seo
An Unjust Fear of Link Buying
So Worried that You Forgot to Compete
While on the link buying panel at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon a few people were pushing that you might need to consider how Google will view your current link buys 5 years down the road, and that they may hurt you then for what you do now. Upon hearing that I said something like “less than 5 years ago I bought spammy links and if I did not I probably wouldn’t be speaking here right now”. That got a cheer from the crowd. Who wants to be worried about what Google thinks or does 5 years from now? That is no way to innovate or take marketshare from current market leaders.
Reviewing Result Quality
When engineers view your site they don’t just look at “if you have a few spammy links” but they try to consider the quality of user experience and the ratio of clean links to dirty links. If your site is good and ranks for years then you are going to get many natural links that dwarf any spammy links that were part of your site launch.
Building a Real Business
If your business model is entirely reliant on Google 5 years from now, your user experience is sub-par, and you haven’t built up any brand equity after ranking for 5 years then there was not much effort put into building a legitimate business, and it deserves to fail. But the sites that rank get self reinforcing exposure. If SEO is part of your brand building and site building strategy you simply can not sit around waiting for the rankings to come in.
Inferior Sites Ranking #1
It is easy to lack objectivity when talking of the quality of your site, but in some fields I compete in, many of the top ranked competing sites are ran by people buying a slew of spammy links and pointing them at their (quite obviously) English second language sites. Because they rank, those sites get some number of self reinforcing links. If I did nothing but create great content they would still outrank my site. You have to buy marketshare in one way or another (public relations, AdWords, link buying) if you are trying to gain marketshare and your market is competitive.
Who Buys Links & Uses Push Marketing to Buy Marketshare?
That does not mean that I am an advocate of bad user experience or poor quality content, but if you care about SEO and have a new site in an old market, user experience and content quality are not enough unless you do some push marketing at launch.
- AOL sent out millions of spammy CDs to market their service.
- Google pushes their logo onto ads they distribute all over the web, has the largest push ad network on the web, has some of the dirtiest domain traffic partners (many cybersquatters), recommend infidelity, and bundle Google Checkout usage with lower ad prices and free links.
- Yahoo! has an in house SEO team and a few years ago Yahoo! was one of the leading link buyers.
- IAC buys a ton of links and aggressively cross links their sites.
- Microsoft has got in trouble for launching new products by bundling them with their old products and steals traffic by sending seobook.om traffic to their live search product.
- Monster.com owns a ton of thin lead generation sites.
- eBay pays affiliates to spam Google.
- One of Google’s large ad distribution partners tried setting up a deal with me to rank their ads in Google’s search results using aggressive black hat spammy techniques, in which I declined to participate in.
We Don’t Write the Algorithms (or Hand Edit Search Results)
As an SEO you simply give the engines what they want. Looking at what they rank and how they market their sites gives you better insights for how to rank than blindly trusting the tips they give you to prevent you from ranking and suggesting you buy their ads. All of the web portals you know and love use push marketing to build their businesses. Why shouldn’t you?
Link Quality Factors Inside and Out
Wiep published a group survey of SEOs on factors affecting the value of a link.
Motivational Time Out Blog Post
DN Journal wrote a cover story about Frank Schilling, which is quite motivating to me, especially after meeting Frank in person and getting rum cakes from him today. About 5 years ago Frank got into domaining as a common man, and now his portfolio is worth deep into 9 figures. In the interview Frank said:
Everything on the Internet begins with a name and there are very few people who understand how domain names work or their importance to commerce, branding etc. Even folks who think they understand branding, donāt get the power or importance and versatility of names - they too miss the boat. This is the ultimate niche during the ultimate window in time and it will be for decades.
Most domainers thought Frank was late to the market and now he is the #1 domain investor in the world. And in spite of all the stories of domain success, there are still many steals on the market today. A few months ago I bought a name for $2,500, and since then the same name in a worse extension sold at auction for well over 10x the price I paid.
A few weeks AFTER Scores.com sold for $1,180,000 I bought Scores.org from the BuyDomains marketplace for $2,300. I don’t have a site there yet, but I have a logo and an idea for a site I eventually want to build, if time permits.
