Webmasterworld recently had a good thread about signs of low quality websites. The less a person knows about your topic the more likely they are to rely on general signs of quality (or lack of) when consider if they should link at your site or not.

Common Quality Questions:

Is the design clean? Is the content well organized? Do they have major misspellings on their homepage? Who is behind the site? Is it easy to contact them? Are they referenced by any other credible sources? How unique and useful is the content? How aggressively are ads blended into the content? etc. etc. etc.

Why Proxies for Quality Are Important:

Recently someone spread a God hates fags song website. Friends were instant messaging me about whether it was real or not. Some journalists guessed it wrong. People are getting better at creating fakes. The easier we make it for people to trust us in a snap judgement the more people will trust us (and link to our sites).

These proxies for trust are important, especially when you are new to an established industry, are in a new industry with a small community of support, are in a rapidly growing industry that the media is having a feeding frenzy over, or are the seedy arm of a larger industry.

Example of the Importance of Outside Perception:

If an industry is new, the early leaders of that industry might be determined by mainstream media perception (or other perception outside of that industry). Using blogs as an example, if the media did not constantly pump up the Weblogs Inc. story that company still might be unprofitable today. That media exposure lead to more media exposure, gave the sites the link juice to help them rank, and gave them brand exposure that brought in advertisements.

Relating This to the SEO Industry:

With SEO it is easier to be seen as a SEO expert if you are first seen as an expert on search. It is easier to be trusted as an expert on any topic if your site does not flag common signals of crap.

I just got a link from the WSJ to my keyword research tool, but if I would have scored lower on the proxies for value maybe they never would have linked. And when you get that type of link you can leverage it as an additional signal of trust that makes it easier for others to link at you.

With BlackHatSEO.com, I mentioned as seen in Clickz and Search Engine Watch, but what I didn't mention was that both mentions were brief and in the same syndicated article. When the London Times interviewed me about that site I quickly put up another as seen in at the top of the home page, which will make it easier to get more exposure. You want your press coverage to lead to more press coverage, because those are some of the most trusted links and links that money alone usually can't buy.

But I am Already Doing Well:

Many people who buy consultations are already doing far better than I would expect them to do giving some of the obvious flaws I see with their site structure and marketing methods. Some state that they are already doing well. The point of these sorts of signs of crap is not that you need to fill all the holes to do well, or that you can't do well if you do not fill them, but imagine how much better a site can do after it fixes obvious errors if it was already doing well when it had many errors that undermined its credibility and linkability.

I have seen many ad studies that empirically proved that the person doing the study did not collect enough data to publish their findings as irrefutable facts. While recently split testing my new and old landing pages I came across an example that collected far more data than many of these studies do:

Same ad title. Same ad copy. Same display URL. Same keyword. And yet one has 3x the CTR as the other.

If you collect enough small data samples you can prove whatever point you want to. And you may even believe you are being honest when you do so. Numbers don't lie, but they don't always tell the truth, either.

Want to know when your data is accurate? Create another ad in the split group that is an exact copy of one of the ads being tested. Once its variances go away with the other clone then the other split test data might be a bit more believable.

As time passes algorithms change and more is required to be remarkable, and easy link opportunities die off. In the past I was a big fan of donating for links, but eventually the typical page that you can donate and get a link from gets filled with junk co-citation that puts the page in a bad neighborhood. For example, Moodle has a donation page that says

Donators over US$50 can add their link to this page (it seems to bring good Google Juice!). Please remember to hit the "continue" button after paying to see the form where you can enter this linking information yourself.

It is no surprise that the page has a bunch of gambling links on it. When I donated in December of 2004 that link probably carried weight (as the page was yet to be spammed out and the link relevancy algorithms were not as advanced back then). No way a sophisticated search engine would still want to count that same link today though.

If you can get a PR6 or PR7 link for a one time $50 fee then eventually the market is going to drive its true value toward that price. And if all your authority rests on those links then your risk to reward ratio of owning a business with a foundation in sand is not good.

I also donated to Mozdev for a link back in 2004. Soon after I did it many people followed my path, spammed the page up with a ton of donations, and the price was increased to $1,000. Now if you donate there you can't even get a link.

