Danny Sullivan's recently made a post highlighting the downside of human review for search engines:

[Tim] Mayer reminded that what's relevant for a query can often change over time. Google's Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, made similar remarks when I spoke with him about human-crafted results when I was visiting at Google yesterday.

One example he pointed out was how Google's human quality reviewers -- people that Google pays to provide a human double-check on the quality of its results, so they can then better tune the search algorithm -- started to downgrade results for [cars] when information about the movie Cars started turning up. The algorithm had picked up that the movie was important to that term before some of the human reviewers were aware of it.

Obviously human review is used at all major search engines, but even when outsourcing reviews humans have limits just like with producing content. Even if Google has 10,000 quality raters those people can only be trained to find and rate certain things.

Dan Thies recently launched his new SEO Fast Start book. You can download the PDF here, or sign up for his updates and join his community here. His guide is 100 pages long and aimed mostly at beginners, but it also covers a bit more, and as his community develops he will continue to give away more content in more formats. His book is generally quite straightforward and easy to understand. He wrote it in a way that is big picture oriented such that it won't need to be updated too frequently. His section on dynamic linking is worth a read. It mentions that by creating an internal navigational structure that places more PageRank deeper into a site, typically most sites will get more traffic than a site with a link navigation scheme that is top heavy (I have been reviewing a number of sites recently and this is a large recurring issue). He recommended using GSiteCrawler to generate sitemaps, and OptiSpider to view the internal link structure of larger sites.

You can see how OptiSpider compares a page's topic to what the internal links say the page is about by looking at the below picture.

Probably the only part of Dan's book that I don't agree with is on is his advice on how to use nofollow. Some of the advice, like add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link for some reason seems a bit aggressive to me. A web that consisted only of paid or nepotistic links would not be a web worth being on.

I don't like using nofollow on most (or all) outbound links for three major reasons

• If something is worth mentioning then I think it is worth mentioning to both people and search bots.

• I think excessive use of nofollow carves up the web, leaving scars in it and making it more wounded for those who use it.
• What was once white hat became gray then black. There is nothing saying that search engines won't eventually penalize sites for excessive or manipulative use of no follow. Just how nofollow magically made paid links evil one day, so might excessive use of nofollow the day Google realizes how damaging it is to the web.

Update: Dan describes what he meant about the use of Nofollow in a comment below, and further clarified his take on nofollow here.

I have been writing too many in theory type posts, so here is a post offering many practical tips to increase productivity and lower your site development costs.

Site Ideas

If you have a deep interest in a particular market or understand some general macro-trends (online or offline) that gives you a big advantage over others in choosing what to make a site about.

You can track memes. See what is hot on blogs, on Google's hot keywords, or the Yahoo! Buzz Index. You can track retail. See what is hot on Amazon or eBay. You can track advertising. Look at top performers inside ad networks or affiliate networks like CJ, Linkshare, ClickBank, Azoogle Ads, or Performics. Also, if you see ads that are highly off target (like auto ads on a site about recipes) it probably means that ad buyers in that industry are hungry for ad inventory.

I also like to look at sites like Elance or ScriptLance to see what kinds of projects other people are creating. Also look at some of the past projects from some of the better service providers to find rich markets.

Buying a Domain Name

Go to PsychicWhois to look for names in related fields. If you can get an exact match keyword .net or .org domain for $8 it might be worth registering it. If you are aiming for a local market your local .co.uk or .ca might be a nice buy too.

Beyond that, there are some free tools that try to generate name permutations, like NameBoy, and a couple (fairly inexpensive) firms that do this were recently mentioned in the comments section on my interview of Frank Schilling. GrabaGoodDomain and PickyDomains cost from $50 to $100 (as of writing this).

Sites like Afternic, BuyDomains, Sedo, and Fabulous offer domains for sale for set prices, while SnapNames, Pool, TDNam, and Sedo (again) sell domains at auction. A couple years ago Mike Davidson wrote an article about buying expiring domain names.

At domain auctions the domains tend to typically go for fairly affordable prices. The .net and .org prices are fairly reasonable because many of the top auctions are based on some multiple of type in value. If the .com names seem a bit more mainstream they can get really expensive unless you have a strong monetization model or a large passive revenue stream. Frank Schilling mentioned that he paid 140x yearly earnings for SnoringCure.com, (over $8,000). Prices can vary widely though. A .net or .org or a URL with keywords in an alternate order may go way cheaper.

If you are creating a new word or brand it is best to get the .com of it, but if the .com is already registered and not much is being done with it yet you might be better off going with a .org or .net and using the price differential for site design, content development, and marketing.

Remember that once you start developing a name many of the associated costs (site design, content, market, etc.) are the same if you have a good name or a bad one. Eventually a good name should be able to pay for itself through lower recurring marketing costs.

Website Design

Some people are graphically inclined while being bad at coding. Working with a bad site design wastes time and may kill your interest in a project. Requiring the designer to produce quality workable code or turning design into a 2 step process might make it more manageable. You can pay one person to create the graphics and use a company like psd2html.com to convert the design into code can keep design costs low while keeping the code usable.

Themespress is a $10 service that can convert your code into a Wordpress blog template.

Another great design option is to just get a free blog template or free site template, then buy a logo from an affordable source. You can buy the logos from logo designers like The Logo Company or Logo Design Works, contests in design forums, or outsourcing sites like Elance or Scriptlance.

