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We recently added support software for SEO Book members. It is powered by Kayako SupportSuite, which is perhaps a bit more than we need as a 2 person business, but I think the software is fairly powerful and looks quite professional. :)
The only downsides were that it took me a while to install it and we are running out of room in the sitewide navigation at the top of the page...one more item and the formatting dies!
Yahoo! is back around the $20 range again today. If Microsoft could find a way to buy them they could quickly gain some search marketshare, but presuming Microsoft builds a memorable search brand they could probably catch up through other acquisitions cheaper.
I think rather than buying another overpriced ad platform a cheaper way to attack Google would be to buy some of the leading editorial brands/sites that dominate Google's organic rankings. For far less than the $47 billion Microsoft offered for Yahoo! they could buy...
Expedia (currently valued at $5.2 billion) and have a leading role in the travel market. I think something like 40% of internet commerce is travel.
Monster.com (currently values at $2.24 billion) and have a leading role in employment and education.
Bankrate (currently valued at $700 million) and have a leading role in the mortgage and consumer credit markets.
WebMD (currently valued at $1.64 billion) and have a leading role in the medical market
IAC (currently valued at $5.38 billion) After IAC spins off many of their other units this price might go cheaper. Google paid $1 billion for 5% of AOL. Microsoft can get 100% of Ask (with more marketshare than AOL) for not a whole lot more, giving them significantly more marketshare than they currently have and an actual brand in the search market. Plus IAC is buying Dictionary.com and some other generic high traffic sites.
The New York Times (currently valued at $2.25 billion) and have a leading role in the news market. If they wanted to they could buy it out, spin out About.com as a Microsoft owned web property, then set up the NYT as an industry non-profit that monetizes via a longterm ad arrangement with Microsoft.
I think those companies add up to around $17.4 billion. Pay 50% over market value to close the deals and they could have all the above for $26 billion, giving them a leading position in most high value markets and $20 billion left over for marketing, branding, and buying further assets.
Is the above strategy crazy? What would you do if you were Microsoft?
When people are angry they are anything but rational, so the amount of brand damage they can do for you is near limitless. Imagine if a person or small group has reach to a group of people entering your space, and tells them that you are unethical, a liar, worthless, etc.
If such a statement is contained then no big deal, but if it starts spreading as common knowledge people will just assume it is true. For every person creating media there are 100 people quietly consuming it, and if you are successful and have mindshare people will try to tear you down every month.
When Unprovoked Try to Be Empathetic, if That Does Not Work, Then Consider Highlighting the Issue
If they are already creating unprovoked brand damage then they are probably angering other people too. If you can't clear it up directly it might be a legitimate strategy to call them out on it such that other people they offend down the road will discover your brand. Another popular strategy is to ask friends to clear it up if you want to keep yourself removed from the conflict.
Do Not Make The Google Engineers Editors Angry
We are all flawed, and the goalposts are always moving. One day we are at the top and the next day people are surprised at the fact that we are a spammer.
One of the things that is most likely to kill a successful SEO job is boasting about the ROI and/or how easy it was. Ever since Google started aggressively editing the search results the difference between a successful strategy and an ineffective one is often one blog post. Brent Csutoras gave a lot of great examples of strategy gone awry in his STFU post.
People Inadvertently Screw You
Back around 2004-2005 Google was having issues with 302 redirect hijacking, so I made the SEO Book affiliate program use 301 redirects. I mentioned that those links passed weight in our online SEO training program. 301 redirecting affiliate links is a popular way to build link equity, but after Rand used my site as an example in the following video those 301s no longer pass PageRank.
People Trash Your Site as Spam to Justify Their Spam
Many years back Jill Whalen and I had a falling out because I was bidding on people's names via AdWords, and she did not like it. She thought it was scummy for me to bid on other brand names, but she had no desire to police her affiliates when they did the same. To this day she still slings mud at me, calling me a black hat, etc.
Public Online Communities Eat Their Young
Dan Thies, who wrote an ebook a couple years before me, had to battle through some nastiness as well, so I am not sure what percent of what I dealt with was natural feeding off the young or if the people complaining about me were actually mad at me. Given that they didn't mind when they profited from what they did not like, I would guess that it was mostly the former.
The big issue with eating your young is that you never know when it will come back to haunt you.
Someone Might Become a Star
Some people who get established allow their egos to grow beyond any rational limit, and are nasty to many new people entering their field. But the thing is you don't know who is going to become a star down the road, and who will have the influence to crush or embarrass you.
Consider how Shel Israel angered Loren Feldman years ago. Shel had long forgot doing so, but then Loren registered ShelIsrael.com and put up a sock puppet show that lasted for months!
That conflict just ended, but the associated brand damage will last for years. Here is Loren's take on why he did what he did:
When I first started my career, you made it a point to bury me online, and more importantly back channel as well. This is a fact. You and your crew went out of your way to take food off my plate. I never forgot that, and now you have something you’ll never forget.
