Sorting Out The Mobile Search & SEO Mess (Search Engine Land) One of the biggest challenges of being a mobile SEO is comparing keyword results across the many different search engines. While the goal of all the mobile engines is the same, their approaches vary considerably. Many traditional SEOs will simply target Google and hope for the best in the other engines, but there is a lot to be learned by comparing the impact of your SEO efforts in all of …
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The tool will help in making the bid managements process more scientific and more efficient when dealing with the most complex paid search campaigns.
Efficient Frontier is focused on delivering advanced technology for search engine marketing performance. With that ability teamed up with Enlightens ebusiness knowledge, it might be something to add to your arsenal.
The search engine bid management tool is currently only available to customers of Enlighten. If anyone has any experience with it, or more info on it, please feel free to post your insight in the comments.
The program is targeted at owners of small amounts of domains in their portfolio. GoDaddy serves ads that are based on the domain name, and the analysis of what people click on and search for in the site.
This new service, CashParking, not only helps webmasters make a few extra dollars, but provides another means by which websites and companies can get search related traffic through links on unique domain names that are not as yet built out.
Volunteer in Africa Travel Site Takes the Organic SEO Challenge (PRWeb) Volunteer in Africa expert, Institute of Field Research Expeditions has taken on another step to consolidate its leading position in the Volunteering Abroad niche of the highly competitive travel industry by hiring Dallas Based “SEO 1 Services” and implementing the organic SEO strategy. (PRWeb Sep 22, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: …
One of the biggest challenges of being a mobile SEO is comparing keyword results across the many different search engines. While the goal of all the mobile engines is the same, their approaches vary considerably. Many traditional SEOs will simply target Google and hope for the best in the other engines, but there is a lot to be learned by comparing the impact of your SEO efforts in all of …
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
Many people wonder why Google hand editing seems random or incomplete, and why some of the best channels get edited while worse stuff is left untouched. Here are some of the reasons Google does a poor job equitably policing the web:
The web it too large to police and engineer time is expensive.
Policing certain segments produces unwanted blowback. How often do large corporations or influential bloggers get policed? (It is rare, and when it happens, it is sold as a side effect of feature for users.)
When issues become popular they get prioritized. Many times Google won’t react unless they feel they are forced to. Sometimes they will lie and say they care, and then do nothing. Back in April I highlighted the Netscape search results in Google. Matt Cutts thanked me, but guess what…those Netscape lolita preteen search result pages are STILL ranking in Google, along with a bunch of other search results.
If they edit in an incomplete or random fashion they evoke fear
It is easier to control people through fear than to create a perfect algorithm
They have no need to hand edit the worst offenders. If they are competent programmers the algorithms should take care of those sites. They sometimes edit a leading sites in a field to send a signal. They may throw in a group of other sites if they need to create cover, but their goal is to send a message and alter behavior.
As a public facing SEO who has many thousands of customers at the beginning of the SEO learning cycle many of my most common questions I get asked come as a result of Google half truths. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a few of these down to save myself time answering the same emails each day.
It may be inappropriate to label Google as a liar for doing the following. A more appropriate and more fair label would be an intentionally deceitful organization.
Want Link Data? Go Elsewhere
Google offers a link: function which shows a sampling of inbound links to a website. A few years back they had a much smaller allotment of machines for handling link queries, so they used to show mostly a sample of the most authoritative inbound links to a site. Then they started showing mostly lower quality inbound links, while filtering out most of the better ones. But they explain that they doubled the size of the sample, and showed more links to smaller mom and pop websites that lacked high authority inbound links, so it was a good feature for users.
When you hear some people at Google talk about this they talk about it, they tend to talk about “from a historical perspective” and explain how they used to be limited, but they still use virtually ALL link data in calculating result relevancy. Given that last statement then the “from a historical perspective” is self serving positioning about not providing a useful feature because they want to make SEO harder.
Want further proof? If you sign up for Google Webmaster Central and verify your site they will show you all your linkage data. I don’t trust Google Webmaster Central because they profile SEOs and hand edit the search results. Signing up is probably an unwise decision.
Google does offer us a free tool to estimate link authority though: PageRank.
Google PageRank
For as hyped as Google PageRank is, Google sure goes out of their way to ensure the values are inaccurate. They only update the Google Toolbar display about once every three months. Even then, when they update it that is not fresh for that day…those stats might be from a week, two weeks, or a month ago. Also sometimes the toolbar is buggy and shows the wrong PageRank values, where viewing the same page multiple times in a row will yield different PageRank values each time.
