A recurring theme in the 2008 link development panel was hand checks and the editorial nature of search, especially from Roger. Great article well worth a read. Thanks Rae!

Corporate SEO

Recently a couple great videos from Gord Hotchkiss and Marshall Simmonds highlighted the corporate SEO field. Corporate SEO is about

• ensuring everyone creating or managing content has at least a base level knowledge of SEO and keyword strategy
• setting up general templates that are useful and optimized
• clearing away technological issues and limitations
• smart structuring of information architecture and internal linking strategies (alternate paths for bots, and blocking lots of duplicate content issues, and sometimes even creating automated internal linking strategies)
• charging a high enough rate that the clients will take you seriously
• presenting your recommendations in a professional looking document and following up with any questions they have about implementation

Corporate SEO is largely about trimming away the fats and fully leveraging the assets you already have.

Ranking Affiliate Sites

Rather than focusing on cleaning out fats, independent affiliate webmastering is more focused on building value and getting the most value out of everything you can. An affiliate has to focus on...

• finding under-served markets (and hiding them under a rock to everyone except prospects in the buying cycle, unless you aim to be the most authoritative webmaster in that space)
• finding loopholes to make a quick buck (see this Shoemoney post about leveraging Google.com's quality score)
• seeing future trends in the web early, and getting out in front of them (see Roger on video content here)
• making sure your site looks as credible as you possibly can (get a good site design, a good domain name, and publicise your publicity)
• setting up a site structure that is well aligned with your keyword pyramid
• creating a wide array of keyword pages focused on brand related queries (that are thus late in the buying cycle)
• creating comparison and contrast pages that answer common questions and authoritatively guide people to a high paying solution to their problem :)
• getting on page SEO as good as you possibly can for each important page
• changing your site structure based on analytics data and conversion data
• creating a second page or a second site for some of your top performers that have limited competition
• keeping your network hidden from Google engineers
• adding some high value content to your site such that Google engineers hopefully will not want to kill your site
• writing sales copy that often does not appear as sales copy, tweaking landing pages for conversion, while testing conversion rates over and over and over again
• scheming for links to build site authority...often creating content built around linking opportunities
• mercenary promotion (del.icio.us bookmark begging and link begging to friends, emails to related bloggers, getting to know everyone in your field, writing guest articles for authoritative websites, link buying, link renting, joining non-profits and trade groups, other promotional ideas, etc.)
• making your affiliate site something that some people care about and follow

Which is Better?

I think of the two options, that the affiliate model pays better for most people who really get the web, but you have to be good at a lot of disciplines to make it pay (and it can pay quite poorly unless you are creative or a fast learner). Ranking a few spots higher or improving landing pages can triple your income as an affiliate. Doing both can increase your income 10 fold.

When markets are healthy and growing that growth can hide major issues, but when the markets swing toward a loss the winners are separated from the losers. As the markets consolidate and the thin arbitrage opportunities fall away the market leaders own a much bigger piece of the market.

The above chart could just as easily be a finance chart comparing Google's 5 year performance to Yahoo's, or any other industry undergoing heavy consolidation. Google's brand is search. Yahoo's brand is ???

Many people view you how you view yourself and label you with the labels you attach to yourself. Something to consider when creating a new business in a saturated field.

If you are not considered the #1 site in your class / vertical then you need to change your brand, find ways to add value (like editorial content, unique data formats, syndication, or open APIs), build an organic advantage (using a strong domain name, a great site design, and through public relations) or do something else to change the rules.

VideoEgg announced $1.5 million in ad revenues over 5 months, which is not much when you consider that they have over 150 top widgets. You can use targeted widgets and gadgets to push things that are already valuable, successful, unique, or interesting outside of the social networks, but traditional advertising is no good.

Rarely will you see the relevancy line up this well unless the gadget was created custom to match the item being advertised. But gadgets need to be extensions of brands, I don't think they can become destinations themselves. And if they do, the network can always change their policies or clone them.

It is harsh doing business on someone else's network. eBay, which has raised rates in the past, but never did much cleanup in over a decade, just announced their first quality score.

And if your offering is just basic data or something that is easy to replicate that is a zero sum game with those profits heading to Google, other market makers, or scammers arbitraging holes in the marketplace:

Data has this really weird quality. In economic terms data has an increasing marginal utility. Anyone who took Econ 101 knows that most physical objects have a decreasing marginal utility. When it is raining my first umbrella keeps me dry, a second may be handy if the first blows out, but a third is unlikely to be used. This is true of shirts, steaks, houses, of almost anything you can think of except data.

Data has the opposite characteristic. Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. It is easy to see this in the context of an advertising network. If the ad network knows that a user is female it can show more relevant ads. But, If the ad network knows that female’s age, it can do even better, and data about location, household income, and recent web sites visited all add value to the existing data points, making it possible to show more and more relevant ads.

Look at how Google expanded their local listings. How long until they own that category? By the time other aggregators want to opt out all of the data (and value) will have already been transferred to Google.

With all the value going to the aggregators who should sue who? Will that grow a broken business model?

The solution to market dilution is information pollution. Oops, wrong quote. What I meant to say was what Brian said here:

The replication process is quite intense and getting faster, which is why we need to focus on building trademark businesses (based on brand) instead of businesses dependent on copyright law.

The old tagline a new chapter every day... was around for about 4 years and I figured a change was in order. The best I could come up with was Learn. Rank. Dominate.

Do you like or dislike the new tagline?

BTW, have been doing a bit of spring cleaning fixing what I can. The archives page was not updating, but I got that fixed. Still lots of small things I need to fix in the coming months.

And Matt Cutts confirmed that the #6 ranking was real for anyone who thought it was just speculation.

I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?

If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.

If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.

Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever...chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.

Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea. :)

On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.

Would this be considered a paid link? Where is the line drawn?

Nice business model too. Are those arrows pointing at the ads legit? How about the request to support our sponsors?