Communities Are Full of Cliques
One of the things I struggle with in the SEO field is that so many of us end up doing so well that sometimes we let our egos get ahead of what made us do well and we forget where we came from. And so I hear negative stuff about interactions between many friends. Its hard to be empathetic when it seems everyone has wronged others at some point in time. I know I have screwed up more times than I can count, and much of the conflict ends up being drama for the sake of marketing.
PageRank was, is, and will always be a flawed concept. In some cases the best person wins, but in many cases the best person loses because they were not good at public relations and marketing - or because they made somebody angry, and they decided to blackball them.
Some of the top communities in the search marketing field do not get along well. Incisive Media employees and Third Door Media employees are banned from attending each other's conferences. Ever since Danny stopped doing the Search Engine Strategies conferences I have been asked to speak a grand total of 0 times. Guys like Graywolf and I were replaced by sponsored panels.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.
and
Those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
Nick Carr, who I was lucky enough to interview a few months back, wrote the cover article for this month's The Atlantic. His story, about how the web is reshaping our minds, is important to consider from both a sanity perspective and a marketing perspective:
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
You can learn a lot about how ideas spread by playing on the web 16 hours a day, but many of the best ideas are either recycled from other markets and/or sparked by deep thinking from reading about other markets and determining how those markets & ideas intersect with your own. When I play online too much I start to feel stagnant and like I am not learning anymore. Reading a good book cures that.
Wikia recently announced that their search service was finally almost worth using. It is easy to rate and vote sites up to the top of the search results. When they have limited marketshare they will not get much spam. As they start building marketshare will they be able to get enough people engaged in the project to fight off spam? And who defines what is spam anyhow?
You can comment about the results, rate a result, spotlight it, and add images to it. With over 100 edits so far today, SEO has to be one of the most frequently edited pages. I am not sure if voting is cumulative, but please vote for SEOBook just in case. :)
Here is an image of a couple results for SEO. Notice how I put my logo in the SERPs
If this project gains any momentum and they provide a list of most frequently edited search results you can expect that to be a nice list of commercial keywords, much like Mahalo!
Wikia Search also offers a nice keyword suggestion tool in their Bloom tool, which shows related search queries based on an input query.
Roger Montti offers an insightful post on link building for new websites in 2008. If you have no traction you need to find a way to buy/beg/borrow/steal attention. Use that exposure to spread content that turns people on / gets them excited / evokes an emotional response / ties in with their worldview and identity...and watch the links flow like wine.
Debra mentioned how she sometimes has a hard time telling people that their sites will not get links because they are boring. I actually enjoy doing that because it forces them to take some ownership over their own success (it is hard to drag a company across the finish line if you are an outside consultant - much easier to win if they are at least willingly walking in the right direction).
The way I teach people that concept is I remove them for their ownership role. I ask "If you did not own this website why would you tell other people about and/or want to visit it at least once a week?" Once they can answer that question honestly with something that is inline with their market it means they have something worth marketing.
Steve, an all around great guy and moderator of our forums, made a great thread in our local website marketing forums worth checking out if you are a subscriber.
Google is hyping image pattern recognition technology they call VisualRank in the media. Either they are about to improve their image search or they want us to think they have the most sophisticated technology.
Brief synopsis of how AdWords has changed over the past couple years - killing off many of the bottom feeder advertisers. The long tail of SEO keeps growing, but PPC is a winner take most game...from head to tail.
Breaking the Digg Code - free guide to getting the most out of Digg, though if you market an SEO site it is not worth marketing it on Digg. The average small-minded short-sighted Digg user thinks all SEO is spam - they are a reflection of the dumbest and loudest parts of society.
Use Intwition to see what posts from a site got the most Twitter links.
Seed Keywords is a cool tool which allows you to pass a question on to friends or customers and ask them what they would search for to solve a particular problem.
Yahoo! may announce a deal to carry Google ads in the next week, according to the WSJ:
While a broad search ad pact would likely attract intense antitrust scrutiny, the options Google and Yahoo are discussing include a nonexclusive arrangement that they believe could satisfy regulators, say the people familiar with the matter.
The basis of such an arrangement would be a real-time auction system that would choose the most lucrative ads for any given consumer query from among those sold by Yahoo, Google and any of their competitors, the people say. Microsoft, for example, could potentially connect to the Yahoo system and have search ads it sold displayed alongside Yahoo Web search results, under an arrangement where they likely would share ad revenue.
We're really focused on this huge opportunity before us, which is automating the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising. We won't get all of that, for sure, but we should be able to get a significant part of that over the lifetime, certainly of my service to the company.
Google's position on top of the web allows them to monitor any area of growth, and give themselves the first slot for any area they want to compete in. If they are uncertain of their competitive positioning they can list a couple other competitors alongside until their internal stats show their product is superior. Free exposure and free benchmarking are great advantages.