Content Development

Cloak Affiliate Links

By cloaking affiliate links through your .htaccess file or a PHP jump script it makes it easy to change affiliate partners if merchants change networks or payout levels.

Dynamic Development

I like using dynamic programing or server side includes to make it easy to change sections of a site without having to edit pages one page at a time. For example, many of my new sites have blank server side includes where the ads go. When the site gets some good traction ads magically appear.

Track Your Progress

Install a tracking script to track your progress to see what keywords you are ranking for and where you need to do more work. If certain sections of your site are more profitable than others make sure to over-represent them in your internal link profile.

How to Write Content:

You can find writers from sites like Craigslist, popular industry forums, look for local college students, or people who are already blogging about your topic. Six keys to profitable content development

• use content as a marketing strategy: as noted here

• segregate content quality: make sure features rock. make the other content good enough to pass a hand check and lead to conversions
• grow your content in proportion to your link equity
• don't display ads so aggressively that people will never link at your site
• focus the content pages on inbound links and subscriber acquisition...show few ads on them
• focus the conversion oriented pages on conversion :)

Email

Use Gmail or some other service that makes it easy to tag, archive, and search your email. I have been a bit behind on email recently, but hope to be catching up in the next couple weeks.

WatchMojo recently posted about their experiences with GoClick:

Looking at Google Analytics, I saw that initially [GoClick's] traffic came from sources such as searchportal.information.com and landing.domainsponsor.com, but that progressively it included sites like myspace-junk.info. By the time you read this, myspace-junk.info is long gone into the annals of web history, which is fitting because these sites stink and the intermediaries that profit from them like GoClick - or their parent Marchex - are full of shit.

The problem when you leave the major ad networks is that monetization is so much less efficient that it is hard for them to have any legitimate CLEAN traffic partners other than media they own. Google bows down and caters to adult traffic sources. Why would any clean traffic sources be part of second tier networks if the top ad networks are willing to pay out nearly 100 percent?

Joe Whyte offers tips on how to get free .edu links - just ask students to work for you on campus websites in the help wanted section.

Students = under-priced workers.
Free or cheap .edu links = under-priced links.
Nice

Information architecture is probably the single most important and most under-rated aspect of the search marketing strategy for large websites.

A Recurring Error

I have been reviewing some client sites that could use work on the information architecture front. Some of them want to rank for keywords that they do not actively target. The key to ranking is to create meaningful navigation schemes that reinforce the goals of your site and your target keyword phrases. In addition, a site which is improperly categorized due to poor internal navigation does not flow PageRank properly through the site, which means your ranking data and market feedback will be irrelevant / broken and not show your true potential.

Conversion oriented structure is a type of content. It is one of the biggest advantages smaller players have over large players that operate in many fields, and adds to the bottom line of any site that takes it seriously.

Compare the following...

What Happenst to a Site With Bad Internal Navigation?

A piece meal site with hacked up internal navigation exhibits the following characteristics

• navigation is inconsistent and confusing, thus it is hard for spiders to know what pages are important and it is hard for humans to work their way through the conversion process

• if the spiders do not rank the correct pages odds are pretty good that the visitors will come into the site on the wrong page (and have a hard time working their way through the conversion process if they start out at the wrong spot)
• hard to buy broad keywords using PPC because competing sites are better at funneling visitors through the conversion process
• hard to buy category level keywords using PPC because it is hard to place people on meaningful content if it does not exist. category pages should be more than a link list or groups of irrelevant chunks of content
• what should be category pages do not add context, build trust, and build credibility - they are essentially placeholders gluing together various unrelated content
• if you do not have well defined and reinforced category pages the site is not structured to rank for the mid level category related keywords
• much of the site's PageRank is wasted on unimportant pages such as photo galleries or other low content pages
• since PageRank is distributed improperly, the market feedback is largely irrelevant
• has many similar pages that duplicate each other, cleaning up the errors leads to broken links and other problems
• the site is hard to grow or market because as your category gets more competitive and efficient you first have to restructure the site and undue the errors before you can compete

What Are the Benefits of Good Navigation?

A site with strong internal navigation exhibits the following characteristics

• properly flows PageRank throughout the site

• search engines are likely to rank the most relevant page
• easier to convert
• is easy for users to move around
• builds user trust
• more likely to be referenced in a positive light than a site with broken navigation (gets free editorial links)
• converts better, so it can afford to pay a higher lead price for traffic (and thus maintain market leadership even as the market gets more competitive)
• category pages add context and target different relevant word sets than lower level pages
• folder and filenames are logical so they aid relevancy and clickthrough rate and the site is easy to build out / extend
• if you ever make errors they are typically far easier to correct
• easy to promote seasonal specials or currently hot items

Many website owners with unorganized websites think that they just need more of the same, but in a game of market efficiency sometimes less is more, especially if it is better organized.

As an entrepreneur the biggest advantage you have over big businesses is that you can spot trends early and invest in them before they have a chance to tamper with the market. I got on the web in 2003 and launched this blog about SEO before the end of that year. That was great timing both for the SEO market and for seeing the blogging trend. While Google is killing a lot of the made for AdSense spam, the next big trend trend is probably going to be web video. But you have to act quickly to lock in large gains. Within days of Google integrating video into their search results, many of BuyDomains.com's video related domains were gone. Overnight the price of some of those domains probably increased 10x. Lots of people are investing in everything social...I think that trend is over-hyped and already on the decline. Nearly daily PR firms send me emails promoting social content stuff from people who clearly are writing about a topic they have no real knowledge of. By the time people who don't care about a market are drawn to it you know it is time to look elsewhere.

