The bigger you are the harder you can spam. AOL recently soft-launched Love.com

The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.

Love.com is a mashup of remixed twitter posts, youtube videos, aggressive 3rd party content snippets, automated cross linking, frame-jacked 3rd party content, pop-ups, automated subdomain spam, all pushed on a purchased domain name that had existing links.

Love.com is so bad that it inspired this quote from noted SEO expert Jeremy Luebke, "This stuff make Mahalo look like the best site on the net."

What did Eric Schmidt say? "brands are how you sort out the cesspool." As soon as Google started dialing up on brand, brand owners got the message, and have reacted quickly.

Counter to Eric Schmidt's claims, any objective viewer of search would note that brands are creating the cesspool.

This is the driving corporate SEO strategy across MANY verticals today: make up for ad declines by polluting Google with recycled garbage. The formula is...

• recycle/steal content
• grab from enough sources that it almost looks unique
• automate it
• cross link from the network of other sites (as needed)
• repeat again and again until it no longer increases profits

Most of these companies are typically far spammier than even aggressive SEOs would suggest being, but that is not surprising given the lack of risk. Brand can spam as they see fit.

Google's original strategy with the authority-centric algorithm was a false belief that the emphasis on authority would make the web a deeper and richer experience. New content would need to be better than older established content to outrank it. But as media companies face sharp losses Google is quickly finding out that their authority emphasis is creating a shallower web, where most of the big networks have 2 primary roles: create garbage and recycle garbage.

I hope after Google eats about 50 more crappy sites like Love.com they see the flaw of their ways. Regular searchers (who don't give a damn about brand) already notice it.

Image source: Matt Cutts

Google announced that they are rolling out a new technology to better understand word relationships and extend their snippets on longer search queries.

Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Note that they claimed that this is "one of its first applications." If they can improve relevancy with integrating this technology directly into the core search algorithms then it will lower the importance of on page optimization (since you only need to be close rather than use the specific words that were searched for). Such a change would likely decrease the traffic to low authority sites held up largely by strong site structure and on page SEO, while increasing the amount of traffic going to high authority sites and well branded sites that are poorly structured from an SEO perspective.

I am not sure if this sort of algorithm change would favor shorter or longer content pages. In most cases I would guess longer pages if they were kept on theme, and broken up to relevant chunks. The expanded snippets on longer search queries show a lot more information directly in Google's search results, which helps thicker pages show off their offering more than thinner pages, but cedes more control of the information over to Google as they can show close to 250 characters in the search results.

If the technology was applied to anchor text it might also limit the value of anchor text manipulation by boosting up the value of related phrases (if Google knows that the word Salesforce is relevant to CRM then they might count that anchor text more).

Greg Sterling noted that this change came from the Orion technology that was purchased by Google from Ori Allon in 2006. He also interviewed them:

I spoke yesterday to Google and Ori Allon. To the extent that I understood his discussion of the way Orion’s technology had been applied to refinements here’s what’s going on at a high level: pages are being scanned in “real-time” by Google after a query is entered. Conceptually and contextually related sites/pages are then identified and expressed in the form of the improved refinements. This is not solely keyword based but derived from an “understanding” of content and context.

It is hard to speculate if/when this technology will move from sideshow to becoming a big deal. The current usage is fairly trivial, but it could get much more well ingrained into many parts of the relevancy algorithms.

As search engines get more sophisticated with how they show word relationships (on branded and non-branded search queries) that is one more thing that can be optimized, though likely one that will require a holistic marketing strategy to optimize, because you will need to create a lot of co-citation (or some other signal of relevancy) across many pages on the web.

A couple years ago Lord Maurice Saatchi described their brand strategy as being built off of One Word Equity.

In this new business model, companies seek to build one word equity - to define the one characteristic they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.

It is the modern equivalent of the best location in the high street, except the location is in the mind.

Phorm, a UK company that partnered with BT to run secret trials to target ads based on usage data, was roasted by the media with article titles like Phorm’s All-Seeing Parasite Cookie.

Google, which has long stayed away from behavioral targeting due to privacy (and negative publicity) concerns, announced they are jumping into the behavioral ad targeting market:

Google will use data it collects about what Web sites users visit and what it knows about the content of those sites to sort its massive audience of users into groups such as hockey fans or travel enthusiasts. The data won't be drawn from users' search queries, but from text files known as cookies that Google installs on the Web browsers of users who visit pages where it serves ads.

DoubleClick, AdSense, Google Toolbar, Gmail, Youtube, Blogger, Google Groups, Google Checkout, Google Chrome, Google Analytics...there are lots of ways to track you, even if you do not want to be tracked. Google will allow users to opt out of such targeting, with yet another cookie, but if you clear cookies then you are back in the matrix again.

