We’ve all experienced it at some point; the sneaking suspicion that those we’ve chosen to trust may not be entirely worthy.

Take web sites, for example.

We visit a web site, look around and like what it has to offer. We want to believe that the site””and the company behind it”” has our best interests at heart. Perhaps we’ve even had a good experience with the site before.

But then the oddities begin to creep in, the strange little inconsistencies that make us wonder… is it me?

Suspicion…

It doesn’t take much to plant seeds of doubt in a visitor’s mind. Small broken promises and misunderstandings can suffice, such as:

• We click on an ad, then don’t find the promised item on the landing page.
• We carefully click on a product link, only to find something different highlighted on the next page.
• We start a registration process, only to encounter many more steps than the site indicated.
• We try to complete a specific task quickly, only to find our progress slowed by questions, ads, and confusing page layouts.

What’s going on here? Don’t these companies know what their visitors want?

In many cases, the answer is yes””perhaps too well. They know exactly what we want, they just choose to use that understanding in a way we don’t expect. In a way that serves their business goals, not necessarily those of their visitors.

Let’s take a look at a couple examples I’ve run into over the past few months.

Example 1 - GeoTrust

Recently it came time to renew the GeoTrust secure certificate I’d installed on a personal server. The email notice contained a convenient link which led to the following page (I’ve enlarged and called out the product list for clarity):

So far so good, this looked like exactly what I needed. I wanted the first item on the list, the “QuickSSL” product, so I clicked on the first dark-blue “Renew” button.

And came to this confusing page:

Here’s where the doubt crept in. The page title is what I expected, but the content on the page seems to be all about the “QuickSSL Premium” product. Did I make a mistake? I didn’t want the Premium product, I wanted the less expensive “QuickSSL” product.

At first glance (and most visitors won’t give the page much more time than that), the only available action on this page is the huge orange “Upgrade to QuickSSL Premium” button:

Yikes! How do I purchase the plain “QuickSSL?” Ah, there it is, a visually de-emphasized link in small blue text:

This is a great example of evil usability at work. Notice all the factors that contribute to this link’s obscurity:

• Unclear design - Compared to the orange button, this option does not look much like an action item. It’s smaller, in a darker color, and doesn’t look like a button at all.
• Unclear wording - the call to action, “Stay with QuickSSL,” isn’t what visitors to this page expect to do next. What they expect to do””what I expected to do when I came here””is to “purchase” or “renew,” not “stay with” the QuickSSL product.
• Unexpected positioning - visitors interested in purchasing the QuickSSL product don’t expect the next step in the process to be hidden down at the bottom left-hand corner of a page, outside the shaded area that contains the emphasized text, and after a bunch of unexpected content. The orange button, on the other hand, IS in the expected position on the page for a next step.

Why would GeoTrust design the page this way? Those not as cynical as I may say it’s incompetence, poor audience task modeling, or a loose-cannon designer.

I think not.

It’s an example of a business goal overriding the visitor’s clearly stated intention. Now, we can debate the company’s intention. Perhaps they truly believe the basic “QuickSSL” product is inadequate for most customers and see this as a way to helpfully guide customers to a better solution.

What’s more likely is that this is a pure and simple upsell that disguises its intent by twisting well-understood usability principles such as:

• Web visitors don’t generally read text. So all that verbiage that tries to make this sound like an option, instead of the only available action? Ignored by most visitors. But great cover.
• Buttons get clicked. Visitors arrive on a page looking for the next step. What’s clickable? they ask. And on this page, that clickable item is the big orange button. It’s not a carefully considered thought process, it’s a trusting response to what appears to be clear guidance. “There’s a button!” Click.

Let’s look at another example.

Example 2: GoDaddy

Another task I undertook recently was registering a domain name through GoDaddy.com. Let me preface this by saying I’ve had a decent customer experience with this company, overall, so I came into this with a fair amount of goodwill.

I’d just found the domain name I wanted, and clicked the “Continue” button. Below is the page I saw next.

Take a look: What’s the one item that looks most clickable on this page?

If you answered, “The huge green button,” you’re right!

But if you click that button, you add two additional domain names to your order, just like magic! What if that’s not what you wanted to do? What if you want to register only the domain name you picked on the previous page?

