Growing Irrelevant with Each Passing Day:

Easier access to information and new technologies force many companies unwilling to change to focus heavily on silencing pieces of the market which claim they are growing irrelevant. Many individuals, systems and organizations evolve slower than the market to where their purpose becomes nothing more than causing a need for their own existence. I tend to think that many lawyers are born with this train of thought in mind. Rarely has one ever contacted me without an immediate threat at hello and offer to escalate the issue, even if the issue is only caused by (and a symptom of) poor customer service to their customers. The lack of investigating the root causes of the problems, and instead offering immediate escalation, is a sign of piss poor customer service on the part of the clown lawyers who tried to scare me. Especially if it is blog related and a simple search for my name would already show that the last company that sued me got featured in the Wall Street Journal.

When Being a Market Leader is Good:

Sometimes being the leader in a market is a great thing. You can't see a person write about search without comparing them to Google. The launch of any new information product requires people to ask about how it compares to Google. Google takes hits for many of the things they do, but when push comes to shove, and stories really blow up they usually play the media and market much smarter than competing companies do.

When Being a Market Leader is Bad:

In certain markets growing in scale or being #1 means you have lost touch with your customers or you get a documentary about how you destroy your customers health. Meanwhile some of your competitors jockey for position and enjoy marketshare growth at your cost and smaller regional firms find it easier to tap into their local culture.

If you are in an industry that is found questionable by many, then being at the top means that toys about killing babies (or other bad things) may look similar to your brand. And they will likely look progressively more and more like your brand until you change your business model or eventually you threaten or sue somebody. When you finally sue or threaten the story spreads through the media and the world is reminded of things like

The design of the package of toy cigarettes--which are actually unscented incense--is intended to "evoke an unsavory association with Philip Morris," alleges the letter, a copy of which you can find below. The company also claims that a "Li'l Smokes" refill pack also infringes its Marlboro trademark. Along with leaning on Toy Lounge, Philip Morris also apparently contacted the novelty doll's manufacturer and was told that the offending products would be altered to address the tobacco company's concerns. Commendably, Philip Morris has never been shown to market its products to newborns. However, the company has previously tracked Marlboro's "market penetration" with smokers as young as 15, since the teenage years are when crucial "initial brand selections" are made, according to one internal company memo.

This is the web though, and we all get to be good dirt diggers, so after reading one story like that people dig up stories about how their company argues things like

Dead Smokers Are Good for Government Budgets

In making the threat to sue Marlboro increased the authority and mindshare of most any negative piece of information about them.

Initiatives That Focus on End Goals Without Tuning Into the Market are a Lost Cause:

Not surprisingly, these "let's clear up our brand" and "lets care about our customer" lawyer based initiatives go in waves or phases, and a lawyer claiming to represent Marlboro recently sent me a cease and desist too. Nice email subject BTW, "see attached". Assholes.

They stated that one of my pages might aid and abet identity theft because some of their customers were posting personal information on it. Sometimes I wonder if companies post that stuff themselves, and then claim identity theft or defamation.

I decided to pull the content they cared about because I after just ending my first lawsuit I don't want another. I want to spend more time learning about things that interest me, dealing with trying to create useful ideas and helping people.

The big irony is that the market for my idea was well created and well branded by them. I will discuss it in a bit though.

Keyword Markets are Just Like Companies:

Just like how companies grow and then lose touch with their customers then fade away the same thing happens with keyword markets. Keyword markets are nothing more than a reflection of our thoughts.

While the core terms may have decent volume and competition, if you really target your messages and go deeper than most competing sites you will find it easy to rank.

Where to Start:

It is hard to create a consumer generated media site or even solid traffic streams if you only focus on what other people are already doing.

If you want to focus on ranking for well established markets or brands you are probably not going to do well unless you do one or more of the following:

• are working off an aged well trusted idea

• are good at creating controversy, causes, or making people talk about you
• are focused on solving problems that the market currently does not easily solve
• are going after niche phrases
• are focused on phrases late in the buying cycle.

Keyword Modifier Love:

If you add on modifiers, say [McDonalds health] or [McDonalds Unhealthy] then it is easier to get exposure, and the people are more receptive to the ads for other ideas when they add a specific modifier. A few good ideas to focus on would be calories, nutrition facts, fries, and nutritional information.

An Example Keyword Market:

Online markets are best create value when they solve problems that are not already easily solved.

For example, if you did basic keyword research for Marlboro, based on search volume, they push the Marlboro Miles concept rather hard. Their customers want it, need it, can't get enough of it. It makes sense since it is strongly tied into the brand and they promote it on most every pack of cigarettes.

However, if you search for that query no official site shows up in the search results, so one of the following must be true

• they intentionally do not care to solve that issue (ie: they don't give a shit about their customers)

• they do not know anything about online search / SEO (they are ignorant)
• they hired an exceptionally sub standard SEO (they hired someone who is ignorant)

Imagine that, some of their most loyal customers not being served AT ALL. They don't make it easy for consumers to solve the Marlboro Miles Catalog problem.

