If your main site does not have a brand to the scale of BMW then maybe it is true that your site has only 1 or maybe a few lives in the search results. For your main company site it may be worth it to take the slow and steady path to the top.

If you aggressively market pages on other sites that prominently feature you then you can do it over and over again, while likely significantly lowering your risk (as compared to directly marketing your own site aggressively).

For example, looking at the Google Viagra SERPs, the SERP is about 50% spam. You got:

• .edu subdomains

• other subdomains of other sites
• Yahoo! news syndication of a press release
• humor page turned advertisement

Since Google is overtrusting root domain trust and heavily leveraging that trust when evaluating the rankings for other pages on that same site many people are simply moving all spam external to their own sites, in favor of placing it on another well trusted domain. Then some of them are creatively using aggressive link strategies to promote those pages where they are prominently featured.

For many of these types of pages the creation and redirection and link building is entirely automated. But if you take a bit longer and create something like that humor page or create a real resource page it may stick in the SERPs longer and eventually grow into a self reinforcing position.

With as wide spread as some of these off site spam activities are I would expect Google to eventually find a way to break down the domain trust scores into pieces, ie: something like only trust a page on a domain in proportion to how much link popularity from that domain flows at that page.

What held Google SERP spam back was the need for placing spam on a trusted domain. Now that many people are exploring that option the system must once again evolve.

SEO Question:

My site already ranks number 1 in Google. How do I get Google to post a mini site map in the search results?

SEO Answer:

I believe that Google primarily displays multi link listings when they feel a query has a strong chance of being navigational in nature. I think they can determine that something is navigational in nature based on linkage data and click streams. If the domain is well aligned with the term that could be another signal to consider.

If you have 10,000 legit links for a term that nobody else has more than a few dozen external citations for then odds are pretty good that your site is the official brand source for that term. I think overall relevancy as primarily determined by link reputation is the driving factor for weather or not they post mini site map links near your domain.

This site ranks for many terms, but for most of them I don't get the multi link map love. For the exceptionally navigational type terms (like seobook or seo book) I get multi links.

The mini site maps are query specific. For Aaron Wall I do not get the mini site map. Most people usually refer to the site by it's domain name instead of my name.

Google may also include subdomains in their mini sitemaps. In some cases they will list those subdomains as part of the mini site map and also list them in the regular search results as additional results.

Michael Nguyen put together a post comparing the mini site maps to Alexa traffic patterns. I think that the mini site maps may roughly resemble traffic patterns, but I think the mini links may also be associated with internal link structure.

For instance, I have a sitewide link to my sales letter page which I use the word testimonials as the anchor text. Google lists a link to the sales letter page using the word testimonials.

When I got sued the page referencing the lawsuit got tons and tons of links from many sources, which not only built up a ton of linkage data, but also sent tons of traffic to that specific page. That page was never listed on the Google mini site map, which would indicate that if they place heavy emphasis on external traffic or external linkage data either they try to smooth the data out over a significant period of time and / or they have a heavy emphasis on internal linkage.

My old site used to also list the monthly archives on the right side of each page, and the February 2004 category used to be one of the mini site map links in Google.

You should present the pages you want people to visit the most to search bots the most often as well. If you can get a few extra links to some of your most important internal pages and use smart channeling of internal linkage data then you should be able to help control which pages Google picks as being the most appropriate matches for your mini site map.

Sometimes exceptionally popular sites will get mini site map navigational links for broad queries. SEO Chat had them for the term SEO, but after they ticked off some of their lead moderators they stopped being as active and stopped getting referenced as much. The navigational links may ebb and flow like that on broad generic queries. For your official brand term it may make sense to try to get them, but for broad generic untargeted terms in competitive markets the amount of effort necessary to try to get them will likely exceed the opportunity cost for most webmasters.

Great interview of Tim O'Reilly

I think that we'll find in some ways that this is the real secret of the relationship between free and non-free content. There will be so much free content that it's going to be hard to find and those who can help you find what you want will be able to charge for it - in one way or the other, whether it's through advertising or through subscription or something else. It's about managing to find "the best", and "the best" is a kind of metadata.

I still think there are many overlooked creative ways to add value to the publishing value chain. More on that in about a month ;)

On average we are all average. There is no money in average though:

Bob would fail if he did average work for average editors just to make a living. But by turning down the average stuff and insisting on standing for something on the edge, he profits. By challenging his clients to run stuff that makes them nervous (and then having them discover that it's great), he profits.

This is scary. It's really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities. Scary to quit your job at an average company doing average work just because you know that if you stay, you'll end up just like them. Scary to go way out on an edge and intentionally make what you do unattractive to some.

Which is why it's such a great opportunity.

This is sorta like my recent porn post, except more sanitized and generally much better.

Some people are going to outragiously overpay. Why not let those people be your customers.

Lets say you write a blog about poker. It is pretty hard to get legitimate links to a poker blog, but lets say you talk about how you met Phil Ivey but the story is not that interesting sounding. You can add a bit of authenticity to the sound of the story by buying a Phil Ivey autographed poker chip for $23 and include it in your post.

In certain markets (like poker) just about any type of link is worth $23. There are also other types of junk or collectibles that may be selling for far less than their linkability factor - weather you post about them and get a few links or you hold a contest of some sort to give them away, and get many more links.

Collecting allows you to easily create original linkable content which leverages the value of a celebrity or brand without needing to fully invest into the cost of building that brand or getting a celebrity to endorse your site. Branded keywords or celebrity keywords are typically high traffic and / or high value terms.