The Computers and Communications Industry Association published research on the value of fair use. The research is completely biased, to the point of being fraud:
Even by the woeful standards of the bespoke research industry, this study is a crock. It's not just bad; it's absurd. What the authors have done is to define the "fair-use economy" so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials.
Even Smart People Buy This Junk
Google is a leading sponsor of the research. They know it is a lie, but one that fattens their profit margins, so why not help spread this one and spend a few dollars sponsoring the next one?
Cory Doctorow, who is brilliant, is helping spread this idea because it was the first such publication and he is emotionally attached to the idea. If you are the first person to create a value system that reinforces others values they are going to cite you day and night.
Marketing Continues to Blur into a Game of Psychological Warfare
As marketing and content merge, and as people become more aware of marketing, there are going to be a lot more non-profit organizations sharing research built around pushing lies that helps for profit companies. Some lies are damaging, others are not. Both smart and ignorant people will cast votes without understanding what they are doing. The machines that count votes promote information pollution and are amoral. Those selling sugar water to diabetics also sell safety water. Every dollar counts. As marketing advances, expect more people to play on your emotions using an ever-increasing complex and diverse array of techniques.
WebmasterWorld recently had another debate on which is more important: links or content. But the debate is flawed. Links or content alone are just one type of asset. You might be able to profit from either for a while, but ultimately the real measure of relevancy and staying power is attention.
When you have a new idea can you spread it? You can do the most amazing thing in the world that would alter the course of history, but if you have no attention it goes nowhere. Days / months / years later somebody comes by and steals / repackages / reformats / relaunches your idea and is hailed a brilliant futurist. You wait in line for their autograph, and can do nothing but laugh or cry because you know you already published that idea, but unfortunately you did it at the wrong place or wrong time or you used the wrong headline.
An old site that already ranks well can see self reinforcing links for years until someone launches a better idea and owns that idea. But if ignored eventually someone will take the idea from you. If you do not have enough attention you do not have the margins needed to be sustainable and fight off competition. If you run a network without adequate attention it turns to spam.
A profitable SEO running a sustainable longterm website is an attention whore. They learn how ideas spread, what types of ideas spread, and how to format them to help them spread. They tap into the human ego and dig deep into psychology to help others want to help them. Marketers spread lies if the payout is high enough. Other times people accidentally spread inaccuracies, but that works too because people talking about it grants you more authority and reading the feedback forces you to learn more.
Some marketers are conservative and like to quietly build links and attention over time. Others like to see their name on the front page of the newspaper or Digg. Both ways work, but links are just a proxy for conversation and attention. Search engines follow people.
Once you have attention you can do whatever you want. Who cares if 90% of your ideas fail? You learn from every failure, content can easily be reformatted, and other good ideas come out of remains of past failures. You only need 1 to be really successful to be set for life. And if you keep trying to launch innovative valuable ideas then people are going to keep talking about you until you launch a success. And when it launches people will talk about it because you already have their attention.
As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].
Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
My flight leaves tonight to go get married. I will be back in the last week of October. I might post again before then, but I might not. I wish you well and will be back soon(ish).
BTW, Compete.com search analytics launches tomorrow. It is exceptionally affordable for its value. Be sure to check it out.
Quintura recently made a search page for Seo Book. Their search service is likely going to be more useful for large publishers with millions of pages than it is on a personal blog, but give it a try and see what you think.
Their cloudlike visual search service is a great tool for finding related keyword modifiers used in competing sites, but I don't think we will see such technology front and center at the mainstream search engines anytime soon due to future advertising regulation which will make it harder to integrate ads and make search results more profitable than the current Google format is. Though I would love to see their technology integrated against social bookmarking sites and personal search history data.
A few months back Threadwatch had a post about Yahoo selling subdomains. Yesterday I stumbled across an AdSense ad for a company selling subdomains that they forward to other sites. I don't believe it is smart to build a big site on someone else's domain, but if you wanted to fling up a bunch of spam or create a single targeted ad page that goes after a competitive phrase why not leech of their authority and let them assume the risks?