I have been on a bit of a domain name binge this year. As I learn more about content and branding and managing people, today’s $1,000 or $10,000 domain name is going to look cheap looking back at it 5 years down the road. My story won’t be as good as Frank’s story, but given how motivated my wife and I are, I think we will do well. A few years ago SeoBook.com was an $8 domain, with a default Movable Type template. Once I could afford spending $99 I bought a logo and color matched the CSS to it. The site has since got enough exposure that I met and married the most wonderful woman in the world through it. And it all started with a domain name. 
If you are an SEO and you grasp a bit of what made Frank do well AND know how to make a site part of the organic web, you don’t need to pay .com prices to compete. A .org or .net can work just fine if you have the content quality needed to be remarkable and citation worthy. And you can get a big big name in those extensions for $5,000 or $10,000. Sometimes you can get it for $8!
At Pubcon Las Vegas keynote speaker Richard Rosenblath said that content does your marketing, and content is essentially the next building block on the web as search continues to dominate the web. From the Bruce Clay blog:
The old model is owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don’t care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail.
Market’s are not fair, but they do not need to be if you have great timing. When you look at some of the content sites that are out there in many verticals the competition bar is still quite low. Wikipedia does not dominate because it is great, it dominates because most content is junk. HowStuffWorks is not a great site, but it sold for $250 million dollars. And if you look at the top ranking sites that talk about the deal, most of those pages are not exceptionally compelling either.
It doesn’t matter how ads change or where the future of search lies. The tools and ideas needed to succeed are at your fingertips and you are going to do great.
I feel lucky to be able to write this post in anticipation of the years to come. You and I are lucky enough to be at a place in time where we can write our own luck! Cheers to the future, and thank you for reading.
Pricing to Sell vs Selling Yourself Short
A friend of mine suggested I read Dan Kennedy’s The Ultimate Success Secret, a great motivational marketing book. One passage from it stuck with me:
When I first started in the “success education business,” one of the few people in the country who was consistently effective at selling self-improvement audiocassette programs direct, face-to-face to executives and salespeople, gave me what turned out to be very, very good advice - he said: “Don’t waste your time trying to sell these materials to the people who need it the most. They won’t buy it. You should focus on selling to successful people who want to get even better.”
Over the years, I’ve demonstrated the validity of this to myself a number of different ways. And I’ve developed an explanation for it. There is what I now call “the self-esteem Catch-22 loop” at work here: in order for a person to invest directly in himself, which is what buying self-improvement materials is, he has to place value on himself, i.e. have high self-esteem, but if he has such high self-esteem, he is probably already doing well and does not have a critical need for this type of information; he will get marginal improvement out of it; but the person who needs it most does not place much value on himself, i.e. has relatively low self-esteem, which prohibits him from buying, believing in or using self-improvement materials.
To some SEO forum members who spend 10 hours a day on forums, EVERYTHING is overpriced (outside of a listing in THEIR directory). But is their opinion relevant?
Anyone selling “how to” advice, consulting services, or productivity tools is selling self help information. Price yourself too low and enter a market for lemons, enjoying fraud daily, selling to people who fear investing in themselves, while scaring away worthwhile prospects with a negative attitude and/or prices that eat away at your credibility.
Meanwhile, people who know less and sell a lower quality product may price themselves higher on the value chain and attract the right kinds of customers. Is it fair? Nothing is, and so you must increase your prices as your knowledge improves and your market grows. Anytime you can have half as many customers and still make the same income you are heading in the right direction.
If you are going to sell cheap then just give that idea / product / information away free and then look for a way to bolt on a higher value product or service. Price yourself at a fair value to get the right customers, build the profit margins to reinvest into building a higher value product or service, and help the people who are already successful become more successful.
How Changes To The Way Google Handles Subdomains Impact SEO (Search Engine Land)
At Pubcon last week, Matt Cutts mentioned a change in the way Google handles subdomains . To better understand this change and what this means for search marketers, letās revisit common site structure choices, how theyāre handled by Google, and how that impacts SEO. Click to continue reading…
We Will Not Make Editorial Judgements, But We Desire to Rank Our Content #1
With the announcement of Knol, Google displayed their desire to become a publisher. Why? To make free information more accessible. It doesn’t hurt that publishers dominate other industries, like music - where in some cases giving artists nothing, while some artist get less than nothing, even if they made millions in sales.
Danny Sullivan had some reservations on Knol, as does Rich Skrenta, and just about every other successful results oriented independent web author.
While claiming Google will not make any editorial judgements of quality, and Google will treat Knols like any other web pages, Google’s Udi Manber had this to say:
A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.