PageRank is just a silly idea in practice, but it is beautiful mathematically. You start off with a simple idea, such as the quality of a page is the sum of the quality of the pages that link to it, times a scalar. This sets you up with finding the eigen vectors of a huge sparse matrix. And because it is so much work, Google appears not to be updating its PageRank values that much.
Any webmaster with an old URL that ranks exceptionally well with almost no PageRank knows that PageRank didn’t drive them to outrank people with 10 times their link equity.
PageRank is important for one aspect of information retrieval though: crawl depth. If you have a lot of PageRank then you will get crawled deeply and more frequently. If not, then they will crawl shallow, and perhaps place many of your pages in the supplemental results.
Are My Pages in Google’s Supplemental Results?
Want to know what pages from your site are rarely crawled, cashed, or updated? Want to know where your duplicate content issues exist? Want to know what pages from your site we don’ t trust links from or trust enough to rank well for many search results? Look at the supplemental results. Oops, they took that label out of the results, but here is a more complicated search you can use to find your supplemental results, at least until it gets disabled. Jim Boykin and Danny Sullivan also offered tips on finding supplemental pages.
Right now a Google search for Google supplemental results provides low quality search results because most of the top results (including my #1 ranking at the moment) do not discuss how to find supplemental results. Unfortunately if you only heard of the supplemental results AFTER they took the label out you likely will have no way of telling if any of your pages are supplemental, which is good for seasoned marketers but bad for mom and pop. If I don’t edit my post then people will think I am a liar or an idiot because Google is deceptive.
If they truly wanted to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful why would they remove this label? At the very least, if webmasters paid attention to this label they would structure their sites better and help Google save bandwidth by not having Google crawl as many low quality pages.
The easiest way to get out of the supplemental results is to clean up site structure issues and build more high quality link authority. Cleaning up site structure issues is much harder now that it is harder to see what is in the supplemental results, and each day it gets harder to build honest links due to Google spreading FUD about links…
Organic Linking Patterns
With all the FUD Google spreads about paid links they make many webmasters afraid to link out to other sites, which reduces the quality of information available on those sites, and prevents some quality sites from ranking where they should. Nofollow is not about being organic. In fact, it was a tool created to directly manipulate the public’s perception of linking. To appreciate how out of hand it is, consider the following situation.
A friend’s business got covered by a mainstream media site. They wrote an entire article about his business but did not link to him because they felt linking would have made the article too promotional. Imagine being the topic of an article and the source of content for other sites without attribution for it. That is the side effect of Google’s bought links FUD.
Since Google’s link guidelines are self-serving and out of nature with the realities of the web, what happens if I get aggressive with link building and eventually get busted for doing the same things my competitors are getting away with doing?
Lose All Your Link Equity (and Your Content and Your Brand, Too!)
Your Site Goes to Jail, You DO NOT Collect $200
Many webmasters have suffer the fate of hand editing recently. The site of mine that they hand edited had about 95% of its links cleanly built by me, with the other 5% coming before I bought the site. Because it was my site they wiped away ALL of its link equity via a hand edit (simply because I bought a site that had some link equity). What makes hand edits worse is when they follow up a hand edit by paying an AdSense spammer to steal all of your content and then rank his site where you ranked prior to the hand edit.
When sites are hand penalized, they typically do not even rank for their own brand related keywords unless the webmaster buys their own brand name in Google AdWords, which means Google is even willing to sacrifice their relevancy to punish webmasters who fall outside of Google’s evershifting rule-set. Unfortunately that punishment is doled out in an uneven fashion. Large corporations can own 10 first page rankings, or use 100 subdomains, but if you do the same with a smaller website expect a swift hand edit. Even programmers who support Google’s API get a hand edit from time to time.
Rank Checkers & Google API Keys
Were you one of the early programmers to build a tool that use the SOAP version of Google’s API? Sorry, but they no longer offer Google Search API keys. Their (formerly useful) API has came back as an academic only project which they can use to recruit college students studying information retrieval.
Anyone who built a tool based on Google’s old API now has to explain to people why their tools broke. Google wanted the tools to break so they could replace the useful API with something worse. In fact, Google is pulling back more data in other spots, even when third parties create tools to add features that should have been core to Google’s products. Let’s take a look at AdSense.
