I mentioned offhandedly in a blog post earlier, but I recently got married and am going to have a big wedding on October 5th in Manila. A few days later there is an SEM conference right next door. Marc Hil Macalua, the founder of SEO Philippines, recently announced the 2007 SEM Conference on his blog, which he is giving away free passes to attend here.
The conference is in Makati City on October 9th and 10th, and I promised Marc that I would keynote. While I love Q and A sessions, this will be my first time as a keynote speaker. Luckily Brett Tabke recently posted these great presentation tips and I got to see Frank Schilling's Domain Roundtable keynote. Both of which should both help me do better. My wife will be giving a 40 minute speech on keyword research too, so on top of sharing the nervousness of a big wedding we also get to enjoy public speaking together. We'll start our real honeymoon after the conference. ;)
Many web companies significantly profit from the appearance that they are open, but anything of value eventually needs to have some limitations placed on it. In spite of no longer having MovableType installed on this server, the mt-comments file is one of my most requested files. Registration moves you away from The Tragedy of the Commons to something more sustainable.
Asking people to register suddenly makes them nicer because it makes the audience less robotic, and the most mean spirited people are not like to remain once anonymous disappears. It is harder to leave anonymous troll comments without being figured out if you have to create an account to post them. And who has time to set up 100 different accounts?
If you can sell a few people a day then you can also sell the idea of a free subscription with future bonuses to dozens or hundreds of people. It is easier to sell in small steps over time than it is to go from anonymous to sold. Pre-selling works so well because people not only learn to trust you, but they are already satisfied with your product BEFORE they purchase it. Some people ask me to do an in depth site review to try to sell them my ebook. I tell them that I do not do that because if they are not pre-sold on me then an exchange is likely going to be a mutual waste of time.
Exceptionally large communities are just as bad as anonymous communities because members have little in common, and relevancy rarely is aligned when everyone is the same. Without leaders a community is dominated by spam, poor communication, misunderstandings, and hate. I can't tell you how many porn messages I see browsing YouTube, and I just got this feedback on one of my videos:
No doubt this dude's got about 3/4 sugar in his tank. The "information" in the video is just more rehashed content available anywhere on the countless webmaster & marketing forums found all over the Web. Beyond the gay plagiarist guise, notice the example; seems we have a little Google/CNN toady here pushing THEIR brand not yours. Silly goy; he doesn't mention that all you need to be successful & dominate any industry is be a loyal satanic zionist. That's the true Google/CNN business model.
Posting the same information on my blog got much better feedback. And writing an article for Wordtracker got great feedback too. Why? Likely because I am relevant to their audience, and anyone who has subscribed to a free newsletter and clicked through to the web article likely wants to consume information.
Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy highlights many of the reasons that smaller communities are more meaningful and useful than large communities. If a site gets to the scale of a Google or a YouTube it must deal with endless spam. For most publishers it is best to be semi-porous, to get the benefits of being branded as being open, and allowing just about anyone to join or participate, but have some level of investment (time or money) required to do so in order to minimize noise.
Some of Google's algorithms give sites a +30 type penalty which prevent the site from ranking better than #31. When Google hand penalizes sites it also tends to look the exact same way, with one exception.
When a site is hand edited typically it won't even rank for its brand name related keywords. Assuming your site has at least a few links, I believe most of the automated penalties still allow mydomain.com to rank for mydomain. Although, over time, I suspect Google may change this, as editing out sites for their own brands hurts Google's relevancy.
I need to verify the new CMS is working ok. I figure the easiest way to do so is to do a bunch of stuff with the site. Plus this will help me know what other features should be added. If you have any SEO questions please ask them below. Also if you have any ideas for improving the site layout and feature set I am all ears on that too.
I recently saw a spam AdSense site covering just about every angle of the financial category, with
about a half million rented links (many are sitewide on PR8 and PR9 sites)
thousands of pages of near Markov generated quality content
ultra spammy internal site structure
a bad design
ranking for well over 10,000 unique Google search queries
likely making anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 per day from AdSense
Some high ranking sites can last for years as long as they stay out of the limelight. But when those sites get public scrutiny they need to have enough community influence to make a search engineer fear hand editing them.
As soon as non-corporate sites get mentioned on a popular SEO blog (as a success story or a spammy site) they stand a good chance of getting killed. My site that got hand edited by a Google engineer was nuked after I signed up for Google Webmaster Central and an SEO blogger mentioned the site.
The moral of the story is it is best to not seek exposure as or get categorized as an SEO play unless your brand is strong enough to hurt Google if they try to hurt you.
In the middle of a site upgrade. Stuff might be a bit messy in the next day or two. Comments are back, but you have to create an account to comment. I was getting too many comments from Mr. Penis Pump and Mrs. Dog Collars.
