Google's traffic estimator tool by default is set to broad match. If you want to see an estimate of the value of a specific phrase remember to wrap it in [brackets] instead of just submitting the broad matched version of the keyword term. I just reprogrammed my keyword research tool's traffic estimator link to include the broad, phrase, and exact match of each term. Since my tool is driven from Yahoo's it strips the s in some plural phrases, so the link to the traffic estimator tool gives all 3 match types, and links to all 3 match types with an s appended to the end of of the keyword phrase.

Creating a Google custom search engine looks like much more work than it actually is. Recently Google allowed webmasters to make them on the fly by seeding them with the links from any page(s).

Add together your few favorite sites, the sites listed in the relevant DMOZ categories, and the sites listed in the relevant Yahoo! Directory categories. Spend 10 minutes purging the spammy our outdated links and you have relevancy that might match Google's in many markets.

Language has historically been butchered by politicians pushing their own agenda, but as networks get better at spreading information quickly, we are immersed in more information than we know what to do with, and more people are voting for ideas / spreading messages without even thinking through what they are voting for. I can't count how many times I have felt duped by supporting things that I later found out to be pure crap.
In a blog post Google tells us why they are buying DoubleClick:

In short, Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick will benefit all parties in the online advertising business, including advertisers, publishers, agencies and, most importantly, consumers.

Wow! The world is going to be better for EVERYONE!!! Gee those guys really are out to make the world a better place.

Corporate drivel has been around far longer than I have, but the fundamental changes that are occurring right now are due to people voting for causes without even thinking what their votes mean. Of course that has always happened, but now we have quick direct measurable feedback of how people reacted, searchable databases of past successful marketing campaigns, and a network quickly willing to go wherever potential revenue exists.

Networks are trying to capture and spread passion in ways that have never been possible before. Consider Google Earth Outreach, which allows non-profits to spread their messages on Google Earth. Every non-profit using this builds the Google brand, which helps Google make more money selling ads for Ponzi schemes, among other things.

Was that unfair? Perhaps, but the point is that even if we are a good judge of character it is hard to understand the full affect of our actions on a network so complex. Worse yet, marketers realize that people vote for many ideas without even thinking them through or reading them. Good headline...wow. So then people package information to cater to the hollow voting systems.

Marketers (like me) are creating more and more elegantly wrapped and packaged informational research studies that starts with the end goal, and collects whatever facts are necessary to justify them. Consider The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth, a study which came up with results like Nearly 58 percent said government should be doing more, not less. What should the government be doing more of? What question did they ask to get that result? Worse yet, even by calling that study crap (and linking to it) I just voted for it and gave it further credibility.

The endless drive toward efficiency by ad networks is hollowing out the viability of profitable content creation, while increasing the profit margins for those spreading remarkably biased misinformation.

It really doesn't matter what compartment we put ourselves in. Someone is willing to act as a leader, tell us what we want to hear, and display targeted ads. Should information agents look beyond popularity when considering the value of information? Will the web end up further fracturing society by making it too easy to find like-minded people who have little care for truth?

Brad Greenspan, the CEO of eUniverse, posted about the history of his company leading up to MySpace. His company survived the dot com meltdown (while profiting the whole time). By the time they created MySpace in 2003 they had a top 20 (US web traffic) network of community driven sites. When they launched MySpace they were able to leverage their other content sites and traffic streams to help MySpace spread quickly. MySpace may have appeared as an overnight success, but it didn't hurt that eUniverse had years of experience launching numerous high growth community sites.

Almost all high growth web businesses start out with an idea that works but a model that does not, but that is why the evolve, and why experience is worth so much. Paul Kedrosky recently shared this Niklas Zennstrom video:

The type of person who reads this blog and other blogs about search marketing knows far more than the average webmaster (or web user) about search. You can use that knowledge as a marketing advantage over the competition, by doing things like creating a custom topical search engine, or write about harnassing the power of Google to _____. Search is a big power on the web, and it relates to everyone publishing a site. Leverage Google's brand to push your own. If you story spreads great, if not then you site is at least a bit thicker and harder for people to compete with.