Their relevancy standards and universal search product allow them to vote for or against any type of information or company. From a business standpoint, anything they buy or launch can be tightly integrated in the search results like they did with YouTube and Google Checkout.
Their protective moat extends out from that position with the following assets
the default video hosting platform
the default display & contextual ad networks
the default blog feed management company
the leading feed reader services
the default web analytics service
the default mobile operating system
the default standard for map sharing
free payment processing for non-profits (good for public relations and a cheap way to buy market exposure)
(soon to be) the default web development platform - Google App Engine
Given the size of that moat and diversity of their offerings, holding Google stock is like holding a mutual fund with a long position on the web. As SEOs we monitor Google too closely to talk about why and what they are penalizing and how to get ahead, but I think you can learn more about marketing by watching what they do to build their brands and dominate their markets, and try to do the same in our markets.
When you have a well known brand, a good idea, and do an aggressive launch sometimes your idea sticks as the default answer for that question. You end up owning ideas - sometimes for years. In some cases idea ownership requires extensive maintenance costs, but in many cases there is little ongoing cost.
Even if a domain name costs $50,000 or $100,000 it is only $8 a year going forward.
A good site design might cost $5,000, but earn you that much each month.
Some software tools and downloads rarely need updated.
The difference between an average blog post and a piece of feature content might only be 8 hours of production and 4 hours of marketing.
Once you have default status in a category the web's network economy works for you and works against the competition.
if you already rank that exposure can become self-reinforcing (until someone creates a better idea)
if you are already well known it is easy to get listed in DMOZ and get other trusted 3rd party citations
if you have a well known brand you can charge more and be selective with who you sell to
if you have a lot of exposure people new to your field are likely to quickly run in to you and help promote you while they learn from you
TechRepublic asks "Will the Google revolution engulf IT departments?" Each time I write a newsletter, about 80% of the items are about Google. They keep innovating faster than other companies their size. Here are some examples of things they have done over the last ~ 2 months.
Added a search box for site search inside the search results, giving Google a second taste at displaying ads even on navigational queries for a specific website.
Started crawling site search forms on trusted sites, which (along with sitelinks, universal search, Youtube, and branded video ads) distributes more traffic to large trusted sites and business partners, with less traffic going to smaller websites (search keeps getting more editorial).
Offered App Engine, which provides free hosting to developers (in exchange for being stuck on their network and letting them spy on your usage data and growth).
Created a marketplace for people building on the Google network.
Begun policing widgets not on their network, a topic that deserves its own post.
Not only are dumb companies buying into the everything Google strategy, but even some semi-intelligent ones are. After logging into Dreamhost recently I was shocked to see them integrating Google apps and email on all customer domains. What happens if/when Google buys GoDaddy? How does Dreamhost compete when Google gives away hosting as a loss leader?
There is big risk to Google consuming the web. The issue is not only information diversity and innovation, but what happens when your Google account gets hacked? I regret my reliance on Gmail, but am unsure how to fix it.
Dan Durick posted about how the economy can affect search behavior. Look at the numerous sources and graphics included in his post. It adds a lot of depth and credibility to the piece, because it relies on third party data and is more work than a typical spammer is willing to do (though many low level linkbaits do source 3rd party stats as a strategy). Anytime you add in 3rd party data you become a guy speaking truth and teaching rather than the salesman. Just by glancing at that blog post and knowing what you already know about search and market research data you have a big advantage over 99% of your market.
Lee Dodd announced the "Biggest Webmaster Forum Contest Ever!" offering over $25,000 in prizes, and 5 chances to win a free 3 month trial of our SEO training program.
While I signed up nearly a year ago, I just recently started using Twitter. As a marketer I find it both interesting and fascinating...as it is more transparent than most social networks are. People often write back and forth using @username when they want to send another person a message, which sometimes draws you into other conversations. And since everyone you follow is someone you know or related to someone else you know it is really easy to get pulled in. And the social pressure of being associated with everything you do (no anonymous domain registration here folks) prevents Twitter from becoming a spam filled mess. Maybe there is some way such a system could be applied to search?
People can subscribe to get short blurbs from you (and whoever else they like), and the system is almost instantly self-correcting. It is the complete opposite of email spam hype marketing - if you want off the list you get off the list. If I were to spew nothing but hollow hyped up marketing messages nobody would subscribe (and many would unsubscribe). Conversely, if I help give people a laugh (and share the goodness of pearl drink worldwide) people subscribe. Next to peace and SEO, pearl drink is the best thing you can spread.
Ok...back on topic, so where was I.... I recently started using Twitter. From a social network and marketing standpoint Twitter is worth checking out and understanding. If you would like to check it out you can sign up here, and if you want to follow me, I am awall19.