They desire it to be a starting point for searchers and yet they will not promote it?
Think back to the YouTube purchase. After Google bought the site, did they start blessing / featuring any YouTube content? Yes they did. Google’s Uinversal Search integrated YouTube so tightly in their search results that now people add YouTube to the search query for many music searches . Don’t believe me that they shifted user behavior? Try using Google Suggest for music searches and see where YouTube shows up.
Manber wrote not to worry about spam, as Google has that issue covered:
Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.
Sure they will filter out some of the garbage people submit, but the good stuff will rank better than it should. I am not a betting man, but if I were I would bet that Knols get ranked right at the top, next to Youtube. As John Andrews describes it:
As TrustRank (the Google version, not the Yahoo! version) takes hold as the #1 or #2 ranking factor for SEO, this Knol thing steps in and bingoā¦ who could be more trusted than Google itself?
Wikipedia has amazing momentum in Google, and is poised to rank for everything. How will Google compete?
How can Google come late to the game, offer no pay, desire to throw their ads on it right out of the gate, and expect to win marketshare UNLESS they rank this content better than it deserves to rank on merit? Put another way, what person who gets paid to create content is going to prefer putting it on Google Knol for free UNLESS Google gives Knol preferential treatment? If you are producing content out of passion with no profit motive, why would you put it on Google instead of your own server? If you desire peer review with your name attached to it why not publish it on YourName.com?
Offline media has always been biased and aggressively consolidated, it looks like the web is going to suffer the same fate, but worse, unless you are a Google stakeholder. Or, if Google gets too aggressive with this cross integration maybe they will hurt their relevancy enough that people search elsewhere.
ā¢ Is Your Hired SEO Expert Truly An Expert? (Turks.US)
Most online businesses know how their rankings on major search engines can spell the difference between success and failure. It takes skill, constant updating, and persistence to stay on top of the search results, which is why many businesses hire experts in this field.
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
Brian Clark just hit a home run with his post about how we let fear harm our productivity.
I want to create more things like The Blogger’s Guide to SEO, with the goal of pushing myself up the value chain by creating better brand touch points. I am hoping to launch a big site in the next month and want to add some cool new features to SEO Book.
Many of my projects have went far slower than they should have, largely because I have been far too busy, but also because I have let fear, laziness, and routine guide me toward accepting the needed excuses to wait until tomorrow. Once you get beyond self sustaining it is easy to sit comfortable and make up fake work just to keep yourself busy.
One of my favorite parts about being somewhat well known online is that I get to talk to others that are well known and far more successful than I am, and hear what they think in a way that is unfiltered by the need for professionalism or public relations. Tips, strategies, ideas, motivations, and human flaws unmasked - stuff you just wouldn’t read on a blog - because if you did they would lose money for sharing. Unfiltered conversations where people are human and real to a level that inspires me to do better things and curb the fears that hold me back. In the end it makes you more confident because you know you can help others out, they can help you out, and everyone has some amount of fear guiding them toward action or inaction.
At the end of the day, Google and other market participants are not our biggest competitors, we are. Having said that, I might take a break from blogging for a week or two and slow down blogging for the rest of the year so I can start digging in on doing some of those big projects that have been lingering about.
[Update: A friend of mine recommended I read Dan Kennedy’s The Ultimate Success Secret, which states that control = responsibility and responsibility = control. If this post resonates with you this book is well worth a read.]
Search Engine Marketing & Brand Lift
Enquiro performed research sponsored by Google which aimed to determine if search marketing could cause a brand lift.
The research stated that buying the top ad position provides better brand recall, better brand association, and improved purchase intent for both branded and unbranded queries. This is true even if you already own the top organic ranking site. They also recommend writing ads for people who are new to your brand and have yet to establish an affinity for it.
You can download the research paper here.
Open Source Media Strategies
Nice Idea, Google!
About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn’t artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people’s sites, unless you are Google.
I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.
Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
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<p>I have never created a Facebook application and have no intent in doing so, because if I am successful they would likely steal my idea and find a way to ban or silence me and/or halt and clone my project. Which is sorta <a target=)
what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.
The Transition From Open to Close
Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.
Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else’s platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.
Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer…Pay: $0
All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas….and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else’s user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else’s product, you are wasting your time.
Microsoft thinks that enterprise search belongs to them. Even though Google has been in the game since the early 2000’s.
