Stocks that Will Rock Your World

Rick Aristotle Munarriz, from The Motley Fool, wrote an article looking at the downfall of MP3.com and the resurgance of online music.

Yet there's a reason why there isn't a single worthy investing angle when it comes to buying into the trend towards showcasing the unheard. No one is doing it right.

The broadband migration continues. Bandwidth and servers get perpetually cheaper, yet the market seems to think that the only money to be made in digital music is in pitching popular tracks for a buck or less, or coming up with some portable aural smorgasbord solution of commercial tunes. In a word, strategy is primitive.

That's why I believe that, years from now, the major labels won't be the same batch of old-school vinyl pushers you see today. As ludicrous as it may seem, I think that the real power brokers in the music industry will be Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT).

Oh, they don't even know it yet. It may be years before they even come around to connecting the dots, but they will connect those dots. That's because those three companies are the ones leading the way in localized search.

Even as a search marketer I think it is hard to appreciate what an effect search will have on society.

Watching a Business Model Get Marginalized

So I work pretty hard trying to keep up with everything that is going on in the SEO / SEM space, but search engines have been releasing a ton of products recently.

Combine that with the fact that SEO is increasingly complex and it gets tough to write a book that is useful and comprehensive and allows novice to intermediate level SEOs to learn enough to do well, especially while still keeping the book short enough that people would want to read through it.

Currently my ebook is about 200 pages, with about 50 of those pages being reference links, the cover page, the table of contents, and that sort of stuff.

After Yahoo! released their most version of MyWeb 2.0 Danny Sullivan wrote a subscription required approximately 25 page article on Yahoo!'s search personalization. There was no fluff in his article either. 25 pages of useful information about Yahoo! personalized search. I think reading a ton every day and summarizing on a blog sorta forces me to become better at filtering information. To appreciate how hard it is to learn and balance it all while working for a few clients as well, I recently wrote the following about pay per click marketing:

A friend of mine is writing a book about PPC right now I think. It can be done well, but to me you need to have a large ad spend to really appreciate how the programs change at various spend levels, and I don't want to be managing all that ad spend. I like the idea of going to Coachella or Burning Man or a small remote island for a while. It is hard to do that stuff with huge ad spend unless you have staff and some office (and offices are evil).

To me writing a PPC book is probably far better for the writer than the consumers. eventually PPC becomes a zero sum game, and it costs much more than effective SEO does.

with SEO you can have far more effect cheaper. and PPC is getting absurdely complex as well:

with Google they factor keyword CTR into the CPC equasion, but now they also factor in the ad copy as well.
add to that the CTR they use to figure out relevancy is not the same one that shows in your account.
add that to the three syndication groups (4 if you count the cpm site targeting only)
then there is exact match, phrase match, and broad match (as well as negative keywords)
there is in trial, on hold, disabled, normal statuses
and then the issue of budgeting, and geotargeting, etc etc etc
and then there are oolies like dynamic keyword insertion and some search engines following and indexing some tracking URLs

and that's just Google AdWords, of course Overture is a different system as well. MSN promises to have a system more complex than either Overture or Google.

To me it seems both PPC and SEO will get too complex for the average newbie to be able to do well unless they have a great site or the market is not competitive. Hopefully that is still a bit off from now though because I need to change the biz model before we go too far down that slope.

Blogs, Attention Markets, & Link Building Opportunities

"Blogs will save democracy." - random blogger

While there are many blogs about blogging, and in general the concept is overhyped, blogs do present a solid marketing opportunity.

Gaining unrequested links usually takes a good bit of effort. You have to be one of the leading resources in your field, you have to provide something that others do not, you have to give others a reason to want to link to you. Some people try to buy their way in, but of course that eventually backfires.

With blogs you can just whinge on about whatever, and so long as it is usually on topic some people will read it. Sometimes the smallest things, like mentioning a 20 pound AdWords coupon can get you multiple free links from other regularly updated channels, and the attention of people who read those channels.

If you are looking for resources to cite you can use a tool to look at topical trackbacks (which also point links your way) and help get you noticed by some of the leaders of your community. Of course you can go too far and be labeled a spammer so you want to use some caution / restraint.

