Outside of hand edits, most search engine relevancy and trust scores come from looking at third party votes. You don't even have to be a subject matter expert to get tons of traffic if you can just come up with ideas that get authoritative channels talking about you. If you are good at public relations that will be reflected in the search results, both directly and indirectly. Trusted sites that link to you flow trust your way. Even if Google decides to manually edit your site out of the search results, you still have a defensible stream of traffic if you obtained coverage on high authority websites.

Those visitors are going to be hard to monetize unless the other site was reviewing your products or services, but many of those visitors may still link to your site or help push your brand in front of other people. If you have a strong affiliate program or a large set of legitimate organic mentions you don't need search engines.

A site of mine that got hand edited was mentioned in LifeHacker about a year ago. So far today that mention sent 22 visitors. Those visitors are highly qualified since they likely searched on a search engine or via LifeHacker's internal search, found that page on LifeHacker, read that page, then clicked through to my site.

The key with building up a strong link profile on trusted sites is to think about your idea from the perspective of creating something that is useful, wrapped in a story that has a self spreading mechanism, and biasing it to the target audience which is going to spread your message.

Conversation is the #1 signal of quality to search engines. That may change at some point, but for it to do so search engines have to try to change human behavior that has been built, marketed, and reinforced for thousands of years.

As high authority sites attract brand advertisers many of their owners look for ways to create additional pageviews to further scale their businesses. I offered a few tips on how to do that here, but an annoying trend that has recently swept across the web is turning external links into internal links.

If you look at blog mentions on Technorati it is hard to get to the page actually linking to you. Technorati mixes in outbound links and Technorati profile pages without differentiating between the two. Some people are also creating thin sister sites, using bait and switch linking. The Wikipedia practice of link hoarding is just starting to spread. How long until the mainstream media companies create thin review sections and start publishing pages or stubs about everything?

Wikipedia can cross link just about everything and look legitimate with it because they are non profit. Independent webmasters have to be more focused if they are trying to create profitable websites. Navigation can be nearly useless and spammy looking, or with a few minor tweaks it can look legitimate and well categorized. Compare the following two examples:

navigation 1

Seen On a Farm
cows
milk
pickup trucks
etc
etc
etc

vs

navigation 2

farm animals
cows
chickens
pigs
etc

dairy products
milk
cheese
yogurt
etc

farm equipment
tractors
pickup trucks
etc

The first navigational scheme is something you might see on the common AdSense website. Each page is not connected to any of the others by any trait other than carrying AdSense ads.

The second navigational structure looks less spammy and more useful. In addition to looking more credible and being easier to use, it also has headings focused on relevant keywords, which can link to related category pages. This allows the site to focus link weight on core topical phrases and pick up on mid tier keywords not covered by a more haphazard navigational scheme that uses generic words unrelated to the way searchers search.

If you think ahead when planning out your navigation it also makes site expansion a breeze. For example, if you later add turkeys to the farm animals category it can be grouped with chicken under a poultry category.

Good internal navigation should be logical, easy to follow, and reflect your keyword theme.

Any independent webmaster who has been making good money on the web for a few years has realized that blending ads in content, or distributing ads as content, is much more profitable than a clean separation of church and state. Jakob Nielson recently wrote about usability research showing that people ignore ads unless they look like content and are in the content area of the page. Once a publisher has enough distribution they claim it is unethical to blend content and ads, but if you look close enough at the publisher and advertiser relationships there are overlaps in virtually every category and on every site. There are numerous well known sites in the search space that would never give me any exposure until AFTER I bought ads at their site, which mentioned me regularly after my ad buy.

Here are a few examples of how ads influence editorial:

• Student loan providers grease college financial aid offices.

• Google gives large corporations free SEO tips and hand edits smaller competitors out of the search results. If a large corporation and an independent webmaster have the same infraction Google engineers are much more likely to try to kill the smaller of the two.
• Some conferences even charge speakers to speak. Talk about ads as content!

Some advertisers get mentioned just because they advertise a lot, while many publishers create content around high profit niches, and others organize their editorial content based on votes and usage data that can be bought (indirectly) through their ad network (think StumbleUpon and Google AdWords).

If your solution to the issue of low profit margins in publishing is to aggressively blend low value ads then you are eventually going to fail. As a publisher then there are at least 7 major ways to compete against others who are practicing and profiting from the blend, without being labeled as unethical, or undermining your own growth potential:

• branding & positioning: create a brand or service that sounds informational and content-like even though it is an ad (think Bankrate, which likely pays virtually nothing to syndicate their ads as content to many major newspapers)

• free samples: much like Bankrate syndicates information to newspapers you can also allow people to access a lot of value for free, then charge for a deeper access (think Compete.com profiles and their Search Analytics product)
• segregate: keep your main content stream free of ads, build authority, and create an offers section on your site
• be pure: don't publish any ads, wait until you have a strong brand, and then launch a better business model than competing channels
• indirect revenues: use your site to build mindshare, brand awareness, status, and expertise. then cash in on that via indirect revenue streams
• move yourself up the value chain: instead of selling AdSense or similar related ads, sell one of your own products and services. you can typically place these ads in-line without as much scrutiny or brand damage as blending someone else's ads in your content (see below)
• free user content: if you can create a platform and rule-set that allows others to build value on your idea while drawing enough of an audience to sort signal from noise you can profit heavily from that (think forums, Technorati tags, Yahoo! Answers, Digg, or Google)

Do you have any additional ideas for profiting from integration without being labeled as unethical?

One of my favorite parts about blogging is that thousands of people way smarter than me read my blog and give me feedback. Recently I was sent a couple links about socionomics and the wave principal.

Information markets influenced by a wide array of marketing techniques and publishing formats are likely also bound by the same sort of wave principals that guide economic markets.

The general trend (online or off) goes something like this...Politicians, corporations, and other powerful institutions abuse language, cook the books, and game rating and ranking systems until eventually the fraud can be held no longer. The bottom falls out of a near perfect market. Then the market gets new guidelines and regulations, which start getting gamed before they are even drafted.

The online world largely reflects the offline world, with a bias toward the edges (as smaller markets can be served online, we are more inclined to follow things that reinforce our worldview, and most modern measures of relevancy are aligned with things that easily associated with signs of bias). Here are some examples of how wave theory applies to search, publishing, and monetization.

• Companies and individuals aggressively optimize conversion rates until one day that form of optimization goes so far that some consider it fraud, as reported by a guy who was flamed in the last Internet bubble.

• Every effective marketing method spreads, gets abused, dies down, then is reformatted and reused again under another name, but touches the same emotional triggers.
• Each new social network is easy to game. After early adopters are ingrained in the hierarchy, the story spreads about how easy it is to game, then the ROI is marginal at best for the latecomers.
• All the new social networks spread out consumer interest, so now Google is investing into trying to pull it back together.
• Google trusts links so people buy them. Google starts filtering some obvious bought links and tries to manipulate public perception when they find that they can't do it well enough to put a dent in the link buying market.
• Most new sites are spammy. Google trusts old sites so people buy them. etc.
• You publish news of how successful a site is. Either Google tries to kill it or dozens of people clone it.
• Auto-generated content is getting more sophisticated and trusted sites are pumping out garbage content to monetize their authority, so Google requires more link equity to keep your content indexed.

Measuring relevancy and manipulating it are both forward looking and reactive processes. As is creating a self-funding brand in a fast changing market dominated by misinformation and information pollution.

[Update: Great follow up post at Squareoak.]