Helpful Robots Txt Tip

When creating a robots.txt file, if you specify something for all bots (using a *) and then later specify something for a specific bot (like Googlebot) then search engines tend to ignore the broad rules and follow the ones you defined specifically for them. From Matt Cutts:

If there's a weak specification and a specific specification for Googlebot, we'll go with the one for Googlebot. If you include specific directions for Googlebot and also want Googlebot to obey the "generic" directives, you'd need to include allows/disallows from the generic section in the Googlebot section.

I believe most/all search engines interpret robots.txt this way--a more specific directive takes precedence over a weaker one.

Using Google to Target Bloggers & the Mainstream Media with Search Queries

Just how one does market research to see how competitive a marketplace is, you can also do market research to view how important some ideas have been historically.

Google Trends shows historical search trends and Google's experimental history search will show published pages based on associated reference time. Google News also allows you to search by timeframe.

Services such as the Yahoo! Buzz Index show what is hot right now. Social bookmarking sites, social news sites, and meme trackers show what stories are hot right now, and were hot in the recent past. When you want to gain access to the media, use the above sources to research what they thought was important in the past. Either look at your exact field, or look to a more mature market to predict what issues will become important in your market. You are basically going to target an idea to create what some people term as link bait. Link baiting background available here.

Once you get an idea, spend whatever is necessary to create a piece of content (text, video, whatever) that is the best piece of content on that topic. It can be history of x, don't get scammed by y, or z do it yourself tips. Heavily integrate that content into your site's internal link structure, and make no attempt to directly profit from it...simply make it easy to link at or want to reference. Consider this content as a cheap marketing cost.

Ask a few friends what they think of your content's title. Ensure it sounds authoritative and/or buzz-worthy (one or both, depending on your target market and story idea). Promote your article to friends, email a few popular bloggers who might like the story, and if you know someone with powerful social media accounts ping them too.

Ensure your site appears credible.

If you are in a new field or have a trusted domain doing all the above might be enough to garner top rankings. If you have a new site in an old field there still is hope, but you may need to create video content that you can post on sites like YouTube or venture into PPC ads. :)

If you buy PPC ads use my keyword list generator or a similar tool to generate a list of various permutations of the targeted phrase. Create an ad campaign with ad groups and ad copy for each relevant keyword basket.

I did this for an affiliate site that is less than a year old, and bid 50 cents a click on AdWords. I was the only advertiser for most of the targeted keywords, got a 25% ctr for high volume search terms at 8 cents a click.

AdWords Bids.

Some members of the media also contacted us wanting face time for television and national radio exposure. As the site ages and gets more exposure we will get a lot more of that.

One could use the same idea to target key bloggers by using AdSense's site targeting function on their blogs.

Market Timing and Search Results

You can learn a lot about how the search results will change based on recent changes that have been made and by seeing what tests the engines are running. As SEOs we track the algorithms quite intensively, but the search result display is just as important. Google allows webmasters to see what search tests they are currently performing via Google Experimental Search.

SEO Digger

A friend pointed me to SEO Digger, which is another site which shows what keywords a particular page ranks for.

Other similar sites that do this are SpyFu (AdWords & Organic), KeyCompete (AdWords), and URL Trends (Organic).

Publishing Video Content is Easy Money

Google bought YouTube, but is struggling with ironing out ad revenue shares and advertising. What is the easiest way for Google to fix these issues? Integrate YouTube and Google Video directly into Google's search results.

Using what legal loopholes they may and something they call universal search, you can now listen to music videos directly from Google.com search results. This creates a marketplace that many businesses will need to be in to stay relevant, destroys a whole vertical of web spam, AND allows Google to monetize the organic search results (via YouTube). If you think video is a passing fad you bet wrong, but if you are doing it you are best off branding your videos to be associated with your domain name and uploading them to YouTube. Eli offered tips on how to make $1,000 a month re-purposing video, but now the number is more like $20,000.

Sure Google has done many YouTube users wrong, but if you need exposure, Google turned back the clock on SEO. Top ranking have never been easier. All you need to succeed is to format your content in video and upload it to YouTube.