And by far, Neil Patel is out in front on the "people subscribed to" list, with over 8,000! I think (once he finds time to) he will finish up writing that final blog post about stopping everything else in favor of reading Twitter 23.9 hours a day. ;)
Hitwise shows plural keywords drive more traffic to shopping sites than singular terms. Perhaps singular versions tend to be more navigational and brand related, whereas plural terms are more informational and transactional in nature.
Mark Cuban offers a killer quote on the failed branding of newspaper blogs
Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business. ... If I worked for the NY Times, or any other media company with any level of brand equity, I would have done everything possible to define the section of our website that offers ongoing as anything other than a blog. I would make up a name. Call it say.....RealTime Reporting.
Indeed it is hard to demonize blogs as being inferior while integrating them into the company under the same name. :)
The Google
Eric Schmidt spoke on video about Google Health about 2 weeks ago. Interesting to think about how Google can provide cloud computing services to any complex or high value vertical (like employment, education, health, financial services) to gain major mindshare and a new revenue stream. And after getting all the publicity Google for some reason took their video down...hmm. Why did they do that?
When a former Google customer (someone who has quit AdWords out of disgust) asks an SEO to help “get free search traffic from Google” it represents a person who is no longer willing or able to play by the established rules. It’s not a sign of criminal intent, mind you, so don’t go hyperbolic on me with the BlackHat WhiteHat stuff. But from a demeanor perspective, that former customer is willing to try things outside of the “let’s do business together” avenue, without telling Google, and recognizing that he is now in competition with Google, his former business partner.
No More Abandoned Carts - even VeriSign is getting into creating quality linkbait. This is what corporate linkbait will look like in a year or two. And like it or not we are probably going to need to be at that level if we want to keep competing.
A year from now heavily advertised linkbait followed by a 301 redirect will be one of the most potent SEO weapons on the market.
In addition to Bulgarian, Dutch, French, Italian, and Slovakian, readers have already volunteered for these languages: Portuguese (Portugal and Brazilian), Spanish, Russian, Czech, Swedish, Tagalog, Croatian, Japanese, Romanian, Danish, German, simplified & tradisional Chinese, Croatian, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Polish. Are there any other languages where you can help translate it?
My goal is to make this the most widely available document on SEO across every language possible. For each language it gets translated into, I will donate $50 to Amnesty International. The first translation in each language will also be referenced from the original guide, which has a lot of traffic and link equity.
Some readers who came across The Blogger's Guide to SEO asked me if it was ok to translate it. It is Creative Commons licensed, so please feel free to. Please comment on this post referencing the language you are going to translate to. I will link to translations from the official guide, which has many thousands of inbound links and hundreds of daily pageviews, so it should send some traffic to your site.
Wired considered it spamming when Search Engine Land mentioned that people can submit articles to the Wired How-to Wiki. That same Wired now offers a guide on how to 'Google Bomb' an Enemy. For those scoring at home, Wired does not really care about spam...they just want controversy and pageviews.
Following last year's pillage of general web directories, Google reset the PageRank on many article syndication directories to PR3 or PR0. EzineArticles did not get edited, perhaps because they have more stringent editorial guidelines, they were a known market leader, or they were a Google case study. Just about every other article syndication directory did.
About 3 years ago I create a directory of directories so I could keep track of new directories. But very few of the directory owners considered editorial quality. Eventually they started polluting their directories with site-wide links to payday loan websites.
On the paid side some people who had success creating one low quality directory decided to create a dozen more pay for inclusion websites, often cross promoting them with discounts...after you buy one they thank you and offer you the ability to buy inclusion in the other dozen at half price.
And on the cheap end, it got to the point where lots of companies like Directory Maximizer do directory submissions for a dime to a quarter each, allowing you to space out the submissions, mix anchor text, and mix listing descriptions. And while many of these services claim to be "SEO friendly" and offer services in bulk, you can see that a search engineer might not hold the same opinion. :)
By the time a technique is cheaply and reliably outsourced the value has already been diminished or will soon become worthless.
lower cost and automation means more people will use the technique
the lower cost often appeals to those making lower quality websites
the more people who use a technique the more likely it is for search engineers to kill it
Andy Hagans used to charge $900 for doing a couple dozen article submissions, and back when he did it, it was probably worth it. He marketed it to highbrow clients who used it to promote quality website. Lower end webmasters probably could not justify paying $900 for that service.
And you could get a hand rolled product of similar quality to what Andy charged $900 for, but at a price $870 cheaper from We Submit Articles. About a month after I showed Andy that We Submit Articles website, where someone was selling services similar to his for $30, he changed his model to promote linkbait stuff, moving himself up the value chain, creating something that is much harder and more expensive to replicate.
Article submission software and article remixing software came out, only making the issue worse. Andy probably could have continued his old model for another year and been fine, but he knew that Google would eventually pull the rug out from under it. It took a while, but the article directories had their PageRank edited.
