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Ralph Tegtmeier (aka fantomaster) has been known for many years as having one of the most insightful minds and original voices in the search game. Years ago I wanted to interview him, and only recently did we get to do that.

What did you do before you got into search?

In contrast to the maverick background and achievements my old friend Mike Grehan revealed in his recent interview with SEOBook, my life before search was positively boring. I was born in Egypt and grew up in the Middle East and Asia, where my father served terms in the German diplomatic service. Later, I mastered in Comparative Literature, English Literature and Portuguese philology at Bonn University in Germany. Even before that, I had founded and run (together with two fellow students) an occult bookshop there and went into freelance translation and writing after that.

As a translator, I hooked up with IT almost as soon as it became available, though I did study the subject in some depth before I finally purchased my first PC, a Victor Sirius 286 hybrid that was both IBM and Sirius compatible.

Came the Internet in Fall of 1994, came the "taxBomber" - that was my thentime nom de guerre as an online marketer in the offshore finance, alternate citizenship and privacy protection field.

Before the Web proper was made accessible to all, I'd been on CompuServe and tested the waters there in terms of online marketing, but there were some pretty severe limits to that so it didn't really scale that well. The WWW really changed all that.

As you may expect, in the mid-to-end 90s, optimizing a web site for the search engines was a lot more simplistic than today: keyword stuffing, multiple title tags, invisible text on page - all these techniques worked like a song.

In 1998, I teamed up with my old school buddy Dirk Brockhausen, who by that time held a doctorate in physics and was a certified SAP consultant, working for companies such as IBM and others.

How did you end up in the search field?

My first online business caught on immediately. Competition wasn't too fierce though definitely existent. One day, I stumbled across a report on how to game the search engines - quite probably the first of its kind. I purchased it, implemented a lot of the techniques outlined, and bang! - rankings improved even more! There was a lot of deadweight tied to that approach at the time, e.g. signing up for FFA sites which would bring me a ton of spam mails, etc., quite a nuisance, really. So it became essential to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Around the same time I hit upon the late Corey Rudel's stuff which was an eye opener in terms of efficient marketing, especially the American kind. Lots of impulses from that and still profiting from the impact.

When Dirk an I decided to set up shop, it was a given that we would develop software, the only question was: what kind of application? So we researched the market at some length, caught onto SEO, tested our stuff thoroughly and finally went public with it.

You built the #1 brand in the cloaking space. What were some of the key steps to doing that?

We conducted about a year and half's intense research, experimenting with all kinds of SEO in a variety of niches. Cloaking beat them all stone cold, so that's what we went for in the end.

It was quite obvious from the start that efficient, reliable cloaking requires an equally efficient and reliable database of verified search engine spiders to work from, so that's what we focused on first: the fantomas spiderSpy(TM) service which to this date boasts the world's most comprehensive list of verified search engine spiders. We've been building this list since 1999 and it's generally considered to be best of breed - and these aren't my words, mind you, but what out customers say about it.

As for cloaking proper, at first it was single page cloaking only, giving you mixed sites with both cloaked and non-cloaked pages. Later, as the major search engines began to adopt a more adversarial stance, we developed the fantomas shadowMaker(TM) which generates entire stand-alone cloaked sites, what we tagged Shadow Domains(TM) - a term Google initially stole from us in the first versions of their Webmaster guidelines. (They dropped it again later.)

Much of this was due to our being fed up with having to build SDs manually for our SEO clients, so we decided to automate the process. And so, the fantomas shadowMaker(TM) was born. We're currently working on a new version that will include a ton of additional powerful features to reflect the ever changing search environment.

Is cloaking today as relevant as it was 5 years ago? Do web 2.0 sites and other easy link sources & hosts still make it quite profitable? How has cloaking changed over the years?

Like all things search, cloaking has changed in the course of the years. Initially, it was sufficient to simply cloak single pages on your site, giving you a mix of cloaked and open pages. Then, it was more about foregoing risks for your money sites plus enhanced scalability by deploying self-contained, independent cloaked sites - those Shadow Domains(TM) I mentioned -, effectively restricting your cloaking efforts to these SDs which could be discarded and easily replaced by fresh ones should they be caught out by the search engines.

Today, cloaking has evolved to both include and target RSS feeds, promoting them via the aggregators and feed directories, for example. Our forthcoming new version of the shadowMaker will also include new functionality enhancing page structure variance, inclusion of graphics, CSS, etc. to make the SDs appear even more organic to the spiders. Finally, it will also offer a vastly improved text generation module as well.

Of course, up until now cloaking has generally only addressed on site factors, optimizing webpages for the search engine spiders. What it doesn't do per se is attend to off site stuff such as link building. So once you've started to roll out your SDs, you'll still have to throw a decent amount of good links at them to make their rankings sticky. However, this isn't a change in technology so much as in SEO strategy: once links became more all-important, you had to add link building to your arsenal of SEO techniques just like everyone else.

Is it still relevant i.e. effective? Most certainly - provided you know what you're doing by running a tight ship strategy wise. Essentially, this is nothing new: it simply comes with changing search engine algos, new platforms (such as blogs or social bookmarking sites etc.).

Another, entirely new cloaking technology is still in an experimental stage. It's what we've tagged "Mosaic Cloaking". Here, only specific parts of an otherwise "normal" web page are cloaked for spider fodder, displaying different content to human visitors. This will effectively lead us back, at least in part, to the mixed sites of yore, featuring both cloaked and non-cloaked content on the same domain. Once we have sufficient empirical data on hand to make this technology viable for general deployment, we hope to integrate it into our software, of course.

As for Web 2.0 sites, we're mainly leveraging them for both link building and traffic generation. It's actually quite easy to promote cloaked sites or pages via the social networking platforms these days because people have become so well accustomed to being redirected when browsing the Web that it doesn't tend to raise any eyebrows anymore.

Some well funded web 2.0 sites do things like list "relevant keywords" and "keywords sending traffic to this page"... what is the difference between cloaking and such an automated approach to keyword rich content generation? Why is one considered bad with the other being considered fine?

Well, cloaking or IP delivery in the technical sense is, of course, about displaying different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors. What these Web 2.0 sites are actually doing is going for the old worn keyword stuffing technique, not cloaking proper. (Well, not as a rule, anyway.)

It's actually quite funny to see well-trafficked sites like that adopt an amateurish level of purported search engine optimization which we, as professional SEOs, have long demoted as no longer effective enough. There's many plausible explanations for this, though in the main it's probably all about fundamental cluelessness. But because these sites are getting tons of traffic from other sources than organic search, and in view of the fact that the search engines are concerned about losing large chunks of their traffic and search market shares (think Facebook and Twitter for two prime examples), they seem to be giving them an unabashed preferential treatment which no ordinary mom-and-pop web site can ever hope to be blessed with.

To the uninformed, this may actually seem to endorse such dated SEO techniques though this is an entirely false conclusions. Because it's actually not the keyword and link stuffing at all that helps these sites achieve to high rankings, PageRank etc. - rather, it's all those other factors your run-of-the-mill site cannot easily emulate.

On the client front, we're experiencing a lot more openness towards "black hat" SEO such as cloaking etc. than e.g. 3-4 years ago. Generally, people aren't as impressed or as easily conned by the search engines' (especially Google's) FUD tactics regarding anything they don't like. Sure, they're worried about possibly losing their sites in the search engine indices, but the number of people who'll simply swallow everything Google feeds them by way of their peculiar gospel of what a "good boy or girl" should do or refrain from in terms of SEO is positively on the decrease.

As Google pushed nofollow and became more liberal with the "black hat" label it seems there is less discussion about black hat vs white hat. Do you agree with that? And if so, why has that conversation died down?

I think it's because people are getting more pragmatic about things. Maybe it's the novelty of doing business on the Web which has worn off, maybe it's the vast variety of divergent opinions and schools of thought of SEO and the unprecedented exposure the importance of organic search engine optimization is enjoying in the media.

Whatever it may actually be, I agree that the debate has become de-emotionalized, less religious even. When we started off with formal SEO services back in the late nineties, the debate was all about "ethical" versus "unethical" SEO. Lots of gut level reactions then to what was, after all, merely a technological, not a theological or moral issue. Add to that the increasingly competitive environment people have to cope with on the Internet and it all figures rather nicely. You might arguably say that Web commerce as a whole has matured, as, of course, has the SEO industry proper.

These days, when you speak with clients they won't flinch one bit if you ask them whether they want to opt for a "white hat" or a "black hat" approach. Rather, they'll inquire about efficacy, the relative risks and so on. So it's a pretty much unexcited, hands-on discussion which is a very good thing.

Matt Cutts often tries to equate search engine manipulators with criminals. And yet the same search results will sell exposure to virtually anyone willing to pay for it. From a linguistic and framing standpoint, what gives Google such dominance over the SEO conversation?

I've recently dubbed Matt Cutts as Google's "FUD Czar" for this very reason, not that I expect it will stop him from pursuing that course in future. Next thing we may find him equating black hat SEOs with kiddie porn peddlers, Columbian drug cartels and white slavery racketeers...

I find this a fairly worrying though certainly not an unexpected development. It's an established scare tactics we've seen deployed ever and again in human history: lump your detractors with anywhich foes everyone is concerned about to make all that muck rub off. It's how witch hunts and, in the political field, totalitarian propaganda, especially the fascist kind, have always been conducted.

I know I may get quite a bit of flak for this, but the way I view things Google as a corporation has subscribed to an essentially totalitarian mindset. It's quite clear for anyone to see: in their public statements, in the way they tend to react to criticism, and of course, even more importantly, in the vast array of technologies and data conduits they're rolling out to dominate all the time.

This being the Information Age, information is equated with power - this is a pervasive meme that's dominated Western culture for centuries if not millenia. And this is precisely what Google is trying to monopolize - alas, quite successfully.

But not to worry, I won't set out on a rant with a long winded academic analysis of Google's crypto fascist ideology and praxis here. Suffice it to say that I've studied these matters in some depth for more than 40 years now. This isn't about some whacko conspiracy theory, it's about cold, hard nosed and sober analysis and evaluation of verifiable facts. But let's let it rest there for the time being.

Many ad networks promote fraud because they promote whatever generates the most money (and additional profit margins are often created through fraud). Why is it that the media generally talks about SEO as though it is a black practice shady industry, and pay per click ads are rarely given coverage for promoting things like cookie pushing, adultery, reverse billing fraud, etc.?

For one, advertising is the media's mainstay, their commercial backbone. So we can't reasonably expect them to bite the hand that feeds them and hope to survive the exercise. Essentially, this makes them utterly blind on that score by default. At the very least, they're not given to be unduly reflective about these things.

Second, SEO is still very much a "black art" in the sense that about 99% of all media workers don't know it from scratch anyway. Let's face it: while the basic concepts of SEO are fairly straightforward and easy to explain, actually running successful SEO campaigns is quite another ballgame. Also, what with time and attention spans mutating into ever more expensive and rare commodities, most media workers simply won't (and quite possibly: cannot, even if they would) bother reading your own excellent SEO book or Mike Grehan's outlines - they're too long, too technical and effectively too specialized for your average media hack to invest time and dig into.

Third, while there is certainly an entirely real SEO industry out there now, it's still very much a fledgling operation. Yes, every man and his dog in upper management may know about the importance of SEO for their Web marketing efforts - but which SEO are we actually talking about? Ten experts, eleven opinions, right? To the outsider, it's confusing, it's mysterious, it's dark, and yes: more often than not all this discomfort translates into viewing SEO as being "shady", like it or not.

Fourth, most SEO agencies I know about are actually focused on PPC management. They may offer organic search optimization alright, but overall PPC is a pretty easy sell whereas organic SEO generally isn't. PPC is easy to understand, it's fast and it's still fairly complex enough to require expert assistance if you don't want to sink your advertising budget into uneffective campaigns at a breathtaking pace.

All this makes people feel a lot more comfortable with PPC than with organic SEO, I guess.

But what I actually find a lot more worrisome is that click fraud as a media topic seems to have been pushed snugly to the back burner for years. Unfortunately, this applies to the SEO industry as a whole as well: they don't seem to be too keen on discussing this issue which, in my view at least, is actually doing their clients a great disservice...

Google has a video game patent to exploit video game players based on their mental weaknesses (like a need for security, gambling addictions, or making rush decisons). You had a great post on Sphinn mentioning the hazards of trusting data mining companies too much and the concept of systemic mechanisms of "reality production". Whenever I mention that sort of stuff people assume I am a cynic and look at me like I am crazy. How can you spread the message about such topics without being seen as crazy?

Well, who says we aren't? (Laughs) But seriously: if you define "craziness" as implying a generally unacceptable divergence from the ruling norms and prevailing views of mainstream society, I'd actually wonder if I wasn't into some terrible mistake if people DIDN'T think I was crazy when airing such views. Plus, the original "cynics" in Ancient Greece were the "dog philosophers" which is what the term actually implies: an eminently contrarian crowd in bitter opposition to the fattened, smug establishment of conventional philosophy. So in a way it's really a badge of honor, don't you think?

It's about the violation of comfort levels, I suppose. People are having a very hard time coping with the pace at which current technology is changing the world, both emotionally and intellectually. If all you're worried about is somehow making ends meet, feeding your family, coughing up money for your mortgage, for medical care and paying for your kids' schooling, you'll tend to reduce your outlook to a tunnel vision. It's called "focus", I know, but more often than not it's a type of mental self-amputation resulting in narrow mindedness, simplistic views of the world and, what's worse, a general refusal do deal with anything unfamiliar if it threatens to shake that less than stable edifice you may mistake for a life.

Once you start putting matters into a larger perspective, they tend to confuse people even more. This, in turn, evokes emtional, gut level reactions - quite irrational, true, but very easy to explain, too: "So what's Google gotta do with fascism now - is that all you can think of, weirdo?"

Actually, this is nothing new at all. Personally, I and many members of my generation experienced a lot of this in the sixties when more or less all members of the political and economic establishment felt threatened by the hippy movement, the anti Vietnam war protests and a general criticism of capitalist and corporate values. Different contentions, to be sure, but the same mechanisms at work nevertheless.

In a Twitter post you made you mentioned something about the web becoming more narcissistic. What is driving that? How can it be prevented on an individual and group level?

To address your second question first, I don't think it can be "prevented" in any pro-active way unless you want to pull the plug on it all e.g. by canning the platforms allowing for it - hardly a realistic scenario, I would think. I'm fairly certain that it will abate to some extent once people's attention starts shifting to other matters, rather than playing voyeurs to some narcissistic exhibitionists. As it stands, it seems to reflect what's been going on in terms of TV show entertainment for many years now: people exhibiting all kinds of entirely personal quirks and traits, with tons of viewers obviously enjoying it, too.

So what's actually driving it? In a nutshell: atomization. With large families and tightly knit rural communities losing ground in favor of "individualism" and an ever more disrupted social fabric, overall societal stability can only be achieved by marginalizing the individual, feeding it (and dumbing it down) with lots of vicarious pleasures in lieu of actual participation in political, economic and societal power - call it the ideology of consumism, if you will. It's one price we're paying for our physical mobility and mental flexibility: the waning influence of the individual i.e. the very same atomization I've mentioned.

What the Web does offer us is a slew of possibilities to at least create some noise and garner a bit of attention - without more immediate social controls being in place to set us stringent limits like we would have experienced them in meatspace. Further, anonymization helps forego even those controls that have actually been implemented: if your forum moderator chucks your account for whatever reason, it's dead easy to sign up under a different identity to continue creating a stink if that's what you're up to.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not bashing the Web in any way - it offers everyone an incredible amount of wonderful possibilities we've never seen before at such a scale. Think of all the options you have in terms of gathering information on anywhich topic, or of mustering support for a cause you feel strongly about, to name but two examples.

But there's an obvious downside to it as well: as everything is essentially accessible to everyone, you're bound to hit upon lots of people you may find obnoxious or boring or outré - certainly more than you did at college or in your rural community where you grew up in pre-Web times.

Why is it that Google thinks highly of public relations (even if founded on lies) but thinks poorly of most other bulk link building strategies?

Well, as Bob Massa never tires of pointing out, a search engine's primary objective is NOT to "delivery relevance" as so many people are fond of fooling themselves and others, it's to make a profit, period. Verbatim: "A search engine's primary purpose is NOT to deliver relevancy. A search engine's primary purpose is to deliver revenue. That is not the same thing."

While many SEOs still seem to find it hard to come to terms with that, it's pretty obvious that the folks over at Google were pretty slow to learn that lesson themselves. Oh, they certainly did so in the end, and with a vengeance, too. But along with this came all the other trimmings that will make or unmake just about any commercial enterprise, an ingrained preference for low pay being compensated with lots of feelgood high talk for the suckers included. See Michael Arrington's summary "Why Google Employees Quit" for some pretty telling insights.

Of course, hypocrisy plays a major role in this field as well: just like "spam" is always what the other guy is doing, not you yourself, "public relations" is always ok for Google if it helps you ramp up your company to potential client status. At the end of the day you'll have to conduct a lot of public relations to be able to afford some serious AdWords advertising - simple as that. So it makes no sense killing the cows you actually want to milk further down the road.

By contrast, however, undetected paid links will negatively impact Google's fundamental business platform because they can't really deal with them effectively, being so very link biassed as they are (or used to be) - so they're bound to be slated as a big no-no from their point of view.

None of this is illogical in any way - but of course that doesn't mean that we as SEOs have got to like or condone it. I know for sure that I don't...

In many ways (nofollow, nepotism, publishers requiring payment for links) the "organic" link has died a slow and painful death. Do you see Google and other search engines moving away from linking as a core component in their relevancy algorithms?

Personally, I tend to view Google's ongoing campaign of stressing the "evils" of undisclosed paid linking as a sign of utter desperation. Yahoo! and MSN/Live as well as Ask, while still relying heavily on links themselves, aren't half as outspoken or, more precisely, as hysterical about it.