But as big business jumps into a wide variety of markets, you look at the information pollution created and realize that many people will be unable to tell the difference between information and what may as well amount to machine generated content.

Search is over-hyped too, but Google is making the search results more interactive in an attempt to re-accelerate that growth. They are evolving search with the web. The fact that they are pushing video means that it wouldn't be a bad idea to do so too. But you probably are not going to make much of a dent in the market as a YouTube or MetaCafe clone. There are a ton of markets where the top ranked organic results are of low quality and will soon be replaced. I think the next big trend on the web is remarkable micro-brands and high quality original editorial channels...video and text.

Google Trends now shows the top 100 fastest growing keywords by date. Each keyword shows peak search time, search profile by hour, related keywords, top web results, news results, and blog results.

Eric Enge noted that at the Searchology event that Google's Udi Manber stated that 20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees in any given day are queries that they have never seen before.

eBay recently banned search arbitrage, and Google is also trying to clean up their network. eWhisper posted that he thought the recent clean up may be an attempt to make the network look more appealing before showing advertisers what URLs their ads appear on. A neverending Webmasterworld thread highlights that many thin AdSense publishers got emails from Google stating that "our specialists found that your business model is not a good fit for the AdSense program".

The hard part is both judging intent and forcing quality. On one front Google offers a heat map showing you that your ads should go in the middle of your content, then they tell you to use AdWords to drive traffic to AdSense sites, and in their guidelines they state:

No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant

In a market where virtually every business arbitrages other markets what is an improper business model? SEO is a form of arbitrage. I even had one engine call me up and ask to pay me to spam arbitraging Google's search results. That engine may even be one of Google's largest syndication partners! As ShoeMoney pointed out, many large arbitragers will continue arbitraging. Companies like Business.com or the 100s of shopping search engines are not going to get booted out of syndicating ads.

I think the big long-term distinction between what Google considers low quality and of quality is going to be brand equity. Do people visit your site from channels other than Google? Large brands get more return out of buzz marketing, while smaller businesses lean hard on search. inbound made a great post in that WMW thread about the arbitrage and MFA changes, which notes that Google is getting better at coming up with proxies for visitor value.

Based on Google's authority-centric relevancy algorithms and this move it is clear that Google wants to trust the larger businesses so they have less work to do policing the web. The way around getting forked by Google is to create something that does not need Google to exist. Create the type of site that people would link at if Google did not exist, and the type of site that they would want to advertise on directly. I have a large AdSense site that needs a re-brand and some serious work on content quality if it is going to stay viable in years to come.

For those who just got the death letter here are a few options:

• Buy old trusted sites with a clean core and real value add. do arbitrage stuff off of them

• Look to other related programs like YPN, Searchfeed, and Ask.com's feed.
• If your site is of low value consider showing fewer ads short term...to make up for non arbitrage ads and to lower your risk profile.
• Create a new corporation, open up a new AdSense account and figure out ways to get your sites approved.
• Publish fewer and higher quality sites with fewer ad units on each page.

From a risk management perspective, I think every web publisher should own at least one real branded site, even if it offers low returns for the amount of work required to maintain it.

If the people you are talking to gain by sharing your story.

For example, right now Google is desperate to show the value of video so they can turn that huge copyright nightmare into a revenue stream.

Nick Carr recently published an article about how page views are consolidating:

He found that between the end of 2001 and the end of last year, the number of Internet domains expanded by more than 75%, from 2.9m to 5.1m. At the same time, however, the dominance of the most popular domains grew substantially. At the end of 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31% of all the pages viewed on the net. By the end of last year, the top 10 accounted for fully 40% of page views. There are more destinations online, but we eem to be visiting fewer of them.

Now that you can play music in Google's search results you have to think that consolidation is only going to get worse.

The cited research also notes that social sites are playing a role in the consolidation of traffic. Andrew Goodman recently published an article about why people would want to contribute to online communities. He noted that much of the community giving spirit is based on a common thread of a shared sense of justice in society. It then makes sense that political blogs, religious sites, deep niche sites, and things built on heavily biased/warped worldviews are typically stronger communities that are likely easier to maintain than those based on broad interests.

Add to that the following, and a clear trend emerges:

• people pay more attention to and believe what resonates with them

• people are more likely to share with those that resonate with them
• fringe biased content is typically more remarkable than vanilla unbiased content
• controversies spread far

As the big players keep taking verticals away from smaller players, back-filling their databases with partner licensed content, and personalizing results to match our worldviews, the profitable (and thus sustainable) communities will move more toward the fringe edges.

Unless there is some other change to modern relevancy algorithms, the top ranked results will be watered down vanilla content from editorially trusted sources or heavily biased content from the fringe. A mixture of various biases will also allow people to believe in whatever they thought was right before the consulted the oracle. There will be a reasonable accessible source for every lie. Thus we will think the information is of greater value, while it turns out to be low value entertainment leading to self fulfilling prophecies...but at least the ads will be targeted. :)

Having coined the term domain investor, Frank Schilling is a recognized leader in the domaining field. He talks about domaining on his blog at Seven Mile.com

I recently asked Frank Schilling if he would be up for an interview and he said sure.