Get a few hundred million in VC funding, buy some old domains. Fill the domain with user generated content. Place a thin layer of link schemes and please click ads on the top. Web 3.0...Wow. Exciting times.

Also, learn how to rent millions of links in a Google friendly way.

The WSJ let the "our content will be free" story spread for months to generate public relations related coverage and to misdirect competitors before announcing that they are going to keep their subscription service:

Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."

The Wall Street Journal has enough trust, connections, and signifigance to keep charging for their best stuff.

Many other websites do to, but as exclusive content rather than part of a package. Bundling packages of similar content channels (like blog feeds) will not work for the following reasons:

• there is already virtually an unlimited amount of competition that is free
• the free content plays an important role in making it easy to subscribe
• Easy subscriptions provies lots of subscribers, social proof of value, and limited risk to subscribers. From those, cumulative advantage kicks in.
• Free content cuts marketing costs to ~ $0.
• People hate micropayments.
• Taste is personal. Some people who like sites similar to this one absolutely despise me. And the other way around is true.
• The incremental cost of having more customers means that you need to charge more than $1 if you are going to establish a sustainable relationship with them.

Central hubs on the web fight off manipulation to keep their status and profit margins in tact. A side effect of this war on control over information access is the butchering of the English language.

Digg is Illegal?

Digg's CEO Jay Adelson said:

I'm sure there could be blackmailers out there. We absolutely know that every single day, people try to game our system. Users are involved in illegal or inappropriate activities all the time. They try to set up fake accounts to promote a story. The thing is, we make changes to our algorithm on a regular basis. We plan for that.

Notice how he put illegal and inappropriate right next to each other, as to equate them. This comes from the same company that published this:

We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Sure you can buy votes on Digg, and they arbitrarily ban websites. But does controlling a bunch of worthless traffic give them the right to butcher language to push their business objectives?

Google is Illicit?

Michael Gray's continued debate about the war on links spurred on additional conversation.

Why is the Yahoo! Directory Considered a Legitimate Link Buy?

In addition to what Jim said, I also believe the following play a role:

• They predate Google.
• Google needs some sort of baseline.
• The directory business model is horrifically inefficient and poses no risk to Google's market dominence. (Yahoo! demoted it in favor of Yahoo! Answers. Even the Google Directory, a DMOZ clone, has a higher PageRank than the Yahoo! Directory does.)
• Few other sites are comparable to the Yahoo! Directory (especially after the Google directory purge of 2007), so it is not a technique that can't be easily and profitably be replicated like paying for reviews.

The truth is independent link sellers often exercise more control than directory editors do.

The entire Business.com directory of over 65,000 categories is managed by 6 editors (source). How could they possibly review stuff as well as you or I do? They can't. But if we all do our business in a direct to direct exchange fashion the central networks and search engines do not get a cut of the action.

Why Google is Different than Digg

Unlike Digg users looking to waste time, searchers have real targeted intent and real value. In response to Michael Gray's post Danny Sullivan said:

But if he wants to stand up to Google, take the lead and block him from crawling his site -- and encourage others to do the same. ... No one has a right to Google traffic. Follow the rules, as stupid as they are, if you want it. If don't like the rules, sure, complain about them -- but don't argue they're robbing you of anything that is supposedly "yours."

But unplugging from Google is not as simple as blocking them in robots.txt. They can still pay others to steal your work and wrap it in their ads.

They change the guidelines on an as needed basis (use nofollow or else), apply them unevenly (why is TLA penalized when TextLinkBrokers still ranks?), and if they don't like you they can penalize other businesses associated with you.

Michael pointed out that the Google's Webmaster Guidelines butcher the word illicit. In response Danny wrote:

Michael, illicit as used on the Google Webmaster Guildelines page is defined by however Google wants to define it -- in that case, doing stuff against the guidelines.

When the networks screw people over it is the fault of "users" or "the algorithm," but when the central networks do not like what we do we are "criminals performing illicit acts."

You know what is illicit? Adultery. And Google ads recommend it.

Recently Google has been more than fair to me, but if they want to use the language they are using to try to control others, they need to clean up their ad network. Just because an ad has a high CPC and gets a high CTR does not mean that it is not immoral or illegal. Plenty of people commit crime.

High Value Keyword List Data for YOUR Business

This video is about more than just generating keywords for AdSense sites, it is about finding the most valuable keywords for any business. But most the people searching for top paying keyword lists are looking for AdSense keyword lists. I wanted to welcome those searchers to this site by making it easy for them to find this post when they search for related keywords on Google (hence the use of AdSense in the page title).

Discover Your Top Keywords

In this video I explain...

• Why most top paying AdSense keyword lists are worthless. (It's not just because AdSense cannibalizes publishing business models and AdSense earnings are dropping).
• how to quickly create a keyword list using data from search engines, public keyword suggestion tools, and competitive research tools. (you could also use data from your analytics tools too)
• how to filter a keyword list to find out which keywords are the most profitable using Microsoft's Ad Intelligence tool and the Google Traffic Estimator

When you evaluate the actual opportunity cost of business opportunities, most client relationships, equity stake deals, and other partnership opportunities fall short of what you could do on your own. The only ways it works out is if their is a symbiotic relationship through different approaches that balance out each other's shortcomings, or if you can learn something from working with them.