In almost every field you can make your content seem more linkable and more remarkable by talking about it as though it is a search play rather than a pure content website. Look how much press Mahalo got compared to the quality of the site and the quality of the concept.

The following is the three step process that I view as the best path for creating sustainable sites that are valuable, successful, and profitable.

Launching a New Website

When starting a new site a webmaster should be willing to do just about anything to build link equity, brand exposure, and an audience. This includes:

• not monetizing too heavily off the start

• buying a good domain name and site design (or as best you can afford)
• paying attention to the marketplace
• stroking the ego of important players in the market (via things like award programs, interviews, mentions, etc etc etc)
• having a unique value proposition and something you stand for
• create real value
• buying a few key trusted links

This phase should include trying many different things...even if 90% of your ideas go nowhere you still do good if just a few of them spread. Test and learn, test and learn, etc etc etc. It is ok if some of your ideas in this stage are flat out bad...it shows that you are learning and it will make others more comfortable feeling they can also learn with you. People don't like to read someone who thinks they are perfect, especially if they are new to a market.

In this phase I usually do not care too much about monetization other than coming up with ideas that I know I can bolt on, unless the site is so niche that it is already immediately focused on the commercial aspect.

If you bought an old trusted site you can skip step 1 and head to step 2.

Monetize Your Site

As the site gets traction, the site can be back-filled with related higher profit content ideas. Don't place ads on your subscription channel in a distracting way. Instead, add other content sections to the site that are of high profit potential. Make a channel / feed of related deals, or create a static content portion of the site with related commercial offers. After you created enough content you can also repackage portions of it in an information product or sell a premium subscription service.

The site's internal link structure should also place more weight on the important high profit pages. As the site ages and gains high authority trusted links, the site's inbound link profile can back-fill that with obtaining some average to lower quality links with the desired anchor text for the most profitable sections of the site.

Here you can also look to launch (or at least think of) ideas that make you the authority on the profitable section of your site. What can you do in that niche to make people view you as the expert? Why would they cite you instead of competitors?

Solidify

If your site makes more than your living costs, but you feel is on shaky ground, it is time to reinvest earnings to create a real brand. If you don't have a great design and great domain name make sure to buy them. Make the site so strong that the competition can't clone you and has no choice but to buy you out. Create thick content that builds your brand even if it does not feel like it will be highly profitable in the short term. After you have enough easy to monetize content keep increasing the quality of your content and create something people would want to subscribe to and share with their friends.

As you keep building your brand and link equity you can also look to increase your income by doing any of the following

• selling consulting or information products

• adding parallel profitable content sections monetized via ads
• going deeper with the commercial sections on your site (by adding more content in that section)
• if you have enough distribution and market leverage, consider creating a marketplace or leverage your brand asset to move your site up the value chain

Question: How do I track the progress of competing sites over time? How do I know what keywords my competitors are ranking for, and which ones they are improving on?

Answer: There are a way variety of means to track competing sites.

Online Ranking Checkers

Online tools such as Digital Point's keyword ranking tool, the ShoeMoney SERP tool, the our rank checker, or the new tool at ZoomRank show where keywords rank. The Digital Point tool also shows you where a keyword ranks over time, but the problems are who wants to check a lot of these keywords one at a time, and where do you get the opening list of keywords?

Competitive Research Tools

There are numerous organic search competitive research tools on the market. SpyFu is a paid tool which offers limited free data, and SEODigger and URLTrends are free tools which shows you keywords that a site ranks for. AdGooroo also takes a look at similar data, with more focus on paid search. If you can afford to spend $10,000+ you may also want to consider trying HitWise.

Keyword Research Tools

After the competitive keyword research tools you may also want to look at the keyword tools promoted by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and companies like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. The Google Traffic Estimator will tell you what terms Google thinks are most valuable, and you can also check keywords in bulk and track them over time by buying software like Agent Web Ranking.

