A friend of mine mentioned how the noise level in SEO forums has gone from around 95% to about 99%. I think it is largely due to a shift from content optimization to content creation (and remember that this is a site selling a book on optimization, so me saying this is not in any way to my benefit).

Here is why there is a large shift from optimization to creation

• The ease which content can be published: It took me less than 2 hours to teach my mom Blogger, Bloglines, rss, xml, etc. She now blogs every day.

• the ease in which content can be commented on and improved in quality
• the casual nature in which links flow toward real content
• the massive increase in the number of channels and quantity of information makes us more inclined to look for topical guides to navigate the information space
• the ease with which content can be monetized has greatly increased. AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Chitika, new Amazon Product Previews, affiliate programs, link selling, direct ads, donations, (soon enough Google Wallet for microcontent), etc.
• contextual ad programs teach the content publishers to blend links, which has the net effect of...
  • short term increase in revenues for small publishers

  • until users trust links less
  • at which point in time users will be forced to go back to primary trusted sources (ie: one of the few names they trust in the field or a general search engine like Google)
• it is getting increasingly expensive to find quality link inventory that works in Google to promote non content sites, and margins are slimming for many of those creating sites in hyper competitive fields
• the algorithms are getting harder for people new to the field to manipulate
• around half of all search queries are unique. most hollow spam sites focus on the top bits whereas natural published information easily captures the longer queries / tail of search
• duplicate content filters are aggressively killing off many product catalog and empty shell affiliate sites
• as more real / useful content is created those duplicate content and link filtering algorithms will only get better
• general purpose ecommerce site owners will have the following options:
  • watching search referrals decrease until their AdWords spends increases

  • thickening up their sites to offer far more than a product catalog
  • switching to publishing content sites
• and the market dynamics for Google follow popular human behavior, even for branded terms or keyword spaces primarily created by single individuals
  • the term SEO Book had 0 advertisers and about 0 search volume when I launched this site

  • this site got fairly popular
  • SEO Book is now one of my most expensive keyword phrases

As long as it is original, topical, and structured in a non wild card replace fashion content picks up search traffic and helps build an audience.

I am not trying to say that optimization is in any way dead, just that the optimization process places far more weight on content volume and social integration than it did a year or two ago.

The efficiencies Google are adding to the market will kill off many unbranded or inefficient businesses. One of my clients has an empty shell product site and does no follow up marketing with the buyers. I can't help but think that there needs to be some major changes in that business or in 3 to 6 months we won't be able to compete on the algorithmic or ppc front without me being very aggressive.

I recently bought advertising on a tool which gave Google AdWords ad impression estimates via the Google AdWords API. My ad dollars, and the Google AdWords search volume tool itself, were both rendered useless when Google decided they wanted to provide more consistent and accurate keyword data.

All quotes below are from the above linked Google Groups thread.

As Ben Michelson put it:

I believe this may be just the first phase of a new "less is more" concept.

I expect subsequent versions will alternately snip out or merge previously inaccurate fields, until finally (AdWords 1.0) the TrafficEstimatorService will be void of inaccuracy by providing no information whatsoever.

Robert, another programmer, was also thrilled by the recent "upgrade"

Well done, Google. I just want to release my first Adwords program - partly based on the ctr value. I work about two month for it. Why we should develop programs for Google, if Google changes the API every two month (see also KeywordService)?

Patrick Chanezon, who was hired by Google as an AdWords API evangelist, stated:

The algorithms used in the TrafficEstimator may return some results that do not match your quality expectations, but they are not skewed in any way.

And here I thought making something inaccurate was skewing it...

Inasisi ran through some examples of the intentional data skewing and said:

If it is not on purpose, I don't understand why Google is not correcting the huge skewness in its estimates and further remove the only good statistics that we had to access to. If Google felt the need to be consistent to both the API users and the advertisers who use the UI, then they should have provided more information on the UI instead of having to strip them from the API.

For being so concerned with efficient market theory and collecting so much data Google sure is greedy with their data. They sure expect marketers to trust them with a bunch for not even trusting marketers with something as trivial as search counts.

Yahoo! and eBay allow access to their old marketplace data because it helps drive up costs, commerce, profits, and makes a more efficient market. Why can't Google get a clue on this?

Would the Sandbox concept be more accurately named the TrustBox?