Problems With Many Opportunities

• Unwilling Clients: Many clients are unwilling to change their sites to add unique content or value to them.
• If you have a thin affiliate site Google told you what they wanted years ago.
• Andy Hagans and SugarRae followed up with great tips.
• If you own the site you can do whatever you want with it. Not so with client sites.
• Employee / Slave Wage: Work for equity stake partnerships where the partner provides the domain name and you do everything else are both lopsided and useless.
• At any time the partner with lots of domains can decide to screw up the project you are working on together, and has 0 time investment and limited capital risk by only putting one or a few domains into the partnership.
• 6 months or a year after working with you they can take all the knowledge you spent years learning and apply it to their more valuable names while giving you nothing for teaching them everything you know. They were not teaching you how to buy domains why they were accumulating them for years. Why give all that knowledge up for a slice of a slice of a slice?
• Buy an alternative average quality domain and keep all the equity. Build it up with sweat equity and learn your market. Buy great domain names when you can afford them.
• Follow the Crowd: Many marketers try to saturate a field with affiliates marketing their products and teach affiliates how to market that same product as a piece of the product that is sold. The margins on those opportunities get compressed with each additional competitor you sell that product to.
• Many marketers show stats out of context, use meaningless sample sizes, and/or lie about the hows and whys.
• People hype opportunities long after they no longer exist because they are addicted to the easy profits still rolling in from old work building out an affiliate network.

Are You Moving Up the Value Chain?

I am not against any of the above models as a starting point, as everyone has to start from somewhere. But if you....

• love business
• love what you are doing
• want to create a sustainable business
• can afford short term risk for long term stability

...you need to build equity from your work, and have a controlling stake in the outcome. If it sounds to risky to change then at least start building a site for yourself in your spare time.

What If? ...

Sure it would have been nice to have been an early programmer at Google, but for every Google there are thousands of market losers. Investing in yourself is the best investment you can ever make, and you one have to be right once.

What happened if you invested in Google a month ago? It seems those who just bought into that market hype just lost a couple dollars. Will Google go back up? Most likely. Will they increase in value at a rate as quickly as you can? Not likely.

My site was stuck ranking at #6 in Google for a lot of keywords. The site that I had that got hit was a site that I had not built links to in a year, and the on page optimization for it was done years ago. Realizing the issue might have been on-site as much as off-site I decided to tweak it a bit...

• All page titles on the site have a brand name in them as this site is devoted to reselling a brand. For the deep product pages the brand was at the end of the page title and on the homepage the brand had one word in front of it. About a half dozen core pages in the site started with the core keywords of a brand the site was reselling. For those page titles the brand related terms were moved to the end of those page titles.
• Some of the sitewide image navigational links had alt tags in them that contained a piece of the core keyword that the site was filtered out for. I removed that modifier and let the navigational links be slightly less descriptive.
• I also got the site a few new links which did not focus on the site's core keywords, but I don't believe that these were the key to getting it ranking again, as the site already has thousands of inbound links, and their were only a couple new links of low to average quality.
• I nofollowed links to some of the to administrative type pages, but I don't think that was a make or break issue either.

The site is ranking in the top 3 or 4 on many Google IPs for many search queries. My sample size is only 1 site though, so I would love to hear what you did to get your sites ranking again if you have any sites that recovered from this Google penalty / filter.

Found this video ranking #19 in Yahoo! for SEO...

And it is only going to get worse with guys like John Reese recommending everyone become an internet marketer selling to internet marketers just so he can prime the pump to sell his latest product and build a downstream of affiliates. Stake your claim before the fake experts turn your market into snake-oil:

And by creating a lot of fake value (encouraging everyone to pose as experts) you actually ruin chances of all new commers as customers will grow more and more skeptic and will tend to go for proven marketers (avoiding the anonymous which might also have a lot to offer)

We updated SEO for Firefox again. The Yahoo! childnodes error is fixed, and we added BOTW directory listings to the stats we pull in to SEO for Firefox.

The WSJ published an article about the fraudulent research sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies which push antidepressant drugs on children:

A total of 74 studies involving a dozen anti-depressants and 12,564 patients were registered with the FDA from 1987 through 2004. The FDA deemed 38 of the studies to be positive. All but one of those studies was published, the researchers said.

The other 36 were found to have negative or questionable results by the FDA. Most of those studies -- 22 out of 36 -- were not published. Of the 14 that were published, the researchers said at least 11 of those studies mischaracterized the results and presented a negative study as positive.

The NYT is publishing custom branded content to help these advertisers. And, from a few months back, here was Google's take on health marketing:

News reporters may focus on Pharma’s annual sales and its executives’ salaries while failing to share R&D costs. Or, as is often common, the media may use an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole. With all the coverage, it’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.

Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.

Prozac vs Tryptophan - On June 15, 1993, the FDA Dietary Supplement Task Force published a report on the work it had been doing in the area of developing FDA policy around nutritional supplements. On page two, the report admits, “The Task Force considered various issues in its deliberations, including... what steps are necessary to ensure that the existence of dietary supplements on the market does not act as a disincentive for drug development.”

This is where the manual editing of search results gets tricky. The multi-billion dollar company rarely gets edited, but in many cases their information is much less honest than that provided by the independent PageRank 4 website

Yahoo!'s Downward Trend

Yahoo! killed off their brand universe project, and recently fired 30 people. Rumor has it that about 2,000 more layoffs might be coming soon. Yahoo! shares are nearing $20, trading at $20.78, and giving them a market capitalization of $27.8 billion.

This WSJ article highlights that about half of Yahoo!'s value is in cash and equity stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan. Over the last year Yahoo! lost significant momentum and marketshare in search. They need to outsource search and search ads, fire a bunch of employees, gain search marketshare, or there is going to be a buyout or merger before the year is out.

Pageviews Still do Not Have Much Value

Sidebar: to anyone hyping the value of pageviews and social media, think of how many pageviews Yahoo! has. If you pull out the value of Yahoo!'s large equity stakes in other companies and cash on hand, Amazon and eBay are each worth about 2 to 3 times Yahoo!, and Google is worth about 13x.