Google AdSense Stats
Google does not tell smaller webmasters what their payout percentage is, what keywords triggered the ads, or what ads get clicked on. Some third party tools were created to help track the ads and keywords, but Google disabled those.
If you think about this, Google is directly undermining the profitability of their partners by hoarding data. If I know what sections of my site perform well then it is easier for me to create high value content in those areas. The more profitable my site is the more money I have to reinvest into building more content and higher quality content.
It doesn’t make sense that they ban high quality content just because it is owned by an SEO, then fund the growing dirty field of cybersquatting. I invested nearly $100,000 into building an AdSense site, until it got hand edited and I realized how AdSense really works, cannibalizing the value of content and making your site too dependant on Google as a traffic source.
Summary
If Google was honestly interested in creating a maximally efficient marketplace they wouldn’t disable third party tools, hold back information, and keep changing their systems to confuse webmasters. They wouldn’t hand edit real sites that thousands of webmasters vote for. And they would not be spreading FUD amongst the market. They would simply find a way to monetize the markets, push out inefficiencies, and grow additional revenue streams.
In some cases, if you register your site with Google they may give you a few more crumbs of info, but unless you have scale they want you to fail. What they really want, like any for profit power hungry authoritative system, is control of your attention and information, so they can ensure as many dollars as possible flow through them. Look no further than their position on the health care industry to see their true vision for making information universally accessible and useful. Ads are a type of information:
We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company s assets while helping users find the information they seek.
Looking Forward
In a few months Google will launch Claim Your Content.com, which is yet another way for them to get you to register your work with them so they can more easily profile webmasters and hand edit SEO owned sites. Allegedly it will make help prevent content theft, but once it comes out, expect duplicate content filters to stagnate or get worse unless you sign up for their service. Dirty? Yes, but so is deceiving people to increase corporate profits. The above 7 examples are just a small set of the whole.
Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die. Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.
As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices. If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.
What happens when publishers can see what is hot right now and can create commercially oriented content targeting it in near real time? What happens when they are encouraged to track and test their results and can see the results of other ideas simply by the frequency they see it? Many current arbitrage opportunities are going to die, but others will thrive on this new opportunity.
The more third party platforms optimize revenue streams the more profitable niche attention based publishing will become. Generalist sites will be less profitable than highly specialized niche publishing. Results based distribution across large networks will force advertisers to give publishers a larger cut of revenue.The key is to scour through the ads and format them in a user friendly way to where they are looking at relevant content. You can’t beat relevancy algorithms without bias, brand, focus, and strong editorial.
As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].
Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.
Volunteer in Africa Travel Site Takes the Organic SEO Challenge (PRWeb) Volunteer in Africa expert, Institute of Field Research Expeditions has taken on another step to consolidate its leading position in the Volunteering Abroad niche of the highly competitive travel industry by hiring Dallas Based “SEO 1 Services” and implementing the organic SEO strategy. (PRWeb Sep 22, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: …
SEO Tips to Avoid Critical Mistakes This article outlines three tips to help the budding web site marketing guru avoid some of the horrific and damaging SEO mistakes made by so many web designers. If care is taken to develop a good SEO plan at the outset much pain is saved later…. Software Development Looking for Software development? Search over 15,000 sites with one click. Your source for everything under the sun!
I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can’t appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.
At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn’t trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search.
If Google can’t attract the right advertisers that also means that the organic search results in that geographic market are likely easy to manipulate. In many underdeveloped markets around the world, PPC offers greater opportunity than SEO because their is virtually no competition, but as the markets mature and margins get squeezed, doing SEO and owning a brand becomes more profitable than PPC. Either way you approach it, if you can compete on Google.com you should be able to dominate foreign markets. The only issue is scale.
Estimating Market Scale
Google offers an ad preview tool to show you what ads look like in various markets, and you can take advantage of their traffic estimator tool to estimate the size of a market.
If you are in a market dominated by engines other than Google (like China and Russia) then of course you have to use tools other than Google to estimate the size of the market.
How to View US Google Search Results
If you are international and do not want to get redirected to your local version of Google you can view Google.com’s results by going to Google.us. While on Google.com you can append &gl=us to see the related US targeted ads. Another option to view international Google search results by using this Google global Firefox Extension or use Joost’s plugins that turn off personalization.