Errors They Could Fix:

• Create a page about the topic, or at least mention the topic on a page on their website

• the domain they are using (smokerservice.com) sounds generic, and they are missing out on the plural versions of the domains
• most of the domain they own that handles the Marlboro Miles Catalog stuff is all secured so you can't see any of it in the search results
• even if they couldn't promote the catalog actively on their site and make that accessible to search engines (maybe there is some weird legal issue that stops them) it wouldn't be hard to point a few links at the smokerservice site that had Marlboro Miles Catalog in the anchor text so engines knew what to rank and people knew where to go
• if they were too lazy to do the above they could at least find one result that answers the query and then work to point a few links at that page

By not addressing a strong offline brand points anywhere online they have pretty much created a marketplace where nothing but scraper sites, competing merchants, or customer complaints about their brand show up whenever their best customers search to continue the offline dialog started by their product packaging and branding.

Why I Got a C&D:

One of my sorta spammy sites (2nd site I ever made, and it was so bad that people bookmarked it on social sites for being so pathetic) had content that solved they query better than most other sites. A single page focused on that single query which gets hundreds of real searches every day.

Given enough time and a few links that page ranked. Given enough exposure I started getting a ton of email from their customers (which easily could have been set up to autorespond with affiliate deals and offers from various merchants which sold the same, related or competing products) but I didn't do that.

The emails I got from Marlboro customers were growing in volume and aggressively more bizzare so I then made a blog post about how bizzare they were and how I thought the people were crazy. Then hundreds of people started pouring in ON THAT PAGE leaving their names, addresses, social security numbers, and one even put in their credit card number and security code.

Many Seemingly Competitive Markets Are Not Competitive, at All:

The page i created about Marlboro Miles was so ugly that it got referenced on social bookmarking sites for being ugly. It had 0 high quality links and ranks #1 in Google, largely for the following reasons

• it was a whole page / document focused on something most scraper sites just mentioned in a page

• most competing sites are exceptionally spammy and do not actually solve the customers problems
• after it started to rank well it picked up scraper links, which sorta helped reinforce its market position

Including automated scraper junk sites there are only 400 pages competing for [Marlboro Miles Catalog]

Given that many of the searchers landing on my page were customers addicted to a drug and focused on a single brand it would be an easy market to make a ton of money from if I was a bit less lazy on it.

Now that I took my pages down likely the search results will not answer the needs and wants of Marlboro's customers. I wouldn't be surprised if that customer relationship remained poor because they solved symptoms instead of problems. 100's of customers per day are finding it hard to get their questions answered.

There is a Shitload of Traffic There!

If you look at this screenshot you will see that after the #3 organic search result for Marlboro searches that Google suggests Marlboro Miles inline.

That page has 34 junky links and is ranking #4 in Google for Marlboro right now.

Article summary:

• scaling often means becoming less efficient, more stuck in your ways, and/or less in touch with your customers

• being a leader in a sketchy field opens you up to tons of negative plublicy
• search makes it easy to view many of your customer's needs and wants
• keyword markets rise and fall with offline market brands, companies, ideas, and news
• your customers want to talk about you. if you do not participate in the market or make it easy to contact you then your customers will look elsewhere.
• immediately offering escalation during confrontation (especially when it is without considering the root problems) is generally an ignorant business policy across the board
• once you start trying to control who talks about you and what they say you are long on the way to irrelevancy
• in the long run it is usually far cheaper to solve problems instead of symptoms
• even competitive keyword markets are not that competitive if you create even somewhat decent content and focus on longer search queries

DaveN points at a screenshot of a Google search result with Paris Hilton giving.... well nevermind. ;)

I did a search on the same phrase and saw someone was putting thier URL in a top ranked image. Pretty smart marketing there, and no doubt one of the cheapest ways to tap into popular culture.

I bet eventually many non profit groups and others sites which have significant authority and limited funds will start making their voice heard in the search results far more, especially on image searches, where they may put the names of people they feel caused problems (and/or other messages) on horrific images of piss poor humanity in action.

I haven't done much on the image optimization front, but there can only be a limited number of factors for images:

• file name

• image alt text
• image title
• text near the image
• image age
• click streams
• trust of site image is on
• links referencing the image

Tag Viewer is a Ruby on Rails AJAX application that makes it easy to cross reference tagged resources at popular tagging sites.

The idea sorta came to life after I started to find the footer tag links on my keyword research tool rather handy. Your thoughts on Tag Viewer would be appreciated.

I don't intend to commercialize Tag Viewer in any way. I had it made because I think it will be useful for helping me do web research. While I claim to be an SEO, I am much more of an info porn junkie than an SEO ;)

Via Brickman comes an interesting WMW thread stating Google may be using traffic analysis and user feedback (clickstreams, etc) to help determine the quality of a site.

