Google recently announced they are offering an ad free search service to small businesses for as little as $100 a year. They are also rumored to be working on creating a mobile search offering to search for ringtones, cell phone games, and other high margin cell phone services:

With the new system, users would search for a piece of content -- such as ringtones -- and would get back a list of companies that provide it, with links letting them easily purchase the material. Eventually, Google would charge companies for high placement in the search results, much as it does with "sponsored links" on Web search, the people familiar with the company's plans said.

If this proves effective, why wouldn't Google create search services for real estate and student loans? Off the start they likely wouldn't be any dirtier than those markets already are.

The local sites (or other niche sites) that die are the ones that don't have a supportive community...the ones that can roughly be described as data. But as you move your site away from data toward community building and user experience you increase its marketability, profitability, and longevity.

John Scott recently said

when the Internet becomes a community more than a marketplace, the community oriented merchants have the advantage.

Most general music lyric sites will lose over 90% of their traffic and value in the next 2 years. Niche value add sites like SongMeanings.net will increase in value.

Some newspapers are fighting off their own irrelevancy by publishing more ads, and becoming more irrelevant. The reason WSJ.com is worth $5 billion is because it will be one of the last newspapers surviving after many competitors are marginalized. Its brand and business relationships make it unique.

The next step for search is moving away from age and citation based trust toward user satisfaction based rating. In a recent interview Jakob Nielson said:

Of course, the big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

Part of that will include collecting user feedback and personalizing results. For the commercial parts of the web, much of this will be done by search engines pushing more aggressive ad units (while using non-ads to test how far they can go), licensing content from premium publishers, and making more transactions direct to funnel traffic internally while minimizing the downside of bait and switch marketing. If Google controls the transaction they know the lead value AND the customer satisfaction stats. If something that was once good becomes spam Google controls distribution and monetization, and can kill it without a second thought.

If you are in a market that is likely to get commoditized what does your site do that makes it more than just data?

Cory Doctorow spoke at Google a few months ago. His speech covers IP protection, copyright law, DRM, and international trade laws. It is well worth a listen for any web entrepreneur, especially those considering getting published.

Someone recently left a comment on my blog promoting a new keyword research tool that is registered via proxy. The competitive analysis keyword research tool has been marketed heavily via comment spam, and currently shows itself as bidding on 0 keywords, per its own competitive measures. The site gives no data about who owns it. Could it appear any less legitimate? How do marketers create market research tools espousing the value of something they are not doing themselves, then market it via blog comment spam? It isn't hard to send an email or buy a review. If their service is worth $90 a month (their current price) their marketing budget should include some money for paid search and public relations. They could at least have a blog comparing seasonal data and data from different companies the way Hitwise does.

The easiest way to show the value of your offering is to eat your own dog food. That is why ReviewMe bought a bunch of its own ads to help the site go viral at launch. There are so many ways to market ad networks or competitive research tools that there is no point creating one if the marketing strategy starts with the likes of blog comment spam and/or cold calling.

SEO Question: I am considering moving my site to another domain name. Do I have anything to fear in moving it? What is the proper way to move a website to a new URL?

Answer: The best way to permanently move a site is to 301 redirect it. If you have a small site you will likely see few small changes with your rankings. The bigger your site is the longer it takes to move and the more drastically the shakeup will be.

301 Redirecting a Small Site Versus a Large Site

When I redirected my article about Search Engine History the pickup was almost immediate because it was only moving one page to another one page site. My friend Daniel recently 301 redirected the old scholarship site to College Scholarships.org. It was a good test to see how the various search engines would react to moving a 1,000+ page website. The site move started on May 30th. By June 3rd Google indexed 385 pages, and on June 6th Google indexed 509 pages. The old URLs ranked until the associated new ones took their place in the index.

When moving a large site make sure to use a find and replace feature to change internal links to point at the new site location. You can do so inside of HTML editing software like Dreamweaver or using freeware like ReplaceEm. Rebranding a site is also a good time to fix broken links. You can find broken links using Xenu.

Why Our Search Traffic is Still Down

Traffic volumes are still noticeably down from their all time highs, but that is largely a function of 4 factors

• The site had not been actively marketed for month and we were busy creating other sites so we didn't add much content to the site for months. We were busy building out other high growth potential properties.

• Right around when we moved the site I believe the traffic volume for that keyword universe dropped (people out of school are not looking for scholarships or grants as much, and people use the Internet less in early summer).
• Before the site moved we had ads on the blog portion of the site. We removed those ads because we want our blog to be a more organic part of the web than it would otherwise be if it were cluttered with ads. Our page-view traffic stats below are for pages that had ads on them. The blog currently represents a small minority of our traffic, but we hope to change that ASAP.
• MSN search sucks at 301 redirects!!!!!