I just saw on the 2007 Bloggies page that they no longer allow you to get links for donating prizes. Another link opportunity that was closed off.

Google's duplicate content filter improvements and changing crawling priorities were largely about keeping many undesirable link sources (like low quality directories that will sell anyone a link) out of their index.

Some link sources are closed off due to greedy people taking advantage of them (like people offering to donate prizes to Bloggies winners and never donating the prizes, or directory owners selling hollow PageRank without enforcing any editorial quality standards), some are closed off due to algorithmic improvements, and others are closed off because as time passes you have to do more to be remarkable.

Many of the best ranking SEO sites rank well because they have crappy submit your site to search engine buttons that were placed on many authoritative college pages long ago. You can't compete by hoping that naive webmasters or webmasters no longer maintaining their websites will change their pages.

You have to find where the current conversations are today and find ways to get people to want to talk about you today. Instead of trying the search engine submission button maybe people would be willing to link to SEO for Firefox. Instead of creating a better Yahoo! Directory or a better DMOZ the popular new directories are social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us. Find out where people are going rather than where they have been.

If you are first to market, it is worth doing something well such that you create the market standard, and are hard to beat. If someone else already owns a market position you may need to come up with another angle to beat them. The good thing is that now more than ever there are more people actively sharing their thoughts online. If you watch ideas spread all day long (Techmeme, Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. etc. etc.) then it shouldn't be that hard to create a few ideas that will spread. And if you understand how to create ideas that spread, it will be much harder for competitors to duplicate than a profile that is powered exclusively by donation links and other links that will be algorithmically discounted or links that just about anyone can get.

When you are new there is nothing wrong with chipping away at the edges to try to get a bit of a boost from it. But it is still important to learn how to spread ideas. If you understand how to create ideas that will spread and how to spread them, then every day the web is feeding into your future profits. If you are only picking at the market edges then you are fighting algorithmic improvements and the general nature of the web, which will get tougher and tougher every day.

Recently Bambi Fransisco asked Googler Peter Norvig about using wikis in search, in response to Wikia's search threat. Peter Norvig stated

Feedback from users is important, and we will continue to use the sources of user feedback we have been using, and will experiment with more in the future. I think that Google Co-op Custom Search Engine may be the largest current collection of user-generated information for search.

With everyone and their dog learning copy writing, how to pander to audiences, and doing some sort of linkbait to get a vote here and there, search engines are going to have to look for other signs of trust. If they can gain access to offline content that is one potential source of editorial signal for quality, but another which may be equally appealing is passionate guides created by trusted online experts. It takes a lot more to be included in a trusted topic specific search engine than it does to create a single linkbait. And imagine if they looked for co-citation data in those guides. Not sure if it will scale, but if it does, Google furthers the importance of search while gaining a signal of quality that nobody else has access to, which would make it appealing to find a signal of quality there, if there is one, especially since few marketers are talking about it.

Dan Thies, an expert in many fields, recently announced his retirement in a podcast highlighting the increasing complexity of internet marketing, and his future plans as an instructor at StomperNet.

Specialization is Needed for Growth:

In Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, a 1945 article about creating a memory extension, he stated:

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Many Great Markets Grow Fast:

Even within a field that once cottage industry can feel like a broad niche. Fields worth being in will eventually grow beyond the means of one person. Danny Sullivan recently stated:

This is rocket science. SEO is only not seen as rocket science BY THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW IT. Everyone in the industry forgets how much knowledge they've acquired, learned, absorbed to the point it becomes second nature. I've joked at that some point, how second nature it is reminds me of a classic scene from The Matrix

Did you see Todd's recent video about Digg? Did you see this .htaccess file for fixing duplicate content issues? Did you know audio search can match words in videos? Did you know you can use geotargeting on AdSense ads, or that they now allow some publishers to pick a list of video ads to run, or that they allow advertisers to filter out an unlimited number of bad publishers?