10 Key Ideas Yahoo! Needs to Implement Tomorrow (or Sooner)

After seeing the underwhelming launch of Wikia Search, I think Yahoo! should push further in human aided search. Relevancy is based on perception and marketing. Yahoo! needs to do the following if they want to compete in search:

1. Increase the relevancy of their directory by actually featuring it (the directory looks like a sidebar to a blog that occupies most of dir.yahoo.com), and by becoming more selective with what sites they accept. You can appreciate their bad marketing of the Yahoo! Directory by the fact that the Google Directory (a DMOZ clone) has a higher PageRank.
2. Yahoo! is testing integrating Del.icio.us data in their search results. Brand Yahoo! search as human edited safe search and find a way to pay end users for their contribution. Payment does not need to be monetary. Take a look at the success of Yahoo! Answers and Del.icio.us and apply those toward search. Google gives Checkout advertisers free ads and a higher ad CTR (which leads to a lower ad cost). Win search marketshare from your users by giving them rebates on your other products as well.
3. Create a branding and awareness campaign around the new Yahoo! Search. Hire someone to do a fake study proving that Yahoo! Search is more relavant than any of the other players. Make sure Ask or Microsoft is ranked #2 ahead of Google.
4. Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.
5. Launch a new toolbar with a meter like PageRank in it...call it YourRank (or something the emphasizes to the user) that it is their web and what they like. Heavily push that branding message to users locked into Yahoo! email, Yahoo! Stores, and other verticals they interact with.
6. Create a well branded specialty search for bloggers with innovative features that make it easy to follow the conversation both ways. Also launch creative ideas to buy mindshare with other high authority communities (universities, open source projects, etc.).
7. Easily allow advertisers to do keyword research on Yahoo! outside of while they are setting up search campaigns. Create a reliable publicly accessible keyword tool which actually markets the Yahoo! Search product.
8. Give away a lot of useful search market data (like Microsoft recently did with their Ad Intelligence plug-in).
9. Put the Yahoo! brand on the millions of syndicated domain landing pages they power each day.
10. Increase the relevancy of their contextual ad product and increase payouts to 100% (buy marketshare) BEFORE Microsoft openly launches their network. Perform case studies with publishers who saw their Yahoo! monetization go up AFTER switching from AdSense (and other inferior networks) to the NEW Yahoo! Publisher Network contextual ads program. Perhaps pay key leading bloggers 150% just to get them using, talking about, and giving feedback on your ads. Buy marketshare...

How Could Yahoo! Become Relevant?

Do you still use Yahoo! Search? What could Yahoo! do to make you want to use them and talk about their search product?

I think conferences are great for coming up with business ideas and making meaningful friendships and business relationships, and I would not have as many opportunities as I have now unless I went to many conferences back in the day. But I think I have been going to about 8 or 10 conferences a year for the past couple years and have got burned out on them. I am going to be at Elite Retreat this year, but am hoping that I can take a break otherwise.

Appreciating Conference Saturation

This past week Elite Retreat was announced and I turned down speaking requests for 4 other conferences! It seems I could do nothing but speak at conferences, but I just have too much fun playing online and see too much opportunity to have to travel once or twice a month. And conference overload leads to burnout, a line I am near more often than I should be.

Appreciation of Online Assets

In the last few years I have seen

• the lowering of the value of typical reciprocal links
• the lowering of the value of most directories
• drastic reduction in cost of market research
• sharply increased domain prices (some people have offered enough to make me a seller, and I get offers about once a week from a rather small portfolio)
• increased cost per click prices
• buying PPC ads getting harder due to relevancy scores that try to prohibit non-brands from advertising
• sales cycles getting more efficient
• the creation of shaddow brands to allow businesses to be bolted on to free offerings that build good will and reduce their marketing cost to zero
• increasingly complex information formats (both free and paid)
• the saturation of markets that were largely created AFTER I got into SEO
• quality links becoming tougher to get (you can see this with how the media is linking internally where they used to link out...you appreciate the trend even more when a few friends send you some private internal documents from said companies)
• increased time commitment to create valuable brands due to increased market competiton (in some rare cases even pure spammers are creating good content)
• people becoming more cynical about content quality due to linkbait attention whoring
• hand edits wiping out once highly profitable websites that were cleaner than competing ones own by large corporations
• the move from one-time sales to subscription based pricing

I still have a few tricks and ideas that offer an amazing ROI, but as more people use them the ideas will see their ROI approach zero, unless I look for ways to layer real value on top of them. And it is hard to layer real value without committing both time and capital to the project.

Comparing Online ROI vs Offline ROI

A few weeks ago my wife held a meetup for bloggers where she and I gave away tons of tips to people with no sales pitch. I also paid for dinner for about 30 people. Out of that mini-conference type event I think only 1 blogger even mentioned it online. Most expensive paid link ever. ;)

When I went to the Blogworld Expo I think there were about 30 or 40 people in the audience. And going to the conference cost me a couple days of work. In about the same amount of time I was able to create the Blogger's Guide to SEO and market it. It got a couple thousand inbound links, over 1,000 bookmarks, over 50,000 reads, and videos I embedded in it got about 300 hundred to 600 clickthroughs to YouTube from my article.

Your Thoughts?

I have way too many ideas and way too little time to implement them. In some cases I have partnerships and my wife is doing lots of development stuff now too, so both of those help, but do you still get the same ROI out of conferences as you did when you first started going to them? If not, what do you do in place of them where you find better ROI?

Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

Shoemoney created this quick video to show how Triggit works

Unlike the automated ad solutions like intellitxt or AdSense, these Triggit ads

• look like other regular links on the page (so they should get a high CTR)
• can easily be applied on a page by page level (so you do not have to clutter up every page to monetize the few pages that can make a lot of money)
• link to products recommended by the editor (to preserve editorial integrity)
• can link to merchants that pay via affiliate payout or CPC (offering multiple monetization models)
• allow you to keep your pages clean (and easy to link at) until they rank, then have you add monetization after you have a leading market position for related keywords

Triggit ads are easy to set up and should require little maintenance on the end user's side, but they are still a small start up, so if you start doing well with them make sure you remember which pages do well so you can keep monetizing the pages if the Triggit partnership stops working, and so you can track which pages you should try to monetize more aggressively and/or build links to.

