Not content with attempts at trying to rid the web of spam, Matt Cutts has been posting about how to get a free credit report and how to stop junk mail. If your job is abstract, an easy way to gain further authority and credibility is to extend your brand into related more established markets that are easy to understand.

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My wife and I just had our first anniversary dinner, which was a lot of fun. She actually found me by buying my ebook back when I still sold it, and our connection was only made possible through years of supporting this site / blog / brand by readers like you...so I just wanted to say thanks. :)

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We recently added support software for SEO Book members. It is powered by Kayako SupportSuite, which is perhaps a bit more than we need as a 2 person business, but I think the software is fairly powerful and looks quite professional. :)

The only downsides were that it took me a while to install it and we are running out of room in the sitewide navigation at the top of the page...one more item and the formatting dies!

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Improve your rankings, traffic, and profits today. The SEO Book training program offers you:

• Over 100 training modules, covering topics like: keyword research, link building, site architecture, website monetization, pay per click ads, tracking results, and more.
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• Every order comes risk free, and with the best selling SEO Book as a free bonus

Watch this video to learn more.

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Yahoo! is back around the $20 range again today. If Microsoft could find a way to buy them they could quickly gain some search marketshare, but presuming Microsoft builds a memorable search brand they could probably catch up through other acquisitions cheaper.

I think rather than buying another overpriced ad platform a cheaper way to attack Google would be to buy some of the leading editorial brands/sites that dominate Google's organic rankings. For far less than the $47 billion Microsoft offered for Yahoo! they could buy...

• Expedia (currently valued at $5.2 billion) and have a leading role in the travel market. I think something like 40% of internet commerce is travel.
• Monster.com (currently values at $2.24 billion) and have a leading role in employment and education.
• Bankrate (currently valued at $700 million) and have a leading role in the mortgage and consumer credit markets.
• WebMD (currently valued at $1.64 billion) and have a leading role in the medical market
• IAC (currently valued at $5.38 billion) After IAC spins off many of their other units this price might go cheaper. Google paid $1 billion for 5% of AOL. Microsoft can get 100% of Ask (with more marketshare than AOL) for not a whole lot more, giving them significantly more marketshare than they currently have and an actual brand in the search market. Plus IAC is buying Dictionary.com and some other generic high traffic sites.
• The New York Times (currently valued at $2.25 billion) and have a leading role in the news market. If they wanted to they could buy it out, spin out About.com as a Microsoft owned web property, then set up the NYT as an industry non-profit that monetizes via a longterm ad arrangement with Microsoft.

I think those companies add up to around $17.4 billion. Pay 50% over market value to close the deals and they could have all the above for $26 billion, giving them a leading position in most high value markets and $20 billion left over for marketing, branding, and buying further assets.

Is the above strategy crazy? What would you do if you were Microsoft?

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I am usually a fan of creating niche sites that are easy to link at and in profitable categories. In some cases generic sites can do well because they allow you to expand wherever the money is.

• Sites like NexTag can buy mortgage ads on Bankrate because they already have enough volume that it makes it easy for them to quickly build inventory whenever an arbitrage opportunity comes about.
• From an SEO standpoint generic websites are great for creating top 10 lists and other egobait driven publishing strategies which allow you to tap into link equity from established bloggers and other publishers.
• A site about coupons or reviews is heavily focused on a traffic stream of people looking to spend money.
• A site about trivia focuses on a traffic stream of people looking to waste time who will engage in quizes and zip submit offers.

The downside to many generic sites is it is hard to build a loyal following, but as long as SEO is driven by links maybe you don't need a following to make a lot of money.

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Imagine turning a Firefox extension into the base for an ad network. Someone just did that, as Patrick Gavin recently announced that ScribeFire is launching an ad network and ad optimization service for bloggers. They are currently in limited beta testing, but if you want to sign up your blog quickly you can be one of the first to try it out by emailing them at seobook@scribefire.com.

An extension to a social network usually does not create such an opportunity, but if you create a brand and destination around the extension and aggressively market it there are opportunities to expand your business. Which sorta makes me want to make SEO for Firefox better and come up with some sort of cool strategy for it. Have any ideas?

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Apparently Google is now pretty good at crawling flash.

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When people are angry they are anything but rational, so the amount of brand damage they can do for you is near limitless. Imagine if a person or small group has reach to a group of people entering your space, and tells them that you are unethical, a liar, worthless, etc.

If such a statement is contained then no big deal, but if it starts spreading as common knowledge people will just assume it is true. For every person creating media there are 100 people quietly consuming it, and if you are successful and have mindshare people will try to tear you down every month.

When Unprovoked Try to Be Empathetic, if That Does Not Work, Then Consider Highlighting the Issue

If they are already creating unprovoked brand damage then they are probably angering other people too. If you can't clear it up directly it might be a legitimate strategy to call them out on it such that other people they offend down the road will discover your brand. Another popular strategy is to ask friends to clear it up if you want to keep yourself removed from the conflict.

Do Not Make The Google Engineers Editors Angry

We are all flawed, and the goalposts are always moving. One day we are at the top and the next day people are surprised at the fact that we are a spammer.

One of the things that is most likely to kill a successful SEO job is boasting about the ROI and/or how easy it was. Ever since Google started aggressively editing the search results the difference between a successful strategy and an ineffective one is often one blog post. Brent Csutoras gave a lot of great examples of strategy gone awry in his STFU post.