To do this, you’d have to click the small text link under the huge green button:

This annoys me every time I go through the GoDaddy checkout process. I’m used to it now, but each encounter incrementally diminishes the store of goodwill I have for the company. I never send friends to the site without detailed caveats along the lines of:

“It’ll be very confusing and they’ll try to sell you extra stuff, but just ignore all that. Look for the tiny little text links that say “No thanks” and keep on going.”

Again, it’s remotely possible GoDaddy truly believes they’re doing customers a service here. Or that they’re incompetent or don’t understand their audience.

Again, I think not.

You’ve Got to Change Your Evil Ways… Baby

It’s easy to shake an accusing finger at these and other sites who deliberately lead visitors into unintended actions. But waiting for them to change their ways isn’t the answer. As long as the rewards of this approach are greater than the downside (customer complaints, blog rants, etc.), they’ll keep right on down the same path.

What can we do about it? How about starting here:

• Complain to the company, often and annoyingly.
• Warn and educate everyone you know about tactics like this.
• Avoid companies that consistently use these tactics, and spread the word about them.
• On the flip side, reward companies who treat visitors with respect. Visit them, buy from them, and spread the word about them.
• Help those who are less internet-savvy than yourself through the minefields.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing my small part, here on the CLM blog. If you run across a good example for this series, post it in a comment, I’d love to hear about it!

It’s finally official: usability can be used for evil.

I’ve always suspected this to be true. After all, even the most innocuous of items””children’s toys””recently were transformed into agents for evil, so how could so powerful a concept as usability not be turned to the dark side? But now Jakob Nielsen has made the full evil potential of usability public knowledge in his recent Banner Blindness research report.

OK, I admit I’m a little puzzled at Jakob’s dramatic tone. Is this really news? Is the manipulative capacity of usability really surprising to anyone? And even if so, isn’t there a larger, more important message here than the awesome power of banner ads?

I mean, one doesn’t have to look far for examples of truly scary technologies out there, and people doing their best to forestall abuse by publicizing and educating on them.

Scarier things, by far, than banner ads

For instance, here’s a technology with clear potential for both good and evil: facial morphing.

Back in 2005, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Shanto Iyengar, & Nick Yee of the Stanford Virtual Reality lab conducted a study titled “Facial Identity Capture and Presidential Candidate Preference.”

The question posed was whether morphing a Presidential candidate’s face so it looks slightly like, say, my face, would increase my preference for that candidate. So, in other words, would a slightly Sandra-looking George Bush be more appealing to me, assuming my mind wasn’t already made up one way or the other?

The answer was YES. Evidently, we humans strongly prefer people who resemble us.

The scary part of this study, though, is that NO-ONE detected the morph. Each study participant thought they were seeing a plain photo of the candidates.

Imagine, if you will, the hellish combination of an evil-optimized banner ad (one that follows the anti-recommendations in Jakob’s post) coupled with an animated sales avatar, say from a company like SitePal, morphed to look like you. And how does it know what you look like? It did some realtime research, grabbed a photo off your IM account, or your blog, or Flickr. Or you have a webcam hooked up and turned on, and it captured your face that way.

However it managed to get your photo, the result would be devastatingly effective.

Not only would your eyes be reeled helplessly to the banner ad, you’d be unable to resist the sales pitch of the virtual being who looks so… familiar, somehow.

My, that’s an outstanding argument for buying a Lear jet, and I don’t believe I’ve ever met such a well-spoken, attractive salesperson. Where do I wire money?

Whoa. Now there’s something to worry about. Top that for scary, Jakob.

(Here’s an avatar that looks ever-so-vaguely like me. Similar enough that I’m already feeling the pull… She has a much bigger office than I do, though.)

I gave a talk at Web Design World in Seattle last month on Balancing Design, Usability & SEO. While doing some research on that presentation, I was trying to find some examples of sites that were strong in only one of these areas. As I’ve done some work in the printer ink space and knew there were plenty of well-optimized but really ugly and unusable sites there, I did a search on ‘ink cartridge’ and hit the jackpot on the first result.

This site was perfect for my needs: A #1 ranking for an insanely competitive keyword, ugly as hell, and horrifically unusable. Score!

