Search is political.

Google has maintained that there were no exceptions to Panda & they couldn't provide personalized advice on it, but it turns out that if you can publicly position their "algorithm" as an abuse of power by a monopoly you will soon find 1:1 support coming to you.

The WSJ's Amir Efrati recently wrote:

In June, a top Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things.

We know what will happen from that first bit of advice, in terms of new subdomains: billions trillions served.

What are the "among other things"?

We have no idea.

All we know is that it has been close to a half-year since Panda has been implemented, and in spite of massive capital investments virtually nobody has recovered.

A few years back Matt Cutts stated Google treats subdomains more like subfolders. Except, apparently that only applies to some parts of "the algorithm" and not others.

My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.

Even though subdirectories were the "preferred" default strategy, they are now the wrong strategy. What was once a "best practice" is now part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Not too far before Panda came out we were also told that we can leave it to GoogleBot to sort out duplicate content. A couple examples here and here. In those videos (from as recent as March 2010) are quotes like:

• "What we would typically do is pick what we think is the best copy of that page and keep it, and we would have the rest in our index but we wouldn't typically show it, so it is not the case that these other pages are penalized."
• "Typically, even if it is consider duplicate content, because the pages can be essentially completely identical, you normally don't need to worry about it, because it is not like we cause a penalty to happen on those other pages. It is just that we don't try to show them."
• I believe if you were to talk to our crawl and indexing team, they would normally say "look, let us crawl all the content & we will figure out what parts of the site are dupe (so which sub-trees are dupe) and we will combine that together."
• I would really try to let Google crawl the pages and see if we could figure out the dupes on our own.

Now people are furiously rewriting content, noindexing, blocking with robots.txt, using subdomains, etc.

Google's advice is equally self-contradicting and self-serving. Worse yet, it is both reactive and backwards looking.

You follow best practices. You get torched for it. You are deciding how many employees to fire & if you should simply file bankruptcy and be done with it. In spite of constantly being lead astray by Google, you look to them for further guidance and you are either told to sit & spin, or are given abstract pablum about "quality."

Everything that is now "the right solution" is the exact opposite of the "best practices" from last year.

And the truth is, this sort of shift is common, because as soon as Google openly recommends something people take it to the Nth degree & find ways to exploit it, which forces Google to change. So the big problem here is not just that Google gives precise answers where broader context would be helpful, but also that they drastically and sharply change their algorithmic approach *without* updating their old suggestions (that are simply bad advice in the current marketplace).

It is why the distinction between a subdirectory and subdomain is both 100% arbitrary AND life changing.

Meanwhile select companies have direct access to top Google engineers to sort out problems, whereas the average webmaster is told to "sit and spin" and "increase quality."

The only ways to get clarity from Google on issues of importance are to:

• ignore what Google suggests & test what actually works, OR
• publicly position Google as a monopolist abusing their market position

Good to know!

You Must Disclose, or Else...

Matt Cutts has long stated that machine-readable disclosure of paid links is required to be within Google's guidelines.

The idea behind such Cassandra calls is that the web should be graded based on merit, rather than who has the largest ad budget. The Google founders harped on this in their early research:

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

Google is not the only search engine in town, and they have been less forthcoming with their own behavior than what they demand of others.

Ads as Content

Both SugarRae and I have highlighted how Google's investment in VigLink is (at best) sketchy given Google's approach to non-Google affiliate links. And now Google's "ads as content" program has spread to Youtube, where Google counts ad views as video views. The problem with this is that any external search service has no way to separate out which views were organic & which were driven by paid exposure.

(Google has access to that data since they charge the advertisers for each view, but there is no way for any external party to access that data, or know how Google is using it other than what Google states publicly).

That is the *exact* type of pollution Google claimed would undermine the web. But it is only bad when someone is doing it to Google (rather than the other way around).

Youtube = Wikipedia + Wikipedia + Wikipedia

As independent webmasters it can be annoying seeing Wikipedia rank for everything under the sun, but after Google's "universal search" push Youtube is far more dominant than Wikipedia. When the Panda update happened Youtube was around 4% of Google's downstream traffic. Youtube has grown their Google-referred traffic by about 4% a month since Panda, up until last month, in which it grew by 18.3% according to Compete.com. That now puts Youtube at over 5% of Google's downstream traffic (over 3x as much traffic as Wikipedia gets from Google)!