What makes domain names so powerful from an investment standpoint?

Several things.. When you build on a domain name you are the master of your destiny because you are not beholden to anyone else's platform. It's the Internet comparison to owning the building vs. leasing from a landlord. Internet law is new and undefined. Google and Ebay can be brutal landlords changing rules or algorithms that put you back out on the street without notice. If you own a powerful generic name or name phrase; you will get internet traffic independent of what the search engines and auction marketplaces try to do to you.

Why are [secondary market] .com's typically so much more expensive than other extensions?

Dot com's are the most readily understood domain extension. They are so powerful even my daughter knows what they are (she's 3) .. Many people will simply append the subject matter they seek with '.com' in their address bar, expecting to find products and services that match the generic keywords they entered. That world-wide mindshare has been reinforced since the very beginnings of the Internet via trillions of dollars in collective global marketing and serve to create a premium value for the extension. The marketing that you, I and others have done, has served to make .com the first extension most of us try in the browser's address bar.

Have you ever sold a domain name for a loss?

No. Even names where folks scoffed saying I overpaid at the time, look cheap in hindsight.

What is the best domain you regret not purchasing?

Cameras.com sold for 1.5 million.. That was a really tasty one.. I chickened out over a million. Wish I could get in the Delorean and go back in time on that one. Also Food.com sold to the food network in a San Francisco bankruptcy court in 2003. it went for $300,000 ish .. I should have bid 500k back then.

Is it too late to get into domaining? If you were starting today which model would you go after? Would you try to buy a few strong domains or try to own a much larger portfolio of weaker ones?

I think there are so many untapped opportunities here.. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands globally are going to be directly employed in this industry. It is early not late. This is like California in the 1960's. -- yes, it's not the 1920's anymore, but there are still mountains of untapped opportunity. I would probably focus on buying and selling, flipping up and bootstrapping profits back into the business if I had to start today. Also SEO and PPC keyword arbitrage.

Are new heavily marketed extensions like .tv or .mobi a good opportunity?

Only to flip.. If you can get something good cheaply and sell it to somebody else then do it, but I am avoiding those extensions completely. I like .com, .net, .org and the CCtld of the Country you are in because the name spaces are established, the renewal fees are certain (consistent/predictable) and because that's where the organic, generic intent type-in traffic is.

What are your favorite cities to visit? How does real estate there compare with domain name prices?

I like Los Angles and Las Vegas a lot. It's funny because those cities real estate histories have parallels to the domain industry. In Southern California you have Irvine where one man basically acquired millions of acres through the early 1900's and then sold to a large corporation in the later 1900's. Today the seller looks like a fool because he sold so cheap when viewed against the development which has occurred in the surrounding area. Yet had he not sold, none of the roads, utilities, infrastructure would be there, so the area would not really be as valuable. So if there is a comparison between domains and real estate, I think "development naturally follows acquiring the land" and "prices increase as the people come in" are the two over-riding factors.

If I am planning on developing a site, and am working with a small budget, do you think it is better to buy the .com, or to buy a .net or .org and spend the difference on more marketing and development? What about country level domains?

I like Country Code domains in Countries that have even-handed registration rules which allow all all sorts registrants to invest and develop there. Country codes I like include .CA (Canada), .co.uk (UK), .de (Germany), .br (Brazil), .cn (China), .in (India). In many circumstances Country Codes are stronger than .com. There are a host of reasons for this including currency issues, language, nationalism. I would always try to get the .com because it helps you to build traffic outside of the search-engines (everybody winds up at the .com eventually). I do like .nets and .orgs when they are priced low enough.

Years down the road when all the best names are gone and many of them are beyond the budgets of individuals and small businesses do you see outlier names like .info, .biz, or .cc getting any traction?

I do not.. I think it will be .com, .net, .org and the CC TLD of the Country Code you live in, ten years from now. If the Web extension gets approved, it could eventually unseat .net but it would take time to catch on. That forecast is assuming names get rolled out in their current way. The only other thing that could change destiny is the wholesale addition of hundreds of new extensions such as .GOOG, .MSN, .IBM, .YHOO, where every company got its own extension. It's problematic because corporate jealousy precludes adding just one or two.. and companies can barely manage their names, let alone an entire GTLD. It would take a generation to roll out and would ultimately strengthen .com relating to generic words such as Maps, Books, Shopping etc.. So while I find that kind of wholesale change revolutionary (ICANN and Verisign would resist it), it still 'could' happen.. and that would change to weaken .net and .org.

If I'm planning on developing a site when is it best to buy the core related keyword domain? When does it make more sense to create a unique word or add a common word like "hub" or "community" to the name to get an $8 domain name instead of spending thousands more for the exact match domain?

You can focus on building a great company without a great name. I like generic word + 'hub' or 'web' or 'world' style domain names. But if you build the world's biggest ceiling fan company at fanhub.com and then you want to acquire ceilingfans.com .. it is going to get much more expensive as time goes by. Names like those are going to be worth millions one day, so the time to acquire them is when they seem cheapest and unimportant to you. That's always the best time to acquire great names btw.

Are there any good $8 domain names available right now?

Yes.. but mining for them is getting harder. I don't buy anything in the available space anymore.. haven't in a long time. Too time intensive and "domain tasting" has creamed off most of the generic defensible undiscovered names.