There are no search engine guidelines on hosting advertisements for third parties because it is not an idea Google wants people thinking about or talking publicly about, and they can't edit out WSJ.com if they will want the WSJ to spread their public relations messages and business interests.
It seems politicians don't like this Internet thing too much. A 23 year old Polish man is facing 3 years in prison for ranking his president #1 for penis.
A friend of mine just posted about trying to build a business by creating 5,000 sites. Everything I know about the trends of the web tells me that there are far easier ways to make money online, especially if you are willing to grow with the latest trends.
You Can't Bring Back the Past
Why would anyone who deeply understands the web start a traditional book publishing business when web formats are so much more profitable and books are becoming irrelevant? Static boring content sites created without passion are, like books, growing irrelevant.
The reason smaller sites could work in the past is because many of them are set and forget. Virtually no incremental cost of upkeep. But the big issue is that they all have some set amount of work required to set them up. And if you are doing something 5,000 times you are going to start automating. And when you start automating you leave footprints. Even if your content is of average quality today, in a year that same content might be considered useless noise and/or spam. At some point a few of the sites get nuked, an engineer does a bit of research, and then the whole network tanks. Then you just lost a year of work and most of your investment.
New Verticals Are Stealing Market-share From the Generalist Web
The problem with set and forget is that there are many new TYPES of content coming online, working to back-fill the organic search results. How uncomfortable is it creating average quality or garbage content when you see half of some search results dominated by books? If you want to do a set and forget approach to marketing I think traditional websites or blogs might be the wrong approach, especially if done in bulk. If I were to try to profit from bulk and was to create something new today I would look at some of the information formats that are just starting to get more aggressively integrated into the search results.
Average Content Has No Sustainable Advantage
The problem with average plain Jane content is that being average is not enough to build permission, gain subscribers, and create a real brand. If you are starting out today you are up against companies with a decade of experience, traction, capital, leverage and market feedback.
The long tail queries that went to garbage content are now sending visitors to large businesses that are becoming more aware of SEO and other vertical searches that are creeping into the traditional organic search results. It is getting easier for competitors to buy your keyword stats for next to nothing, and competitive research is only getting cheaper by the day. When you have virtually no authority, a business model search engineers hate, and are easy to clone then where is your sustainable competitive advantage? Why build anything that lacks a solid foundation?
Dominate Newer Verticals
If it were within my power, and I was scaling this type of bulk content operation, I would have at least one site in Google news. The value of being listed there just went up because they are filtering out many of the duplicate wire service stories that dominated the results in the past. You could also think of videos as easy pickings, at least for now.
Are there other verticals that will become popular? Sure, but you have to be creative and use the word vertical loosely. Remember that in the Google Florida update commercial intent pages were demoted in favor of informational content pages. With Universal search Google has many ways to define verticals and filter irrelevant or lower quality ones. Here is a quote from a recent brilliant post by Tedster
Search terms themselves can also be sorted into various taxonomies, especially the 1-word and 2-word queries. ... With the advent of Universal Search, Google now has the infrastructure to force integrate selections from any class of websites onto the first page. So the implications of Universal Search can go well past the obvious and publicised taxonomies of images, video, news, books, maps, blogs. Even more than a simple "commercial" and "informational" taxonomy, there could also be classes like brochureware sites, trademark holders, businesses with a physical world presence, manufacturers, B2B, multi-topic (encyclopedic) and on and on. One factor Google could then tweak would be which classes of sites to force integrate into the results for which kinds of search terms.
Create a New Vertical
If you rush to find new verticals, change how people use language, or define a page as fitting an alternate meaning of a word then perhaps all this vertical stuff presents an arbitrage opportunity for you. If you create the same type of crap that is already saturated then it is working against you.
SEO Book was not a popular search query until after I created this site. Search engines follow people. Google recommends my brand name and my name in their ad links. The easiest and most sustainable way to dominate a high value vertical is to create a new one, which is something I hope to do in a big way before the year is out.
Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.
The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait. ;)
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful
Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.
It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn't pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.
Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.
It doesn't matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer
Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don't Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well
Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.