1 in 20 downstream clicks is landing onto a nepotistic property where Google has blurred the lines between ads and content, making it essentially impossible for competing search services to score relevancy (in addition to making features inaccessible, the data that is accessible is polluted). It is unsurprising that Youtube is a significant anti-trust issue:

Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Google promotes "openness" wherever they are weak, and then they erect proprietary barriers to erode competitive threat wherever they are strong.

Playing Politics

At some point it is hard to operate as a monopoly without being blindingly hypocritical. And this is at the core of why Google's leading engineers feel the need to write guest articles in Politico & Eric Schmidt is working directly with governments to prevent regulatory action. They understand that if they curry favor they can better limit the damage and have more control of what sacrificial anodes die in the eventual anti-trust proceedings.

Is Google Lying Again?

As a marketer & a publisher you can go bankrupt before governments react to monopolies. Thus you need to decide what risks are worthwhile & what suggestions carry any weight.

Here is the litmus test for "is this piece of information from Google more self-serving garbage" ... does Google apply the same principals to itself in markets it is easily winning AND markets it is losing badly?

If their suggestion doesn't apply to Google across-the-board then you can safely ignore it as more self-serving drivel from a monopolist.

A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy

There are many approaches to online navigation & discovery. On the surface many of them look exceptionally different, but when you look a bit deeper many of them are playing the same game with the same game plan. The main differences are brand perception & marketing angle, but they all copy off of each other.

New Ideas, or The Same Ideas?

There is an illusion that social media is significantly different because messages from friends are mixed in with the other stuff. However, when you look at the aggregate trends, ultimately social media pushes the same stuff that the mainstream media pushes (which is the same stuff that post-Panda Google pushes).

Researchers at HP tracked Twitter:

Huberman and three fellow researchers demonstrate that "user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation."

Instead, says Huberman, "we found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends. Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases."

Social signaling is powerful. It drives people to like things they otherwise wouldn't. And the tear down is far faster & far more brutal than the build up:

it's amazing how you can be the king at one point, quote unquote, and everyone loves you and the minute your time has passed and it's time for you to get torn down. When it's tear down time -- woah, it's harsh. There's no pity. They will hurt you however. Jabs, uppercut, hooks, and they want to see you on the floor knocked out. TKO. That's what they want. I saw it happen to some people, but when it happens to you, it's amazing how devastating it can be. When the negativity is directed at you, it hurts because you're there as an entertainer. You want to please your fans, have a good time and make them smile. You do the best you can on stage for them, and suddenly, you're nothing but a joke. - Fab Morvan, Milli Vanilli

Facebook is also aiming to highlight big media:

Facebook is developing features that will make the sharing of users’ favorite music, television shows and other media as much a part of its site as playing games or posting vacation photos.

Along with the official relationships (and game board tilting) that big media enjoy, larger merchants can also tilt the table by selling into a new category with a loss leader to buy marketshare. In some cases they can promote give aways that use social signals as a form of payment.

The largest companies enjoy an asymmetrical information advantage, which easily allows them to scale up and down the value chain to dominate their vertical. Amazon.com sold books, but after Kindle they now sell more ebooks than physical books, they promote new formats like Kindle singles, and they look to be pushing into publishing. That is great news for authors, but is certainly scary for some traditional publishing companies.

Most of the "social" signals will generally promote that which is already large, or (for smaller businesses) that which is weird, funny, exotic, extremely biased, comforting & (falsely) empowering, fluff, or brutally honest.

If you are small, race toward an edge & stick with it. Own an idea. ;)

Like vs +1

Facebook has their popular like button. Google owns like.com, which unlike other shopping-search businesses that Google has bought and folded in, remains an active site, in spite of the launch of Boutiques.com. Google unveiled the +1 button to compete with Facebook. Facebook's add as friend button now states "+1 Add as Friend."

In a recent Youtube video, Matt Cutts highlighted that "Google will use +1 activity to influence its search results ... "It's definitely a signal we're paying a lot of attention to," Cutts said. "It has tons of potential. It looks very promising."

Google accidentally leaked on TV that they were going to bake +1 into Google Chrome.

Like vs Spy

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about how some of the social media voting buttons track users, even if they do not log in to the social networks or click on the voting buttons. You can avoid using the official buttons & use third party buttons, but those companies do the same thing! You can say "enough is enough" and simply avoid all the social media nonsense, but unfortunately 25% of Google's bonuses this year are tied to social crap. If you ignore social & your competitors do not, then ultimately you lose.

