Outside of Danny Sullivan few people have probably read and wrote about SEO as much as I have the past couple years, but I think I am going to tune it back a bit.

I like reading the feed reader maybe once or twice a week, and just get bored / burned out if I do it much more frequently than that. I also find that trying to be the first with the news ends up meaning that I end up not reading as many books and it surely crosses beyond the point of diminishing returns.

I plan to post less often, but on average it should be better or less shitty, depending on how critical you are of my posts.

Lots0, one of my true mentors in this field, recently announced he is stopping publicly discussing SEO:

I wonder why some people think that they should receive premium service when they contact a "well known SEO" out of the blue and then ask for "FREE" advice and help.

Then, if you do give them "free" advice, then they always want to argue with you about your findings and how whatever you found can not be the problem (see above posts in this thread).

Time should have a price and a value on it. You can only help people so much before it starts to be at your own expense. Want an example?

I get pissed off when I know that people who were once friends write sales letters full of sleaze and lies to sell more bullshit, even if they are hurting the people buying their products. I have not thought of how I am going to change my sales letter yet, but it says this:

I have spent thousands of dollars developing free custom made SEO tools which are better than tools other people sell for $150 to $300 - saving you way more than the price of the book.

In SEO the tools are as important as the methodology. I hold nothing back. You get access to every SEO Tool I use and all my SEO tips and tricks.

Up until the middle of December that statement was entirely true. I spent well over $10,000 dollars creating tools that I give away. I get feature requests and lots of questions, but at least personally I can create better value for me if I don't make EVERYTHING entirely open. Some ideas just don't scale. Does that make me a bad person? No. It just means I may need to rewrite my sales letter. The only thing that is pure is ignorance.

While supporting open source and helping newbies get up to gear is cool, I am nothing but an asshole if I teach people how to make 6 or 7 figures a year and then consume all my time learning how to teach the topic without stocking away a large large nest egg myself.

I am not all about money per say, but I want it to not matter. If a sleazy company sues me I want to have enough money to be able to do nothing but laugh at them. Being as opinionated and honest as I am means that likely many sleazy or dishonest companies will end up suing me throughout the next couple years.

I may start selling SEO services to high end clients soon. I may also spend a bit more time working with friends on creating content sites. So far I have only completed two content related joint ventures, and the second one was so beautiful that it well paid beyond the losses created by the first one.

EGOL recently stated that SEO has limited value for most people:

SEO by itself is not worth a pile of beans. To have an effecive website you must have more, and that "more" is content, product, salesmanship, etc. SEO has zero value without these things.

I see SEO as a single course in a larger program such as "internet marketing". At present there are very few of these programs but the importance of them is enormous to many businesses.

I have had the chance to speak at an internet marketing MBA class, and SEO was nothing more than part of a larger course. Could it be extended? Sure. But the reality is that as search technology advances, it will get better at displaying various versions of exceptionally popular or exceptionally unpopular opinions in the results. Most people will not need to learn what will eventually become the uber complex SEO field. It will become far easier to directly manipulate people rather than trying to manipulate the algorithms.

Over at Gapingvoid Hugh recently posted tell the truth and the brand builds itself and in that spirit I thought I would post why I perhaps have overinvested so much into SEO. When I first started SEO I was:

• nearly bankrupt

• unemployed
• told that I deserved to be a failure for life by the largest US employer, which even ripped up some of my work records
• spiritually empty

After a while I got another real job, and while I liked my boss and many of the co workers there I realized that the way I am programmed means that whatever I did I was going to do far beyond what most people would consider normal, and that eventually overworking myself was going to lead to an early death due to wreckless living.

Having said all that, SEO was (and perhaps still is) my escape from all of that. But it does not make sense for me to hold onto something for too long.

If I wanted to paint a more accurate picture of reality blogging has probably made me more money than being an SEO has. I still plan on regularly updating my ebook and posting to this site, but would love to shift more toward posting what I find interesting when I feel like looking instead of trying to catch almost everything and read ALL the news.