How many ways do you categorize domains? What types of domains are the best from an investment perspective?

We have 60 main categories such as 'cars' and then 1600 subcategories including 'car accessories', 'towing', 'insurance'. etc. The best domain-names are generic defensible keyword-style (one two and three word) phrases which get some trickle of organic generic-intent type-in traffic; for nothing more than the keyword-weight, gravity and resonance of the generic words that make up the domain name.

What are your favorite spots for buying domains right now? Which auction do you like the best? What changes would you like to see to how domain names are auctioned off?

We are going through a seasonal dry-spell at the moment.. There is still an annual echo effect of expiring domain names which results from the dot-com bust where millions of folks in 2001,2,3 let their domain names expire.. the expiring name echo-period runs from November through April, so we are in the quiet season at the moment. I like Snapnames, Enom, BuyDomains, Godaddy. The auctions are presently run by for-profit clearing houses which inject themselves between expiring names and bidder registrants. One day ICANN will probably get involved auctioning new names like the FCC does with reissued airwave licenses.

What percent of domain sales do you estimate are publicly known?

About 5%.. maybe less. I was at my daughter's friend's birthday party recently and the father of one of the children confided that he sold a terrible made up brand-like sounding name for $23,000 (it was either 23 or 33k.. can't quite recall) This guy was not a domainer.. you would never hear about the sale. I get folks from regular walks of life coming up to me all the time confiding that they are part time domainers.. These are folks who have never visited a domain chat room, have never visited another domain site. Their only connection to the industry is through their registrar. It is a billion dollar business.

Many domains tend to sell for a multiple of PPC earnings. In 10 years time do you think the baseline will move to some other metric?

It already has.. No good domain portfolio has changed hands since BuyDomains and that business would have sold for considerably more than the rumored amount had the company's former owner been engaged in selling advertising alone, vs selling his names. Prior to that there was Name Development's sale to Marchex (Yun Ye transaction). No large, high-quality portfolios have changed hands since. Other sales have been smaller or split-portfolios consisting of good names interspersed with trademark issues. Individual names often sell for 100 years PPC.. No high quality domainer would dream of selling a portfolio worth potential billions to a third party for 10-12X PPC revenues. PPC is a flawed multiple because it works off a rev-share. If you buy a portfolio for 10X and it is on a 50/50 rev share (after 'cost of services' through Google Adsense) that means you sold your portfolio for 5X what Google could make with it. Maybe 3X if you exclude the amount Google shaves for smart pricing. That is so insanely cheap. Only a fool would give names away like that. If I were selling I would pick a walk away number (the youtube style multiple) or I would sell names individually. The breakup value of large portfolios will be in the billions if they aren't already.

You have mentioned that you thought search was promoting too many anchor stores vs smaller boutique websites. Do you think this creates an opportunity for other search players or adds value to topical community resources? Do you see it becoming more or less profitable to make niche websites and domain names?

I think of every domain name as an alternative search engine under the keyword embodied within the name. Search-engines by their nature can only display 5 to 10 results above the fold. As markets get more competitive that 11th result will become a different website, with a greater frequency. It's always getting harder for search engines to rank the top results.. as that competition intensifies as domain implementations get better, the domain name becomes a more viable alternative browsing experience. It's going to become much more profitable to run boutiques that sell things in the years ahead because software, fulfillment, products are all becoming cheaper as marketing costs go up. A good domain name reduces your lifetime marketing costs and increases marketing opportunities.

Are you concerned with large web companies claiming certain websites and types of websites as being unsafe to end users?

It depends how far they take it. Clearly I'd be concerned if browsers incorrectly claimed that advertising was bad and tried to block all sites with ppc ads.. While that wouldn't impact my lifestyle it would stymie newcomers and limit folks abilities to browse the web. I think the browsers are already on thin ice with a lot of the error search stealing to the right of the dot.. type your favorite website with .xom or .con watch where you go, think about where you were intending to go. That's stealing in the browser. It's unseemly to see that kind of conduct coming from a major US Corporation. I think in time there will be more freedom of navigation not less. Users (by their nature) want to be free. So to answer your question, there are probably too many sites with advertising on them for the browsers to do something draconian or to limit browsing freedoms. People would type in a website and say the internet's broken, my browser won't let me go anywhere .. too many sites would be impacted.

As the web gets more competitive, I believe any single sign of quality will likely have less of an overall effect on a website's position on the web. Do you believe that is true for domain names as well, or will everything being so gamed only increase the value of domain names?

I think probably the later.. Mark Twain said: "History doesn't repeat but it rhymes" .. The past may not be a true indication of the future, but domain names 'are the Internet'. You need a domain for email, in fact the only constant since the dawn of the commercial internet in 1993 (Netscape 1) has been the domain name. If you feel comfortable investing in anything related to the Internet it should be a generic domain name.

What makes Riesling so good?

I was picking up dinner at www.pappagallo.ky they have this new house wine from Germany.. very light refreshing.. good lunch wine. Darn, can't remember the name - Maybe if it ended in .com! :)

----

Thanks Frank. Check out Frank's blog to read his latest insights on the domain market.

Just how one does market research to see how competitive a marketplace is, you can also do market research to view how important some ideas have been historically.

Google Trends shows historical search trends and Google's experimental history search will show published pages based on associated reference time. Google News also allows you to search by timeframe.