As I wrote earlier, many of them are playing the same game with the same game plan.

Other Search Engines

Blekko's slashtag model is all about highlighting content from the most well known sources in a niche. When you think about some of the really awful misinformation shared in the SEO space it is clear that popularity & quality are not the same. But if you have brand, sound authoritative, and speak of innovative changes; those can easily mask any factual errors. ;)

Bing's Stefan Weitz was recently interviewed by Eric Enge. In the interview Stefan points out how he thinks Bing sees the web differently than Google, in that:

• they "look at the web as a digital representation of the physical world"
• search will move from a web of nouns to a web of verbs, helping you to complete tasks in a more integrated manner: "there are enough services opening up their protocols and their APIs, Bing can then broker out that request to a number of different services across the web and stitch that information back together to help me go from I want to do this to I have done it."
• "Humans have this primal behavior around the social experience where we almost always ask our friends and acquaintances for advice."

I highly recommend the interview as a must read to understand where search is headed. The speed of change in technology is increasing at a logarithmic progression & search is going to become much more of a complete end-to-end service.

The big takeaways for me from that read were that Bing will be doing hard brand pushes at some point (a digital representation of the physical world) & a lot more tight vertical integrations (a web of verbs). In summary, that means their game plan is just like Google's.

Partnering vs Owning

The only areas where they are significantly different currently is that Microsoft is trying to partner to build an ecosystem, whereas Google wants to own the ecosystem (see Freebase, Google's ITA integration, Google Places pages scrape-n-displace, BeatThatQuote / Google Advisor, illegal ebook scanning, Google's botched partnership with Paypal on mobile payments).

Hosting Youtube's 3 billion daily video views, Google now controls more display ads than Yahoo! does.

More Data = Better Relevancy

In search, more data is typically better than better algorithms. As more signals get mixed into the pool, the value of any individual signal decreases.

Google has tried a number of attempts to solicit end user feedback & collect user data: the Google toolbar, Knol, SearchWiki, SideWiki, Google Chrome, etc. The Google founders have desired an annotated version of web more than search:

Sidewiki feels like another swing at something Google seems to desperately desires — a community of experts offering high quality comments. Google says that’s something that its cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted more than a system for ranking web pages. They really wanted a system to annotate pages across the web.

Yelp has dominated the review space, but in Portland (a test market) Google has collected more local reviews than the rest of the big review sites have in the history of their existence - and it only took them a couple months to do it.

A lot of information is coming online, but it is hard to sort out the signal from the noise unless you have identity. Google now has that through Gmail, Google Checkout, Android & Google wallet.

Eric Schmidt suggested that smartphone contacts could be used to create a social graph. Those cell phones use local services to send your location. With Google Wallet they are willing to give you $10 just to try it, simply because they know they will make more than that back on improved ad targeting & getting a taste of local ad budgets via their offers. They even have stickers to put on phones without NFC to enable it.

Who are the real wine experts in Portland? Maybe the people who...

• actually live there (confirmed by the address associated with their credit cards, the IP address of their home computer & the location information Android phones share with Google)
• those who are consistently spending hundreds to thousands of Dollars a month buying wines (the more skin you have in the game the more weight Google can put on your feedback & reviews.)
• those who review wines (Google can offer perks & bonuses to get people over the hump, & then add social game dynamics like badges)
• those who review wines who have positive reviews from other wine drinkers (nothing like a little peer review to an academic mind)

What wine stores in Portland are the best? Probably the ones which the above wine reviewers shop at. Looking up driving directions can be seen as a relevancy signal.

What wine stores in Portland are less scrupulous? Those which are mostly given 5 star reviews by out-of-town (or, out-of-country) people who have never logged into Google from an IP address in the Portland area, never used an Android phone in the Portland area, and have never looked up driving directions around the Portland area.

Cell phones show human movement predictable 93% of the time.

More Holistic Marketing

At one point in time online was a new and (fairly) level playing field where one could win based on meritocracy. Increasingly though search is becoming "a digital representation of the physical world." To win online you will often be required to win offline.

