Yodle protects against the problem of duplicate content. That’s a good thing for your organic search rankings, but it could harm your paid rankings – in other words, where you show up on the paid ads.
Google uses an algorithm for paid searches that is similar to the one used for organic rankings. Among other things, Google looks to the relevancy of the advertised site to the search term in order to generate the best results for the searcher. No matter what you offer to pay per click, Google will factor in the entire site (as well as the ad and bid price) when deciding where to place you on the paid ads.
That’s why some pay-per-lead servies rank very well on the paid searches but pay far less per click than other lawyers and advertisers. They have deep, relevant content that scores well with Google.
There’s more to it, of course. But look solely to this factor – one of many, but one to consider nonetheless.
If Yodle blocks Google’s robots through a robots.txt file or noindex tag then Google has no idea as to what the site is about. That’s bad because your site will show up lower on the paid ads. And if Yodle doesn’t do this then it may harm your organic searches.
What does Yodle do? I have no idea, but it’s something to consider and ask about prior to making a decision to hire this company – or any other company that duplicates your site content wholesale.
What's funny is that they were accused of this before when they were Natpal back in 2007. While they said that they fixed this it looks like they've started to index their sites again. I've delt with some clients who have come to me and i've started running their programs because I've been able to show them that their website is indexed and the calls that they are getting might be coming from their PPC, but also might be coming from their organic (which they should have received anyways but Yodle doesn't make it easy to determine what calls come from where). Take a look at this past article.
http://www.searchinfluence.com/2007/06/natpal/
What's funny is that they were accused of this before when they were Natpal back in 2007. While they said that they fixed this it looks like they've started to index their sites again. I've delt with some clients who have come to me and i've started running their programs because I've been able to show them that their website is indexed and the calls that they are getting might be coming from their PPC, but also might be coming from their organic (which they should have received anyways but Yodle doesn't make it easy to determine what calls come from where). Take a look at this past article.
http://www.searchinfluence.com/2007/06/natpal/
We worry about the recording of calls that is accessible by yodle as I believe it violates the confidentiality and atty
/client privilege. People who call, even if they are informed it is being recorded believe it to be in your possession and not on some website for others to view. Yodle then uses those recordings to recruit new business.
We worry about the recording of calls that is accessible by yodle as I believe it violates the confidentiality and atty
/client privilege. People who call, even if they are informed it is being recorded believe it to be in your possession and not on some website for others to view. Yodle then uses those recordings to recruit new business.
Hi Jay,
Thank you for your post. It is certainly a compelling topic and I’d like the opportunity to clarify what we do here at Yodle. Because of the complex nature of the topic, I took it to our resident expert, Brian Battjer, Director of Product at Yodle. Here’s what he said:
“First off, I want to assure you that quality scores are in no way harmed by our site implementation. This topic speaks to the very complicated world that is search engine optimization and search engine advertising. We study the subtleties of Web site implementation very carefully on behalf of our clients, as this can have a very positive or negative impact on your entire online advertising solution. To ensure all readers of this blog have the most accurate information for how Google determines quality score for paid listings and position for organic listings, here is a detailed explanation with references to Google’s “Adwords Help” https://adwords.google.com/support/.
It is correct that if Google sees two sites with duplicate content, there will be a penalty for organic rankings. This is why Yodle uses the “Disallow All User-Agents tag in a robots.txt file” code (below) to block organic web crawlers from indexing content on our clients Web sites:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Most importantly and what speaks to the heart of this blog, is that when a Web site that blocks web crawlers is listed as a campaign landing page in Google Adwords, Google has a different web crawler that comes in and crawls the page. This bot is called “User-agent: AdsBot-Google” This bot is not prevented from indexing a page that blocks organic crawling bots as long as the method used to prohibit other web bots is “User-agent: *” which we use (above).
Per Google’s Adwords Help, “Note: In order to avoid increasing CPCs for advertisers who don't intend to restrict AdWords visits to their pages, the system will ignore blanket exclusions (User-agent: *) in robots.txt files.” Referenced here – https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?…
If for whatever reason someone wanted to block both organic indexing AND Google’s Adwords Landing page bot they would use this code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
Thanks -Brian
I hope this explanation satisfies your readers questions regarding website implementation and organic ranking when using Yodle. We are manically focused on creating the most effective search campaigns for our customers and we welcome further discussion on this or any other topic. Thanks again for the post!
