In 5 years the web will not look like it does now. 5 years ago cheesy thin topical directories were linkworthy and serious webmasters voted for them. If your competitors are outranking you based on

• having a more well known brand

• earlier market entry

don't think that you are going to catch them and beat them and STAY RELEVANT by only replicating their links and doing what they are doing. People are creating large networks to try to take down competing sites. People are writing software to estimate the probability of a community liking something.

If you don't have enough time to compete on the industrial strength SEO front you can still win by being real and evangelizing your topic.

In a few years your biggest competitive threat might not be a direct competitor. It might be a person who loves your topic and just happens to have stumbled into business by selling ad space. Ignore the social aspects of the web at your own peril.

Many people are promoting a meme on why they blog and why you should blog. I thought I would cover it from the other angle.

What are the downsides of running a popular blog and selling an information product?

1. Some people like my site design so much that they steal it. getnorthstar.com looks sharp. I have seen many other derivatives that were a bit more creative, derivatives of everything from my sales copy to graphics, to whole design.

2. My sales letter states clearly that my ebook is an ebook. And my mini sales letter says available for your immediate download. Yet daily I get asked when it will ship.
3. Some people wonder why I don't allow them to resell my ebook on their site for less than I sell it for on mine (commoditizing my perceived product value), and why I don't permit selling it on eBay (because people would just do it over and over again).
4. Affiliates scrape friends content, and post it without attribution, then wrap it in affiliate banners for my site, then want to give me crap when I disable their accounts, as though they weren't doing something illegal or sketchy. Do I need terms of service that state "don't steal?"
5. So much manual comment spam that I probably assumed some legitimate comments to have ill intent, and ended up having to remove the URL box.
6. Public relations spam. No personalization. No originality. No value. Just pushing garbage. Daily.

I love SEO and I love marketing. But there are a couple different types of people who are drawn toward it.

1. Those who are curious, probe and test, want to create real value and leverage the value they create.

2. Those who want a free ride. The people who will buy your ebook and not read it, email spam you asking for links, comment spam your blog and blow up when you stop them, request feedback on how to improve their site, and then reverse charge their credit card.

The first group is where I have met so many friends and business partners, and the reason I continue to work on this site. I wish I could automatically detect members of that second group and 301 redirect them to another site.

It doesn't hurt to buy a bit of exposure to get traffic for a new site. If you can nearly break even while buying and selling ads that send RELEVANT visitors to / through your site without making it look cheap, tacky, or untrustworthy you are ahead, because that traffic will improve the algorithmic trustworthiness of your site. I recently launched a new site, and due to a competitive market and various distractions have been slow to rank it. I have been buying low cost exposure, and one couldn't even imagine how many good deals and offers I have got just because the site looks and feels real and is getting a bit of paid traffic.

Getting traffic to even a bad site can lead to it being trusted more. I have seen blogs with cheesy designs and roughly a dozen $1 posts blogrolled by experts on spam and related topics that are frequently featured in the mainstream media. Why would they link to it? Who knows, maybe they were in a rush, but as people are exposed to your site and brand some will like it. Exposure breeds exposure, etc.

As a marketer there is no reason to hope that quality + free is enough to get your site where it belongs. Spending a few dollars a day can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in audience building and link building expenses.

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.

Google Controls the Perception of Trusted Advertisers:

I recently did link building for a site where I tried to build links in a stale industry. Many of the people who had top ranked sites did not want to sell links because they were afraid that the links would eventually decay, and they did not want their site to promote garbage.

Many of these same sites published Google AdSense ads in the content area. These ads promoted garbitrage, sleazy offers that bombard you with email spam, generic surveys, off topic crap, etc etc etc. And yet these publishers didn't think anything was wrong with it, either because they were unaware of what they were marketing, or because they were not directly connected to it.

Google Will Find You:

If you want to do anything online you eventually run into Google, or the effects they have on the web.

Google started off with search, which allows them to directly connects with consumers. Their branding, distribution deals, relevancy, and market position have created the fundamental standard of relevancy that all other systems are compared against. It is hard to beat them on relevancy because they have more data than any other company in the world (toolbars, browsing history associated with user accounts, Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Google analytics, free website optimizer, Google Checkout, cost per action ads, the most popular feed reader, etc etc etc). Even if you did find a way to match Google's relevancy, nobody would notice unless you could match their brand, and overcome the self fulfilling prophecy bias / skew Google's personalization features give searchers.

Spam Will Find You:

Google makes it easy to publish content and monetize even the worst content in the world. By placing their ads on Warez sites and sites they have identified as spam, they pay people to pollute competing search engines. You can't look at a competitive term in Microsoft's search results without tripping over a .blogspot spam page.

Quality is a Relative Term:

Google uses their market position and market knowledge to selectively display the most profitable ads. Consumers are advertised to without the perception of being advertised to. Quality scores support related businesses and trusted allies. Mid-market players make Google's ad relevancy matching engine more relevant. Outlier players do keyword research for trusted businesses until they concede those terms to margin squeeze and quality scores.

Due to the ease of implementation and depth of their advertising base, it is easy for new competitors to become an ally, publishing Google AdSense ads, and thus giving Google their usage data. This distributed ad network keeps Google abreast to market trends, allowing them to duplicate innovation, and buy competitors they can't beat.

We Are Not Flawed:

Google cloaks their own content, then sets up quality guidelines for others to follow, which they themselves do not follow. They outsource their flaws on marketers, and tell marketers to clearly identify paid links, all while teaching publishers to blend AdSense ads in content.

As Google changes their ranking criterias publishers addicted to the traffic source have no choice but to give Google even more control and authority.

Back to the Invisible Hand:

Google currently offers the following for free

• Google Analytics

• cross channel conversion tracking
• A/B split testing and Website Optimizer
• Google Checkout

Their newest ad unit is an unmarked text link ad, which only displays any ad notification AFTER people hover over the link. Publishers who refuse to sell links directly will publish the ads, and if they spread anything like AdSense does, what happens to links to commercial sites? What happens when virtually nobody is willing to link to a commercial site unless it is through Google? What happens when their affiliate payouts are not high enough to solicit a review? And what happens to those businesses when Googlers decide they want that market for themselves, like real estate?

More background here and here.

Adam Smith would be proud.

WMW has a good thread about some of the changes people are noticing at Google. Two big things that are happening are more and more pages are getting thrown in Google's supplemental results, and Google may be getting more aggressive with re-ranking results based on local inter-connectivity and other quality related criteria. You need some types of links to have enough raw PageRank to keep most of your pages indexed, and to have your deeper pages included in the final selection set of long tail search results. You need links from trusted related sites in order to get a boost in result re-ranking.

There are also a few other types of links to look at, if you wanted to take a more holistic view:

• links from general trusted seed sites

• links that drive sales
• links that lead to additional trusted links
• links that gain you mindshare or subscribers

Some of those other links may not even be traditional links, but may come from a well placed ad buy.

Every unbranded site is heavily unbalanced in their link profile. If you do not have a strong brand then the key people in your community who should be talking about you are not (and thus you are lacking those links).

Most branded sites do not create enough content or do enough keyword research to fully leverage their brand strength, but occasionally you see some of them get a bit too aggressive.