I am also on record umpteen times as having pointed out that PageRank and, in fact, all ranking technologies unduly biassed towards inlinks are suffering from a fundamental fallacy. Because links may be lots of different things to many people, but they're definitely not simple "votes" in the sense of unequivocal acceptance, recommendation or endorsement, i.e. quality. At the very least, that's only a tiny fraction constituting their overall functionality.

To reiterate, PageRank in its original form was nothing but an overblown and hyped citation index, directly derived from academia's predilections: in the past 40 years or so it's become a very popular metrics to grade scholars by the number of citations they can ramp up, very much in line with their overall "publish or perish" career criteria. Allow me to point out, however, that this is essentially a culture thing: on the whole, European academics, to cite a contrarian example, have always staid aloof of this mindset. Plus, competition is just as fierce and cut throat in their world as it is in the "outside world" of regular commerce. I'm not sure there's actually a lot of "citation buying" going on in the academic universe, but frankly I wouldn't be too surprised if there were.

Be that as it may, a citation index makes even less sense in a commercial environment than it may possibly do in academia. Why should you want to link to your competitors? Why should they link to you? And if I happen to link to some article of yours I happen to be in violent disagreement with, trying to refute it in all bitterness, and ridiculing you on the same stride - does that link constitute a "vote" even in terms of "relevancy"? Or a "quality" indicator? That's like arguing that Jewish activist sites rightly pointing out anti-semitic or racist pages they are in disagreement with are actually endorsing them. So what if thousands of Jewish pages are linking out to the same revisionist neo-fascist site until it starts ranking above them all? That's plain ridiculous.

I mean, is any old "reference" a "vote" or even an indicator of "relevancy"? Sure, pointing to your sources to underpin your arguments will lend them (and you) more credibility, just like in academe. But make no mistake: such questions aren't as clear cut and easy to answer as one may wish to think - after all, philosophers have been wrestling with such issues for centuries for a slew of good reasons.

So if linking as a signal of relevancy is flawed at the very best, what alternatives do the search engines actually have? And in a more direct response to your question proper: I am seeing a lot of experimentation being conducted these days, ranging from behavioral metrics to personalization of search. SERP hand jobs seem to be hitting it big now, too, certainly as far as extremely competitive niches are concerned, think PPC in the "black hat" sense of "pills, porn and casino" sites.

While it may still be premature to term this the "return of on page factors" as a critical ranking element, we're actually seeing a lot of this happening again, albeit in a very pussy footed manner.

As more people compete for attention online do you see that increasing or decreasing the quality of the web as a whole?

That's a bit like asking whether the glass is half full or half empty, I'd say. The Web is expanding, that's a fact, of course. Obviously, this applies to what you or I may consider the "bad" as much as it does to what we deem to be "good", whether it's sources of information or common behavioral traits.

In many ways it's like a commotion on the rural market place: the more people join in the fray, the louder it tends to get - and the more aggressive you'll have to be when competing for attention.

But if you shun the crowd to retire to your private club and meet with your peers, things tend to get a lot more quiet and comfy again. This is actually happening at quite a large scale these days: there's lots of "closed shop" forums and communities online who will strictly vet their members to keep out the riffraff.

Google's CEO recently stated that "brands are how you sort out the cesspool" and that humans were hardwired for brands. Did it surprise you when he said that?

Frankly, I hope I'll never live to see the day when the likes of Eric Schmidt actually manage to surprise me. I mean, what to make of a man who is on record for blithely stating that World War I was caused by a "lack of understanding" between nations - something he claims Google will actually help prevent? Sure, this may be the Reader's Digest naive version of how WW I came about, but it certainly doesn't reflect reality in any meaningful let alone accurate or verifiable way. What it does reveal, of course, is a picayune, self-serving and utterly petit-bourgeois mindset. (And no, I won't dig into the question of where the 20th century fascists used to recruit the lion's share of their followers...)

Ok, so he's obviouly no qualified historian - but is he an anthropologist, then, making even more asinine claims like this one? "Hardwired" according to Mr Schmidt the neurologist, eh? And what, pray, makes the Web a "cesspool", anyway?

No, I'm not surprised at all: brands are what Schmidt and his chums are comfortable with, what they flatter themselves to understand well. Well, perhaps they actually do, but really, my only reasonable comment on this one is: "garbage in, garbage out"...

Search penalties are well known to be two tier depending on things like "brand." How does one know how far to push while staying within their desired risk/reward ratio?

For all the ballyhoo ramped up around "scientific SEO" (and, for that matter, "scientific marketing" - of which SEO is arguably but a minor subset), it's always been about trial and error and - and this is really important! - educated guesswork. Because the cards have always been stacked from day 1: the search engines won't allow us to study and review their ranking algorithms (which, from their perspective, is perfectly understandable, of course). Also, they can exploit vast amounts of usage data no single SEO company can ever attain to even remotely - and thus they're always leaving us with the short end of the stick. Which, in statistical terms, means that we as SEOs can never hope to get the full picture anyway.

But even if it's a David vs. Goliath kind of scenario, the search engines' major weakness is their requirement to turn a buck. This makes them just as vulnerable to advertiser pressure tactics as most classic deadwood newspapers are and, in fact, always were.

When all is said and done, you cannot ever really know for sure how much is too much of anything: every niche is different and there's no such thing as a golden key to them all. So it's a question of learning, usually the hard way, of trying out different things, both old and new, of testing, testing, testing.

On the upside, if you're not concerned with branding so much, you can easily skew that risk/reward ratio in your favor by essentially cloning your sites (yes, modify them a bit so their not all-out dupes) and run various SEO strategies for them. That way, you'll probably get more exposure while minimizing your risks. Should one or several of your sites underperform or even get penalized, you'll still have others that should perform well enough. So it's really about scaling done properly.

The reliance on brand and domain authority has lowered result diversity on many fronts. Will the fear of spam cause Google to keep clamping down on diversity, or will mom and pop shops still have a chance online 5 to 10 years from now?

This will probably depend on how the search market will evolve in general. If people should get fed up with getting served more and more brands they've known about anyway, this approach may lead to a dramatic loss of market share. If so, Google's only choice will be to push back brands in favor of lesser sites and more diversity again.

Nor is this entirely unrealistic: brands are one thing, but consumer experience with these brands' products is quite another. Personally, if I want to know more about some product being offered online, I'll inquire on Twitter where I'll typically get a ton of useful responses in a whiffy - no way Google or any other major search engine can match this presently. And I'm certainly not alone: I know lots of people who are doing exactly the same now.

Then, when I'm finally ready to buy, I don't need Google to compare offers and prices, either. Once I've bookmarked my favorite comparison sites, I can merrily fulfill my consumer duties without hitting any major search engine at all in the process.

What I'm not sure about is whether people will actually go to the lengths of explicitly demanding other, better search results from Google etc. It seems more likely that they'll simply vote with their mice and go elsewhere - that's a lot easier and faster to do than having to deal with a sluggish, unresponsive behemoth of a corporation.

Generally speaking, I'm afraid I don't see mom-and-pop shops gaining any leeway within the foreseeable future as there's nothing to indicate currently that they actually will. But then, 5 to 10 years is a time span I'd be loath to predict for anyway: too many unknown variables at work here. Two to three years seems a more tangible time frame, and I doubt we'll see any major improvement of small web sites' clout and standing within that span.

Is search an already won natural monopoly? If not, what do you see hurting Google from a competitive standpoint?

For all its undisputable explosion and evolution in the past 15 years or so, search is still in a very primitive, almost primeval stage in my view. Think "Deep Web" which has hardly been scratched superficially as yet - and yes, think "relevancy", too: we're still very much experiencing the Stone Age of search currently. By inference, search is bound to undergo some very fundamental changes pretty soon, and so will searchers' requirements and expectations.

The way many Web 2.0 sites are starting to impact search as we knew it is a good case in point. I've mentioned my own Twitter usage by way of some anecdotal evidence. Sure, Twitter may still turn out to be a mere ephemereal fad in the end, the way MySpace hasn't managed to live up to its original overblown promise. There's many people predicting just that, and who knows - maybe they're right.

But no matter who will evolve to become the biggest boys on the block in the end, and it seems very likely that there'll be several of them, this is where current crawler based all-purpose search is certainly beginning to hurt. If eyeballs are really everything, I for my part wouldn't want to bet the farm on Google maintaining its current monopoly of the search space for very much longer. And I don't see Google being all smug and ignorant about it, either: it's one of the reasons why they're expanding into so many different fields ranging from mobile communication technology to trans Pacific data cables, book digitalization and online document storage, to mention but a few.

For all we know, we may possibly witness the return of the vertical fairly soon as well. This would actually dovetail nicely with the prevailing trend towards ever more granular specialization and specificity. Highly specialized information archives, focused on specific fields of expertise and an equally selective user demographics only, be it directories or portals or crowd sourced networks or databases may well be the one big thing to watch out for.

What have you been up to lately? Do you have any new products or services launching soon?

While we're best known for our cloaking applications, our activities are actual a lot more varied than that. For example, our 100% "white hat" "10 Links A Day" link building service over at http://10LinksADay.net/ is another major focus of ours.

Beyond that, we're very busy developing proprietary technology in the field of automated content creation: targeted towards clients' specific requirements in terms of topicality, keywords and links in a scalable manner, this is what I'm most involved in myself currently. Moreover, the content we're creating is all 100% readable and entirely unique stuff of an unprecedented quality, if I say so myself.

Having presented this to our 10 Links A Day clients as a special, subscribers only offer up until now, we'll soon roll it out as a stand alone service named "Customized Content Creation" (CCC).

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Thanks a bunch Ralph! To read his latest thoughts on search, check out his blog at http://fantomaster.com/fantomNews/

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It seems everyone (but you) is getting a bailout right now, and we didn't think that was fair. So we decided to do something about it - on tax day. :)

On Wednesday, April 15 at 2pm Central, I'll be interviewing Perry Marshall on Google AdWords and Pay Per Click strategies.

Perry is author of the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and is the most referenced AdWords specialist on the Internet.

Perry will explain how to get AdWords clicks for 20% to 70% less money than your competition is paying for the same traffic, and how to get maximum leverage out of your advertising investment. He'll discuss why "SEO people" often avoid Pay Per Click and how to blend both worlds together for not just 2X results, but 3X.

Time: 2:00pm Central Time (3pm EST / 12pm Pacific / 19:00 GMT)
Date: Wednesday April 15, 2009
MP3's/transcripts will be available for purchase.

Reserve your spot at http://www.perrymarshall.com/aaron/

This call is perfect for beginner and intermediate AdWords advertisers. If you're spending more than $100 per month on Google clicks, this information is essential.

The economic downturn has driven more companies to advertise on Google; Google had a record quarter at the end of '08 and it's more important than ever before to employ the right tactics with AdWords!

Perry will show you how to structure a Pay Per Click campaign and discuss recent changes to Google's system that require a different approach.

http://www.perrymarshall.com/aaron/

Perry will also be interviewing me 2 hours earlier, at 12pm Central time. I'll be giving his audience my tips for Search Engine Optimization techniques and what's working in 2009.

What better way to "celebrate" Tax Day than to get more visitors to your website and more sales after they get there? Talk to you then!

Aaron Wall
- and Perry Marshall

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Many thanks for talking with us today, Mike. We've spent a few messy evenings drinking girly Merlots, but for those who don't know you, can you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

Ahhhh… those halcyon Merlot fuelled days… I remember them well… (truth be known, with all that Merlot, I don't remember much at all!).

So for those folks who are new to the industry, I can give a little background.

I first invented the Internet back in the 1960s. I had a young whippersnapper working for me as my assistant at the time. Al Gore was his name. I believe he grew up and took some sort of job with the government. Not sure where he is now.

In about 1965 I coined the term “hypertext,” which I was thrilled about. It didn't actually mean anything, but it sounded really cool. I used to drink with a guy called Ted Nelson who thought this was a pretty cool word, too. Ted's an old scientist living here in New York. And we do laugh when we get together about all of those people who have assumed that it was him who coined the term. Boy, must we have been drunk that night.

After messing around in physics (it being the new rock and roll, of course) I moved to Geneva, Switzerland and took a job at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It was a pretty dull job actually – same thing day-in, day-out. Atomic nuclei can get pretty boring to interact with. Plus I didn't like the special suit.

On one occasion, I was working with a complete dunderhead by the name of Tim Berners Lee. He was one of those guys that you just knew was never going to amount to anything in life. I explained to him that, during my morning shower, I had this brilliant idea to apply hypertext to the internet. He was so excited.. Mike, he said, I think you've just invented the… interweb!

Stupid boy!

Anyway, after being knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for my sterling work inventing what we now know as the “World Wide Web,” I thought I'd better do something practical with it. By now there was a lot of stuff out there and it was getting difficult to find anything. I was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University at the time and hooked up with a couple of kids called Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

This was not a good experience for me. These guys came to my dorm one night and stole a paper I had written called, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” I even had a pet name for it. I called it “Google.” I thought that was quite cool and trendy, what with Google being a play on the word goggle, which means to ogle women. Some time later, I read some bullshit from these guys who stole my idea that it had something to do with "googol," which is the Californian pronunciation for a word which also means to ogle women… er… I think.

I'm in the process of suing these Google jokers for almost 600 bucks to cover the amount of time it took me to write the paper. I'm not stupid… I'll get every penny of it, I bet!

Eventually, I moved away from search, mainly because it doesn't work properly and never will. So, I invented my latest toy, which I call Twitter. I called it Twitter because it's full of twits talking bits of shit to each other. Shitter.com had already gone by then, unfortunately.

Oh! Fancy me forgetting to mention Wikipedia! I actually invented that as a joke and people started taking it seriously. What fun!! People are failing exams because it's full of false crap. Some people have been seriously injured for the rest of their lives for taking some of the medical advice… ROFL

I'm on the verge of leaving the internet space to work on my new invention, which is very much a green thing. Imagine this: Reusable toilet paper! Heh! How cool is that. Some people have called it a flannel. In fact, some have called it a face cloth. Dood, I wouldn't want that near my face knowing where it had been before. Eeeuuwww!

Anyway… these are just some of the excellent things I've done in my extremely interesting life. What other brilliant things do you need to know about me? Being as modest as I am, I may not be able to answer all of your questions of course…

Every word Mike says is true :)

In your paper "New Signals To Search Engines", you frame search in a historical context - where it has been, where it is now, and where it might be going. What are the major changes coming up that will have the most impact on current SEO practices and goals?

Grehan now puts serious head on…

I've talked about how search engine optimization evolved in the first instance. It was driven by the limitations of the technology used by search engines. Basically, the World Wide Web was developed to do one thing – but everyone wants it to do another. So, crawling the web using the HTTP protocol was the obvious route to go for search engines back then.

But if Google is saying they now have seen a trillion URLs and have no certainty that they'll ever be able to crawl them in a timely fashion, maybe we've reached the zenith of the crawl. Not only that, the end user is expecting a much richer experience. So if the main job of SEO was to optimize static web pages and make them available to crawlers, it's all becoming a little passé now.

Have we seen the end of HTML and the crawler? Absolutely not. But the level of requirement for SEO work is going to diminish, rather like that of the blacksmith when motorized transport was introduced. Do we still have blacksmiths today? For sure, but they're not as required as they used to be.

The main changes will be in existing SEO shops either moving into other technical/development work or retraining in other online marketing disciplines. It's a very exciting time in search. Most marketers can see that. But those people from a purely technical background and used to just doing geeky code for a crawler don't see it that way.

You mention that user trails - as provided by the toolbar, tagging etc - will become some of the strongest signals. That's pretty much the death knell of traditional SEO, isn't it?

If we take what I said in the answer to the last question, you can see that traditional SEO as we know it has had to evolve anyway. I don't really think of link building as SEO, to be honest. For me, link building is the by-product of good marketing. Whereas fixing pages for a crawler is purely a technical process.

What needs to be taken into account most importantly is not where SEO goes to next, or whether it survives at all. It's about where search goes to next and how the end user evolves with those changes. Making pages for crawlers and getting links for the sole purpose of getting links omits one thing from the equation: the end user experience.

So, now that search engines can follow end users they can see where they started and where they dropped off. That kind of data is so important. It's the wisdom of crowds. It's the people's vote. So how does a marketer get involved there? It's going to be a little clichéd, but create an experience - not a web page.

Last year, Eric Schmidt CEO of Google, said an interesting thing in an interview. He mentioned - and I'm paraphrasing here - "that the Internet is a "cesspool" where false information thrives, and that "brands are the way to rise above the cesspool". Do you think brands might be an important signal of quality?

I read that interview too.

He was stating the obvious to be honest. People have long bemoaned the fact that smaller businesses don't get the same shelf space in search as the big brands (the same applies offline, of course). Brand building is all about good marketing. It's all about building trust and reputation. But wait for this… It's not just about the big boys. A local store can build up as much trust and reputation within its community as well as a high street chain.

Social networking sites are all about people building up trust and reputation on a personal level. So, I think the notion of brands as we've known them – such as multi-nationals like Exxon – is going away. I think we're moving more into social search and that's all about tapping into a network of trust.

Addressing your question directly: "Do you think brands might be an important signal of quality?" As long as those brands belong to the end user and not large corporations, and that's certainly what's happening, then yes, a great signal of quality.

Social media, for want of a better term, is a "place" where most content is being generated, and increasingly where many people are spending their time. What are your thoughts on, say, Twitter? What are the implications for Google and other big search engines when people rely on real-time wisdom-of-crowds, and communities, for answers?

So we've already touched on this a little when talking about tapping into a network of trust. Absolutely this is a very important move. The results you get at search engines are hardly verified results and they can be manipulated. That means you have what a mathematical formula (the algorithm) believes are the best ranked documents. And then you have a little re-ranking going on when Ralph Tegtmeir gets to them!

However, if you tap into a network of trust, such as a parenting group, and ask them a about a child's allergy, the information is likely to be much more verified. If 500 parents all agree that a certain method works then that's more trustworthy information than a search engine algorithm can provide.