And while Google claims they are not using search queries in their current behavioral targing, Danny Sullivan wrote:

Google confirmed in a session I moderated at the Omniture Summit last month that they have tested behaviorial targeted ads using past search history data. Again, that doesn’t seem to be part of this release, but it could come in the future.

As discovered during early Google research titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine:

we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Indeed. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, spoke out against behavioral targeting:

"People use the web in a crisis, when wondering whether they have a sexually transmitted disease, or cancer, when wondering if they are homosexual and whether to talk about it … to discuss political views."
...
"The power of this information is so great that the commercial incentive for companies or individuals to misuse it will be huge," he said. "It is absolutely essential to have absolute clarity that it is illegal."

If Google continues down this path unquestioned, then in due time you may not be able to get health insurance because of a web page you viewed or a keyword you trusted Google enough to search for. Better luck next life!

So here we are on Tuesday, March 3 rd, and I’m still trying to fully digest the implications of Aaron’s “Heavy emphasis on Brandings” post from last Wednesday, February 25. The data that was presented, the context that was provided and the labyrinth of insightful user comments that were spawned left me reeling for days. So much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if the annals of SEO history associate February 25, 2009 as the infamous “Aaron Wall” update.

In all seriousness, though, this really is a big deal, especially for folks like me who spend their days attempting to optimize mainstream “Big Brand” web sites for a living. I’m fortunate enough work for an interactive agency that takes SEO seriously, and my team strives to deliver a truly comprehensive approach to SEO – blending site-side factors, link building, social media elements, and analytics. We usually do a pretty darn good job, despite the myriad of obstacles and pitfalls associated with trying to implement SEO for a large, lumbering, Fortune 500 web portal. And sadly, like many big firms out there, we have occasionally chalked up our shortcomings to a lack of implementation and cooperation on the part of the client. It’s that typical “not our fault, it’s a crappy big brand site” copout that many of us have heard a thousand times before.

Then along comes Aaron with his revelations about Google’s recent algorithm shift and its ramifications for big brands, and all hell breaks loose:

• I immediately spiral into self-doubt regarding me and my team’s marketing abilities
• I start scrambling to deconstruct this alleged algorithm shift
• I start emailing all of my senior team members asking them to attempt deconstructing the algorithm shift
• they roll their eyes and one of them tells me stop sending so many random emails at 10 o’clock at night

I’ve calmed down a bit since then, but I’m still hard at work trying to figure out exactly what levers have caused certain “Big Brand” sites to skyrocket in the SERPs while others remain mired in search engine mediocrity. As with most things in life, the best course of action is to introduce a bit of the old scientific method, systematically isolating variables in an attempt to identify predictable patterns that can be replicated.

After taking a high-level look at each of the keywords outlined in Aaron’s post, and the corresponding brand sites that made the jump onto the front page, several possible culprits become apparent. Here are a couple that jumped out at me:

Social Media Signals – companies like University of Phoenix have made a concerted effort to engage users via social media channels, and those social reverberations could be a key facet in Google’s newly refined algorithm, especially if some of those reverberations include mention of the phrase “online degree.”

Increased weighting of anchor text within internal site linkage – companies like American Airlines seem to be leveraging both their own internal site pages as well partner sites to increase the volume of anchor text occurrences for the term “airline tickets” (although they’re missing out on some seriously low-hanging fruit by failing to optimize the alt. image attribute on their global logo image link). If Google has decided to increase the potency of this element, then large brand portals with voluminous amounts of internal pages and partner sites (or branded micro sites) could gain an upper hand for highly competitive terms.

Increased sensitivity to offline marketing campaigns – Perhaps Google’s algorithm is getting better at recognizing site traffic associated with offline marketing campaigns. This would extremely difficult to do without having direct access to a site’s analytics data (although Google Analytics conspiracy theorists are convinced that this is already the case for sites using GA) but perhaps Google is using signals such as the relative volume of specific search queries (e.g. branded queries like “State Farm”) and somehow tying that data back to terms that the algorithm associates with the given brand query (e.g. State Farm = Auto Insurance).

Disclaimer: I haven’t been able to actually test these hypotheses out thoroughly or with any real semblance of scientific method. After all, it’s only been five days since I read the post, and I do have other things to do besides ponder the ramifications of this alleged algorithm shift (it’s 10pm so I have to start annoying my team with random emails again).

Besides, Google’s results could roll back at any moment, rendering all of these insights (nearly) moot. Still, if you’re in any way involved in optimizing web sites for big brands (or if you just want to improve your eye for SEO) it’s probably a good idea to start doing a little scientific testing of your own.

If you liked this post (or even if you thought it was a flaming pile of dog excrement) feel free to reach out to me via my Twitter handle: http://twitter.com/hugoguzman11