Search relevancy algorithms are ever changing, but I recently snagged a good example of Google placing significant weight on exact matching domain names. When you search Google for search engine history there are over 20,000 exact phrase match pages and over 90,000,000 matching pages. The #6 result in this screenshot is SearchEngineHistory.com, which is a site that I never really developed. It has no inbound links on Yahoo!, Google, or MSN (as you can see on this screenshot and that one). Also worth noting that SearchEngineHistory.com is a single page site, and with NO link authority it outranks a LifeHacker post that has the exact matching phrase in a page title (and LifeHacker is an extremely authoritative site).

Why could Google trust domain matches so much? Because they are often associated with brands which protect their trademarks more vigilantly than in the past, and there are so many domainers and so much vc money placing premiums on domain names. To get an exact matching domain it is probably going to cost you something (either lots of money or the foresight to be an early believer in a new field), so that in and of itself is some sign of quality. For example, today I tried buying a non-word 5 letter domain for $1,000 and the domainer turned me down stating that he turned down 5x that much last week. About 3 years ago SeoBook.com cost $8, largely because the standard frame of thought in the SEO market was that there was no market for a book or ebook.

The best way to promote a new blog is to track conversations, interject your opinions, and to talk about others when it makes sense to. The WSJ published an article titled How to Get Attention In a New-Media World [Sub Req], in which a blogger stated:

"Our best PR," Ms. Dunlap says, "comes from people who are mentioned or featured on our site and forward the link to their friends."

Of course, it is hard to build up enough authority to do well if you start off with non controvercial fan blogs. You have to have a great writing style or a certain amount of credibility built up before people want to share your mentions as being newsworthy. You need to build brand loyalty one visitor at a time starting from day 1.

Short term you can get exposure quickly by creating controversies (see Valleywag) or being the consumate contrarian (see Nicholas Carr). But, if you want to do well longterm it is important to create a platform for showcasing the value of others and their ideas, like Paris does.

One of the things I wrote in my ebook was something like "If you make other people feel important they will do your marketing for you." (yes I know it is shitty to quote myself)

But the large theme of most successful and profitable sites is that there has to be some associated social element...some way for the site to make the consumer feel special. An insider's club circle jerk, if you will. People like to feel like they are in the in crowd and that they are important. That is why you see low level information being so popular so often on the social sites...people can quickly consume, understand, and identify with it.

The web, at least as a social marketing medium, is less about doing deep research and more about creating something that can quickly evoke emotional reactions or help people reinforce their worldviews, identities, and sense of purpose.

If you write hundreds and hundreds of pages about a topic odds are that eventually one of them is going to rank, get some decent self reinforcing links, and then keep ranking. This is especially true if you are writing about a modern technology or a field that is rapidly changing. One of the reasons exposure on sites like Digg and Del.icio.us is so valuable is that it earns you unrequested secondary and tertiary (and fortuary, hey wait, is that a word) organic citations. Some underfunded mainstream media sites just link to whatever ends up on sites like Del.icio.us that day, then other people find those channels and link to you from there as well. It is equally cool and lame, but perhaps a bit more cool if you are on the receiving end of the linkstream.

Longterm the key to doing well on the web is to do things that are strong enough that they build unrequested links.

So what if you are already ranking #1 for a keyword on an old page? Is it ever worth editing it?

I have a page which got about a half dozen unrequested .edu links back in 2004. The page was probably of average quality, but easy to cite, because it looked comprehensive. As time passed I added a bit of info to the page here and there but did not go through to format and edit it...those changes, coupled with rapid changes in that field meant that the page went from average to below average quickly.

It still ranked #1, but that page has not got a single .edu citation since 2004. What if I would have made that page far better? Have I been throwing away a .edu link a week for the last year and a half? Likely. And it gets worse too, because as that page would have got cited it would have lead to secondary and tertiary (and fortuary, hey wait, is that a word) organic citations from people who were passionate about that topic.

And had that site gained another 50 or 100 .edu links it would have doubled or tripled the value of that site. The authority from that one page would have carried that site.

Now I am not a fan of going through and editing everything over and over again, but if you have a couple core pages which capture powerful ideas it is worth it to make those as good as they can be. And if you already rank, then you are just leaving links on the table if those pages are average. Clean them up a bit and get the love you deserve, you obviously deserve it if you are already ranking :)

Some marketing is push. Other marketing is pull. What makes SEO great, is that when you figure out what ideas to target your pull marketing is self reinforcing while others are pushing pushing pushing and never able to catch up.

In Human Computation Luis von Ahn talks about how the Google Image labeler turns work into a game, and how you can enhance that information further by using a game like Peakaboom.

How many cool things will people do on the web for arbitrary points? And are the points actually arbitrary if they make people happy :)

If you want to make a site that looks legitimate and is well structured you probably only want to have one main page for each topic, with sub pages working to further expose sub-topics. But what do you do if you are tracking your results and are making a thousand a month or more from a single page? Some algorithms are somewhat literal in nature, while others are more elegant and look for more natural writing. I am still trying to tweak a page in to rank for all varieties of it's core main phrase in Google, but in the course of tweaking it in to match Google (by making it more elegant and less literal) that page does not score as being as relevant as it once was in Microsoft.

The ideal solution would be to just keep getting authoritative links until that page was viewed as the ultimately authoritative topical resource by all major engines, but unless you have real topical authority and high quality content it is going to be hard to get legitimate citations on the conversion oriented page. And getting it low quality link spam is not going to be the most cost efficient method if I care about the long-term health of the site. In fact, without trying to get any spammy links the page picked up hundreds of them just by ranking well.

What is another solution? Use the main page with the most link equity to target Google since they have the largest search market share, but also consider creating a second page on the topic which is more literal in nature. The second page can be about the history of the topic, background information, future of the topic, how that topic fits a location or a minority, saving money with topic, do it yourself with topic, or frequently asked questions related to the topic.

After making the first page less literal and creating the second page that was exceptionally literal I checked back on the rankings of both pages for some of the core keywords. For many of the phrases those pages targeted I scored a double listing in both MSN and Google.

As search engines change their relevancy scoring algorithms they may not only change weather they match deeper or shallower pages, but they may also change what they are willing to rank based on how literally it matches the query.

Another way to look at this phenomena is that if you are working from a new untrusted domain and are trying to create the backfill catalog of content for your site, it may make sense to make some of the early writing more literal in nature since it will be easy to rank well in MSN for it. As you learn more about your topic, get a bit of a following, and have some topical authority it may make sense to go back over some of your most important content areas and create new pages which are less literal in nature.