Don't forget to also consider macroeconomic factors and seasonal traffic trends.

Look at the Competitor's Website

Looking for a few more keywords that the competitor may have found but the market missed? Beyond those competitive research tools the easiest spots to look for keywords on competing sites are

• the internal navigation of competing sites (especially look for pages that are bizarrely over-represented in their navigation)

• a competitor's homepage page title and headings (you can see the page titles with Xenu and the last two data points with OptiSpider)
• abnormal patterns in their inbound anchor text (use a tool like Backlink Analyzer)
• if they participate in AdSense and allow site targeting, buy AdSense ads targeting their site to dig into their traffic stats

Look at Their Reach

As far as general traffic trends for a site go, Compete.com, Quantcast, and Alexa all give snapshots of site traffic trends. That data tends to be rough though...especially for small sites. The two big ways to track site growth from a market penatration and search representation standpoint are to look for changes in the rate of citation by using the following data points and tools

• Yahoo Site Explorer for link count (pay attention to the quality of the top links, also use SEO for Firefox to dig in for more general linkage data)

• Technorati and Google Blogsearch links for links from blogs (pay attention to rate of growth, and the what percent of the links are of decent authority)
• Google News mentions

and look for the rate of the growth of the site's content, reach, and trust using the following metrics

• number of RSS subscribers (use Bloglines subscribers as a sample estimate if they don't have any other numbers public) and/or number of comments on blog posts for sites with feeds

• how often you see well read channels mentioning the competitor
• how often you see (search, contextual, or affiliate) ads for the competitor
• number of pages on the site indexed in Google
• the ratio of the pages that are in the regular index vs Google's supplemental index (having most of your pages in the primary index is a good thing)

As long as Google allows webmasters to report spam and report paid links, few will question how much webspam Google sponsors. As long as they are the lead corporate sponsor of Stop Badware few will think of their Toolbar as spam.

Some of the A list bloggers who trashed paid reviews, are talking up the virtues of conversational marketing, forgetting what they just wrote. The hard part of being a well known blogger is that as one gains exposure, influence, experience, friends, enemies, and a large archives it is easy to appear hypocritical. This is especially true on a rapidly changing network, where successful people change with the network, and advertising techniques that were once unethical are mainstream a year or two later.

This is at least the second time that I was mentioned in the mainstream media where journalists read blog comments to look for sources to cite.

If you see a hot story spreading don't be afraid to jump on it, especially if you have specific details related to the story, or your view is counter to the popular view. Journalists want sources, numbers, and to appear unbiased.

Background on Public Relations

Along with branding, public relations is one of the few things that save you and I from commoditization. Every business (and business model) has flaws, hidden costs, value propositions, and has stories to express the delivery of value. PR aims to minimize the downsides of the flaws while making the upside look much larger than it is. Alternatively, public relations can also be used to diminish the upside of competitors while making their flaws look much larger than they are.

The Idea of a Fair Market

Is buying links fair? Is buying and holding domains fair? Is linking to a friend's site or your own new site fair? Is buying out competing sites fair? Is syndicating your spin through your own media outlets fair? Business does not care about the concept fair. It only cares about results.

The word fair is typically used to manipulate people. Markets are not fair. Humas have a bias toward that which they have an affinity to, and business is self-serving and inherently dirty.

PR aims to exploit the media and our inherent biases to create an affinity for a brand or product while viewing other brands or products lowly. Low kicks are allowed, though not recommended unless you thought through the potential consequences ahead of time.

Who Uses PR?

• Governments use public relations to create and maintain support for wars. In The Fog of War, Robert S McNamara discussed how he manipulated public perception to keep the war in Vietnam going. Today, due to poor public relations, leading to a recruiting shortage, the US government is pushing recruiting illegal immigrants to fight as conscripts in Iraq.