People Inadvertently Screw You

Back around 2004-2005 Google was having issues with 302 redirect hijacking, so I made the SEO Book affiliate program use 301 redirects. I mentioned that those links passed weight in our online SEO training program. 301 redirecting affiliate links is a popular way to build link equity, but after Rand used my site as an example in the following video those 301s no longer pass PageRank.

People Trash Your Site as Spam to Justify Their Spam

Remember when Jason Calacanis was launching Mahalo, and how he started railing on about Squidoo being spam before he launched his site? A year later the truth washed out that Jason intended to create a site with content that would be categorized as spam by Google's internal documents.

Consider Future Effects

Many years back Jill Whalen and I had a falling out because I was bidding on people's names via AdWords, and she did not like it. She thought it was scummy for me to bid on other brand names, but she had no desire to police her affiliates when they did the same. To this day she still slings mud at me, calling me a black hat, etc.

Public Online Communities Eat Their Young

Dan Thies, who wrote an ebook a couple years before me, had to battle through some nastiness as well, so I am not sure what percent of what I dealt with was natural feeding off the young or if the people complaining about me were actually mad at me. Given that they didn't mind when they profited from what they did not like, I would guess that it was mostly the former.

The big issue with eating your young is that you never know when it will come back to haunt you.

Someone Might Become a Star

Some people who get established allow their egos to grow beyond any rational limit, and are nasty to many new people entering their field. But the thing is you don't know who is going to become a star down the road, and who will have the influence to crush or embarrass you.

Consider how Shel Israel angered Loren Feldman years ago. Shel had long forgot doing so, but then Loren registered ShelIsrael.com and put up a sock puppet show that lasted for months!

That conflict just ended, but the associated brand damage will last for years. Here is Loren's take on why he did what he did:

When I first started my career, you made it a point to bury me online, and more importantly back channel as well. This is a fact. You and your crew went out of your way to take food off my plate. I never forgot that, and now you have something you’ll never forget.

Communities Are Full of Cliques

One of the things I struggle with in the SEO field is that so many of us end up doing so well that sometimes we let our egos get ahead of what made us do well and we forget where we came from. And so I hear negative stuff about interactions between many friends. Its hard to be empathetic when it seems everyone has wronged others at some point in time. I know I have screwed up more times than I can count, and much of the conflict ends up being drama for the sake of marketing.

PageRank was, is, and will always be a flawed concept. In some cases the best person wins, but in many cases the best person loses because they were not good at public relations and marketing - or because they made somebody angry, and they decided to blackball them.

Some of the top communities in the search marketing field do not get along well. Incisive Media employees and Third Door Media employees are banned from attending each other's conferences. Ever since Danny stopped doing the Search Engine Strategies conferences I have been asked to speak a grand total of 0 times. Guys like Graywolf and I were replaced by sponsored panels.

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My wife has been learning a lot about pay per click marketing recently and decided that she wanted to create a site focused on PPC. We have made about a half dozen posts so far to PPC Blog, and she just finished her review of Google Ad Planner.

She plans to make at least a couple posts a week, so please subscribe. :)

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ICANN laxed strict rules on top-level domain names, which will allow people like you and I to create new domain name extensions based on "any string of letters, in any script." The initial cost of setting up a new TLD could cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

Given that Google is already biased against some domain extensions (Google dropped .info names a month ago) and trillions of dollars have been spent advertising businesses connected to current TLDs, many of the new TLDs will be fighting an uphill battle from both a search relevancy standpoint and a mindshare standpoint.

When Google's Carter Maslan was interviewed about Google Local he stated

We are experimenting with how much verification vs. how much ease of use. There are variables as to when to prompt... In the past it had been too liberal, and is becoming more stringent. We are experimenting on the quality of the listings and spam. There is no hard yes or no answer to the correct structure.

That strategy works well for Google Local, Mahalo, Squidoo, Digg, etc. but new domain extensions will struggle with growing in a similar manner though, because there is significant opportunity cost to building something great on them, and if they are too lax and spammy they might get filtered out of Google's search results.

How might the marketplace react to an increase in the number of competing domain extensions?

• This will likely increase the .com premium for domain names (and local GTLD premium for .de, .co.uk, etc.) as more TLDs lead to more confusion in the marketplace, which leads consumers back to the default
• It might provide a cap the price that some generic names without businesses trade at. As noted by a person who commentedon this Domain Name Wire post, "Why would disney spend millions on Resorts.com when they can get their own extension for MUCH MUCH less and just go with Resorts.disney."
• I suspect .org names will still remain strong because so many organizations already use them and most non-profits will not be able to justify spending 6 figures on a domain extension.
• The .net domain name might suffer a bit, while some of the less meaningful TLDs (.info, .biz) will sharply drop in value
• Decent - but not great - .com names (like 3 or 4 word domains without much exact match search volume) might lose some of their value. I suspect even more of a drop for lower end .net and .org names.

What new extensions will do well?

• A few new generics (.web and .blog) might get some traction, but most will fail. Even if .com names keep increasing at 7% a year, there is a lot of certainty on going with the established standard, and a lot of risk in going with something brand new. Who knows if an extension might eventually go away after you spent years building a brand on it?
• The new TLDs will create a great opportunity for branded community websites built around memorable ideas and causes, but the backers need to be good at public relations to gain meaningful awareness.
• Some of the new TLDs will buy sponsors (like when Demand Media partnered with Lance Armstrong on Livestrong.com) to gain awareness, while others will gain mindshare by making hosting and other paid for services free and easy.

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