Some systems, like PubSub, also show you how citation data / linkage profiles change over time. If someone is linking at a competing channel then you can ask them to link to yours, or reference them, or make a useful comment on their site which is likely to get them to click through to your site.

Some bloggers also tag their content. Some have suggested using tagging systems for keyword research, but tagging is sloppy, narrow, and somewhat self reinforcing IMHO.

To me the real value of tagging is in linking opportunities and attention markets.

You can tag your content to work yourself into the tagged channels. Some people track certain terms, so you can almost guarantee they will read what you write if you tag it with the terms they track.

Of course, if tagging systems get too popular they will get heavily spammed. Technorati tags: blog, blogs, marketing, link-building, blog-spam, scoble, msn etc etc etc

For link building you can find people who are tagging things that interest you, make a good personalized proposal, offering something they are interested in, and get the link :)

Stuntdubl has a list of social bookmarking tools here.

Erosion of Value: Small General Directories...PUNT!

BobMuch keeps promoting directory lists over at SEW forums (which frequently inclde 5 of his own directories), but many scrappers sites have recently been given a hand job, and DaveN says of directories:

whats stopping someone just scraping and building directories, using the same footprint

DaveN

added oops they all ready have

If scrappers are a big burdon on Google (and they are), and

they pattern themselves after directories; and
most of the small general directories are not much more than glorified link farms

Then it makes sense that small junk directories are on their way out.

Marcia also mentions identifiable link networks, staying below radar, and how many directories appear as link farms:

There are some that are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, visibly identifiable as being part of linking "networks" - either networks of likeminded directories interlinked and cross-linked with the same business model in mind, or quite visibly as SEO networks.

Unfortunately, trying to emulate BH techniques without following the basic rule of BH, which is to stay off the radar, isn't what so many of them are doing. Publicizing and soliciting business for them right at SEO forums, right where search engineers can and do read, is exactly the opposite - it's putting them right on the radar and it's only been a matter of time before the ships either float or sink.

and

A good, substantial, vertical directory that's well established and gets inbound traffic for the relevant keyword set will do that, but those are a far cry from many of the little directories being thrown out there daily, both independently and as part of networks, that hope to monetize by selling text adverts or footer sitewides, even though, as pointed out, in many cases they're literally undistuishable from scraper sites

For a while I tried to help promote some of the directories, but almost all of them have turned out to be quick buck operations, and I will not be sad to see that business model erode.

What have you seen of Google and directories? Are they becoming less effective?

Evil SEO Business Models: Hate Site Networks & Mafia Styled Ranking Manipulation

So like Google's motto, usually I try not to be evil. Sometimes I think of random evil thoughts though. I can't help it, sometimes I forget to wear the tinfoil hat... ;)

I have been contacted by an increasing number of corporations who want me to bury negative websites. Some general feedback sites with good root authority have inner pages which are ranking for a wide variety of business names.

What would happen if a person set up a network of sites to collect feedback about various companies, knowing that they would get mostly negative responses? Throw in a dash of promotion and a link to us reminders and you are ranking for many business names.

Have someone else inform people of the hate sites and maybe there is a subscription SEO business model burying the bad news. If they stop paying for your services you go about removing links for some sites and build a few for the negative site.

Of course if the businesses are too well connected and some stuff is sold in the wrong way I think it could be extortion or something, so I am not trying to promote that.

There has to be a way to make money leveraging the ability to bury bad news. Then again, depending on what bad news you were trying to bury that could be evil too.

Personalized, Targeted, & Relevant Search Spam

Search spam is ready for the next level...DaveN appears to like the new Google personalized search. :)

I hope to be interviewing DaveN shortly, and will post the interview online when it is done.

DaveN also thinks that useless small directories might be on their way out.

Link Harvester Updated Again...

So my friend Mike just updated Link Harvester again (be cool and grab your source code here).