Services such as the Yahoo! Buzz Index show what is hot right now. Social bookmarking sites, social news sites, and meme trackers show what stories are hot right now, and were hot in the recent past. When you want to gain access to the media, use the above sources to research what they thought was important in the past. Either look at your exact field, or look to a more mature market to predict what issues will become important in your market. You are basically going to target an idea to create what some people term as link bait. Link baiting background available here.

Once you get an idea, spend whatever is necessary to create a piece of content (text, video, whatever) that is the best piece of content on that topic. It can be history of x, don't get scammed by y, or z do it yourself tips. Heavily integrate that content into your site's internal link structure, and make no attempt to directly profit from it...simply make it easy to link at or want to reference. Consider this content as a cheap marketing cost.

Ask a few friends what they think of your content's title. Ensure it sounds authoritative and/or buzz-worthy (one or both, depending on your target market and story idea). Promote your article to friends, email a few popular bloggers who might like the story, and if you know someone with powerful social media accounts ping them too.

Ensure your site appears credible.

If you are in a new field or have a trusted domain doing all the above might be enough to garner top rankings. If you have a new site in an old field there still is hope, but you may need to create video content that you can post on sites like YouTube or venture into PPC ads. :)

If you buy PPC ads use my keyword list generator or a similar tool to generate a list of various permutations of the targeted phrase. Create an ad campaign with ad groups and ad copy for each relevant keyword basket.

I did this for an affiliate site that is less than a year old, and bid 50 cents a click on AdWords. I was the only advertiser for most of the targeted keywords, got a 25% ctr for high volume search terms at 8 cents a click.

Some members of the media also contacted us wanting face time for television and national radio exposure. As the site ages and gets more exposure we will get a lot more of that.

One could use the same idea to target key bloggers by using AdSense's site targeting function on their blogs.

A friend pointed me to SEO Digger, which is another site which shows what keywords a particular page ranks for.

Other similar sites that do this are SpyFu (AdWords & Organic), KeyCompete (AdWords), and URL Trends (Organic).

• MSN is considering adding images to their search ads.

• AOL recently showed graphic ads near their search results for some seasonal searches.
• The Yahoo! Directory offers image ads in some categories, like web design.
• Google sold Ford run of network AdSense ads for Ford Explorer.
• Google offers a distributed pay per action ad network which does NOT clearly mark their ads.
• Google is starting to offer interactive gadget ads.
• Google arbitrages their own search results with large ugly Google Checkout ads and video content from Google Video and YouTube.
• Marissa Mayer just hinted that Google is willing to consider selling graphical ads on Google.com.

How long until search engines are the biggest affiliates on the web? And when they do that, will affiliate marketing still be looked down upon the way SEO and domaining are? Better yet, will we have any way to know who is buying the ad or how it is priced?

A friend recently launched a new site and promptly crafted a great linkbait award idea that got so many links that over 95% of the website's inbound links were reciprocal links. The award program worked so well that traditional PR firms used our list of award winners to seed their list of people they wanted to contact to talk about a client.

The site did not rank anywhere near as well as it should have because there were too many reciprocal links gained far too quickly when you consider the rest of the site's link profile.

One of the reasons that it is so important to mix link types is such that if any of your marketing really takes off you want some semblance of balance to your link profile.

Frank Schilling and Andy Hagans both wrote posts about the bogus worldview of the role of SEOs. Frank also highlighted that most every industry gets this treatment:

It seems to me that the only groups "incapable of doing wrong" on the Internet are either the browser, operating systems or Google. Even when these groups are clearly doing wrong they are incapable of doing wrong in the media's and public's eyes. Everyone else eventually gets maligned as a dark-hearted "neer do well" or "rounder".

Yet in spite of this treatment, people like Rand give tips on things like segmenting search intent nearly every day, Blue Hat SEO shares real world SEO examples, Shoemoney shares his designer, Eric Enge interviews search engineers, and DaveN is even willing to tell you when new link buying algorithms roll in.

Don't forget that the people telling stories about fighting spam or fighting for good are often full of crap. Take Collactive, for example. Here we have a company backed by Seqouia (which also backed Google) which is creating a marketplace for spamming social media sites. The same company behind Collactive was originally behind Blue Frog, which aimed to stop email spam. Why did they shift for being against spam to promoting it? Money. That is all most businesses are interested in anyhow.

Google doesn't care about spam if it is through AdSense. The lines between signal vs noise, ethical vs unethical, and friend vs foe change depending on where the stack of money is largest. Anytime you read a business drone on about ethics make sure to think about the self serving nature of their advice.

On one front the military is creating a war channel on YouTube, while on the other they are censoring soldiers. Pretty screwed up.

Censorship in China is bad. Why is it any better when the US government does it?

Matt Cutts posted a series of anti-link buying posts on his blog then quickly moved on to cat blogging. One of his posts gained a lot of attention because it was controversial. After the post got hundreds of comments and inbound links he updated that post to show more information

Nothing wrong with doing a rewrite to add to your messaging after you garnered attention...it is probably better from a marketing / SEO / usability standpoint, as noted by Massa:

The way to alter perception is exactly the way Google does it and the way Aaron has been trying to do it. Historical reference.

If you notice in posts by engines reps, there is always statements pointing to past documented events. If there is no one to counter those statements with different views or contradictory events, it makes it easier to have the first persons FUD appear to be factual and historically correct and beyond reproach.