• Like governments, most successful businesses use PR.
• Search engines are so powerful largely because they are so good at public relations. Every week you see Google partnering with someone, fighting for a cause, or talking down competing companies like Microsoft.
• Much of the media you consume was created because a PR firm pitched a story. All media is biased. Look at how people who watch Fox News thought Saddam was involved with 9/11.
• The Wikipedia's PR article and Paul Graham's essay The Submarine offer good introduction articles into how prevalent public relations is in the mainstream media.
• Thank You for Smoking is a DVD about how the tobacco market spins their product.

Why PR is so good for business

• People and search engines have to trust something. Good public relations campaigns target the trusted parts of the web, by targeting either general authorities or related topical experts.

• PR is hard to duplicate. Each story has a main storyteller. Another people retelling your story wont make the right people want to talk about them. Other SEO techniques, such as link buying, are much easier to duplicate and much easier to penalize.
• Some of the best PR stories get to be told over and again by the main storyteller, surfacing that person as a topical expert whenever their field comes in focus of the media. Awareness builds relationships, which allows you to spread other stories.
• Being trusted by one expert makes it easier to be trusted by others. The exposure builds an affinity to your brand and builds credibility.
• Some things are popular only because they are popular. Good public relations stories can go viral and produce Justin TImberlake-like results. Using large seed sets makes it easier to ensure success, even if the story is not as viral as you would like.
• Media exposure gives a sense of credibility. My landlord called me to tell me he read about me in the Wall Street Journal. It is much easier for him to view me as a topical expert after reading that article.

We Love You

Good public relations campaigns spread so well because they make the target want to share the story, by making them feel important, sharing their bias, and/or giving them some incentive to spread the story.

• Salary.com created a story about how much work at home mothers should be paid, high-balling the numbers. Every year they re-release the same story and the media eats it up as though it is new.

• All of the blog value calculators high-ball the value of the blogs to get people to want to talk about how great their blog is.
• Even if you hate the concept of SEO it is hard to hate a version of it that is useful, free, and co-branded with Firefox.

Even if you fail to spread to spread these types of stories right away, you can still passively target the right audience using AdWords for less than 10 cents a click.

We Hate You

Many smaller companies make a name for themselves by stating how impure competing businesses are. Creating a common enemy makes it easy for people to identify with you.

The key is not to rant, rave or bash the enemy, but to provide an underlying theme that shows you’re all in it together against the enemy. When framed that way, you’re not a salesperson; rather, you’re a comrade who can lend a hand. Establishing a thematic enemy allows you to focus on providing solutions without coming across like you’re hard selling, and is a perfect technique for white papers, tutorials and blogging in general.

• In some cases small market players can garner support when businesses attacks them. Once lawsuits are filed you never know how much support the competitor will get. When I was sued by Traffic Power my fight was for freedom of speech online and saving blog comments. It was an easy story to want to share, so people did. Within days of my blog post about it, the story was featured in the Wall Street Journal.

• When we submitted a story about the fall in the value of the US Dollar to Netscape the story was titled How Bush Devalued the Dollar. They like political stuff on Netscape, so the story quickly shot to #1 on their homepage, stuck there all day, and sent over 15,000 visitors to our site.

Please Hate Us

Some public relations ideas play both sides of the coin - creating controversies then fixing problems they created. For example, PayPerPost went lowbrow with their marketing, offering unmarked editorial blog posts as a service, then came up with their Disclosure Policy site to correct the problem they created. They got press on the way down and the way up. They probably would have never received VC funding if they were not so lowbrow with their marketing.

Jason Calacanis

Love him or hate him, he is great at public relations. Most Weblogs Inc. content is at best average, yet he got a nice payout for it, and he used the PR machine again to launch Mahalo.

• Weblogs Inc. worked because it got so much link equity from the media, which wanted to tell a story on blogging.

• Jason maintained that all you needed to be successful was great content, but they had first mover advantage, paid low rates, and scraped by on profitability by selling spammy links.
• Jason got a lot of press for Mahalo by claiming the death of SEO. Mahalo is a human compiled scraper & the URLs are seo friendly.
• A week into creating Mahalo they already scraped trendy keywords off the Google hot terms list and now anyone can get paid a near livable wage building the manual scraper

Reputation Management

SEO can also be used to aid your public relations for your core branded terms. Reputation management works by helping favorable documents rank better, which suppresses the rankings of negative documents.