With all the above data being included in Google's algorithms in the coming years (along with other brand signals) some people might decide that SEO is becoming too hard for the head keywords & that they are better off playing in the tail of search. But even that has 3 big problems:

• if you have too many low quality pages Google can torch the whole of your site for it (and at this point it has been close to 100 days since Panda, and virtually no recoveries have been reported)
• the eHow model will be reformulated at some point & added into some of the larger publishers that Google's algorithms boosted the rankings for, so if you are not one of those guys then they would still have a cost advantage over you through increased rankings & distribution (along with easier influence of social signals & such)
• Google is looking into renting ebooks & could eventually unveil an ad supported ebook model for endless editorially-reviewed longtail content (and since Google would host those ebooks they would be able to track more relevancy signals from them, just like they have with videos on Youtube).

Certain categories with significant guilt or shame (say genital wart removal, criminal defense lawyers, etc.) won't have much end user data shared publicly (or, at least, users won't intentionally share that data with Google - though they may do so accidentally). Many (most) categories will have a sea of data available. And in those categories, at some point jumping through technical loopholes will be so tiresome & expensive that it will be cheaper and easier to create the signals Google wants to see through brand, public relations, and consumer experience than it is to try to fake them.

As search is becoming "a digital representation of the physical world" some of the best SEO tips in the years to come will have nothing to do with sitting at a computer. In due time, in search, there will be no security through obscurity.

Indeed, the future is already here.

This Shouldn't Hurt Too Bad

One of the more perverse things about online markets is that since things are not done in person a lot of people are willing to work in the gray area. That allows people like Vitaly Borker to torture his customers as a marketing strategy. ;)

When Stanley Milgram did his famous study on if people were willing to torture others (so long as they thought it was part of a scientific experiment), he found out that the more distance they put between the torturer and torturee the more brutally they would behave. People would dial the voltage up to x if they were holding the hand of the person getting shocked, a bit more if the person was on the other side of a glass wall, and a bit more if they were behind a brick wall.

Fleecing Newbs

Many online economic innovations are ultimately scams, where the cost is hidden, with the scammers operating one step ahead of the legal system. Swoopo was basically a semi-legal form of gambling that took advantage of people's ignorance of math. As soon as it started working dozens of companies followed suit. The rage was so popular that people would buy overpriced "credits" to spend their "credits" to bid on the ability to get more "credits" at a slightly discounted rate. :D

OMG I Just Lost 3,000 Pounds!

The fake blog (flog) strategy where a woman writes about how she lost 40 pounds in a month due to Açaí & colon cleanse was an economic "innovation" where affiliates could rope a person into 2 fraudulent reverse billing scams at the same time.

Public relations hacks were quick to adopt the fake blog "innovation" for their corporate clients & such gems like Walmarting Across America & Working Families for Wal-Mart were born.

In Other "News"

Affiliates who needed to differentiate from all the other affiliates needed a new round of "innovation." So they would take the items or categories or topics they were selling something similar to & add a "as seen in" section on their websites highlighting how something tangently related to what they are selling was once mentioned in the media in some way.

From there it was a quick jump to fake celebrity endorsements & fake news sites offering "a special report on how you can get rich overnight" as a millionaire who wants to give back naively shares everything they know for $4 shipping in an anyone-can-do automated wealth generation blueprint, while losing 50 pounds in 1 month. :)

Step by Step

Ultimately sales is not an event, but a process. Which is why the above mentioned reverse billing scams only charged shipping off the start, so the perceived risk was lower than the actual risk (much like bad faith insurance companies that take your money until you need what you paid for, and then manage to disappear).

Everyone Pays for Fraud

The scammers eat off the plates of everyone honest in the marketplace. Multiple times a month I get refund requests from people who bought something totally unrelated to us from Clickbank, demanding I give them their money back for something that is in no way related to us. I highlight that refunds at clickbank.com is where they need to send their emails, but for every person who manages to get their money back there are likely 5 or 10 more people who are disillusioned & less trusting of online markets & online marketers.

Google Polices Scams *Everyday*

Circling back to the SEO & PPC niche, Google has to deal with the scams & scammers every day. In certain cases where it is exceptionally profitable (say illegal prescription drugs, knock off goods, Obama mortgage modification) Google may choose to look the other way / have lax policy enforcement, but at some point looking the other way creates financial risks & a risk of brand damage.

Doing What is Easy = Doing What is Best?

Generally when it comes down to it, Google's revenues are heavily concentrated & no matter how widespread or profitable any individual scam is, they can cut it out of their ad network without being overly concerned. Last September AdAge shared data showing that there are around a couple thousand advertisers spending over $10,000 a month on Google ads. While the longtail concept is widely praised, in the search ecosystem it reflects more on products rather than merchants. Some time ago SEM Rush sent me the following chart highlighting AdWords spend breakdown estimates.