Site design, site theme, and domain name play a critical role in information credibility. In staying with that theme, I decided to republish my article about the history of search engines at SearchEngineHistory.com. I redirected the old URL to the new location about 2 minutes ago by placing the following in the .htaccess file of the old site:
redirect 301 /search-engine-history/ http://www.searchenginehistory.com/

Compare the new site to the old design. Same content, but one is far easier to link at than the other.

Of course creating an about page with contact information will also make that site far more credible, and will make librarians more likely to link at it and the press more likely to contact me.

If you are passionate, a site can have value without ranking, as rankings are a lagging indication of site quality, market timing, and/or marketing savvy. If you are offering something that is substantially similar to competing sites, it has virtually no value until it ranks at the top of the results. In the quest to build value, mindshare, and rankings it is easy to focus on unimportant things that eat time and provide little return. For example, you could write a 3000 page website that is the encyclopedia for your topic or you could try to create the ultimate branded property, but if nobody sees it then the content or brand it doesn't flourish. You need the site to look good enough to compete, but there is little value is trying to make it perfect right out of the gate.

Brand Developement and Market Leverage

While one is writing page after page or tweaking away building a perfect new site, the competitors are leveraging Indian copywriters who write thin informational pieces wrapped in AdSense. Those same low quality sites garner self reinforcing links because they are already ranking, and most people are lazy, just linking to whatever they can easily find.

Premature Testing

The results of any tests to monetize a low traffic site are going to provide inadequate and inconclusive results, which also likely feed into your biases and expected outcomes. If you build authority first and then come back and test later you will receive a greater ROI for the amount of effort required to perform the tests.

To put into perspective the testing errors that small samples can create, a friend of mine has a site which makes virtually the same amount from AdSense every day. The same site sells leads. Some days it generates 6 conversions and other days it does 21, all while the traffic flow and AdSense earnings are fairly constant. If you compared one revenue stream to the other, the obvious winner would look different based on what day you chose.

Everything on the Web is Broken

If you try to look really polished that might not be remarkable. You are not cutting edge if you have to be perfect before you are willing to be seen. If I wasn't willing to release my first ebook prior to when I should have you probably would not be reading these words right now.

Everything on the Web is Biased

I believe people have more of a tendency to talk about and share things that are unpolished. Google gets talked about by getting sued, Digg gets talked about by getting gamed, Fox news gets talked about by entertainment sold as news, etc etc etc.

When you try to come out of the gate perfect, it is hard to relate to your end audience without spending thousands of dollars on marketing. It is far more remarkable to come out of the gate slightly broken and biased and appeal to the overt biases of those who can give you authority. I am not suggesting to be racist or sexist or anything like that, but people are generally more receptive to (and thus likely to share) things that reinforce their worldview. Appeal to a known bias, market that story, then create another story that works another group. Do it over and over until you have enough authority to clean up the site and become the market leader.

Rough edges appealing to deep niches is a far better approach to marketing than broad and polished to a fine dull.

In Summary...

Get authority by appealing to smaller groups of your audience, grab marketshare, THEN try to look authoritative. Most people don't know HOW you acquired your authority...it is not something most think to question, and if they do you can always change your look and feel as needed to accommodate the market.

You don't have to do anything deceptive to gain authority, but if you think perfect content is the answer you are only deceiving yourself.

I was just interviewed about SEO for articles by Forbes and the Wall Street Journal last week. This week Forbes, which hosts doorway mesothelioma pages, has another one titled "Should You Hire a Search Engine Consultant?" Due to Google's push of their news vertical, the Forbes article quickly ranked #4 in Google for "seo", which helps push me down another spot. Arg ;)

The WSJ also published another article about SEO, which includes news of a mom naming her child after a toilet bowl company because the name is rare.

As if the news coverage wasn't bad enough for heating up market competition, some SEO firms are investing heavily in automation technology and are sharing that story publicly, while Google is emphasizing old authority sites, (killing small new sites both in organic search and on ad quality scores).

By the time something is widely talked about the easy ROI is already on the downward slope. Buying domains was really profitable about 5 years ago when the first web bubble burst, but some of the sharpest domainers are buying domains for 140 years revenues. If you are new to a market how can you compete with that?

And since search is almost as old as the web is, and search engines collect so much usage data it is hard to compete without a serious budget or an original marketing angle. Many of the sharpest minds in SEO have moved beyond just doing SEO, because if you only do SEO you will only make a fraction of what you would if you spent that same amount of time doing things that are becoming relatively easier for real SEOs, like folding SEO into a holistic marketing mix and creating real brands. But if one's core profession was not SEO how would there be enough time? Who has time to be a subject matter expert, provide customer service, while learning branding, marketing, monetization, etc etc etc on the side?

Worse yet, the window of opportunity for each new opportunity gets shorter and shorter. Social media is already too hyped to be of any value for most webmasters. People buy votes from top contributors and PR firms are sending out iPods for publishers to keep if they are willing to review it and associate it with a specific merchant. Everyone is buying links one way or another, and if you don't have a budget or some serious creativity you are screwed as a would be SEO.

Google is further commoditizing the role of the ad agency. They are signing up advertisers interested in trying their new Ad Creation Marketplace:

In the Ad Creation Marketplace, you'll find industry professionals who can provide script writing, editing, production, and voice-over talent at an affordable package cost. It's free to search for and send project bids to specialists, and you aren't under any obligation to work with them until you accept a bid.