How Google Makes Lazy US Only Advertisers Buy Foreign Traffic
While in the Philippines I have noticed that some $20 keywords (in the US) have few advertisers here, and many of the ads are for garbitrage websites. For example, one page advertising on student loans went to a page with stolen content, and had a page title about mesothelioma. If an advertiser choses US only search distribution but opts into the content network they are probably paying for exposure on that page.
When I switched Google to only search local pages the number 1 ranked page for online degrees was an off topic forum thread. Limited competition means great opportunity for those who understand the local culture and are able to gain international recognition.
Google and Amazon are both pushing to sell ebooks directly aggressively. An article in the NYT mentions a new device Amazon will offer for reading ebooks, but I don’t think the problem with books and ebooks is that they need a better reader.
Google now allows you to embed book pasages directly in web pages, likeso But that feature isn’t going help you get discovered or earn you many readers unless you already are William Shakespeare.
The big problem is that the web is quickly becoming more interactive and diverse and useful, making books irrelevant for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.
Personal Relevancy
The larger a book becomes, the less likely it is to be relevant to any individual, and the less value each word has. People who may disagree with some concepts in your book may agree with pieces that they would be willing to cite if they could only find it. But they will never cite your information unless they can find it.
No matter what people believe, in almost every case someone has already shared the same belief. Format it in small sharable chunks with good findability and people will cite it.
People may want to consume relevant bits. Cognitive dissidents. Summaries that let us dive deeper if we want to. Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.
Rarely is something that is fully polished, comprehensive, and dated what we need. More likely it is easier to learn by stepping into a process and learning one piece at a time, starting with your interests, then expanding as we run into additional problems. Even with blog posts, people justifiably complain about my writing blog posts in spurts, and using links that are not descriptive enough to merit a click-through.
Leveraging the Web
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Writers should use the web for what it is worth. Break books into pieces, read and write daily, cite sources, go back and polish the best pieces and package them, but try to keep each idea as sharp as possible.
Knowing how to create a useful information product is not enough to maximize profits. A big flaw with my ebook is that it has soooo much information in it, but it is hard to show the value of it because it is a single item. You can’t tell how much stuff was waded through to write it, that it is mentally and emotionally draining to revise, and it doesn’t help that most Internet marketing ebooks are lead generation devices or affiliate marketing tools. Someone could sell much less and look like they were selling more, just by using better packaging.
The Inevitable Death of No & Low Value Networks
Just like chunks of content are getting broken down into smaller bits, so will content creation companies. Choice and technology are disintermediating most of the gatekeepers. You and I don’t need publishers for distribution, and the fear associated with that is the real reason why the US DoJ recently whored itself out to telecom companies. Many people in positions of power abuse copyright and are afraid of open markets. From the Fake Steve blog:
[TV] was a wonderful system. For you [TV Networks] anyway. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middlemen, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain — the consumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed mountains of dog shit, and the producers of content who were at your mercy and had to negotiate with this tiny number of networks who operated, let’s be honest here, as a kind of cartel.
Artists Become Publishers
If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.
You artists out there generating content will have to learn to publish if you want to participate in the Internet economy. Maybe that s why Google spends so much trying to help the Internet advance because it helps Google disintermediate the middlemen. When will Google bring us fast quantities of ISP-free, wireless bandwidth?
One day there will be no more middlemen. And then, Google will squeeze you for more profits. After all, growth needs to come from somewhere, right? When all the middlemen are gone, what s left? You are. For every producer there are hundreds of consumers hungry for more. Will Google offer rewards for you to procreate? Of course it will. It has to. It s Google s destiny to manage the creative class.
Contrary to popular belief, selling is not about tricking people into buying what they don’t want. Yes, there are liars and thieves but that is not selling. That is lying and stealing.
Selling is about getting people to trust you enough to tell you their needs or desires and you satisfying those needs or desires. It is not always easy but it s certainly not complicated.
The Key is to Not Look Like You are Selling
If markets keep getting more competitive and artists become publishers then I think publishers need to start becoming artists. Almost anything you want to consume has free samples available online. Some are copyright violations, others are free marketing, and some are both.
Here is Dane Cook on why it is so hard to win an argument against a woman:
the trust and goodwill you built up through sharing information, personal interaction, and the above points
Even when we are not buying we are still paying with attention. Familiarity and attention are early steps in sales. The WSJ wrote about how Disney kept a low-fi feel to Mari Digby’s YouTube videos. She mixes in a few of her own original songs with old classics that have been viewed MILLIONS of times prior to dropping her first album. It is much easier to launch if you start off with a large fanbase.