But there's a whole lot more to it than me Tweeting my followers and asking which is the best Irish pub in New York and wanting an answer now!

Can we talk a little about formats. You make the point that HTML may have served us well up to now, but things are changing. The web is becoming media rich. What does this mean for SEO? Do search marketers become multi-media positioners?

I saw a quote from a senior scientist at Google where he said we’re moving "away from a web of content to a web of applications." So it's more about the end user experience and the method of delivery, as opposed to one protocol over another. I don't think HTTP/HTML is going away anytime soon. But it's not going to be the primary method for internet search going forward.

People are already talking about new platforms. One idea is Flash. I like that. Or maybe pure java. Most certainly social search into networks of trust and live search via apps such as Twitter will further develop in the future.

We spend a lot of time on SEOBook connecting-the-dots between areas such as seo, brand and traditional marketing. You've said "connected marketing" is the future of marketing. Can you talk a little about this? This is the point where big worlds collide, isn't it?

Connected marketing is a kind of generic term for the new audience of always-on, 24-hour-a-day networks. I use the iPhone as a primary example of how to connect with your audience in so many different ways. Sure, it could be the HTTP/HTML route as it comes with a browser. But there are also so many apps you can download. You can get to your audience via email, txt, Twitter. You'll be surprised at this… you can even use it as a telephone!

It is about big worlds colliding. It's not just that technology has changed so we market via different channels to the same people. It's more about how the audience has changed. And so we have to change the way we connect with them.

I don't think that conventional methods such as the 30-second spot are going away anytime soon. But we need to examine all areas of this new marketing mix and get our messaging aligned.

If traditional SEO is at a point of diminishing value, what are the things an SEO can do to adapt to this brave new world?

First of all, stop using just SEO. The job we've been doing to help search engines do a job they should have been doing themselves is not as critical as it was. Crawlers are getting smarter and the communication between search engines and SEOs is much more transparent now. Search engines provide many tools to make the process of letting them know that you have good indexable content available.

But as the end user demands a much richer experience, search engines need to know a lot more about other types of content. Not just the textual HTML pages that SEOs labor over.

It is a brave new world of marketing. It's tremendously exciting. But you do have to start and think more about smart marketing and less about smart HTML coding.

There's a plethora of books and information on social media, optimizing video and perhaps, more importantly, analytics which open up this whole new world of marketing. As the value of providing pure SEO services diminishes, the value of new services increases. This is not a bad time for search marketing: It's the best it has ever been!

Many thanks, Mike.

Mike Grehan is Global KDM Officer with Acronym Media, a leading search marketing company based in New York's landmark Empire State Building. Follow Mike on Twitter here.

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I have been a follower of Jonathan Mendez's Optimize and Prophesize for a while, and recently interviewed him.

At SES in New York you are speaking on a panel titled "search becomes the display OS" - what does that mean, why is this shift happening?

The shift is part of the Darwinian evolution of the web. Many people have mistakenly viewed search as a channel when in reality it is a behavior. It is the way people use the web. This is clear as YouTube is now the #2 search engine, Facebook, eBay & Craigslist are in the top 10 search engines and Twitter is trying to position itself as a real-time search. Search is integral to the web experience.

From the display standpoint we need to keep in mind that this medium does not need ads to support it nor are ads part of the experience. Display advertising was built as a parallel platform - not weaved into the web like search but placed on top of it. Display has always had its own ecosystem of real estate, content and serving that is separate from the public web.

What we’ve witnessed with display’s lackluster performance and the inevitable crash of CPM rates is the idea of it being a stand-alone platform was wrong. Display needs to be an application that is integrated with web platform and the way people use the web. It should be based on user controls and rules based delivery of content. To truly be relevant and useful for people, publishers and advertisers, it must become a web service like search.

Search is currently at the center of the web. Do you foresee any technologies or services that might shift its position?

On the contrary I think it will become more entrenched and important since everyday millions of new pieces of content data keep getting added to the web and older content gets digitized. As I mentioned search is basic human behavior. We all go online with a goal in mind to either recover information and content or discover information and content. Those behaviors are primal. No technology or services will shift them.

How do you place value on a search impression?

The value is based on what you do with the information. Impressions are the ultimate arbiter of interest and demand. Of course if you go to Google trends often you will become somewhat worried about the collective psyche of this country. In all seriousness however, this is business intelligence. Quick story about impressions - a few years ago I was working with a big client and they were launching a new product. We had purchased the category kw for this product over a year and it hardly had any impressions. We strongly advised them against spending two million dollars to launch this product because there was no demand for it. They didn’t listen to the “search” guys. Within a year the CMO was fired because the product flopped. So in that instance I would say those couple hundred impressions were worth two million dollars.

One of the most powerful pieces of search is that the ad unit looks just like the content. What can publishers do to maximize ad integration without risking their perceived credibility?

In my experience you add credibility as a publisher if you provide helpful, useful and interesting content. There’s no reason that can’t be an ad. Most everyone I know has clicked on a Google ad. Sometimes it is preferable. This creates value to Google as a publisher. Ads that are helpful and interesting will add value to other publishers in the same manner because they are helping their visitors. People rarely forget who helped them in a useful way whether it be a website or “in real life.” In fact there is a large intangible value that is not even being captured when this happens. I think some people even refer to it as branding.

What can publishers and vendors learn from the dominance of search when thinking about how to build and brand their websites? What are some easy ways to make our user experiences more relevant?

Give people control over the delivery of content. The most successful online segmentation strategy is when a person tells you what they want -- self-segmentation. That is the beauty of search. The keyword is the ultimate expression of people’s goals. No website or advertiser knows more about what I want than I do! It explains why the best and most successful experiences on the web (Google, eBay, Craigslist, Yelp) have query fields and lots of text links and it is something I always keep in mind in doing page design. As far as branding I think that goes back to what we were just talking about, the site experience. Great experiences build brands and that is the same online as well as off. Keep in mind all of this should be tested and optimized. It is no accident that Google is the #1 brand in the world without spending a penny on advertising. From day one no one has tested online experience more than Google.

Many people have been promoting Twitter as a Google-killer in real-time search. Why are they wrong?

You mean besides the fact that Google made $21B in ad revenue last year has $8B in cash, owns half a million servers and Twitter search has probably 10 employees and no revenue?

There are some major problems with RTS. First let’s start with the way people search. This has been studied and very clearly defined over the years by brilliant people like Andrei Broder, Daniel Rose and others. I recently took the query classifications they defined and applied it to RTS (http://www.optimizeandprophesize.com/jonathan_mendezs_blog/2009/02/misguided-notions-a-study-of-the-value-creation-in-realtime-search.html). I came to the conclusion that with optimal RTS - which is a huge challenge as I’ll get to - that less than 20% of all queries would benefit in anyway from RTS.

As far as the technical challenges spamming would be very hard to filter in real-time. Also authority as we know from PageRank is a fundamental driver of relevance. How do you define authority in real time? If you do not rank results than is it just a noisy stream? I’ve come to the conclusion that if it RTS becomes anything useful it will be a search vertical, like travel. Helpful for certain things but nowhere near a primary search tool. It is still a great addition to the web but not something Google needs to be concerned with. In fact I think Google is in the position to provide RTS for the entire web which is much more useful than RTS for a single app.

How slow and painful will the transition of ad dollars from offline to online be? What will be the catalyst that allows ad agencies to push search and online aggressively?

Very slow, but this shouldn’t be painful. We know the attention is online so dollars will continue to increase but I think a $25 billion dollar online industry is pretty good right now. It’s grown much faster the past few years than even the most bullish forecasts from five years ago. The catalyst will be innovation and the businesses themselves that must demand performance. Bill Gross the inventor of PPC said it best, “the true value of the Internet is in its accountability…performance guarantees have to be the model for paying for media.” As soon as we embrace performance for all advertising, even so called brand advertising, we will prove our value and grow our industry. Google stands as proof of concept for this. But the battle over performance will be long and bloody. In just the past couple of weeks we’ve had groups like the IAB and the AAAA speaking out against performance and metrics. This type of rhetoric and their fear of accountability are actually helping to slow down the transition.

How many newspaper companies do you see lasting through this economic downturn?

Not too many. Besides the fact that their authority over the past years has waned with bloggers and false reporting the real problem is that newspapers are not an efficient means of information compared to everything else we have today. What percentage of the paper is relevant or interesting to you? 5%? 15%? Yet you are paying for the entire paper when you buy it. Doesn’t make sense. We used to have town criers too, but then newspapers came along. I don’t think most people will miss them. Times have changed. Maybe we’ve just come full circle – people getting their news from other people they trust is the best way to disseminate information. Who trusts the papers?

What will the online vs offline divide look like in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?

I’m not so sure we’ll have a divide in 5 or 10 years. The kids graduating high school this year were 8 years old when Google was started. I see kids 4 and 5 years old naturally manipulating iPhones. Many of us have persistent web connection and we like it - we feel uncomfortable without it! Of course it’s nice to get off the grid sometimes but what is happening with digital technology is the great story of our age. Everything is becoming digital, addressable and connected via the web. All of us lucky enough to be working here will reap the rewards of that in the coming years because the growth of digital will far outpace the amount of talent in the workforce. We should have bigger paychecks in 5 years!

Many people focus on one particular segment of the market, whereas you seem to have a well-rounded knowledge of SEO, PPC, user experience, and conversion strategies. How did you find the time to tie all these different disciplines together?

Well, I’ve been at it 11 years so that accounts for the time. It is corny but I love the web and I am passionate about trying to make it more relevant to everything we do. Looking back my career path from Site>Email>SEO>UX>SEM>LPO>Display, it seems like a very natural progression to me. Basically, with one stop for UX I have just been a marketer trying to stay ahead of the advances in marketing technology. Also, I love learning how people use the web and all the disciplines I have worked in are fundamentally rooted in the same thing -- understanding people’s goals and optimizing the delivery and presentation of information to meet those goals. As an industry we tend to divide the web into vectors but we often lose sight that the web experience for people is linear. The more holistic understanding we have generally the better our results.

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A few months ago, I hired Conversion Rate Experts to work on my business. I have learned loads from them. So far they have grown our conversion rate by 124%, and have given me great insights into the thought process of consumers hitting this site...reminding me why they buy, and how ineffectively we were conveying the value of all the different components of our offering. 124% is a good start, and we still have a lot of things to improve upon.

Earlier this week, I interviewed them for this blog, so you can benefit from their advice too. The interview contains loads of tips you can implement today to grow your business.

Aaron: What made you guys start Conversion Rate Experts?

Karl: Several years ago, I started working with Ben, who had been working in web marketing for years. I have a Ph.D. in rocket science, and we discussed how we could take a scientific approach to increasing the conversion rate of our employer’s website. Within twelve months, we tripled the website’s profits, to $9.1 million.

At that time, we had just bought SEO Book, and claimed our free 20-minute call with you, Aaron. We asked for your advice, and you recommended we “Give away as much valuable information as possible”. We took your advice, and, a few weeks later, launched Conversion-Rate-Experts.com with a free report called Google Website Optimizer 101, which described some of the techniques we had developed.

The report went viral, getting on the homepages of Digg and Delicious. By the end of the week, we’d been featured on the Alexa.com home page as the third-fastest-growing website, in their “Movers & Shakers” list.

The following day we were contacted, out of the blue, by Google’s Tom Leung, who suggested we partner with them to offer consulting services. We said no at first (what were we thinking?!) but, six months later, we decided to go for it. Since then, we have had some fantastic successes for clients in some highly competitive industries—including weight loss, travel, gaming, technology and health and fitness.

Aaron: Lets say I have no idea who my customer is...but my boss wants me to give a report on the topic at the end of next week. What should I do?

Ben: Speak with your sales people—or customer support people. They understand your customers in much more depth than any web analytics report could give. They know what the customers care about, and what their major objections are. If you have no customer support people, consider temporarily adding a phone number to your website, just to give yourself an opportunity to speak with customers.

To show you the extremes we go to to hear the “voice of the customer”, here are a few of the things we have done to get face to face with real prospects:

• Sold travel products in airports, from a stand that was rented for a few days.
• Sold phones at a market. (We were in a hurry to gather objections for a new product, and the market allowed us to just turn up on the day.)
• Joined a local slimming club. (This was by far the most embarrassing.)
• Attended a local bingo hall.
• Opened up Japan’s first-ever Nokia store.
• Ordered antibodies through the post. (They’re still here on the desk—we don’t know how to get rid of them!)

Other great services include Crazy Egg, Kampyle, ClickTale…and of course, web analytics software. We created a summary of some of the services we use regularly.

Aaron: Testing…personas…consistency in messaging. What is more important for improving conversion rates?

Karl: Consistency in messaging should be a given. If your messaging isn’t consistent, you’ve got a “dog’s dinner” of a website.

Testing, too, should be a prerequisite; without testing, you can’t confidently be sure whether you have improved your conversion rate or not.

You definitely need to understand your visitors’ intentions and mindset. This should be done by real research, not just “ivory towers” guesswork. Many web marketers fall short at this point. They ask us how to increase their conversion rates, and the first question we ask is, “Why are most of your visitors leaving without spending a penny”…and they can’t answer the question! These people would struggle to create just one realistic persona, never mind five of them. Personas can be a useful way of considering different types of visitor, but as long as the personas are based on a real understanding of your visitors—otherwise you’re just sitting in an office, creating soap opera characters.

Aaron: What is the single biggest thing most sites screw up in the conversion process?

Karl: Most web marketers work on the wrong part of their conversion funnel. For example, they might over-obsess on their landing page, but forget that they don’t have a refer-a-friend program.

One of the first things we do is to look at the whole conversion process—from visitor to repeat customer—and look for the opportunities in the chain. We have an immediate advantage because we can see the website with fresh eyes.

Aaron: Did you ever make a mistake during the conversion testing process that surprised you and worked really well?

Ben: We regularly carry out usability tests on our clients’ websites. During one test, the participant mentioned that he’d prefer the page to have a different background colour (the color to the left- and right-hand side of the page). We mentioned it to the client in passing, who then tested it. The client saw a 9% improvement in the site’s conversion rate, worth $400,000 per year. We were amazed that such a subtle change could make such a massive difference to a business.

Aaron: Many of the internet marketers that do email-based marketing are willing to lie to make a sale. It makes sense that get rich quick people are easy to monetize since they want to buy a dream. How does one compete with such a sales strategy in a field where competing businesses overtly lie?

Ben: Prospects are hungry for proof—and they’re surprisingly good at detecting lies. If you can show irrefutable evidence that your offering is best, you have an enormous advantage. SEO Book’s success is largely due to your integrity, and the high quality of your information. You might call it “white hat” conversion! And, as with “white hat” SEO, it’s the easiest way of building a long-term sustainable business.

Aaron: Sales optimization vs exploitation: some people push it too far, whereas most businesses are way under-monetized. Where do you draw the line between improving conversion rates and misleading people? Is misleading people ever profitable in the longrun, or do the people who do that need to keep starting over again and again.

Karl: The best approach is to offer people what they want—and then deliver it. Monetization doesn’t mean exploitation. We regularly ask this question to our clients’ customers: “What would persuade you to use us more often?”

You’d be surprised how many customers ask the company to offer more products or services to them.

Aaron: From my experiences, with Adsense and ad click based business models it seems like it would be easier to monetize people of limited topical knowledge and limited knowledge of the web. And some people who have been around forever feel they already know everything. Yet some models work best monetizing at the higher end. How does a business owner know what types of customers they should target?

Ben: There’s no one right answer. Some companies—such as 37 Signals, with their collaboration tools—target the lower end of the market, and some—such as Accenture—target the high end. It depends on which segments of the market are currently being neglected by vendors, and how you feel you can add the most value.

Aaron: If a person targeted the wrong audience for years, is it easy to later shift to the right target? How does one shift without losing market momentum?

Karl: Here’s a great way to identify your company’s opportunities: Quickly write down two lists:

• List your company’s strengths. These are the things that you company is good at, and that competitors would struggle to compete with you at, because there’s some “barrier to entry”—whether that’s because of a skill you have, or an asset you have. For example, SEO Book has an enormous readership, a reputation for integrity and intelligent commentary, true expertise in SEO, many successful customers, and a large number of respected contacts in the SEO world. Any new competitors would struggle to compete with those things.
• List your company’s opportunities, in terms of what people are willing to spend money on. The best way to get this is by understanding your customers. If you don’t know what they’d like to spend money on, ask them, in person or by survey.

By studying these two lists, you should be able to find opportunities that you are best-positioned to serve. The question to ask is, “How much money could be made from this opportunity, and could my company be the best in the world at providing this service?”

Often, you’ll find that your biggest opportunities are right under your nose.

Often, the answer is to narrow down the opportunity to a very specific focus. For example, rather than aiming to provide SEO services to everyone, maybe SEO Book could specialize in providing linkbait services to small businesses.

It can be scary to narrow down your focus, but it’s often the most lucrative strategy. To get a good understanding of how to focus and positioning can help a business, read the chapter “Positioning and Focus”, pp. 103–127, in the book Selling The Invisible by Harry Beckwith.

By the way, the above exercise isn’t just useful for businesses—it can be really useful for planning your own career.

Aaron: Do you ever use public relations as part of your conversion enhancing strategies?

Ben: Yes, frequently. We have managed to get our clients into magazines such as TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Press mentions can lend loads of credibility to a product or service—and they can’t be used by competitors.

While working on a weight loss website that generates $5 million/year, we noticed that the company had a fantastic press testimonial that wasn’t prominently displayed on their website. By moving this information “above the fold”—and reformatting it—we managed to create an overnight 67% increase in sales.

Aaron: How important is social proof of value to sales?