Need an example of why knowing SEO may not be as important as some of the other things we pick up along the way?

NickW ran what was my favorite SEO site. While he did he frequently posted about how bad the blogpuppy fucktwits were. He later launched another site about blogging and sold his original site. If you look at the growth of Performancing I would guess that it will probably end up being far more successful than Threadwatch was for him because there are far more bloggers than SEOs, blogging is far more viral, and they will be easier to monetize than some of the members of ThreadWatch are.

I am going to launch a few free open source beginer level SEO tools soon. I also am going to start answering many questions I get via email publicly so that I create value for myself when I answer email questions. I am not certain if I should make a separate answers feed for that or if it should be part of the original SEO Book feed.

While some of the readers will tell you that they don't want certain things sometimes the things that are quickly rejected grow to be the most popular, so answering SEO questions right in the main feed may not be adding any noise to the SEO Book brand.

Wishing you a happy-safe-warm-fun new year full of friendship and joy,
Aaron

Search Engine Watch has another thread on the Sandbox concept.

Highlights...

Mike Grehan tends to think Sanbox is synonymous with garbage website, but much of his perspective may be biased by the size and quality of the clients he works worth.

Macia points out that she thinks usage data may matter, referencing this Google patent.

Andy Hagans writes about search results becoming more like the real world in how they learn to trust marketing and branding.

Jason D hints that the sandbox effect may not apply to all TLDs. Numerous friends have confirmed this with me.

Orion has a great post about researching the effects of site age on PageRank and relevancy.

In the next 6 months many of Google's algorithms will likely greatly shift away from trusting raw link popularity and domain / link age to go more toward rate of change.

Lots of good stuff in there. It's really worth a read for anyone interested in SEO.

Matt kicked our asses in the recent best SEO blog vote.

If we work out ways to spam his index hard enough maybe he won't have time to make any posts. ;)

If he beats us again I start investing into creating a wide variety of automated content / site generator software :)

Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

So I have been diligently reading my feeds, and came across a few ideas that are worth cross referencing. DaveN recently said:

• 75% of his income is whitehat
• When out for a casual drink with Greg Jarboe, Dave also said "Black hat stuff is getting too hard," he said. "I'm actually thinking about turning legit."

DaveN also mentioned that he is starting to work on a search engine, and has been producing legit content...even posting niche channels with furry animal USB drives.

In a recent WMW supporters thread Brett Tabke said:

I count 15 independent blackhat SEO's that have went to work for other corporations. The actual number must be closer to 50 or 60 that have thrown in the towel and went to work for the man.

But Marcia added

If the newer breed of the SEO black arts involves link-based manipulation, how could anyone assume there wouldn't be a good degree of underground collusion involved?

Contextual advertising and easy blog related links are making niche channel content production a no brainer. Even if it was only self funding or moderately profitable a content network would still allow you the ability to help market anything in a hurry. Partner up with a few friends on the idea and you are talking about some serious link authority that can be shifted to and fro.

So long as it is scaled out in a logical manner I think many SEOs are going to start becoming large scale publishers of many niche networks.

Sure the blog hype might be overrated, but there is something to be said about having your own network which can be used to help launch newer sites. Content costs are usually a one time fee, and so long as your niche selection is smart within a year or so the revenues should be able to outpace the cost on most channels.

Many paid links may be a bit obvious to engines and discounted, but there is only so many links they can chose to ignore. If you have a legit network that does not blatantly sell links your link popularity and content base will likely be leveragable in more ways than you can count.

I think the SEO theme for 2006 is networks and friendships with network owners.

When something is free, that's what people expect to pay for the next one.

When overpaying people have to talk to others about what they are doing to justify their course of actions.

Many people need marketing messages pounded into them to act.

Today I noticed this review, stating:

Wall states that while he markets the book as being about SEO, it really is more about conveying everything he knows about the web. And providing the reader with lists of valuable resources so they can do more research on their own.