Search engineers can't stop everything, but by the time a technique is cheaply and reliably outsourced the value has already been diminished or will soon become worthless.
lower cost and automation means more people will use the technique
the lower cost often appeals to those making lower quality websites
the more people who use a technique the more likely it is for search engineers to kill it
When you think of the web from that perspective it is easy to see why my current business model is so much better than the old model. The community interaction allows for deeper understanding, and helps people move past using just the techniques that are quick, cheap, and easy.
Parasitic hosts and upload sites, social media sites full of spam, endless cross-referencing internal tagging, blog carnivals...all are quick, cheap, and easy. What do you think is the next quick, cheap, and easy marketing technique that Google will kill?
When I was on my multi-month critical review of Google a few months back, I frequently highlighted how the perception of spam or quality was often associated with the brand (or lack of brand) behind the content. Stuntdubl wrote a post about brand size reviewing engineer double talk and how brand perception may control the sustainability of your site.
Many people and many sites disappear. For how long just depends on who was behind the infraction and how real their site looks and feels.
About a month ago I asked a friend of mine if he knew that one of his sites got banned from Google. He said no. Then he went and looked at it and asked "why the f*ck did they do that?" His site that was penalized was exceptionally similar to his sites that still rank, with one big exception. It used a default Wordpress theme. Thus it looked like it was probably spam to a search engineer or under-waged remote worker judging a bunch of sites in a rush.
As soon as human editing becomes a big piece of search, humans start thin slicing and start making errors. Once you are gone will anyone notice? Can you escalate the issue to a high enough priority to get your "glitch" fixed?
If you have any top ranking income earning site that exhibits the following traits, look for your income to drop sharply sometime in 2008.
has a default Wordpress design
has multiple hyphens in the domain name
exclusively monetizes via Google AdSense, placed top and to the left in the content area of the page
does not have a clear way to contact you
lacks an about us section
is registered with fake whois
Some cops enjoy handing out speeding tickets. Thin slice your site as though you are a search engineer who enjoys killing spam, but has a quota to kill 1,000 sites a day. Does your site pass the sniff test? Are there areas that could use some improvement?
The democratic nature of the web is a unique concept, but Google no longer uses that line in their marketing brochures. Sometimes the web needs defused.
If you have something that makes money, you need to make it look like it is worthy of its position and earnings. Or else Google will exert as much editorial influence and quality scores as they can to take $$$$$ from you, all in the name of what's good for the customer and helping out "mom and pop webmaster".
After all, when Google Local, YouTube, Google Knol, Google Shopping, and Google Checkout are fully integrated next to AdWords, mom and pop webmaster won't even need to own a website. They can do everything they need on Google.com. How benevolent.
The semi-legal and illegal spread of copyright information keeps driving value toward the aggregators. Google, which already has a music search service and owns YouTube, is looking to give away licensend music to win marketshare in China.
Vivendi SA's Universal Music and about 100 other foreign and domestic record labels have been working with Top100.cn, a Beijing-based Web site that currently sells licensed music downloads for 1 yuan (about 14 cents) each, and Google. Together, Top100.cn and Google would provide free MP3 downloads with value added services, people familiar with the plans say. The new search options, for example, promise to give users free access to a database of information about their favorite artists -- from concert listings to links to special ring tones.
If Google licenses lyrics and allows user feedback on songs, they prettymuch aggregated the entire value stream in that marketplace, at least outside of experiencing live music. Fierce competition for attention will drive virtually all publishing models in that direction. What do you offer that is live or that aggregators can't take from you?
Some people are saying that Google #6 issue was just a glitch and not a penalty or a filter. And sure, according to Google's current classification, that change was a glitch.
But lots of glitches have commonalities amongst the sites that were hit. Like many of the sites that got hit by that #6 profile were in some ways stale. And perhaps stale was just a symptom of dated SEO strategy.
You can learn from glitches, because many times glitches show you where and how Google is trying to shape the web. Glitches are side effects of algorithms with a targeted intent, but with too many unintended consequences and/or casualties.
Look back a couple years, and at one point in time SEO Book was not ranking for SEO Book while Paypal was not ranking for Paypal. Add on a bit more market feedback from other sites that were hit and it seemed sites were getting filtered out for having their anchor text too well aligned. That glitch was fixed in a few days to a month (depending on how far over the line your site was and how important your brand was) but the underlying idea of whacking sites for having anchor text that was too focused was indeed a direction the algorithms moved.
Look back a few years more to the Florida update. Some people called pieces of it a glitch or thought that the whole thing needed to be undone. Sometimes lowering the keyword proximity of a page title that was not in the search results brought it back to ranking. And yes the update was too aggressive and they had to back off of it. But filtering out unnatural copy was indeed a direction the algorithm moved.
Glitches reveal engineer intent. And they do it early enough that you have time to change your strategy before your site is permanently filtered or banned. When you get to Google's size, market share, and have that much data, glitches usually mean something.