Ben: Social proof can be extremely persuasive, particularly when other forms of proof are scarce. For those of your readers who don’t know what social proof is, it’s often known as “herd behavior”; when people are unable to determine how to behave, they will tend to imitate the behavior of others. Marketers often use social proof by demonstrating how other people are using their services. Here are a few examples of social proof:

McDonald’s “Over 99 Billion Served”

The Elvis album entitled “One Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong”

Aaron: Many customers who like a product or service do not give feedback about it. How do you encourage them to do so?

Ben: Most companies don’t have this problem: they just don’t ask for feedback, because they’re scared to hear it. When was the last time you went to a restaurant and they genuinely wanted to know what you thought of the meal?

Karl: However, sometimes your best customers are also your busiest customers, so you need to reward them for sparing some time to give feedback. In these cases, you may consider rewarding them for sparing the time.

Aaron: Throughout my blogging history I have seen an amazing correlation between controversy and sales. Do you ever suggest clients make a ruckus to gain exposure and increase their sales?

Karl: We haven’t done so, but mainly because it’s more a traffic technique than a conversion one. The client would need to feel comfortable with “riding the storm of controversy”, which tends to scare a lot of people.

Aaron: What type of traffic converts best?

Karl: Existing customers convert very well, as do visitors from refer-a-friend programs.

Aaron: Is search traffic the best type of traffic to test conversion principles on? What other sources are worth testing aggressively?

Ben: We test on whatever traffic the website is currently getting—but avoiding, where possible, traffic that is transient, such as one-off campaigns.

Aaron: Do you prefer to do straight A/B split testing, or to test changing many variables at once?

Karl: We recommend clients start with A/B split testing, because it’s less complex. Multivariate testing is just carrying out several A/B tests simultaneously.

Aaron: When does it make sense to do incremental changes? When does it make sense to blow things up and start from scratch?

Karl: It’s a case of “baby steps” versus “giant steps”. If you’re confident that your giant step will be a winner, then it’s often worth testing, especially because large improvements can be detected much faster.

Aaron: If someone clones one of your products and makes it free how do you counter that from a marketing standpoint?

Karl: This is a question that many industries, such as the music industry, are currently facing.

It’s important to bear in mind that people pay for SEO Book’s training program because of the following: the community, the mentions in the world’s press, the popular blog, the fact they know and like you. Those things can’t easily be cloned.

Kevin Kelly wrote a great article about this difficult subject. The article is worth reading, but here is a summary of it, as it pertains to SEO Book:

Immediacy: people will pay a premium to have first-access to something. For example, people would pay extra to have early preview copies of new content on SEO Book.

Personalization: people will pay to have something that’s personalized for them (even though the personalization doesn’t need to be extreme). For example, people would pay more just to have someone tell them which parts of SEO Book’s training program they should focus on first.

Interpretation: people will pay to have something explained to them. For example, Google Website Optimizer is free software, but many clients pay to have help in setting it up.

Authenticity: people will pay more just to know that their copy is authentic (up-to-date, legal, free of erroneous information, etc.)

Accessibility: people will pay to have instant access to a hosted service, rather than having to look after and manage it themselves. With SEO Book, people would rather have access to the continually updated membership site rather having to constantly have to keep all the training videos up to date on their own computer.

Embodiment: people will often pay more to have the product in a “real” format. They may prefer to have SEO Book’s courses available in a printable format, so they can read it by their bedside, or they may prefer to attend an Elite Retreat session, so they can see you and your colleagues speak in person.

Patronage: sometimes people want to pay the product creator, because it allows them to connect.

Findability: sometimes, the main service a company makes it to raise the awareness of a product. For example, many people wouldn’t be aware of the SEO Book training program if it weren’t for all the channels (blog referrals, search rankings, affiliates, etc.) that direct visitors towards the seobook.com website.

Aaron: What were your biggest personal business hang-ups, and how did you get over them?

Karl: We tend to be perfectionists, and our blog readers often complain that we don’t publish enough. On the upside, our reports tend to get loads of attention when we publish them. If you would like to learn more about conversion, I’d suggest you view the free reports on our website, and sign up for our free newsletter.

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Thanks for the great interview guys!

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For a number of years I have been meaning to interview Andrew Goodman (and thank him for how his original ebook helped me out back in the stone ages (circa 2003, when I was first getting online).

He recently finished the second edition to his popular Winning Results with Google AdWords book, so I figured now would be a good time to interview him.

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Hi Andrew,
I remember when I bought your ebook way back in 2003. You introduced me to Seth Godin, Rob Frankel, and many other clean parts of Internet marketing vs the sleazy stuff someone could waste years and 10s of thousands of dollars on, while getting nowhere ...so I just wanted to say thanks for that. :)

That's great to hear - you certainly took the ball and ran with it. Godin is a boundless phenomenon. Frankel on the other hand I have rarely given a thought to in all these years!

How would you compare your old ebook with your physical books?

The old ebook was a bit reminiscent of this post I just made on my blog, Traffick: Lietzke vs. the Clones.

Back in the day you could just come out with stuff and try out big ideas, and find an audience. You didn't have to get it all perfect. Time was of the essence. I had no "coaches" save for a few small voices in the wilderness... luckily they were intelligent voices talking about how to go about producing and pricing an ebook, and writers like Godin and Emmanuel Rosen talking about how to promote something like that.

The print book is more systematic and more professional with a prettier cover. And I have learned not to discount the human touch of handing a book (even a signed copy) to someone I meet. The memento aspect of a print book is indeed significant.

Fortunately, my publisher (McGraw-Hill) saw things my way enough to let my ragged, "unprofessional" personality come through... especially in the 2nd edition. I think we still got most of the stats right and the headings and stuff make sense. :)

How many copies of your ebook did you sell?

Tens of thousands, at various price points. The exact number is classified.

What caused you to shift from an ebook model to writing a physical book?

The opportunity. There is a hole in the capabilities of an ebook, even though it makes you more money typically (directly anyway). You can't be introduced as the author of "x ebook" that you self-published, if you want to be taken seriously on the global speaking circuit, just to use an example. It depends on the audience but it's basically fair to say that a print book is a better long term lead generator for a company like mine.

I think you have to be wary of piling on into a crowded category, though. Seems everyone is writing a book right now. You want to be the category leader. I don't have to explain this to you. Most people have heard of your ebook for example. You're not the fifth name that comes to mind when people think "SEO book."

Winning Results with Google AdWords, Second Edition was quite a major update from the prior version that was about 3 years old. What are some of the biggest changes you have seen from AdWords in the last couple years? What might be coming soon from Google?

In many respects, the complexities of Quality Score are a huge challenge -- mainly because they are difficult to understand. But the system was clunkier before with too many hiccups in how principles were being put into practice. So it's actually an improvement in many ways.

The algorithm there is just a fascinating piece of work. Google is not content to stop at CTR's as a factor for ad ranking; nor are they content to stop at landing page and website quality. They are looking at relevancy signals in quite a radical way, in my opinion. New accounts and new campaigns are especially vulnerable to the algo's predictive data, and must be managed meticulously.

In terms of incremental improvement, the Content Network, reporting options, and so on, have continued to improve as Google responds to advertiser concerns. The search-based keyword tool, Google Insights for Search, etc. are all better than ever. And now we wonder what Google intends to achieve, if anything, with Google Ad Planner.

There are numerous small and large policy changes behind the scenes that largely don't make it into the book because the book is pitched to Intermediate (not Advanced or agency level) strategy. Those who do this full time know it pays to be inquisitive and to use negotiating skills and diplomacy to make the most out of the Google relationship.

Campaign supports, such as Google Website Optimizer for landing page testing, are great strides for the industry -- requiring equally significant commitment and expertise to take maximum advantage of them.

In the "coming soon" area, we can talk about sexy stuff like expansion into print, mobile, radio, TV, etc. -- but what's remarkable is that Google has actually stalled in some of those areas - especially print.

Most of the big things that come out of Google are completely separate, new products/software, that don't directly relate to search or monetization. It seems like they'll be attempting to cross a few chasms. Hard to say if they'll get there from a business sense in many of their new categories. Certainly Google Search (PageRank and other innovations that made it great), and Google AdWords were remarkable exercises in soft innovation that taken all together, come across as Big Ideas and Great Leaps Forward. From a financial standpoint, some analysts insist that they remain a one-trick pony.

The argument goes: what if Google's many other soft innovations, Big Ideas, and Great Leaps Forward don't turn into business? It's possible. Luckily they have the resources to wait it out as many pieces of their grand vision are developed. Since the costs are so enormous, you really wonder if they can pay for all of it with advertising revenues. If not, what are the new business models going to look like? How will they make money giving away an operating system, etc.?

What made you become attracted to the AdWords model so early in its existence?

I think it was one of those experiences where you sign up and try it and immediately get it. I'd tried GoTo/Overture, of course. With AdWords, you saw yourself rising up to the top as you tested your ads for CTR. You got to play with matching options. You got much nicer reporting. And the beat kept going on from there.

Just the simple game of watching two ads "race" each other for CTR at first, and then ROI (right in the interface) after the Conversion Tracker was released, was addictive in the extreme. Many of us didn't even know we had a little direct marketer inside us waiting to come out. We were hooked immediately.

Keep in mind that along with Overture, this was the first monetization platform for search that didn't end up killing the audience for the search engine or discrediting the company implementing it! It was a huge step for our industry. When companies like Infoseek pondered the monetization issue they were just plain naive.

What did you do before you got into search?

I was close to finishing a doctorate in Political Science. I was doing research and teaching courses in Political Philosophy, Public Policy, etc. There are a lot of great people in those fields, but they produced too many of us by a factor of 5-10X over the available jobs. I like to say I sacrificed my academic career to watch my wife go on to thrive in hers, but it was also the pull of the dot com bubble and everything it represented (both good and bad). I found myself living online and finding new passions and new friends. Life began moving at a different pace. So on my own, I'd been dabbling with Internet businesses, reading Business 2.0, and all of that stuff, prior to making the move.

When does it make sense to create an ad that gets a high CTR? When does it make sense to disqualify most potential visitors?

Savvy question. The literal interpretation of testing ads would have us look only at ROI or CPA numbers, right? But Google so strongly rewards CTR that we need to keep testing and maybe tip our hat to CTR in the overall mix... especially as the account gets established.

A CTR bias is not a terrible thing - you just need to refine carefully from there, to move towards a variant that has a relatively strong ROI among several high-CTR candidates (what I like to call a "double win"). Sounds impossible, but it isn't. That's one way to approach it, anyway.

5 to 10 years down the road, do you still see Google being the center of the web in the US, Canada, and many European countries?

Yup.

Need a longer answer?

They will face some hurdles globally as regulators won't like some of what they try to do. As long as their cash flow remains as strong as it is now, they're determined to build powerful, fast applications and systems that keep us locked in, that outdo similar offerings from competitors. That's not going to be good for their profitability, but it'll be nice for market share and generalized dominance.

Google has grown more aggressive with adding shortcuts (maps, flight search, real estate search, etc.) directly in the organic search results. Do you see them eventually monetizing these?

They'll turn up the heat on monetizing a proportion of their successful properties. They've definitely started doing this on YouTube - if successful, imagine the revenue growth there. We've only seen just the beginning of what they're likely to attempt in the local and classifieds space.

In the UK Google did a merchant search beta test where they basically put a lead form inside a house AdWords ad. Do you see Google eventually shifting the AdWords product away from a CPC model to more of a CPA model?

I think a lot of that is experimental. Some of their little experiments don't lead much of anywhere. A CPA model would be damaging to Google unless carefully controlled. The CPC or effective CPM methods of payment are juicier.

In September of 2003 Nick Denton wrote "Imagine a web in which Google and Overture text ads are everywhere . Not only beside search results, but next to every article and weblog post. Ubiquity breeds contempt. Text ads, coupled with content targeting, are more effective than graphic ads for many advertisers; but they too, like banners, will suffer reader burnout." Do you see any indication of ad burnout from web users yet?

Jakob Nielsen also wrote about text ad blindness potential, on April 28, 2003, so he beat Nick to the punch. Well, iPods are ubiquitous. Gillette spent billions of dollars on TV ads over the years. Are they held in contempt? On the other hand, eBay still shows up way too much on generic queries, with those lame text ads. I think that does breed contempt and has hurt eBay's brand, much as people auctioning off their toenails has done.

So the answer is definitely that it's highly situational. Users look at this as navigation, not advertising, and as long as there's full disclosure and they aren't annoyed by the ads, I find it hard to believe that clicking on a link to Kayak.com or Hilton Hotels when I'm searching for travel information is going to be associated with "burnout." It's efficient and the ads aren't shouting.

Is the content network a good buy? What sorts of business models and markets do well with it? Which ones perform poorly?

The content network has made huge strides judging by the ROI numbers in our campaigns.

It's tough to generalize about verticals. As long as there are some quality content sites, discussion forums, or even parked domains in the relevant vertical, the links do convert a certain amount of the time, so it's a matter of bidding right.

High ticket, complex services and hard-to-find or high-tech products seem to do better in general, though. If you're selling cashmere sweaters there just aren't enough sites where people are high enough up in the purchase funnel to be swayed by ads for cashmere sweaters. People buy from recommendations in content, but those tend to be direct recommendations or reviews, right?

Some advertisers are using the network for brand reasons, in concert with more of an integrated campaign. In general advertisers need to be trying more banner creative sizes and types - and more publishers should be more open to them. The system began with text ads only and there is a certain inertia in that.

I have been seeing a lot of AdWords ads about "free trials" and "only $1" government stimulus secrets packages with fine print that mentions that the "service" is a subscription that costs $50 a month. Should Google be responsible for cleaning up such ads? Why do they let some such ads run when they spend so much capital policing the organic search results & creating quality scores?

I agree. The website quality side is policed more on the search end of things, so these kinds of come-ons tend to leak over into content, where there is more of a dearth of advertisers for some of the inventory.

On the whole, it's very hard to police unscrupulous come-ons. Many if not most legitimate businesses in some fields are built around lead generation, free trials, free samples, free downloads, etc.

I'm sure it's on Google's to-do list. They're working very hard on policing the search side (mostly algorithmically). The standard will always be more lax on the content side, but it seems like it should be beefed up some.

You wrote an interesting post on Search Engine Land about the potential for business models to be banned. Is there any way of predicting what might lose out next? How can a business stay competitive in PPC in the long run?

Google will tell you it's largely user driven. I would love to know if, beyond panel testing, Google actually maintains a sort of "user advocacy" "ripoff squad" in house these days. The problem is, once you start to go down that path, it's hard to stop. You start making all these value judgments. So anything that is going well past what the law actually says is suspect, especially when it seems to be Google taking issue with direct competitors, such as directories, media companies, etc.

I wish I had an easy answer. But the short answer is, AdWords loves conventional businesses with physical presences, whether they ship physical goods, services, or software, and whether they are B2B or B2C. They are harder on online pure plays, especially those that buy ads to sell ads, and to a significant degree, affiliates.

That's not all that hard to figure out at the end of the day. Google's job in the ad program is to connect customers with businesses, not to connect customers with another couple of clicks through that may or may not result in a satisfactory search experience.

Searchers just respond better to "conventional" businesses - be they brands or reputable small businesses. And people have valid concerns about privacy policies and the identities and legitimacy of the businesses they are dealing with. So of course they are freaked out by appearances, poor disclosure, affiliate codes, and other "weird-looking" stuff. They're being asked to provide their information and credit card numbers, so they have every right to expect some protection against those who operate in the shadows.

Are you seeing small players pushed out of the ad market? Has the downturn shifted the make up of the types of ads Google is showing?

No, small players in niches that fit the above profile (conventional businesses) do very well if they're optimized and know their customers.

Of course the downturn is affecting things in areas you might expect: the ecosystem around finance, real estate, and much more besides. Advertiser behavior is odd, though. Many companies don't seem to have the wherewithal to deal with economic slowdowns through bid adjustments, so the auction may remain hostile to marginal players (bids still prohibitively high to reach the top 4-5 ad positions). Companies seem to overbid their way through an economic cycle, then get cold feet and shut things off completely. That's not how you do it!

So smaller companies actually have nimbler decision-making and don't "budget" in these all-or-nothing ways, as some large bureaucratic companies still have to do.

Yahoo!'s recent change in terms of service were ugly. Do you see them getting bought out by Microsoft? Or what can they do to get back in the search game and stop bleeding market-share?

What are they waiting for? Consolidation here would be healthy. I bled purple for a few years. But as Air Supply once sang (paraphrasing slightly), "I'm All Out of Blood". With both Microsoft and Yahoo we all feel the need for clarity in our industry; a sense of who we are buying from, what the future holds, and so on.

Can you share a surprising PPC secret that you thought you wouldn't share with anyone in a public interview? :)

I'd be happy to. An old AdWords account of mine, mainly aimed at selling my ebook, was slapped with low Quality Scores. It's been dormant for a couple of years. Trying to revive it just to point to the page on the Page Zero site that talks about the nice, happy, white hat print book (that you can buy at Amazon.com for all of $17)... no-go, Landing Page Quality is still deemed Poor. We're working on the problem, but if it's an arbitrary call, what are you going to do?

Some days it does seem that it would pay to turn "black hat" and just work for "Google Cash" instead of clients. After all... if they're willing to slap the "good guys"...

But really, I can't see myself just sitting on a beach half naked year round, snorkeling and windsurfing and making millions of dollars spamming the system. That would be so dull!

Saving the most important topic for last, what makes peanut butter taste SOOO good? When does your line of premium luxury gourmet peanut butters hit the shelves at the local grocery store? :)

I think mainly what makes it taste good is the jam, rye toast, and milk you have it with. Which just goes to show, we always need a little help from our friends. Peanut butter is no exception.

But honestly, organic cashews are where it's at now. You've gotta go where the puck is going, Aaron. :) Thanks & best wishes.

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Thanks Andrew. To learn more about Mr. Goodman you may want to read his blog at Traffick.com, buy his book at Amazon.com, and visit his SEM firm at PageZero.com.