This book is for anyone with a website, who wants to get out there and get noticed by search engines. And I suspect that is everyone with a website. If you want the world to know about you, you need to know about SEO.

but they also said my ebook is expensive. And yet I am highly tempted to raise the price.

Today I also got this via email

If I buy your ebook will it stop inserting your ebook advertisement when I browse your site?

to which I responded

Unfortunately I don't have user custom accounts set up...the site format is the same for all site visitors :(

If you subscribe to the RSS feed there are no ads in that.

Ads are annoying and I hate them, but the day I moved my SEO Book ad inline my sales tripled. To move it out of the content area could likely be a big risk.

Leaving the RSS feed ad free makes it easy to subscribe to and recommend, but most of my potential clients probably have not heard of RSS or do not use it.

Rand reports on OR being an ignored as an ad targeting word in Google AdWords.

Pretty bad deal for those using their keyword selection for regional Oregon AdWords campaigns.

I don't do as many power searches as I should, but today I noticed that when I searched for "blah" or "fla" Google ignored the boolean function until I capitalized the term. Can't they trust that a capitalized OR stands for something in the ads too?

I think Rand's post about OR is a good example of how just being around and experiencing SEO or SEM teaches you many tricks, problems and ideas that most would not naturally think of before playing around in the field.

Perhaps if Oregon becomes part of Baja Canada Google will not have to worry about this problem. If CA and WA stop working as intended then we will know Google is trying to send a hint, and adjust our ads to target Baja CA.

Google has been involved in political redistricting in the past.

Now I know people say you should always be nice, but I sometimes screw that up. Most potential business relationship offers are garbage and the guy who accepts every offer he gets is lucky, born rich, and/or likely eventually homeless.

It takes a dumb business person to try to help everyone who contacts them because if you develop any real brand value many more people will want you to help them than you possible can help. Couple that with the easy of communication and the anonymity of the web and it gets easy to feel a bit shitty if you don't do things to filter out the noise and scamsters (and yet I still get astrology websites claiming to be legitimate charities).

Recently I had one person contact me about 5 times a day asking questions like where is the Overture suggest tool. Stuff that would easily pop on the first page in Google if they used the exact same queries as they instant messaged me with. I explained to them that search is there for a reason and my time was limited, but my explanation was to no avail.

Had I not progressively ignored them and gave continuously shorter answers to encourage reading or searching I would have probably got about 50 questions a day from them. Eventually things were not going to do well.

They asked me questions which to me seemed to show they did not even attempt to read my book. In essence they said they bought my ebook, but I think what they wanted was a full time SEO tutor for a one time $79 fee. Sure I answered a bunch of questions but then after a while I told them I couldn't answer any more because it was not an honest or functional business model for me to continue to do so.

$79 is a bunch to pay for an ebook that you don't read, but $79 is not enough for a real time long term ongoing one on one internet business strategy consultation. People create autoresponder lists and write books and build software to leverage their time because individuals only scale so far.

I think the person who contacted me is probably a good person, but I think that even attempting to make myself widely available on IM is probably not a great idea as it makes it too easy to chat away instead of spending time learning.

I have spent a bunch building free tools to help people leverage their time. Some people are not going to appreciate you do no matter what you do or how hard you try though. Likely their expectations are unreasonable, selfish, or (most likely) they do not place much value on their own time and project their valuations on your time.

You still can learn something from clients who frustrate you and site visitors who seem like they don't have a clue. I am not sure if I will launch it anytime soon, but I think there is a good business model to be made by running an SEO Q&A service for a fee. If I did that it would solve multiple problems:

1. If I placed a tangible value on each answer people would value my time more.

2. I still could answer free questions if I wanted to, but would not have to worry about people viewing me as arrogant if I chose not to.
3. Much of the content on this site is not geared toward picking up newbie targeted traffic from search engines because I can't keep hitting the same questions and ideas over and over as I learn more and the industry changes. Most potential customers are early on in the learning cycle, and this blog started after I had already learned for about a year, and that was a couple years ago. By having a feed of nothing but high quality answers to common newbie questions that content would rank great for many queries and likely convert at around 2 to 5% depending on search query and page layout.

