Email lists & Google Ranking
Yesterday Jake Luddington posted an article on Lockergnome.com claiming that “Email Reputation Causes Penalties In Google Search Results” . Whilst the article makes some excellent points on email list management, it’s off the mark on it’s basic premise.
Top 3 reasons why your newsletter does not affect your ranking
1.Gmail is not a good measure
The article above uses Gmail.com as an example of how Google can tell the quality of your newsletters. Since Google can see the amount of bounces to Gmail from your newsletter address and they can see the number of Gmail users that open the email, Jake says they can then use this information to make a qualitative assessment on your newsletter and therefore penalise your web site if the numbers of unopens/bounces are high. Google would have no way of knowing what percentage the Gmail addresses represent in your email list. Is it 1% or 50%? Without this data it’s a bit difficult to draw conclusions whether the behaviour of Gmail users would be typical across the whole list. Also I haven’t seen any concrete evidence suggesting Google is cross referencing Gmail behaviour to web content.
2. What has email got to do with the web?
The assumption with this concept is “people don’t open your emails, therefore your content is rubbish, ergo your website is also”. This is what I would call Pythonesque logic, which I myself, am at times guilty of using. In the film “Monty Python & The Holy Grail” there is a witch burning scene. The official in attempt to establish whether a woman is a witch, asks a series of questions of the town folk. By the end of the scene it is established that witches are made of wood because they float like wood and also burn. It is also queried at one point that they may be ducks or very small stones. Just because some people have seen ranking drops AND they may have a lot of Gmail bounces or unopens does not automatically mean the two are related. When I hear theories like this, I put the logic test on them. The way someone opens or uses email has little reflection on the quality of the website they may link to in that email. A lot of emails don’t get opened purely because they have boring subject headers. Government departments or those notinterested in marketing are notorious for this. It may simply be an informational email they are sending out and have not thought to use a descriptive or catchy subject header.Think of a weather bureau that has a regular marine forecast update newsletter. A percentage of people on that list may only be interested in that news at a certain time of year. They tend not to use subjects like “What the ocean doesn’t want you to know!” or “Top 10 secrets of barometric pressure!”. Those sorts of organistions, that are providing a service and not trying to sell you something, generally have boring subject headers and therefore may have low open scores if they get drowned out in the inbox.” That does not make the weather bureau less likely to rank for relevant phrases.I always go through this logic process when I hear a new Google ranking claim.
3. Google rewards relevance not clever marketing
An email is something that has been sent to me and my opening of it can represent good content or good marketing, it certainly does not represent authority or lack thereof. Authority is made up of a number of things, the quantity and quality of pages that link to your pages, keyword density, link structure etc. Whilst I love a conspiracy theory this “big brother” one does not work for me. Just because you can’t do email marketing properly doesn’t mean that you don’t have authority on the web. Have a read of Jake’s article though as he does make some excellent points about email marketing.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