Why it Helps to View Marketing as an Art
People are lazy and selfish. Especially anonymous people. If you try to replicate the links of an older competitor using the same techniques, many of the webmasters who linked at them will ignore you, even if your content is better than the stuff they are already linking at.
In all honesty, profit margins come more from perception than reality. If you are going to stay profitable you have to see the wave coming in and stay out in front of it, especially because as marketing techniques get abused they stop working. I am doing things today that I know I would not be profitable in a few years if I didn’t go out of my way to lay the foundation to make them look and feel exceptionally legitimate today. The only differences between legitimacy and illegitimacy are trust, familiarity, and perception.
The Short Side of Web Publishing
This post is not to suggest that the web is a utopia that is better than all other sources of information, but more that it is cheaper, faster, easier, and provides something that is good enough to satisfy most demands for free.
The web has downsides to it, like promoting hyped up information pollution as a form of marketing. But the reality of it is that everyone is short on time. And few deeply understand the publishing dynamics of search, so when people get screwed by finding bad information on the web or make bad decisions because of ideas they discovered over the web they will likely blame themselves for it.
It seems politicians don’t like this Internet thing too much. A 23 year old Polish man is facing 3 years in prison for ranking his president #1 for penis.
The Computers and Communications Industry Association published research on the value of fair use. The research is completely biased, to the point of being fraud:
Even by the woeful standards of the bespoke research industry, this study is a crock. It’s not just bad; it’s absurd. What the authors have done is to define the “fair-use economy” so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials.
Even Smart People Buy This Junk
Google is a leading sponsor of the research. They know it is a lie, but one that fattens their profit margins, so why not help spread this one and spend a few dollars sponsoring the next one?
Cory Doctorow, who is brilliant, is helping spread this idea because it was the first such publication and he is emotionally attached to the idea. If you are the first person to create a value system that reinforces others values they are going to cite you day and night.
Marketing Continues to Blur into a Game of Psychological Warfare
As marketing and content merge, and as people become more aware of marketing, there are going to be a lot more non-profit organizations sharing research built around pushing lies that helps for profit companies. Some lies are damaging, others are not. Both smart and ignorant people will cast votes without understanding what they are doing. The machines that count votes promote information pollution and are amoral. Those selling sugar water to diabetics also sell safety water. Every dollar counts. As marketing advances, expect more people to play on your emotions using an ever-increasing complex and diverse array of techniques.
Many people wonder why Google hand editing seems random or incomplete, and why some of the best channels get edited while worse stuff is left untouched. Here are some of the reasons Google does a poor job equitably policing the web:
The web it too large to police and engineer time is expensive.
Policing certain segments produces unwanted blowback. How often do large corporations or influential bloggers get policed? (It is rare, and when it happens, it is sold as a side effect of feature for users.)
When issues become popular they get prioritized. Many times Google won’t react unless they feel they are forced to. Sometimes they will lie and say they care, and then do nothing. Back in April I highlighted the Netscape search results in Google. Matt Cutts thanked me, but guess what…those Netscape lolita preteen search result pages are STILL ranking in Google, along with a bunch of other search results.
If they edit in an incomplete or random fashion they evoke fear
It is easier to control people through fear than to create a perfect algorithm
They have no need to hand edit the worst offenders. If they are competent programmers the algorithms should take care of those sites. They sometimes edit a leading sites in a field to send a signal. They may throw in a group of other sites if they need to create cover, but their goal is to send a message and alter behavior.
Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die. Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.
As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices. If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.
What happens when publishers can see what is hot right now and can create commercially oriented content targeting it in near real time? What happens when they are encouraged to track and test their results and can see the results of other ideas simply by the frequency they see it? Many current arbitrage opportunities are going to die, but others will thrive on this new opportunity.
The more third party platforms optimize revenue streams the more profitable niche attention based publishing will become. Generalist sites will be less profitable than highly specialized niche publishing. Results based distribution across large networks will force advertisers to give publishers a larger cut of revenue.The key is to scour through the ads and format them in a user friendly way to where they are looking at relevant content. You can’t beat relevancy algorithms without bias, brand, focus, and strong editorial.