Google's great value has been in targeting and tracking, but text and image ads are not as emotionally appealing as video ads. As they try to move up the value chain to caputre branding ad dollars they are trying to create a support ecosystem that helps the market grow quickly and keeps the market as efficient as possible.

How much does Google expect ad production to cost? Crumbs:

Once you accept a specialist's bid, you might expect to spend anywhere between $100 and $1000 for your ad.

From a story about AP by AP:

As newspapers focus increasingly on locally relevant news, Curley said the AP is proposing changes that would allow members to subscribe to a core package of breaking news and then add other news packages. Currently, it offers broader packages of news defined mainly by the volume of news delivered -- small, medium or large.

So a near monopoly is breaking up how it sells content to other news agencies? I think that more than anything else shows the effect search and the internet are having on news agencies.
The media is addicted to search, and Google is keeping them addicted by giving them a bit more traffic. The NYT is already republishing old stories to spam Google. Eventually I wouldn't be surprised to see the AP sell chunks of stories that local papers can chose to wrap their own content around, to get past duplicate content filters.

Microsoft just launched AdWriter (a free tool to write ad copy), and Thomson Financial already admits to using robots to automatically write some of their stories:

Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data.

This movement toward efficiency and recycling is the exact opposite of what the papers need to do if they want to stay relevant, but the machines are already in motion, doing everything from writing the news to trading stocks:

Quants seek to strip human emotions such as fear and greed out of investing. Today, their brand of computer-guided trading has reached levels undreamed of a decade ago. A third of all U.S. stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC. By 2010, that figure will reach 50 percent, according to Aite.

As established trusted authorities and rich power sources move toward automation and efficiency who could beat them? Probably Google, but then whats left to trust but robots?

When looking at the potential upside of conversion improvements we tend to overestimate the opportunity. Avinash Kaushik looks at filtering bounce rates, bots, and user intent to see your true conversion opportunity.

Avinash recently did a podcast interview with Simon Chen.

Social policy (and profitable business models) shift over time. Swords Crossed describes the Overton Window

The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse. ...

One useful tool is the Overton window. Named after the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy who developed the model, it's a means of visualizing where to go, and how to assess progress. ...

If you're of an analytic bent, and want to figure out where a legislative or policy strategy is heading, try constructing the scale of possibilities and the Overton window for the subject at hand. Change can happen by accident, true: but it is just as often the product of deliberation and intent, and it does all of us well to understand the mechanisms by which it occurs.

Increasingly, bogus advertisements are being packaged and distributed as content. If you watch how people like Frank Luntz or Glenn Beck aim to manipulate public perception and language you can predict trends quicker than competitors do. Even if you do not agree with their message, you can still profit from the trend while undermining their goals.

YouTube is taking over the organic search results, and they are buying a ton of AdWords ads. Google doesn't even take the time to write relevant ads when promoting YouTube. Their second ranked ad for the word music doesn't even contain the word music.

Clearly with an ad so irrelevant they are not factoring in quality score into YouTube's ad position, or if they are they are paying themselves over $5 a click for the word music. How is a competing service to compete when they are forced to write relevant ads to be able to afford the click, and Google serves itself sloppy targeted broad reaching branded ads?

As Google arbitrages itself one vertical at a time the only businesses that are safe are:

• those that get traffic AROUND Google

• those that provide Google with the high quality content that Google is forced to rely on to keep spam out of their SERPs
• those that Google does not have enough data or brand strength to compete with, or have some important offline component
• those that are so small that Google doesn't want to compete

Bit of Friday humor, but I couldn't help but laugh at the AdSense ads on 4spark.com.

Some real estate broker has an ad which is just his face smiling. It probably gets a lot of curiosity clicks, but I bet that smile wears off the day he starts tracking his ad spend.

I once saw a college professor cite a page about caffiene on a low quality site about pornography, gambling, and drugs on his official profile page. Many people never look beyond the page when linking to a story.

This is not to say that one should put a story on a bad website, but that one should make the story page they are currently marketing as clean as possible so it is easy to link at. And you are probably better off placing your marketing stories on your key site if you think they will still spread.

Over time people will become more aware of using content bait on a crappy site, but for now most people don't look beyond the page when referencing a story.

I recently read John Reese's PDF announcing the launch of his new Income.com site. In the PDF he talks about how competitive internet marketing will become in the coming 5 years, and stated what are the two main ingredients to large sustainable profit in that type of marketplace. The first is on the concept of optimization:

The key to dominating any market online (now or in the future) is simple. It comes down to who has the highest average visitor value and who has the most traffic.

That is part of the reason I need to increase the price point of my ebook. There are only so many times you can see other marketers repackage and resell your information at a higher price point using aggressive affiliate marketing before you change your price point to more accurately reflect value.

I recently started a site with a friend of mine. Off the start it was frustrating doing all the tweaking needed to learn, but my friend so broadly believes in the concept of optimization that our site will probably out-earn older versions of its format by 400%. 4x the earnings on the same number of pages gives you serious capital for marketing investments and content production.

John's other tip is that when people land on your sites "Are you truly making someone's life better?"

I think that second point is one that is easy to miss if one is too shortsighted. Creating sites that are helpful / of significant value is something I want to work hard on, and has been core to the brand ideas behind my last couple major domain purchases.