I was just voting on the PPC section of the SEMMYS and I saw some new posts I liked a lot.
It is not the comprehensive list of all the best posts of the year, but most of them are of great quality and well worth a read. It is nice to read the best stuff someone else spent a whole year digging up. Great job Matt.
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.
People who are well established can trade on reputation and attract strong enough clients to not need to perform tests to learn the algorithms intimately well.
Recently another well known marketer put out a video saying domain names were irrelevant to SEO. Then they got feedback from viewers who said they thought that statement was wrong. And then their reply sent to thousands of members on their list included
It's true that your domain name has no REAL effect on your SERPS.
That answer is intuitive, but it is also incorrect. The only way one would claim that as fact is if one has not done any testing recently.
It is one thing to be wrong, but it is another thing to be wrong, be called out on it, and stand by your incorrect claim. People are spending good money to read incorrect and/or outdated information. Unfortunate really, but if you are already doing well you don't need to track and test every little thing to keep doing well. Very few gurus openly sharing information have thin affiliate and newly launched test sites that back up their claims. But it is getting harder to succeed with thin affiliate sites as Google becomes creative director of content development.
Share REALLY Good Tips & Die
Most established people are too lazy or too busy to do in depth testing. And if they are doing it, they probably do not want to share it publicly. Share a hole and watch it get plugged. After a search engineer reads your blog and destroys one of your sites you mentioned, it makes it much harder to want to reveal tips and algorithmic holes with hard evidence behind them. Show your proof and watch Google burn it to the ground. Even if you know what you are doing you can't overcome a hand edit unless it was unjust AND they care enough about your site to let it rank again. You were right, but only until you opened your big mouth. :)
Much of the game of relevancy is a mind control exercise. The conversation revolves around debates including "should be" or "in an ideal world" rather than "how it is".
The Endless Sea of Tests & Noise
People newer to the field have less to risk by being aggressive, place a lower value on their time, are generally more excited about the pursuit, are more willing to try things that established people may not, and are more willing to share their results. But many of them have limited exposure, limited confidence, and/or are drowned out by an endless sea of incorrect information. With so many people saturating the SEO market it is getting harder to be the person first with the scoop. Today blogs are a lot like forums were a few years back. There is no way you could ever get any work done if you subscribed to all the SEO blogs, so it is impossible to read all the information.
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
If you create a public facing SEO brand, so much of your time goes into brand management and marketing that it is hard to have time to launch many new sites unless you have scaled out a staff. If you have scaled out a staff, you must keep more of your secrets to yourself, because getting a site burned or losing a competitive advantage not only hurts you, but also hurts everyone who works for you. This really hit home after Google killed a site that I had a team working on.
I Was Just Looking At Your Site!
Some of the people who introduced themselves on SEO Book recently mentioned that they were in fields or owned sites that directly competed with some of my sites. If I share all my best ideas with them for free on the blog and they share almost none of their best ideas with me that gets a bit hard to compete with them on my secondary sites, especially if I am competing with them and search engineers decide to pillage my sites. ;)
More Work for Less $ = Bad Trend
The market is getting more competitive. So longer hours are required to achieve similar profits from thin sites. People who see and feel this trend are not only working extra to make up for it, but are also working extra to establish a firmer foothold for the future. 1 hour of work today may be more effective than 2 hours of work next year, or 3 hours of work the following year. But after you get that network effect behind a site the ball is rolling down hill. Gravity is on your side.
SEO as a Subset of Marketing
As it gets harder to fake it people make more legitimate sites offering more value. But as their sites become more embedded in the web doing SEO tests related to links become less and less relevant because it is harder to isolate variables. Dominating the search results becomes a game dominated by the people who are the best at spreading ideas. And so with each passing day SEO for most webmasters is more of a subset of marketing than an independent discipline.
With about 4,000 members signed up so far I figured it would be good to have an SEO Book introductions thread. Please use this thread to introduce yourself, and give feedback on how we can make this site better for you.
Webmasters currently face link rot as a major website maintenance problem. As we rely more on Google and other third parties for features such as hosting, ads, and content syndication what happens when some of the business relationships that are opening up content fall away or search engines reorganize and rebrand their offerings?
A few weeks back I made a post about the book being a dying format, and in that post I have a Google book snippet. Within a week that snippet was broken. I had a Google CPA ad integrated into one of my major websites and the ad went away, breaking 10% of a large site and making it look like spam.
Even some of the services that are not broke will likely be drastically different in a few years. Google maps is really open because they need marketshare, but after they become the clear market leader will they stay fairly open? How long until we have ads in everything?
A good webmaster service that would be exceptionally useful is something that scours websites and looks for broken stuff. Think a Xenu Link Sleuth for multimedia. Another would be how to guides on how we can enable interactivity without becoming too reliant on any third parties that break our sites.