As blended semi-editorial in content ad networks like these evolve, the distinction between optimization and spam blurs. And since Google has a similar product, it is going to be hard to view this in a negative light without looking hypocritical in the process. From Google's pay per action page:

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher's recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we've found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

To be honest, I have used the "scam or not" angle before when trying to pull in traffic for something and have called stuff a "scam" when I did not like it, but I have never called something a scam right before trying to sell it.

Is this a common affiliate technique? Would you allow it? Does it bring in skeptics that never would have bought? Or does it taint the brand too much?

Lorna Li wrote a wonderful overview of my wife's blog meetup speech. Jeremy Schoemaker announced the next Elite Retreat, which is on April 3rd and 4th. With Brian Clark speaking, I feel more like I am going to be an attendee than a speaker. Check out Brian's post on creating leading edge strategic content.

Kris Jones launched the PepperJam affiliate marketing network today.

Microsoft is testing placing ads and an interactive media environment on shopping carts:

Cardholders will be able to visit a website and plan their shopping list that will then appear on a cart-attached screen when they get to the store and swipe their card.

The screen will display the price of items that shoppers place in the carts and a running tally of the total; moreover, ads, coupons and incentives will also be displayed as shoppers walk around the store.

The instant-feedback nature of such incentives will give advertisers real-time results on which prompts worked and which didn't.

Green Giant Green Beans are the nutritious choice of 3/4 moms. They are in isle #3 and they will make you happy and healthy.

Not interested in your health?

Try some delicious peanut butter flavor Snickers. On sale today only. Buy 9 get 1 free. :)

I got a few dozen emails chewing me out for our keyword tool breaking. This post is just to let you know that it is fixed and to say thank you to those people who let me know about it breaking.

Many SEO Book readers have seen Google Trends before, but did you know that Google Checkout also has a trends feature? Google has those touch-points, email data (now with a mailing list feature), AdWords bid data, conversion data, analytics data, and search referral data.

A recent research paper reviewed Google's internal Prediction Markets [PDF]. Three key quotes from that research...

Biases

Google's prediction markets are reasonably efficient, but did exhibit four specific biases: an overpricing of favorites, short aversion, optimism, and an underpricing of extreme outcomes. New employees and inexperienced traders appear to suffer more from these biases, and as market participants gained experience over the course of our sample period, the biases become less pronounced.

Arbitrage opportunities

As further evidence of short aversion, in order book snapshots collected each time an order was placed, we found 1,747 instances where the bid prices of the securities in a particular market added to more than 1, implying an arbitrage opportunity (from buying a bundle of securities for $1 and then selling the components). In contrast, we found only 495 instances where the ask prices added to less than 1 (implying an arbitrage opportunity of buying the components of a bundle for less than $1 and then exchanging the bundle). The median duration of these arbitrage opportunities was about 2 minutes.

The effect of proximity

An important caveat to our results is that they tell us about information flows about prediction market subjects, many of which are ancillary to employees' main job. this may explain why physical proximity matters so much more than work relationships - if prediction market topics are lower-priority matters so much more than work relationships - if prediction market topics are lower-priority subjects on which to exchange information, then information exchange may require the opportunity for low-opportunity-cost communication created by physical proximity. Of course, introspection suggests that genuinely creative ideas often arise from such low-opportunity-cost communication. Google's frequent office moves and emphasis on product innovation may provide an ideal testing ground in which to better understand the creative process.

Google's new mailing lists wipes out the need for many boutique email services. They know what features they are going to roll out before anyone else does. And they have market moving data before others do. Google's AdSense is the fuel that drives web innovation. And they can decide at any time if a competing service is no longer viable to push it toward its demise.

Virgin real-time data + arbitrage identification algorithms + understanding investor flaws + algorithms to target mental flaws + direct and indirect market influence = $

As I see it, competitive forces between traditional publishers, market saturation from the bottom, and market influence from the likes of data hoarding companies like Google are going to quickly commoditize anything that is sold as information. To survive you need emotional touch-points that consumers share.

A friend of mine was a leading affiliate for an information product, selling over $300,000 worth of someone else's service. How did they reward him? They cloned his sales channel and killed his business model. Everything that is not a memory, brand, or experience is becoming a commodity. What prevents you or I from becoming a commodity?

You become what you surround yourself with, and when you push out you attract the right people or the wrong people. Threadwatch, for example, attracted the wrong people, or perhaps the wrong mood and tone from the right people. But you could also engineer the silicon valley in your industry if you work hard enough.

In the information age, where marketers

• have granular controls
• can remain anonymous
• can market brands in minutes
• leverage reverse billing fraud and computer destroying viruses
• can distance themselves from the fraud via affiliate programs or pushing blame on algorithms

there are a lot of scams to be wary of. Especially when there is so much information being produced to where content is published in biased sound-byte format to whore for attention. The stakes for calling someone out are big, because you need attention to profit, and unfortunately, the structure of the web has changed:

Google and it's copy-tition were designed 10 years ago. But the web has changed significantly in the past decade. Google was built to index a web that no longer exists... a web where people still engaged in social linking behavior, for one thing.

But there are lots of experts who keep learning and change with the markets. Some people give because they like to learn and they are not driven by short term profits. Teach a man to fish, etc.

Each day we chose who we want to listen to, who we want to be like, who we want to like us, and why we want them to like us. Those relationships are the only thing that prevents us from becoming commodities.

"You're lucky in life if you have the right heroes. I advise all of you, to the extent that you can, pick out a few heroes. There's nothing like the right ones." - Warren Buffet

My web heroes thusfar are Tim Berners-Lee and Seth Godin. Who are yours?

In most markets worth being in and with most sustainable business models, sales is not a one time event, but a process. You first have to create awareness, then build trust, then finally make the sale. Do all 3 happen at once for some people? Sure, but probably not for the majority of customers.