I have spoke to a well known engineer at another major engine who told me that it plays a significant role in their engine.

It makes sense that they would want to allow users to give feedback, but they wouldn't want to use just traffic analysis, because that would just promote large conglomerate sites and/or stifle innovation across the board (by promoting first movers at the expense of better products that followed).

In the WMW thread Walkman said:

Traffic? This would mean that a search engine is the last to know /show that you're popular.

But when you think about it, hasn't search ALWAYS been this way? Following links that OTHERS PUBLISHED. The links were not only used to crawl, but also a good way to imply trust or quality.

Quality global web search has never been about helping you find stuff first. That is what vertical databases, vertical search services, human editors and reporters are for.

Links to a site without traffic no longer imply the same level of trust that it used to. Sites selling link trading services use sales copy like:

The more websites you can get to link to your website, the higher you will rank in the search engines, guaranteed!

And even the mainstream media is talking about SEO.

Some people will claim that using searcher feedback as a baseline to help determine site quality is nonsense, but most of those people are probably launching new brands off of their old brands and current popularity, which make them much more likely to instantly get significant traffic / mindshare / linkage data.

It is easy to learn from your own SEO experiences, but it is also easy to extend what happens to you as to be the way things happen everywhere, even if that is not the case.

I don't think Google would want to base a ton of the overall relevancy algorithm on site popularity (and clearly they don't since the top results are not always the most popuar sites), but they can and may use traffic patterns and searcher feedback to filter out junk sites. And it may help certain types of link spam stick out (ie: a site that just picked up 50,000 backlinks but few of them drive any traffic) may be a red flag for spam.

Couple some of the temporal ideas with power laws and much of the spam should be pretty easy to detect.

Google talk recently even started redirecting chat URLs through Google.com. Do you think they would do that without reason?

Sometimes I get quotes like this

"Bottom line, out-going links are always a BAD IDEA for SEO. It creates what we in the SEO community call SEO hemorrhage. It BLEEDS off GOOD PR. Not a good thing. We actually NEED MORE incoming links."

and

Somewhere in Google's webmaster guidelines is a warning about having more than 100 outbound links on a page. My advice is to take that point very seriously.

Using the same principle proves, at least to us here in this one office, that 101 outbound links on a page (don't forget to count navigation links in the total) may lead to an immediate decrease in absolute PageRank even if it's not demonstrated in the toolbar.

These ideas are typically short sighted and miss a broader view of the web. Is it possible to start from scratch and build up a brand while being completely greedy with your link popularity? Sure it is, but generally it is going to be easier to create a useful site if you are willing to link out to some related resources.

Especially if you write about your industry you have to source some ideas or information. Why avoid social interaction? How can you only view links as a cost? If you link out enough sometimes they come back. Heck sometimes other content authors will even defend your brand for you without you even knowing about it.

What are search engines but link lists? And most of the links are free. And people come back and use them again.

I do have some clients that for a period of time did not link out to some sites that they should of. For about a year or so a client outranked their own manufacturer for the manufacturer brand name in Yahoo! and MSN. In that case I was greedy with the link popularity because I didn't want to lower our exposure. After Yahoo! started ranking the appropriate site #1 for the brand name then I freely linked out to it.

For most any site there are probably at least a few sites that can be linked to.

As far as controlling internal link popularity goes, the reason for the 100 link suggestion was based on page usability. How many options can you give a person before you give them too many to be useful?

As recently noted by Matt, crawl depth is typically a function of PageRank:

One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages. So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submit a sitemap), that doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply.

The theory that I have though is that you have to point at others thoughts that you find interesting if you hope to have others find you interesting. There is only so much one person can do. As a bonus to getting free content ideas by reading and linking at other people sometimes those links come back.

Some people have taken the PageRank funneling concepts to an extreme where they are even heavily using the link nofollow attribute on their own internal links, or whenever they point at official documentation on other sites. Both of which are usually bad form.

To snag a quote from DG

Sorry you fucksticks, but if you've ever used nofollow as anything other than a joke or to fuck someone else, yer an idiot, Just bend over and wrap yer lips around yer own asshole and suck until yer head explodes. At the very least, you'll reduce the number of stupid people that can breed. Follow?

I think things like many nofollows to internal pages might set off some sort of SEO flag. Just like being stingy with outbound links often forces some sites to have unnatural inbound link profiles.

It is just as easy to use links within your content to funnel your link popularity and actively drive users toward your desired goals. In the end goal to funnel visitors one way make sure you make it easy for them to go back in the other direction if they make a mistake or arrive on your site on the wrong page, otherwise you may hurt your conversion rates.

Bleeding PageRank is probably a bit arbitrary when you factor in the larger social aspects of the web. Plus some engines may also look at outbound links when trying to theme the content of your site.

Most content publishers have to vote for at least a few others before too many people are willing to vote for them. If you are a business selling products and services it still makes sense to link to business partners and other useful resources just to increase the depth and richness of your site without needing to recreate the web to do so.