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I have been fond of the depth of Majestic SEO's data and the speed with which you can download millions of backlinks for a website. While not as hyped as similar offerings, Majestic SEO is a cool SEO service worth trying out, and their credit based system allows you to try it out pretty cheaply (unless you are trying to get all the backlinks for a site as big as Wikipedia)...as the credits depend on the number of inbound linking domains.

They give you data on your own domain for free, and share a nice amount of data about third party sites for free. For instance, anyone can look up the most well linked to pages on SEO Book free of charge

What made you decide to create Majestic SEO?

We arrived to it naturally - our main aim with the Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine project is to create a viable competitor to Google. We use volunteers around the world to help us crawl and index the web data. This project was started in late 2004 and about 2 years later it became clear that we need to be as relevant as Google and in order to do that we have to master power of backlinks and anchor text. As time went on many hundreds of terabytes of data were crawled it also became clear that we need to earn money as well in order to sustain our project. It took well over a year to actually achieve the level that we felt confident with to release it publicly in early 2008.

What were the hardest parts about getting it up and running?

The most difficult part was to avoid the temptation to simplify the problem and focus on a small subset of data that is much smaller than that indexed by Google. It was felt that it would be a mistake as you can't really be sure that you have the same view of the web unless you are close to Google's scale.

Once it was decided to follow the hard path a lot of technical scalability problems had to be solved as well, and then deal with the financial aspect of storing insane amount of data using sane amount of hardware.

You use a distributed crawl, much like Grub did. What were some of the key points to get people to want to contribute to the project? How many servers are you running?

The people that joined our project did so because they felt that Google is quickly becoming a monopoly (this was back in 2004) and a viable alternative was necessary. We have over 100 regulars in our project that run distributed crawler and analyser on well over 150 distributed clients: all this allows us to crawl at sustained rate of around 500 Mbits.

Since we recently moved closer to commercial world with Majestic-SEO it was decided that our project participants will benefit from our success by virtue of share ownership - essentially project members are partners. It needs to be stressed here that our members did not join the project for financial reasons.

How often do you crawl? How often do you crawl pages that have not been updated recently?

We crawl every day around 200 mln urls. At the moment our main focus is to grow our database in order to catch up with Google (see analysis here), however we have dedicated some of our capacity to recrawls, in fact in February we should have new version of automatic recrawls of important pages (high ACRanked) released and this will allow to see competitor backlink building activity pretty quickly. Our beta daily updates feature shows new backlinks found in previous day for registered or purchased domains, this gives a chance to see new backlinks before we do full index update (around every 2 months time).

What is AC Rank? How does it compare to Google's PageRank?

ACRank is a very simple measure of how important a web page is based on number of unique domains linking to it. More information can be found here: http://www.majesticseo.com/glossary.php#ACRank

This measure is not as good as PageRank because it does not yet "flow" between pages. We are going to have much improved version of ACRank released soon.

Do you have any new features planned?

Can't stop thinking about them ;)

You allow people to export an amazing amount of data, but mostly in a spreadsheet basis on a per site basis. Have you thought about creating a web based or desktop interface where people can do advanced analysis?

We offer a web based interface to all this data with ability to quickly export it using CSV format.

For example, what if I wanted to know pages (or sites) that were linking to SearchEngineWatch.com AND SearchEngineLand.com but NOT linking to SeoBook.com AND have a minimum AC rank of 3 AND are not using nofollow. Doing something like that would be quite powerful, and given that you have already done the complex crawl I imagine adding a couple more filters on top should be doable. Another such feature that would be cool would be adding an Optilink-link anchor text analysis feature which allows users to break down the anchor text percentages.

We do have powerful options that enable our customers to slice and dice data in many ways, such as excluding backlinks marked as nofollow or only showing such backlinks, this applies to single domain analysis however, but something like what you describe in your example of interdomain linking will be possible soon.

Have customers shared with you creative ways to use Majestic SEO that you have not yet thought of?

We get good customer feedback and often implement customer requested features to make data analysis easier. As for new creative ways our customers prefer to keep them to themselves, but once you look at the data you might see one or two good strategies on how to use it. ;)

How big of an issue is duplicate content while crawling the web? How do you detect and filter duplicate content?

It is a very big issue for search engines (and thus us) as many pages are duplicate or near duplicate of each other, with very small changes that make it hard to detect them. We do not currently detect such pages (we crawl
pretty much everything) though we have a good idea how to do it and will implement it soon. Our reports tend to show data ordered by importance of the backlink, so often it is not an issue though it depends on backlinking profile of a particular site.

A lot of links are rented/bought, and many of these sources get filtered by Google. Does your link graph take into account any such editorial actions? If not, what advice would you give Majestic SEO users when describing desirable links vs undesirable ones?

At the moment our tools report factual information on where backlinks were found, we do not currently flag links as paid or not. This is something that humans are good with and computer algorithms ain't - that's why Google hates such paid links so much. We do have some ideas however on how to detect topically relevant backlinks (paid would usually come from irrelevant sites) - it's coming soon and might actually turn up to be a ground breaking feature!

Microsoft has done research on BrowseRank, which is a system of using usage data to augment or replace link data. Do you feel such a system is viable? If search engines incorporate usage data will links still be the backbone of relevancy algorithms?

BrowseRank is a very interesting concept, though we are yet to see practical implementation on large scale web engine. I don't think such system obsoletes link data at all, in fact it is based on link data just like PageRank only it allows to detect the most relevant outgoing links on a page, essentially such votes should be given more weight in PageRank-like analysis. For example imagine that this very interview page is analysed using BrowseRank and it finds that the following cleverly crafted link to Majestic-SEO homepage is clicked a lot, then such link could be judged as the real vote that this page gives out!

This approach would help identify more important parts of on page content as well so that keyword matches within this content block could get higher score in ranking algorithms. So I actually think there is a lot of mileage in BrowseRank concept, but it would be a mistake to think that it will completely replace need for link data analysis. I am pretty sure Google uses something like this already - Google Toolbar stats would give them all they need to know.

The great irony in my view is that Microsoft lacks good web graph data to apply their browsing concept, this is probably why they are so desperate to buy Yahoo search operations who are much better than it comes to backlinks analysis, though Google are the real masters. Majestic-SEO is trying to slot itself just behind Google and who knows what happens after it ;)

I look up a competing site and see that a competitor has 150,000 more links than I do and feel that it would take years to catch up. Would you suggest I look into other keywords & markets, or what tricks and ideas do you have for how to compete using fewer links, or what strategies do you find effective for building bulk links?

First of all: don't panic! :)

Secondly use the SEO Toolbar that will query our Majestic-SEO database to show number of referring domains - it may well be very few.

Thirdly consider investing into detailed stats we have on this domain: this will tell you anchor text used, actual backlinks that you can analyse by their importance (we measure it using ACRank). Once you see real data a lot of things can become clear: for example you can see that your competitor has got lots of backlinks pointing just to homepage or spread around the site. Seeing actual anchor text is really an eye opener - it can show which keywords site was optimised for, this will allow you to make a good decision whether you can catch up or not. Chances are you may find that your competitor is weak for some keywords, this is where keywords research tool like Wordtracker is invaluable.

And finally consider that a few good relevant backlinks are likely to be worth more than many irrelevant ones: it is those backlinks that you want to get and knowing where your competitor got them should help you create a well targeted strategy.

You allow people to download a free link report for their site. How does this report compare to other link sources (Yahoo! Site Explorer, Alexa links, Google link:, and links in Google Webmaster Central)?

We give free access to verified websites, this is a great way to try our system and you might see the backlinks that you won't find elsewhere because our index is so large and we show you all backlinks (rather than top 1000) that we've got: this will include backlinks from "bad neighbourhoods" (this is not yet automatically marked by our system, but visual human analysis wins the day here) that you may not be shown in other sources.

We believe that our free access reports are the best in class, since it's free why not find out for yourself?

For analyzing third party sites you have a credit based system. How much does it cost to analyze an average site?

The price depends on how large (in terms of external referring domains) a particular website is. We have some sites that have hundreds of millions of backlinks, average would be very different depending on what you really after, the best option is just to run searches for domains that you interested in on our website, this will give you very interesting free information as well as price for full data access.

For a domain like Wikipedia I might only want the links to a specific page. Are you thinking about offering page level reports?

Yep I am thinking of it - I actually had requests like this, funnily Wikipedia being the main object of interest.

What is the maximum number of links can we download in 1 report?

Our web reporting system tries to focus on most valuable backlinks to avoid information overload, however we allow complete dataset download that will include all backlinks - some of our clients have retrieved data on domains with well over 100 mln backlinks! Using our powerful analysis options you can focus on backlinks for particular urls coming from particular pages and retrieve all qualifying data.

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Thanks Alex. For more information on Majestic SEO please visit their site and look up your domain.

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With online ad networks slowing in growth and some collapsing I thought it would be a great time to interview the team from YieldBuild, an ad optimization service, to see where they saw online ads and ad networks heading.

What online ad markets are dominated by companies other than Google?

With its acquisition of Doubleclick, Google definitely does dominate both the largest publishers and the long tail of smaller content sites, but the fact it's the dominant player doesn't necessarily mean that it's exerted a monopolistic presence. At the high end, Doubleclick competes with (Microsoft's) Atlas, Yahoo, and (AOL's) Platform-A, while the long tail is served by a wide range of smaller ad networks, like Chitika, AOL's Quigo, Tribal Fusion, and Blue Lithium, in addition to the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft, which recently released its contextual ad network, Pubcenter. And when you go beyond traditional online media, the market's still open for mobile, games, and video. And, of course, lead generation (CPA) is a fragmented market that's certainly not dominated by Google.

Steve Ballmer mentioned how advertisers + search volume build off each other to create a higher yield. Do you see online advertising becoming a natural monopoly market?

I don't, because although economies of scale have an important part to play in establishing the pecking order among firms, there are other ways in which an ad network can successfully compete.

Google certainly benefited from being an early, aggressive mover in the space, and it is clearly the dominant player, but there is still substantial opportunity that is being capitalized on by other networks. Smaller ad networks fighting Google with a more generalized approach can still offer lower pricing, because heavy bidding with Google and limited high-quality inventory means that Google can't necessarily always provide the best value proposition to advertisers, so they offload to other networks. But there will always be other ad networks that either nail a specific vertical market well enough to be an attractive option for both niche advertisers and publishers, and smaller ad networks will also continue to innovate, creating engagement and pricing (payment) models that work better for some advertisers and publishers.

Google as a network can't do all these things - the market is just too big and too complex. But there is a way for Google to be the dominating player in the market by owning the marketplace, by opening up its platform to other advertisers, as it has done. Google doesn't derive any direct benefit by doing so, but one predominant ad delivery platform creates the liquidity in the market that makes Google's economies of scale matter.

What are some of the more innovative things smaller ad networks have done to gain ground on Google?

As I said before, Google draws tremendous strength on the economies of scale it's developed. But there are a large number of firms that can do some things better - either creative, targeting, deeper integration with advertisers - that can give it a leg up on Big G, enough to carve itself a profitable niche (at least that's been the case until now). Some have taken on the creative capabilities of traditional ad agencies, merged that with innovative, unique technology, and created online advertising formats that deliver better response/engagement. But targeting - being able to deliver a specific audience segment that advertisers want to reach - is something that smaller, vertical ad networks have been able to do better than Google or any of the larger, more general networks.

Do you see any ad networks playing the opposite role of Google? Google started a search engine to have an ad platform...do you think an ad network will ever build a search service around itself?

It's conceivable. I can see ad networks wanting to own properties that contribute valuable inventory. Search is an attractive piece of online ad revenues, but the competitive nature of search and the massive R&D budgets getting put into it make it unlikely that an ad network would be able to organically expand to include a consumer search service. It's much more likely that an ad network would build a search service through a partnership with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, but it's a tremendous challenge to change people's search habits when Google does the job so well (although Ask, Yahoo, Cuil and others have certainly tried!). The closest I've seen is the one developed by Snap; their in-text links to pop-up windows include a small "Search the Web using Snap.com" below the related content.

As Google builds more verticals (local search/maps, checkout, Google Product Search, book search, searchwiki, etc.) and adds features to their ad program (checkout logos, product links) do you see an eventual advertiser backlash happening against them?

Yes, although this is just a natural progression from partner to competitor as Google expands its feature catalog. I can give you one example from our own experience. HubPages, a site that we started in 2006, began as a partner with Google, offering users of the site AdSense revenue for publishing unique content on our site (we were the first site that used the AdSense API to manage this). HubPages has become hugely successful, and is a terrific revenue maker. Two years later, Google launches Knol, which is similar in many ways to HubPages. Naturally, it remains to be seen if Knol will ever become as successful as HubPages, but it's not surprising to us that Google would see how lucrative the business is and try to enter the market.

How many ad networks are typically in strong rotation on each YieldBuild client site?

It is hard to say, because there is no typical. We have a lot of publishers who just use YieldBuild to optimize their AdSense. Others already have a relationship with a display network like Advertising.com or Tribal Fusion, and they'll add that to the networks we optimize for them. We do typically recommend that publishers optimize one ad network for each two impressions a visitor is served from an ad network every day; this can be the case if a site gets lot of repeat traffic.

How often do you guys rotate through services to test them? Do you use earnings data cross sites to help improve yield?

The entire process is done through an algorithmic approach that uses performance data from the ads tested to determine the networks, formats, and layouts that generate the maximum revenue. YieldBuild is constantly testing, looking at changes, and adapting its algorithm to produce better results for our publishers.

We don't have any practical use across sites that can help any one site in particular, but we do monitor trends and can come up with more generalized trends like those here:
http://blog.yieldbuild.com/2008/11/03/online-ad-price-trends/

Some ad networks build added services in them to personalize the advertising experience. Do you see such personalization algorithms boosting yield?

I don't know of any data confirming it generally, but I can easily imagine that services which tailor each ad's creative or message to the visitor would boost yield. It's certainly been the case that our testing on HubPages with personalized/targeted campaigns generally do well, although the results are uneven.

What do you guys typically see performing better: text ads or image ads?

It completely depends on the site, page, and, most specifically, zone on the page. Sometimes a display/image ad on a page will do well, sometimes a text ad will, and often both will work well in rotation with each other. There is no way to know for sure unless you test; each site monetizes differently. It's certainly true that high CPM display ads are the holy grail, but there aren't enough of them (especially these days) to go around, so the goal should be to optimize your inventory with the best-performing ads, text and/or image, that are available.

How has the ad slowdown affected the network rotation ratios? Were smaller networks hit more than bigger ad networks?

I think it's too early to tell, but from our purview, rates are down across all networks. This is a pretty rough time regardless, though, since Q1 is weak generally. As the year wears on, I do think the biggest difference will be display vs text, mostly because text's generally CPC pricing model fits tighter marketing budgets better than display's CPM model, but we don't have the data yet to tell.

What baseline optimization ideas should a publisher implement before going to a third party for ad optimization help?

There are a lot of things that a publisher can do; some are simply applying best practices (like blending ads with the background, or embedding them in content), some involve a bit more work (testing). I've written a number of posts on our blog about how to optimize ads for blogs, forums and other sites. Naturally, a one-size-fits-all approach won't work best for everyone--you have to do more involved testing or use a service like YieldBuild--but it is better than blindly putting in ads in a haphazard manner and hoping for the best.

When does it make sense for a publisher to go with a third party ad optimization platform? Is the leading issue revenue, impressions, time, etc.?

I would say that unless optimization is a fun hobby for you and you enjoy it, or unless you're making little/no money and don't care about the revenue, then it's worth it to use a third-party optimization platform like ours. We haven't surveyed our users yet, but I'd guess the leading reason is to maximize revenue, while avoiding the hassle of tweaking ads all the time coming in second-place. Just finding the best ad sizes, positions and optimal number of ads to display for each page is very daunting to do manually, given its on-going nature and complexity of permutations. Beyond maximizing revenue and saving themselves time and trouble, platforms like YieldBuild also offer ad network management and deep analytics (comprehensive, consolidated reporting) which help publishers get insight into what inventory and traffic is earning them money.

Some ad networks (like Federated Media) often get quotes or other input from publishers and use it to help build the ad campaign. Can publishers work with those types of networks and YieldBuild at the same time?

YieldBuild doesn't do any campaign management; we're not a classic ad network. Rather, we support a number of ad networks that our publishers typically already have a relationship with. Federated Media is a bit of a different animal in that it works on an exclusivity basis; i.e. you have to agree to allow them to manage all of your site's ads, so I'm not surprised that they allow the publisher some input in shaping the campaign.

Blend vs contrast: which usually works best? When should a publisher consider using each.

The rule of thumb is to blend, especially above the fold and with white/light backgrounds. Below the fold, and with dark backgrounds, sometimes a color very close to the background works better, and sometimes a highly-contrasting, even bright, color works well. But often there's substantial benefit to nailing the exact right color, as in this example:
http://blog.yieldbuild.com/2008/03/24/myth-all-ad-units-on-a-page-should...

Google AdSense offers a heat map for ad placements. Do you think it is fairly accurate? What ad placements have you found that worked surprisingly well?

I would say it's a pretty good rule-of-thumb. It underscores that placement does matter, especially placing ads above the fold and juxtaposed/embedded in content. I hate to keep dropping links to our blog, but there is an example here that's interesting, because even at the handful-of-pixel level, the precise positioning of ads matters:
http://blog.yieldbuild.com/2008/02/06/exact-position-of-ads-matters/

Do you feel that banner blindness will eventually carry over to other ad "units" to where advertising eventually has to leave the standard format size?

The IAB standard sizes have enormous value to the online ad industry because they help advertisers buy media at scale; too many custom ads just create too much friction for both advertisers and publishers, and relying on them would make the whole industry suffer. That said, although ad size is only one dimension that a viewer can become "blind" to (position, color, style, format all also matter, too), there will probably always be a market for custom ad solutions--there's an opportunity for combo packages that include a non-standard, custom ad product along with a lot of standard ads that publishers can slot in easily.