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.
The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful
Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.
It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn’t pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.
Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.
It doesn’t matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer
Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don’t Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well
Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.
Stora Enso (SEO), one of the world’s largest makers of paper products, is selling its North American unit for about $2.1 billion to an Ohio-based company owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital.
The Pros and Cons of Microsites As An SEO Option (Search Engine Land) I’ve never been a fan of “one page salesletter” web sites espoused by some marketers ( here’s an example ). Such sites seem to drone on, with so many screenfulls that I get tired of scrolling. And there are so few pages to the site that it’s an SEO nightmare. If each page should only have a maximum of three keyword themes, that doesn’t provide for very many keyword ranking opportunities. …
Google’s Matt Cutts answered some questions recently on Google Video. Check these videos out if you are really into search, Matt has some good thoughts down.
The SEM blog is retiring Dear readers: The Search Engine Marketing blog is retiring. I admit to feeling sentimental about it, because this blog was originally created for me by Jason Calacanis, in the early days of Weblogs, Inc, and although I ended up contributing to several blogs in our lineup, this is where it started for me. I’m grateful to Jason, and thankful for the people I met in the SEM and SEO universes, via this blog.
Chris Gilmer, who has been posting here lately, is still with us! You can find Chris writing on Download Squad, our software and online services blog.
Although our editorial priorities have changed over the nearly three years of operation, we do not remove retired blogs. the SEM blog will remain available as an archive (and not a badly optimized one!). Thanks to everyone for reading.
SEO Guidelines in Creating Link Partners (Turks.US) Heard about search engine optimization? Search engine optimization or SEO is a way to increase the number of visitors to your business website by making you on the top rank of the search engines results.
SEO 101 : Blogs, SEO and Link Building (Search Engine Journal) Yesterday I had the priveledge of being asked to do a guest spot on SEO 101, the Webmaster Radio show hosted by David Brown of Neo1Seo, Brian Mark of Toolbarn.com and Carolyn Shelby. Here s the Podcast of the show: Standard Podcast [34:00m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download podPressPlayerToLoad(\’podPressPlayerSpace_103\’, \’mp3Player_103_0\’, \’300:30\’, …
To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.
MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.
The tool will help in making the bid managements process more scientific and more efficient when dealing with the most complex paid search campaigns.
Efficient Frontier is focused on delivering advanced technology for search engine marketing performance. With that ability teamed up with Enlightens ebusiness knowledge, it might be something to add to your arsenal.
The search engine bid management tool is currently only available to customers of Enlighten. If anyone has any experience with it, or more info on it, please feel free to post your insight in the comments.
Sorting Out The Mobile Search & SEO Mess (Search Engine Land) One of the biggest challenges of being a mobile SEO is comparing keyword results across the many different search engines. While the goal of all the mobile engines is the same, their approaches vary considerably. Many traditional SEOs will simply target Google and hope for the best in the other engines, but there is a lot to be learned by comparing the impact of your SEO efforts in all of …
I’ve never been a fan of “one page salesletter” web sites espoused by some marketers ( here’s an example ). Such sites seem to drone on, with so many screenfulls that I get tired of scrolling. And there are so few pages to the site that it’s an SEO nightmare. If each page should only have a maximum of three keyword themes, that doesn’t provide for very many keyword ranking opportunities. …
American Blind and Wallpaper Factory agreed to settle its four-year-old trademark dispute with Google out of court. American Blind had filed one of the first trademark cases revolving around Google s AdWords practices concerning trademarks but it wasn t the last and there are more in the works. Don t expect the search engine giant to change its behavior any time soon however…. Automate Software Builds with Visual Build Pro Easily create an automated, repeatable process for building and deploying software.
Call it the story that just won t die. The idea of Google creating its own smart phone to compete with the likes of Apple and more conventional companies in the industry keeps growing under its own steam. A patent filing by Google which was made public only recently has been adding fuel to the fire…. Atlassian JIRA: Bug & Issue Tracking Fast. Flexible. Powerful. Secure. J2EE, web-based bug and issue tracker. JOLT award winner.
To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.
MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.
LookSmart Publisher platform Looksmart has released its new publisher platform. The new publisher ad platform works much like other search engine publisher platforms, whereas ads are easily displayed on sites, and generate revenue per click.
Through LookSmarts AdCenter you can sell online ads directly on your site to advertisers, and actually determine your own CPC’s. This approach helps publishers grow direct relationships with advertisers.