Traffic Trends

The site was moved on the 29th of May, and you can see how the traffic was at its all time high in May (the red is the old site and the blue is the new site). In addition to a nice third party trend graph, here are some traffic numbers by date

How Google Reacted to the Redirects

Google picked up on the 301 redirects for the core pages almost immediately. For core terms, that were heavily emphasized on-site and off-site, the rankings dropped slightly then rose back to their typical positions within about a month. Some of them dropped for as little as a week, while others stayed at #1, but for athletic scholarships the rankings are still a bit lower than they were before, with 4 sites still outranking the site, but then again I doubt we should have beat the NCAA for that term. ;)

At the low point, search traffic was about 50% of its high point, and now it is back up to about 70%.

For some portions of the site, Google took quite a while to pick up the 301 redirect. The sections of the site about state scholarship and grants programs, state student loans, and study abroad scholarship programs were slow to move because they each contained many pages, and were numerous few links from the homepage, requiring a bot to go from the homepage, to a category page, to the subcategory page, to each of the 50 or so pages in each of those sections. To help speed along that movement links to some of the deeper sections were added to the homepage.

Helping Deeper Content Get Re-indexed Quickly

We got about a half dozen average quality links after the site moved and changed the URLs in a few of our directory listings like Business.com to help show the transition of the site. The exact match domain name helped improve rankings for the core matching term, and changing the site architecture to place more emphasis on the deeper pages not only got them crawled again quickly, but also helped those pages rank better as well.

In addition to placing more emphasis on lower nodes in the site structure we also blocked some of the duplicate blog content in the robots.txt file and lowered the number of site-wide outbound links from about a half dozen to a couple. These helped focus more of the PageRank on lower pages to get them indexed quicker.

How Did the Engines Do?

Yahoo! Search

1 month later Yahoo traffic is about the same as what it was before the site moved, which likely represents a slight increase in traffic, given the seasonal trend.

Google

Google traffic is down slightly, but I think that is partly due to seasonality factors, as the site ranks where it used to for most of its competitive search terms.

Microsoft's Live Search

The big shocker is that MSN is so bad at following 301 redirects that they now send the site 0 traffic. The old site is listed URL only, while the new site is not listed.

MSN's failure to follow redirects can also be appreciated by seeing how they indexed 10,000 more pages on the SEO Book site than Yahoo! or Google do. Most of those additional pages are affiliate redirects. As of writing this, MSN also failed to index SearchEngineHistory.com.

I filed a re-inclusion request with MSN about a week and a half ago, but have got no reply so far. If it is still hosed near the end of this month I will ping a few people I know who work there.

What Should I Do Before & While Moving My Site?

• If you have a seasonal site you can mitigate risk by moving your site early in the off season.

• Buy ads for any brand related queries or other keywords that you feel your site must rank for.
• Look for low information pages, and eliminate their ability to waste PageRank by blocking them from being indexed.
• Take inventory of your most profitable sections of your site (from a search standpoint) and ensure your current internal link structure places emphasis on them. If you have a large site and some of your most profitable sections of your site are many clicks from your homepage consider raising their prominence in the site's navigational scheme to help them get re-indexed quickly. Heavily cross link toward the valuable sections whenever and wherever it makes sense.
• If you are afraid of risking your rankings, you can try 301 redirecting one piece of your site to see how well the engines receive that, then push the rest of your site a month later if the results are good.
• If your new site launch is a big deal ensure you submit a press release, and come up with a few good marketing / promotional ideas you can do when you launch your new site to help you build link authority and make the transition as smooth as possible. Also changing some of your better directory listings, your internal links, and any other links under your direct control to point at the new location is ideal.
• I like to buy a bit of StumbleUpon traffic and ads on topical traffic source sites when the site moves.

Question: We have a multi-week turnaround on our content which makes it hard for us to write about fresh news. Is there an easy way to get past compliance, legal, and information only formatting requirements?

Answer: This is in no way legal advice, but here are a few ideas that might work...

If you have this limitation so do most of your competitors, so in that regard it probably does not hurt you much when competing with other large players. If your business model is solid you should still have a similar or higher visitor value. Where it might hurt is competing with smaller players, but since they are smaller they are typically easier to influence.

You can still attract the traffic streams of the smaller players by using affiliate programs, hiring them as consultants, buying ads on their site, sponsoring special reports they create, creating things they would want to talk about (free tools, widgets, etc.).

I am not sure of the legalities of it, but you may also want to turn some of your star content producers into people you are buying ads off of, or spin the content portion of your business off into its own business then work to cross promote, or publish a few independent blogs with legal disclaimers. Look to see what competitors are doing, and if it is legal try to do it better than they do.

Create and sponsor an independent non-profit organization that speaks for your industry. At least one of the non-profit organizations in the search marketing space is a complete joke, but it still helps its leaders gain brand recognition because they are affiliated with it. I bet more than one car donation charity was created by an auction house.