My big issue with hyping social media is that most things that are popular on social media sites do not actually build credibility, and that you are going to have marginal success building your brand if you start by focusing on these broad third party communities rather than YOUR TOPICAL COMMUNITY.

When I first started getting well known there was no Digg. There was a Slashdot, but exposure on Slashdot did not make or break me. What really sent my personal brand on a sharp upward trajectory was when Danny Sullivan mentioned me. Because he felt I was comment-worthy many other people suddenly thought I knew what I was talking about and that I was trustworthy.

That perception of trust, audience, and personal-brand that Danny had spent years building was in some part transferred to me. Am I as well known as he is? Of course not, but while sites like Digg have audience they tend to lack that perception of trust and personal-brand that transfers BUYING CUSTOMERS to your site.

If a person who has trust and a broad base of readership recommends you that creates immediate sales. I see that in my daily sales data and my affiliate statistics. If you get featured on social media sites it does not lead to many sales. Perhaps that exposure leads to awareness, which can further be enhanced by writing about that community, buying banner ads from sites like Lead Back, or by writing other create subscription-worthy content, but generally in content editorial link from a trusted expert creates more sales than exposure on a nearly automated hollow social news site.

If your site is new to the market and you want some exposure you have two options

• eat Taco bell for a month, take the world's biggest crap, then write a leading 10 step how-to guide on how-to polish it, or
• create things that people INSIDE YOUR COMMUNITY will find useful

One of those strategies will get you in the Guinness book of world records. The other will make sales.

Does your content build trust?

Straight Up Spamming
The economics of spam.

Thin Arbitrage
In regards to that $130 million investment in Geosign by American Capital... it turns out to be the arbitrage investment that was not:

American Capital CEO Malon Wilkus told TheStreet.com that as a result of the split-up, his firm recovered a "substantial" amount of its original investment in the form of cash proceeds. He declined to give the amount.

Domain Names
Oversee.net bought Moniker. They purchased SnapNames earlier this year. They must be pretty good at business to be able to afford over $100 million in acquisitions in one year.

Never trust Network Solutions again. They are now registering any whois lookups that occur on their network, and are challenging RegisterFly for the dirtiest register ever award.

Marchex has dropped below the sharp fall off back when they lowered Q3 2007 guidance. They currently trade at an 82 P/E ratio, and could unlock a lot of value if they had a real development strategy or started selling off some of their names. A Domain Tools blog post highlights how generic domains could appreciate if capital was more accessible for premium domains. I think before that happens companies like Marchex are going to need to issue a new strategic memo that is valid in the current marketplace. The Domain Tools blog post also had a comment from a search marketer:

Besides, the real downside to generic domains from my point of view is that every day, the “type-in traffic” generation becomes smarter, or dies off. More people use a medium such as Google or other search engines. With search engines, sites such as “Travelocity.com” and “travel.yahoo.com” become the apparent winners for the term “Travel”. Not Travel.com

As a search marketer who keeps spending more and more on Google ads, I firmly believe the above comment, and this is why I have been buying decent names and developing them. A balanced investment strategy where pieces build off each other and I put my marketing skills to work will outperform a strategy where I enter a saturated market late without a unique strategy. A strong domain is a great advantage, but you can still succeed with only a decent one and a bit ofsweat equity.

Yahoo! Buzz Index
Perhaps this is an old arbitrage strategy I somehow missed, but the Yahoo Buzz Index links to a list of popular searches. What better way is there to rank for them and drive traffic than to reference them on an high authority page, likeso:

That might be a nice strategy for other leading publishers to follow, though it makes Yahoo look a bit desperate in their marketing approach.

General Publishing Trends
Seth Godin highlights trends in the music industry, which is a set of trend applicable to just about every industry.

Microsoft offered $1.2 billion, a 42% premium over market valuation, for Fast Search & Transfer. Fast Search & Transfer is largely an enterprise search solution. As an example web index to showcase their technology years ago they created AllTheWeb. In early 2003 Overture bought AllTheWeb, and Fast's web search unit for $70 million cash. Yahoo bought Overture the same year for $1.63 billion.

In 2005 Fast again appeared on the web search scene when they started powering organic search results for Miva, but they do not have their own search destination. Earlier this year Fast made noise about creating an independent ad network that allowed publishers to keep the bulk of the profits, but OpenAds already exists, and I have not heard much of Fast's proposed AdMomentum after the initial hype.

Fast recently missed quarterly numbers and changed their accounting practices. They do not have a great business model compared to Google (enterprise search is nowhere near as profitable as web search). If general web search relevancy moves beyond measuring links and more toward user feedback perhaps owning Fast would help Microsoft increase their core relevancy algorithms, and enterprise relationships can probably help them cross sell web ads too.

Update: Fast is to lead the Pharos search project, which will be funded in part by European governments. If Google gets regulated out of market domination in Europe then Microsoft may have bought a key competitive piece.

Potential search plays later this year:

• IAC is only worth about $7.2 billion. Earlier this year they announced that they are planning on spinning off into 5 major companies. Perhaps when that is done Microsoft, eBay, or Amazon.com should try to buy Ask.
• Why there is no money in second tier search stocks. They are all losing marketshare and money. CNET passed on buying Looksmart for a nominal sum while purchasing FindArticles.
• Perhaps search engines will start buying more major content sites. AOL is wasting away, and what else is out there?

Fake Businesses

Today I came across an AdWords ad for an automated ebook business model website. Their screenshot highlighting their Paypal account was:

• hosted on another site
• named powersell_paypal2.jpg
• did not show payments but showed withdrawals

Fake Business Statistics

A lot of (mis)marketing techniques are more covert though, through the use of

• false stats due to small sample size
• sponsored research
• syndicating bogus stats from third party research

Fake / misleading research is remarkable, so it is more likely to be cited, and recycled by people hyping similar business interests. A while ago MarketingExperiments did social media marketing research which was not really research, and yet those false stats promising social media goodness just appeared again:

Claiming that the above ROI is 1,427% higher is at best dishonest. You can teach the value of something without syndicating lies as truth.