LookSmart allows you the opportunity to white label AdCenter solutions. The hosting, sales, and service are fully hosted through LookSmart, and pricing is fully determined by you.
Microsoft Live’s new markets The Microsoft Live team has just launched the Live search service into 34 new markets.
The new markets include:
China - Simplified Chinese Netherlands - Dutch Belgium - French Belgium - Dutch Brazil - Brazilian Portuguese Denmark - Danish India - English Russia - Russian Sweden - Swedish Taiwan - Traditional Chinese Arabia - English Argentina - Spanish Austria - German Chile - Spanish Finland - Finnish Greece - Greek Hong Kong SAR - Traditional Chinese Hungary - Hungarian Indonesia - English Ireland - English Malaysia - English New Zealand - English Philippines - English Poland - Polish Portugal - Brazilian Portuguese Singapore - English South Africa - English Switzerland - German Switzerland - French Turkey - Turkish Czech Republic - Czech Slovakia - Slovak Slovenia - Slovenian Latin America - Spanish
Microsoft is on the run, trying to launch into as many markets as it can in an effort, im sure, to stay side by side with its main competition in the search world, Google.
YouTube leads the video search marketplace Like many people, I enjoy a good video. Especially with YouTube. Anything and everything is on there, well pretty much anything.
YouTube hosts any video it seems. From full length feature pirated movies, to news stories, video blog entries, a ton of just plain personal videos of the dog running around, to just plain hilarious videos of senior citizens dancing helping add to the 20 million visitors per month.
Hitwise just released some stats on YouTube, and their amazing 60% share of all videos watched online in the US. Compare that with Yahoo, MSN, and Google’s share of only 3-5%, and you can see why YouTube is a video traffic genius. The company gets around 100 million video’s viewed per day, and YouTube has said that they had 2.5 billion videos watched per day last month.
If you think there is nothing to see in the video search marketplace, look again, it’s hotter then ever, and YouTube is steaming up the web.
The SEM blog is retiring Dear readers: The Search Engine Marketing blog is retiring. I admit to feeling sentimental about it, because this blog was originally created for me by Jason Calacanis, in the early days of Weblogs, Inc, and although I ended up contributing to several blogs in our lineup, this is where it started for me. I’m grateful to Jason, and thankful for the people I met in the SEM and SEO universes, via this blog.
Chris Gilmer, who has been posting here lately, is still with us! You can find Chris writing on Download Squad, our software and online services blog.
Although our editorial priorities have changed over the nearly three years of operation, we do not remove retired blogs. the SEM blog will remain available as an archive (and not a badly optimized one!). Thanks to everyone for reading.
The program is targeted at owners of small amounts of domains in their portfolio. GoDaddy serves ads that are based on the domain name, and the analysis of what people click on and search for in the site.
This new service, CashParking, not only helps webmasters make a few extra dollars, but provides another means by which websites and companies can get search related traffic through links on unique domain names that are not as yet built out.
Top Keyword Terms Companies are Buying Nielson Netrating has done some homework and developed a list on the Top 25 Companies By Sponsored Link Impressions list.
Its a pretty interesting list that shows the top 3 keywords that are bought by some major companies.
Clickz has some other charts from the report that show the Advertising Breakdown by Industry, Advertising Breakdown by Ad Unit Types, and Top 25 Companies by Sponsored Link Impressions.
Effective Keyword Choice Strategy and Useful Tools There are several ways to describe the enigma that is keyword marketing. The use of carefully selected words to optimize a site s content for search engines presents one explanation. Keywords will be relevant words and parts of phrases that relate to the site content. This article will give you plenty of tips for choosing those all-important keywords…. Automate Software Builds with Visual Build Pro Easily create an automated, repeatable process for building and deploying software.
Confirming the lauch of www.seovacancies.co.uk - the jobs portal for SEO, SEM and PPC professionals in the UK, USA and Canada. Free jobseeker and employer registration. (PRWeb Sep 19, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/WmV0YS1FbXB0LUluc2UtTWFnbi1UaGlyLVplcm8=
A friend of mine just posted about trying to build a business by creating 5,000 sites. Everything I know about the trends of the web tells me that there are far easier ways to make money online, especially if you are willing to grow with the latest trends.