Can PR be Dirty?

Just like SEO, public relations can be used to push things that are good or things that are bad. Seth recently published my favorite marketing rant post ever. Here is a quote:

I believe that every criminal, no matter how heinous the crime, deserves an attorney. I don't believe that every product and every organization and every politician deserves world-class marketing or PR.

If you get asked to market something, you’re responsible. You’re responsible for the impacts, the costs, the side effects and the damage. You killed that kid. You poisoned that river. You led to that fight. If you can’t put your name on it, I hope you’ll walk away. If only 10% of us did that, imagine the changes. Imagine how proud you’d be of your work.

PR Watch highlights some of the misuse of and abuses by the public relations industry. They also publish videos to YouTube. I marketed some really dirty stuff when I was new to the web. As I learn more about the power of marketing, I am less willing to market things that only sound good when ignoring the hidden costs.

I tend to hate link aggregator posts, but I have read a lot of good stuff recently, and do not want to write 30 posts today or regurgitate other's info verbatim, so here is a link list of useful stuff I recently came across.

Affiliate Stuff

• Affiliate Survival Guide - by SugarRae

• how to make a thin affiliate site thick and why you should be scared of universal search by Andy Hagans
• My friend Anita Chaperon launched her Reviewlicious review site and reviewed my ebook.
• A Large Internet Audience Is The Quickest Way To A Billion Bucks and I Stopped Trying To Rank for Anything When I Realized I Could Build Traffic For Everything by Scoreboard Media

Search, SEO, & Personalization

• Wordpress extension to help build links from Google image search and Yahoo! renting subdomains to affiliate sites by Patrick Altoft

• extension to de-personalize Google

by Joost de Valk

Business, Media, & Publishing

• the truth about venture capital parts 1, 2, and 3 by Marc Andreessen

• why ebooks are bound to fail
• Blueprint for a Brilliant Blog Launch
• top ranked Google news sources, Media Predict, and keyword based conversion tracking with Google Analytics (via Peter)

Arbitrage & PPC

• 5% refund on your PPC spend and Wordze vs Hitwise by John K

• AdWords IP Exclusion feature (mentioned on WMW)

Ad Relevancy & Quality Scores

Google has again and again touted the value of their targeted marketing, but most of the fortune 500 ad dollars are not spent on targeted marketing. A couple weeks ago in a WebmasterWorld thread many advertisers complained about getting killed by another quality score update.

What quality score actually means probably comes down to one of two things

• your site is a thin affiliate site or something else they once needed to fill a market niche but now is viewed as noise

• you have not created enough organic value and/or have not yet spent enough money building your brand

Google Hates Most Affiliate Websites

Some key quotes from the WMW thread...these two show the trend against affiliate sites in general

Too many outgoing affiliate links and you are toasted

So on my basic two types of sites, when I send the visitor to another domain to buy, I'm getting severly penalized ( a new affiliate "penalty"), but if I have a another party's lead form on my domain, I didn't get hit.

and this one shows that the change is not a short term one

A Google Adwords customer service rep said that they do not systematically target affiliates as a whole, nor sites with affiliate links. But, she said they are taking more steps with each landing page tweak to weed out sites that do not add a certain level of "value" to their visitors (as other posters to this thread have mentioned). She wouldn't tell me if this "value" is human-determined or algo-determined, again saying that she didn't know.

If your site is not the type of site they would white-list in the organic results eventually they are going to look to dispose of your position in the ads as well. As soon as enough brand advertisers find your space you are no longer needed. Thanks for sharing the keyword data needed to tell the brands what to bid on, and best of luck getting traffic from somewhere else.

If you want to see where paid search quality filtering is headed, look at how the organic algorithms have changed. Nothing better to glimpse the future of PPC than to read the documents about how they expect humans to rate organic search results.