Mike DeLuca
SVP Sales & Marketing
Yodle, Inc http://www.yodle.com
mdeluca@yodle.com
PS- Re: Call recording. All of our customers have the choice of either turning off call recording or having Yodle block access of the calls from anyone but the customer or his or her delegates which can include Yodle account managers and marketing specialists. We are sensitive to all of our clients needs with regard to privacy and act accordingly.
Hi Jay,
Thank you for your post. It is certainly a compelling topic and I’d like the opportunity to clarify what we do here at Yodle. Because of the complex nature of the topic, I took it to our resident expert, Brian Battjer, Director of Product at Yodle. Here’s what he said:
“First off, I want to assure you that quality scores are in no way harmed by our site implementation. This topic speaks to the very complicated world that is search engine optimization and search engine advertising. We study the subtleties of Web site implementation very carefully on behalf of our clients, as this can have a very positive or negative impact on your entire online advertising solution. To ensure all readers of this blog have the most accurate information for how Google determines quality score for paid listings and position for organic listings, here is a detailed explanation with references to Google’s “Adwords Help” https://adwords.google.com/support/.
It is correct that if Google sees two sites with duplicate content, there will be a penalty for organic rankings. This is why Yodle uses the “Disallow All User-Agents tag in a robots.txt file” code (below) to block organic web crawlers from indexing content on our clients Web sites:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Most importantly and what speaks to the heart of this blog, is that when a Web site that blocks web crawlers is listed as a campaign landing page in Google Adwords, Google has a different web crawler that comes in and crawls the page. This bot is called “User-agent: AdsBot-Google” This bot is not prevented from indexing a page that blocks organic crawling bots as long as the method used to prohibit other web bots is “User-agent: *” which we use (above).
Per Google’s Adwords Help, “Note: In order to avoid increasing CPCs for advertisers who don't intend to restrict AdWords visits to their pages, the system will ignore blanket exclusions (User-agent: *) in robots.txt files.” Referenced here – https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?…
If for whatever reason someone wanted to block both organic indexing AND Google’s Adwords Landing page bot they would use this code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
Thanks -Brian
I hope this explanation satisfies your readers questions regarding website implementation and organic ranking when using Yodle. We are manically focused on creating the most effective search campaigns for our customers and we welcome further discussion on this or any other topic. Thanks again for the post!
Mike DeLuca
SVP Sales & Marketing
Yodle, Inc http://www.yodle.com
mdeluca@yodle.com
PS- Re: Call recording. All of our customers have the choice of either turning off call recording or having Yodle block access of the calls from anyone but the customer or his or her delegates which can include Yodle account managers and marketing specialists. We are sensitive to all of our clients needs with regard to privacy and act accordingly.
Mike,
Thanks for that explanation. I guess my question will lie in the consistency of which you implement the coding strategy above. I took a look at a random site and then researched under the company name in Google. I found under their name both your site and their site in the organic listings. I also could not find the code that you described above in your source coding.
http://www.leskaremodeling.net/ (your site) http://www.leskaremodeling.com (their site)
I used "leska roofing" when typing into Google the search term.
Thanks,
Tony
Mike,
Thanks for that explanation. I guess my question will lie in the consistency of which you implement the coding strategy above. I took a look at a random site and then researched under the company name in Google. I found under their name both your site and their site in the organic listings. I also could not find the code that you described above in your source coding.
http://www.leskaremodeling.net/ (your site)
http://www.leskaremodeling.com (their site)
I used “leska roofing” when typing into Google the search term.
Thanks,
Tony
Yodle apparently only uses robots.txt to block the spider if you complain..take a look at the clone web site they made for the yodle challenge on a law blog!
http://buettnerlawgroup.net/robots.txt
No robots.txt there! It's already showing up high in organic for common searches on that lawyer's name in Google. If they are going to act this way on a client everyone's paying attention to, imagine what they get away with on clients nobody is watching.
Thanks for that posting Mike. I'm not sure about the consistency of your practices of not indexing sites. Can you take a look at these two sites and respond to why they're not using the code described above?
http://www.mikeree.net (Yodle) http://www.mikeree.com (Their website)
I found them under the keyword "mikeree inc md"
Thanks.