Google and Amazon are both pushing to sell ebooks directly aggressively. An article in the NYT mentions a new device Amazon will offer for reading ebooks, but I don't think the problem with books and ebooks is that they need a better reader.
The big problem is that the web is quickly becoming more interactive and diverse and useful, making books irrelevant for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.
Personal Relevancy
The larger a book becomes, the less likely it is to be relevant to any individual, and the less value each word has. People who may disagree with some concepts in your book may agree with pieces that they would be willing to cite if they could only find it. But they will never cite your information unless they can find it.
No matter what people believe, in almost every case someone has already shared the same belief. Format it in small sharable chunks with good findability and people will cite it.
People may want to consume relevant bits. Cognitive dissidents. Summaries that let us dive deeper if we want to. Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.
Rarely is something that is fully polished, comprehensive, and dated what we need. More likely it is easier to learn by stepping into a process and learning one piece at a time, starting with your interests, then expanding as we run into additional problems. Even with blog posts, people justifiably complain about my writing blog posts in spurts, and using links that are not descriptive enough to merit a click-through.
Leveraging the Web
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Writers should use the web for what it is worth. Break books into pieces, read and write daily, cite sources, go back and polish the best pieces and package them, but try to keep each idea as sharp as possible.
Knowing how to create a useful information product is not enough to maximize profits. A big flaw with my ebook is that it has soooo much information in it, but it is hard to show the value of it because it is a single item. You can't tell how much stuff was waded through to write it, that it is mentally and emotionally draining to revise, and it doesn't help that most Internet marketing ebooks are lead generation devices or affiliate marketing tools. Someone could sell much less and look like they were selling more, just by using better packaging.
The Inevitable Death of No & Low Value Networks
Just like chunks of content are getting broken down into smaller bits, so will content creation companies. Choice and technology are disintermediating most of the gatekeepers. You and I don't need publishers for distribution, and the fear associated with that is the real reason why the US DoJ recently whored itself out to telecom companies. Many people in positions of power abuse copyright and are afraid of open markets. From the Fake Steve blog:
[TV] was a wonderful system. For you [TV Networks] anyway. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middlemen, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain -- the consumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed mountains of dog shit, and the producers of content who were at your mercy and had to negotiate with this tiny number of networks who operated, let's be honest here, as a kind of cartel.
Artists Become Publishers
If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.
You “artists” out there generating content will have to learn to publish if you want to participate in the Internet economy. Maybe that’s why Google spends so much trying to help the Internet advance… because it helps Google disintermediate the middlemen. When will Google bring us fast quantities of ISP-free, wireless bandwidth?
One day there will be no more middlemen. And then, Google will squeeze you for more profits. After all, growth needs to come from somewhere, right? When all the middlemen are gone, what’s left? You are. For every producer there are hundreds of consumers hungry for more. Will Google offer rewards for you to procreate? Of course it will. It has to. It’s Google’s destiny to manage the creative class.
Contrary to popular belief, selling is not about tricking people into buying what they don't want. Yes, there are liars and thieves but that is not selling. That is lying and stealing.
Selling is about getting people to trust you enough to tell you their needs or desires and you satisfying those needs or desires. It is not always easy but it’s certainly not complicated.
The Key is to Not Look Like You are Selling
If markets keep getting more competitive and artists become publishers then I think publishers need to start becoming artists. Almost anything you want to consume has free samples available online. Some are copyright violations, others are free marketing, and some are both.
Here is Dane Cook on why it is so hard to win an argument against a woman:
the trust and goodwill you built up through sharing information, personal interaction, and the above points
Even when we are not buying we are still paying with attention. Familiarity and attention are early steps in sales. The WSJ wrote about how Disney kept a low-fi feel to Marié Digby's YouTube videos. She mixes in a few of her own original songs with old classics that have been viewed MILLIONS of times prior to dropping her first album. It is much easier to launch if you start off with a large fanbase.
Why it Helps to View Marketing as an Art
People are lazy and selfish. Especially anonymous people. If you try to replicate the links of an older competitor using the same techniques, many of the webmasters who linked at them will ignore you, even if your content is better than the stuff they are already linking at.
In all honesty, profit margins come more from perception than reality. If you are going to stay profitable you have to see the wave coming in and stay out in front of it, especially because as marketing techniques get abused they stop working. I am doing things today that I know I would not be profitable in a few years if I didn't go out of my way to lay the foundation to make them look and feel exceptionally legitimate today. The only differences between legitimacy and illegitimacy are trust, familiarity, and perception.
The Short Side of Web Publishing
This post is not to suggest that the web is a utopia that is better than all other sources of information, but more that it is cheaper, faster, easier, and provides something that is good enough to satisfy most demands for free.
The web has downsides to it, like promoting hyped up information pollution as a form of marketing. But the reality of it is that everyone is short on time. And few deeply understand the publishing dynamics of search, so when people get screwed by finding bad information on the web or make bad decisions because of ideas they discovered over the web they will likely blame themselves for it.