Expanding the Role of Brand Related Advertisements

In that same WMW thread Skibum posed the following question

Why attack long time advertisers regardless of their business model who are providing consumers with what they are looking for while using broad match to show more ads triggered by keywords they were not intended to run on?

I recently saw a Dollar rent a car ad at the #1 ad position for Forex, which is not a cheap keyword.

As the day passed Google's CTR numbers showed they expanded that ad out too far and they made that ad less broad. They can automate spreading out brand ads too far, and then pull them back if the relevancy scores are too poor.

When it comes down to it, it is all about money. As Google commoditizes everything that is not a brand they need to collect more money from brands. The reason Google is pushing video hard is because they want to lead that ad market. It is no suprise to see Google leading in innovation in the video ad field. There is no better way to create inventory than to get it from your already established near infinite traffic stream.

The Cadillac Escalade video ads are taking the place of the textual Ford Explorer ads. Google has no brand allegence. Whoever is willing to overpay for exposure right now can buy all they want from Google.

Even when Google can show relevant ads, they still prefer to show brand ads if they think they will pay more. Consider a Michigan counties page where Google shows the following ad links.

Those are relevant. But what ads does Google also target to that page?

A lot of car donation charities are non-profit shells wrapped around dirty high margin auction houses (just look at the $20/clicks ad pricing).

A pharmaceutical ad from a company with a patent an a marketing budget larger than their research budget.

"The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion)." - Marcia Angell

Given that ad targeting, it doesn't seem that Google is so pure, does it? One of the guys at WMW said the following

You guys are AdWords arbitrageurs. Although I'm sorry that your little gravy grain went off the rails, as a Google user, I can say good riddance to your garbage Web sites. Google, and users, want actual retailers to come up top in search results for sellers of a product, not parasite Web sites linking to actual retailers.

In a few years that same guy will probably be whining about how Google destroyed his business, but just like the other websites that died, Google doesn't care about him. What they want is decent relevancy WITH as much profit as legally possible. The more they cut out middle men the bigger they can make their chunk, even if doing so hurts relevancy and result diversity.

How do they get any more efficient than automating ad targeting while turning the text link into an unmarked ad unit? And they have patents for ad targeting based on how big of a risk taker you are:

"Examples of information that could be useful, particularly in massive multiplayer online RPGs, may be the specific dialogue entered by the users while chatting or interacting with other players/characters within the game. For example, the dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users."

How can anyone else compete in the ad market?

Eli goes through the thought process of how to create automated search spam generator software. His recent launch of SQUIRT (a much expanded version of his free quick indexing tool) seems to have went quite well. Great marketing on the launch.

He also posted about recycling content, which is a bit aggressive for high brand sites, but probably quite common on thinner spammier sites.

Update: The below coupon code no longer works, but we have found a couple new 2011 Business.com coupons. :)

In a recent interview Jessica Bowman offered the following Business.com coupon code: AVIVA, which is good for 20% off Business.com directory listings. Inclusion typically costs $299 a year, so with the coupon you would pay $239 for your submission.

Another nugget from the interview:

We currently have five editors and one editorial manager out of a total staff of nearly 100 employees, and all Business.com listings, whether pay-per-click Featured Listings or internet directory Standard Listings, are reviewed by a member of our Editorial Team.

Not bad margins on that business model if all the listings are wrapped in Google PPC ads and it only takes 6 editors to review it.

Frank pointed at this subliminal advertising video, which goes to show the power of Google's preferences in a SERP full of personalized recommendations, and a web of automated and personalized ads posing as standard text links.

A friend named Brent sent me a link to the Cyc project page on Wikipedia and a background video on Google Video. Cyc is an AI project which aims to enable AI applications to perform human-like reasoning.

What happens to the value of your content when search engines get better at providing answers directly in the search results? Is your site the type of site they would like to cite, or does it fall further down the list on another category of queries? What can you do to make them more likely to want to source your site? Does your site have enough perceived trust and value to draw clicks after they put your content directly in the search results?