Excessive advertising on content can cut away at usability and site growth. What is the optimal number of ads/ad units that a publisher should display on a page? What are some ways people can include more ad units in their pages without making the pages look too ad heavy?

There was a study done on this recently that I blogged on, and if you're not using something like YieldBuild that makes that determination for you (YieldBuild will often serve less than the maximum number of ads per page, because this actually does improve page revenue), then I would probably do some sort of testing. Of course, it depends not only the number of ads, but their size, intrusiveness, how long your page is, etc. But you could always start conservatively, then slowly add more ad units and carefully monitor bounce rates. When bounce rates climb to an unacceptable level (minus ad clicks, naturally), then you could pare back the number of ads. This is assuming you don't have a way of A/B testing, which, of course, would probably offer better results.

Have you guys discovered great strategies for monetizing social media?

There is no one standard approach that works beautifully. Social media sites tend to monetize poorly, at least relative to their traffic - worse than original content sites. (This is something that even heavyweights like Facebook and YouTube are struggling with.) That doesn't mean that there aren't ways to improve what you are earning. Finding the right combination of ad networks, formats and layouts for your specific site can boost revenue. We have a large number of social media sites - some small, some very large - that are seeing impressive gains to their earnings by optimizing.

Who is the ideal client for YieldBuild? What types of publishers (site size, vertical, content type, etc.) can expect to see the biggest lift from working with you?

We actually work really well for just about every publisher. Naturally, larger sites will get through the training period faster, so they'll see improvement to their revenue more quickly. We've worked well for a lot of different types of verticals and content types: we optimize content sites, social networks, forums, blogs, and have seen success in all types. Occasionally we don't work well for a site, but we haven't determined any sort of pattern.

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Thanks Jason. If you want to learn more about YieldBuild check out the below video or visit their site.

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After seeing the rapid rise of Tip'd, I figured it would be a good idea to interview Muhammad Saleem, a social media addict who knows social media both from site manager and site participant perspectives. You can follow him on Twitter.

How did you get into social media?

I got into social media by reading James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds. I think it's one of the best books written so far on the topic. The lessons from that book and Gladwell's The Tipping Point are essential for anyone who truly wants to understand social, collaborative media, and viral marketing.

Some friends I know who have been actively involved in social media got burned out quickly. How do you keep it interesting after years of experience?

I think its important to love the fundamentals of social media, be interested in the relationships and conversations, and the theory behind it. If you're genuinely interested then you won't get bored, in fact, I read 2-3 books a month on the topic and each one makes me appreciate it even more (I'm currently reading Groundswell).

On larger sites is social media largely a game of reciprocal voting, or is there something deeper to it?

I think a lot of people misunderstand what reciprocal voting really is. Consider this, people that are friends usually have similar interests and preferences (hence they bond and are friends), and when you have similar interests and preferences, of course there is going to be a large degree of voting for each others content. Keeping that in mind, I really don't see this as you rub my back and I'll rub yours, it's more like we share the same interests, we are friends, and naturally vote on each others submissions.

When there are thousands of people hunting for stories how do you manage to find new ones that have not yet been discussed? Do publishers give you exclusives?

There are definitely people who message me and say 'Hey, do you think this story would do well on Digg (or StumbleUpon, or...), and since they are friends or acquaintances, if the content is good, I see no reason why it shouldn't get exposure. Apart from that, I really don't have to 'hunt' for content much. I usually find most of my submissions when I'm just browsing my favorite websites and other social news sites.

From talking to friends it seems there is a lot of payola in social media. What percent of the top 100 and top 1000 contributors to sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller, and StumbleUpon engage in payola?

There is quite a bit of payola that goes on but fortunately that's all short-term because the sites and users get banned pretty quickly. I routinely get some pretty spammy emails about payola and without exception I forward them to abuse@digg.com and let them deal with it.

How heavy is the user overlap amongst the big social media sites?

The user overlap is pretty heavy in terms of registrations but it's not that heavy in terms of activity. For example, most of the top users on Digg are also on StumbleUpon and Reddit, but Digg is their primary social news activity, and they participate much less on the others. The same is the case for many top Stumblers and Reddit users, they will be on multiple sites but use them much less than their primary community.

How does a person decide if social media should be a core part of their marketing strategy?

It all depends on what your conversion goals are and what vertical you're in. For example, if you're trying to get affiliate sales, make money from advertisement, get newsletter (or other) subscriptions, and so on, social news is probably the worst place you could go because most of those users have adblock plus installed and have a severe case of banner blindness. You should consider the following: your demographic, their social technographics profile, their interests and preferences, and your conversion goals before deciding if social media should be part of your online marketing strategy. Even then, most people default to Digg - social news is just one aspect, don't forget social networking, online video, online communities and forums, and so on.

What sort of marketing tips would you give to a person who said that their site simply did not fit existing social media sites?

People focus too much on social media sites and often have too narrow a definition of the term (i.e. social news - Digg). First of all, I doubt that 'social media' wont work for any niche, there is always rudimentary stuff like sharing content on microblogging or aggregator sites (Twitter and FriendFeed) or social networks (Facebook). And if that doesn't work, go back to the basics and participate in your blogging community, which is something you should be doing anyway. Work with other bloggers in your niche to increase both your audience and give them exposure.

When Tip'd launched you got a lot of coverage from bloggers. What was key to making that happen? Were you surprised with that level of coverage?

We didn't hire a PR firm or write up an official press release. Instead we reached out to people who we had relationships with and asked them if they could do a write-up, and only approached sites whose audience would enjoy the coverage. Actually I was personally a bit disappointed with the coverage. It seems I gave too much credit to some 'pundits' and 'gurus' who ultimately didn't have the foresight to appreciate why Tip'd is an important development in the social space.

What were some of the biggest keys to getting Tip'd up and growing?

There are several important considerations. The site has to function properly and has to be simple enough so that Joe non-techie can use it but also robust enough that more tech-savvy users can enjoy it. It has to score high on design, usability, and branding. You need to have a good pitch to draw people in. And finally you need to build relationships with publishers in the space. We were able to avoid the 'chicken and egg problem' of "no one wants to participate if there is no existing community, but you can't build a community if no one participates" by building and leveraging relationships with key players in the personal finance and financial news blogosphere.

What is the biggest mistake you feel you guys have made with Tip'd so far?

I don't think we've made any missteps so far. If the is limited in anyway, it's because we have decided to build, market, and grow it entirely ourselves and without taking funding from anyone. Think about this, it is a bootstrapped operation that started with $25,000 in funding, took 3 weeks to launch, and didn't push for any pr. Even with all that, our growth rate and the feedback is largely positive. Just yesterday a marketer messaged me and said "even with 24 votes, a front page story on Tip'd sent me 100 visitors, while with 75 votes on Mixx, they only send about 25 visitors." If a site with $25,000 in funding is already driving a larger audience than one with $3.5 million in funding and relationships with mainstream media, I think we've come a long way in three months.

Many niche social news sites have come to market. How many of these do you think will be successful and still around 5 years from now? What will separate those that succeed from those that fail?

I don't think even 25% of them will succeed. The problem, I believe, is that they are all self-centered and don't have a forward thinking vision. What will separate the successes from the failures is a focus on the site's own community, but also relationships with publishers. Community participation is one aspect of growth on social news sites, but people really underestimate how big a role online publishers and marketers play.

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I met Greg Jarboe at my very first SEO conference about 5 years ago and have chatted with him many times over the years. Recently we conducted an interview via email.

You are speaking at Chicago SES next month on a variety of topics from the first timers guide to SES and SEM, to an introduction to SEM, to SEO for video content. What are your favorite topics to talk about?

I'm also speaking about turning PR efforts into SEO results as well as teaching the optimizing for universal search workshop with Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. So, I plan to get a pair of roller skates in order to make it to all five sessions in time. It's sort of funny how all this landed on my to-do list, but I think that it's a an example of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. A couple of years back, SEO-PR pioneered press release optimization. It was a niche -- and it got our foot in the door. Then, we branched out -- and started optimizing video for YouTube. At that point, Amanda and I starting teaching workshops entitled "Getting found in all the right places," which covered getting found in Google News, YouTube, and other vertical search engines. Then, on May 16, 2007, Google introduced universal search -- incorporating information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results. So, all of those niches that we had focused on in the early days had suddenly gone mainstream. This also fundamentally changed how you can best optimize content to gain "natural" or "organic" traffic -- because we no longer live in an era of 10 blue links. So, which one of these topics is my favorite? It's video search engine optimization. In fact, I'm writing a book for Sybex entitled: YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day. It's part of the series that includes Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik. So, I'm pretty focused on video right now.

How has video changed the SEO game? Do you recommend submitting to YouTube and other third party sites, or hosting video content on your own sites?

Hosting video content on your own site was the right thing to do in 2005, when Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Singingfish and other video search engines were the leaders in online video. But, in 2006, YouTube came out of left field -- and totally changed the game. That's why Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, a video sharing site. It had beat all the video search engines hands down. According to Hitwise, YouTube accounted for 76% of all U.S. visits to online video websites in October 2008. Google Video had less than 4%. Yahoo! Video changed its focus to Yahoo-hosted video only in February of this year. And Singingfish has ceased to exist as a separate service. So, if you host video content on your own site, you're optimizing it for less than 4% of all U.S. visits. A much smarter strategy is to submit your video to YouTube, which gets about 20 times more visits, and then embed your YouTube videos in your website or blog.

Of the Search Engine Strategy conferences in the US, Chicago has traditionally been one of the smaller conferences. For a person new to SEO how can the smaller size benefit them?

SES Chicago will attract about 2,000 attendees, which SES San Jose got more than 6,000. So, yes, it is a smaller conference. But, it's the only SEM conference in the Midwest, so most of the people you see at SES Chicago aren't ones that you'll already seen at other conferences. In fact, 87% of attendees at last year's SES Chicago were new to SES, just 13% were alumni. And 85% of the SES Chicago attendees approve or recommend purchasing decisions. So, the quality of the audience is very high. I find that means the Q&A sessions are not only lively -- they are lively at all of the SES events -- but people come away feeling that they got "their questions" answered.

When I first got started with SEO, I remember sitting at a table with your partner Jamie and you, as you guys discussed some of your tips. Since then you have become more and more well known in the search marketing space. What were some of your keys to that growth in exposure and awareness?

It takes time for new ideas to catch on. So, part of this is just persistence. But the other part is the willingness of many of our clients to share their case studies with the rest of the industry. When we started in early 2003, press release optimization was an interesting concept. Then, we were able to show that optimized press releases had generated $200 million in qualified leads for Symmetricom’s chip-scale atomic clocks, more than $2.5 million in ticket sales for Southwest Airlines, and almost 1.3 million searches for “florists” on SuperPages.com. Later, we were also able to explain how combining blog outreach with press release optimization generated a record 450,000 unique visitors to The Christian Science Monitor, more than 85,000 entries into Parents magazine’s cover kid photo contest, and a record 1,100 attendees to the Wharton Economic Summit. So, if there is a tip, I say focus on measuring business outcomes instead of traditional PR outputs, like the number of clippings. Money talks. The other stuff walks.

With universal search and authority based search relevancy algorithms it seems Google keeps placing more and more weight on public relations. Are you surprised at how far this has come over the past few years? How far do you see these fields merging?

Actually, David Dalka posted an item to his blog about a year-and-a-half ago that said, "One can’t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn’t have designed it (better) to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues." But, I didn't go to Google and I didn't design Universal Search. Nevertheless, it does play to our strength in public relations. We were among the first to recognize the getting links from blogs with a lot of authority wasn't a technical skill. It required public relations skills.

When should a new site consider using public relations as an SEO strategy? What are the keys to effectively using public relations as an SEO strategy?

Before it is launched. As it is being launched. And after it is launched. As for the keys, here is what the Google Webmaster Help Center says, "It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest."

When should people consider outsourcing PR, and how much of it should be driven by internal resources?

We've trained PR departments as well as PR agencies. So, it isn't that important whether this is outsources or handled internally. It is important to start -- and then to continue updating your skills -- because learning SEO isn't like learning the multiplication tables. The search engines are constantly changing -- and Universal Search is just an example of one of the bigger changes we've since in the past five years. So, learn how to optimize press releases, then learn how to optimize blogs and RSS feeds, then learn how to optimize video for YouTube, then keep learning.

While in Chicago what dish should everyone make sure they eat?

If you don't eat some Chicago-style deep dish pizza, then you haven't been to Chicago. You were just visiting some big city in the Midwest.

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Thanks Greg.

Check out SEO-PR to learn more about Greg and the intersection of public relations and search.

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When was Quintura launched? What gave you the idea to launch it? What problems were you trying to solve by launching it?

Quintura was founded in August 2005 and released its first search application in November of that year. One year later, we launched a web-based search. It was based on visual context-based search concepts that the founders had been developing since 1990s. Quintura was founded to solve several fundamental problems inherent with today's search engines. Those problems include too many irrelevant search results returned, no one reads past the first page of results; inability to manage or tune results by defining context or adding search scope; no means for users to graphically visualize search terms or manage their relationship/relevance. Quintura is designed to make it visually simple for searchers to find what they are looking for, and to make it easy for web publishers to expose the content their visitors are looking for.

You guys have got a lot of great press from tech bloggers. On the marketing front what are some of the biggest and most successful surprises you have encountered? What have you found to be hardest when marketing your search service?

The simple fact that there is a tremendous amount of interest in our technology and service, in spite of the large field of alternative search engines on the market. We've invested most of our time and efforts in research and development. Our biggest challenge has been in getting our first marketing message out, which is we're in the process of expanding now to mainstream media.

How do you guys generate the keyword clouds?

That's part of the magic behind the Quintura technology. At the heart of our technology is a semantic-based 'neural network' algorithm. The cloud is literally a depiction of those search terms laid out to show their contextual relationship. Since the graphic depiction is dynamic - (you are interacting with the search in real time) one of our design goals has been to develop the widget to be extremely responsive. Through the past year, we think we've reached that point.

Quintura is popular as a keyword research tool amongst many SEOs (I use it all the time). Have you thought about combining your service with search volume data and/or competitive research data to create a formal premium keyword research (or competitive research) service/tool?

We've been asked that several times, but for now, our goals are to provide the best consumer site search services to the market and to provide our search widget to as broad an end-user audience as possible.

Quintura makes boolean search easy to visualize. Do you think searchers will eventually start using advanced search operators more on general web search engines, or will most only use it when it is presented in an aesthetically friendly way like Quintura does?

The question is whether users want to become adept at boolean logic or would they prefer to have that hidden in the background. From our experience, users would prefer to focus not on the math but on the search itself - finding the most relevant results in the least amount of time. By laying out search terms contextually and graphically, Quintura helps users manage their search and be in control of their search.

When partners sign up for Quintura you guys create a custom index from a crawl of their sites. How many domains can be part of the same index? What sort of sites does Quintura's visual search work great on? Which ones are not as strong of a match?

There is no limit. We're glad to work with large web publishers directly to assure that we are indexing all important content as part of our site search solution. The publisher of several web-sites can create a “vertical” search engine based on the Quintura search cloud. Quintura works well with all web-sites that we have worked with to date including numerous amount of blogs. Though, our first major site search clients were lifestyle portals and lifestyle magazine web-sites.

Do you see the face/interface of general web search changing drastically in the coming years? How might it change?

The web is getting more visual. So is search interface. That’s the trend. We are enabling our content-publisher customers to be more creative through customization of the widget itself. We're also looking at ways to make the search results even easier to see through the use of even more graphics.

Does Google have general search locked up? What competitive positions might allow people to build out a strong competitor that can take marketshare from Google?

General search is mostly locked up with Google. In my opinion, the best way of taking a marketshare from Google is not by building a better search destination site, but by changing the paradigm – give reasons for users not to make a decision to go to a search engine. Because when the think search engine, they think Google. Essentially, what Quintura site search does is creating environments where users keep exploring the passions, their interests, their information needs from where they are on the Web. People go to search engines when they can’t find what they want where they are.

Chitika has created a fairly large sized behaviorally targeted ad network by targeting ads to the search query prior to people landing on a page. Your site search strategy seems like it could be a rather powerful strategy for building a strong network. How has growth been going? Do you have any interesting success stories from the publisher or advertiser standpoints?

Quintura currently powers site search for a monthly audience of 8 million site users. The tests are underway on various U.S. sites, including two major men’s lifestyle sites and an educational publisher. We plan to reach the audience of 50 million in 2009. You can see Quintura search widget on lifestyle sites Maxim.com, Passion.ru and Cosmo.ru; technology news sites ReadWriteWeb.com and Compulenta.ru, business community portal E-xecutive.ru; web-sites of consumer magazines Hilary Magazine, Russian Newsweek, ComputerBild, luxury news site LeLuxe.ru, in addition to hundreds of smaller web-sites and blogs that joined our affiliate program for site search. We have also approached several online advertisers including security software vendor Kaspersky Lab to advertise on our search widget network of sites.

What types of ads work especially well with a service like Quintura? Which ones are less strong?

We have tested both contextual search ads and display ads. We are going to blend search ads with display ads for more visual appeal. Plus, can target those contextual graphic search ads with much greater precision because of our context-based algorithm. Ads from companies with established brand logos benefit from our ability to graphically display their logos in the search cloud.

What areas does Quintura have a lot of inventory in?

It is in lifestyle and technology areas.

Many search engines (Google, Yahoo! Search, Live), large content & commerce sites (Amazon.com, eBay, Wikipedia), and browsers (IE8 Beta 2, Google Chrome, Firefox 3) are now adding search suggestions in the browser via the search box and/or address bar. Do you see this eventually evolving into a Quintura-like service?

It’s a helpful feature that is mostly based on search statistics. We go a step further by offering contextual suggestions. One of the greatest aspects of our display cloud is that it shows contextually-related results, and to depict them with a graphical element. Can you imagine a shoppng experience that lets you see related items in real time?

Quintura is currently powered from the Yahoo! index. Do you guys ever plan on creating your own web-wide search index?