Social Media Traffic Does Not Buy

Want to know the truth about most social media traffic? Its garbage. Some of my AdSense ad campaigns use an affiliate account to track ROI. Until I filtered them out for poor performance, MySpace and Digg were providing about 90% of my overall affiliate ad volume with 0 conversions, whereas some of my better affiliates make a sale a day or a sale every few days on far less traffic.

I know that was an isolated example and it would be unfair to judge the entire market on that, but consider this...those ads had a horrifically low clickthrough rate and still only cost a dime a click. If I was getting a lot of volume on a network that size while bidding next to nothing then that ad inventory is not worth that much. Simple as that.

Some Top Publishers Are Afraid Social Media Marketing

Some leading publishers are even worried about deflating their CPM by getting to much lousy social media traffic.

Comparing Social Media to Direct Navigation

Why do you think domainers make so much money without even needing to develop websites? For a person to end up on a parked page they have a lot of implied intent in their location. The same is true for a search result. If you just searched for something you have implied intent. Google is worth 200 billion and I am not. :)

For all the hype Facebook ad system has got, there is limited value in their user data:

Google actually knows all of that, and at least 10X more data about users than Facebook, but hasn't seen the need to really mine the data yet, since search intent has proven to be worth about 100X more than that kind of data so far.

If social marketing gets you clean links it is great. If people recommend your product to their customers that is great. I get mentioned on Seth Godin's blog and sales double. I make the front page of a social news site and nothing happens. Most of the social media hype is hollow and without value.

Put Social Media to the Test Today

Still don't believe me that most social marketing traffic is worthless? Ask yourself why StumbleUpon only charges 5 cents a visitor for any category - including big money categories like daytrading, gambling, and financial planning.

If the successful secret marketing strategies that send 4 cent traffic are buzzworthy then they could at least have the decency to tell me I can get the same thing for a nickel with no effort.

I think these two comments do a nice job of showing the difference between how people perceive something they paid for and something they got for free. If people do not have a tangible opportunity cost they often tend not to respect or value the product or service.

Compare these side by side reviews:

• the person who bought it thought it was one of the best ebooks they ever purchased.
• the person who won a free copy thought it was dry, above their head, and has 0 respect for copyright, offering to trade it

To build up publicity and mindshare you have to give away value, but the same product often has a vastly different perceived value based on price point and how they got it. It is so hard to win marketshare by lowering price, but easy to win marketshare by increasing (real and perceived) value.

Question: We were thinking of mirroring our website by giving affiliates subdomains with our content like xyz.oursite.com. Is this a good idea or a duplicate content nightmare?

Answer: Giving affiliates the same set of data is indeed a duplicate content nightmare, and it makes it hard for the affiliates to push their sites into the core organic parts of the web. If they have a product database and the same reviews and content that exist as the core branded site there is nothing remarkable about what they are doing. You can look back to this post on leaked human review documents to see how Google views affiliate sites.

Instead of cloning all your content and giving affiliates access to that, I recommend encouraging affiliates write personal journals on their own subdomain. I would encourage them to promote your products and blog about topics other than your products. This will allow some of them to work their sites into the organic parts of the web while encouraging them to write content interesting enough for people to want to subscribe to it. Sure some of the affiliates will not get much traction, but enough of them try it a few will, and they will boost your brand whenever people visit their sites.

You can include a bunch of Wordpress themes and extensions with their blogs, create a free guide to blogging, create an affiliate directory, and other offers that make it easy to get affiliates into sharing information. Maybe even install a Vbulletin forum and write a blog just for your affiliates. Bonuses to further entice a sense of community might be highlighting daily or monthly top posts, offering free design services to top affiliates, giving away prizes like link building, and interviewing some of your better affiliates in a monthly community newsletter.

Creating a platform for sharing passion is a much better affiliate strategy than duplicating content is.

Search Engine Watch lost its magic glow the day it got scummed by SEMPO. A friend pointed me to a 3 part series on Search Engine Watch about how you can't learn SEO from a book. The author of these articles used the same articles to recommend you get certified from the SEMPO Institute. Coincidentally, the author's profile mentions that he is an author for the SEMPO Institute.

But, to be honest, SEMPO saved my life. If they hadn't sent my wife an SEO who got her site penalized she probably never would have found me, bought my book, started chatting with me, and saved my life.

What is worse, when Matt Marlon's Traffic Power cold calls people selling SEO services or when Wal Mart offer SEO services for $25 a month? Both of them carve away at the profitability of real SEO by creating a market for lemons.

Given that many of the industry associatiations are hollow vehicals for self promotion and that services are not as profitable as running your own sites it is going to get harder and harder to find an SEO worth hiring that will actually want to optimize a website for what is deemed a fair market price.

A New Google Filter is Born

In early December some astute webmasters noticed that some of their longterm (in some cases many years) #1 or #2 ranking pages in Google now rank at #6. Just like with the Google -30 and the Google -950 penalties, some people will maintain this is fiction, but too many smart people experienced the same thing at the same time for it to be such.

Background Information

Tedster started a WMW thread on the topic on December 26th. From Tedster's post, some of the sites that were hit:

1. Well established site with a long history.
2. Long time good rankings for a big search term - usually #1
3. Other searches that returned the same url at #1 may also be sent to #6, but not all of them
4. Some reports of a #2 result going to #6.