Their numbers are based off of the publicly shared Google keyword estimates (which generally skew toward trying to get advertisers to spend more), and I believe they may count certain AdWords ad management platforms as being 1 advertiser each, but yet again Pareto principal appears in the data & Google could keep roughly 80% of their US search revenues if they only accepted ads from the top 5,000 advertisers (out of more than 300,000). And those estimates were before Google widely launched their CPA product ads, which only further consolidate traffic to a smaller number of websites.

Ultimately Google can try to police an ecosystem of x thousand companies or an ecosystem of x million companies. The latter will have more innovations in it, but also a wider variety of scams & be much more expensive to police. This is a big part of the reason Google has felt the need to become more & more portal-like over time. Their engineering culture assumes that they can do it better internally.

Depending on how your positioned, their anti-innovation "do what is easy" approach to search can either be a boon or a major hindrance. The companies that were worried about maintaining complex search strategies which sorta fell into top rankings on the Google brand +1 obviously benefited. But Panda (and Google's approach to AdWords) keep raising the bar on smaller businesses.

I thought it would be worth highlighting a few examples:

Google Arbitrage Tax

A friend recently had their AdWords account penalized for running an "arbitrage" business model.

• the site wasn't advertising for revenues, but to build links & awareness
• the ad campaign was inactive
• the site had since been sold & the buyer added another ad unit to the page

To appreciate how arbitrary the above editorial judgement is against that webmaster, not only were they 0% responsible for the alleged editorial infractions, but 3 hours after the sincere "notification only" email Google did a follow up which said the site was once again approved to advertise, but the ads need to be re-submitted for review.

We live in a world where flagrantly parasitic sites like Mahalo required "an algorithm" (with endless collateral damage) to fix & yet the above sequence is somehow a reasonable way for Google to treat there paying customers.

Much like there is "too big to fail" there is also "too small to matter" but if you look at Google's numbers you can see how that happens. We are basically expecting them to be better than all other monopolies if we expect a level playing field.

Google Disclosure Tax

Some smaller advertisers may get their AdWords campaigns disabled because they offer a freeware trial, where a person has to buy the full version to unlock all of it's features. Google suggests that these advertisers lead with the disclaimer that a customer may eventually spend a Dollar if they like what they are trying, but sales is a process rather than an event. Sometimes you first have to show proof of value before people are willing to spend money. The problem is that if you are paying for every click & you have to lead with your disclaimer of potential cost for a full upgrade (and so on) then you are not going to be able to compete with a larger brand that does not need to clearly display disclaimers.

The flip side of the above is that Groupon can put their TOS in a foreign language & it is no big deal.

You can only have a strong conversion-oriented page with message clarity if you are a brand, otherwise you need to LEAD WITH THE DISCLAIMERS, which never works if you are paying by the click in an efficient market if you are taxed x% of conversions upfront. Not only are brands given leeway, but Google also allows their own products & services to routinely violate the terms of service they push onto others. The footer on Google Advisor states "The information displayed here was provided directly from the issuer and/or collected from the issuer's website. Check the details pages for each offer for the data source and update time. Google is not currently being paid for these listings."

Note the "NOT CURRENTLY." So everyone else is required to place the entire info harvesting policy next to the form, but Google can have a "google protects you from spam, Learn more" link which they specifically prohibit just linking to as an AdWords advertiser. Where do you see EXPLICITYLY how you can opt out of communications? Look at the table at the bottom of this page.

If you are creative enough you can say that disclosure doesn't have to kill conversions, but the problem is that sometimes it does. And when it does, it is not like there are many other avenues for you to compete online. In some markets Google owns over 95% of the search marketshare.

The brands always have the flexibility of setting up a mini-site to test if unbranded works better, but the non-branded smaller advertiser doesn't have the option of using similar textual formatting to their larger competitors.

Google Data Harvesting Tax

Online self-regulation of ad networks is going slow because ad networks prefer to focus on arbitrary technical limitations (that they can later worm around) rather than focusing on the real world impacts of how people are profiled.

Part of the reason Google & Facebook are willing to invest into smearing each other publicly is they are trying to damage each other's brands so the other is trusted less, so that they may build an asymmetrical information advantage.