Then I did a link: lookup command on Google to get a sense for the link pop this page has, certain that they must have engaged in some serious link-building to get this result. Little did I know…

As I scanned the results of the link query, I was struck by how many unrelated sites seemed to be linking to InkandStuff.

I figured they could be paid links, but many of the sites listed didn’t seem like the kind you would normally associate with posting paid links. So when I saw a listing for the World Islamic Forum Foundation, I clicked through to figure out why in the world this site was linking to InkandStuff. This is where things get interesting… because I couldn’t find a link on this page.

Now I was REALLY intrigued. Google was seeing the link, so it had to be there, right…? So I did a View Source to check out the code and figure out where the link was, and saw this:

What the…? Google is attributing link popularity to sites who have embedded invisible sponsored links in free stat counters? Apparently so… How else is this awful UK site ranking #1 on Google.com for “ink cartridge”?

So next I figured I’d check out MyWebStats to see what they were all about. Sure enough, on their FAQ page they state:

“If this service is so good, how can it be free?
We are lucky to have sponsors who cover the complete cost of running this service. To show our appreciation we accompany your counter with a small link to one of these sponsors.”

“To show our appreciation” - I love that.

SO - That apparently is the secret to gaming Google. All of Google’s tough talk about paid links and how they’re so proactive about making sure people can’t spam their way to the top is apparently just that - talk. This should be SO easy for Google to detect and act upon, but they haven’t… If they had, InkandStuff and/or MyWebStats would’ve been penalized, right?

I was one of those people who looked down on buying links for a long time. It just seemed wrong - and surely the brain trust at Google would clamp down at some point. I just couldn’t believe that buying your way to the top of the organic results could A) be SO easy, or B) yield sustainable results. That was three years ago.

This scheme of embedding links in free stat counters in order to juice link pop has been around for at least that long - and should be among the easiest for Google to detect. It should be a big yellow flag when a site gets lots of inbound links from totally unrelated sites over a short time period. And it should be really easy to detect the code pattern like the one shown above for those inbound links (it even says “invisible” for God’s sake!). Finally, it is pretty irregular to have a UK page show up at the top of the results for a competitive term like this on Google.com. It seems like that might have thrown a flag somewhere along the line as well. The patterns are easy to spot. But Google is either oblivious to all of these issues or they’ve decided not to do anything about it. I’m not sure which is worse.

People will point out that Google may already be aware of this and not be flowing PageRank from these links, per Matt Cutt’s post here. And maybe InkandStuff has enough link pop from other sources that are driving them to the #1 spot for “ink cartridge.” But I really doubt it. And that argument misses the point. InkandStuff is clearly trying to game Google with this and other activities - and they are doing so quite successfully - to the detriment of searchers and their less-savvy competitors. Bottom line: Google is letting these guys blatantly spam their engine and get away with it.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz (on whom one of my team members has what she calls an “SEO crush”) wrote an excellent post on this topic a while back: Paid Links - Can’t Be a White Hat With ‘em, Can’t Rank Without ‘em. (Rand - If you want to know the identity of your secret admirer, slip me a $20 while we’re on stage at SES. Just my way of trying to spice up the otherwise sedate SEM Pricing Models discussion)

But I digress…

It makes it really hard to be white hat SEO practitioners when we see things like this happening. Sadly, this is the second time I’ve run across this exact same scenario (an invisible sponsored link embedded within a different free stat counter) in the past few months while trying to figure out why a really crappy site was ranking so well for a competitive term. So count me among the growing legions of grey hats now, I guess… Given the competitive environment and the fact that “everyone is doing it” now - and it’s working - it no longer serves my clients’ best interests to advise against buying links. I hate saying that, but don’t feel like I have a choice any more. It’s the price of entry if you want top rankings on any competitive terms these days.

I happen to be a big fan and promoter of Google’s. But they risk killing (or at least injuring) the goose that laid their big golden egg if they don’t get more serious about cleaning up their results. Granted much of this may be beyond their control. I don’t expect them to be able to singlehandedly solve this problem for good. But it seems like they could be putting up more of a fight and at least making someone have to work to game their engine. As is, it’s just too easy.

I’m going to report this as a paid link. But their bluster aside, I’m not going to hold my breath hoping it will do any good. I first saw this result two months ago, and as of today both the InkandStuff and MyWebStats sites show a PR6.