Yodle apparently only uses robots.txt to block the spider if you complain..take a look at the clone web site they made for the yodle challenge on a law blog!
http://buettnerlawgroup.net/robots.txt
No robots.txt there! It's already showing up high in organic for common searches on that lawyer's name in Google. If they are going to act this way on a client everyone's paying attention to, imagine what they get away with on clients nobody is watching.
Thanks for that posting Mike. I'm not sure about the consistency of your practices of not indexing sites. Can you take a look at these two sites and respond to why they're not using the code described above?
http://www.mikeree.net (Yodle) http://www.mikeree.com (Their website)
I found them under the keyword "mikeree inc md"
Thanks.
Thanks for all of the comments about Yodle. It appears to me that they are not blocking indexing of all sites, as is shown by the http://buettnerlawgroup.net site. Both the .net and the .com are being indexed organically by Google, which is troubling.
My hope is that Yodle chimes back in with a response to this issue.
Thanks for all of the comments about Yodle. It appears to me that they are not blocking indexing of all sites, as is shown by the http://buettnerlawgroup.net site. Both the .net and the .com are being indexed organically by Google, which is troubling.
My hope is that Yodle chimes back in with a response to this issue.
Thank you for bringing up yet another good point. My apologies for not including this in my above post, as I was focusing on the question of quality score penalty for duplicate content.
Regarding your comment on SEO and duplicate content penalties: This isn’t an oversight on Yodle’s part. There are actually plenty of instances where we create a “second site” for a client, and after consulting with them carefully to ensure that they haven’t done any SEO optimization on their own, we elect to NOT hide the second site using “robots.txt.”
During our sign up process, if a client has an existing site we’ll ask them, “Have you had your site professionally optimized” and/or “Do you track your current SEO ranking for any key phrases?” If they say yes, we make sure to hide our “second site” from being indexed via “robots.txt.”
If they say no, we’ll often deliberately choose to not hide our site, because we know that the tool we use to create & publish sites is always being updated and refined to reflect current best practices in terms of SEO-optimization and machine-readability. It’s likely that our “second site” will be preferred by search engines, but there will not be any type of “duplicate content penalty.” (To read more about duplicate content penalty, check out Google’s Webmaster Blog.)
The example that Tony found of a Yodle Client with two domains is a great example to dig into.
Client’s Existing Site: http://www.mikeree.com/
Yodle-created “Second Site” http://www.mikeree.net/
Let’s look at Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and compare the two sites.
The very first thing Google recommends is to use each page’s TITLE tag effectively. So let’s do a quick comparison:
The client’s existing site uses very generic title tags like:
“Home” http://www.mikeree.com/index.htm
“Product Detail” http://www.mikeree.com/index_files/Page589.htm
Compare these to the much more descriptive Title tags the Yodle-version uses on the same two pages:
“Mikeree Inc. | Roofer in Centreville, VA | Call 703-537-5853” http://www.mikeree.net/index.html
“Siding in Centreville, VA from Mikeree Inc. | Call 703-537-5853” http://www.mikeree.net/siding.html
If someone searches for the phrase “Siding in Centreville, VA,” the Yodle-created page for “Siding” probably has a much higher likelihood of showing up in organic search results than the client’s original site.
Google won’t consider these two sites “duplicate content,” rather they’ll just see it as two different websites organizing some of the same information in a different fashion, and they’ll reward the site that they think does a better job of organizing the information by giving it more “weight” in their organic search results.
Hope all this helps answer the great questions everyone raised. Going forward in the future it may be more productive to have a call where we can dig in and address any questions in much greater depth. We feel confident in our offering and want to ensure the right information is getting out there to small businesses in choosing a online advertising partner. Please email info@yodle.com and we can arrange.
Mike
Thank you for bringing up yet another good point. My apologies for not including this in my above post, as I was focusing on the question of quality score penalty for duplicate content.
Regarding your comment on SEO and duplicate content penalties: This isn’t an oversight on Yodle’s part. There are actually plenty of instances where we create a “second site” for a client, and after consulting with them carefully to ensure that they haven’t done any SEO optimization on their own, we elect to NOT hide the second site using “robots.txt.”
