Yahoo! allows paid inclusion members to buy quick links in the search results and indexes sites more fully if they use Yahoo! for their site search. While neither of these may seem like a big deal they both are. Allowing businesses the chance to buy a greater share of the search results or giving them greater indexing priority for them using your search service are both things that would make search purists cringe.

While Google is busy turning the text link into a performance based ad network Yahoo! sells their search credibility and marketshare too cheaply. Buying Del.icio.us and MyBlogLog are not going to make up for the undermining effect on credibility paid inclusion offers.

When I was new to the web I was excited when I would get things to rank from scratch, thinking I did a great job of SEO, but if your results are effective and consider applicable risks does it matter what techniques you used to promote a website? None of us really start out from scratch. When I started on the web I was a recluse with low living costs, lots of time, the need to be successful, and lots of rage. Those were off the web assets that played in my favor, as well as my liking for reading and writing, and my experience selling baseball cards in high school. I also had a friend who was web savvy and made many friends on forums. Without them I would have failed online.

That is probably too much of talking about me, but consider yourself:

• what unique experiences or biases do you have?

• what resources do you lack?
• what resources do you have a lot of?

After you think of your own assets and skill sets, ask yourself if it matters how you achieve your results.

• Does it matter how you learned what you know?

• Is it better if your site is brand new? Or is it better if you bought an established site?
• Is it better if you designed your site? Or is it better if you used a free template or paid a site designer to create it?
• Is it better if your site is hand coded? Or is it better if you use an extensible content management system?
• Is it better if your site validates? Or is it better if your site renders in browsers and you spent that extra time and money to create more content?
• Is it better if you created all the content yourself? Or is it better if you paid writers to create it?
• Is it better if you sell your own product? Or is it better if you sell ad space?
• Is it better if your links are all organic? Or is it better if you bought a few topically related trusted links?
• Is it better if you rank your own site? Or is it better to buy an ad on an authoritative site and rank that page?

You learn more by doing things yourself, but you can't learn and do everything if you are trying to make a scalable business. All those points of distinction are arbitrary. Every market is gamed, and so long as your methods work it doesn't matter how you got there as long as you didn't have to hurt others to do so.

After you are profitable and growing, for many projects it makes sense to outsource tasks, including:

• website design

• content creation
• ad sales
• maybe even initial marketing, by buying old websites

Thinking that you have to do everything from scratch means that you are going to run into scale issues much quicker than a competitor who believes in outsourcing will. Once you consider opportunity cost, doing everything yourself becomes far less appealing.

A couple friends recently mentioned The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It is a great DVD from the perspective of a former Secretary of Defense, about the errors he made and the lessons he learned in his life.

It is mind boggling to hear about all the fire bombing in Japan, how serious the Cuban missile crisis was, and that the Vietnam war lasted so long due to a lack of empathy. So much has been smudged away from the school books. The DVD concludes a killer quote derived from T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.

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Machines optimized for market efficiency and profit don't have ethics, and do not promote businesses that do. How much we will allow ourselves to trust personalization and quality scores?

"They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised. They preferred lies and mood music...." - J G Ballard, Kingdom Come

As ads and content continue to blend eventually there will be some type of blowback where websites that are driven by passion will keep taking marketshare from sites that lack passion. If you have a hobby the odd are you are passionate, spending a lot of time on it, and may also be spending a lot of money on it. Why not align work and play?

If you turn your hobbies into businesses at the very least you get a tax write off, but on the upside you might create a sustainable profitable business model.