As search engines work harder at things like universal search, search personalization, and cyc any sites which are only facts and filler won't get much exposure.

Question: A client of mine wanted to target high traffic terms in his industry. His industry was not very competitive, and some of the target terms were competing trademarks. We rank top 5 for them in Google, and now legal troubles are occurring. We removed all references to the competing trademark on our site, but still have some rogue inbound links that we can't get removed that have the anchor text which targets the competing mark. What should we do?

Answer: There are four options which can help get you out of this situation.

Work With the Competition

If you have a nepotistic relationship with the competitor and recommend them then perhaps you can both be strengthened as category leaders.

Is the Lawsuit Cheap Marketing?

Anything involving Google and search is still a ripe field for media exposure. If you think your chances of winning are good enough, and the potential return is much larger than the risk of losing consider letting them sue you. It is probably not your fault that Google ranked you, but also seek legal advice outside of reading this post... I am not a lawyer.

Tank Your Rankings for that Keyword

If the links point at a page other than the homepage, consider removing the URL from your site, and then use the Google URL removal tool when the 404 error shows.

If you bought those links cash usually works to help remove them. Use their on site contact information and the email in their whois. Call the number in the whois data. Pay them to take down the links.

Improve the Rankings of Competing Pages

The tips offered in my search engine reputation management post work here as well. Follow the tips in that post to help make other competing pages rank better.

You can also work on improving the rankings of other competing pages while lowering your rankings. Feel free to push a couple strong pages if you are just trying to end the confrontation, but if you feel they are dirty you may also want to help surface some ugly news that was ranking on page 3. Do that and they may care less about your rankings, and shift their focus to those other sites.

Question: I have a .biz website that ranks well in some of the major search engines for a few keywords, but does not rank as well as I would like for many other keywords. Should I consider switching to a .com domain name?

Answer: In the long run I think it is worth moving away from .biz if you are creating a real long-term business. The web was created to share information, and businesses are generally viewed less admirably than the individuals that work in them. As long as relevancy algorithms are based largely on links, then a .biz extension could hurt your exposure in most fields.

Most web companies that control large traffic flow have taught their userbase (and those who they trust to vote) that commercial = spam. To put this in perspective, some journalists write entire articles about businesses and then do not link to the businesses because they feel that doing so would be too promotional. In competitive fields sometimes only a few links separate a business that is getting 5% of the traffic or 30% of the traffic a search engine offers.

If you are starting your business on a .biz it doesn't matter if you have the best information in the world...the bias of .biz (and toward business in general) is going to hurt your exposure, making your business less efficient and increasing your business cost. The small businesses that are best sustainable on the web are those that function as businesses yet have the feel of non-commercial sites (and acquire links as though they are non-commercial sites).

Some top ranking sites do not deserve to. When one is lucky enough to be in such a situation it allows us to get away with being lazy, because a site does not have to be too efficient to make money if it is well represented for targeted search queries that send free traffic. But every website has upside potential, even if it already ranks #1.

Improve Internal Navigation & Usability

One client of mine only ranks below his official manufacturer for their name. His site had inadequate internal navigation. I took a day to improve the navigation, and the result was a 150% increase in sales. The last 8 days of last month sold nearly as much as the rest of the month combined. His business model looked like it was about to die, but that one day of work made it functional for at least a couple more years.

High Profit Parallel Markets

I had a site which made a couple hundred dollars a day that was well established in its market, but did not dominate it. Taking the path of lowest resistance, I branched the site into two parallel markets of greater commercial interest where the competition was weaker. On an investment which is less than what the site earns in a month now I was able to increase its income 5x, without even doing much link building.

An Undeserved Ranking

One of my friends is in a high profit market where the competition is absolutely clueless. Basic SEO brought that site to a #1 ranking in Google. The site is highly conversion oriented and makes great income, but now that it already ranks it probably makes sense to reinvest some of the profit into improving content quality and reinforcing that market position. Businesses that do not reinvest eventually fall, especially if they are winning only because the competition is clueless. After spending a couple thousand dollars a day on AdWords eventually the competitors will start to look into SEO.