During our sign up process, if a client has an existing site we’ll ask them, “Have you had your site professionally optimized” and/or “Do you track your current SEO ranking for any key phrases?” If they say yes, we make sure to hide our “second site” from being indexed via “robots.txt.”
If they say no, we’ll often deliberately choose to not hide our site, because we know that the tool we use to create & publish sites is always being updated and refined to reflect current best practices in terms of SEO-optimization and machine-readability. It’s likely that our “second site” will be preferred by search engines, but there will not be any type of “duplicate content penalty.” (To read more about duplicate content penalty, check out Google’s Webmaster Blog.)
The example that Tony found of a Yodle Client with two domains is a great example to dig into.
Client’s Existing Site: http://www.mikeree.com/
Yodle-created “Second Site” http://www.mikeree.net/
Let’s look at Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and compare the two sites.
The very first thing Google recommends is to use each page’s TITLE tag effectively. So let’s do a quick comparison:
The client’s existing site uses very generic title tags like:
“Home” http://www.mikeree.com/index.htm
“Product Detail” http://www.mikeree.com/index_files/Page589.htm
Compare these to the much more descriptive Title tags the Yodle-version uses on the same two pages:
“Mikeree Inc. | Roofer in Centreville, VA | Call 703-537-5853” http://www.mikeree.net/index.html
“Siding in Centreville, VA from Mikeree Inc. | Call 703-537-5853” http://www.mikeree.net/siding.html
If someone searches for the phrase “Siding in Centreville, VA,” the Yodle-created page for “Siding” probably has a much higher likelihood of showing up in organic search results than the client’s original site.
Google won’t consider these two sites “duplicate content,” rather they’ll just see it as two different websites organizing some of the same information in a different fashion, and they’ll reward the site that they think does a better job of organizing the information by giving it more “weight” in their organic search results.
Hope all this helps answer the great questions everyone raised. Going forward in the future it may be more productive to have a call where we can dig in and address any questions in much greater depth. We feel confident in our offering and want to ensure the right information is getting out there to small businesses in choosing a online advertising partner. Please email info@yodle.com and we can arrange.
Mike
The debate on whether there is a SEO penalty on dupe pages is minor compared to how well the client can rank on geo-modified terms. If the original site has no link equity, then merely copying the site onto a .net domain won't do much, no matter how you change the title pages or do robots.txt.Consider this from Google's standpoint in determining what site should rank for a particular query– if it's something a spammer can do, too, then it won't buy you much. Else, spammers could just create millions of such sites and fill up the search engine results pages.The real solution to getting organic traffic is writing unique content and building links. That, unfortunately, takes real work on behalf of the client and the agency– it cannot be automated. If it could, then spammers could come in and do it. And spammers are far more technically sophisticated than folks like Yodle, ReachLocal, and ourselves.The world of SEO is filled with misinformation and it's important that business owners know enough to tell what is real versus baloney.Dennis
The debate on whether there is a SEO penalty on dupe pages is minor compared to how well the client can rank on geo-modified terms. If the original site has no link equity, then merely copying the site onto a .net domain won't do much, no matter how you change the title pages or do robots.txt.Consider this from Google's standpoint in determining what site should rank for a particular query– if it's something a spammer can do, too, then it won't buy you much. Else, spammers could just create millions of such sites and fill up the search engine results pages.The real solution to getting organic traffic is writing unique content and building links. That, unfortunately, takes real work on behalf of the client and the agency– it cannot be automated. If it could, then spammers could come in and do it. And spammers are far more technically sophisticated than folks like Yodle, ReachLocal, and ourselves.The world of SEO is filled with misinformation and it's important that business owners know enough to tell what is real versus baloney.Dennis
Hi Jay,
Great post! Your question is a very common question for both Yodle and ReachLocal. It is my understanding that Yodle doesn't duplicate websites. They do not mirror or proxy websites as well. Keep note that a true "Duplicate" website includes not only content but the code it is written in, file names etc.
To qualify a duplicate website you really do need all of these factors. During my research on the SEM Showdown I have not been able to identify 1 case where Yodle has harmed any websites organic listings, I have seen how they have helped however.
Many thanks,
Sean