Mitch Ratcliff had an interesting post about Why Conservative Blogs are More Effective - they are more inclined to spread a consistent message...whereas liberal bloggers are more likely to slightly change the message to fit their version of the story.

In some markets it may make sense to tell stories in a manner where people use consistent language and anchor text and create a story that they will push far amongst their demographic.

At other times it might make sense to make your post or framing a bit less clear to ensure the anchor text is mixed around a wide variety of phrases and such that the story can appeal to different demographics.

The framing can help determine who picks up what stories and how far they will run with them. It is easier to syndicate spin, hype, and biased information, but it is a balancing act because too much can equate to lowered authority.

Lee Odden interviews Mr. Google AdWords. Of particular interest to me, Andrew speaking on creating his guide to AdWords:

The first one, of course, came out in ebook form in March 2002 and really took off the moment I started selling it. A bit later, MarketingSherpa and many others helped to publicize it. Believe it or not, I'd been working on a comprehensive SEO document for eighteen months by that point, but I kept feeling like the subject was too broad and no one would get excited about it, so I never completed it.

I think I sorta proved there would / could be demand for an ebook about SEO, as many other SEO book authors have, but I would bet that Andrew has made far greater profit by targeting a niche that is prequalified to have money to spend on ads.

Many people want SEO because they don't have a functional business model and are looking for a free ride. Sure there are probably more searches for SEO than AdWords, but probably less buyers. And another thing that hurts the SEO Book concept is that many of the people looking for SEO believe that there is some automated solution that will make them gobs of money. I know I personally bought a bunch of junky SEO software before I bought any books on the topic.

While he did not discuss organic search in deep depth in his book Andrew Goodman's ebook was the first legit book covering the search space that really helped me better understand some of the limitations of SEO as a service. I think his ebook was the first ebook I read where I didn't feel that the author wrote it to up sell me some sleazy garbage software or put me on a list to spam my inbox.

So yesterday on my drive cross country I called back a person who wanted some strategy advice for marketing his sites.

He was creating satellite sites using stuff like spam-brandname-productname.info but putting quality useful articles on those sites.

There are two ways to do well on the web. Create uber high quality channels or create lots of garbage. The people at the top of the content pyramid gain from the additional public relations and linkage data. The people at the bottom gain by appearing relevant for so many random queries. If you are stuck in the middle you are going to get ate up from the edges.

If you are creating garbage you need to keep your costs low - both in attention and in money. If you are creating good stuff you want to have something that is original and one of the best channels in your field such that you can get linked from the experts in your field and even some web experts outside your field.

100 small satellite domains probably are not going to work well at promoting your main channels directly unless they are niched down to be uber unique and/or require essentially no ongoing commitment.

If your field is really spammy you can eventually do well by starting off with one of the least spammy channels if you can keep it fairly low cost until they are profitable, but as the markets get more competitive and become attention markets eventually some of the profits need to be reinvested or you end up losing market share.

I generally steer clear of awards because they seem a bit gratuitous and self serving, but they are great for link building.

Loren recently created a 2005 search awards contest. The awards have been mentioned on most every major search blog and have even got a bit of coverage outside the typical search sphere.

When Loren did his recent contest he ran it past me first and I said that he should re-categorize some of the stuff and add at least one category that could go viral or would be inclined to be talked about.

The category which fit that profile well for me is

Matt or Jeremy: who is more likely to flame you for spamming?

Sure enough both Matt and Jeremy blogged about it.

I have never done a contest to build links, but if I did here are things I would think about

• which people should I run the award ideas past before it exists so I can refine it? This could help improve the contest categories, and it gives those people a reason for them to want to help market it since they gave feedback on it. Plus asking for feedback is a bit more tactful than asking for a link.