The Value of Branding

If a site ranks #1, and is monetized via PPC ads, it still might only make a portion of what it should because AdSense is not as efficient as some people would lead you to believe. If a site is strong enough to attract brand advertisers they will pay a premium just for getting their brand seen. Scraper sites and thin content sites don't attract brand advertisers, even if they convert. I have seen a site that was making $80 a month on AdSense make over $10,000 a month selling brand advertisements.

Stymiee, a moderator at SitePoint, in a thread about learning SEO claimed:

Read forums and websites dedicated to discussing SEO. You'll learn more and won't get only one point of view which is usually a bad thing. Remember, those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

In the thread they dismiss the -950 Google ranking phenomena as a myth, when it clearly happens to many websites (likely due to filtering and local re-ranking of search results). Misguided group-think lead by an alpha male ogre is a bad thing.

The guy who claims teachers are bad has about 19,000 posts and carries around his SitePoint SEO Guru badge. In the same thread, he talks crap about my book, deletes my response, bans me from the forums, as he claims the forums provide more opinion diversity. Charles, the person who notified me of the hate thread, had the following to say

Have you ever run into him before? He is an unbelievable dickhead. I hate to sound unprofessional with someone I have never met, as it is not my style but, he roams the sitepoint forums spouting off at the mouth like he wrote every single SE algorithm. Not to mention how he does it in a belittling way to people who are truly ignorant through no fault of their own. I have no idea why sitepoint allows him to be a team leader. I have written them with links to posts he has made offending comments on so many times I can’t even count.

I am willing to bet that your post will be removed within hours. That is what happens every time I make a valid point against him.

Since my comments were deleted from SitePoint I will post them here for posterity:

Nice to see you delete my comments while running a hate thread about me... which shows how accurate and balanced this forum thread is.

[QUOTE=stymiee;3416219]Remember, those who can, do; those who can't, teach. ;)[/QUOTE]

And it only took him about 19,000 posts to figure out what group he belongs to. Congrats Mr. SEO Guru of 2006.

What a joke!

Price points are a reflection of value. Set them too low and you attract the wrong people. If information is personalized free is almost always the wrong price. Some people will warn how little money they have, in spite of spamming for a half dozen sites in competitive high profit verticals. If they ask for services with the little or no money warning they are probably worthy of little or no attention.

Some customers will search for your old price or old offers on other sites and demand hours of your time and/or full refunds. No matter what you do that customer was going to want a full refund. You just have to determine how much of your time you want to give them for nothing.

Some clients have subsidiaries that will try to get free information out of you. If a company does not pay directly then they are not taking you seriously. To best appreciate this, it is worth noting that an advertising firm for a high touch fashion website (which tried squeezing free SEO information out of me) just emailed me an advertising request for advertising on Threadwatch. Could they be any more clueless?

Much of the free information also isn't worth listening to. Some platform speakers drone on about how everyone else in their industry is an idiot. If they hate themselves so much why are they still in the field? Why don't they move into a field they enjoy?

Fantomaster had a great comment about whether automated content generation is moral:

I don't really get the "moral dilemma". Would you say the same about press releases, product announcements, ads, commented statistical tables and other forms of corporate droidspeak? And if not - why not?

I mean, it's not as if the Web as a whole were particularly dominated by high end literary prose, deeply suggestive well crafted poetry or similar feats of human creativity.

And, when you think of it, what is Mahalo but a human compiled scraper? Why is it ok that the WSJ publishes auto-generated looking advertorials? Thompson, like search engines, already produces automated content.

Journalistic integrity matters most to those who need you to believe others are unethical for their business models to work.

Spyjax allows you to view the browsing history of website visitors. You upload a list of competing URLs and see which ones the browser visited before visiting your site, which can be used to let you know what competing sites people typically visit before seeing your site. By tracking this, you can replicate the features and/or marketing strategy of other well visited sites and move yourself earlier into the buy cycle.