You Can't Do Everything:

And that is one of the things that makes the web difficult...it is so easy to think that you can do everything that you try to do everything. A few years ago I was a moderator at about a half dozen forums, had many clients, took on a client who had an asp website and started learning how to tweak the asp code, and answered every email I got even if a person would ask me 20 questions in a row without buying anything. That works well if you are unpopular and your job becomes your identity, but eventually that tears your health apart, and as soon as you start trying to live away from the computer it seems a bit silly. You need to start filtering things.

Once you have significant demand or significant market influence the market will push your prices higher but your time toward a commodity and force you to filter.

Signs of a Bad Customer:

Daily I get emails with subjects like "Site review for a broke man :)" but the problem is most websites and businesses are broke on many levels. That email subject that I just mentioned... that person stated they read my ebook, but he didn't even have unique page titles on his site. How is that possible?

And then if you reply, you get more emails until you stop answering them or provide obtuse answers. They ask can I run my ads with Google's ads. You answer read Google's TOS. Or eventually you stop answering.

And even worse, if you seriously engage bad customers who refuse to listen they not only waste your time, but also do stupid things like spam your site, and then blow up when you stop them.

Long after they give up on ineffective marketing methods and broken websites you will have another customer pitching the same or requesting things like the following:

the author of SEO Book,
I just want to say:

the contents of your SEO Book is ok, but a horrible problem is that most of your contents are organized under completely wrong English grammar, which made it a hard job for translators.

Before you put your SEO Book online, you should know that readers would be from every corner of the world, somebody will not fully understand your SEO Book, if their Engish is not good enough, of if you wrote many many sentences organized under wrong grammar.

I don't know where you are from, but all those disordered contents just made peope think maybe English was only your second language, maybe you were not a native English speaker, at least, not well enough to compose a "socalled" book.

The author, I just want to suggest you that you ask somebody else that is a native English speaker to check all the contents of your SEO Book, the most important point is to revise all the wrong sentences organized under wrong grammar, which already made translators hate you .......

The contents of my SEO Book is ok? I didn't realize my target audience was short fused translators that use bad grammar in attempts to criticise mine. But live and learn, eh?

You know you are answering too many emails when people are sending you support questions for competing products and services, and out of making my email less easy to find other webmasters have told me they are getting traffic for things like Aaron Wall email address.

Waste Caused By Servicing Bad Customers:

And even if you want to help people you end up getting jaded by some, frustrated, and miss others. A couple months ago a customer wanted to pay me to work a day at $500 an hour and I didn't have enough time to, even though they were pre-sold. Refusing thousands of dollars of income for a few hours work is absurd.

All Value Systems Are Challenged as They Grow or Change:

The reactive (not proactive) Web 2.0 news sites echo the echos. Jimmy Wales, on his open source search project list said:

One of the things that I believe in passionately is genuine human communities, as opposed to "crowdsourcing".

What do I mean by that?

I mean, people who get to know each other, over time, as real human beings, and through that process, gain a sense of trust and responsibility for each other and for the task at hand. So for me, if we are to succeed here, this is the first place we need to focus attention...

And in spite of that belief system he decided to apply nofollow to Wikipedia in an attempt to filter out some of the noise, but odds are that it is too little too late. Google trusts Wikipedia too much for people to stop spamming it.

Every community or authority system, left unchecked eventually kills itself unless it reacts to the shifting marketplace - just see Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

Every Publishing Format is Dated or Full of Noise:

Forums build friendships, but generally are noisy. I have had my instant messengers turned off for most of the past 3 months and spoke to one friend who just told me he started his IM list with a new username from scratch. Many blog posts (especially on my blog) are incomplete thoughts or just echo what is already stated elsewhere.

It is important to consume information from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats. Unless you have market leverage and inside sources it is easier to create value by relating information from other markets to your own field rather than trying to always be the first with the story, especially if you are an individual competing against groups or entire companies which have more resources.

Growth Forces Change:

As time passes, we learn, markets change, and business models evolve each of us find ourselves doing different jobs at different points on the value chain. At the low end, some of us work half the day to pay interest on debt as slaves controlled by computers:

Early this year, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., using a new computerized scheduling system, will start moving many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge retailer but could be a major headache for employees.