Imagine you are looking for fresh information, and are one of the hundreds of students searching for new scholarships each year. The top result Google shows you is a CNN news article for a $250 white's only scholarship from 2004. It was a stunt to shock people and send a message, and as a side effect anyone searching for new scholarships on Google gets to see that message. Does a speeding ticket make a driver a good driver? No, it just means that he was citation worthy. Some people do despicable things for links and make lots of money from it. It is a flaw of the current relevancy algorithms to assume that a citation makes a business trustworthy. On the commercial parts of the web, most links are an indication of is an ad budget, a public relations budget, nepotism, or controversy.
Where a business runs into issues with bad press is if it ranks for their core brand related terms, but typically that stuff can be drowned out by subdomains, alternate corporate sites, buying out competitors, and using a press page to pump up the good coverage a business gets. Current search algorithms encourage unethical business practices because they can't separate good from bad. They only care about who gets citations, which makes some people do just about anything for a link.
News agencies and other central authoritative systems have always highlighted things that were out of the ordinary, but search makes them stick around, and ranks them for broader topics just because they have a related tangent and were able to garner the most votes.
Perhaps Procter & Gamble doesn't care of their making us into a nation of fat slobs, but there's no reason why programmers and the rest of the startup world need to be so amoral. And no doubt, as pictures of cats with poor spelling on them become all the rage, people are beginning to wonder about where all this idiocy is leaving us. Which is where apologists like Doctorow and Steven Johnson step in, assuring us that Everything Bad is Good For You.
It isn't. YouTube isn't going to save us from an Idiocracy-style future in which everyone sits at home and watches shows like "Ow! My Balls!" (in which a man is repeatedly hit in the balls) -- YouTube's damn-near creating that future. As I write this, YouTube's #1 featured video is titled "Farting in Public".
I just shaved my head, placed a tattoo front and center on my forehead, and ran naked through town with a flag wrapped around my penis. I can't imagine how many organic links will come rolling in, and will love it when the local newspaper page talking about that incident ranks #1 for US Flag. That ought to put me on the map:
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?
As it gets less manageable your rule sets are disengaged with reality, and if you look close enough at just about anything you find what you would (or at least could) call spam. Everyone is a cheat. Or is that only in my mind?
Should you hand edit this result? Will anyone care if you do or do not? What does the legal team look like at the company behind this website? How large is their ad budget? How bad is this exploit? Should you write an algorithm that will close off this hole? If you do, what other holes does that open up?
How much longer can we trust links until we move on to usage data? Can we ever really trust usage data? Do our policies actually promote creating and sharing good content? How can we improve them without hurting our revenue numbers? Now the web is filling up with stupid garbage reminiscent of Idiocracy. How much of that am I responsible for? Would the web be cleaner if I just quit my job and let free market forces do as they may?
Running Threadwatch for a little over a year took me from being a fairly positive person to being cynical about everything. Could you imagine how bad it would be if your job was to fight spam day in and day out, especially if your employer sponsored the creation of most of it? Some days at SEO conferences Matt Cutts appears as a star, but could you imagine how demoralizing that job would be to do, looking at the worst parts of the web every day? No matter what you do tomorrow there is more spam waiting just for you.
When a page or section is new and you are competing against older sites that have built authority for nearly a decade one of the easiest ways to gain traction is to pick a specific keyword phrase that is not that competitive and go after trying to rank for it.
Often I find myself making a page title relevant for a wide basket of related keywords, then when I check the rankings the page comes in at #12 or #16. My mom's blog currently ranks at #13 in Google for weight loss calculators and #4 for free weight loss calculators using the page title Free Diet, Calorie, & Weight Loss Calculators. The page also ranks #30 for diet calculators and is deep for calorie calculators.
The best thing to do here is to focus the title on the phrase closest to ranking at the top, and try to get it a few more links. If the page starts picking up organic traction after ranking and eventually grows into a self reinforcing authority status then I could help it get more traffic by including those related phrases that don't make much sense to highlight in the page title right now.
If a site has 100 units of link equity and offers 10 sitewide categories then each category gets 10% of the link equity. If that same site limits its number of sitewide categories to 5 then each category gets 20%. By being a webmaster who tracks results one of your biggest advantages you have over webmaster who do not track results is you can limit your navigational selection to suit your financial goals. Is something hot this season? Rotate in the featured category or featured products. Is a category unprofitable or far beyond the authority needed to rank for it? Place less emphasis on it.
The nice thing about template sites with includes and dynamic websites are that it is easy to quickly change your weightings to place more focus where the revenue is. A few #6 or #10 ranking pages in the good section suddenly going to #1 might mean 3x to 5x the earnings.