Tim O'Reilly compares Google and Amazon to offline companies:

If Google or Amazon were your bank or credit card, they'd let you know which merchants had the best prices for the same products, so you'd be a smarter shopper next time. They'd let merchants know what products were popular with people who also bought related products. They'd help merchants stock the right products by zip code. They'd let you know when you were spending more on dining out than you have set in your family budget. They'd let you know when you were approaching your credit limit, with a real-time fuel gauge, not just a "Sorry, your card has been declined."

Universal search mixes videos and news in the organic search results and recommends other verticals at the top of the search results. And Google is testing a broader array of layouts.

By making search richer you have less reason to leave Google. Google started with targeted text ads, but it is even better if they can combine their targeting with trusted brands and offers while making their ads look like a useful piece of content in any format.

Search Engines as Affiliates

How long until search engines are the biggest affiliates on the web? And when they do that, will affiliate marketing still be looked down upon the way SEO and domaining are? Better yet, will we have any way to know who is buying the ad or how it is priced?

Social Search and Personalization

Gord Hotchkiss recently posted about how he thought personalization was Google's trump card in social search. DigitalGhost noticed that Yahoo! hired some of the best sociology professors in the world, including Duncan J. Watts.

Bill Slawski recently highlighted that the original goal of PageRank was to:

...be useful for estimating the amount of attention any document receives on the web since it models human behavior when surfing the web

Google has a personalized home page, recommends gadgets, added many verticals to their organic search results, and biases the search results to your interests. With Google and other engines adding more content types directly to the search results, and adding more ways to search through it, the need for many of the niche communities diminishes. The social communities built on strong brands or bias will want central editors. Communities built on other weaker commonalities will wither.

Many of the smaller social search plays will get buried under their own weight. At this point, their page count will increase faster than their authority does, and as their outbound traffic drops so will their interest and authority. In other words, I think most of the social search plays are at best a fad.

When Marketing is Too Successful

A friend recently launched a new site and promptly crafted a great linkbait award idea that got so many links that over 95% of the website's inbound links were reciprocal links. The award program worked so well that traditional PR firms used our list of award winners to seed their list of people they wanted to contact to talk about a client.

The site did not rank anywhere near as well as it should have because there were too many reciprocal links gained far too quickly when you consider the rest of the site's link profile.

One of the reasons that it is so important to mix link types is such that if any of your marketing really takes off you want some semblance of balance to your link profile.

Outbound Links Matter: Google's Recent Paid Link War

DaveN offers his recovery plan for a recent Google algorithm which has affected the rankings of many sites engaged in buying and selling links.

Key points from Dave's post and comments:

  • DaveN focuses on the importance of building topical and trusted links before reaching into the outlier parts of the web. Older and more trusted sites can then loop back to buying lower quality links to shore up their rankings for important keywords.

  • Links from high quality trusted blogs are a more effective way to buy / build links than links that have obvious footprints associated with being bought in a group of other links.
  • Dave also noted that in the past people who bought links may have got hit, and link sellers might have got their outbound link passing ability blocked, but this is the first time Google actively lowered the rankings of link sellers.

Is Your Field Tarnished?

Frank Schilling and Andy Hagans both wrote posts about the bogus worldview of the role of SEOs. Frank also highlighted that most every industry gets this treatment:

It seems to me that the only groups "incapable of doing wrong" on the Internet are either the browser, operating systems or Google. Even when these groups are clearly doing wrong they are incapable of doing wrong in the media's and public's eyes. Everyone else eventually gets maligned as a dark-hearted "neer do well" or "rounder".

Yet in spite of this treatment, people like Rand give tips on things like segmenting search intent nearly every day, Blue Hat SEO shares real world SEO examples, Shoemoney shares his designer, Eric Enge interviews search engineers, and DaveN is even willing to tell you when new link buying algorithms roll in.

Don't forget that the people telling stories about fighting spam or fighting for good are often full of crap. Take Collactive, for example. Here we have a company backed by Seqouia (which also backed Google) which is creating a marketplace for spamming social media sites. The same company behind Collactive was originally behind Blue Frog, which aimed to stop email spam. Why did they shift for being against spam to promoting it? Money. That is all most businesses are interested in anyhow.

Google doesn't care about spam if it is through AdSense. The lines between signal vs noise, ethical vs unethical, and friend vs foe change depending on where the stack of money is largest. Anytime you read a business drone on about ethics make sure to think about the self serving nature of their advice.

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