SEO for Firefox has been updated again. It now shows the number of pages from a site that are stuck in the supplemental results.

Here is an old primer on supplemental results, and here is how to find what pages from a site are in the supplemental results.

I took a while to post this because the AdWords data was too small of a sample set to trust as meaningful data, but from affiliate sales I now can say that the new SEO Book salesletter is a big success. Affilate conversion rates are up, last month I paid out twice as many affiliates as any prior month, and this month looks like it will be beating last month.

Here is the new sales letter and the old sales letter. You can read about the changes Brian Clark made here. I will soon do multivariant testing to further improve the salesletter and sales process.

Andy Hagans recently posted about his linkbait marathon strategy to rank his sites at the top of the search results. Brian Provost posted about his love for domaining. Domain names may play a big roll not only in anchor text, but also in overall domain credibility, linkability, and defensibility.

An Example of a Domain Waiting to Fall:

In spite of making over a thousand dollars a month, one of my unappealingly named domain names has cost itself significant credibility and links. Since it is an invisible cost it is hard to estimate how much it has cost, but I have a perfect example of showing how much it hurts.

One time I tried sponsoring an event and they said sure. They got my credit card details and then asked for the domain name. Once they saw the domain name they said sorry they couldn't accept my money. And this is a reputable content site in a field that is easy to like, but on a junky sounding domain name. Ouch.

Being Honest With Yourself:

If you have a quality legitimate content site, and people who typically sell reviews or links are unwilling to take your money you know it is time for a change.

Other Signs of Trust:

If people who need sponsorship are unwilling to take my money imagine how much a bad domain name suppresses my click-through rate in the search results, and how many other links it cost me. If and when relevancy moves toward an attention based metric I am screwed if my house is built on a cheesy domain name that looks spammy.

Domain Buyer's Pricing Tips:

You can sometimes capture emerging field names cheaply, but you are probably going to have to spend at least a few grand to get a good name if you are in an established field.

If you are new to domaining, and can't afford a great .com there are still a lot of great .org and .net names out there available for $1,000 to $10,000.

Is a 301 Redirect Risky?

I will eventually 301 redirect my high ranking ugly domain name to the undeveloped MyKeywords.org domain that I just spent $8,000 buying. Short term I will probably see some drop in traffic, but long-term it is going to be far less risky to create an leverage what looks like a real resource and a real brand.

If you do something like this, make sure you have enough other passive income streams to afford the risk, and keep developing links to the new domain name. Keep that old trusted domain registered and redirecting for many years into the future. If you lose it you will probably lose a large portion of your link authority.

There is No Value in Being Anonymous:

You can spend the money your site is making as a passive income source, but if you believe in what you are doing, and have money in the bank, there is no reason to use a bad domain name. It is like writing nameless.

You can get a decent design for few thousand dollars, or a design modification for a few hundred. You can get good content for $50 a page or less. You can move a CMS for a low price too. The cost of moving and re-branding a non-brand site are negligible compared to the potential upside.

If you ever decide to sell, you are not going to get much out of my-ugly-do-mainz.biz, but if you create a real brand on an undeveloped strong domain name you will be able to sell it for a premium far in excess of the domain name cost.

Google works so well because they are scalable, but they are not adverse to paying people to review content quality, because they love human computation, just see their Google Image Labeler game. What if Google came up with ways to determine which users were real and trustworthy, and could give those users incentive to edit the search results for Google? And what if Google could give a similar incentive to advertisers and legitimate publishers?

What if just by reading this you are helping Google trust this site more?

Attention Data:

Google already is the market leader in tracking attention data on the active portions of the web. What if Google integrated attention data into their algorithm and to offset that decide to lower the quantity of links they would count in any time period or the weight they would put on them? What would that do to the value of link baiting? How can Google move away from links?

WebmasterWorld and Threadwatch both recently had great posts about a recent Google patent application about removing documents based on the actions of trusted users.

Google's Own Web Graph:

Google is setting up an alternate proprietary web graph outside of linkage data. Sure any single point of attention data may be gamed, but they are likely far more reliable when you triangulate them. And if a few data points fall outside of expected ranges for the associated site profile pay to have the data reviewed. Based on that review demote spam or further refine the relevancy algorithms.

A Complete Feedback Cycle:

Google is the perfect shopping mall. Google...

• verifies the legitimacy of user accounts by looking at their history, comparing them to other users, and challenging them with captchas.

• tracks click-through rates and user activity, associated with user accounts and IP addresses.
• hosts a bunch of web content, which is syndicated on many channels, and can further be used to understand the topical interests of the account holders and reach of publishers.
• asks for searcher feedback on advertisements
• allows people to note URLs using Google notebooks
• tracks feedback after conversions
• puts themselves in the middle of transactions with Google Checkout

Why wouldn't they be open to using those and other forms of feedback to help shape relevancy?

Opening up AdWords to display content partner URLs is probably a pretty good example of them adding an advertiser feature for improvement of organic relevancy scores. If advertisers think a site is garbage and Google knows that most of that site's traffic only comes from search engines it would pretty easy to demote that site. AdSense publishers also have created blacklists.

Popularity vs Personal Relevance:

Google can triangulate all these data points to see beyond just how much hype any idea creates. They can understand user satisfaction and brand loyalty, which are far more important than just how much short term hype an idea can generate.

If 100 searchers with somewhat similar profiles to mine are loyal to brands x, y, and z then I am going to see them more often, even if those sites are not well integrated into the web as a whole.

Digital Identities:

Bill Slawski recently posted about Google's Agent Rank patent, and there is a push to create a distributed login system called OpenID. Google may not need a single login to track everyone. All they have to do is get a large representative sample of legitimate web users to get a pretty good idea of what is important.

As Bob Massa said, search engines follow people.

Personalization is not going to be what makes SEO harder. It is going to be linguistic profiling, attention profiling, community interaction, and layered user feedback that make it harder to promote garbage and easier to promote quality sites. I still see spammy link building working today, but I don't see it staying that way 2 years out.

With many companies offering free keyword research tools I recently created a keyword list cleaner that can be used to help you format keyword data into a usable format. Use the SEO Book keyword list cleaner, grab the source code if you like it, or read here for background on the tool.