As a matter of fact, we are already creating our own web index from individual indexes of web-sites where Quintura powers site search. Quintura site search on those web-sites is powered by search results from Quintura index of those sites.

How many regular users does Quintura.com have as a search destination? Do you guys intend to become a consumer search destination, or are you more focused on providing search for third party sites?

We focus on providing site search, analytics and monetization platform for web publishers and content owners. As a search destination, Quintura has less than 1 million users per month. We will continue operating and developing our search sites to provide the benefits of our search technology to users. For example, Quintura.com will evolve into an online research tool where registered users will be able to save and share their searches online with the other registered members.

You guys have a vertical search service for kids. Is that seeing good adoption? Do you plan on coming out with any other vertical search engines?

Children are far more graphically oriented and can grasp contextual depictions easily. It was a natural extension for us to offer a search engine designed specifically for children - Quintura for Kids. It's also a great test bed for us to further evolve search technologies while giving kids a hand. The search engine is used mostly in the elementary schools and public libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Since its first launch in March 2007, several hundred school and teacher web-sites linked to Quintura for Kids. According to site statistics, the search engine has 70 percent returning visitors. 75 percent of visitors come to the site directly from a browser. In June 2007, Quintura for Kidswas ranked the highest among search engines for kids by Search Engine Watch.

We evaluate additional opportunities including licensing our technology to intranets and major search engines.

For now, our hands are full with upcoming site search product enhancements and monetization as well as  with our growing site search customer base.

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I have been going to SEO conferences for many years, and it seems Neil Patel was at every one of them...always laughing, joking, and having a good time. I went from obscurity to being somewhat well known on the web from 2003 to 2005 and Neil did the same, but started about a year later. In addition to learning so much about social media, Neil shares tips on Pronet Advertising, runs ACS SEO, and created a start up named Crazy Egg.

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Kevin Lee is the CEO of the search engine marketing firm Didit and an engaging speaker at many search conferences. While he loves his PPC, he also sells SEO videos on his personal blog. We recently chatted back and forth via email, and decided it would be a good idea to do an interview. Here are the questions I asked Kevin and his answers.

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I just came across an interview of NFFC from 3 years ago. It is just as good today as it was back then...maybe even better.

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I recently finished reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch, and as a longtime fan of his Rough Type blog asked if he would be up for doing an interview. He said sure, and here is the interview.

What is The Big Switch about?

It's about the interplay between technology and economics and how it influences the way people live and work. I look at how the electric grid transformed industry and society a hundred years ago, which is a cool story in itself, and then I use that story as a way to explain the similar shift that's going on today with computing, as software applications and data storage shift onto the Internet's computing grid. I argue that the rise of "cloud computing," as it's called, will also have far-reaching social, cultural, and business effects - some good, some bad.

What inspired you to write The Big Switch?

It's been clear to me for a number of years that the Internet was going to transform computing - to turn it into a kind of centrally supplied utility. I guess I just wanted to put that shift into a broader context for readers, a historical and economic context as well as a technological context.

The web empowers many individuals. Yet in spite of all this innovation, the middle class in the United States is hollowing out. Why is that? As individuals how can we protect ourselves from that trend?

People with computers and Internet connections have enormous new opportunities to express themselves, and a smaller set of people have also gained new economic opportunities thanks to the Net. But I don't see any sign that the economic opportunities are being widely spread, as they were with industrialization in the last century. I think what we're seeing, in fact, is that software can take the place of labor on a broad scale without creating large new pools of attractive jobs. That's one of the main reasons the middle class has been stagnant in recent years and the divide between the very rich and everyone else has been growing ever wider. As the cost of computing continues to fall, software-based automation will only expand and accelerate. There will still be lots of good opportunities for individuals - the ranks of the rich are bigger than ever - but for the middle class in general things will likely get tougher.

With the publishing economy becoming more attention based, will most writing come in chunks so small and so fast that they lack context and the bigger picture? If so, how could this trend be reversed?

I think it's quite clear that the Internet is training our minds to take in information in quick bursts and that in turn we're slowly losing our ability to maintain the concentration and patience necessary to read extended pieces of writing. This is a phenomenon that many people who use the web a lot have noticed. I think we're probably at the start of a major shift in cognition, and I doubt it's reversible.

Sometimes I read TechMeme and 100 claimed thought leaders are all agreeing on the same thing. Then the next day (or sometimes two days later) you write about how all of them are wrong, and then 2/3 of them agree with you. What makes your contrarian blogging so captivating and buzz-worthy?

The wisdom of crowds is, I think, greatly overrated. Crowds are usually full of crap. So if you see a blog mob happily racing off in one direction, you can be pretty sure that if you go the opposite way you'll find something interesting.

TechMeme, by the way, is a great site to visit if you want to get a quick read on what's going on at the moment in the Internet end of the technology world. But it's a very dangerous site to spend a lot of time on if you're a tech blogger. It narrows your view and promotes rapid-fire me-too-ism. It's better to try to seek out interesting new sources of information, to give yourself some space to think rather than just reacting.

Some bloggers have called you cynical, but many of them fail to see connections that you easily make. What makes it so easy for you to identify relationships that others miss?

I don't really know. Being open to a broad set of influences is important, I think. To me, what's fun about writing - and about thinking, for that matter - is making unexpected connections. When most people write, they get very earnest. They approach writing as if it were work. It's better to be playful, to let your mind and your sentences take chances.

Is user generated content an answer to anything, or does it only accelerate the diminishing content quality problem?

People write blogs and upload photos and videos and tag content because they enjoy it. It gives them satisfaction. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But user-generated content does not exist in a vacuum. It competes with other content, and because it's cheap to produce and usually given away free it has a big market advantage. You have to ask yourself what's going to be crowded out of the market - what good stuff are we going to lose. A lot of people seem to think that new digital media represents a break from mainstream mass media. I don't see it that way. I think new media represents a continuation of mass media and a further amplification of some of mass media's worst qualities.

You mentioned studies about political blogs in The Big Switch. From those studies, it seems links, attention, and readership seemed confined and self-reinforcing in some ways. How may search engines (and other gate-keepers) promote the creation of balanced content when people typically vote for content that is aligned with their biases and identities?

That's a good question, but I don't have a good answer. I think what we're going to see is greater personalization in search and other filtering and navigation tools, and in time that will tend to further reinforce biases and push people to have less sympathy for views that are different from their own. I think media personalization is good for search engines and advertisers. I don't think it's a great thing for society.

Some publishing companies already use profit potential to guide what types of content they create and what topics they cover. Could this create a thinning out in many important fields where the economic viability of the publishing in the field is limited?

In the long run, all for-profit publishers are influenced by profit potential. How could they not be? That's not meant as any kind of criticism of journalistic ethics. It's just a simple observation that production shapes itself to the market. So, looking again at the longer term, you can expect that the combination of unbundled content and precisely targeted advertising will mean that some types of content, including some times of very serious, very worthy content, will fall by the wayside or be shunted to a small elite. We may come to look back fondly on the days of bundled content and lots of cross-subsidies.

How far will the shift to publishing profitable topics go. Might we see a weekly (or daily) NYT story on Viagra?

I think it will be more subtle than that, at least for the top papers. What we'll see is a slow but meaningful change in what's published and how it's published as publications adapt to the new modes of information consumption among readers and the new expectations of advertisers.

I just added a subscription based service to access parts of my website. Do you see publishing shifting to charging less for content (using content for marketing) and charging more for interaction? In what areas may selling content without interaction be a viable business model 20 years from now?

I think there will always be niche markets where specialized content carries a high value, and printed books and magazines will probably continue to sell well for a good long time. But for most online publishing, including interactive publishing, a subscription fee is an awfully hard sell.

Increasingly we let machines make decisions for us, which on the surface simplifies things. But what are the hidden costs?

When you let machines take over parts of your thinking, you start to think like a machine. This is the greatest danger posed by the Net. Computers get a little smarter, we get a little dumber, and eventually we meet somewhere in the middle.

Do you feel you have a health records problem, or was Google's recent move into the space guided by profit potential? At some point will people refuse to use the data hoarding ad networks?

There's a huge health records problem - a fatal problem for some unfortunate folks. I think Google sees this as a problem to solve, a problem well suited to its own expertise. I applaud them for their ambition. But I think that using health records as a platform for advertising is dangerous and unethical, and so while I don't doubt Google's good intentions I am very suspicious of how its program will actually play out.

If I was new to the web and wanted to write for a living, where would you suggest I start? What was key to helping you becoming a great writer?

First of all, thank you for the compliment. I think the best way to learn to write well is to read a lot, particularly when you're young and impressionable. If you want to write for a living on the web, your best bet is to find a niche market that's attractive to advertisers, start a blog, and then work like hell. You'll still probably fail, but you never know.

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Thanks Nick. If you would like to read more from Nick please check out his Rough Type blog. Go buy The Big Switch today as well, I promise you will like it.

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A recurring theme in the 2008 link development panel was hand checks and the editorial nature of search, especially from Roger. Great article well worth a read. Thanks Rae!

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I have been a longtime reader and fan of BlueHatSEO.com, and recently asked Eli for an interview. He said sure, and here it is.

What is your background? What got you into SEO?

I started around '95-'96. I had a lot of interest in music and games and stuff so I created a couple sites related to stuff I normally really enjoy and download a lot. I got in good company with a few guys who ran hosting and colocation companies who made quite a bit of money so naturally my focus started shifting towards how I can make as much as they do. From there it kind of spurred into researching and developing traffic generation and search engine related stuff in an effort to keep up with these guys who had quite a bit more resources and money than my broke ass did. From there it kind of escalated and apart from a short break in college I've been doing it ever since.

You have many original posts on your blog highlighting many interesting techniques I have never heard shared publicly before. How do you come up with all your new ideas?

Thanks, even though they seem pretty generalized and polished many of the techniques I talk about are developed from either a problem I've had to solve in the past or stuff I've encountered while dabbling in specific industries. For instance bloggers as an industry have a multitude of resources and methods they use to promote their blogs. While a lot of their techniques may seem like common sense to them and are well formed over years of experience and others fine tuning it, their methods and resources may not be so obvious to people in other industries. It's fairly safe to say that I have ADD when it comes to jumping around in various niches and markets so I get a good variety of the unique ways each one markets their sites. While it may be standardized stuff to them, many of the techniques can be spun and with a little creative twist can be applied to any other form of generic sites. So while many of the techniques may create a Why didn't I think of that moment, most are well practiced and many marketers within the specific industries they came from know no other ways of doing it. I just kind of twist them and collaborate them into a methodology anyone can use based on my own experiences and how I've applied them to my sites. Eitherway none of the techniques I talk about ever negatively affects my actual business and I usually have the techniques spun an even better way before I give out the old way.

Isn't the value of many aggressive SEO ideas inversely proportional to the number of people using them? What makes you decide what ideas to share and when to share them?

In many cases that's absolutely correct. I've shared several techniques that have died within days of posting them. Just to list a few examples, my Abandoned Wordpress series, Wikipedia Series, and Amazon.com exploits. In all these cases I know before I ever post it that it'll die moments after I do. So most of the time I'll post it out of greed. They are usually techniques I've been using for several years and have since retired them out and quit using them. Naturally with any technique others are bound to figure it out. When I start seeing them popup underground and are being used against me in increasing numbers when I'm no longer using them myself I might as well wreck it. There's a saying; If you're going to wreck a room, you might as well WRECK IT. So in those rare cases when a retired technique starts becoming this annoying little buzz in my ear I might as well squash it and help out a few of my readers at the same time. Win-win if you ask me. Most of my other techniques on the other hand are scalable and free range. I develop them to last, so whether I'm the only one doing it or everyone else on the net is doing it they're not something that can get stopped only suppressed. Often times through saying stuff like Don't do that, its sneaky and we don't like it. Existing propaganda and inherent difficulties in the technique itself usually take care of the rest and help weed out the people who just read for entertainment. There are a few people however that have been reading since the very beginning and after every single post actually do every technique and report back to me through email. They'll be the first to testify that the techniques almost never die, and just because many people know about them doesn't mean everyone is actually using them.

What are QUIT and SQUIRT? Is your system fairly scalable? What types of risks are associated with using them? What types of site should I consider using them on?

QUIT stands for Quick Indexing Tool and SQUIRT stands for Super Quick Indexing & Ranking Tools. My office is filled with wacky and weird acronyms. QUIT is the free one that basically employs several hands off indexing techniques I've developed over the years. It helps get the submitted site crawled by the search engines very quickly, and often times indexed within a day or two. It works off a very simple principle. How many ways can you think of to attract a search engine bot to a specific url? Make a list...figure out a way to do each one with a hands off approach (can't modify the site). You got yourself a Quick Indexing Tool. :) SQUIRT is the paid version and works much the same way. It employs all the techniques QUIT does plus a few extras that aren't scalable, so the membership must be limited. It also goes one step further and develops a bit of link worth to the site to ease it into better deep indexing and rankings. Lastly, it uses analysis of the site to counter a few shortcomings through hands off methods. Just as an example, if a page of the site doesn't have the targeted keywords in its title, then give that page a few backlinks with the keywords as the anchor text. Stuff like that. Most of it is very simple, there's just a lot of it in play at once.

If search did not exist what do you think you would be doing right now?

Lol, I'd be super sizing your Value Meal.

Currently it appears as though Google is heavily focused on domain age and authority. Do you see them staying this way for a long time? Does improving automated content generation technology make it hard to move away from domain authority? Where do you see them going next with their relevancy algorithms?

I'm going to have to politely disagree with that. I think Google is moving in the opposite direction. More towards LSI technology and content relevancy as it pertains to the domain as whole much like Yahoo has been trying to pull off for many years. I think the direction switch started taking place when MSN came out with its own engine. While MSN focuses heavily on age as it pertains to their index rather than actual domain age back when it first opened it had a very young and growing index. So the rankings were more determined by keyword relevancy. So there was a brief period where MSN had all these really nice fresh sites and while rankings were much easier to come by they had fresh results with newly updated content and newer sites with better information. Meanwhile Google, who was relying heavily on DMOZ (as a basic prerequisite for rankings) was finding themselves with SERPS that had a bunch of old stagnant abandoned sites. This was very apparent if you were developing sites in aged industries such as Real Estate. Just three years ago if you had a real estate site, no matter how good it was, it was constantly outranked by old agent cookie cutter sites, and unless your site was at least a year old it would have a hard time even popping into the top 100 for its keywords. Now you can see things moved in quite a bit different direction. You can get a site competing in an aged niche just as easily as long as the content fits properly and in a much shorter time (3-8 months as apposed to a full year minimum in certain cases). I do agree and see authority as a big issue though. Fortunately authority can be replicated and pushed. I did a post awhile back called SERP Domination that talked about ways to push authority and get a brand new site to compete in highly competitive niches. I think improving your automated content plays a big part in that.

Google is starting to move away from being a search engine toward being a content host. How do you see this affecting the future of spamming Google?

Absolutely. There is a breaking point in Google becoming a content host, which I'm certain is their overall goal. As long as they can reward the contributors with increased traffic to their site (ie. -negative rankings..above the top listing like with google base products) people will be willing to donate content to them. I for one will testify that Google Base is very difficult to spam on a mass level as apposed to their search. This is due to the fact that they have a very good hands on antispam team and their content levels are low enough for human checks to be possible. The way I see it is, as their content hosting efforts increase, so will the possibilities for spamming them on a mass scale. It's just a matter of time. Until then, I limit my spamming of them at a level just below getting caught. At the moment, unlike Adsense, their multiaccount banning capabilities are very well done and to be frank it works out well for them. Their content is very good and in all objectiveness very well kept as far as spam goes.

I have never done much overtly black hat SEO. I was not good at programming when I got on the web and after I had been online for a few years I decided to try to build things that can grow logarthimically. Can black hat techniques grow logarthmically? Do you have any strong branded sites to stabelize your income if the black hat streams come and go? How many different website marketing techniques do you use at any given time?

With beautiful domains like blackhatseo.com and seobook.com theres no doubt in my mind you have a nack for predicting the next big things in the industry. If I were you I wouldn't bother with black hat either. You obviously got it made with the skills you already have. I do preach a lot about programming and building sites through autogeneration. In fact a lot of people consider my style Code SEO. I have quite a few very high profile sites, you've probably heard of them and they do bring in good money but I don't ever really talk about them. I like to diversify my investments because not every investment is solid. As far as my blackhat network goes it is actually as solid as it gets. It's very rare when a black hat site of mine gets banned and if you saw one unless you have a really well trained eye you'd probably have a very hard time knowing it was black hat. Thats just part of the investment though. The more legit you can make things appear while autogenerating it the more income you can squeeze out of it in a site's lifecycle.

What is the longest timeframe you have seen an overt black hat site rank for in the various engines? How much have the lifespans of these types of sites changed over the past 5 years?

I think the lifespans of black hat sites increase as your skillsets increase. I have some black hat networks that are still around now and bringing in income and gosh I don't even remember when I made them. Thats also why I talk a lot of "hosted black hat sites" on orphan subdomains and such. Like in my recent SEO Empire post. They really help when making the obvious ones stick. I usually stick to the rule of thumb, if you can mimic the footprints of white hat sites and minimize the footprints of blackhat sites than theres no reason why they shouldn't last forever. Search engines can only ban a footprint that no legitimate sites use. So if you're interested in starting blackhat, as long as you stick by that principle you'll be just fine as far as investments go.

Are there some markets that are too competitive for automated marketing? How do you do successful black hat SEO in hypercompetitive markets like mortgage or insurance?

I don't personally compete in competitive black hat dominated markets, like you mentioned mortgages and pharmaceuticals and such. I feel a little more secure with my black hat sites roaming around the longtailed phrases and localities. It's just a matter of putting in the extra effort which in those cases I'm too set in my ways to sit down and accomplish. I know several people who do strictly that and make a very good living, but I personally have no strong opinions on the matter. So I leave those markets to the pros and if I want to get competitive I use my white hat sites to do it.