The newest version of the tool:

strips the www. off of filtered domains such that both the www and non www versions get filtered out in one swoop
allows users to manually enter domains to filter. This works well if people have links from various subdomain URLs like Every-Town-in-the-Country.Spam-Site.com. Just enter Spam-Site.com and it will filter all of them.
links into the Whois Source data for DMOZ and Yahoo! listings
added # of c block IP addresses and URLs for the filtered sites section
still has all the features the old tool had

Anyone have any more feature requests for it?

Cache Crawler... New SEO Tool Idea

Feature requests... feature requests.

So recently Waxy held a contest for creating a tool to visually see the history of a Wikipedia page. The winning programmer got like $200, which in terms of SEO spend is not much money for a tool that many people could use.

While search engine APIs may have limited longterm value I am hoping that they last a while and are not too evil with their TOS. If they are of course more people will just scrape the data. They may try to block scraping, but tools and spam techniques evolve with the engines.

I am thinking our rate will usually be above $200, and I don't want to make the price something where people place the lowest bid. We will just come up with a price and then throw the idea out there and see what comes back. I can pay for the tools, or if it really takes off and others want to support some of the ideas they can help donate too.

If people would be willing to program decent SEO tools for a decent price I could probably think up at least 50 tools to be programmed.

With that in mind, I think the SEO community should have a mass cache tool, to know when stuff was cached. Here are the desired features (so far):

works with the Google API
checks Google's cache feature (cache:www.example.com) for cache date.
the tool should have three main modes it functions in:
1. allows bulk upload of a list of pages and returns the cache date of each page, also informing users of what pages are not cached.
2. allows you to enter a URL and return the cache date from the first 1,000 URLs.
3. allows you to enter a URL and returns which pages are freshly cached. also allows you to set a fresh date to return URLs spidered since then when you do a bulk upload of URLs.
If it is possible return if the page is in the supplemental results.
The data should be easily exportable to CSV for further manipulation.

Is this a good tool idea? Bad idea? Have any feedback on how to make the idea better? Ideas on how to market it? Suggested award amount? Did I use too many vowels in the post? please give feedback :)

Trackback Search - Sure to Tick off More than a Few Bloggers

So I have noticed trackback spam is much heavier on the weekends. This weekend some kind souls have been promoting bestiality and hentai in my trackback section for me. I always wonder why there is the need to promote those types of topics, when it is just as easy to be relevant (but then again there probably are not too many hentai bestiality bloggers, and I can't see why a person would want to market anything else).

I just got an email from a guy named Jim promoting a free tool called Trackback Search. I have not yet asked how the database was created and the like, but am emailing him right now.

Most people using a tool such as Trackback Search would probably use it to create low quality automated spam, but there are probably good ways to use it, Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub, Feedster, Blogdex, Daypop, and many of the other tools to help find useful blog type content to cite in meaningful ways.

Interesting to see free automated tools building topical relevance into their systems. Having looked at a number of searches it appears as though the topical relevancy is not perfect, but it does return many relevant sites, and most of them are from rather new posts.

The nice thing about a tool like Trackback Search is that it automates part of the research process, but still allow you to manually write posts, and manually integrate the data such that the people you are referencing do not see you as a dirty trackback spammer (like the hentai and bestiality people are).

Tools are tools, and I always adovcate looking at your long term goals and the potential outcome of using any tool prior to using it.

Even if search engines did not count the trackback linkage data trackbacks could still be a great way to help integrate yourself into a topical community, but you don't want to do it in a manner to where experts on your topic are hating you unless you are creating a crash and burn site.

As time passes more and more tools and sites will continue to blur the line between spam and useful remixing.

Free £20 Google AdWords Coupons for New Advertisers

Not sure how long they will last, but here is a free 20 pound Google AdWords coupon at services.google.com/marketing/links/UK-OA-NETCRAF found on SearchGuild.

Update: here are some more recent coupons

Google AdWords:

You can get a free $75 AdWords coupon here (or here or here or here or here or here or here) ... many options linked because some of their coupon offers expire over time & we update this page periodically. The Google Partners Program also offers coupons to consultants managing AdWords accounts.

Bing Ads: get a free Bing coupon today.