The big issue with data harvesting is that one company's sales funnel or cross-marketing campaign is another's data harvesting scheme. Just like the tax on disclaimers, this is another area where larger businesses of scale get an economic advantage by being able to get more benefit of the doubt on their approach

Google's I am Duplicate Content Tax

In the past I highlighted how some webmasters have trouble ranking for their own content due to duplication & how it could even impact their ability to buy ads. Ultimately this leads to some level of fear & indecisiveness amongst many small business owners who may become afraid to have duplicate content anywhere on their sites.

While these businesses are told they don't add enough value, the biggest players grow through acquisition & duplication:

• Google runs a product search engine, Boutiques.com & Like.com.
• Google runs Google video search, Youtube & Vevo.
• Bankrate runs Bankrate.com, CreditCardGuide.com, CreditCardSearchEngine.com, Interest.com, CreditCards.com, and NationwideCardServices.
• Expedia runs Expedia.com, Hotwire.com, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor.com, & tons of smaller niche websites

Google Link Buying Penalty Tax

The Panda update made it so that certain businesses did not need to build (m)any links to compete, while some other businesses were required to build many more links to stay competitive.

Around Mother's Day there was a hit piece in the NYT about how some online flower sites were buying links. Google's official take was that they did not care about the link buying since those brand rankings (allegedly) did not impact the search results. Today those same link buyers rank #'s 1-4 in Google

Brands rank because Google puts weight on brand-like signals (and they can get away with link buying which smaller competitors would get torched for). Then Google claims that the link buying is irrelevant because it doesn't influence the search results.

With that sort of circular logic why does Google even care about paid links at all? Why do they arbitrarily police one segment of the web?

On the flip side, there is a suspicion of smaller webmasters which is core to how Google operates (even if the site they are passing judgement on ranks right at the top of the search results for core industry keywords & is linked to organically from top newspapers). Sometimes it is a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach.

Google recently started sending out "unnatural link profile" notification emails. Well if they can detect that the link profile is unnatural then why can't they automatically discount it? (Didn't they just say they do that?)

Why, in this instance, do they suggest they can identify the problems & that a business owner should first be penalized for it, then need to fix it before reconsideration, all the while some larger businesses do the same exact things but Google looks the other way because they claim to have already detected it?

Why does one form of detection require penalization while the other doesn't?

Unstable Business Tax

During the Panda update many small businesses (which did nothing wrong other than participating on the same Internet that the likes of eHow abuses) got torched. They were given abstract qualities where they need to improve on. Over 3 months later they are still in the dark hoping the penalty clock hits zero before the bankruptcy clock does.

When traffic heads south & becomes unreliable a business not only loses that income, but it also loses negotiating leverage with suppliers.

The uncertainty not only retards investment, but may lead to physical, emotional, social & mental health issues. People make better life decisions when they are driven by love than when they are driven by fear.

Localization

The one big counter-trend to the move away from small businesses is Google's increased emphasis on localization, which allows some small local businesses to participate in search markets that they were simply priced out of in years past.

How to Handle Duplicate Content

Here is a fun webmaster help video from March 10th of 2010, answering the following question:

"If Google crawls 1,000 pages/day, Googlebot crawling many dupe content pages may slow down indexing of a large site. In that scenario, do you recommend blocking dupes using robots.txt or is using META ROBOTS NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW a better alternative?"

The answer kinda jumps around a bit, but here is a quote:

I believe if you were to talk to our crawl and index team, they would normally say "look, let us crawl all the content, we'll figure out what parts of the site are dupe (so which sub-tree are dupes) and we'll combine that together.

Whereas if you block something with robots.txt we can't ever crawl it, so we can't ever see that its a dupe. And then you can have the full page coming up, and then sometimes you'll see these uncrawled URLs where we saw the URL but we weren't able to crawl them and see that its a dupe.
...
I would really try to let Google crawl the pages & see if we can figure out the dupes on our own.

Trust in GoogleBot

The key point here is that before you consider discarding any of your waste you should give GoogleBot a chance to see if they can just figure it out on their end. Then, without updating said advice, Google rolled out the Panda update & torched 10,000's of webmasters for following what was up to then a Google best practice. Only after months of significant pain did Google formally suggest on their blog that you should now block them from indexing such low value pages.

Matt's video also suggested some of the other work around options webmasters could do (like re-architecting their site or using parameter handling in Webmaster Tools), but made it sound like Google getting it right by default was anything but an anomaly. What such advice didn't take into account was the future.