But as you gain trust, mindshare, and market influence it is easier to create real value if you filter out the noise, but as you learn and time becomes more scare what used to be useful becomes noise. In an ideal world you would be able to learn from your students, and have the price point act as a filter to prevent potentially bad students from wanting to participate. If your framework is set up well your students will want to help one another as well. This site (and the associated business models) are probably quite far from that ideal world, so that is part of the reason it is important to keep trying new things.

Trying New Business Models:

Our early feedback on the first Elite Retreat was great. Chris Hooley knows his shit, and he said the following about me:

Aaron Wall gave his SEO seminar (which started with the basics then was nice and detailed. I think he could have gone a bit further with specific new NEW linking strategies, but he was still pretty good and to his defense my expectations were probably extremely high). I loved when he spoke of trusted sites like wikipedia and how to leverage their power without being at all shady.
Aaron may be the most brilliant single mind in the SEO space. As he spoke, he brought up tons of his web properties (some that you may not even know of) and explained in depth how / why each of them worked. He also used our (attendees) spaces as examples and busted through numerous tools.

which I take as a huge compliment coming from him.

The hardest part with working in a group of successful people is generally related to egos and making time for everyone, but once you get past that the sum of the parts turns out to be greater than the pieces.

• Would I be anywhere near as good at working with large clients if I wasn't working with Caveman? No way.

• Would ReviewMe have went as well if I launched it myself? No way.
• Would I have wanted to put on Elite Retreat by myself? No way.
• I can only create so much content myself. My cohort in crime that works on my content websites is a well oiled machine that can produce quality content for less than $20 a page and in two weeks he went from new to a top 500 Digger. But the key to working with people like him and getting full value out of each other is trusting one another AND limiting how many people you work with. Working with 3 great partners is probably far better than working with 10 bad partners. Working with 3 great clients is better than working with 10 bad clients.

What Are Some Ways I Filter?

• Instead of answering the same question over and over again I sometimes make blog posts I can point at. For example, if someone asks "how do I build links" I send them a link.

• Give people a free spot to start from. If people ask for a free intro to SEO to see if my book may or may not be worthwhile I send them a link.
• If they instant message me and I do not know them I usually block them.
• If they send me an email and I respond only to read "you need to confirm your email..." I delete it.
• If they are a blow hard or start their introduction with excuses or reasons they can't change and won't listen to suggestions do not service them.
• If I call the support center of a monopoly to cancel something I lie and say I want more services so I actually get a human response instead of being lied to when they say they are overwhelmed with calls (thanks Verizon).
• If a telemarketer calls I am never me and never home. In fact I just moved or died.

Filtering Your Way to Profit:

Ultimately your ability to create profit and enrich the world revolves around your willingness to learn, your work ethic, your marketing, your creativity, and how good you are at filtering out noise. And people will hate you for filtering out noise because it may make them feel insignificant, may challenge their value systems, or may make them envious.

If you are so consumed with petty tasks that you stop learning you are dead, and need to come up with new rules to filter noise out of your life. If you don't filter you lose market-share and become less efficient than competitors who are filtering out the bad parts of the market.

What is the difference between good and bad clients? Andrew Goodman stated:

Looking back at the absolute worst business experiences I've had, it makes no particular sense to draw universal conclusions, because some bad stuff can't be predicted.
...
Just now I ran across a reminder of perhaps one of the most toxic I've ever met. And I thought: what might we have noticed that would have filtered this guy out?
...
At the time I missed a key difference: willingness to consider optimization (in the broadest sense of the term) suggestions. Someone who realizes that there are broken parts of the website and poorly optimized images and wants to fix and optimize the user experience as much as possible; vs. the one who disagrees, changes the subject, and uses a combination of profanity and sarcasm in his next anecdote, to further confuse the issue.

If you want to enjoy your job the key is to create an environment of abundance and then come up with algorithms and procedures to filter out the bad parts.

Google creates so much value because they create a framework that connects so many people and allow others to filter out the bad parts. Success is nothing more than pushing self serving rule-sets and giving others enough incentive to make them want to buy into and promote your worldview and filters.