• Are there any official sounding endorsements that would make the contest seem official like?
• Who do I REALLY want links from? Those sites should be listed in small categories that really fit there niche?
• Will any of the contestants get pissed if I email them to tell them they are in the contest? If not which contestants should I email?
• Can I make something funny or interesting that people would want to link at?
• Outside of the problem of self selection can I get a consensus on something that generally has no consensus?
• Can I relate this study to bloggers or any niche markets that typically link virally or link with authority?

There are probably a bunch of other good ideas with contests, please let me know which ones you like.

In many ways a link in and of itself may not constitute a vote of quality. How do you discount sites like FT selling hidden links or links that are out of the way ads?

Brian thinks search engines may use clickstream data.

Throwing out the book on SEO is another post covering site visitor action, and the concept has to be at least a bit valid because Rand's recent beginner's guide to SEO already ranks in the top 30 for SEO. If you look at Rand's link trend or Del.icio.us information you can see that he has had a sharp increase in viral linking and SVA recently.

Peter D recently posted on finding relevancy in hyper saturated markets. The solution to the problem?

• buy old

• go viral
• do both

So New Years is just around the corner. Many people will act in predictible ways, saying that this year they want to do this or that. Odds are there are some good linking opportunities pent up in that demand. This page currently ranks #7 in Google for lose weight.

I recently interviewed Greg from BOTW. He chats about directories, blackjack, and running some of his other web based businesses.

He also offers a discount for BOTW submissions at the end of the interview.

Steve Rubel posted about The Guardian launching a feed reader.

Many sites that are hard to link at or are in fields where many people are competing on near similar content theme and quality may be able to boost their overall site authority scores by creating something that people with lots of link popularity would like to link at.

I hate rules...but I have a new email rule. If a person emails me with Dear Sir
they probably will not get a response unless I know them well (in which case they would not use dear sir).

I recently started doing this a bit more with some of the give me a free ebook because I am a fake charity scam emails and it feels so good deleting it that I want to broaden that out a bit more.

I have to value my time because eventually I will die.

Peter D set up his Squidoo page.

Not sure how set out he will be on updating it, but the guy knows his shit and it is well worth a read and RSS subscription if he is gonna teach only 1% of what he knows.

A few of his opening tips:

Don't Think of Adsense As Advertising, Think Of Adsense As Content - Ads can answer your visitors questions just as easily as your content. So let it. Integrate it. Mix it into your written paragraphs.

Comprehensive Content Does Not Necessarily Equal Great Adsense Revenue - If the visitor is so engrossed in your article, or you answer all their questions, they may be less likely to click on your ads. Don't answer all the visitors questions. Leave them wanting more. The Adsense ads can, and often do, provide that "more". Let them.

I have been well known to almost always screw up on that second tip (writing way too much). More content might bring in more traffic, but if that traffic does not do something you want them to do then what is the point?

I have found that being an altruistic publisher often equates to being a poor one, at least compared to the guy with many lines in the water driving visitors to targeted profitable goals.

Less interesting content per page lets you split your information up and makes the ad click a higher probability action.

I don't know how many link exchange sites there are (way too many), but someone created a content + link exchange site.

Ultimately this still has similar problems to traditional link exchange sites:

• Over 99% of websites are useless

• Most people attracted to the trade your way to the top schemes couldn't create useful stuff on their own site or else they would not be using community based schemes.
• Many of those who have content worthy of exploiting the effects of commmunity linkage are already doing so in better systems like del.icio.us.

link via Rand and Donna

neato...this bloggie is 2 years old today.

Oilman was recently contacted by Anthony Noto, the world renowned stock analyst and phone spammer.

A while ago Randy Ray pointed at a post called The Ultimate Secret to Winning Poker, where Bill Rini posted about how he failed at being a stock broker because he did not cold call enough people. He spent too much time trying to study the market and perfect the craft. He did not read or understand that just calling calling calling was the most important step until it was too late.

That post also mentions that if people read many books on a subject and still do not understand the subject then the answer does not necessarily rest in some obscure passage they will one day cross, but more likely in a book they already read, but did not read closely with enough attention and an open mind.