Imagine if virtually everything you chose to trust eventually betrayed you. You try to create shifting rules and push your worldview to try to make it manageable, but even in your attempts to do so people call out the self serving nature of your suggestions. Every day thousands of people share free information about how to take advantage of you, and in return you wade through garbage and do everything you can to suppress it, but work for a company with policies that encourage information pollution. Even when you try to stop something, your company will still spread that message to anyone willing to look for it for a dollar or two a click, and affiliates quickly race to fill in the hole your hand edit created. You can't suppress them. You hand edited one company, but is it fair to leave their largest competitor? Will someone call you out on that today? Will it matter when they do?
CollegeScholarships.org recently launched a web design scholarship, offering students interested in web design a chance to win $5,000 for designing a Wordpress template for a scholarship site.
I wasn't going to mention it here (figuring I have mentioned that site too many times recently with covering the 301 redirect from the old site, eh?), but I know many designers read this site, and so far there are only 2 entrants. The scholarship was going to close on the 13th of August, but I asked Daniel to extend the submission deadline to the 18th, and he was up for that, so there is about a week left before the submission deadline. The winner will still be announced on August 20th.
If you are a student into web design please apply! If you know people who may be interested in it please pass the word on.
In May, a virus in a banner ad on tomshardware.com automatically switched visitors to a Web site that downloaded "malware" -- malicious software designed to attack a computer -- onto the visitor's computer. ScanSafe Inc., one of the first security firms to discover the virus, estimates the banner ad was on the site for at least 24 hours and infected 50,000 to 100,000 computers before Tom's Hardware removed it.
As traffic streams consolidate and ad networks improve in efficiency many people who get marginalized are going to get more insidious in their attempts to make money. This fear will further consolidate web traffic toward trusted brands and place a premium on central ad networks.
I have a partner who runs some older authority domains who is looking for a full time link builder. The job is a work from home position, available immediately, and pays $2500 a month. We are looking for someone who is self disciplined, creative, and aggressive.
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.
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.
As email filtering gets better many of the true scammers of the web are shifting to distributing adware on websites. As terrorism is used to help politicians push their agendas, fear marketing and the concept of security are only going to grow in importance online as well.
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.
I have been writing too many in theory type posts, so here is a post offering many practical tips to increase productivity and lower your site development costs.
are market timing, passion, and a unique data source. If you have none of those you are screwed. Of course you can get by well with only one of them for a long time, but the more of them you have the more sustainable your business model will be.
If you improve the value of another service based largely on their infrastructure or data, it usually doesn't take much for them to roll your offering into their well known brand, and kill your market position.
I recently read John Reese's PDF announcing the launch of his new Income.com site. In the PDF he talks about how competitive internet marketing will become in the coming 5 years, and stated what are the two main ingredients to large sustainable profit in that type of marketplace. The first is on the concept of optimization:
The key to dominating any market online (now or in the future) is simple. It comes down to who has the highest average visitor value and who has the most traffic.
So I just got approved for Google's pay per action advertising account. It was exceptionally easy to sign up, perhaps frighteningly so. Currently there is little risk to using Google cost per action ads, but long-term I think the risk proposition is much uglier than most people appreciate.
Because I offer a marketing related ebook and blog about marketing stuff I get about 20 emails a month asking me if I reviewed product x or heard of person y. Most of the time these are hyped short lived marketing products or services that are repackaged ideas from 6 months earlier that upsell people on other junk. This is my general review guide on what types of products and services are trustworthy.
When I was new to the web I was excited when I would get things to rank from scratch, thinking I did a great job of SEO, but if your results are effective and consider applicable risks does it matter what techniques you used to promote a website?
Elite Retreat just finished, and I think this one was even more fun than the last one. Wendy and Kris both blogged it. Thanks to everyone who attended and spoke.
TicketMaster, a near monopoly which hated ticket auctions in the past, now auctions seats for a premium. You can bid on an auction for row 1, and if the minimum bid drops below the required amount to win they will automatically drop you into an auction for row 2, and so on.
Update: After reading Alan Greenspan's book I realize that not all central bankers are bad, but I still believe there are a lot of dirty people in international banking.
A bit of a do-gooder tip here, but when a main story gets cited by bloggers many of us tend to link at the same mainstream media source, thus voting for that source as the best article on that topic, when it is often the first perspective we found, but not the best.
When considering who to link to, it is worth it to take a minute or three to do a few news searches and blog searches to find better articles from sources that are more trustworthy than the mainstream media.
Not sure if this is something new or not, but I just saw a CNN Money article which linked at a Wikipedia article about Joe Kraus as background on him. Given how much the search engines already trust the Wikipedia imagine how much exposure it will be getting if the mainstream media regularly cite it and deep link at their biographies!
Just the fact that the mainstream media would link at articles that anyone can edit shows a big shift in power over the last couple years.