My Site That Got Hit

My site which saw a ranking dive on December 18th had the homepage hit, and interior pages hit for some (but not all) related phrases. Here are some noteworthy conditions with my site that was hit:

• The site was entirely ranked on SEO. There is no ad budget outside of PPC ads or link buying, and no brand recognition outside of the search results. Outside of one linkbait there is nothing remarkable about the site.
• The homepage did not get any new quality links in over a year.
• Much of the link building was done years ago when I was far spammier and far more aggressive with anchor text than I would be today, though I did use some semantic variation to pick up rankings for many different keyword permutations.
• The internal pages still rank #1 for some semi-related longer queries, while they are also filtered and ranking #6 for some more obviously connected shorter search queries.
• The site continues to buy PPC ads and gets decent conversion rates for the keywords that were hit, and gets great conversion rates for more focused related terms, some of which the site was hit for and some of which the site still ranks great for. This conversion data is being sent to Google via the AdWords conversion tracker.
• This affected alternate permutations of acronyms (letters strung together or pulled apart).
• For my site this affects rankings on alternate versions of words (ie: single vs plural). For at least one person on WMW they did not see it affect both single and plural versions of their keywords.
• This affects words if mixed into a different order.
• This affects many longer search query containing the core words or closely related words.
• This did not affect obvious domain name or brand related queries, even if the brand contained one of the words overlapping with the penalized set. If a filtered word outside of the domain name / brand name is appended to the query then the rankings are killed, and the site is stuck at #6.

Usage Data or Improved Phrase Relationship Detection of Anchor Text?

Why I do Not Think it is Usage Data

Based on feedback in the WMW thread it is hard to isolate this to any one variable with certainty. Two possibilities that have been thrown out are rolling more usage data into the search results or a better understanding of word and phrase relationships. It is easy to think of usage data as a possibility given my site's lack of marketing and lack of integration into the organic web, but that would not explain why some pages and queries were hit while some similar pages and queries still rank, with Google getting strong conversion data via AdWords on some of these pages. Also, for that homepage I wrote an aggressive page title and meta description that draws in many clicks, and the landing page is exceptionally relevant for the query.

Why I Think it is Phrase Relationships

I think this issue is likely tied to a stagnant link profile with a too tightly aligned anchor text profile, with the anchor text being overly-optimized when compared against competing sites.

The fact that some related queries were hit, but not all, makes me think that rather than being about usage data this is about word and phrase relationship improvements. I think if Google got better at understanding word relationships, many of the pages that once fit the criteria to rank may now have anchor text that is too focused and too well aligned with the target keywords, especially if they compare your anchor text to the anchor text of other sites competing for the same phrases. Once possible manipulation is identified via artificial anchor text your rankings across the site can be suppressed for a basket of semantically related terms, as noted in some of Google's phrase based indexing patents.

Matt Cutts Does Not Know What Happened

This filter was also called the minus 5 penalty, but many of the sites that were hit still rank at #6 even if they were ranking #2 or #3 before they were hit. When Barry posted about this Matt Cutts said "Hmm. I'm not aware of anything that would exhibit that sort of behavior," but some past SEO issues, like the famed Google sandbox have been accidentally introduced as a side effect of Google upgrades:

What's a sandbox, Matt?

"Some people have asked, "does this apply to newer sites?" Essentially, the way to think about it is, around 2003 Google switched to a new method of updating its index. Before that we had monthly Google dances. So as a result, new data is always being folded into the index. It's not like there was one pivotal moment when anyone can say, "Hah! This is the change!" In fact, even at different data centers we have different binaries, different algorithms, different types of data always being tested.

"I think a lot of what's perceived as the sandbox is artifacts where, in our indexing, some data may take longer to be computed than other data."

Great Comments About the Filter

3 great posts from the WMW thread:

• Randle - on how not building links may be a risky strategy
• Tedster - on how universal search may change how much Google can hand craft trust requirements for ranking on the first page
• JoeSinkwitz - on how he got around the filter by pointing a few more links at a site

Your Feedback Needed

With my sample set of one site my current hypothesis might be out to lunch. If you have any sites that you feel were hit and want to share them for helping everyone figure out what is going on please do so in the comments below. If you have any ideas or feedback on what happened please leave a comment with that too.

Improve SEO Book - the ebook format and sending updates via email have a lot of friction associated with them. Perhaps so much so that I should have realized it and changed my business model years ago. A partial list of that friction includes

• shipping questions (for an ebook)
• a text that takes a while to read
• a format that presumes you want to read the whole thing
• a text too large for most people to want to re-read the whole thing when it is updated
• requests for special addendums when updates are done, which would make the whole book structure quite pointless
• a text so large that it is hard to update
• refund requests within 3 minutes of purchases by people who bought it with intent to steal it
• people trying to sell it on eBay or on their websites
• a lowered perception of value due to using a format that is often associated with scams

There are many ways I can add value to SEO Book and enhance value transfer to customers if I turn the purchase process into establishing a relationship. There needs to be more backend support for learning. With internet marketing getting more complex I need to make learning easier, more granular, and more interactive.

Treat SEO Book more like a business - I sorta stumbled into SEO, and honestly have not treated this site like a business like I should have. Over the years some of my mentors have given me many great tips that I was too lazy or scared to listen to at the time. After seeing one of my favorite SEO sites go offline it makes me want to treat this site more like a business so I can still focus attention on it for years to come, even while some of my other projects have grown to be more profitable.

Make my other sites more like SEO Book - I have some other sites that do pretty well without adding much value to the web. At some level I feel there is a moral obligation to start adding value to markets as you extract profits. Plus, if relevancy algorithms moved away from links and domain trust many of those domains (as they sit today) would be screwed. I want to create more product and service oriented websites and be less reliant on advertising and affiliate based income streams.

Try to get at least 2 weeks away from the web - this will be mid year sometime with my wife, in a one month European honeymoon.

Read more away from the web - I always learn a lot from reading books, and I doubt I would miss much if I cut how much time I spent reading recycled online content.

Start working out more again - after losing a bunch of weight I gained it back due to stress from doing way too much stuff. I have eased up my work load and am chipping away at it.

Spend more time with my wife - given that we both work on the web we spend lots of time near each other, but far too much time working and not enough time playing.

Set a better examplewhat competitors do I want to put a lot more effort into creating things worth copying.