NFFC, Lots0, and Massa highlight in far more detail what I was hinting at in my recent sandbox post and what I was trying to say on my WMW panel. Like it or not, SEO is largely becoming a game of public relations in many competitive industries.

Other semi-recent posts about the shifting of bulk spam to trust related techniques:

• risk vs reward in hiring a cheap link monkey

• link spam detection based on mass estimation
• TrustRank
• buying old sites

For those who recently complained that link trading doesn't work, it is largely because most link exchange offers and opportunities are garbage.

A long time ago I thought that search algorithms were going to advance to the point that it would be easier to influence (barter / manipulate / become friends with / etc.) people than search algorithms. With algorithms like TrustRank and the viral nature of blogging you really don't need to seek the approval of all that many people to do well. Put another way, if Danny Sullivan likes and frequently references your SEO website then odds are Google will too. In every industry there are going to be a limited number of people like Danny.

BTW, Danny also recently posted about the move toward trusted links.

If you watch Google close enough you get a lot of good free tips on public relations. They are ALWAYS in the news. And it is on all fronts.

• controvercy (Google Print)

• business (why split your stock when a lofty price makes front page news in the business / finance section)
• technology (too numerous to mention)
• etc etc etc

I have not been able to get a screenshot, but at WMW Vegas I noticed that when Baked Jaked was looking at Google search results for [Gwen Stefani Tickets] that their were Google AdWords ads at the top, right, and bottom.

On this pannel sites are reviewed for what they could do to improve their SEO.

ArtInternationalWholesale.com

• use specific page titles on deep pages

• Tim Mayer recommends optimizing for image search since it has lots of traffic and few people optimize for it. Use proper file names, alt tags, and link at the images.
• duplicate content issues (individual product pages are so similar)
• Matt says they need to look harder at link quality
• has the site duplicated on the .co.uk

OnlineHighway or InformationHighway...something like that...I so could not see the URL

• 50,000 to 5,000 visitors per day on update Allegra

• using popunders is just as evil as popups
• unsure purpose of site by looking at a page
• used to have multiple location based URLs...301ed to one central domain. Matt Cutts recommended that.
• Baked Jake said it can take 2 weeks to 6 months for 301s to take effect

TicketsToGo.com

• TicketsToGo seems penalized in Google since October 2004

• also created TicketsToGo.net because
• duplicate content issues
• Jake recommends starting from the bottom up. Building links into some of the subject specific pages and then working your way up.
• target Geo specific concerts
• Matt Cutts said "tell me about your backlinks" ... uber spammy reciprocal linking campaign. said good news is no manual spam penalty, but few of the low quality links this site has are doing it any good.

BargainTravel.com

• Tim Mayer asked what is actually unique about your domain?

• Yahoo! looks to ensure that with travel that the travel box is owned by the domain, not an affiliate form. Would not recommend submitting to Yahoo! paid inclusion
• Matt pointed out bad cross industry linking between his own site (like mortgage and credit sites), but said there were some good links
• Tim recommends making the site more unique from page to page and cleaning up the navigation links. He thinks the site navigation being at the footer and the page content existing primarily of wildcard replace duplicate content makes him think the local pages are for search bots instead of users
• not only link to related pages about immunization, etc., but also create tables of the locatin based related information, etc.

MicroMatic.com

• home page title nice

• site looks good
• individual product pages have good data
  Matt Cutts calls some of their paid backlinks "painfully obvious" to most any search engine. Matt said those links are not hurting them, but they are not helping in Google.

• could probably be rather easy for a site like that to get many links from beer hobbyist sites

LendingTree.com

• question about looking at their sitewide links to IACI partner network

• instead of looking to rank for mortgage Matt recommends looking for 20 year mortgage loan, etc.
• Jake recommends geo targeted pages
• Matt recommends maybe adding more text, but they are already looking at ROI testing and that is why there is limited text
• internal links can help reinforce topics
• Matt said their cross network linking seems pretty organic / not with intent to spam. Note that in Google's spam review guidelines that IACI's travel sites were ones that were whitelisted examples for remote quality search raters

• mortgage calculator link on LendingTree built for a manipulation test on Google...that was the reasoning the guy said and Matt Cutts made a funny face
• Matt Cutts said the partner links section on IACI properties as a technique do not work in Google.
• Matt said the goal of engines is to detect and count editorial quality votes.