What Does a Search Engineer Do?

The problem with Google is that no matter what they trust, it gets abused. Which is why they keep trying to fold more signals into search & why they are willing to make drastic changes that often seem both arbitrary & unjust.

Search engineers are well skilled at public relations. A big part of what search engineers do is managing the market through FUD. If you can get someone else to do your work for you for free then that is way more profitable than trying to sort everything out on your end.

Search engineers are great at writing code. A lot of what the search engineers do is reactionary. Some things get out of control and are so obvious that FUD won't work, so they need to stomp on them with new algorithms. Most search engine signals are created through tracking people, so they usually follow people. Even when it seems like they are trying to change the game drastically, a lot of that data still comes from following people.

What to Do as an SEO?

The ignorant SEO waits until they are told by Google to do something & starts following "best practices" after most of the potential profits have been commoditized, both by algorithmic changes & a market that has become less receptive to a marketing approach which has since lost its novelty.

The *really* ignorant SEO only listens to official Google advice & trusts some of the older advice even after it has become both stale & inaccurate. As recently as 2 years ago I saw a published author in the SEO space handing out a tip on Twitter to use the Google toolbar as your primary backlink checking tool. Sad!

The search guidelines are very much a living breathing document. If search engines are to remain relevant they must change with the web. Those blazing new paths & changing the landscape of internet marketing often operate in ways that are not yet commonplace & thus not yet covered by guidelines that are based on last year's ecosystem. Individual campaigns fail often, because they are trying something new or different. Off of each individual marketing campaign the expected outcome is failure. However they generally win the war. Those who follow behind remain in their footprints (unless they operate in less competitive markets).

The savvy SEO is a trail blazer who is pushing & probing to test some of the boundaries. They are equally a person who watches the evolution of the web through the lens of history, attempting to predict where search may lead. If you can predict where search is going you are not as likely to get caught with your pants down as the person who waits around for Google telling them what to do next. It may still happen in some cases, but it is less common & you are more likely to be able to adjust quickly if you are looking at the web through Google's perspective (rather than through the perspective they suggest you use).

Google's Noble Respect for Copyright

Google has a history of challenging the law & building a business through wildcatting in a gray hat/black hat manner.

• They repeatedly broke the law with their ebook scanning project. Their ebook store is already open in spite of a judge requiring them to rework their agreements.
• They bought Youtube, a den of video piracy & then spent $100 million on legal bills after the fact. When they were competing with Youtube they suggested that they could force copyright holders to pay Google for lost ad revenues if they didn't give Google access to the premium content. :D
• They sold ads against trademarks where it was generally viewed as illegal and awaited the court's decisions after the fact.
• They tried doing an illegal search tie-up with Yahoo & only withdrew after they were warned that it would be challenged. They later slid through a similar deal with Yahoo Japan that was approved.
• They "accidentally" collected personally identifiable information while getting router information & scanning streets (and we later learn via internal emails in court documents how important some of this "accidental" data collection was to them).
• They pushed Buzz onto Gmail users and paid the fine.
• Google torched UK finance comparison sites for buying links. Then Google bought one of the few they didn't torch (in spite of its spammy links). After getting flamed on an SEO blog they penalized that site, but then it was ranking again 2 weeks later *without* cleaning up any of the spammy links.
• When the Panda update torched one of your sites Google AdSense was probably already paying someone else to steal it & outrank you. Google itself scrapes user reviews & then replaces the original source with Google Places pages. The only way to opt out of that Google scrape is to opt out of Google search traffic.
• Google promotes open in others, but then with their own products it is all or nothing bundling: "we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want." - Google's Dan Morrill
• For years Google recommended warez and keygens and serials to searchers, all while building up a stable of over 50,000 advertisers pedaling counterfeit goods. That only stopped when the US government applied pressure, and then Google painted themselves as the good guys for fighting piracy.
• Google is reportedly about to launch their music service, once again without permission of the copyright holders they are abusing.

Those were examples of how Google interpreted "the guidelines" in modern societies.

Google doesn't wait for permission.

What are you doing right now?

Are you sitting around hoping that GoogleBot sorts everything out?

If so, grab a newspaper & pull out the "help wanted" section. You're going to need it!

If you want to win in Google's ecosystem you must behave like Google does, rather than behaving how they claim to & tell you to.