Do you do much client work? Have any AdSense sites? Do you mostly rely on affiliate commissions? Have any infoproducts or more tools coming out? What business model do you see as the best source of growth for established SEOs? What segment do you think looks best for new webmasters?

I've never done any client or paid SEO work. I couldn't imagine a worse form of hell to be honest :) I do answer a lot of questions privately though, or at least as many as I have time for. I have lots of adsense sites. I do mostly affiliate marketing and CPC, but I've spent a couple years of my career building actual ecommerce sites. Other than additions to SQUIRT I really don't have any new webmaster related products coming out. I had a few ideas I set into motion but it may be a looong time before they actually come around. I would like to do more though, but I'm afraid of spreading myself too thing. Internet Marketers as I'm sure you're well aware of can be very demanding of ones sanity. When it comes to business models though I wrote a post called SEO Empire. It is MY business model. I've always wanted to write a detailed article on web investments and that's probably as close as it comes to making me happy.

Given the offline macroeconomic trends and trends online what high growth markets do you think are currently less competitive than they should be?

Well of course I'd have to couple trademarked markets into that group, such as myspace, facebook, digg and such. As long as they are working hard to knock down the big boys in the coattailing markets theres always room for new growth. The biggest market I see right now that no one has yet to figure out a good way of capitalizing on is web episodes and webtv. Theres sites like tv-links and other show specific sites that give out streaming episodes of tv shows and movies that are in constant danger of copyright infringement and being shut down by their hosts. More often than not these types of sites get more traffic than they can handle very quickly just because they are in such high demand. Even just putting up a simple site for a small anime type show with all the current episodes available to stream can drive thousand of visitors a day within a month or two of being brand new. The only problem the industry has to figure out is how to keep from getting shut down and attacked constantly. This just goes in line with a theory I've started pushing my own company towards quite a few years ago that television and the Internet are increasingly having an effect on each other.

You seem to be quite outspoken about there being many scams and a lot of hype in the SEO market, complete with A lists and all that sort of stuff. Do you ever see these trends changing? Are these niche specific, or just a reflection of general social structures that cross all lands and industries?

Yeah thats definitely a topic I feel very passionately about. I think scams and hype only exist where theres opportunity. Our industry just happens to have a ton of opportunities for it to flourish. I just try to do my part, step up the plate and make a difference. I take it to a bit of an extreme though by attempting to cover the Advanced SEO topic which is kind of like the Antarctica of SEO, most know its there but how many have actually seen it talked about? The reality is, all I'm doing is making changes by example. I'm saying this is how I want SEO blogs to be like, the spirit can be applied to just about any aspect of our industry including newbie material. Persistently, instead of using the success of it to promote myself or advertisers I use it to promote other likeminded blogs. Many small blogs have made it big and exploded over night just by showing they have what it takes by writing a guest post on Blue Hat and getting it published. Thats where I'm seeing this trend go every day. I really don't think it'll be very much longer before the bloggers that work torwards being helpful start really showing that they are truly taking over. You can see the gurus that establish their expertise by bragging rather than showing are starting to slope and decline to make room for those that are mimicking the helpful spirit. It's just a matter of time and I think it'll come faster than people imagine :)

I am new to online marketing...what books, articles, blog posts, and blogs should I start reading?

Lol, ass kissing aside, i really do send nearly all new people to the industry that talk to me to SEOBook. SEO book gives it out clearly and explains the stuff they need to know. Everywhere else tends to be flooded with bait and switch tactics and misinformation that leads them to the exact opposite direction they should be going. Not only is it a good resource but it's miles ahead of the other blogs and books trying to attract "offer fillers." <- my affectionate term for John Chow readers (my words not Aarons). I also like several blogs where the writer is not only talented but is also in the thick of the industry just like his/her readers and trying to make his way. For instance JonWaraas.com does a great job candidly talking about his experiences and what he's learning at the moment. He's also cool enough to share his sites with you. A great step from there might be the late NetBusinessBlog.com where the new writer and past talk about nice little techniques that range anywhere from intermediate to advanced and are always a great read. Also can't go without mentioning EarnersBlog.com, busin3ss.name, and professionalmiddleman.com.

I am new to the web...when should I consider quiting my job to be a full time marketer/webmaster? What are the biggest attributes I need to succeed online in today's market.

By all means please eat. Three out of every four projects I develop fail overall. As a new person to the business expect to do much worse, so make sure to take care of yourself first and the business second. The added stress of having to pay bills while developing your business only escalates the toll off the inevitable failures that await you. Thats the beauty of the Internet business. hehe don't just dive into a pool without checking the water first. You can get started without a $100k+ startup cash and tons of risk. You'll still have to work just as hard as any other business startup, you just have the luxury of being capable of starting small. The only quicksand you'll run into is the myth that you can make money in your spare time. Many often figure out, who actually has SPARE time? You have to treat it just like a regular job. Make smart investments in both time and money. Build and escalate until your other job starts to phase out. When you can finally answer both of these questions with a yes you should be good to quit your day job. 1) Does your day job earnings supplement your online earnings? (or is it visa versa). 2) If you suddenly got sick and were taken away from your online work for three months, would you come back to a business that has grown?

What is the best keyword you have ever ranked for? What is the best keyword you ever ranked for using almost nothing but automated mareting free content?

Should have specified a time frame, but since you didn't we'll go old school :)

At one time or another in my career: Music, MP3, Downloads, Freeware, Real Estate, Games, WWW, Homes, Pamela Anderson, Internet, Bikini, Sites and College.

No, sad to say I don't have any sites that still rank for any of those terms. :( But I still do have some very competitive phrases amongst my sites today, they just can't compete with some of the million dollar ones from back in the day when SEO was relatively new.

Have you ever felt a search engineer was lying about something? If so, have you ever called them out on it?

I think we're being lied to about nofollow. Consider this the call out :)

It seems as though large branded sites are able to get away with far more than smaller newer websites can. What tools or features would you like to see search engines make available to help level the playing field? Do you think search engines are more focused on relevancy or profit?

I think they're focused on profit through relevancy, and currently they attempt to accomplish that with authority factors. The playing field isn't level because its designed not to be. I honestly wouldn't want it to become level and fair. I kind of see it as "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you."

Do you ever see search losing some of its importance? What might replace it?

Webmasters set the pace the web, they always have. What's important to the webmasters becomes important to the users. It was the webmasters that made Google, MSN, and Yahoo important not the other way around. Just throughout history, the moment webmasters quit caring about something it becomes obsolete and forgotten by everyone within no time, the opposite is also true. It's entirely possible that search will lose its importance. I don't see it happening anytime soon, but if the average webmaster gets frustrated enough with them and a good alternative comes out I'm sure it won't take very long from that point before its gone. A good way for them to begin that process might be to hand pick a couple sites like wikipedia and have them conquer every single result...oh wait.

Do you ever see Google losing their dominance? What might replace them?

Going along with the above question, there was a short time in Google's history right before Matt Cutts and Webmaster Guidelines/Tools where they started becoming very secretive about their algorithm and lost nearly all contact with webmasters outside of a submit url button. During that time a whole multitude of search engines and creative forms of search started popping up like crazy. It was like there was a new one almost every day. Some were really fun to play around with. None really had both the form and function that would of inspired a permanent switch for me, but it goes to show how easy it is and I doubt Google will make that mistake again.

Do you feel domains names have large synergies with SEO? I am currently not using the domain names BlackHatSEO.com and WhiteHatSEO.com to their full potential. What do you think I should do with them? What would you do with them if you owned them?

I think domains are a very large factor in SEO and I don't think many will disagree. I was always curious about those domains of yours Aaron. They're awesome. I'm sure you get asked 10 times a day to sell them. Why not throw up forums on them or even mashups? I understand your underuse of them though, I'd be all excited to get them but then I'm certain a hard reality would hit and I'd come up blank for what to actually do with them. I personally would love to some day see an AskABlank SEO site. I'm sure you've seen the format before, its like Ask A Midget(hypothetical, don't go searching for it). Then people get to submit questions and the midget answers and it gets posted publically covering various topics, but with SEO. An idea?

Why BlueHatSEO? Why not another word/color?

Completely, 100% random. I'm not even fond of the color Blue, Green is my fav. If you've ever noticed, the site is extremely generic. Default Wordpress template, No SEO, no link building (never even done a link exchange), no link bait, no nofollow tags, no submissions to social sites, no promoting...absolutely nothing from the very beginning. Very very -by- all definition and to the core... pure white hat. I did it intentionally to make a point. Interesting Trivia For Ya: Can you name the ONE other popular SEO blogger that has also done it? Minus maybe the ridding of nofollow tags. :)

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Thanks Eli. Be sure to check out his blog at Blue Hat SEO.com.

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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…

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Danny Sullivan has been covering search for over a decade and is known as the leading expert in the field of search. I recently asked Danny for an interview and he said sure. We talked about search, marketing, and doughnuts.

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Michael Mann founded BuyDomains, and numerous other companies through his WashingtonVC incubator. He also launched Grassroots.org and the Make Change! trust, and authored the popular ebook Make Millions and Make Change! for entrepreneurs and non-profits. After reading his book I asked him for an interview and he said sure.

Why is confidence so important when starting a business?

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Having coined the term domain investor, Frank Schilling is a recognized leader in the domaining field. He talks about domaining on his blog at Seven Mile.com

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Although I don't read as much literature as I would like to, I have enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut's writing a few times. Cory Doctorow mentioned his passing. Kurt was interviewed here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Rae recently posted a 5 person interview about link building that is well worth a read. 5 experts are interviewed. Each answers a set of questions without seeing the other answers until after the interview.

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Graywolf recently interviewed RC Jordan about SEO. Great interview of one of the true industry pioneers.

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I have been a long time fan of Brian Clark. His blog, Copyblogger, is crisp, clear, and entertaining. He recently announced that he is a 2007 Bloggies award finalist.

Brian recently revised my salesletter, and I asked if he would be willing to do an interview. He said yes, and so it goes...

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DigitalGhost is an odd fellow, in a good way. Always a blast to chat with, and a smart guy who gives me lots of good advice. He recently started blogging again, and that prompted me to ask him from an SEO.

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Scott Smith, also known as Caveman, is one of my favorite personalities in the SEO business. I recently have done work with him on numerous projects (look for an official announcement of some sort soon), and Scott always seems to have a slightly different (and far more brilliant) angle than I on many SEO and marketing related issues.

I wanted to interview him for probably at least a year, and I finally got him to say yes :)

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Bob Massa is one of the most eloquent people in the search marketing industry. I have wanted to interview him for a long time, and finally got around to it.

He was probably one of my favorite interviewees.

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Paul Graham was recently interviewed on TechCrunch, where he said:

The easiest way to make something people want is to make something you want. What do you wish existed that doesn’t?

Every market has a ton of those opportunities if you know the market well and are passionate about it.

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Not in German, but a bit of a focus on Germany in this 29 minute Matt Cutts podcast interview.

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I recently asked Dan Kramer of KloakIt if I could interview him about some common cloaking questions I get asked, and he said sure.

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A while ago I contacted Kim Krause Berg for a usability review, but I threw a curve ball in on her. I asked her how I could make this blog more usable. I believe Kim is the first person who has ever offered blog usability review services.

Her feedback was why I made the changes mentioned here, and many other site improvements. I asked her if she would let me interview her about blogs and blog usability and she said sure. The interview is in the extended area of this post.

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I recently interviewed Seth Godin. Seth is a well known marketing guru who's blog and books have helped me become a more holistic marketer. I read everything he writes. He also did a video interview on AuctionBytes recently.

Here is the interview:

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I will probably start doing a few more interviews in the coming months. I recently interviewed Lee Odden, who is a well known blogger, SEO and public relations expert.

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Lee Odden interviews Stuntdubl and Lee gets interviewed here

John Battelle speaks to Google NYC

While I have grown to hate SEO contests I currently am the only advertiser for the phrase on Google AdWords and here is a free link for my brother v7ndotcom elursrebmem, although he is going to have to be a bit more innovative than that if he actually wants to win. I really would like to see Graywolf win the v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest.

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Interview of Martinibuster

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I recently interviewed Greg from BOTW. He chats about directories, blackjack, and running some of his other web based businesses.

He also offers a discount for BOTW submissions at the end of the interview.

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Andy Hagans recently swore to the importance of his accessible white hat SEO techniques, and I asked him about his love for haggis.

Tips on blogging, outsourcing, link building, and other goodies in the Andy Hagans interview.

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The man, the myth, the Mick Jagger of search, well I guess he doesn't really go by that name ;) but...

Matt Cutts was nice enough to answer a bunch of questions I asked him via email.

For the gray hat in the crowd, I asked Matt what fields SEOs should look at as search advances. He said:

If you're creative, I'd look at the marketing/buzz aspect of things. A person who is savvy about marketing will often have a good leg up on interactions with people. If you are a talented backend person, there's a ton of neat start-ups right now. 2-3 people in different places can collaborate on some nice stuff. If you're a button-pusher, I'd try to diversify that skillset. ;)

for tips on building a search engine & doing SEO read more of the Matt Cutts interview

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Recently I got to interview Eurotrash. Fun, just don't ask him about bacon!

Thanks Jan :)

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I have a bit of the flu, but I also have a marketing friend who is exceptional at selling ad space who somewhat recently let me interview him. He is not well known in the search space, but manages media sales and email marketing for a number of niche websites.

I am trying to get him to start a blog (we bloggers like to spread our disease) but for now his personal site is using an article manager, which is evil evil evil. Jason recently wrote a few short but high quality ebooks on improving email subject lines, creatives, and email marketing in general.

Check out the interview if you want to work on improving media sales.

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I recently interviewed another one of the great SEO oldtimers, who goes by the name of Lots0. Lots0 talks Google Sandbox, SEO Ethics, & a bit of SearchKing.

Thanks for the interview Lots0.

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Frank Watson is a good friend of mine, and just about any decent pay per click search engine. He manages some rather complex pay per click accounts.

I interviewed him asking about pay per click tips and strategies. Read it here: seobook interviews Frank Watson

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Recently I interviewed NickW. I asked him mostly about community building and ThreadWatch. His replies were mostly about the importance of being authentic, timely, and being different. Surprisingly Nick moderately used curse words, although he did work some into the content. :)

Thanks for the interview Nick.

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I wanted to interview Jim Boykin, from WeBuildPages a while ago, but some of my questions were evil and it took a while to get around to do the interview. I recently came up with a new list and asked Jim many SEO business related questions, in large part because he runs one of the few SEO companies that I feel comfortable refering leads to. At the recent WebmasterWorld conference I had not one, but two different people come up to me and thank me for refering them, which makes me feel great for recommending them.

In our interview Jim gives lots of good web design and link building tips, and he also confirmed the rumour that WeBuildPages will be entering the original content production market!

To me it seemed like that market was waiting for more competition, especially considering that some of the other networks that do it place competing ads on the same pages that webmasters pay to have create.

Read the full interview: Aaron Wall interviews Jim Boykin, founder of We Build Pages.

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Jason Duke is a true lover of all things search, and that came through in his recent interview.

I think the interview flowed pretty well from question to question and is sorta hard to take out of context, but a good sample might be something like:

Whether it be an Amazon feed or the entire Gutenberg project you can get volumous amounts at no charge and it is all duplicate content.

But if you have rights to the content or the content is free contractually for you to do with as you want then there are software tools ... the so called "Button Pushing".... that helps turn that dupe content into a unique position.

Read Jason Duke's thoughts on the future of search, how algorithms work, and how you can get the most out of SEO.

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I am a big fan of Search Engine Blog, and wanted to ask Peter a few questions about search, blogging, pants, and the web (ish).

He said sure and here is the Peter D interview. I think I have changed some of my ideas of how I should do stuff from about every interview I have done, and this one is no exception.

Thanks again Peter.

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Dan Thies has been branded as THE keyword guru, and has a great background in business and marketing. I asked him for an interview and he said sure.

Doing SEO and selling SEO are two separate things, as explained by well by Dan:

SEO consultants, in particular the small firms, the one-person shops.... I've rarely seen a group of people with more talent going to waste, because they don't get marketing, they don't understand sales, they can't write proposals, they spend so much time chasing bad leads. If I had a dollar for every consultant who has asked for advice on how to get someone to spend $500 on SEO...

If $500 is an issue, you either have no credibility (because you haven't created it) or they just don't have any money. Most of the time, the budget is there, but the credibility isn't.

He then goes on to recommend resources and offers tips to help close sales and improve SEO business efficiency. Dan talks about keywords, proposals, and running an SEO business.

That is my fourth interview in the last month or so and all of them have been great. I feel somewhat silly for not doing more of them earlier. More to come...

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So a while ago I bugged NFFC for an interview. He kept saying no, but then I gave him $50,000, naming rights to my first kid, and another copy of SEO Book [he said it was so good he wanted another] and he said yes. Amazing how that works.

Lucky for you, you get the interview free...and IMHO it's killer good.

I would quote a section, but it would not do NFFC justice. Interview of NFFC, Sexy SEO God

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Get seen First:
DaveN posts about how Google duplicate content filters have a tendancy to reward the first spotting of content.

Interview:
Interesting stuff Dave. I should interview him, oh wait, I just did :)

I think the key takehomes from his interview are:

• trust & friendship are HUGE in the SEO space

• the importance of collecting data

but the interview is well worth reading for all. Thanks again for the interview Dave :)

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A while ago I said that my ebook could be improved by interviewing a good number of industry experts to help build a more broad / diversified voice.

My goal is to interview about a dozen people who are doing well or I think really know their stuff. Recently via email I interviewed Shawn Hogan from Digital Point. He claims not to be an SEO, but his site gets far more traffic than most SEO related websites.

The biggest things that stood out to me from his interview:

• he created things that he himself wanted / found useful

• he threw it out there to collect feedback & added features people wanted
• he loves to automate as much as possible

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