You Can’t Bring Back the Past
Why would anyone who deeply understands the web start a traditional book publishing business when web formats are so much more profitable and books are becoming irrelevant? Static boring content sites created without passion are, like books, growing irrelevant.
The reason smaller sites could work in the past is because many of them are set and forget. Virtually no incremental cost of upkeep. But the big issue is that they all have some set amount of work required to set them up. And if you are doing something 5,000 times you are going to start automating. And when you start automating you leave footprints. Even if your content is of average quality today, in a year that same content might be considered useless noise and/or spam. At some point a few of the sites get nuked, an engineer does a bit of research, and then the whole network tanks. Then you just lost a year of work and most of your investment.
New Verticals Are Stealing Market-share From the Generalist Web
The problem with set and forget is that there are many new TYPES of content coming online, working to back-fill the organic search results. How uncomfortable is it creating average quality or garbage content when you see half of some search results dominated by books? If you want to do a set and forget approach to marketing I think traditional websites or blogs might be the wrong approach, especially if done in bulk. If I were to try to profit from bulk and was to create something new today I would look at some of the information formats that are just starting to get more aggressively integrated into the search results.
Average Content Has No Sustainable Advantage
The problem with average plain Jane content is that being average is not enough to build permission, gain subscribers, and create a real brand. If you are starting out today you are up against companies with a decade of experience, traction, capital, leverage and market feedback.
The long tail queries that went to garbage content are now sending visitors to large businesses that are becoming more aware of SEO and other vertical searches that are creeping into the traditional organic search results. It is getting easier for competitors to buy your keyword stats for next to nothing, and competitive research is only getting cheaper by the day. When you have virtually no authority, a business model search engineers hate, and are easy to clone then where is your sustainable competitive advantage? Why build anything that lacks a solid foundation?
Dominate Newer Verticals
If it were within my power, and I was scaling this type of bulk content operation, I would have at least one site in Google news. The value of being listed there just went up because they are filtering out many of the duplicate wire service stories that dominated the results in the past. You could also think of videos as easy pickings, at least for now.
Are there other verticals that will become popular? Sure, but you have to be creative and use the word vertical loosely. Remember that in the Google Florida update commercial intent pages were demoted in favor of informational content pages. With Universal search Google has many ways to define verticals and filter irrelevant or lower quality ones. Here is a quote from a recent brilliant post by Tedster
Search terms themselves can also be sorted into various taxonomies, especially the 1-word and 2-word queries. … With the advent of Universal Search, Google now has the infrastructure to force integrate selections from any class of websites onto the first page. So the implications of Universal Search can go well past the obvious and publicised taxonomies of images, video, news, books, maps, blogs. Even more than a simple “commercial” and “informational” taxonomy, there could also be classes like brochureware sites, trademark holders, businesses with a physical world presence, manufacturers, B2B, multi-topic (encyclopedic) and on and on. One factor Google could then tweak would be which classes of sites to force integrate into the results for which kinds of search terms.
Create a New Vertical
If you rush to find new verticals, change how people use language, or define a page as fitting an alternate meaning of a word then perhaps all this vertical stuff presents an arbitrage opportunity for you. If you create the same type of crap that is already saturated then it is working against you.
SEO Book was not a popular search query until after I created this site. Search engines follow people. Google recommends my brand name and my name in their ad links. The easiest and most sustainable way to dominate a high value vertical is to create a new one, which is something I hope to do in a big way before the year is out.
Adprecision launches SEO toolset with Jet2holidays.com (e-Consultancy) Adprecision have launched Adfly, their new SEO toolset with Jet2holidays.com. Adfly creates html pages directly from product feeds enabling retail websites to expose all their inventory in a better way to consumers and search engines. All Ad Flypages feature special Adzoom intuitive navigation links…
As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].
Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbria, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.
The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful
Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.
It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn’t pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.
Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.
It doesn’t matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer
Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don’t Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well
Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.
While being much less self promotional than others in the same field, Debra Mastaler is nonetheless one of the most well known and creative link builders in the industry. I have wanted to interview her for a long time since she has a unique way of working but she s hard to pin down and not very good about returning interview questions
How long have you been doing link building? What did you do before link building?
First, thank you for the nice intro and sorry to have been such a deadbeat about responding. Alliance-Link has been in operation since late 2000, it came about while I owned and operated a directory featuring organic food and clothing. When I started to rank well for a large number of money terms, business owners advertising in my directory asked i
